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The Emerging Alliance of
World Religions and Ecology

By Mary Evelyn Tucker

Religious and environmental leaders are using the symbolic, scriptural, ritual, and ethical dimensions of religious traditions that support nature to inspire environmental activism and protection around the world. This emerging alliance of religion and ecology assumes that environmental protection can be promoted by activating a sense of the earth's sacred qualities.

There are numerous examples of this, ranging from Buddhist monks who ordain trees in Thailand to prevent their destruction, to Hindu communities in India that encourage water conservation and tree planting, to indigenous groups in Latin America and the South Pacific that organize to protect their forests and homelands. A remarkable example of interreligious cooperation around reforestation is ZIRRCON (Zimbabwean Institute of Religious Research and Ecological Conservation), which brings together Shosoni tribes with Dutch Reformed Christian Churches to plant over one million trees annually.

Religion Conditions Human Ecology

Religions play an important role in promoting persuasive visions of a more sustainable future because they are key repositories of human civilization's enduring values, as well as indispensable motivators in moral transformation. This is especially true because our attitudes toward nature have been consciously and unconsciously conditioned by our religious worldviews.

More than 30 years ago, historian Lynn White observed this by noting: "What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny – that is, by religion."

Religions clearly affect how people value the environment, on both a local and global level. For example, the Earth Ministry in the Seattle region promotes environmental concern in more than 170 Christian churches. On the international level, the Islamic Republic of Iran's Department of the Environment and the United Nations Environment Program together sponsored the Tehran Seminar on Environment, Religion and Culture in June 2001.

These projects make clear that religions are an effective force for environmental activism. The State of the World 2000 report notes that in solving environmental problems, "all of society's institutions – from organized religion to corporations – have a role to play." The growing alliance of religion and ecology presumes that religions – like other institutions and grassroots movements – play an important role.

While religions preserve traditions, they also provoke social change. They can be limiting but also liberating in their outlooks.

During the 20th century, for example, religious leaders and theologians helped give birth to progressive movements such as civil rights for minorities, social justice for the poor, and liberation for women. More recently, religious groups in England were instrumental in launching the Jubilee 2000 movement that promotes debt reduction for poor nations.

The moral authority and institutional power of religions is already causing changes in attitudes, practices, and policies that affect the environment. For example, the campaigns of the U.S. National Council of Churches and the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life are raising public awareness and political responsibility regarding climate change as a moral issue.

Pastoral letters from the Catholic Bishops in the Philippines and the United States have helped reframe issues regarding the conflict between jobs and the environment.

Further evidence of religions' growing response to the environmental crisis is the fact that religious leaders and laypersons are increasingly advocating protection of the environment and support of education and action in this regard. The Dalai Lama has made numerous statements about the importance of environmental protection and has proposed that Tibet should be designated a zone of special ecological integrity.

Rabbi Ishmar Schorsch of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York has frequently spoken on the critical state of the environment and the need for seminaries to include this in their curriculum. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch Patriarch Bartholomew has sponsored several seminars that highlight environmental destruction in the Black Sea and along the Danube River, labeling such examples of negligence "ecological sin." He too has supported education of clergy in environmental matters.

Since 1995, a critical Alliance of Religion and Conservation (ARC) has been active in England and has identified and assisted numerous grassroots environmental movements influenced by religious values. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE) has organized Jewish and Christian groups around this issue in the United States.

A member group of NRPE, the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), is helping to mobilize the American Jewish communities regarding environmental issues, especially global warming. The World Bank has developed a World Faiths Development Dialogue on poverty and development issues with a select group of international religious leaders.

Notable Statements and Policies, and Forums for the Study of Religion and Ecology

The meetings and documents described above and in the box at left have encouraged theological reflection and action within seminaries, churches and institutional policy that responds to destruction of the environment and social inequities caused by economic globalization.

In 1992, at the time of the UN Earth Summit in Rio, the World Council of Churches (WCC) facilitated a gathering of Christian leaders that issued a "Letter to the Churches," calling for attention to pressing eco-justice concerns: solidarity with other people and all creatures; ecological sustainability; sufficiency as a standard of distributive justice; and socially just participation in decisions for the common good. As a result, there have been major efforts to link social justice with environmental protection in seminary classes, liberation theology, and church projects that highlight environmental justice.

In addition to the major conferences of Christian churches, there have been interreligious meetings and the ongoing emergence of interreligious movements. These include the interreligious gatherings on the environment in Assisi in 1984 under the sponsorship of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and under the auspices of the Vatican in 1986.

Moreover, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has established an Interfaith Partnership for the Environment (IPE) that has distributed thousands of packets of materials for use in local congregations and religious communities for more than 15 years. A number of these religious communities are now working on the "greening of the churches" in areas such as energy sustainability, as is evident in the U.S.-based Episcopal Power and Light Project.

Examining Religious Attitudes Toward Nature

In light of these various initiatives, John Grim and I collaborated with a team of area specialists to organize a series of ten conferences entitled "Religions of the World and Ecology" that took place from 1996 to 1998, at Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions. The series examined attitudes toward nature in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Shinto, and indigenous religions, and highlighted environmental projects inspired by religious values.

Scholars of the world's religions from around the world joined environmental activists and grassroots leaders to identify both ideas and practices that support a sustainable environmental future. During three culminating conferences at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, United Nations, and American Museum of Natural History in New York, representatives of the world's religions conferred with each other and key scientists, economists, educators, and policy makers in the environmental field.

The conferences produced ten volumes of articles that identify the world's religions' attitudes and practices relating to the environment. A summary can be found in the articles in the fall 2001 issue of the journal Daedalus.

With the caveats that religious leaders and laypersons must work with environmentalists, scientists, economists, businesspeople, politicians, and educators to adequately address environmental issues, and that traditional religious ideas may have more limited local application, we can identify three methodological approaches that appear in the emerging study of religion and ecology: retrieval, reevaluation, and reconstruction.

Interpretive retrieval involves the scholarly investigation of cosmological, scriptural, and legal sources in order to clarify traditional religious teachings regarding human-Earth relations. Interpretive retrieval also can identify ethical codes and ritual customs of a tradition to discover how these teachings were put into practice, and how they might be utilized today for appropriate environmental protection.

In interpretive reevaluation, traditional teachings are evaluated with regard to their relevance to contemporary circumstances. Can the ideas, teachings, or ethics present in these traditions be adopted by contemporary scholars or practitioners who wish to help shape more ecologically sensitive attitudes and sustainable practices?

Reevaluation also questions ideas that may lead to inappropriate environmental practices. For example, are certain religious tendencies reflective of otherworldly or world-denying orientations that are not helpful in relation to pressing ecological issues?

It asks as well whether the material world of nature has been devalued by a particular religion, and whether a model of ethics focusing solely on human interaction is adequate to address environmental problems. Another major area of reevaluation is the critical role of women, especially in relation to environment, development, and population issues.

Finally, interpretive reconstruction suggests ways that religious traditions might adapt their teachings to current circumstances in new and creative ways. This may result in a new synthesis, or in a creative modification of traditional ideas and practices to suit modern modes of expression.

This is the most challenging aspect of the emerging field of religion and ecology. In all of this, there must be sensitivity to who is speaking about a tradition in the process of reevaluation and reconstruction.

Post-colonial critics have appropriately highlighted the complex issues surrounding the problem of who is representing or interpreting a tradition. Nonetheless, practitioners and leaders of particular traditions may find grounds for creative dialogue with scholars of religious traditions in these various phases of interpretation.

Several example of this reconstruction of traditions come to mind: socially engaged Buddhism developed by Sulak Sivaraksa, Joanna Macy, Ken Kraft, Stephanie Kaza and others; contemporary Confucianism as articulated by Tu Weiming, Liu Shu hsien and others; Hinduism as developed by Karan Singh, Vasudha Narayanan, and others; and ecological Jainism as described by Satish Kumar and L.M. Singhvi.

Converging Values for the Earth Community

This project of exploring world religions and ecology is leading toward convergence on several overarching principles. The common values that most of the world's religions hold in relation to the natural world might be summarized as reverence, respect, restraint, redistribution, and responsibility.

While there are clearly variations of interpretation within and between religions regarding these five principles, it may be said that religions are moving toward an expanded understanding of their cosmological orientations and ethical obligations. Although these principles have been previously understood primarily in regard to relations with other humans, the challenge now is to extend them to the natural world.

As this shift occurs – and there are signs it is already happening – religions can advocate reverence for the earth and its profound cosmological processes, respect for the earth's myriad species, an extension of ethics to include all life forms, restraint in the use of natural resources combined with support for effective alternative technologies, equitable redistribution of wealth, and the acknowledgement of human responsibility in regard to the continuity of life and the ecosystems that support life.

Just as religious values needed to be identified, so, too, the values embedded in science, economics, education, and public policy also need to be more carefully understood. Scientific analysis will be critical to understanding nature's economy; economic incentives will be central to an equitable distribution of resources; education will be indispensable to creating sustainable modes of life; public-policy recommendations will be invaluable in shaping national and international priorities.

But the ethical values that inform modern science and public policy must not be uncritically applied. Instead, by carefully evaluating the intellectual resources both of the world's religions, and of modern science and public policy, our long-term ecological prospects may emerge.

We need to examine the tensions between efficiency and equity, between profit and preservation, and between the private and public good. We need to make distinctions between human need and greed, between the uses and abuses of nature, and between the intrinsic value and instrumental value of nature. We need to move from destructive to constructive modes of production, and from the accumulation of goods to an appreciation for the common good of the Earth community.

As Thomas Berry has observed: "The ethical does not simply apply to human beings but to the total community of existence as well. The integral economic community includes not only its human components but also its natural components. To assist the human by deteriorating the natural cannot lead to a sustainable community. The only sustainable community is one that fits the human economy into the ever-renewing ecosystems of the planet." In essence, human flourishing is intimately linked to the flourishing of the earth's ecosystems.

The emerging alliance of religion and ecology is dedicated, then, to fostering ways in which the world's religions can contribute more fully to life of the Earth community. The Forum on Religion and Ecology hopes to promote this alliance by identifying ecological ideas, ethics, and practices that assist the realization of environmental sustainability for the well-being of future generations.

Mary Evelyn Tucker is Professor of Religion at Bucknell University and founding member of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in the history of religions, specializing in Confucianism in Japan. She and her husband John Grim have directed a series of ten conferences on religions of the world and ecology at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions and served as editors of the Harvard University Press book series from these conferences. Her research interests include topics regarding the world religions, Asian religions, and religion and ecology.

Portions of this article first appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Daedalus.

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