Rev Left Radio - Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Bron R. Taylor is an American scholar, conservationist, and professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida. Taylor works principally in the areas of religion and ecology, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy. He is also a prominent historian and ethnographer of environmentalism, especially radical environmentalist movements. Taylor is also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature and founded the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, serving as its president from 2006 to 2009. He also founded the society's affiliated Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, serving as its editor since 2007.   Professor Taylor joins Breht to discuss his book Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Outro Music: "Forest Green" by Wolf Parade  ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have a really, really interesting conversation with the professor Braun Taylor, and it's going to be centered around his book, Dark Green Religion, Nature, Spirituality, and the Planetary Future. Braun Taylor is a scholar, a conservationist, a professor of religion and nature, also a prominent historian, an ethnographer of environmentalism and specifically radical environmentalist movements. He is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature and founded the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, and many other things, just a very fascinating thinker and scholar who has traveled the world and wrote this fascinating work that I recently

came across, devoured, and immediately reached out to him to come on the show, because it dovetails so nicely with elements of this show, of my own spirituality, of my own relationship to nature, and a lot of the things that I advocate here on the show. And this is a really academic, deep dive into the plurality of movements and ideas and practices that could be put under the umbrella term dark green religion or dark green spirituality, as it were. And we get into those distinctions and those nuances throughout this conversation. Overall, it's absolutely fascinating and really excited to share it with you. And as always, if you like what we do here

at Rev Left Radio, we are 100% listener supported and listener funded. You can go to patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And in exchange for the cost of a cup of coffee every month, you can have access to hundreds of our Patreon exclusive episodes that go back

five years now. This is February. So we've been on the air for five years, half a decade, blown away by how fast time flies and the amount of support that this show has gotten. We started this with very humble ambitions. We thought it was going to be a local activist show, and it immediately burst the bounds of our wildest expectations

and grew incredibly large. And we are deeply grateful for everybody who's been along with us for any part of that ride, and particularly those that go all the way back to before Trump, right when we started making these episodes. and you've been around since then. I tip my hat to you, and I'm deeply, deeply grateful for you and your support. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Braun Taylor on his book, Dark Green Religion.

Enjoy. My name is Braun. Taylor. I'm a professor of religion, nature, and environmental ethics at the University of Florida. And as we'll probably get into today, I study grassroots environmental and social movements and their spiritual and ethical and political dimensions. Absolutely. And today we are talking about your book, Dark Green Religion. I recently just came across it. It turns out it was published back in 2010. I think it's a really, really interesting text. and it dovetails quite nicely with some things that I've talked about on this show

and some things that just in my personal life I pursue spiritually, intellectually, et cetera. So maybe for those that don't know anything about this text, can you kind of talk about why you wrote this book and sort of what you wanted to achieve with it? Yeah, absolutely. I think especially for your show, it might be good for you to get a little background on what led to the book in the first place. Sure. Back when I was young and a teenager, actually, I was drawn into the Jesus movement there in the early 70s and all that ferment.

I was growing up in Southern California, kind of that was an echo of the 1960s. And when I finally got to college, because of that background, I began to take a couple of religious studies classes. I was shocked to hear about something called liberation theology. And also, I was surprised by what I was learning about the Hebrew prophets, the ancient Jewish prophets, and the way in which they advanced an understanding of social justice that was about concern for the poor and the outcast and the sojourner and so forth. I immersed in that evangelical subpoena. culture, which was really about converting people to Jesus Christ so they could avoid the perils of hell, I was surprised to learn about these forms of Christianity that were entirely new to me.

Learning about them, and I guess for my own reasons, being moved by the egalitarian nature of them and the quest for social justice in them, it caused what I would call today a kind of ideological suspicion about the evangelical form of Christianity that I was more familiar with. Why had I never heard about the social teachings of Jesus or about the Hebrew prophets? About the same time, I was getting saved, I suppose, I could say, musingly in a different way, by the ocean. The ocean had become a refuge for me from some of the dysfunctions that so many people experience in their familial lives. And just going down to the ocean, sometimes late at night,

looking out over the sea, seeing the anchovies jumping in the moonlight, also just convinced me that there's really something right with the world, despite the dysfunctions of my own family and the tremendous social injustices in the world. So those two things made me wonder, why is the liberation of nature ignored by Christians in general, but also, as I began to learn about social movements, why was the liberation of nature ignored largely by left-wing social movements, whether they're religious or secular? Now, as you know, Marx and Engels had part of the answer to such questions, that the ruling ideas at any age are the ideas of the rulers and the elites who benefit from their service to them. So quite clearly, religious ideas, generally speaking, have tended to promote the status quo, the ideas of the rulers. But then I also, as I began to study religion more and the great sociologists of religion, not just Marx, but folks like Max Weber, Max Weber, of course, kind of challenged the Marx Engels view by arguing that sometimes religious ideas precipitate decisive changes in socioeconomic systems.

systems that can even be, depending on your point of view, positive. So he wrote, of course, about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, how a certain form of Protestantism that emerged largely in Switzerland originally promoted capitalism. But I also was studying how religion, deliberation theologians in Latin America, South Africa, and some places in Southeast Asia, were, resisting unbridled plutocratic capitalism, and they were fusing what they understood to be the teachings of Christ and the prophets with leftist political and economic analysis. In fact, the first thing I ever published was a book review of Marx and the Bible,

which was a good example of that kind of fusion of radical Christianity and radical leftist thought. Indeed, back in that day, some priests had embraced Marxism to such an extent that they participated in taking up arms against the authoritarian and despotic regimes in a number of countries in South America and Central America. So that's kind of the background that got me interested in religion and politics kind of generally. I thought that at one time I would go and study these liberation movements, but I really couldn't afford to. And so I worked, my dissertation and so forth was focused on affirmative action policies in North America. My first book was about such policies. But by the late 80s, as I was wrapping up graduate school, I began to notice a group of environmental radicals who were sabotaging the barso to Las Vegas desert race out in the Mojave Desert. They were arguing that

the desert is a fragile ecosystem that has intrinsic value and that nobody had a right to just run their motor vehicles over it and destroy that and damage that ecosystem. Similarly, people were sabotaging the hunting of endangered big horn sheep on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So I began to pay attention to these movements, and I arranged to get some of their tabloids. And as soon as I did that, I realized that there was something deeply spiritual that was animating many of those radical environmental activists. Many of them were interested in religions originating in Asia or the religious dimensions of traditional indigenous societies. And there was also a strong critique of the so-called Abrahamic tree. traditions, which is a term that not everybody knows, but the Abrahamic religions are Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam, all the religious traditions that trace their lineage to the prophet Abraham. So by 1990, to my shock, I got an academic job at the University of Wisconsin-Ashkosh, and it just so happened that Dave Foreman showed up on campus that spring, or was booked to show up on campus. I had nothing to do with it. But I knew who he was. He had recently been arrested for complicity in an effort to sabotage power lines from a nuclear power plant in Arizona and for funding other acts of equitage in the southwestern U.S. So he was a notorious figure. He was also the most charismatic figure of a movement that formed in 1980 that went by the name Earth First.

By Earth First, they were proclaiming that the world as a whole is valuable apart from its usefulness to just our own species. So I arranged in 1990 to show him around when he came to town. I knew something about the movement by then, so I introduced him. I invited him and his feral friends to my house afterward, and I was immediately convinced that this was a really different kind of social movement, that it had the potential to really revolutionize environmental politics in North America, and that there was a deeply spiritual dimension to much of it. So in the early 90s, I left for the woods and spent the bulk of the 90s and doing ethnographic and historical research on that movement. I began to see that they had very specific views.

toward social movements around the world, wherever people were getting uppity on environmental issues, they saw those folks as their soulmates. These were often movements of indigenous people in the so-called global south who were defending their lands and their ecosystems and their cultures. And they sort of looked at these folks as also practitioners of the philosophy that they had adopted from the Norwegian philosopher Arne Nass that's known as deep ecology. That's basically the idea that all life has value apart from its use ofness of human beings. And they thought that that's what was motivating a lot of these resistance movements around the world. I wasn't so sure of that. So I orchestrated a research project with a bunch of others

that was published in 1995 and it was under the title ecological resistance movements, the global emergence of radical and popular environmentalism. And that was in part to test the perceptions of these North American radicals. Were they being romantic about these other movements? Were these movements actually kindred movements? The answer was complex. Many of these movements were not really animated by the same kind of deep ecological spiritualities that were more prevalent in the North American and European radical environmental movements.

but nonetheless, there were significant affinities, and some of those folks definitely shared some of those same kinds of perceptions and beliefs. So through that experience, I began to notice both continuities and discontinuities between grassroots, social movements that had profound environmental dimensions from around the world. And then as I traveled around the world all the more and began to study sectors like, what's going on under the umbrella of the United Nations at World Summits, for example. I began to see some of the same patterns, ideas, practices, perceptions emerging in those sectors that I first encountered in these radical environmental subcultures, which made me think,

well, gosh, maybe there's a lot more cultural traction to these kinds of nature spirituality is in radical politics than I originally thought. So I just kept looking at diverse social phenomena to see how much cultural traction there were to these kinds of what I now call dark green spiritual subcultures and trends. And that's what ultimately led to the book. Basically, the primary question that has animated my career is, what's it going to take the human animal to respond adequately? and rapidly enough to arrest the accelerating ecological crisis. And because religion is so powerful in human culture and because it tends to be conservative, but isn't always conservative, we can look at the civil rights movement as well, for example.

I thought that it was really important to try to plunge in depth into the spiritual or religious dimensions of environmental, to see if some of the answers might lie there. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. And, you know, your text specifically resonated with me so much because I've been trying to, you know, sort of clumsily articulate some, a need for not only outward political social transformation, social justice, you know, on our side of the political spectrum, anti-capitalist, et cetera, but I also saw a deepening need for a spiritual engagement with nature and for spiritual transformation in general to go alongside this more outward transformation

project. And so I've been sort of groping for words and concepts to sort of put together to make that case over, you know, the past few years and coming across your text, it was like, oh, it's all already here. So I really, really appreciated that. Before we get into some of the details, can you kind of maybe just start with some definitions, specifically just the term dark green religion? Each word in that phrase has a certain definition and a meaning to it. Can you talk about that and then maybe how you define spirituality? Yeah, I think that it probably would be helpful to all concerned, your listeners, to provide some kind of terminological background. Because the term religion, for example, is thrown around a lot,

but it's rarely carefully defined. Same thing with spirituality. People kind of think they know what's meant by it. But to communicate clearly, I spent considerable time in the book, getting systematic about it. So let's talk about several aspects of this. Let's start with religion, spirituality, and the sacred, these terms. So today, of course, people often contrast religion with spirituality, right? For many, religion is understood to involve beliefs and practices related to divine beings or forces, and it is organized.

It's institutional in some way, right? Now, people typically, on the other hand, consider spirituality to be more personal, involving one's deepest moral values and profound aesthetic, even mystical experiences. Many people today consider themselves spiritual but not religious. Such individuals are more likely to be metaphysically agnostic, in other words, unsure about the ultimate nature of reality, or if there's divine beings out there somewhere, or even imminently here. And such individuals are less likely to work in traditional ways or hold

orthodox religious beliefs, and they're more likely to adopt beliefs from diverse religious traditions, including New Age subcultures, and more likely to consider the divine as feminine. So practitioners of such nature spirituality often participate in ritualized or therapeutic means to promote personal growth and healing, and those who consider themselves to be spiritual tend to also be engaged with environmental and social justice causes. So spirituality is often seen as a quest to heal oneself and to find one's authentic self and sometimes even to heal the earth. Now, when we think about both religion and spirituality, a good starting point are with scholarly understanding to trace the early understanding of the word religion to the Latin root

league, which means to bind or tie fast or religiari, which can be rendered to reconnect. This would suggest that religion, and I think spirituality too, involves that which connects and binds people to that which they most value, depend on, and consider sacred. Now, of course, for anything to be sacred, it typically is set off and considered sublime or holy in some way. Other things must be mundane. If anything, to be sacred, something has to be mundane, ordinary, or profane. And things that or sacred can be desecrated, and their sacrality can be damaged or undone. Religious studies scholars also talk about how the sacred is also something that's constructed, because if you can create the sacred, if you can convince something, people, that something is

sacred, then it becomes inviolable. So it can also be a politic, declaring something as sacred can be a political strategy to protect it. Now, the sacred typically involves some kind of binary, but it can have to do with lots of different things. For example, times, processes, practices, places, and experiences. And as David Chidester, one of my favorite religion theorists put it, it tends to have two important characteristics. It involves ultimate meaning and transcendent power and to lead to powerful transformations related to physical, spiritual,

or even planetary healing. Okay, so there's a riff on religion, spirituality, and the sacred. Let me just pause and see. Is that relatively clear? Do you have any follow-ups on that? No, I think those terms are well-defined, and I largely agree with how you're placing them together. So, yeah, I think we're good there. Yeah, you know, a lot of people, in common parlance or common language, a lot of people make a very big distinction between spirituality and religion. As kind of a religion study scholar, I acknowledge that common way of distinguishing them and what it tends to mean for people. but both of them have the same sorts of traits and characteristics, okay?

So let's turn for a moment to worldviews. Now, worldviews, which some people are calling Cosmovisions today, are understandings of the nature of the universe and the human place in it. So what I call dark green religion, or variously dark green spirituality, are experiences of just such an understanding of the universe, and our place in it and our responsibilities to it. So, you know, ever since our species emerged, we've been constructing such understandings.

We've been trying to figure out what's going on here. What's the nature of the universe? What's our place in it as best we can? And we've done that given the available facts to us at a particular time, place, and region, given the sometimes odd experiences, the extraordinary experiences that people have. And, of course, given the many mysteries and confusions that we have,

just as human beings here on planet Earth. Yeah, absolutely. And the term dark green, specifically when we're talking about the dark side of it, do you kind of want to mention anything about that? Because I find that particularly interesting and helpful. Sure. Maybe this is a good time to just kind of now outline what the dark green worldview is about.

Sure. And along the way, I'll explain the double meaning of the word dark. How's that sound? Perfect. Yeah. So in the book, I focused especially on the last few hundred years since Charles Darwin wrote on the origin of species in 1859, 160 years ago. And I argued that two longstanding understandings of the world are taking on new forms,

especially since Darwin penned that famous book. These two main forms are known as organicism and animism. So please bear with me, you and your listeners, because I know there's some jargon here, kind of religious studies jargon, a philosophical jargon that maybe not everybody's familiar with. So again, a little bit more terminology. Organicism understands the world to be deeply interconnected

and mutually dependent in a way that's in that, analogous to our own bodies, right? So we are one organism, but there are many organs within us, and we now know there's many organisms within our bodies. We're symbionts, right? We can't exist without lots of other little organisms in our bodies. So without many organs and without the organisms in our bodies, we could not function.

We would not be an organism. So for an organism to flourish, it has to have, it has multiple organs within it that work together, okay? So organicism basically understands the world, the biosphere, in this kind of way. So what about animism? Anonym refers to perceptions that natural entities, forces, and life forms have one or more of the following. A soul or life force or spirit, personhood, and emotional life and personal intentions, consciousness, and sometimes also some special spiritual intelligence or power.

In the book Dark Green Religion, I show that organicism and animism can be found widely around the world in two main forms. With organicism, and these two main forms are, on the one hand, one is more traditionally religious, and one is more naturalistic, and I'll explain those presently. So with organicism, the religious form includes the perception that the universe and the biosphere as a whole is divine. Some organists liken this to the universe to being the body of God. With animism, the religious form involves the perception that some entities in nature or non-human organisms are themselves deities, or at least they're animated by some invisible spiritual force.

So there are spirits in the trees, for example, or in the rocks, or in non-human animals. Now, with organicism, the naturalistic form is based on observations and science that understands the world as an interdependent whole. Such understandings have become more widespread since the 1970s when you, and I'm sure many of your listeners know about James Lovelock, who advanced with Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis, a theory that the biosphere functions as an interdependent, self-regulating organism. And in the book, I argue that today, Gaia, the female Earth goddess in Greek mythology,

has become the most popular trope, the most popular way to express an organist worldview. So organicism seems to be something philosophers will recognize and talk about more, but today people are more talking about Gaia. Now, with animism, the naturalistic form, is based on personal experiences and observations that people have with species other than their own, such as like with their companion animals, right, or if they're farmers, with the domesticated animals that surround them, or maybe just by observing wild creatures and seeing the apparent curiosities that they have toward us just as we have toward them, or even the playfulness they sometimes seem to have with

us. It's also, this kind of naturalistic animism is on the rise through evolutionary biology and ethology. Now, what's ethology? Well, it's fancy word for the study of animal consciousness and behavior. And what evolutionary biology and ethology tell us today is that there's a lot more to the emotional and cognitive lives of non-human organisms than many have thought, especially perhaps in Western cultures with its particular scientific history. So with animism, people often perceive that they can communicate with or be in communion with such intelligences and life forces. And the religious forms can include belief that these intelligences and forces are

divine and that people should worship or beseech them for healings or for healing or other favors. And both forms of animism promote respect for non-human organisms and entities and forces. And interestingly, they also tend to promote a felt kinship with them. And today, post-Darwin, that feeling of kinship is often kindled or promoted or enhanced by an understanding that all human beings share a common ancestor and got here through exactly the same evolutionary process that involves a struggle for existence, which tends to lead to empathy for other organisms that are in that same struggle. And Darwin himself was moved by the struggle for existence and expressed feelings of kinship with all other life forms that have been going

through that. So anyway, whether religious or naturalistic, organicism tends to promote what we call ecocentric ethics. And ecocentric ethics are ethics in which the protection of whole ecosystems and the diversity of life as a whole in the biosphere is a central moral priority. So that's a, you know, that's a riff on the two major types of dark green spirituality, and animist, and that it, they tend to be naturalistic or more traditionally religious. And as the book explains, some people blend all of those in, in various ways. So there's not a, these categories are fluid. Right.

Well, the last thing that when I'm trying to lay out what dark green religion is, in addition to those, to animism and organicism, there are certain types of, ideas that I find increasingly around the world in very diverse social settings. And here's, here's like the major, you might call them the pillars of dark green spirituality. The perception that nature is sacred, its value is not only indirect by virtue of having been divinely created. Nature itself is sacred. All living things have intrinsic value and deserve respect and reverence. For the philosophers in your group, people, people, People will recognize that here we can be synonyms for this would be deep ecology,

ecocentrism, or biocentric ethics. The notion, as I was just talking about, that all life shares the common ancestor, and thus we are literally kin, we're biologically related. And it's easy to surmise from that that there's moral responsibilities that come with such close relatedness. This ecology-based understanding that all life is interconnected and mutually dependent. And this typically leads to deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature, humility about the human place in the world, and an experience of awe and wonder at the beauties

and mysteries of the world. And finally, a love of nature and all living things. So those are the basic ideas that are prevalent in dark green spirituality around the world. Yeah, I love that breakdown. It's very, very interesting. I see so much of myself being reflected back to me, especially the blurring between some of those sort of quadrants, if you will. Certainly there's like a naturalistic organicist impulse within me, but I'll often speak about this stuff in highly religious terms, you know, using God and nature interchangeably. And I think that my spiritual practices are definitely geared toward a felt unity with the natural world, with the cosmos as a whole, and even with my children, to sort of instill within them

love of the natural world, knowing the generational fight that's ahead of us, knowing that we need to sort of instill within our children in so far as we can, a deep love of the natural world, so they become natural defenders of it. I'll often use recourse to our common ancestor. of blow their minds by saying, you know, you share 33% of your DNA with that tree in our front yard or whatever. And so I find that to be a scientifically valid, but also deeply, spiritually meaningful fact about the world and about our kinship with all of life, plant and animal. I do have, in my case, and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this or in your

experience studying this stuff if this resonates at all. In my case, my entire spiritual my entire sort of motivation for this stuff, mysticism, et cetera, started when I took a rather reckless dose of magic mushrooms at age 16, not knowing what was going to happen, not even being, you know, drunk before that. I was really like a total noob to this stuff. And my experience on those mushrooms, I've talked about it before, so I won't go into too much deep detail. But basically, I fell into the grass. I looked up at the cosmos, and subject, object, dualism fell completely away. It felt as if the stars were raining down into me, and it was ecstatic. And it was only very brief, and then my friends pulled me away, and, you know, my trip went

badly from there. But it was that just 15-second wrenching open of my mind and my heart and the complete collapse of subject-object dualism that, you know, radically at least opened up the possibility that there's something more to consciousness and there's something more to my relation with the natural world that can be felt and can be visceral. So I'm wondering what role, if any, have you seen psychedelics in particular play in pushing people towards this sort of worldview or these sorts of practices? Well, you're not alone. I've interviewed scores of environmentalists, radical and not, who either trace their environmental passions to a decisive moment on some kind of mind-altering substance, what are traditionally called

psychedelics in which religious studies sometimes call entheogens, or that which bring forth the gods, while others may have already had profound experiences leading to their environmental concerns, but then are in subcultures in which taking part in assuming these mind-altering substances is a common thing and widely shared, and then those experiences deepen their environmental perceptions, values, and activist inclinations. So I certainly wouldn't say that far from it, that every dark green practitioner has had an experience on psychedelics or in theogens, but no small number of them have. and many of them talk about it in the ways that are similar to the way you have.

Still, others also talk about experiences with non-human organisms that are enhanced through those experiences. Of course, famously, Aldous Huxley wrote about these processes. And today you have Michael Pollan talking about these kinds of experiences as a very popular writer. and more and more people are finding meaning through, or at least enhancing meaning through taking these kinds of substances. And we're finding places in the Pacific Northwest that are legalizing these substances because there's very little evidence that if, that these are, you know, there's certainly no more dangerous than something like alcohol that's legal.

All right. And for many people, it's an important part of their spiritual practice. yeah absolutely yeah and there's there is something sort of intrinsically fascinating about going out in nature in the case of magic mushrooms in particular being able to take something that just grows out of the ground and have a you know radically mystical transformative experience that brings you closer with nature it's like a communication device between nature and its organisms it's kind of fascinating in that way and i often i often feel mixing these spiritual feelings and these senses of of unity with the natural world and political struggle that, you know, oftentimes, and this is even some slogans for radical environmental groups, is like, we are the earth fighting for itself, or the earth is fighting to heal itself through us, its vessels, or even this is the idea that we are through our consciousness and our inseparability from the earth, literally the earth become conscious of itself. I find all of those lines of reasoning very, very inspiring

and very, very meaningful to me. Yeah, the Australian Buddhist, John Seed, put it, I think, really well. And this is maybe what you're referring to, you know, that we are the species recently emerged into consciousness defending ourselves as he participates in campaigns against deforestation. Absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and move on a little bit and maybe even get into some philosophy because this is, among other things, a philosophy podcast.

And Spinoza in particular has been, been not only a personal influence, but a recurring figure on this show. And in addition to Spinoza in the book, you also mentioned the French philosopher Rousseau, who I'm increasingly interested with. I mean, he's popularly known as a political theorist, but he also had quite a mystical site, as you point out in the text, and he's the philosophical godfather of romanticism, which had a huge impact and continues to have an impact on culture broadly. So can you talk about these two thinkers, Spinoza and Rousseau, and specifically sort of their impact on nature spirituality throughout the Western world in particular?

Yeah, well, hugely influential in both cases. Spinoza and Rousseau influenced critically important environmental scientists and thinkers, including Alexander von Humboldt, Ernst Hackle, Albert Einstein. And more recently, Spinoza was especially influential on Arne Nass, who I mentioned earlier, the one who advanced the idea of deep ecology as a philosophy. and also George Sessions, who became a good friend of Arnie Nass and was one of the two chief popularizers of deep ecology in North America. George was a philosopher.

He taught at a community college in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He was an avid climber just as was a mountain climber, as was Arnie Nass. And Sessions' earliest work promoting deep ecology drew specifically on Baruch Spinoza. So it would be difficult to underestimate the echoes of those two of Rousseau and Spinoza down through environmental thinking. And, of course, people like Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst tackle, when you read them, you realize that these folks, are much like Henry David Thoreau, who also drew on them, very much promoting and expressing a kind of naturalistic nature, spirituality, dark green religion that was organist with sympathies for non-human organisms that were definitely anomalous in their time. And if you look

at somebody like Alexander von Humboldt and David Thoreau, these folks also recognized that this kinship recognized this kinship with all life and that this kinship with all life also meant that that racism was incompatible with their understandings of the human place in the biosphere and our responsibilities to one another and to life itself so anyway whether interpreted if we look at spinoza as you know he's interpreted differently right some call him a pantheist others which basically means that the world as a whole is divine and pantheism generally doesn't have a personal god involved it's just it's all uh if you use the god word it's just it's just kind of a synonym for the laws of nature this is this is kind of the pantheism of

albert einstein some interprets spinoza and this might be right as more of uh a pan-antheist. And for your listeners, this is more jargon, I apologize. But it's an interesting distinction. A pan-antheist is one who believes that the entire universe is divine, but there is some superordinate divine intelligence giving rise to it. So it's kind of like, oh, we might put it flippantly. It's kind of like having your cake and eat it too.

You know, the whole world is divine, but you still get a god. And we see, in philosophy, we see panentheism in Albert North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorn, the process philosophers and the process theologians. So there, in pantheism, you don't have an all-powerful God as you have in the Abrahamic traditions. Rather, you have a God that is in the process of becoming. And this is also the way in which process philosophers and theologians try to get God, whatever God is, off the hook for the suffering and evil in the world. You know, he's not all powerful.

Therefore, God's power is more in beckoning the world toward a more beautiful future. So it's a different image of God and the process of the universe than you find in traditional Western theology and philosophy. So anyway, Spinoza provided a way for naturalists to express their scientific and, emotional connections to nature, conceiving of it as sacred and as the ultimate source of meaning and sometimes as divine. So both Spinoza and Rousseau, and of course, I think Rousseau, for non-scientists, I think Rousseau has been even more important because it was Rousseau who really kindled so much the romantic movement in the arts and in poetry, literature, painting, and so forth and so on. So both, anyway, our indispensable tributaries to what, for lack of a better term, I've called dark green spirituality.

Yeah, absolutely. Two philosophers that I like a lot and love studying and actually learned more about Rousseau in particular in your text, talking about his, you know, walks, his long walks towards his later life on the outskirts of Paris, where he would describe these sort of aesthetic or, you know, pretty much mystical or spiritual. experiences in relation to his appreciation of the natural world. I found that all incredibly fascinating. And you mentioned Alfred Whitehead as well. I'm actually having on an expert on Whitehead come on the show in a couple of weeks to talk about his process philosophy, because I think it dovetails very nicely with this discussion in general. I'm sort of thinking

outside of the European tradition, particularly you've touched on indigenous, but also there's African and Asian philosophies and religions. And in a lot of these, there seems to be a sort of innate appreciation for the natural world and our place within it. I'm obviously not an expert on all these philosophies, but it seems that way, and it seems like there's something different in the Euro-Western understanding of our relationship with nature that is damaging to the ecosystem and perhaps is being rectified, but has had a multi-century long sort of whirlwind of destruction, if it were. So I'm just wondering if you can talk about these other ways of relating to the natural world and maybe how they differ from a more traditional Euro-Western

understanding? Sure. Well, I always start off when this kind of question is posed to me to emphasize it's really important not to make stereotypes either of those traditions that are typically called Western, Asian, or indigenous. These are complicated traditions. They're internally contested and plural. And they're often contradictory in terms of internally with regard to attitudes and practices related to nature. So, you know, this is my caution sign up at the get-go here as a prelude to what I'm going to say next because there are some generalizations that can be made, but we should do it cautiously and aware that the more time you have, the more nuance one can provide.

So we're not going to, you know, in my writings, these are longer and I can provide. the kinds of qualifications that I can't when we're just brainstorming today. That said, let me offer some research-based generalizations about the world's predominant religious traditions. And I like to talk about the world's predominant religious traditions and then say, I'm going to refer to them as world religions for shorthand. And by these, I mean the big ones that most people recognize as world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zen Buddhism, you know, those, the major world religions. So typically, scholars who focus on religion and nature, well, not typically, universally, scholars

are focused on religion and nature these days have to wrestle with a fellow named Lynn White. I'm curious, have you heard of Lynn White? I have not. I don't think so. Okay. So Lynn White is, is a, was a historian. at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a devout,

a liberal Christian layperson as well. And he played a major role in precipitating the emergence of actually the entire field of interdisciplinary environmental studies. And back in the late 60s, he wrote an article where he analyzed Christianity. And he argued, first of all, this kind of general theory that the roots of the environmental crisis, are largely religious, and therefore, he contended, the remedy must also be essentially

religious, whether we call it that or not. And then specifically, he blamed Christianity for promoting environmentally destructive attitudes and behavior. And the argument that he made, many people have largely accepted. And what he did is he focused on these things. He said that the belief that only humans are created in the image of God, and that therefore they have superior moral value to all living things precipitated negative attitudes toward the rest of the living world. And of course, this doctrine that humans are created in the image of God is at the beginning of Judaism. And the very same doctrine is very important in Islam. So the Abrahamic religions all share this belief that only humans are created in God's image. Secondly, Christianity and

Judaism and Islam, all, although White was in a dominantly Christian, North American context at times. So he focused on Christianity, and that's what he knew best. But this applies also to the other Abrahamic religions. But the prohibition on idolatry, worshiping anything other than God, led to nature-based spirituality, such as paganism and animism and indigenous societies. It led to them being suppressed. And the suppression, often involved the forced conversion of people with such spiritual beliefs, as well as the destruction of sacred groves and other natural spaces that were important to them. So despite this critique of Christianity, White thought there had been and were versions of the tradition, of the

Christian tradition, that could be used as a foundation for green Christianity. Now, here you won't be surprised because you did a wonderful show about St. Francis to hear that Lynn White identified St. Francis is a potential resource for Westerners and for Christians to construct a green Christianity. Now, we could also talk a little bit more, and we could nuance St. Francis a little bit more, but White, in fact, suggested that St. Francis could become the patron saint for ecologists. And then a couple decades later, Pope John Paul, established St. Francis as the patron saint for, people often say for the environment, but actually, St. Francis in the Catholic tradition, is the patron saint for ecologists, if you take it

literally. And of course, you talked about how our current Pope became the first Pope to take, although he's a Jesuit, became the first Pope to take Francis as his papal name, right? And he did that because he wanted to promote a love of nature among Christians and beyond the Christian community and more environmentally responsible behaviors by everybody. Okay, so White not only identified St. Francis as a potential resource, he also talked about Buddhism. And he thought that Buddhism, as well as more animistic spiritualities, were more naturally eco-friendly than the inherited Western tradition. But he also thought the reason that he brought up the St. Francis stuff is not only because

he was a Christian, but he was in a dominantly Western society. And he thought he didn't expect enough people in the West to be drawn to Buddhist or animist and indigenous spirituality to make much of a difference. So what are the possibilities for a green Christianity? Or by extension, a green Islam and a green Judaism? But he did have this perception that Buddhism was, you know, and these animistic spirituality were more naturally eco-friendly. So what was the impact of this?

Well, the impact was huge. In interdisciplinary environmental studies, probably no single article, this was published in the journal Science, so it got a wide reading, has been cited more often, and many of us in this field are just so tired of Lynn White, and I almost hesitate to mention him. But White's argument led to a lot of soul searching initially and especially among Christian intellectuals, but before long among religious thinkers from the world religions. When people, you know, these intellectuals began to ask themselves why their traditions did not seem to take protecting nature a priority. And so some within these traditions began to look for and

draw out what they consider to be environmentally friendly themes and to argue that, hey, if you understand our tradition properly, or if you reform it well, these religions can and should promote conservation. And sometimes these thinkers fused these concerns for natural systems with concerns for social justice, for after all, you know, the well-being of human beings is ultimately dependent on the well-being and flourishing of the ecosystems we all depend on. So anyway, efforts to nurture and spread green versions of these traditions have grown since Lynn White. And this has happened both internally, as well as through interfaith encounters. And some of these interfaith encounters have kind of pushed people of different religious traditions,

kind of pushed them further. So there's been some criticism back and forth, right? Well, your tradition seems to not promote green thinking. This part of your tradition seems to not work in the right direction kind of thing. So anyway, I've now been researching the relationships between religion and environmental decades for decades. And recently, I did a comprehensive review with two of my colleagues of all the kind of quantitative and ethnographic research that we could find.

We reviewed over 700 studies. to try to assess what's the relationship between religion and environmental behavior. Here's, I'm going to give you a little summary of this because I think this is directly related to your question. Okay. Those with profound environmental concerns within the so-called world religions remain, even today, a tiny minority. When it comes to environmental understanding and values, religiosity is typically less important than other variables, such as political ideology, and education levels. And all world religions, whether they emerge in Asia or the Near East, what some people

call the Middle East, have themes and dynamics that hinder understanding of how environmental systems work, as well as hinder pro-environmental values and behaviors. So that's not a very pretty picture or pretty summary. But what am I talking about? What themes hinder environmental understanding and concern? Well, perhaps the most important one that we found in these data is that beliefs that a deity or deity's controlled nature is one of the ideas that occlude or hinder understanding of human impacts on environmental systems. So whether nature is harmful or beneficent is good to us, right, is often believed to be related to whether an individual or a group is properly aligned with God, or the gods. and whether people are properly carrying out their religious duties.

Consequently, it's just so common in religions that to ensure a favorable environment, one must appease or please any deities that are powerful enough to influence nature. So this is why sacrifice is such a big part of the history of religion. Commonly sacrifices of plants or animals, and sometimes human animals, are considered to be a way to please or appease some division. community. And sometimes those who are believed to be offending the deity must be converted or suppressed in some way, because if they're allowed to continue to offend the deity, the plants won't grow or there will be other severe problems. So given such beliefs, religious people often find it difficult, if not impossible to imagine that negative environmental changes, including catastrophic climate change, is the result of human behaviors unless those behaviors. are of disloyalty to the deity or that violates some religious obligation. So this, this, you know, I can give you many examples of this.

One that comes to mind, if we're not getting overly long, I'll give you a little anecdote from Kenya. Yeah, it's fine. Okay, so shortly after about a decade ago, there was election violence that occurred in Kenya between different ethnic groups. I happened to be doing research for a couple months there on the Kenyan Greenbelt movement, a tree planting movement that was founded by Wangari Maafi, who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for that work. And I was way out in the bush, and I was listening to radio preachers talking about the severe drought that was unfolding out there.

And these religious radio preachers were saying, that the drought is because God is displeased with the post-election violence that occurred and the theft that occurred. So if you want the drought to go away, the preacher said, you must reconcile with your neighbors. If you damage their homes, you must help them rebuild. If you stole their animals, you must return them. And then the crops, you know, God will bring back favor on you.

Now, of course, on the one hand, that's a beautiful message of reconciliation. On the other hand, it doesn't help the people in that region to understand what they're up against with regard to climate change and how they need to recognize that this is not something that's going to go away if they reconcile with their neighbor, but it's a long-term trend to which they must figure out how to adapt to an increasingly arid, environment. And I was there and I saw how the grasses were stressed and how the animals were dying and I talked to Maasai people and it was, they were in a, they were in a world of hurt because of the desiccation of their soils, the drying up of their soils and, you know, less grassland for all the animals and so forth. So that's just one example. But the ethnographic and historical research provides many, many others. That's just one that I happen to experience directly. Anyway, this gives you an idea why religious people often find it impossible to

understand environmental systems and the way they are kind of independent, at least from a scientific perspective, of how people orient themselves to a God. Now, of course, you know, maybe the traditionally religious people are just are right, but for those who are more scientifically inclined like I am, you know, I find it frustrating if, you know, I find it frustrating if people can't understand what they're up against because the religious ideas are in the way. Now, the second thing that's common in the world religions in their mainstreams is that, and this kind of works against some of the stereotypes about Asian religions, is that they're all deeply anthropocentric in their own ways. They promote the notions that humans are exceptional,

and with few exceptions, they assume that humans are of greater moral value than other life forms. So for the Abrahamic religions, it's only humans that are created in God's image. And there to be regents you know, or stewards over all other life. That's the beneficent, that's the more friendly, eco-friendly possible version, right? And for the Dharma traditions, those originating in the Indian subcontinent, human beings have achieved the highest spiritual pinnacle

short only of enlightenment. And this perception of superiority, I think, erodes identification with and thus empathy for other species. Now, we could debate that. but that's, I think that that's fairly clear from the data. And then thirdly, world religions also tend to devalue this world by envisioning divine rescue from it in some way, either promising an extraplanetary post-death home or transcendence

from this world and its travails and suffering through spiritual practices or meritorious reincarnations. So in my view, it's important to recognize that there are themes in the world religion, that can be and are being used to promote environmental values and behavior and to analyze the extent to which such ideas are being embraced. But there are also strong barriers to that kind of approach. Yeah. I think that's very fair and a balanced view of the pros and the cons, the possibilities and the pitfalls. Certainly when you're talking to, let's say, like a reactionary Abrahamic religious person

like a white evangelical reactionary here in the U.S. and talking about something like climate change, I mean, they could either just outright deny that it's a problem or, you know, because they believe that God is controlling of everything that ultimately God will either

end the world or set it straight or whatever, but humans have very little part to play in that, and so it can lead to just be like we don't even believe in climate change, it's not even real, or even if it is, there's nothing we can do or nothing we should do, et cetera. There's also another reactionary posture, and I think it was even articulated by a figure like bin Laden, where there's like a very conservative Islamist perspective that is actually criticizing capitalism for its denigration and destruction of Allah's creation. So you can even see in some reactionary strains that there's this like at least acknowledgement that certain social forces, economic and political forces, are caused.

causing environmental degradation. So that can kind of go both ways. Now, the solution of a bin Laden type isn't necessarily a universalist, you know, eco-minded solution, of course. But it is at least interesting that that's being articulated, and that's one of the fears of the rise of eco-fascism, which is like this idea that people on the far right are going to increasingly be forced to accept the eco-crisis and the climate catastrophe, but will understand and react and engage with that problem through a reactionary.

And even fascist lens, I mean, for some of it is articulated as like, you know, just destroy as many people as possible to get people off the planet or whatever. Or in the chaos created by eco-collapse, we're going to fight for a white ethno state, you know, somewhere here in the U.S., etc. So those are all threats. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on any of that. Yeah, I sure do. Well, first of all, you've identified apocalypticism as an important. of what we're talking about. And White didn't talk about apocalypticism.

But apocalyptic, for those unfamiliar with the jargon here, it's basically understandings about the end of the world. The world, as we know it, is going to end. And there can be completely secular apocalypticisms, and there are, of course, religious apocalypticisms. after Lynn White wrote that book, Christianity in North America and around the world, conservative Christianity has become increasingly apocalyptic. It's theology much more so.

And there's different forms of this that we need not go into detail now. But if you believe that God is going to end the world as we know it, and God is in charge of the way this, end time's process will work, then, and if your soul is in peril, then really the highest priority for you is to try to live authentically your faith and to bring others to it, because that's, in fact, if we're going to look at this charitably, that's the most compassionate thing you can do, if that's what you believe about the world and it's unfolding and its near-term end. Now, you're right that bin Laden and actually lots of other Muslims who are trying to draw out the environmentally friendly dimensions to their tradition, they've got their favorite passages and they point to passages about how human misbehavior has led to corruption,

which leads to God withdrawing favorable environmental conditions. So they're using that idea to argue that if people get themselves right with God, the environment will be better. And one of the ways you do that, of course, is by treating the environment better. So there's this theological basis for environmental protection that some of these folks are, advocating. Similarly, Jews and Christians who are promoting these environmentally friendly virgins, they often like to talk about certain themes in their traditions, such as, these are shared with Islam, of course, that God created the world and then declared that

it was all good. Well, if it's all good, then people who love God should not destroy it, right? pretty basic logic. And then Abrahamic figures will often look at the story of Noah and they'll view it as an environmental fable. God created the world. Humans disobeyed. God decided that he had to start afresh, but he made sure that he kept up, that he brought all the species onto the arc so that it could start fresh. So some people view that as an environmental fable. I don't. I view it as an environmental horror story where God decided to destroy countless organisms and ecosystems because of the disobedience in his view of one species. And then right after the flood, he went and gave the same species that had disobeyed him

authority over these natural systems again. So, you know, it's a problematic story. But it's one that people are trying to resurrect, if you will, as a green fable. For example, you may have seen the Aaronowski, the film by Darren Aronowski that came out a few years ago that was titled Noah. Did you see it, by the way? I don't think I have, no. You and your listeners should go watch it. Because Darren Aronowski, he reconfigured Noah and this story in a much more dark green way. it's another example of dark green spirituality in my judgment that's being promoted

in the cinematic arts just like the not just like but in a way that's analogous to the avatar movie by James Cameron that I actually did a book about because it was such a perfect example of dark green spirituality but the the arts artists of all sorts are expressing and promoting these kinds of spiritualities through their craft. And the film Noah is a good example of that. Now, he had to take significant liberties with the story to turn it into a green fable and he had to ignore certain things in the story, such as the ones that I just, the ironies that I just pointed out. But the truth is that when it comes to religion, unless one is a fundamentalist, and indeed, even if one is a fundamentalism. There's always picking and choosing that goes on. What themes in the tradition do you

emphasize? And there's a great word for this from the French bricolure or bricklayer. The word is bricolage. So religions are a bricelage. They're an amalgamation of bits and pieces of differing cultural systems and ideas and practices. And no religious this group is kind of immune from this kind of process. And so when it comes to those who are trying to turn this or that religion green, they are inevitably going to cherry pick that tradition for the themes that they think resonate with their environmental values and their love of nature, for example. So that's actually encouraging, right, that people can arrive at environmental values in a host of ways.

And if they are involved in a religious tradition, there are ways in which those religious traditions can be interpreted in green ways. But to do it, you usually have to look the other way and ignore the themes that don't seem to support a green interpretation. I'll give you another great example because I enjoy your St. Francis interview so much. Thank you, yeah. If I had been in that conversation when you were talking about Gubio, the wolf, and St. Francis preaching to the wolf and arranging peace between the wolf and the citizens, so the citizens would feed the wolf, I would say that although that's interpreted as a great green fable, from an ecological perspective, it's not at all. because ultimately what St. Francis is asking of the wolf is to let go of his wolfiness.

The wolf is a predator, is a social hunter. And so that story is one that's asking in which Gubeo is domesticated and no longer a wild wolf, no longer really a wolf, more like a dog. So it's disrespecting the ontology of the wolf. So now that's not, it's not that the story isn't a beautiful story that we can take some, you know, moral, that we can value morally. But from a contemporary ecological perspective, we can only go so far with it. And we ought to note the ironies in it. So St. Francis was a luminary.

and moved the sort of love of nature significantly down the field, if we want to use a sports metaphor. But he was also a medieval monk that was a person of his time. And so it's kind of like all of these religious traditions, whether the axial age ones that emerged thousands of years ago, the so-called world religions, or the forms of them in the Middle Ages or new ones, They're all, after the emerging ecological paradigms, the evolutionary ecological worldview, gains traction, we now, if we're kind of modern people and we have scientific understandings, we can appreciate those traditions in all sorts of ways.

We can draw out the ethical dimensions of them while recognizing that there were still some things that they didn't quite understand them. And we don't have to be harsh in criticizing those things, but just sort of realize that we're involved in a long process of biocultural evolution. We should no more adopt wholesale an understanding of a religious tradition as it was understood thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago without putting it into a critical correlation. with the best of human knowledge today. And the best of human knowledge today does recognize, because you were talking about indigenous traditions, that indigenous traditions, and I think we can say because they have tended to still remain close to the land

and to have developed knowledge systems based on how to live within an ecosystem in a way that doesn't destroy it, Again, generally speaking, to the extent that they are still, especially in touch with their cultures and their religious practices, it's possible to generalize and say that they tend to understand non-human organisms as kin and to develop ethics of gratitude and reciprocity toward all of their relations and to have developed life ways that can coexist over long periods of time. the ecosystems they depend on. Yeah, I find all of that incredibly, incredibly fascinating. There's this interesting little dynamic, too, with colonialism in the indigenous struggle, which is like colonialism has sort of been part and parcel with a sort of fundamental feeling of separateness between the colonizer and the colonized, the colonizer and the natural world,

and after centuries of colonialism bringing us to the brink of this ecocastrophe, as well as with other variables, you know, obviously playing into it as well. You see this, the, this emergence of indigenous struggles all across the globe as being on the front line of the fight against, you know, eco-crisis and climate change in particular, saving land, saving, you know, defending water, et cetera. And so that, that, I don't want to call it a reemergence necessarily, but a more acute emergence of this force is, is, I think, very interesting. And historically, it's like trying to put us back on the right path after centuries of colonialism and, you know, brutalizing the natural world and each other, which, you know, humans are part of the natural world. And if you feel

fundamentally separate from the natural world, it doesn't take much to feel fundamentally separate from the other to dehumanize them, to, you know, invent racism, to justify colonial destruction through narratives of racism and inferiority and savagery, etc. So I think all these things are deeply, deeply connected. Yeah, they sure are. And the fact that so much of the thinking that we now call traditional ecological knowledge is now gaining respect in environmental circles is having, is contributing significantly to kind of the global environmental and social justice movements.

So this is really quite fresh. And there's all kinds of interesting ironies here. I'll give you another example from Africa. I was at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, and I was sitting in a field talking to two of the leading Greenbelt activists and intellectuals. And one of them was talking about his own ethnic community's tradition of venerating a mountain in Kenya and how that, as often is the case, where there's a sacred mountain or a sacred green. it leads to at least a kind of de facto wildland reserves.

And he talked about the colonization that's been going on in Kenya by both Christians and Muslims for generations and how the colonizers have been telling them that they need to reject their superstitious worldviews and embrace the, these incoming religions and later and embrace even a more scientific understanding. And what he told me is there's a tremendous irony here because now the scientists are coming in and they've been studying our spiritual and knowledge systems. And they're saying we need to protect our spiritual and knowledge systems because they're valuable. They have valuable knowledge about how to live properly here.

Ironically, he was finding validation in the contemporary sciences rooted in ethnobiology and so forth that was urging him to a homecoming to his traditions. Wangari Maathai herself who found the Keeney Greenbelt movement and ended up in the United States because she had been educated in Catholic schools and was a precociously bright young woman. She got to the states in the early 60s and experienced the feminist and social, civil rights and environmental movements. She went back home. She battled for the forests, for women's rights and so forth and so on. Well, Kenya has been significantly Christianized and Islamized, depending on what parts of the country you're talking about.

And she was a political figure, and she was trying to bring people together. So she had to be gentle in the way in which she, she promoted her values and her spirituality. But basically, she had returned to a much more indigenous spirituality than a lot of people recognize. And she was urging people to return to their own African traditions and to blend those with contemporary scientific understandings. So there's a lot of power in those combinations and those reciprocities,

especially when they're done between people who have mutual respect. And that's not easy because we're all people of our culture and these relationships between indigenous people and their allies are often fragile. And there's a lot of learning that needs to go on both sides, but especially on the size of people from settler societies, to make those relationships and those eco-social movements

as powerful and as effective as they can be and sometimes are. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well said. I could not agree more. I have just a couple more questions. I do want to be respectful of your time and, you know, respectful of your work overall. So just a few more questions for you because I really love you in this conversation. And I want to focus here on political struggle because, interestingly, you include political environmentalist movements, even ones that are not outwardly or even self-consciously overly spiritual or religious as participating in a sort of dark green religion of its own. And for me, you know, a real nature spirituality of any sort seems to organically give rise to an impulse to defend the natural world, to defend the integrity of the biosphere, etc. So can you kind of talk about the role that environmentalism plays here and the role of political struggle in general?

Yeah, that's opening a lot of things we can. talk about, right? Okay. So a part of what I argue in the book and elsewhere is that over the last 160 years, the worldviews of people around the world who are privileged to be relatively well educated have been revolutionized by evolutionary understandings that were precipitated by Wallace and Darwin, especially, and the corresponding evolutionary and ecological worldviews. Those spiritualities have been expressed and promoted in a host of ways by very diverse social actors. We mentioned artists. We could talk about museum, and I write, as you know, about museum curators and moviemakers, filmmakers, photographers, dancers, and so forth. People are

expressing and promoting their deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature in all sorts of ways. And they're doing it also. You find this happening in concrete political struggles through political theater, through protests where people dress up as non-human organisms who are and they'll do performative acts that are resisting the force. of extraction and destruction as they see it. We also see in international sectors, such as the United Nations, and one of the things that I've been very interested in is the role of the United Nations and their environmental summits.

I've been involved in the intergovernmental panel on biodiversity and ecosystem services and the reports that they've been writing. And what you see there is this effort to kind of promote the sorts of pro-environmental values and spiritualities that are associated with profound environmental concerns and pro-environmental practices. So even in a venue like that, we see increasing efforts to pay more attention to the spiritual and value dimensions. And Interestingly, if we look at something like the Earth Charter, which was officially suggested in 1990 at the Earth Summit in Rio and was pitched to the delegates of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, that's a deeply spiritual document. And in some ways, the most profoundly animistic dimensions of it were there because of the advocacy for them by indigenous people. And this is an important document that was developed by, oh, the leaders of a wide variety of grassroots movements around the world.

So it's a very plural, that's a very plural document. It reflects what the political theorist Dan Doudney cleverly termed terrapolitan earth religion. So what's that? Or he also talks about terapolitan earth civilization. Now, Dan and I became acquainted in the early 90s because we, were both interested in the ways in which contemporary nature spiritualities in social movements were unfolding and appeared to hold significant political promise. And as a theorist of international institutions, Doudney argued that what we needed was a kind of nature spirituality that provides the emotional infrastructure for spiritualities of belonging and connection to nature. upon which constitutional reforms and international treaties could be rooted.

That's asking a lot, right? And you might think, well, that's kind of fanciful. And as someone is, you know, can be pretty cynical myself, I can understand how somebody said, well, that's a, that's a stretch. But let's think about that for a minute. A little more than a decade ago, both Bolivia and Ecuador revised or, created new constitutions that enshrined the rights of nature. And these constitutions enjoined, they told ordinary citizens and actors in civil society, business, and governmental actors,

that they had a responsibility to protect nature. And the courts could be a way to pursue that. that's earth-shattering. But it's also a reflection of thinking that began in the early 70s when Christopher Stone wrote a famous law review article and turned it into a book called Should Trees Have Standing. So the idea that non-human entities have value, apart from their usefulness to us, that they have a right to their own existence and their own evolutionary unfolding, that kind of idea has been spreading around the world and gaining, cultural traction. That's a key part of what I call dark green spirituality. And now we see in New Zealand rivers being protected and considered to be persons largely because of the activism of indigenous people there. Similarly, places are being kind of reconsecrated, remade sacred as people return to their traditions in other places the world and advocate for them to be protected intrinsically.

Okay, so what are we to make of that? I don't know if you've ever heard of the theory of civil religion. Does that ring a bell? Vaguely, but yeah, I couldn't explain it. Okay. Most people can't. We're kind of into religious studies nerddom here. So let me give you a little bit of a primer.

Yeah. So the theory of civil religion, and it's very robust, is that in Japan, This is where a sociologist named Robert Bella first advanced the idea of studying Japan. And then he turned his attention to his home country, America. So let's focus on America for a second. The theory of civil religion suggests that there's a kind of a glue to American society that considers our nation to have a special place in human history. Oftentimes the story of America is that we are the kind of

new promised land, right? The Atlantic is like the Red Sea, where people who were oppressed left Europe to establish a new city shining on a hill, Philadelphia, right? The city of love. And just like Abraham and his people were supposed to be a light to all nations in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, as Christians call it. So America is to be a light shining on a hill to all people. Now, what Bella did is he went back and he looked at presidential speeches, and he noticed that presidential speeches and other political thought often would refer to God in a kind of generic sense. I mean, it wouldn't say, you know, our Lord Jesus Christ or something like that, but just sort of providing a kind of generic appeal to God and to people's

loyalty to God as kind of akin to the value of the Republic. These are related, right? God has helped to establish the nation. There's a high calling for this nation. God wants Americans in the American Republic to develop their republic in a way that's in concert with God's understanding of social justice, civil rights, and so forth. Okay. And then you can also analyze You can look at, there's all sorts of ways to look at the way in which civil religion is taught to the American people, has been taught to the American people. Look at the monuments to the saints of the patriotic religion. We could call it religious nationalism, right? Washington, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson, so forth.

And so despite the kind of rethinking about some of these figures, because they often did. did not live up, live in concert with their own ideals. Martin King came along and recognized that, right? Yeah. But Martin King didn't say, let's just reject everything about the American Republic experiment. He said, we need to call the American people back to what their true calling has been, which is to create justice here on earth.

Right. So it's possible to have a kind of generic spirituality. where people can believe in all kinds of different particulars, you know, they can be Christian, Jewish, they can be Hindu, but they all believe that there's something sacred about this land, right? Because what is patriotism? Patriotism is about we feeling, togetherness, and place feeling, love of place, right? So it's possible to have a kind of generic, non-sectarian, shared belief that this is a sacred place, and we have a responsibility here to respect that,

and that our responsibilities are tied to the divinity, however we understand the divinity in some way. And with this kind of approach, you don't have to be in contention over which divinity you worship, right? Right. So, okay, so that's the civil religion. And when America was a more homogeneous society, there was a lot of power to that kind of understanding of civil religion and its power in society.

And the critics, of course, of civil religion say, well, it tends to promote religious nationalism. It tends to be conservative. But just like Weber came to Marx and said, hold on, that's not all there is to it. Martin Luther King came to the criticism of civil religion and religious nationalism. He said, no, hold on. There's a prophetic dimension to this. And we see the prophets, the Hebrew prophets, And Jesus himself, if you follow their teachings, then the civil religion is not a conservative kind of religion.

It is a religion that calls people to their proper calling. All right. So that's civil religion. What's civil earth religion? So this is what I wrestle with at the end of the dark green religion book. especially if we think medium and long term 500 years out a thousand years out 2,000 years out if we get through the adequately through this ecological bottleneck that we're facing right now is it possible that people are going to learn are going to increasingly

gravitate toward these dark green spiritualities which are compatible with contemporary scientific understandings and in a host of different ways come together to recognize that everything we care about, everything, whatever it is and whatever our difference is, depends on the health and resiliency and fecundity of the biosphere and its environmental systems. And so we need to treat them with love and reverence. And it's possible that when people, when enough people, there's a lot of people feel this already, when enough people understand their deep interrelatedness, one with another, their kinship, one with another, and with all other living things, that these sorts of constitutional revisions

can spread, that international treaties can be developed that have the kinds of laws, agreements, and enforcement mechanisms that would, for example, deal with issues. like climate change. Now, this strikes me as rather fanciful because we don't have a lot of time to deal with current environmental predicaments we've made for ourselves. That said, when I look at dark green spiritualities, as I call them, they are emerging rapidly. They are spreading around the world. There's increasing proportions of the human population who feel that way, even if they don't have any terminology to express it or know anybody close to them who feels the same way that they do. While I think this kind of vision is not one that I expect to see it certainly in my

lifetime or even near term, when we look at how long it takes for worldviews to really spread around the world, now with all the contemporary communicative technologies, they can spread much more rapidly than ever before. And when do people respond most rapidly, politically to deal with things? It's in times of crisis and severe threat. And people are increasingly realizing that that's the kind of situation we're in. So we see new movements like, you know, extinction rebellion and so forth, which is really another form of radical environmentalism that was birthed in the states

in the 1980s and spread to the UK short. after that and elsewhere. Yeah. Yeah. I find it utterly fascinating in your vision of these different, a million different ways that this dark green spirituality or dark green religion is already sort of emerged. Like the seeds are planted and they're starting to burst forth and it may take, as you say, decades, centuries for the full dimensions of it to be realized.

But if we can understand that it is happening, that we're living at the beginning of some huge transformation period, we can all. take it upon ourselves to deepen our relationship with the natural world and to apply our interests and our talents toward the development of this new way of thinking and whatever details you know you specifically come out of whatever religious tradition cultural tradition political movement etc and there's almost like a like a threshold right like if enough people are waking up are developing are consciously developing practices in particular that can deepen your felt connection to the natural world.

Certainly, there seems to be like a tipping point through which enough people begin engaging in this, whether fully consciously or not, and it makes radical changes to culture, to worldviews overall. And I think that process is underway and will develop even more intensely in the face of both the climate crisis, the eco-crisis, as well as the new technological ways of communicating instantaneously across the entire world, which is truly new. Those two things together can really accelerate things in a positive direction as well as, you know, negative things. I mean, you can't separate the rise of something like QAnon from the technological communications

that we now have and the ability for misinformation to spread incredibly quickly as well. Indeed. That puts a responsibility, I think, in all of our laps individually and collectively. I do want to touch on as a closing question or two, we've talked about some of the obviously good aspects of it, but I think there is a, as you talk about in the work itself, a shadow side that can sometimes at least need to be acknowledged and looked out for. And that's sort of the double meaning behind the dark

and the dark green religion terminology. So what are some of the potential dark sides or pitfalls that you personally see as possibly emerging with or from these dark green religions? Well, first of all, just to be clear that by talking, dark, I mean two things. The positive side in my judgment is the sort of deep ecological sense that all life has value apart from its usefulness to our own species. The other side is the negative side. If we study religion, we know that religions are a double-edged sword. Sometimes they promote, and one reason that they're here is that they can promote social solidarity and

the survival of individuals in a group. But, But religions also typically divide human beings into different categories of kind of holy person, ordinary person, and oftentimes subhuman person. And they can also look at non-human organisms and tend to view them as inferior to our own species, as I mentioned earlier. So the dark side of dark green religion has to do with these categories of inclusion and exclusion. that it, and so any religion is dangerous because of those kinds of typical categories that are in there, right? So that's part of the danger of dark green religion. The other danger of dark green religion is the kind of danger that inheres to any kind of holistic ethics. So as you well know, as a philosopher in ethics, to put it simply, you can divide ethics into,

those, again, to oversimplify, that are consequentialists that focus on ends and goals and what are the ends and goals we want to pursue, and those that are kind of rule-based, what rules ought we to live by, right? What actions are prescribed and to be avoided? Well, if you focus on the well-being of ecosystems as a whole, if you're an ecocentric philosopher or spiritual person, then the critics would argue that the well-being of individuals can come second to that whole. And that's a concern. That's a legitimate, that's a legitimate concern. And of course, the debates about ethics are often between individualism and holism. As we see, for example, in the disputes about the coronavirus and whether it's a responsibility wear mask or it's infringement on liberty,

to wear masks, to be forced to or mandated to wear masks. So, so that's an ongoing dispute. But what I argue in the book is that when you look deeply at the metaphysics of interconnection in the kinship dimensions of dark green spiritualities, the hand-wining about the dark side or the arguments about eco-fascism that are sometimes leveled against radical environmentalists and others. That hand-wringing, in my judgment, is overblown. It's not that there's no legitimate concern, but it's overblown. And it's overblown in part because the idea is endemic or native to these kinds of

spirituality that emphasize interconnection and kinship. But also, that's reflected historically. The examples of radical greens, deciding that to defend ecosystem holes, they're going to use violence, are exceptionally small. And even those who engage in sabotage or arson, the most radical, or some of the most radical tactics, they also historically have done everything they can to reduce the risk of, such tactics to human beings. I'm not saying that to justify them.

I'm just speaking as a historian of these movements. So I wanted to use the term dark green, not just because I like double entendre and the mystery of it, but because in any spiritual or religious movement, one needs to be alert to the shadow side and the dark side. Otherwise, it can emerge in very negative ways. indeed. Absolutely. Absolutely. Last question, this is personal, your point of view, sort of

studying the roots of this and the historical development of this over so many, you know, decades and centuries as your study does. Where do you personally see this going and developing particularly in the next few decades to even maybe a century out? And are you more or less optimistic specifically with regards to our ability to overcome the climate crisis in particular? In 1972, a group of precocious MIT scholars, most of them were postdocs, did research that they published under the title, The Limits to Growth. This is a famous study now. In it, they predicted that during this century and certainly by the middle of this century that we're currently in, if we didn't dramatically change course, there would be widespread collapse of environmental systems and the social. systems that depend on them. Scientists have since that time, looked at those early computer modeling, and tracked using

real-time data whether they were on the right track in their predictions. And their predictions, actually, they provided scenarios. Here's the status quo scenario where we just kind of keep doing what we are typically doing. There was a intense, you know, sustainable technology scenario. a intense technological advance plus reduction of human consumers and consumption track. Okay. More or less, we've continued along the status quo line. We've been doing a few little things in the last few years to reduce the amount of carbon

that's going into the atmosphere. But basically, the data suggests that this was an exceptionally prescient, an exceptionally, this was exceptionally good at predicting what was unfolding here. And anybody who's out in the world or paying close attention to what's happening to environmental and social systems sees this breakdown, sees collapse, failed states, and a lot of this can be a significant factor is environmental decline, decline in food security, and so forth and so on. All right.

So in this century, it is exceptionally hard if you're paying attention. and you know the facts and you're studying climate change to be optimistic. So near-term, I'm not optimistic. And part of what's so incredibly frustrating is that if you value all life, which I do, there's an extinction crisis unfolding and accelerating today. And apart from perhaps the possibility of resurrecting an extinct species or two or something like it using fancy technology, that's being developed like CRISPR and so forth,

there's no way to bring back the overwhelming majority of species that we are exterminating. And that's on our watch and it's our moral obligation and it's despicable. That said, there are times in human history

when humans rally in very dramatic and sacrificial ways to prevent what they perceive to be a grave threat. My dad fought in the Second World War against fascism. He was one of the first people at Daqa, liberating that concentration camp. And he took pictures of that place.

The defeat of fascism took a tremendous commitment of money, energy, and mobilization. I don't think that that kind of commitment was greater than what the world could mobilize to defeat the worst of the climate disruption that is currently unfolding and still accelerating. But we have to treat it like the threat that it is. And some people understand the threat that it is, including some very important politicians and scores of grassroots people around the world, and increasingly so. And Mother Nature, I'm not speaking animistically here as as though Mother Nature is a, you know, conscious being. But metaphorically, Mother Nature is screaming at us about this.

Mother Nature is getting our attention. And for anybody who's not kind of just immersed in the propaganda world of the Fox Corporation and similar insular fake knowledge systems, it's increasingly hard to deny that the climate is changing in ways that are very harmful to us and to the rest of the living world. So it could be, it could be that we are nearing the cost of a tipping point in human consciousness so that we would aggressively address this, reduce human consumption by reducing human numbers and per capita consumption of those numbers humanely over time, I would hope.

Because if we don't do it, it will happen involuntarily. And by the way, the great anthropologist, and I'm paraphrasing here, Roy Rappaport once said, as I paraphrase him, maladaptive cultural systems kill their hosts. So if we don't get this, if we don't create sustainable biocultural systems, those sustainable biocultural systems will evolve here sooner or later with or without us or with possibly with far fewer of us if we don't learn our planetary manners so when i think with regret about the loss of so many species that it's already they're already going away but i think out 200 years 500 years a thousand years two thousand years out uh there has to be a more

sustainable human socio-ecological system that will emerge or we won't be here and then the rest of the living world will just continue just fine without us right so if one is not all hung up on our own species maybe that's not a bad outcome you know if we can't learn our manners we might not be here. Maybe that's a form of justice. Yeah, I agree with that assessment, honestly, and especially that short to medium term sort of baked in brutality and chaos is not going anywhere. We're going to have to go through it. There's no other way out. But the sooner we wake up, the better. And you're right, nature is handing us an ultimatum. And it basically is grow up or perish, evolve or perish. You know, live in a balanced, harmonious.

way with your natural environment and understand your deep embeddedness and interconnectedness to all life or you know you're going to be you're going to be knocked off the planet by by nature itself and the youth i think understand this and a lot of my hope you know i have i have several kids and several nieces and nephews and as they grow up it's just very clear and it's it's baked in that the climate crisis is a huge thing and their futures are online and if you're an 80 70 60 year old right wing, you know, oil tycoon or Republican politician, you can just say, F it, you know, it doesn't, it's not going to affect me who gives a shit. I want as much profits as I can possibly get in a short amount of time as possible. But no matter what your politics are,

if you're 15, this is your future. And so I think, I think the youth plus the indigenous struggle, plus this emergence of these new ways of thinking and being in relation to the natural world and many variables that we can't even put our finger on yet are working it in a positive direction and we just have to, you know, throw our lot in with that side and become vessels through which nature heals itself and repairs itself. And I think that's the task of our generation and the next several generations as well. I agree. And this is one reason that I've been so interested in kind of grassroots social movements and the spirituality's and values that animate the people involved in them. We see that the stronger they are, the more

concessions they rest from social and economic elites. And it's also the case that many of these and increasing numbers of these privileged social elites are beginning to understand that their privileges and their lives and the lives of their children and their grandchildren, their great grandchildren, depend on dramatic changes in socioeconomic and ecological systems. And so we find some of those sectors coming around. And I think those are very important trends. I'll give you one quick anecdote. I was in Germany because I was a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center there.

And a fellow came, the chief scientist of Munich RE, which is an insurance company, that does reinsurance. In other words, these are the huge insurance companies that insure the smaller insurance companies. And they had the most sophisticated analysis of extreme weather events around the world and the risks that they involve to all kinds of human activities that I've ever seen.

And it's been the insurance companies who are going to lose tons of money due to climate change and have to assess climate risks that have been among those that have been in international sectors for, oh, at least 20 years urging action in response to climate change because it affects their bottom line. And they need to know those risks. But it's not just the insurance companies whose bottom lines are at risk by climate disruption. And

some, it's inevitable that people are going to recognize this. including these elite sectors. The question is, as you suggest, will they give a dam? And the ones that care about their kids and grandkids will, and are showing signs of giving a dam, and will they begin to do the kinds of things that are necessary to play a role in ameliorating these situations? And we see examples of that in places that many leftists would find surprising, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And it's going to have to be people from all walks of life, all different levels of society, waking up to the reality and putting whatever they have towards its solution if we're going to make any headway at all. And I do agree there

are elements even of the elites who understand the human impacts of this, the implications for their own life, because this is already happening. It's not like it's going to, it's not even like it's in the future anymore. It's already happening. If you're 60 years old, you've got 20 more years of a deteriorating or destabilized climate environment. So yeah, I do agree with that. And we should take allies on this front where we can find them for sure. Bron Taylor, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation based on a fascinating work. I highly recommend people go out and get a copy of this. Before I let you go, though, can you just please let our listeners know where they can find you and your work online?

Well, happily for me in these kind of situations, I have a weird name. It's Braun, B-R-O-N. There aren't too many bronze around. So if you Google Braun-Taylor, I'm pretty easy to find. but you can go directly to my website, which is brawn taylor.com, all one word, all lowercase. I'm on Twitter at just at Braun Taylor, and I've started to put some lectures and ruminations up on YouTube. So please feel free to give me a shout if you have questions and your listeners. And I do my best to respond, not always quickly, and sometimes I need

somebody to write me more than once, but I welcome inquiries from from folks like you and your listeners. Perfect. Yeah, I'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible so people can find you as easily as possible. And, yeah, keep up the important, important work that you're doing. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for coming on today. Well, thanks for inviting me to the show.

It's a fascinating show that you've got working there. And I know that a lot of people value it greatly. So keep it up. Persevere. Under the sky And the shining stars above Stars above Stars above A sudden

So through rainy life, I don't get out, don't see much daylight, I can see air is sweet, familiar ghosts coming home beat in my sleep in my sleep But I always take it for survival Every day is like the one The bull it seems On forest screen the lights cut in The awful night was creeping in again

in again it's something that you've known but if you understand this place is cursed it is cursed and it feels flat bone It's in the landlord's smile Satisfied days of the ranking file

We got the sea and the sand We got the load of your beds I'm stolen, stole the land Stolen no more oasis in the end of the scene only flat black glass under the waves

and don't it last Oh my glass Oh my glass Always Only stay here For survival real arrivals

on the scene In forest screen The lights go in The awful night was Creeping it again In again It's something that You've known since birth

You understand This place is cursed It is cursed But it feels Like home feels like home, and I can't stay alone. So, you know, I'm going to be able to be. Oh. I don't know.

Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm a lot of you know I'm going to I'm going to go.

Oh. I'm going to I. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.