10 Questions for Bron Taylor on Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (UC Press, 2009)
What inspired you to write Dark Green Religion? What sparked your interest?
I have long been interested in grassroots social and environmental movements, and whether and to what extent religious perceptions and moral values motivates their participants. When working on an earlier book, Ecological Resistance Movements, I began to see that ideas that found fertile ground within grassroots environmental movements around the world were becoming increasingly influential. As I traveled around the world in the subsequent years, I encountered a fascinating and diverse set of examples that convinced me that something new and critically important was emerging that could decisively reshape the political, environmental, and religious landscape. I called this phenomena Dark Green Religion, and by this I mean religious (or religion-resembling) beliefs and practices that consider nature to be sacred and worthy of reverent care, and non-human organisms to be kin and as having intrinsic value.
What’s the most important take-home message for readers?
Religion and environmental ethics were transformed forever when on November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. It shattered traditional religious explanations for the fecundity and diversity of the biosphere. Where this cognitive shift has been made, traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline. The desire for a spiritually meaningful understanding of the cosmos, however, did not wither away, and new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects.
The biggest obstacle to the emergence of these new forms is the failure of the majority of humanity to recognize their absolute dependence on the earth’s living systems and that these ecosystems are declining rapidly almost everywhere. Without such recognition, ecosystems will continue to be rapidly degraded and the most likely outcome will be the collapse of the social systems that depend on these ecosystems. This collapse will involve increasing numbers of environmental refuges, and widespread social strife, as competition increases for scarce land, water, and calories. Under these circumstances, the struggle for survival will become paramount for most human beings, and they will prioritize their own survival and that of their closest relations. Under these conditions, it will be far less likely that there will be further, rapid, biocultural evolution toward kinship ethics, wherein people empathize with one another and the wider community of life, and act accordingly.
It often takes a crisis to dislodge deeply entrenched beliefs and practices (which are precipitating ecological and social collapse) and thereby, to create the soil for new modes of thinking and being. The coming crisis may finally convince people that they are not exceptional in the sense that they are exempt from natural laws, such as, that organisms that exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat experience decreasing fertility, increasing death rates, or both, until they no longer exceed their habitat’s carrying capacity. This realization may reinforce the emerging evolutionary-ecological worldview and the humility that tends to accompany it, and play a role in fostering dark green spiritualities and ethics, and concomitantly, a widespread sustainability revolution.
Anything you had to leave out?
Lots! I originally produced a 190,000-word manuscript because I simply needed to assimilate a host of experiences and data. I knew I would have to dramatically reduce the size before publication. After trimming lots of interesting material, I promised readers that I would supply additional examples and detailed explanatory notes at my Web site, and further illustrate the themes of the book with slide shows, music, video, internet links. I’m also working on a blog to facilitate discussion and debate.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?
That ‘religion’ necessarily involves beliefs in non-material divine beings. Those who think such beliefs are the essence of religion would think it makes no sense to consider those with evolutionary-ecological worldviews as ‘religious.’ In contrast, I do not think it is particularly important to figure out exactly where the boundaries of what we call ‘religion’ might lie. I do think there is explanatory power in analyzing the religion-resembling aspects of diverse social phenomena, such as many characteristics of contemporary environmentalism, without getting too hung up on which labels for it are most apt.
Tags: darwin, earth, ecology, environment, environmental theology, green, nature, new religion, religion, science, sustainability
What a bore this green religion is: instead of Bach, Chartres and icons we get nature hikes and recycling campaigns.
Of course we're absolutely dependent on earth's ecosystems. And that's a huge pain in the butt, hardly something to celebrate. Taylor's quick evolutionary argument for the ascendancy of deep green religion overlooks the fact that deep green religion is simply unpleasant. Who wants the moralism of green religion, the puritanism, the endless exhortation to sacrifice our convenience, our pleasure, ourselves for the sake of the ecosystem and future generations--who, of course, are supposed to sacrifice themselves to the ecosystem and yet more remote future generations?
Traditional religion is just a lot more fun. Whether supernaturalistic claims are true or false, if it disappears we, our culture will be impoverished and we as self-interested hedonists will be significantly worse off.
While I must agree with you that Christians have writen some of the most beautiful music ever written, as far as haveing fun goes, you clearly have not experienced nature worship with the right crowd. The song (arguably not to be compared to Ave Maria) that comes to my mind regarding your post here is Pete Seeger's 'Old Time Religion' in particular the lines: "We will pray like the old Druids. They drank fermented fluids. And ran naked through the Woo-ids. And that's good enough for me."
One could write an entire book on the fun practitioners of dark green religion have.
The author assumes sense experience can tell us what we need to know for religion, "In a nutshell, and thinking long-term, maybe very long-term, I think that in the future, what we know scientifically, through our senses, will provide the parameters within which most people will find their spiritual understandings", so when he says parameters he means setting limits; whereas I would argue that this method tells us very little about the most fundamental questions about reality such as origin, other minds, and even new data on near death experience (see this Habermas article, http://www.garyhabermas.com /articles/Bibliotheca-Sacra /habermas_BtS_paradigm-shift.htm [remove the spaces before the "/"s]).
This is also scary, "the needs and rights of individuals might be overridden in the interests of promoting some understanding of the common good". The fact is, we would have a much cleaner environment if we respected and enforced property rights and the harm principle; whereas now we act more towards the socialist "greater good" doctrine and ignore individual rights, and the system we have that has done the harm already puts the greater good before individual rights. This video by Dr. Block explains a good deal about the superior environmental alternative under a free market, http://mises.org/media/1891?silverlight=0.
Hooey alert.
What these guys call "free market" is really corporate welfare. The powerful tweak all the laws to accord themselves more wealth and power. We saw that in the corporate socialism of the Bush bailouts. That was "saving the capitalist system". When working class people are involved, then it becomes "socialism." Property rights are inviolable until some big developer wants your property for a football stadium.
Some "socialist" should have overridden the needs and rights of individual builders in Haiti and established some building standards, "in the interest of promoting some understanding of the common good".
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