Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T19:44:08.442Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2006

Judith Adler
Affiliation:
Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

Abstract

Environmentalist writers and their critics agree that Western environmental problems, projects and movements have a marked religious dimension. In an often cited but now widely qualified paper, Lynn White located the roots of our ecological ‘crisis’ in a Judeo-Christian orientation to nature (White 1969). Some contemporary environmentalists call for a new “religion of nature” (Crosby 2002; Willers 1999) or, on the model of modernist negative-theologies, proclaim the death of Nature (Merchant 1980; McKibben 1989); others offer new interpretations of scripture and doctrine as guides for action (Bratton 1993; Hessel and Ruether 2000; McGrath 2002). Political opponents of environmentalist politics also focus on its religious dimensions, though with the aim of discrediting it as unscientific or, among Christians, as pagan (Rubin 1994; Huber 1999; Bailey 2002).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)