DARK GREEN RELIGION:
NATURE SPIRITUALITY AND
THE PLANETARY FUTURE
Chapter 1. Introducing Religion and Dark Green Religion
ADDITIONAL NOTES
(Listed In Order of Page and Paragraph Number In Dark Green Religion)
[2]   [3]   [4]   [5]   [7]   [8]    [9]   [11]   [12]
[2]

Par. 1-2, more about defining religion: 

Arriving at a consensus about the term religion has been made difficult because some have argued that the term has been used by powerful, imperial peoples to stigmatize and denigrate their colonial subjects. These colonizers used assumptions about religion (narrowly conceived on a Christian, monotheistic model), or the lack of religion, to denigrate poor and marginalized peoples as "primitive" or somehow not fully human or deserving of full moral consideration. According to this point of view, the term religion should be jettisoned in favor of terminology with less violent baggage. As David Chidester once summarized this perspective, "the terms of religion and religious are so damaged by their colonial, imperial, and globalizing legacy that they should be abandoned in cultural analysis." [David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and Popular American Culture (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 27.]
As examples of such argumentation Chidester cited Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1999), Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For more recent examples of such argument see Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion (Washington, D.C.: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), and compare Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Chidester demurred from their arguments that the term religion should be abandoned, however, even though he had demonstrated particularly well how the development of religion and religion-related terminology can function in oppressive ways in David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). The most recent critiques Chidester cited are more politicized versions of Wilfred Cantwell Smith's argument in 1963 that scholars should abjure the term in favor of terms like "faith" - which Smith (problematically) considered less problematic, and are insightfully analyzed by Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 27-69, and Kocku von Stuckrad, "Discursive Study of Religion: From States of the Mind to Communication and Action," Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 15 (2003), 255-71. For an important recent work on terminology in religious studies see Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially the essays on the terms "religion" and "sacred," and with regard to the latter term, see Stewart Guthrie, "The Sacred: A Sceptical View," in The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data, ed. Thomas Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 124-38. On the possibility of a "comparative study of religion" see the balanced and nuanced remarks by Jeppe Sinding Jensen, The Study of Religion in a New Key (Arhus, The Netherlands: Arhus University Press, 2003)

Disuptes over the boundaries of religion are long-standing. Are certain things essential to it, such as beliefs about supernatural beings or extraordinary forces? Such questions become particularly relevant to discussions surrounding what constitutes "nature religion." For there to be nature-oriented belief systems to be considered religious and/or spiritual, for example, must adherents believe in supernatural realities? [For an example of a definition that insists that religion must have something to do with supernatural divine beings, see Jonathan Z. Smith and William Scott Green, "Religion, Definition Of," in The Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith and William Scott Green (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 893-94.] Or is a more nebulous sense that "nature is sacred" in some way sufficient to trigger the term religion when describing people with such perceptions? Is the presence of terminology that typically accompanies religious forms sufficient evidence that associated beliefs and/or practices are religious? Such conundrums can be summarized with these questions: Is religion a useful term for analysis? If it can be, what are the ways it should be understood? Where does religion end, and where do social phenomena that are not religious begin?

Despite the best efforts of scholars to uncover the roots of the term and trace its development over time, etymology does not resolve definitively the earliest meanings of the word religion or demonstrate which early or later usages should be preferred [For an exhaustive study see Ernst Feil, On the Concept of Religion (Binghamton, United Kingdon: Global Publications, 2000) or begin with two valuable but shorter overviews, Jonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and C. Auffarth and H. Mohr, "Religion," in Brill Dictionary of Religion, V. 3, ed. Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2005).] Nevertheless, examining the earliest root of the term is a reasonable starting point, and some trace this first use to the Romans: 
For the Romans, religio especially denoted ritual precision. Being religious, “having religion,” did not mean believing correctly, but performing acts such as sacrifice or oracles (sacra et auspicia) at the right point in time and in the right series of parts: religio, id est cultus deorum (Lat., “Religio, that is, the worship/cult of the gods”). Proverbially, the “augur's smile” is that of the specialists who preside over the “tricks.” Superstitio, then, the counter-term to “religion,” was not aberrant belief, as it is usually translated, but aberrant activity, wrongly performed, exaggerated, often excessive or unauthorized. [Auffarth and Mohr, "Religion,"1608-09, drawing on Feil, On Religion.]
Other scholars trace religion to the Latin root leig, meaning “to bind” or “tie fast,” or to religãre, which could be rendered “to reconnect” – from the Latin re (again) and ligare (to connect). Many scholars elect to focus on the roots that, apparently, have to do with binding and connecting, finding these to be more analytically useful than what may be the earlier, Roman, meanings. In his recent book on religion in American popular culture, for example, David Chidester tethered his theory of embodied religion, which he considers deeply related to the human sense of touch, to religãre:
If we give credence to etymology – and if we accept that religio has its roots in religãre, “to bind” [more literally to re-bind] – then we have a tactile basis for the very notion of religion. From its ancient origins, according to this rendering, religion has been about binding relations, either among humans or between humans and gods, relations that have constituted the fabrics and textures, the links and connections, the contracts and covenants of religion. In this respect, although religious discourse might very well point beyond all that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, it points with a hand that is religiously bound. Tactility, in this view, is a fundamental bond of religion. [Chidester, Authentic Fakes, 75.]

If Chidester is right about touch being critical to religious life and perception, then this insight would certainly be pertinent to exploring the natural dimension of religion, in which human sensory experience is understood as a critical wellspring of religious belief and perception.

Such examples suggest that etymology can provide an analytical springboard for saying interesting things about religion but they cannot clarify the best way to understand religion or resolve its boundaries. As Tom Tweed concluded when examining diverse understandings of religion, “No constitutive disciplinary term is elastic enough to perform all the work scholars demand of it. But that means we should continually refine and revise our understanding of the term for purposes and contexts, not abandon it.” [Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), 39-40.]

This makes sense, for it is through this process of refining and revising that misleading or even malicious constructions of the term will, over time, decline in influence. Messing around with inherited terms and understandings may yield valuable new insights, but the bottom line is that terminology is needed for analysis, however problematic and contested it may be. In the following two quotations, Chidester and another eminent religion scholar, Jonathan Z. Smith, put this eloquently.
We require rigorous conceptual terms for analyzing authoritative discourses and practices that transact with the transcendent, the sacred, or the ultimate in all areas of human life. For better or worse, the terms religion and religious can be useful in highlighting these meaningful and powerful human formations. [Chidester, Authentic Fakes, 75.]
“Religion” is not a native term [meaning, one that most people use self-descriptively], instead, it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore it is theirs to define. It is a second-order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that concepts such as “language” plays in linguistics or “culture” plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon. [Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," 281-82.]
Chidester and Smith are correct that thoughtfully constructed understandings of religion can illuminate human life. As the anthropologist Benson Saler put it in Conceptualizing Religion, “The power of religion as an analytical category . . . depends on its instrumental value in facilitating the formulation of interesting statements about human beings.” [Saler, Conceptualizing Religion, 68.]

Par. 4, more on the family resemblance approach to religion study:

Along with Saler, Kocku von Stuckrad has also called for such a “polyfocal approach,” tracing it to Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote, “There exists only a perspective viewing, only a perspective ‘comprehension’ [‘Erkennen’]; and the more affects concerning a matter we present, the more eyes, different eyes we are able to employ for the same matter, the more complete will be our ‘understanding’ [‘Begriff’] of this matter, our ‘objectivity’.” This quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, "Zur Genealogie Der Moral. Eine Streitschrift," in Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Wtudienausgabe in 15 Bänden, #5, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 245-412, here at 365, italics in original, in and translated by Stuckrad, "Discursive Study of Religion," 260-62.

Par. 4, the family resemblance approach to religion and the characteristics of religion, unabridged text:

What are these resemblances, the elements that are constitutive of religion? Here is a list that includes those most typically articulated characteristics of religion that focuses especially on religion’s natural dimensions.

Religion, or the religious dimensions of life and culture, is often if not usually characterized by:
  1. Beliefs in or concern about (and regarding) supernatural beings or spirits, or dramatically extra-ordinary forces, which are sometimes explicitly understood as divine or holy or conceptualized with a similar cognate.
  2. Division of the world into sacred and profane objects or domains or spaces.
  3. Ritual acts and forms, often focused on sacred objects or spaces, but sometimes also having to do with seemingly mundane matters, such as birth, food preparation and consumption, and death.
  4. Beliefs and practices about, and believed to be related to, earthly and/or otherworldly destruction, and/or redemption/salvation/healing (where healing may alternatively be physical, emotional, spiritual, or all three).
  5. Practices and techniques including trance and other extraordinary states of consciousness.
  6. Processes and pressures that seek to get individuals or groups to alternate or retain religious allegiances and belief systems—conversion experiences and the failure or reversal of such experiences.
  7. Affective feelings and experiences of awe, mystery, shame, love, empathy, devotion, hatred, or rage, which tend to be evoked through ritualizing or other routinized practices, and are generally believed to be conducted in the presence of sacred beings, places or things, or in concert with their wishes.
  8. Beliefs in and practices (often, if not usually, with strong anthropomorphic dimensions) related to communicating or communing with supernatural or divine or extraordinary powers, or ultimately meaningful beings, or spirits, or forces.
  9. Understandings of the cosmos and the place of the earth and people and other living things in it, often understood as having ultimate meaning or as being some kind of holy order; such understandings may provide a sense of well being, belonging, and/or connection between individuals and the wider spiritual/ethical communities with whom people feel associated. Such religious understandings help people to cope with and find meaning, especially in the face of anomic realities such as suffering and death.
  10. Ethical understandings of the proper place for people and other living things in the world; these may promote or hinder social solidarity (identify morally considerable kin groups) and/or function to serve the economic, prestige, and power interests of some individuals and groups more than, or at the expense of, others.
  11. Beliefs and practices which divide humans (and/or other living things) into hierarchical classifications and reinforce the same distinctions, which often involve the labeling of some people as divine (or at least as having special lines of communication with divine beings or places), others as ordinary (or human), and others as evil (or subhuman), legitimating the repression of the latter.
  12. Beliefs, including narrative cosmogonies and cosmologies, which are not empirically demonstrable but are strongly reinforced through education, reinforcement/reward, penalties for deviance, and other social means.
  13. Sacred narratives (written or oral), which are often understood to have been given to people in some special/holy way, from some special/sacred place, for some special/holy purpose.
  14. Spiritual leadership, religious specialists, and physical/spiritual healers, who teach and assist seekers and devotees, and sometimes resist or fight (either directly or by example, exhortation, and administration) perceived, spiritual adversaries.
  15. Beliefs and practices that govern (and sometimes consecrate) the ways people use and transform their various habitats, and that sometimes tend strongly to reinforce or work against certain forms of socio-economic organization (namely, beliefs and practices that shape and influence their environments).
  16. Beliefs and practices that draw directly and indirectly on natural symbols and events for practices related to some or many of the above characteristics (namely, beliefs and practices shaped or influenced by their environments, such as volcanoes).
Awareness of such characteristics can facilitate analysis of social phenomena that may or may not eventually be judged to be religious. I have not provided this list to demarcate the boundaries of religion but to explore the ways that people are in reciprocal production with each other and nature, and to better understand the complicated ways in which beliefs, perceptions, and practices – which may be explicitly, implicitly, or ambiguously religious – are all involved in these processes. I am in accord with Saler on this, who concluded,
In the [family resemblance] approach recommended here, there are no clear boundaries drawn about religion. Rather, elements that we may apperceive as “religious” are found in phenomena that numbers of us, for a variety of reasons, may not be prepared to dub religions. But if our ultimate purpose as scholars is to say interesting things about human beings rather than about religions and religion, appreciation of the pervasiveness of religious elements in human life is far more important than any contrivance for bounding religion. [Saler, Conceptualizing Religion, 226.]
Analyzing family resemblances is valuable, therefore, regardless of the great differences that inhere in different peoples and places, and despite the absence of any clear, essential, universal trait that everyone will agree constitutes religion’s essence. Such an approach to conceptualizing religion leaves “in play” and open to contestation the definition of religion. It even leaves open to debate whether the contestation over definitions is important. It insists that the critical thing is nor to police the boundary of ‘religion’ but to learn valuable things about human beings, their environments, and their earthly co-inhabitants.
[3]
Par. 3, spirituality and religion, unabridged note 6: One sociologist of religion, for example, found that the key difference between spirituality and religion, in the minds of many, is that, “to be religious conveys an institutional connotation [while] to be spiritual . . . is more personal and empowering and has to do with the deepest motivations in life,” Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 76-77, see also 30, 76-79, 129-30. Other researchers found similarly, that “religiousness is increasingly characterized as ‘narrow and institutional,’ and spirituality . . . as ‘personal and subjective’” – and reported that nineteen percent of their respondents viewed themselves as spiritual but not religious; Brian J. Zinnbauer, Kenneth I. Pargament, and others, "Religion and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 4 (1997), 563, see also 549-64. Two books provide further evidence that increasing numbers of people in Western countries consider themselves spiritual and not religious, making understanding what people mean by the distinction obviously important. See Paul Heelas et al., The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality(Maldon, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), which contributes an empirical case study in the United Kingdom. The authors stress how the growth of “subjective spirituality” and the “holistic milieu,” which involves a tendency to focus on quality of life in this world as opposed to material acquisition or the attainment of an otherworldly domain, is growing strongly, even if perhaps slower than in the past and not in a way that could be characterized as a wholesale revolution, although they think this is possible. See also Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 87-100.

Par. 3, Anna King on spirituality and religion, additional quote related to note 7:

Anna King has provided even greater specificity when analyzing the idea of spirituality within the countercultures of many western societies.
If ‘religion’ is seen in terms of inherited structures and institutional externals . . . spirituality has become a term that firmly engages with the feminine, with green issues, with ideas of wholeness, creativity, and interdependence, with the interfusion of the spiritual, the aesthetic and the moral. [Anna S. King, "Spirituality: Transformation and Metamorphosis," Religion 26 (1996), 345. Fuller,Spiritual but Not Religious, 85-98, similarly notes the affinities between metaphysical traditions and eastern religiosities, holistic feminist, ecological, and healing visions, and humanistic psychology.]
[4]
Par. 1, Anna King on spirituality, unabridged quote:
The term spirituality as currently used, indicates both the unity at the heart of religious traditions and the transformative inner depth or meaning of those traditions. . . It is more firmly associated than religion with creativity and imagination, with change, and with relationship. It is less associated in the popular mind with hierarchies of gender, race or culture. It indicates an engagement with, or valuing of human experience and expression through art and music, through a response to nature and to ethical ideals as well as through the great religious traditions. It can embrace secular therapies and cosmologies as well as concerns with the environment.Thus it seems to include both sacred and secular, and to enable a fundamental rethinking of religious boundaries. [King, "Spirituality," 346, my emphasis. On holistic healing and spiritual psychotherapy (and its debts to humanistic psychology), see Fuller, Spiritual but Not Religious . It is noteworthy but not surprising, given the metaphysics of interdependence that they typically share, that as ecological alarm has grown, physical and psychological spiritualities of healing have become increasingly ecologized.]
Par 2, a more pantheistic belief, unabridged note: Another study found that attitudes toward environmental issues are “associated with the extent to which the individual believes that s/he is part of nature,” but that this is an unconscious awareness; see P. Wesley Schultz et al., "Implicit Connections with Nature," Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004), 31. Other research “supports ecopsychologists’ contention that connection to nature is an important predictor of ecological behavior and subjective wellbeing.” Stephan F. Mayer and Cynthia McPherson Frantz, "The Connectedness to Nature Scale: A Measure of Individuals’ Feeling in Community with Nature," Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2005), 503. Another study found that among Americans, “a number of radical environmental ethics, which revolve around a set of arguments for the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature, were embraced by respondents, especially ‘organicism/animism’ . . . ‘natural rights’ . . . and to a lesser extent ‘pantheism’; see Ben A. Minteer and Robert E. Manning, "Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics: Democracy, Pluralism, and the Management of Nature," Environmental Ethics 21, no. 2 (1999), 199. See also Kathy Brasier, "Identifying Environmental Attitudes and Their Correlates Using Exploratory Factor Analysis," Sociological Imagination 32, no. 2 (1995).
[5]

Par. 1, earth’s living systems, additional references: Bron Taylor and Gavin Van Horn, "Nature Religion and Environmentalism in North America," in Faith in America, "Personal Spirituality Today" (V. 3), ed. Charles H. Lippy (Westport, CT, London: Praeger, 2006), Bron Taylor and Joseph Dylan Witt, "Nature in New and Alternative Religions in America in America: Cases from Radical Environmentalism to Adventure Sports," in New and Alternative Religions in the United States, ed. W. Michael Ashcraft and Eugene V. Gallagher (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006).

Par. 4, distinguishing characteristics, additional note: Frazer noted, for example, that the Hebrew King Josiah initiated a death penalty for those who worshipped the sun in the seventh century bce and moreover, that subsequent Hebrew leaders, including the prophet Ezekiel, continued to battle the solar cult and other forms of what they considered nature-related idolatry.
[7]
Par. 2, macrobiotic dietary movement, additional note:Albanese’s work has significantly influenced my research trajectory, including that which is represented in this book, although I usually define nature religions more narrowly than she does. In this book when I speak of “nature religion” I have in mind religious phenomena that consider nature to be sacred in some way. Albanese uses the term nature religion for any time religion is an important dimension or resource in a religious worldview and practice; whether nature is considered sacred is incidental.
[8]
Par. 8, many affinities, additional notes: Naess (b. 1912) is the Norwegian philosopher who coined the term “Deep Ecology” in 1972 to express the idea that nature has intrinsic value, namely, value apart from its usefulness to human beings, and that all life forms should be allowed to flourish and fulfill their evolutionary destinies. He invented the rubric to contrast such views with what he considered to be “shallow” or “reform” environmentalism, namely, environmental concern rooted only in “anthropocentric” values that are concerned only about the well being of human beings. The term has since come to signify both its advocates’ deeply-felt spiritual connections to the earth’s living systems and ethical obligations to protect them, as well as the global environmental movement that bears its name. For his initial statement promoting the idea see Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1973). For an introduction to deep ecology and its religious dimensions see Bron Taylor and Michael Zimmerman, "Deep Ecology," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London & New York: Continuum International, 2005) and for a biography of Naess, see Knut A. Jacobsen, "Naess, Arne," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London & New York: Continuum, 2005).
[9]
Par. 4, more on Rousseau:Passages that illustrate how Rousseau’s feeling of an expansive self leads him to identify with the universe and embrace all beings, include: “I love myself too much to be able to hate any man. To do so would be to limit and confine my existence, whereas I would prefer to expand it to include the whole universe.” [Rousseau, Reveries, 100.] A few pages later in a somewhat confusing statement on his ability when younger to more easily “throw myself headlong into this great ocean of nature” and “swim in the chaos of my former ecstacies,” Rousseu wrote of a feeling of an expansive self that embraced other beings, “independently of my will my expansive soul seeks to extend its feelings and its existence to other beings [even though…] I cannot as I once did throw myself headlong into this great ocean of nature.” [Rousseau, Reveries, 112.]
[11]
Par. 2, on Lynn White’s Christian biocentrism, unabridged text:The final sentences in White’s article illustrate that a liberal Christian can be involved through scholarship in the effort to green a mainstream religion by criticizing it and urging it in its most promising directions. It also shows how the effort to green a mainstream religion can also promote dark green values and prescriptions, which White does by urging Christians, ecologists, and other westerners to reject an instrumental and anthropocentric worldview in favor of a religious biocentrism:

…We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious. . . The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists. [White, "Historic Roots," 1207/]
[12]

Par. 2, Asian religions and environmental concern, more references:

For works arguing that Asian and indigenous religions provide more fertile ground for environmental ethics than Abrahamic religions, see J. Baird Callicott, Earth's Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, eds., Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004).

For more sources expressing skepticism about environmentally friendly Asian religions, see Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland,Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach (London: Curzon Press, 1995), Ian Harris, "Buddhist Environmental Ethics,"Religion 25 (1995), and Stephen R. Kellert, "Concepts of Nature East and West," in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael Soulé and Gary Lease (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995). Kellert argued, “There is a biological basis for all human values of nature” (117) and concluded, “Neither Eastern nor Western societies are intrinsically inferior or superior in their perspectives of nature” (118). For a critique of the idea that indigenous peoples are naturally environmentally friendly, see Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999). For more on such approaches see Jeffrey Snodgrass and Kristina Tiedje, "Indigenous Religions and Environments: Intersections of Animism and Nature Conservation (Special Issue)," Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 1, no. 4 (2007).
Par. 3, on sustainability as a central religious objective, additional references: Bron Taylor, "Religious Studies and Environmental Concern," in Encyclopedia of religion and nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London & New York: Continuum International, 2005), Mary Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim, eds., Worldviews and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy, and the Environment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), Arne Kalland, "Religious, Environmentalist Paradigm," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London & New York: Continuum International, 2005).