Bron Taylor Environmental Research Overview Over the past thirty years there has been an explosion of scholarly inquiry in areas now labeled “environmental philosophy,” “environmental ethics,” “religion and ecology,” and “nature religion.” Sharing an assumption that people’s attitudes and behaviors toward nature are decisively shaped by religious and philosophical worldviews, these emerging disciplines have drawn heavily on the social sciences and humanities, and sometimes on the natural sciences.
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The resulting scholarship has sought to understand the many relationships between nature and culture. In some cases, this scholarship has also involved a normative dimension, evaluating ethically human livelihoods and lifeways, and proposing public policies.
As one trained in Religious Studies and Social Ethics and concerned about social justice and environmental sustainability, much of my own research has taken place at the interdisciplinary intersection of these fascinating, rapidly evolving disciplines. My general research goal has been to illuminate descriptively the role that divergent religious and philosophical ideas, and various perceptions of social and environmental facts, play in contemporary environmental struggles. This descriptive goal is animated not only by an intellectual curiosity; I believe that such inquiry can promote critical thinking about environmental issues and thus wiser environmental behavior by individuals and institutions.
In 1989 I undertook research exploring specifically the religion, politics, and ethics of grassroots environmental movements. Although I began by reading widely in the literature of these movements, I was interested in more than their texts and ideas. I take a more social-scientific approach to religious and philosophical environmental ethics than do many of those who have examined such movements, or who are engaged with the emerging literature dealing with environmental ethics, or religion and ecology. I am interested in the ways environment-related values are understood, articulated, and acted upon by ordinary environmental actors. I seek to understand how such values shape human lifeways and material culture, to apprehend their impact on the living systems from which culture springs and upon which it depends. I examine in particular the continuities and discontinuities — because the values and practices of environmentalists may or may not cohere with the environmental ethics or religious ideas espoused by members of the environmentalist intelligentsia.
In 1990 I began the fieldwork component of the research; my initial goal was to conduct an in-depth study of the radical environmental movement in North America In 1991 I published my first article focusing on this movement in The Ecologist. Entitled, “The Religion and Politics of Earth First!,” it provided the first detailed description of the movement’s religious dimensions, and a careful analysis of the factions within this movement that had only recently been split by long-simmering strategic and ideological differences. This article, abstracted as follows, provided a framework and has posed questions for much of my subsequent work:
The United States radical environmental group Earth First! is animated by biocentric values based on religious perceptions and beliefs that can best be labeled “primal spirituality.” An apocalyptic expectation based on ecological science, and a militant urgency grounded upon an anarchistic critique of nation-state governance, is then grafted onto this religious “intrinsic value theory.” To understand fully this movement we must comprehend not only its militant tactics and the internal disputes about them. We must also understand the plural religious perceptions and traditions that serve as cultural tributaries to such movements, the way their emerging myths and innovative ritualizing inspire and sustain participants, and how ecological and political analyses are drawn into the overall worldview and ethics characteristic of these movements. When we understand the factors giving rise to radical environmentalism and its various factions, and discern that such factors are increasing, it appears likely that such groups will proliferate and further diversify, playing an increasingly important role in environment-related struggles.
Since I first wrote about them these movements have become increasingly influential, especially in North America, Europe and Oceania. I have spent much of this decade tracking their development, exploring the ways activists in these movements have influenced each other across the Atlantic and Pacific, describing their cultural dimensions and impacts, and explaining (and more recently evaluating) their moral, ecological and political claims. After my initial article was published I was gratified to learn that movement participants found it to be fair and accurate. This widespread perception helped me to secure unique access within this movement, facilitating subsequent fieldwork.
Over these years I have explored in depth these subcultures and their various dimensions. In “Evoking the Ecological Self: Art as Resistance to the War on Nature,” for example, I illuminated and provided many examples of the widespread belief among deep and radical ecologists that the arts can reach people affectively when they cannot be reached rationally. Many of these activists believe that music and drama (including guerilla theatre), poetry and prose, graphic arts and photography, all can evoke and deepen people’s felt connections to a sacred natural world. “Earth First!’s Religious Radicalism” offered an expanded analysis of this spiritual epistemology, providing even greater detail of the mythic and ritual life found within radical environmental groups. This article included the first Religious Studies-informed scholarly analysis of the Council of All Beings, a fascinating and novel form of green ritualizing that has become influential far beyond its radical environmental birthplace. A number of important studies have documented the importance of nature as a symbol in American religious history. I built on such research in “Resacralizing Earth: Environmental Paganism and the Restoration of Turtle Island.” In this article I first provided detailed evidence that there is more continuity than is commonly appreciated between the religious perceptions and motivations of the most prominent environmentalists in the 20th and late 19th centuries and their contemporary radical environmental progeny. I then analyzed a recent environment-related conflict in which Apache activists and radical greens created a coalition to oppose -- as a desecrating act -- the planned construction of observatories on Arizona’s Mt. Graham. The article described the many disputes that emerged during this struggle, both within the coalition opposing the telescopes, and between the observatory’s opponents and proponents. This case study illuminated dynamics that often characterize nature-related social battles: Environmental conflicts are often grounded in competing assumptions about whether the sacred is located above or beyond the world, or is somehow surrounding us and residing underfoot.
Many fascinating facts and questions have emerged throughout my fieldwork. I discovered that radical environmentalists generally consider indigenous people to be natural allies and grassroots movements in less-affluent countries to be kindred movements. Moreover, such groups are generally believed to be motivated by biocentric values and pagan or primal spiritualities. Previous readings about peasant and indigenous social movements, however, led me to doubt such sweeping generalizations.
I expanded my research, therefore, to address this question: When examining the explosion of grassroots social movements around the world that are taking on environmental agendas, what sense would it make to consider them kindred movements to radical environmentalism? I sought to answer this question first by drawing on extant ethnographic studies of such movements and upon social movement theory, but there was insufficient data. I then constructed research questions and recruited a number of scholars into a collective endeavor designed to assess whether and if so how, in the global context, radical environmentalism is a useful rubric for understanding the proliferation and increasing militancy of grassroots environmental action.
Our findings appeared in Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism and are summarized in my concluding chapter, “Popular Ecological Resistance and Radical Environmentalism.” Among other things, this volume described how misperceptions and conflicts often result when groups with dramatically different backgrounds strive to create coalitions to battle environmental degradation.
While orchestrating this global research, I continued my own fieldwork in America. My next article spotlighted one of the most difficult and painful issues that has, in some regions, significantly hindered the creation of indigenous-environmentalist alliances. Entitled “Earthen Spirituality or Cultural Genocide?: Radical Environmentalism’s Appropriation of Native American Spirituality,” and published in the journal Religion, this article drew on anthropological studies that analyze religious bricolage. It also drew on the views about such phenomena as they are expressed at the grassroots.
Indeed, this article shows that I am committed to listen carefully not only to the way intellectuals debate contested moral issues, but to the voices of those involved in various contests who would never place their views in written form. This approach is time-consuming and requires patience, but it allows me to bring a more judicious and nuanced perspective to difficult moral conundrums than would otherwise be the case.
Up to this point in my environmentalism-related research, I had placed a premium on writing in an objective and social-scientific manner. With this article I crossed something of a genre-threshold, adding an “applied” or “normative” dimension to some of my work, analyzing the major moral arguments and fact-claims that I had previously only described and analyzed.
“Earth First! Fights Back” (and the unabridged version entitled “United States Forest Service versus Earth First! Army Corps of Engineers: Contextual Reflections on Resistance and Democracy”) is a different example of my normative turn. In it I first examined, with my usual descriptive caution, the recent escalation of direct action resistance to logging, focusing attention on three contested forests in the American west, including the “Headwaters” Redwood forest in Northern California
. I then evaluated through the lenses of environmental science (especially Island Biogeography and Conservation Biology) the ecological claims made by activists about the importance to biological diversity of these specific, contested places. I also assessed the claim commonly made by activists that government lawlessness and corruption in its administration of biodiversity‑related environmental law justifies illegal direct action.
About the same time I entered into more theoretical debates currently underway about whether any ground can or should be established for environmental ethics. In “On Sacred or Secular Ground? – Callicott and Environmental Ethics,” for example, I challenged Baird Callicott’s effort to construct a universal, science-based, religiously influenced environmental ethics. I did so by revisiting the perennial philosophic question as to whether morality is necessarily dependent on religion.
The various normative (both evaluative and prescriptive) dimensions of my work, from the more eco-philosophical, to the assessment of the ecological and political fact-claims characteristic of radical environmentalism, are being expanded and integrated into one of the two book manuscripts I working on, On Sacred Ground: Earth First! and Environmental Ethics. As with all my work, however, my first objective will be to provide careful description and interpretation of the movements. Such analysis provides an ideal springboard for normative reflection.
Another article that blends social science and normative reflection is “Religion, Violence, and Radical Environmentalism: from Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front.” Published in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, this article assesses the extent to which radical greens have used violence or terrorism and whether such tactics are increasingly likely to be deployed. It concludes with an ethical argument, in the light of the empirical findings and the predictions based upon them, about how scholars and journalists should frame their discussion of environment-related sabotage and violence.
In “Bioregionalism: An Ethics of Loyalty to Place” I began a new inquiry, this time into the countercultural roots of this increasingly influential green movement. It also provided a preliminary assessment of the merits and perils of bioregional social philosophy, particularly in the light of global commons issues and international relations theory. Even more recently I published in two parts an article entitled “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality: From Radical Environmentalism to Scientific Paganism,” in Religion.
The other book manuscript that I am working on is Dark Green Religion, will expand the examples and build on the argument in “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality.” I am especially interested in focusing attention on the meaning and characteristics of science-grounded, earth-based spiritualities, namely, groups such as “The Epic of Evolution Society” and the “Society for Scientific Pantheism.” These organizations include many prominent scientists, some of who do not consider themselves religious, but nevertheless seek to consecrate scientific evolutionary narratives and label such processes “sacred.” They do so in an effort to describe their deepest aesthetic experiences and express their reverence for nature and its processes.
All of the above work contributes to, builds upon, and complements my efforts to understand “nature religion” and “nature-influenced religion” around the world, and to help build and shape the nascent, emerging field of “religion and ecology,” through my work editing the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005), which is described at www.ReligionandNature.com.
I hope this overview has provided a helpful introduction to the range, evolution, and future direction of my scholarly endeavors.
Religion is arguably the premier international journal in the field, and bricolage is the process whereby bits and pieces of different, colliding cultural systems are amalgamated and fused into new forms of belief and expression.
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