Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism

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).