Spotlight on Teaching: “Religion and Ecology”

Guest Editor: Whitney A. Bauman, Florida International University

Whitney A. Bauman is assistant professor of religion and science at Florida International University in Miami. His publications include Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (New York: Routledge, 2009) and, coedited with Richard Bohannon and Kevin O’Brien, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2010). Bauman currently serves as co-Chair of the Religion and Ecology Group at the American Academy of Religion and as book review editor for Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology. He teaches courses such as “Technology and Human Values,” “Religion, Nature, and Globalization,” and “Religion, Gender, and Nature.” Bauman’s current research is in the area of religion, nature, and queer theory.

Like most subdisciplines within religious studies, the field of “religion and ecology” — and also “religion and nature” — is multidisciplinary and hence employs multiple methods of inquiry. One commonality of the methods employed within the field is that they are aimed at uncovering ways in which our religious ideas, beliefs, values, and histories become embodied, whether we are talking about one of the major world religious traditions or emerging religious practices. In other words, they focus our attention on how religions materialize in the world and affect human bodies, the bodies of the more-than-human world, and the exchanges of materials and energies between bodies. Most often, such reflection is not done with the goal of acquiring mere facts or aggregating disengaged knowledge in mind.

Similar to “women’s studies,” religion and ecology/nature has a normative aim, which is to understand the implications of religions and value systems for human–earth relations so that we can begin to think and act in ways that will bring about a better planetary future for the ongoing, evolving process of life on planet Earth. In other words, people who teach “religion and ecology” don’t teach students how to better use religions to exploit the earth’s resources. Another similarity to women’s studies is that the goal of religion and ecology is to become such an integral part of syllabi across the curriculum so that there will no longer be a need for the field. Though the past forty or so years of religion and ecology work has done a lot to move in this direction, there is still a great need for the teaching of this subject within religious studies and theology curricula today. 

In what follows, six different instructors offer their own insights from teaching some aspect of “religion and ecology.” Some teach whole courses devoted to the topic, others teach whole courses devoted to a subtopic within the subdiscipline, and still others teach only a unit or two of religion and ecology within a much broader course. The institutional settings of these teachers are also quite diverse. They include a public university, private university, seminary, and liberal arts college. These contexts are important as the face of religion and ecology looks different from the context in which it is taught. Another mark of diversity — other than race, gender, and age — that may be especially important for an issue on religion and ecology is the geographical and topographical diversity from which these articles emerge. From urban to rural, coastal to inland, mountainous to flat, hot to cold, local to transnational, the geographic places from which these articles emerge are important both theoretically and pedagogically. 

Even with all of these differences, there is at least one common theme that ties all of these articles together — the importance of embodiment. Some entries — Robb and Patterson — focus on how the experiences of organic gardening or within a specific “place” in nature can lead to an embodied understanding of some of the more “spiritual” connections we have with the rest of the natural world. These “more than intellectual” engagements with the rest of the natural world begin to unhinge some assumptions about human exceptionalism and anthropocentric understandings of the world. Other entries — Jenkins and Stivers — focus on how specific ecological problems such as climate change or mountaintop removal can change one’s religious understanding of the rest of the natural world and challenge the silence of religious peoples in the face of such problems. How does climate change affect one’s understanding of deity, "Good," "Justice," etc.? How does confronting firsthand the destruction caused by mountaintop removal help students understand at a bodily level the connections between environmental degradation and social injustice? Still other articles ask students to examine the ways in which the contemporary process of globalization affects religious identity and understandings of nature (Mukonyora), or how technological developments change what it means to be human vis à vis the rest of the natural world (Bauman). Together, these techniques suggest how one can approach teaching students about “religion and ecology/nature” in more than just an intellectual way. 

Though not explicit in each article, I suspect that another common factor of the teaching practices described in this issue is that they in some way address students’ experiences of being overwhelmed and falling into despair. I would imagine that students and scholars of Holocaust studies, anthropologists cataloging dying languages, psychologists focused on death and dying, and perhaps a few others face such overwhelming feelings as those facing global climate change, species extinction, environmental injustice, and other issues of ecological degradation and injustice. This despair has marked the field from its beginning. At times it can lead to apocalyptic-style declarations, at times prophetic acts, and still at other times denial. Regardless, both teachers and students of religion and ecology/nature have to come up with coping mechanisms. Teaching methods that involve embodiment can be a useful tool in addressing despair and helplessness. 

As most religions teach hope in the face of the impossible, so gardening, choosing “green” technologies, confronting specific issues, becoming vegetarian, and other embodied responses to ecological ills can help ground a sense of hope in the face of future uncertainty. Not the naïve hope that one act, solution, individual, or classroom can “save the world” — not one of these teaching techniques claims easy answers, nor do they claim that their given approach or solution to a problem is the thing that is going to save the world. Rather, the goal is to foster a sense of being a part of a larger earth community and a part of the solution to these overwhelming problems. In the end, the goal of these problems is to help students learn, in an embodied way, how and why religions matter in and to the world around us. If they do shape our interactions with the rest of the natural world, then surely we can at least critically examine how they do so. I thank all of the contributors of this issue for doing just that, and to the editors for allowing us to share these insights with the wider AAR community.