The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

Thomas R. Dunlap. Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. xvii + 206 pp. Notes, selected bibliography, and index. $24.95.

For the past twenty-five years, millions of Americans have watched the CBS News Sunday Morning show. Hosted originally by Charles Kuralt (and now by Charles Osgood), the program covers topics ranging from politics and business to literature and the performing arts. Each week the show ends with a nature segment. The camera pans across a wild landscape—often a national park—and presents viewers with scenes of migrating birds or vibrant wildflowers. As these images flash across the screen, there is no narration and no music; audiences hear only the sounds of nature itself. For lapsed churchgoers sitting at home on a Sunday morning, the segment may provide a kind of substitute for formal religious experience, a celebration of nature's beauty rather than a sermon on biblical tradition. Indeed, Osgood has recently claimed that the "nature piece" acts as "a sort of benediction," a blessing to conclude the show.¹

Thomas Dunlap's Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest offers a provocative and challenging context for understanding such representations of nature in American culture. Moving from the European Enlightenment to Earth Day and beyond, Dunlap blends the histories of science, religion, and the environment into a compelling study of the intellectual origins and development of American environmentalism. Throughout the book, he presents the environmental movement as an effort not only to save nature, but also to preserve a sense of the sacred in a world that has seemed increasingly secular and scientific.²

Dunlap frames the book as both a personal quest and a contribution to ongoing debates in environmental studies. In a brief introduction, he offers engaging reflections on the place of science, religion, and nature in his own life. Before becoming a historian, Dunlap was trained as a chemist. Although he eventually moved from the laboratory to the archive, his historical scholarship has consistently emphasized the importance of science to environmental thought and politics. A practicing Catholic, he combines this lifelong interest in the sciences with a personal commitment to religion and questions the lines dividing spiritual faith from rational insight. For Dunlap, the ideas and passions of environmentalism provide an exciting meeting ground between the seemingly contradictory discourses of faith and reason, emotion and argument.

The impetus for this book lies not only in Dunlap's background, but also in a well-known debate that began in 1995, when the environmental historian William Cronon published "The Trouble with Wilderness."³ In this controversial essay, Cronon posed an epistemological challenge to the wilderness ideal—the notion of pure, pristine nature as separate from civilization. Cronon linked the American celebration of wilderness to the rise of a Romantic sensibility and the closing of the frontier, convincingly showing how our ideas of nature are a function of culture, how they are shaped by the ways that we learn to see. The problem, according to Cronon, was that the way Americans learned to see wilderness promoted a dualism between nature and society. He concluded by arguing that this concept of a wildernesspurged of human inhabitantshas troubling consequences: it renders invisible the history of indigenous populations and their interactions with the natural world; it encourages people to long for distant, sublime beauty while ignoring the more modest landscapes closer to home; it elevates the preservation of woodland grandeur over less spectacular but more pressing environmental problems—cleaning up toxic waste sites, sustaining wetlands.

Cronon's essay triggered a kind of culture war within environmental studies, a debate over scholarly methods, contemporary politics, and even the broader question of whether culture should be used as a category of historical analysis. His critics expressed dismay or even outrage at his claims. Objecting on political grounds, they feared that his essay could fuel the anti-environmentalist cause and weaken the campaigns to protect wilderness. Some also could not...