A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future (review)

Roger Gottlieb's latest contribution to the growing literature on religion and environment opens with the sounds of a new start. It is not uncommon to hear that an environmental crisis challenges humanity to rethink its fundamental sense of identity and respond in new ways, nor that religions may possess resources to help us do that. But Gottlieb announces that this rethinking and responding is in fact already happening, and is doing so within a diverse religious scene, where practical responses and cultural innovations are emerging. Whatever its contribution to underlying causes or crises may have been, says Gottlieb, religion is becoming a source of good environmental news, a place to look for emergent forms of human identity in an environmental age.

A Greener Faith therefore makes religious environmentalism of importance not only to pragmatic environmentalists and political observers but to religionists, for it signals that religious communities, pressed by a new kind of social challenge, have begun adapting and redeploying their traditions to offer meaningful responses. More importantly, Gottlieb claims that these responses are part of a groundswell phenomenon that is reshaping politics and culture in religious dimensions: "[r]eligious environmentalism is a diverse, vibrant, global movement, a rich source of new ideas, institutional commitment, political activism, and spiritual inspiration" (215).

A Greener Faith purports to describe that movement as a religious phenomenon, including "an account of how religious thinking has changed, how religious institutions have committed themselves to environmental causes," and how secular environmentalists are finding religious resources (90). In order to do that, Gottlieb revisits general topics of religious study under the aspect of environmental crisis: religion and secularism, religion and politics, religion and change, spirituality and environmentalism. Gottlieb seasons those general topics with brief reports on environmental initiatives from major religious communities and conducts interviews with public religious practitioners engaged in kinds of environmental activism.

For a book that announces its subject as "the full scope of religious environmentalism," however, the description of the movement comes off strangely parochial and curiously framed in Gottlieb's own style of faith: politically activist, religiously moderate, uncompromisingly progressive, and infused with ecological spirituality (9). The scope seems truncated both geographically and religiously. His five faces of religious environmentalism do represent different religious traditions and temperaments, as well as several ethnicities, but all are North American. This is a global movement, Gottlieb assures us, but he fails to portray a face from outside his own domestic cultural scene (of which there are many, representing significant formations of religious environmentalism).

More confusing is Gottlieb's narrowing frame for the religious. At first the book promises to tell of the diversity of a global array of religious initiatives, but offers only a selection from a few confessions, and then eventually comes to tell us that religious environmentalism is really the spiritual offspring of a wider progressive political movement for an ecologically extended democracy. We can rightly think of it, Gottlieb goes on to say, as a religiously faceted leftist political movement in the traditions of feminism, liberalism, and radicalism (216).

Surely this is not how interviewee Cal DeWitt understands his biblically centered evangelical environmentalism. Nor would, for example, an environmental ethic resting in Islamic law know how to recognize itself in that description. Gottlieb himself does not seem to know what to make of Islamic environmentalisms, rarely mentioning one, and then only to mention the Qur'an-based environmental regulations of Iran and Saudi Arabia as indicative of the way environmental pressures break down religious conservatism.

The discrepancy between the comprehensive aims and parochial treatment seems to lie in an unresolved ambiguity of "religious environmentalism." It could mean the environmental responses, practices, and adaptations from various religious traditions and communities, and Gottlieb sometimes means it that way. Or it could mean the general religious dimensions to a deeper strand of environmentalism, and Gottlieb sometimes means it that way. The two senses are probably related. Throughout the book Gottlieb presents on the one hand...