Nature Spirituality, Environmental Movements, and Radical Politics: A Conversation with Professor Bron Taylor
- Nature Spirituality, Environmental Movements, and Radical PoliticsA Conversation with Professor Bron Taylor
On 11 April 2023, Dr. Bron Taylor joined professors Joshua Gentzke and Morgan Shipley for an engaging public conversation on the history and current state of environmentalism and radical politics. Dr. Taylor is one of the world's leading scholars in the field of religion and nature, a core faculty member in the University of Florida's Graduate Program in Religion and Nature, and Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society located in Munich Germany. He is the editor-in-chief of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005), and he founded the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture and its affiliated Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, a quarterly journal, that he has also edited since 2007. Taylor's own research focuses on the emotional, spiritual, ethical, and political dimensions of environmental movements, both historically and in the contemporary world. He has led and participated in a variety of international initiatives promoting the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. His books include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future [End Page 179] (2010), Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (1995), and Affirmative Action at Work: Law, Politics and Ethics (1992).
Working through a host of topics and examples, Dr. Taylor unpacks the significance and impact of contemporary environmental movements that, when compelled by sociopolitical forces, turn to alternative, artistic, and, at times, increasingly radicalized expressions of action.
The following represents an edited adaptation of this conversation, which includes some of the sources Dr. Taylor mentions or otherwise was drawing on during his reflections.
Dr. Taylor, you've had quite a wide-ranging scholarly career, which has entailed intensive study of grassroots environmental movements around the world, including the most radical of them, as well as efforts by some of the so-called world religions or global religions to mobilize their co-religionists in response to the environmental crisis. For decades now, you've also been studying what you call the "global environmental milieu," and you've argued that there's been a growing convergence among diverse pro-environmental actors across the world toward what you call "dark green religion," which is to say, an ardently ecological version of spirituality. You've even written about the connection to "mother ocean" that many surfers describe feeling, which has led many of them to become environmental advocates or activists. I wonder if you might tell us something about your background and how your interests unfolded. It would also be wonderful if you could briefly summarize some of the most significant things you've discovered along the way.
Like many of the students who are listening in today, in my late teens and early twenties, I became very interested in and passionate about the predicaments we had put ourselves in, from nuclear war and nuclear power to wars in Central America and civil rights. I began to notice that religion was oftentimes a hindrance to moving forward on those causes, as well as sometimes a resource for them.
I studied grassroots movements for social justice when I was in college, specifically the liberation movements in Central and South America that were deeply informed by a radical reading of Christianity. I found those [End Page 180] moving and compelling, but I also noticed that they were deeply—as we would put it in today's terminology—anthropocentric, human centered; they really didn't address the extent to which the erosion of Earth's ecosystems were negatively impacting people in the various struggles that they were trying to ameliorate. When I was working on my doctorate at the University of Southern California, beginning in about 1987, I noticed that there were people who were engaging in acts of civil disobedience and even sabotage to prevent the erosion of biological diversity. Intrigued, I began to gather news about them as well as their own publications. I learned that this movement had formed around 1980. They called themselves Earth First!, which was...
