Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Notes

N O T E S P R E FA C E 兩 L A U R E L K E A R N S A N D C AT H E R I N E K E L L E R 1. The term ‘‘tipping point’’ was originally coined in the early 1960s by Morton Grodzins to name ‘‘white flight,’’ the dramatic point when white families would move out en masse of a gradually integrating neighborhood. (Morton Grodzins, The Metropolitan Area As a Racial Problem [Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1958]). It has been lately popularized and merged with the ‘‘butterfly effect’’ of chaos theory. 2. Ross Gelbspan, The Boiling Point (New York: Basic, 2004). 3. This echoes the title of Jay McDaniel’s book With Roots and Wings: Christianity in an Age of Ecology and Dialogue (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995). 4. http://www.wakeuplaughing.com 5. As impressively collected, for example, in the Harvard World Religion and Ecology volumes, coordinated by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. More information is available at http://www.religionandecology.org, which features a full listing of the titles published in the Harvard Series. 6. Further information about David Wood’s art project is available at http:// www.vanderbilt.edu/chronopod/. See also Heather Elkins and David Wood, ‘‘The Firm Ground for Hope: A Ritual for Planting Humans and Trees,’’ in the present volume. I N T R O D U C T I O N 兩 C AT H E R I N E K E L L E R A N D L A U R E L K E A R N S 1. There is good news on many campuses as the concept of sustainable or green campuses and education has spread. Many colleges and universities have built LEED-certified green buildings, worked to reduce their CO2 544 兩 n o te s t o p a g es 2 – 6 emissions, and electricity consumption, switched to producing or purchasing some of their power from alternative sources, and examined their production of waste and sources of food. 2. It is worth noting that as academic leaders in the field, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, John B. Cobb Jr., Larry Rasmussen, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim have retired or left to continue their work elsewhere, they have not been replaced by scholars whose focus is as ecological . Many of the organizations established in the 1990s or before to work on faith-based environmental activism are struggling to support their staff and find enough funding. 3. There is a wide array of religious organizations working on environmental issues. See the Web sites of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (www.nrpe.org) and its constituent members. See also the Forum on Religion and Ecology (www.religionandecology.org), the Web of Creation (www.webofcreation.org) and the Interfaith Climate Change Network (www.protectingcreation.org) for links to many other organizations. See also Laurel Kearns, ‘‘Cooking the Truth: Faith, Science, the Market, and Global Warming,’’ in the present volume, for a more detailed discussion of religious environmental organizations. 4. The Earth Charter: Values and Principles for a Sustainable Future. For copies of the brochure or information on the initiative, consult Earth Charter Web site, www.earthcharter.org. 5. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 6. See David Wood, ‘‘Specters of Derrida: On the Way to Econstruction,’’ in the present volume; see also his discussion of Derrida on Marx, ‘‘The Eleventh Plague: Environmental Destruction,’’ in The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 7. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, ‘‘The Death of Environmentalism ? Global Warming Politics in a Post-environmental World,’’ Social Policy 35, no. 3 (2005): 19–31. 8. John B. Cobb Jr. and Herman Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon, 1994). 9. This, for example, is the charge levied against William Cronon and colleagues in UnCommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996), a work itself stemming from a conference on the dilemma of naı̈ve realism in popular ecological discourse vis-à-vis the antirealism of strong constructivism. In addition to Cronon’s volume, the authors n o te s...