Today, I have the
pleasure of presenting an interview with Bron R. Taylor, Professor of Religion
and Environmental Ethics at the University of Florida and a Fellow of the Rachel
Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
in Munich. Perhaps the world’s best-known scholar working on the intersections
between religion and environmentalism, Taylor is responsible for formulating the
concept of ‘dark green religion,’ outlined in his book Dark Green Religion:
Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010). He is also the author
of Affirmative Action at Work: Law, Politics and Ethics (1992) and has
edited or co-edited Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of
Radical and Popular Environmentalism (1995), Civil Society in an Age of
Monitory Democracy (2013), Avatar and Nature Spirituality (2013),
and the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005). He is a
founding member of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature
and Culture (ISSRNC) and its Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and
Culture, of which he is editor. More information about Professor Taylor’s projects, lectures, and publications can be found at his personal website, http://brontaylor.com/. We discuss how he got involved in academia,
the potential for ‘greening’ the world’s largest religions, and the spirituality
of surfing.
[EDW] Growing up in
southern California, you worked as a lifeguard for almost fifteen years before
securing a PhD in Social and Religious Ethics from the University of Southern
California in 1988. What led you from the beach to an academic career?
[BRT] On
my 13th birthday I was fortunate to move to Ventura, California, a short walk
to the beach. I spent a lot of time there which led to a love of, and knowledge
of, the ocean and the kind of skills that enabled me to land a coveted ocean
lifeguard job. In California, ocean lifeguarding is a well-paying blue-collar
job, which enabled me to go to college and eventually to graduate school.
During high school, I
became involved in evangelical Christianity.
In a religious studies class at college, however, I was introduced to a
completely different variant of Christianity known as liberation theology; it
blends leftist social analysis with what these theologians consider to be the
economically radical message of Jesus as a basis for resisting authoritarian
and plutocratic regimes. I was surprised
to learn about this sort of Christianity and for my own reasons, identifying with
those who are marginalized and struggle for justice, I was attracted to it.
Liberation theology helped to kindle my long-term activist interests and
eventually, my scholarly curiosities, especially about how social movements,
including religion-related ones, might promote positive social change. Not long
ago I was asked by the editors of The Ecological Citizen to write an
autobiographical essay about my pilgrimage. Given the sometimes embarrassing
details this involved, I only reluctantly agreed; it was published as “An
Ecocentric Journey.”
[EDW] Your first book was
Affirmative Action at Work: Law, Politics, and Ethics, brought out by
the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1991. This is quite a different topic of research
than that which you are well-known for – how did it come about?
[BRT] As
a blue-collar guy, I never really expected the academic thing to work out,
although as I left college, I did have the idea that I would love to teach and
open the world to others in a way similar to how my professors had done for me.
Nevertheless, I loved lifeguarding, a job that, despite the tragedies one
experiences, has many satisfactions, so I assumed it would be my lifelong
career. I turned permanent, which with State Parks involves becoming a peace
officer. This, I also valued, since it involves protecting park visitors and
the park itself. But I was also open to adding to these responsibilities as one
who was studying ethics and interested in analysing issues related to state
power and violence not from the ivory tower but from in the midst of real-world
contexts. Southern California beaches are places where all the problems from
that highly populated urban society appear.
As it happened, the State
Personnel board had officially sanctioned State Parks for having discriminated
against women and people of color and consequently, our Department had
established an Equal Employment Opportunity Committee to work toward
establishing a workforce that represented the diversity of California’s
population. Because I had become known as an academically inclined park animal
who was doing graduate work in ethics, I was invited to serve on the committee.
My efforts on the committee, which involved among other things developing
curricula to and teaching the department’s anti-discrimination and affirmative
action policies and practices, and the rationales for them, to rangers,
lifeguards, and other parks personnel, cohered with my sense of justice. These
experiences also underscored my understanding of the extent and ways in which
these policies were controversial.
Given my desire to
grapple with ethical issues in specific conflictual contexts, I pitched to
departmental leadership the possibility of doing a study that, I hoped, would
illuminate the various ways our employees thought about these policies, with
the idea that such a study might even help us to make them more effective and
better accepted. Both the department director and the chief affirmative action
officer were supportive: they let me interview over 50 employees “on the
clock,” and send a unique survey instrument that I designed to test hypotheses
developed from the literature about such policies and my interviews to over
1000 randomly selected employees. Almost
no one was doing mixed methods research at the time and it led to my testifying
to the US Congress in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which was being
debated at the time. My findings undercut many of the most common arguments
against affirmative action policies that philosophical and political opponents
of such policies had advanced. Although I shifted my scholarly focus to
environmental issues, I have sought to integrate diverse disciplines and
methodologies into my research ever since.
[EDW] From your earliest
publications, your interest in environmentalist movements, both in the U.S. and
elsewhere, has been clear. Your articles on the subject first appeared in 1991
and an edited volume of yours, Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global
Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism, was published in
1995. If I understand correctly, you
were one of the first scholars to write about radical environmentalist groups
such as Earth First! Where did this research interest come from, and how easy
was it to conduct fieldwork with activist groups who can be fairly cautious
about their interactions with outsiders due to fears regarding infiltration by
law enforcement?
[BRT] While
still in graduate school and working for the park service during the late
1980s, I began to notice efforts to sabotage environmentally destructive
activities by self-described radical environmental activists operating under
the moniker Earth First!. I was intrigued, in part, because I had long found
something missing in the writing and activism of the self-described liberation
theologians, namely, a concern about non-human organisms and environmental
ecosystems themselves. I arranged to get Earth First!’s tabloids and quickly
realized that there was something deeply religious (or at least religion-resembling)
animating these wildlands activists. I
thought, after I wrapped up the affirmative action work, that I would go find
these folks and study them and their claims, in part, so I could begin to work
out my own environmental ethics, which was on my radar but undeveloped because
none of my professors were focused on such ethics and related social movements.
Soon after receiving my
Ph.D. I was fortunate to join the faculty at the University of Wisconsin,
Oshkosh. During my second semester there, in the Spring of 1990, the most
charismatic of Earth First! founders, Dave Foreman, was slated to give a public
lecture. Foreman had recently been arrested by the FBI for allegedly
orchestrating an attack on a nuclear power station, and was at the peak of his
infamy. Although I had nothing to do with the invitation, I knew more about the
movement than anyone at the university and managed to arrange to be his escort,
interview him, and introduce him before his rabble-rousing talk. Afterward, I
hosted him and a dozen of his rather feral associates at my home. On that
occasion, one of the regional leaders invited me to a gathering which took
place soon after in a National Forest in northern Wisconsin. There I was able
to introduce myself, my interest in learning about the movement and using it as
a muse for my own efforts to figure out my own environmental ethics and political
views. Fortunately for me, the leader who had come to hear Foreman speak and
who had invited me to the gathering, vouched for me, which helped to create the
conditions of trust that I was able to build on subsequently. This trust was
dramatically enhanced when in 1991 the first article I wrote about the
movement, “The
Religion and Politics of Earth First!,” was published in a
British journal, The Ecologist, which was then the most widely
distributed environmental journal in the world. Activists in the United Kingdom
and the United States viewed the article as accurate, fair, and insightful
(despite a few quibbles), and it was widely distributed among them. It had the
effect of opening doors because I was then considered to be a fair-minded
analyst whose writings were, on balance, good for the movement, especially
since they were so used to being pilloried by their adversaries and much of the
media as well.
I am more than willing to
say that the movement has indeed been a valuable muse – it has posed a host of
critically important questions that I needed to consider as I sought to work
out my own environmental values and spirituality. The movement is exceptionally
diverse, despite some unifying beliefs and shared practices, so a discussion
about its strengths and weaknesses, contributions and mistakes, promise and
peril, cannot be put briefly.
[EDW] You are the editor
of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, which appeared in 2005. How
did this project come about?
[BRT]
Knowing of my research interests, in the late 1990s Jeffrey Kaplan, a colleague
of mine in Oshkosh who had recently completed an encyclopaedia of his own,
suggested that the area of religion and the environment would be a great focus
for an encyclopaedia. I loved the idea and he offered to help so we pitched the
idea to several publishers, all of whom were interested. Most of them, however,
had a template for their encyclopaedias that did not fit our vision for it,
which included inviting practitioners of various religions, not just scholarly
analysts, to write for it. These contributions were labelled practitioner
entries and this was an innovation that some traditionalists likely thought was
inappropriate for an encyclopaedia. Janet Joyce, however, who was then with
Continuum International publishers, loved and supported the approach and offered
a generous contract. This enabled me to hire and create a website with what were
then innovative online tools to manage what became a monster project.
The process began with
brainstorming an initial list of about two hundred entries and dozens of possible
contributors, after which I recruited a diverse editorial board and hosted
several meetings at conferences, adding to the prospective entry and
contributor lists. I also orchestrated some religion and nature panels at the
2000 meeting of the International Association for the History of Religions in
Durban, South Africa, which was an enriching event that contributed to the
encyclopaedia eventually including 97 Africa-focused entries. The project was originally under contract for
350 entries but through a multi-year snowball method, it was published with
1000 entries and over 1.5 million words. It also won awards, which I attribute
in part to its historical, geographical, and interdisciplinary range, as well
as its innovative nature, which included ‘perspectives’ essays from scholars
that were more provocative and went beyond the standard encyclopaedia entry,
which are supposed to remain neutral with regard to the interpretive
disagreements scholars may have about the given subject matter.
[EDW] In
2006, you founded the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature
and Culture, and were subsequently elected to serve as its president from 2006
to 2009. What was the impetus behind this and what do you see as the Society’s
impact within academia?
[BRT] The
idea goes back to the late 1990s and a conversation with Northwestern
University Professor Sarah McFarland Taylor (no relation apart from our
long-term friendship). We shared a frustration that at the huge annual
conferences of the American Academy of Religion it was difficult to find and
have extended conversations with those most interested in the religion and
nature nexus. A few years later, in 2002, I was hired as an endowed professor
at the University of Florida and charged with helping to launch a new Ph.D.
program with an emphasis on religion and nature. By then, the encyclopaedia
project was well under way and had grown far beyond my original expectations
for it, so I thought the time was ripe to create a democratically structured
scholarly organization, to build on the ferment unfolding in the
encyclopaedia. With the modest funds
then available to me I orchestrated several meetings to refine the idea,
develop bylaws, and officially established the non-profit organization the year
after the encyclopaedia was published. The ISSRNC, as we abbreviate the
organization’s name, was launched with a major conference at the University of
Florida in 2006. Scores of individuals helped to bring the society into
existence. The ISSRNC
history is available at the society’s website as are more
details in the early ISSRNC
newsletters.
Since its inaugural
conference, the ISSRNC has held meetings, which are usually co-hosted with
universities, in Morelia, Mexico (2008); Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2009);
Perth, Australia (2010); Vatican City, Rome, at the Vatican Museums (2011);
Malibu, California (2012); again at the University of Florida for its 10th
anniversary meeting (2016); New York City (2017); Cork, Ireland (2019); and a
virtual one in collaboration with Arizona State University in 2021. The society
website provides more details about the ISSRNC conferences,
which have played a significant role in increasing interdisciplinary scholarly
collaborations and research exploring the natural dimension of religion and
religion-resembling social phenomena.
[EDW] Through the
Society, you launched the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and
Culture (JSRNC) in 2007 and which you still guide as editor. Was the
journal your idea and what do you see it as having achieved?
[BRT] I
had the idea for the journal well before initiating the meetings that led to
the society. I felt that much of what was going on within what some called the
field of religion and ecology was insufficiently critical, too narrowly focused
on the world’s predominant religions, and too little informed by the
evolutionary and other natural sciences. I initially expressed this point of
view in a ‘scholarly perspectives’ essay adjacent to an encyclopaedia entry
titled “Religious
Studies and Environmental Concern.” A few years later I expanded on this perspective
in the JSRNC
introduction. In it, I called for a taboo-free, interdisciplinary enquiry
into the complex relationships between religious and religion-resembling social
phenomena and Earth’s socioecological systems. I think the journal has
fulfilled its promise of providing a valuable venue for such enquiry and, like
the society, has helped to build scholarly capacity for such research.
[EDW] In 2010, the
University of California Press brought out Dark Green Religion: Nature
Spirituality and the Planetary Future, perhaps your most important work.
Here you promote “dark green religion” as a concept through which to understand
“religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and
worthy of reverent care.” You then set forward four sub-types – Naturalistic
Animism, Spiritual Animism, Gaian Spirituality, and Gaian Naturalism – through
which you interpret a range of past and current thinkers and communities, from
Edmund Burke to the surfing subculture. What led you to write this book and
what do you see as the value of your concept of dark green religion to scholars
of religion more broadly?
[BRT] By
the late 1990s, having been studying environmental movements around the world,
as well as other actors seeking to understand and protect environmental
systems, I had observed patterns that were common among them. These included
religious, or at least religion-resembling beliefs, perceptions, values, and
practices. Indeed, these patterns existed despite great diversity among the
environmental milieu, which included those who believed in non-material
spiritual beings and forces as well as atheists and others who were entirely
naturalistic in their methods and views. Indeed, there were so many similarities
among these actors that it seemed to me that I was witnessing the emergence of
a new kind of global, nature-based worldview. The historian in me recognized
that most of what I was observing had continuities with earlier thinkers and
movements around the world, of course. But there were many innovations,
including the ways that perceptions were being shaped by evolutionary and
ecological understandings, and new means of expressing and promoting these
nature-reverencing spiritualities. Impressed with its increasingly global reach
and fledgling global influence it dawned on me that, with the right analytic
lenses, we might be able to identify the rise of a new, planetary, Earth
religion. The notion of nature religion, a trope introduced by American religion
historian Catherine Albanese, is an important form of religion that is too
little recognized, studied, and taught by scholars of religion. Moreover, the
forms of contemporary nature religion that prioritize the protection of
non-human organisms and environmental systems are especially important if
religion scholars are to keep up with the religious dimension of human
experience today, and think about not only the future of religion but of the
coevolution of religion and Earth’s living systems.
[EDW] As you acknowledge
in the book, your use of the term “religion” is a fairly broad one, one that
encompasses many atheists, agnostics, and those who do not believe in any form
of supernaturalism. Could you give us more of an understanding of how you
employ this term and what you see as the advantages of such a broad definition?
[BRT] There
is no scholarly consensus about what constitutes religion, and thus, no
consensus about where the boundary of religion ends and that which is not
religion begins. I am not interested in boundary setting or its enforcement.
Rather, along with others who take what is called the ‘family resemblances’
school of social analysis, I have found that it can be illuminating to examine
the diverse traits and characteristics typically associated with ‘religion’
when analysing social phenomena that have many of these dimensions and
dynamics. It is fine with me, by the way, if some other scholar wants to borrow
or make up a definition of religion, analyse phenomena based on that analytic
template, and conclude that some or all of the examples of dark green religion exemplify
it. Scholars should be at liberty to
deploy the definitions in ways that they find lead to insights.
What I have been doing is
focusing attention on social phenomena taking place under the global
environmental milieu (which I define as the contexts in which diverse actors
working to advance environmental protection encounter, engage, and typically
influence one another). And when I do this, I think that when spotlighting
environmental social phenomena it has tremendous explanatory power to do so
with the analytic tools that have typically been deployed by those who study
religion.
Those within this milieu,
for example, typically use religious terminology to express and promote their
most profound experiences, understandings, and concomitant values, and they
often promote and participate in ritualizing and ethical practices that are
religion-resembling. In the
aforementioned JSRNC
introduction, I provide a pithy primer to the “family resemblances” school
of religion analysis, which I have learned has been useful to many readers. Dark
Green Religion, of course, provides many examples – including in the lives
of scientists, environmental philosophers, activists, historians, artists,
musicians, filmmakers, nature writers, literary critics, museum and aquarium
curators – who in their own ways express and promote such spirituality. I think
this research illustrates why scholars with narrow definitions of religion
cannot illuminate the full range of nature-related spiritualities.
[EDW] You’ve expressed
hope that dark green religion will spread internationally and thus help move us
all towards more sustainable ways of living, but I’d be interested to hear more
on what you thought was the future of what you describe as “green religion”,
i.e. religions which posit “that environmentally friendly behavior is a
religious obligation” without actively regarding the natural world as sacred.
(Might we call it “light green religion”?). Christianity and Islam are both
huge and, on a global scale, are unlikely to contract substantially in the next
century – what are the prospects for a greener Christianity and Islam,
especially as many of the countries where these religions are strongest are
going to be hit really heavily by climate change?
[BRT] I
have spent a great deal of time examining these issues and, with Gretel Van
Wieren and Bernard Zaleha, two colleague-friends, produced the most
comprehensive review of extant social scientific research focused on the
environmental potential of the so-called world religions, including
Christianity and Islam, in “The
Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White,
Jr., to Pope Francis.”
Unfortunately, the
evidence is not encouraging.
The problem with those
who think differently, who believe that the presence of ardent greens within
these traditions represents evidence that a significant greening of religion is
underway, is that they do not consider Émile Durkheim’s insight that religions
tend to reflect the societies in which they are situated. It is not surprising
that there are environmentally concerned individuals (and even groups) inside
Christianity, Islam, and indeed all of the world’s predominant religions,
who
are trying to convince their fellow religionists about the gravity of the
situation and the need to respond. The real questions are whether a religion
(1) has ideas and practices endemic to it that tend to hinder, or conversely,
encourage, devotees’ understandings of and care for environmental systems and
the organisms who constitute them; and (2) are the devotees of a religion more
(or potentially more) proenvironmental than others who are otherwise similar
socially and demographically similar but who do not share that religion. With
regard to the first of these questions, the weight evidence is that the world’s
predominant religions tend to occlude understandings of and care for
environmental systems; and with regard to the second question, the weight of
available evidence indicates that, in fact, those in the world’s predominant
religions are less likely to be environmentally aware and concerned than the
societies are in general where they live.
The good news is that
religions can be brought along when a society is increasingly focused on
providing environmental education and explaining why protective action is
needed. But there is little reason, as yet anyway, to expect effective
environmental leadership to dramatically emerge from the world’s religions,
despite the sincere efforts of some individuals in these religions to
accomplish just that. In our review of
research, we explored the reasons for these unfortunate findings. The in-depth
versions of these studies can be download at my website. I wrote summaries of
this research in two short articles that have been published online by The
Ecological Citizen as “Religion
and Environmental Behaviour (part one): World Religions and the Fate of the
Earth,” and “Religion
and Environmental Behaviour (part two): Dark Green Nature Spiritualities and
the Fate of the Earth.”
[EDW] In 2013, the
Wilfrid Laurier University Press brought out your edited volume, Avatar and
Nature Spirituality, in which you assembled contributions looking at James
Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi blockbuster Avatar. You’ve discussed your interest
in the film both in the book and elsewhere, and how you see it as potentially
promoting dark green spirituality or related perspectives among a substantial
audience, but I wondered if you could provide a little more background on your
interest in the film. Did it stem from a broader interest in the relationship
between religion and cinema?
[BRT] I saw Avatar
shortly after it was released in December 2009, the same month Dark Green
Religion was printed. I immediately recognized it as superb cinematic
example of the kind of cosmogonies, politics, and Gaian and animistic
spiritualities that are common in dark green religion. I thought, had it come
out a year earlier, I would have discussed the film in the book. More
importantly, I wondered whether, given its blockbuster nature, the film would
become the most effective propaganda for a dark green worldview and politics
yet produced. I issued a call for papers about the film, expressing special
interest in research analysing audience responses and its societal impacts.
Several of the contributions did provide fascinating examples of the ways
people have responded to the film, including resonating with the film’s
nature-drenched spirituality.
[EDW] At various points
you’ve talked about your interest in surfing and the spiritual or religious
experiences that members of the surfing subculture often have. Could you tell
us more about this?
[BRT] As
one who has been deeply immersed in surfing and lifeguarding subcultures, I
have long been aware of the religion-resembling aspects of the surfing, such as
the ritual-like dawn patrols; reports of experiences using religious terminology
to explain them; learning stories about Native Hawai’ian cultures and their
spiritualities and connections to marine ecosystems and their inhabitants. And
I could see that for some surfers, the complex of feelings, understandings,
values, and practices was another example of dark green spiritualities. Consequently, it has been quite natural to
include these sorts of surfers in my overall analysis of contemporary nature
religions.
[EDW] What does the study
of religion bring to the table both in understanding humanity’s relationship
with the broader natural world, but also in seeking to find more
environmentally sustainable solutions for how we as a species live?
[BRT] Extant
research is pretty clear that religion plays a significant role in hindering,
and sometimes enhancing, human understandings of environmental systems and
sustainable lifeways and livelihoods. Awareness of this research could, and I
think should, inform strategies to promote sustainable and equitable
socioecological systems, including communicative and political strategies for
reaching religious individuals who are, of course, important political actors.
[EDW] How has your work
been received by environmentalist activists, whether radical or mainstream? At
the same time, how has it been received by scholars of religion (and those
working in adjacent fields)? Have you experienced much resistance to your
ideas?
[BRT] I’ve
heard from many environmentalists (professional and not) that they consider
themselves to be a part of what I called ‘dark green religion,’ and I am
unaware of any of them disputing the fairness of my descriptions or my
analyses. However, I have heard, from a
few scientists and science-rooted activists who fit well with what I called
dark green religion, that they feel discomfort with religious terminology
because they think any association with religion, and especially with Paganism,
would erode their credibility. Of course, as any of the book’s readers would
know, I was arguing that environmental subcultures resemble religions in many
ways, and that there was evidence these could even become a kind of new global
religion.
Religion and
environmental studies scholars aware of the book have found it provocative if
not also compelling. The only scholarly complaints I encountered, really, was
with my using the world ‘religion’ when discussing radical environmentalists,
when some of them might not consider themselves to be religious. Given that I so carefully discussed the term
and how I had used it, I surmise that these complaints, whether expressed by
environmentalist actors or scholars, came from those who had not got much past
the book’s title.
Criticisms aside, the
argument and evidence have held up very well, and frankly, the way it has sold
and been embraced in many countries, as evidenced by translations of excerpts
or even the entire book, suggest that indeed, as I argued, there are people all
around the world who feel and act in the ways I conveyed in the book.
[EDW] What topics would
you like to see tackled by future scholarship on the relationship between
religion and the natural world? Are there any areas of that topic that have
been seriously overlooked by prior scholarship?
[BRT] The
quest to understand religion and environmental behavior has expanded dramatically
in recent years but huge lacunae remain. There are scores of regions and
religious traditions that have received no attention whatsoever. But to me, the most important question is,
what if any communicative strategies can mobilize people in general, including
religious individuals and groups, to respond effectively to the accelerating
erosion of Earth’s life support systems?
Answering this question would require an ambitious and well-funded group
of interdisciplinary researchers.
[EDW] What projects are
you now working on that we should look out for in future?
[BRT] I
am working on an ethnographic and historical book about radical
environmentalism in North America, as well as developing special issues of the JSRNC
focused on the Green Man, and on Religion and Covid. I’m also working with
others on survey research exploring religion and environmental behavior.
Specifically, I have developed a survey instrument that examines how
environmental attitudes are entangled within not only nature-based religions
but also all of the world’s predominant religions. I hope to commence research
using these surveys in diverse regions around the world. And I’m working to
facilitate translations of Dark Green Religion into Russian, Mandarin,
Italian, and Turkish, to complement the translation that has already been
published as Dunkelgrüne
Religion in German. I hope to eventually revise and expand Dark Green
Religion, for there is so much more now worth discussing.
[EDW] Professor Taylor,
thank you for taking the time to give us more of an insight into your life and
work.
