Spiritual Ecology - History

History

Spiritual Ecology identifies the Scientific Revolution—beginning the 16th century, and continuing through the Age of Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution—as contributing to a critical shift in human understanding with reverberating effects on the environment. The radical expansion of collective consciousness into the era of rational science included a collective change from experiencing nature as a living, spiritual presence to a utilitarian means to an end.

During the modern age, reason became valued over faith, tradition, and revelation, and industrialized society replaced agricultural societies and the old ways of relating to seasons and cycles. With the growing predominance of a global, mechanized worldview, a collective sense of the sacred was severed and replaced with an insatiable drive for scientific progress and material prosperity without any sense of limits or responsibility.

Some in the field note that our patriarchal world-view, and a monotheistic religious orientation towards a transcendent divinity, is largely responsible for destructive attitudes about the earth, body, and the sacred nature of creation. Thus, many identify the wisdom of indigenous cultures, for whom the physical world has remained as sacred, as holding a key to our current ecological predicament.

Spiritual Ecology is a response to the values and socio-political structures of recent centuries with their trajectory away from intimacy with the earth and its sacred essence. It has been forming and developing as an intellectual and practice-oriented discipline for nearly a century.

Spiritual Ecology includes a vast array of people and practices that intertwine spiritual and environmental experience and understanding. Additionally, within the tradition itself resides a deep, developing spiritual vision of a collective human/earth/divine evolution that is expanding consciousness beyond the dualities of human/earth, heaven/earth, mind/body. This belongs to the contemporary movement that recognizes the unity and interrelationship, or “interbeing,” of all of creation.

Visionaries carrying this thread include Rudolph Steiner (1851-1925) who founded the spiritual movement of anthroposophy, and described a “co-evolution of spirituality and nature” and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Priest and French Philosopher (1881-1955) who spoke of a transition in collective awareness toward a consciousness of the divinity within every particle of life, even the most dense mineral. This shift includes the necessary dissolution of divisions between fields of study as mentioned above. “Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”

The American Jesuit priest, Thomas Berry, (1914-2009) has been one of the most influential figures in this developing movement, with his stress on returning to a sense of wonder and reverence for the natural world. He shared and furthered many of Teillard de Chardin’s views, including the understanding that humanity is not at the center of the universe, but integrated into a divine whole with its own evolutionary path. This view compels a re-thinking of the earth/human relationship: “The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.”

More recently, leaders in the Engaged Buddhism movement, including Thich Nhat Hanh, also identify a need to return to a sense of self which includes the Earth. Joanna Macy describes a collective shift – referred to as the “Great Turning” – taking us into a new consciousness in which the earth is not experienced as separate. Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee similarly grounds his Spiritual Ecology work in the context of a collective evolutionary expansion towards oneness, bringing us all toward an experience of earth and humanity – all life – as interdependent. In the vision and experience of oneness, the term “Spiritual Ecology” becomes, itself, redundant. What is earth-sustaining is spiritual; that which is spiritual honors a sacred earth.

An important element in the work of these contemporary teachers is the call for humanity’s full acceptance of responsibility for what we have done – physically and spiritually – to the earth. Only through accepting responsibility will healing and transformation occur.

Historically we see the development of Spiritual Ecology in some of the more mystical arms of traditional religions and the more spiritual arms of environmental conservation. And woven throughout its history, we hear a story of an evolving universe, bringing us to an experience of wholeness in which all dualities dissipate – dualities that have marked past eras and contributed to the destruction of the earth as “other” than spirit.