17 Facts About Spiritual ecology

Spiritual ecology is an emerging field in religion, conservation, and academia recognizing that there is a spiritual facet to all issues related to conservation, environmentalism, and earth stewardship.

Proponents of Spiritual Ecology assert a need for contemporary conservation work to include spiritual elements and for contemporary religion and spirituality to include awareness of and engagement in ecological issues.

Contributors in the field of Spiritual Ecology contend there are spiritual elements at the root of environmental issues.

Those working in the arena of Spiritual Ecology further suggest that there is a critical need to recognize and address the spiritual dynamics at the root of environmental degradation.

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.

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Some in Spiritual Ecology argue that a pervasive 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.

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.

Spiritual ecology includes a vast array of people and practices that intertwine spiritual and environmental experience and understanding.

Spiritual ecology shared and furthered many of Teilhard 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.

Catholic nun interviewed by Sarah MacFarland Taylor, author of the 2009 book, “Green Sisters: Spiritual Ecology”, articulates this perspective of unity: “There is no division between planting new fields and prayer.

Many in the field of spiritual ecology agree that a distinct stream of experience threading throughout history that has at its heart a lived understanding of the principles, values and attitudes of spiritual ecology: indigenous wisdom.

Spiritual ecology directs us to look to revered holders of these traditions in order to understand the source of our current ecological and spiritual crisis and find guidance to move into a state of balance.

For example, with colonization, indigenous spiritual ecology was historically replaced by an imposed Western belief that land and the environment are commodities to be used and exploited, with exploitation of natural resources in the name of socio-economic evolution.

Spiritual ecology is developing largely in three arenas identified above: Science and Academia, Religion and Spirituality, and Environmental Conservation.

Spiritual ecology played a leading role in the drafting of the Earth Charter.

Christian environmentalists emphasize the ecological responsibilities of all Christians as stewards of God's earth, while contemporary Muslim religious Spiritual ecology is inspired by Qur'anic themes, such as mankind being khalifa, or trustee of God on earth.

Spiritual ecology similarly explores the importance of this experiential spiritual dimension in relation to our present ecological crisis.