Faith in Nature: Environmentalism As Religious Quest (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Product DescriptionThe human impulse to religion--the drive to explain the world, humans, and humans place in the universe can be seen to encompass environmentalism as an offshoot of the secular, material faith in human reason and power that dominates modern society. Faith in Nature traces the history of environmentalism--and its moral thrust--from its roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism through the Progressive Era to the present. Drawing astonishing parallels between religion and environmentalism, the book examines the passion of the movements adherents and enemies alike, its concern with the moral conduct of daily life, and its attempt to answer fundamental questions about the underlying order of the world and of humanitys place within it.Thomas Dunlap is among the leading environmental historians and historians of science in the United States. Originally trained as a chemist, he has a rigorous understanding of science and appreciates its vital importance to environmental thought. But he is also a devout Catholic who believes that the insights of religious revelation need not necessarily be at odds with the insights of scientific investigation. This book grew from his own religious journey and his attempts to understand human ethical obligations and spiritual debts to the natural world.From BooklistDunlap undertook this book in reaction to a discussion in which the argument that "wilderness" is a social construct arose. The resistance to that conception, Dunlap thought, was like Christian fundamentalists' reactions to historical-critical reading of the Bible--an analogy that prompted thinking of the resistance as "religiously" motivated. Dunlap argues that environmentalism has effectively been a religious quest, even when it has been unconscious of, or openly hostile to, religion, and he uses environmentalism as a sort of case study to turn attention to interrelations among religion, science, and technology. His definition of religion is broad but shaped by the American experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Perforce, he focuses on the individualist slant in American environmentalism, which, citing Aldo Leopold, he identifies as a problem for a movement that seeks not only to affect but also to transform society. Dunlap's accessible, informative history of environmentalism in the U.S. is particularly useful for this attention to the Americanness of the movement and its roots, via Emerson, in a distinctly American Protestantism. Steven SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reservedReviewA gracefully written and thoughtful book that traces the moral and spiritual aspects of American environmentalism. H-EnvironmentThis is a fascinating and provocative study that engages the reader in an alternative way of understanding the meaning and purpose of American environmental movements..This is an insightful interpretive treatment that is not only well written but of considerable depth and substance. . ChoiceThis is an important book for the times in which we live. American ForestsDunlap has succeeded in opening or perhaps re-opening an important debate, and his book will serve as a valuable point of reference as that debate unfolds. Agricultural HistoryA fascinating look at what we fall in love with when we fall in love with the world outside. In an age where our species is suddenly bigger than anything else, it raises profound if subtle questions about how we understand who we are. -- William McKibben, author of The End of NatureFaith in Nature offers many intriguing insights into modern American environmentalism and its advocates. Its most enduring insight and its most controversial and the point of the book centers on its argument that environmentalism is a religion. -- Jon Butler, Yale UniversityEnvironmentalism and its various antecedents represent one of the most sustained and creative efforts over the past two centuries to translate core religious value
Author: Dunlap, Thomas R.

Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0295983973

ISBN-13: 9780295983974