Bron Taylor | http://www.brontaylor.com | https://florida.academia.edu/BronTaylor The Sacred, Reverence for Life, and Environmental Ethics in America in Steve Gardiner and Allen Thompson (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (Oxford UP, 2016). Final version before typesetting Abstract: Among the sources of environmental ethics that have been assessed, none has been more important than perceptions that environmental systems are sacred, or conversely, desecrated. Those with such perceptions have often also criticized the world’s predominant religions—which consider the sacred as above and beyond this world or as a penultimate place to be transcended—as promoting environmentally destructive attitudes and behaviors. In contrast, in North America since the mid-nineteenth century, environmental ethics have typically been rooted in scientific worldviews, which in turn typically contribute to affective experiences of belonging and connection to nature, kinship feelings toward non-human organisms, ecocentric values, and expressions of reverence for life. Even among those who have left behind conventional religious beliefs, understanding the biosphere and all those who enliven it as sacred and worthy of reverent care has and will continue to provide a powerful foundation for environmental ethics. Keywords: religion, sacred, spirituality, kinship, biocentrism, ecocentrism, intrinsic value, biophilia, wilderness 1. Prolegomena: Religion and the Sacred Perceptions regarding religion, spirituality, and the sacred have been and will continue to be deeply entwined with environmental ethics. To analyze this history and think about the future of nature/human relationships and the corresponding role of environmental values, I provide operational definitions of these terms, which have been variously understood. Religion is often assumed to involve beliefs and perceptions related to non-material divine beings or supernatural forces. Increasingly, however, scholars consider this to be a problematic assumption, for it leaves aside a wide variety of social phenomena that have typically been understood to be religious. Consequently, increasing numbers of scholars are assuming what they call the “family resemblances” approach to the study of religion. Those taking this approach seek to illuminate the multifarious religious dimensions of human experience, indifferent to a project of discovering a strict boundary between what counts as religion and what does not (Saler, 1993). This approach has the analytic advantage of being able to consider as similar what some distinguish as “religious” and “spiritual” social phenomena. With the family resemblance approach, the commonly-made distinction between religion and spirituality—such as the former is organized and institutional and involves supernatural beings while the latter is individualistic and concerned with the quest for meaning, personal transformation, and healing—is not heuristically valuable because both “religion” and “spirituality” share most if not all of the same sorts of characteristics. As a “family resemblance” scholar, therefore, I focus broadly on the nature and influence of a wide array of traits and characteristics that are typically associated with religious perceptions and practices, including those having to do with • • • • Sacred and profane/mundane times, spaces, objects, and organisms, as well as rituals and ethical mores governing how to orient oneself and one’s community with regard to them Food acquisition and preparation, birth, and death Spiritual or physical health, healing, transformation, and redemption Cosmologies and cosmogonies that purport to explain the origin and unfolding of the universe and the human place and future in or beyond the biosphere Other common elements include practices and processes that are designed to • • • • Evoke and reinforce proper perception, emotions, and behavior Recognize or establish leaders and justify their authority and governance Classify organisms into hierarchies of differing spiritual and moral value Provide meaning and community to enhance felt well-being and help people cope with fear, suffering, and death All of the these elements reflect and influence environmental values and practices, but in the Western world and when assessing the religion-related sources and dimensions of environmental ethics, none has been more important than perceptions that environmental systems and their constitutive elements are sacred or, conversely, profane, mundane, or desecrated. The sacred, however, has been understood in two main ways. For some, an experience of transformative spiritual power or of something as holy is the essence of religion. Mircea Eliade thought, for example, that an experience of the sacred is the heart of religion and involves “an uncanny, awesome, or powerful manifestation of reality, full of ultimate significance” (Chidester and Linenthal, 1995). For Eliade and his progeny, the essence of religion was the eruption of the sacred into profane space during extraordinary experiences, usually in natural surroundings and consequently being replete with naturerelated symbolism (Eliade, 1959). A contrasting perspective on the sacred—first found in the writings of Emile Durkheim’s early observations (Durkheim, 1965 [1912])—has been that “nothing is inherently sacred,” therefore, the term “can be assigned to virtually anything through the human labor of consecration” (Chidester and Linenthal, 1995: 6). Put differently, some understand the experience of the sacred to tap into some extraordinary but objective reality, while others (myself included) think it is the result of cultural work involving “attention, memory, design, construction, and control of place” (Chidester and Linenthal, 1995: 6; following Smith, 1987). A bearing in mind of these two understandings of sacred place—what could be called the metaphysical and the constructionist approaches, respectively—can illuminate the role of religion in the contested historical unfolding of environmental ethics in America. 2 2. The Sacred in North American Environmental History and Ethics There has long been a deep connection between environmental history and environmental ethics. Indeed, it is hard to imagine environmental ethics without environmental history, especially as it has contrasted the religious beliefs and practices of the Europeans with that of American Indians. The main outline of this history can be simply summarized and draws especially on the work of the pioneering historians William Denevan (1992, 2011), Perry Miller (1956), Roderick Nash (2001 [1967]), Lynn White Jr. (1967), Donald Worster (1994 [1977]), Carolyn Merchant (1980), Stephen Fox (1981), Max Oelschlaeger (1991), and Catherine Albanese (1990). By the time significant numbers of Europeans began to arrive in North America with an intention to stay rather than just raid, the diseases that the earlier arrivals carried with them had decimated the American Indian populations that had no natural immunity to them. As a result, the land they encountered was much less populated and appeared less domesticated than would have been the case otherwise (Denevan, 2011). These European settlers were, generally speaking, deeply conditioned by Christianity as well as European histories and philosophies, which had desacralized nature and promoted instrumental attitudes toward it; moreover, they had little experience with the kind of wildness they encountered. Consequently, and again generally speaking, they had fearful, negative, and exploitive attitudes toward the peoples and environments they encountered, attitudes and subsequent behavior that led to a rapid decline of the continent’s biocultural diversity. While there were dissidents to the hegemonic cultural mainstream who appreciated their natural surrounds, it was not until the early nineteenth century that such voices became pronounced. This was due to a complex matrix of factors, including the rise and influence of European romanticism, corresponding developments in literature and the arts in America, and the rise of Transcendentalism, combined with skepticism about the supposed march of progress and its impacts on the land and on the character of Americans. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism was especially influential, as was his reverence for nature. For Emerson, however, the spiritual value of nature was indirect: in a way that had affinity with Plato’s doctrine of correspondence, material nature was ultimately a symbol that pointed to deeper, universal, spiritual truths (Emerson, 1836). Emerson’s writings nevertheless struck an experiential cord with many of his readers and promoted reverence for and value in nature, thereby providing a cornerstone for the soon-to-follow conservation movement. Emerson’s greatest influence on this movement, however, was probably his mentoring of Henry David Thoreau. In any case, while some scholars have interpreted Thoreau differently, the weight of evidence is that toward the end of his life Thoreau had left behind Emerson’s Platonic vision of nature as a sacred symbol, supplanting it with a sense of material nature as sacred in and of itself—even its aspects, such as suffering and death, that are typically considered negative. Moreover, he innovatively expressed a number of ideas that would become central to environmentalism and many subsequent constructive environmental ethics: a spirituality of belonging and connection to nature, kinship feelings with non-human organisms, and an ecocentric value system in which environmental systems and species have intrinsic value. Thoreau also contended that he had nothing to learn from Christianity but much to learn from Native Americans and some of the religious traditions that 3 originated in Asia. Most importantly, Thoreau had become a naturalist. Indeed, he had spent so much time in close observation of natural systems that by the time he first read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (within a month of its publication) he immediately endorsed Darwin’s theory. Moreover, he had become convinced that what everyone most needed was direct, visceral and sensory contact with nature; this was his spiritual epistemology. Thoreau also advanced the possibility of scientifically-informed religious and moral evolution, which in turn would depend on people developing an intimate relationship with nature (see Taylor, 2010a: 50–58, 227–247). Not long after Thoreau’s death in 1862, John Muir completed a long and difficult journey from Wisconsin to Cedar Keys, Florida. In a scathing and sardonic essay named for the place and originally written in 1867, Muir attacked what he understood to be the Christian doctrine that the world had been made for man. Such a view, according to Muir, provided theological underpinnings for anthropocentrism and indifference, if not also hostility, to non-human beings, which he considered widespread. And while later critics would point out other themes in the Abrahamic traditions that worked against environmental concern and respect for peoples with nature-based spiritualities, Muir was the first to pointedly launch such criticism. Not much more than a century later this critique would be widely held among environmentalists. It was not only Muir’s critique of anthropocentric theism, however, that took root among environmental thinkers and activists but also his constructive religious vision. For Muir, wildlands were “holy” and “sublime” places, likened often to “cathedrals” and “temples,” inhabited by animals and plants who were thought of as kin. What Muir meant by the sublime reflected what, writing in the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke considered to be the experience of the sublime and the beautiful, namely, astonishment at nature’s beauties and sometimes terrifying power, which he averred, leads to “admiration, reverence and respect” (Burke 1990 [1757]: 53) for specific places and sometimes also for non-human organisms in such places (see Taylor 2010a: 45–47). Nowhere did Muir express such perceptions more clearly than in this passage reflecting upon his first encounter, in 1869, with the Sierra Nevada’s Cathedral Peak: The Sierra Cathedral, to the south of camp [at Tuolumne Meadows], was overshadowed like Sinai. Never before noticed (sic) so fine a union of rock and cloud in form and color and substance, drawing earth and sky together as one; and so human is it, every feature and taint of color goes to one’s heart, and we shout, exulting in wild enthusiasm as if all the divine show were our own. More and more, in a place like this, we feel ourselves part of wild Nature, kin to everything (Muir, 1997 [1911]: 296–97). . . . The Cathedral itself [is] a temple displaying Nature’s best masonry and sermons in stones. . . . In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars (Muir, 1997 [1911]: 301). In combination with his critique of anthropocentrism, Muir’s expressions of kinship and reverence for life clearly expressed an ecocentric ethic long before this ethical orientation was named. In religious terminology he was both a pantheist and an animist1—nature and indeed the entire cosmos were sacred; receptive humans could feel and be healed by the love of “mother earth”; and humans could communicate and commune with other life forms. Sacred places and animals, however, could be desecrated—and in a way that seemed 4 to echo Thoreau—this occurs when they lose their wildness. Although for decades Muir lived a domesticated life, he nevertheless often spoke of domesticated spaces and domesticated animals, including human beings, as defiled, and he expressed outrage at those responsible for desecrating acts. Muir compared Gifford Pinchot to Satan for promoting the construction of a dam on the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, declaring “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man” (Cohen, 1984: 330; for the Satan comparison, see Fox, 1981: 141). This prophetic denunciation is interesting not only for its clear statement of the valley as a sacred place but also for its recognition that the designation of sacred places is a human act rooted in affective experience. This recognition was an insight that preceded by generations constructionist scholarly understandings of religions and sacred spaces that became prevalent beginning in the late twentieth century. Reflecting the early and longstanding influence of Alexander von Humboldt, Muir also expressed and promoted an ecological metaphysics of interdependence, which would become a central tenet within the global environmental milieu. He put it poetically in what may be his most famous aphorism: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” But equally representative of Muir’s thought, and much environmental spirituality to follow, was his next but less-often-quoted animistic sentence: “One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as fellow mountaineers” (Muir, 1997 [1911]: 245). This was only one of many animistic phrases in Muir’s writings; earlier and regularly his biocentric sentiments were expressed in phrases such as “Nature’s precious plant people” (Muir, 1997 [1911]: 231). Whether Muir meant his animistic writings to be taken literally or metaphorically remains unclear but their biocentric implications are clear. Muir thus rooted his love of nature in a sacred cosmos in which wanton killing and needless destruction were sacrilegious, and efforts to prevent these evils were a profound ethical duty. Similar sentiment would become prevalent in much subsequent environmental ethics. Muir’s contemporary, John Burroughs, for example, the earliest and most prominent proponent of America’s back-to-the-land and bioregional movements, perceived the cosmos and biosphere to be sacred, even though he was not in any conventional way religious: “The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion—the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe— persists. . . . If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were” (Burroughs, 2001 [1912]: 246). Rachel Carson also had a deep sense of the sacred in nature. In her first book, for example, she imaginatively and intimately expressed biocentric values: in an animismresembling way that even had tinges of a kind of naturalistic pantheism, she empathetically entered the world of marine organisms and expressed kinship with them, even striving to give agency to the ocean itself by making it her central character (Carson 1941).2 In a candid lecture to female journalists in1954, she waxed unapologetically sentimental and expressed her love of the beauties of the earth and the need for human contact with it, adding, “I believe it is important for women to realize that the world of today threatens to 5 destroy much of that beauty that has immense power to bring us a healing release from tension.” Then, presaging later essentialist versions of ecofeminist claims, she added, “Women have a greater intuitive understanding of such things” (Carson, 1998: 161). In an equally innovative way she contended, “This affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted” because “as human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life” (Carson, 1998: 160). In this, she anticipated the biophilia hypothesis that would be advanced by E. O. Wilson a generation later (Wilson, 1984). But nowhere did she signal her own sense of the sacred more directly than through her dedication of Silent Spring to Albert Schweitzer, thereby expressing her affinity with his “reverence for life” ethics. In a way that resembles many other environmentalists, Schweitzer’s reverence was rooted in feelings of belonging to the earth and humility about humanity’s tiny place in the universe, as well as in empathy for and solidarity with all creatures, with whom we share a will to live (Schweitzer, 1936, 1969). Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) also expressed a deep, affective connection to and reverence for the earth. He summarized his “land ethic” with these often-quoted words: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold, 1966 [1949]: 261). But ultimately this ethic was, for Leopold, rooted in affective experience: “It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value” (Leopold 1966 [1949]: 263; cf. Callicott 1982, 1989). And 20 years before Lynn White Jr.’s 1967 argument that Christian anthropocentrism and the tradition’s antipathy to nature religions were key drivers of environmentally destructive behaviors, Leopold had already made a similar argument while simultaneously contrasting such attitudes with organicist and pantheistic understandings of the interdependence of life (Meine, 1988: 506), combining these understandings with expressions of personal feelings of belonging to nature, and biocentric, kinship ethics: Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect (Leopold, 1966 [1949]: xvii–xix). It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us . . . a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over . . . the biotic enterprise (Leopold, 1966 [1949]: 16–17). Leopold’s kinship ethics was rooted in a Darwinian understanding that all life is related, intimated by Darwin himself in one of his notebooks: If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake [of] our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all netted together (in Worster, 1994 [1977]: 180). 6 Of course, there are more pathways to felt empathy toward other life forms than an evolutionary understanding of biotic kinship—many Native American traditions have expressed a similar sentiment with ethics of care for “all our relations,” which should be recognized in any discussion of environmental ethics in North America (see LaDuke, 1999; Callicott, 1994). And Leopold himself was doing more than articulating a scientific narrative, he was consecrating it, making it an evocative and compelling sacred story—it was an odyssey, an epic, a heroic journey. Leopold’s language echoed the concluding passages in On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin offered solace to those who would leave behind traditional religious cosmogonies, by proclaiming there is grandeur in the evolutionary story of the origin and unfolding diversity of life (Darwin, 2003 [1859/1839]: 913). Leopold also presaged E. O. Wilson’s use of the phrase “Epic of Evolution,” who called it “the best myth we will ever have” and used it to capture the feelings of awe, wonder, and grandeur that scientific observers of nature often feel (in Barlow, 1998: 12; cf. Wilson, 1998). But Leopold’s youngest daughter provided the most revealing window into Leopold’s spirituality when, not long before Leopold’s death, she asked him about his religious beliefs. “He replied that he believed there was a mystical supreme power that guided the universe but to him this power was not a personalized God. It was more akin to the laws of nature. . . . His religion came from nature, he said” (in Meine, 1988: 506). Leopold’s son added that his father, “like many of the rest of us, was kind of pantheistic. The organization of the universe was enough to take the place of God, if you like. He certainly didn’t believe in a personal God” (in Meine, 1988: 506–507). As his offspring suggested, Leopold and his progeny, both in and beyond his own family, had a deep sense that, although mysterious, there was something precious, something sacred in the world, which is a common metaphysical ground for ecocentric and biocentric ethics. 3. “Dark Green Religion and Environmental Ethics” after Earth Day I have focused on the most important precursors and inspirations to the emergence of the discipline of environmental ethics in North America in order to spotlight how important their perceptions of the sacred were as grounding for their environmental values. I have elsewhere labeled such nature spiritualities and ethics “dark green religion,” analyzing their affective and religion-resembling dimensions and the diversity of proponents and means of expression that are used to spread such spirituality and promote environmental protection (Taylor, 2010a). In addition to its critical stance toward much Western religion and philosophy, dark green religion, as I defined its key tenets, is generally “deep ecological,” “biocentric” or “ecocentric,” considering all species to be intrinsically valuable, that is, valuable apart from their usefulness to human beings. This value system is generally (1) based on a felt kinship with the rest of life, often derived from a Darwinian understanding that all forms of life have evolved from a common ancestor and are therefore related; (2) accompanied by feelings of humility and a corresponding critique of human moral superiority, often inspired or reinforced by a science-based cosmology revealing how tiny human beings are in 7 the universe; and (3) reinforced by metaphysics of interconnection and the idea of the interdependence (mutual influence and reciprocal dependence) found in the sciences, especially ecology and physics (Taylor, 2010a: 13). Such dark green spirituality also often involves animistic perceptions about the possibility of relationship with non-human organisms, as well as holistic, Gaian metaphysics (Lovelock, 1979). Dark green spirituality is expressed and promoted not only by scientists such as Lovelock or through the discipline of environmental ethics but also by environmental activists, historians, and artists, nature writers and literary critics, museum and aquarium curators, and many others. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, such spirituality has grown along with the environmental movement in America and globally. I have argued that these sorts of spiritualities and ethics are grounded directly in, or at least cohere with, the senses and reason and thus are consistent with scientific methodologies and understandings; consequently, they are likely to increase their share of adherents in the increasingly global and competitive cultural marketplace. Moreover, I contend, these trends have been salutary and historically significant, even though this is as yet little recognized. The approaches to environmental ethics that I have spotlighted, however, have been sharply criticized. One of the most influential critics has been the historian Bill Cronon, who stressed that notions such as “wilderness” were socially constructed and argued that these constructions were misleading and have perverse consequences (cf. Evernden 1992). According to Cronon, the long-prevalent environmental story of (desecrating) anthropogenic environmental decline from a pristine nature, combined with a corresponding priority on the conservation of wildlands, has fostered a nature-humanity dualism, ironically separating people emotionally and conceptually from the environments they typically inhabit. This has hindered action toward reforming the everyday practices that negatively impact environmental systems (Cronon, 1995a, 1995b). A chorus of scholars from different disciplines have taken Cronon’s critique even further than he did, arguing that the human impact on nature is so widespread that if nature is understood as something distinct from human beings then there is no nature in that sense, using such a view to criticize those who wish to protect wildlands as naïve and misguided if not also misanthropic (for an analysis, see Sutter, 2013, for examples, see Fletcher, 2009; Kareiva and Marvier, 2011, 2012; and for rejoinders, Callicott and Nelson 1998; Soulé and Lease, 1995; Butler, 2002; Noss et al., 2012; Taylor 2013b). Still others argued that environmental narratives and objectives mask and protect elite privileges and have been indifferent to social injustices, including when the establishment of protected areas has involved the deracination of peoples who had been inhabiting them (Guha, 1989, 1997; Peluso 1993; Warren, 1997; Spence, 1999; Jacoby 2001; Dowie, 2009; Fletcher, 2009; Büscher, 2013). Much such criticism is steeped in postmodern theory and postcolonial criticism, which is hostile to anything resembling a universal narrative due to its potentially authoritarian consequences. Such theorists contend that the declensionist narratives prevalent in the environmentalist milieu, as well as narratives of environmental enlightenment, are problematic if not also pernicious. In 1994 the foundational postcolonial critic Edward Said put such views starkly, calling environmentalism “the indulgence of spoiled tree huggers who lack a proper cause” (Nixon, 2011: 332, n 69). 8 Postmodern and postcolonial critics have astutely observed that narratives can express, reinforce, and legitimate repressive histories and social systems, and that it is difficult to “decolonize” these belief and action systems. Yet many of the critics have simplistic understandings of nature protection movements, believing they are animated foremost by recreational or aesthetic preferences or by individualistic spiritual values, whereas in fact what has united the more radical forms of such movements are efforts to protect or restore commons regimes (Taylor, 1995). Moreover, most of the critics fail to realize that since the time of Thoreau and Darwin, the rationale for nature protection has often been based foremost on the value of biodiversity (even though the term was not coined until the 1970s), which has in turn been undergirded by understandings of biotic kinship, ecological interdependence, and mutual dependence (Taylor, 2012; Butler, 2002). This latter sort of rationale has grown in importance as more has been learned about the dependence of all organisms on flourishing and diverse environmental systems. And this rationale has also been strengthened by increasing understanding of the synergies between cultural and biological diversity and by findings from the field of environmental psychology, which demonstrate the ways in which human physical and emotional health depends on or is enhanced by contact with relatively intact biological systems.3 That so many fail to recognize that the health of human beings and their social systems depends on flourishing environmental systems may be due in part to the extent to which such intellectuals live urban lives. What is more difficult to grasp is why so many of those who focus on human-on-human oppression fail to notice or express concern about the domination of humankind over the rest of the living world (Taylor 2013b,).4 A part of the answer might be the deep roots of human exceptionalism in the Western world, as inherited from Abrahamic traditions with their hubristic claim that the human species alone bears the image of God and properly has dominion over it (Taylor, 2010b; Taylor, 2014). Whatever the cause of such anthropocentrism, one antidote is an evolutionary and ecological worldview that stresses biotic kinship, interdependence, and mutual dependence (Callicott, 2011; Callicott et al. 2009; aa). As Leopold put it when expounding his Land Ethic, this ethic “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the landcommunity to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold, 1966 [1949]: 240). And such values are often embedded in perceptions and expressions to the effect that the biosphere and natural systems—indeed life itself—is sacred and worthy of reverent defense. 4. The Persistence of the Sacred in Environmental Ethics People disagree as to whether the sacred is something divine or holy that perceptive humans recognize or is a notion that humans construct to express what they feel and care about most deeply. What is certain is that environmentally concerned people often rely on religious terminology, on rhetoric of the sacred, to express their feelings of connection to nature and of kinship and responsibility toward other kinds of life. Such individuals have often also viewed the destruction of living things and living systems as desecrating acts and, as some critics have asserted, this sometimes leads to binary thinking in which some places and things, but not others, are sacred and worthy of care. Despite the criticisms that have been made of those who perceive, express, and promote understandings of nature as sacred, the impulse to invoke the sacred when expressing deeply held feelings and urging environmental protection is not going away. 9 Rhetoric of the sacred is like profanity—sometimes only the strongest possible language can convey one’s most passionately held feelings. There is also a strategic reason that rhetoric of the sacred is often invoked—if one wins the rhetoric-framing battle in environmental disputes, then one’s ethical claims are rooted powerfully on sacred ground—and sacred values trump mundane concerns every time.5 There may be a deeper, even a logical reason, that in environmental ethics perceptions regarding the sacred, and the strategic deployment of the sacred, have been so important and are not likely to go away. If there is no metaphysical grounding for the perception that life on earth has value—regardless of how extensive that valuation is considered to be—then one could argue that any valuing of nature expresses mere emotion, as many analytic philosophers have done when analyzing emotion-based value claims (following Ayer, 1936). One way that traditionally religious individuals can respond to such a critique is to root environmental values in sacred ground by claiming that a holy being created everything. The book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, for example, states that God, after his creative acts, declared that it was all good. This could lead in a straightforward way to a broad ethical principle: Whatever God creates is valuable and should not be destroyed. But why do so many who are skeptical that the universe and Earth were created by some divine agent nevertheless use religious terminology to express their awe, wonder, and love for life, or conversely, dismay and outrage at its destruction? It may be that there is a twin root for both ethics and religion, in the affective human experience of the value of life and in a corresponding supposition that, without some kind of sacred ground for this experience, the accompanying feelings and values are at best transient and at worst delusional (Ogden, 1963, 1966; Crossley 1978; Taylor 1997). But ultimately, those who love and value earthly life must choose whom and what to trust. Indeed, we all face what social constructivist theorist Peter Berger once called the “heretical imperative”—which he traced to the Latin root meaning “to choose”—to argue that we must choose whether to find meaning and value in our lives and in the worlds surrounding us (Berger, 1979). Should we embrace an absolute moral relativism or even nihilism, siding with cynics and the skeptics? Or if we have experiences through which we come to value human and other life forms, should we trust those sentiments? For many, including those who find the mystery underlying the existence of the universe and of life impenetrable, it makes sense to confess a conviction that life on earth is sacred, even if fully understanding the origins of life and the universe itself remains beyond our ken. Many if not most of those who find meaning and virtue in a life caring for and trying to protect life will continue to find sacred ground for both a meaning-filled life and for a reverence-for-life ethics. For many, these are the roots of environmental ethics and, indeed, all ethics. 10 References Albanese, C. L. (1990). Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London: V. 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Pantheism is the belief that the world as a whole is God or divine. 2 For evidence of Carson’s biocentrism and her animism-and-pantheism-resembling 2 For evidence of Carson’s biocentrism and her animism-and-pantheism-resembling spirituality, see Carson (1998: 54–62). 3 For an extended list of references see Taylor (2013: 142, n5). 4 There are a few scholars affiliated with postmodern and postcolonial schools who are exceptions to the general tendency, including Haraway (2008), Morton (2010), Nixon (2011), Carrigan (2011), Miller (2012), Tsing (2012), and especially Helen Tiffin (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010). Some are even articulating a kind of sacred ground to their theorizing, such as Connolly (2010) and Bennett (2010). 5 Detailing these developments are beyond the scope of the present analysis but two journals have especially focused on these trends, Worldviews, and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (see www.religionandnature.com). An encyclopedia and a number of books survey such phenomena (Taylor, 2005; Tucker, 2003; Gottlieb, 2006, Sponsel, 2012). 15