Originalbeiträge

Bron Taylor’s book Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, published in 2010, remains to be an important resource still today. This article discusses the book in the light of Bron Taylor’s work in the field of religion and ecology, interpreting the “global greening of religion” as a strong movement that is driven by discourse communities, consisting of scholars (both from the humanities and the natural sciences), writers, artists, practitioners of all walks of life, politicians, and environmental activists. After briefly discussing examples from recent literature and fiction, the article reviews some influential tendencies within the field of religion and ecology that followed the publication of Dark Green Religion. Besides further research that tests the book’s main hypotheses, these tendencies include a new interest in animism as a key concept both for practitioners and researchers.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten befassen sich im Zuge des 21. Jahrhunderts zunehmend mit sozialen Interaktionen zwischen menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Tieren. Während frühere Publikationen eher die symbolische Bedeutung und den ökonomischen Nutzen von Tieren analysierten, wird derzeit ebenfalls gefragt, ob Tiere Teil der menschlichen Sozialgemeinschaft sind. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird dargelegt, inwiefern sich auf biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaftsbetrieben, die sich im Demeter-Verband zusammenschließen, Tier-Mensch-Beziehungen ergeben, die aus der Innenperspektive als kooperativ und gegebenenfalls freundschaftlich betrachtet werden und weshalb Biodynamiker:innen die Ansicht vertreten, ein Interspezies-Austausch zwischen Mensch und Tier sei möglich. Die Befunde der Studie fußen größtenteils auf einer ethnographischen Feldforschung und semi-strukturierten Interviews. Der Beitrag lotet das Potenzial der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung als zukünftiger Forschungsperspektive im Bereich der Öko-Spiritualität aus und knüpft in diesem Zusammenhang an den Ansatz der Material Religion an.

The articulation of ecology and spirituality has long-time either be ignored or taken for granted. Rarely has it been approached by a constructivist or processual perspective. This text draws on research on public environmentalism in Switzerland since 2015 when an increasing number of appeals to consider ecological issues with spiritual references appeared. While this observation could not be explained simply by the hypothesis of “greening of religions”, the research asked what the social profiles were of the carriers of this articulation? This text presents how the research has explored life courses of environmentalists to reconstruct the way they have articulated their spiritual or moral ideas with ecology or vice versa. It thereby identifies two main groups who have very different positions in the public realm. The aim of this text is to understand how the two fields of religion—in the broadest sense of the word—and ecology, which were previously quite distinct and relatively impervious to each other, have recently been reshaped in relation to each other, particularly around the notion of eco-spirituality. This text adopts a socio-anthropological perspective to describe eco-spirituality not only as an intellectual category invented in theological and philosophical spheres but as entailing a variety of practices, worldviews, and meaning-making processes interweaving ecology and spirituality.

Il contributo si propone di rileggere gli attuali processi di sacralizzazione della natura sullo sfondo di una storia plurisecolare del sacro tipica dell’Occidente che ha portato all’emergere di un sacro secolare distinto da un sacro religioso. Dopo aver riflettuto sul problematico concetto di natura/Natura (par. 2) e accennato alle fasi principali che il sacro ha conosciuto nella tradizione occidentale (par. 3 e 4), l’articolo si sofferma sugli attuali processi di sacralizzazione della natura (par. 5). Essi possono essere di due tipi, a seconda che si richiamino a un sacro religioso, come nel caso delle correnti neopagane che costituiscono una componente importante della spiritualità ecologica, o secolare, come nel caso dell’ambientalismo radicale non religioso.

Il est extrêmement rare qu’une réflexion sur les relations entre les êtres humains, la religion et la nature ne se réfère pas à la publication de la fameuse thèse de White « The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis » (1967). Les intentions de la contribution de White se voulaient véritablement « programmatiques » en suggérant des réformes de la théologie chrétienne. L’argument de cet article est de souligner que l’historien appelait par sa conférence à une réforme du christianisme, en mettant en lumière sa responsabilité dans la crise environnementale. Pour étayer cette position, nous nous appuierons, au-delà de la thèse de 1967, sur deux autres publications postérieures que nous présenterons dans cet article. Nous relèverons qu’en voulant infléchir la théologie chrétienne, White pensait influencer les valeurs occidentales sur l’écologie. L’ironie du sort est qu’il est bien parvenu à participer à un mouvement de réforme de la théologie, mais la sécularisation a depuis frappé à la porte de l’Occident annulant la potentialité qu’une théologie dissémine des valeurs fondamentales pour la société.

In 2010, Bron Taylor published his seminal book Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future, which rapidly became a “must-read” in the ongoing ecology-religion debates. A decade later, this work gained broader visibility and diffusion with a German translation. This paper aims at introducing the first two chapters of Angelica Federici’s and Eleonora D’Alessandro’s translation in Italian to a European continental audience. It first provides a brief genealogy of the ecology-religion debates and how it structured into an interdisciplinary field of research. Then, it details how the concept of dark green religion is useful for expanding ongoing scholarly discussions. On a more critical note, and from the perspective of social theory, the author suggests two critiques that challenge religious scholars and social scientists to extend current thought and reflection on dark green religion.