The Context of Eco‐theology
The phrase "I'm a tree-hugging Jesus freak," a self-description uttered recently by a Pentecostal environmentalist, demonstrates the complexity of contemporary eco-theology and religious ecological activism. For the past two decades or more, the combination of these two identities seemed unthinkable, for Christians were still struggling to articulate a response, much less a response that would appeal to Pentecostals, usually viewed as un-ecological. This chapter examines many of the historical and more contemporary contexts that shape what is now a rich eco-theological conversation. Although the chapter tries to give a broad international sense of the movement, it draws heavily upon the US context where a diverse and multi-faceted conversation about eco-theology has been going on for over three decades. Furthermore, while there are now ecological voices within all the major religious traditions, this chapter will primarily focus on Christianity as the context of eco-theology. While there are many historical precedents that one could acknowledge leading into the contemporary environmental movement, such as Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac (1949), most scholars agree it began in the 1960s, marked by a variety of publications that brought attention to the issues at hand. In fact, many historians of the movement date the birth of the modern environmental movement to Rachel Carson's 1962 paradigm-changing book Silent Spring, which detailed the damage wrought by pesticides throughout the ecological web. Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" (1968), a doomsday scenario about population growth, was published toward the end of the decade. Taken together, these two works exemplify the dominant concerns of the early movement-pesticides, pollution, and population. Also in the late sixties, Lynn White's infamous article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" appeared in Science (White 19 6 7), in which White concluded that "Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt for the ecologic crisis." Certainly there were plenty more forces in the sixties that shaped the environmental movement, and to this we will return, but ideas alone do not produce social movements. It was in the sixties, however, that widespread activist and scholarly concern coalesced, and the response from Christian thinkers started to