That was the attention grabbing title of Bron Taylor’s lecture at the annual public meeting of the Kansas University Department of Religious Study, this year, co-sponsored by the KU Environmental Studies Program.
For those of us in the GKC Interfaith Council who had been discussing the relation of science and religion in the Sacred Text study group, focused on the nature of ongoing creation and evolution of the cosmos, we had to know what he had to say. So several of us traveled to Lawrence April 13th.
Bron Taylor is Professor of Religion, Nature and Environmental Ethics at the University of Florida. His lecture began with a lengthy list of examples with slides of diverse individuals and groups reporting extraordinary experiences in interactions with animals and the world of nature. Many experiences were aquatic, e.g., surfers for whom surfing had become a spirituality, a kind of mystic life with ‘sacred ocean.’ These intense experiences were leading persons to conclude that they were an integral part of the created and animal world, not entirely separate and over it.
Taylor was of the view that a “new, global, earth religion has been rapidly spreading around the world,” a phenomenon he labeled “dark green religion.” This he had elaborated in the book on which the lecture was based on Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2009, University of California Press). A supportive example of this phenomenon, he proposed, was the deep sympathy viewers had for the creatures and the enchantment they felt with the environment in the film Avatar
(2009) directed by James Cameron.
Taylor had collected and edited dozens of reviews and analytic articles into a recent book, Avatar and Nature Spirituality (2013, Wilfred Laurier University Press). Having these experiences, Taylor saw both persons of traditional faiths for whom this was evidence of a powerful theology of nature, and other persons for whom ‘deep green’ was becoming a new religious way of life. In the question and answer period following the presentation, a number of participants probed the depth of the evidence and the extent of the trend which has come to preoccupy Taylor’s academic career and become the center of his reflections on the future. Something of both can be glimpsed by a visit to his website.