This course explores how certain religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism—have addressed the ecological crisis for the past 50 years. The world today is in the midst of a major ecological crisis that is manifested in extreme weather events; loss of biodiversity; depletion of fisheries; pollution of air, water, and soil; prolonged droughts; and mass extinction of species. Since the 1970s, world religions have begun to grapple with the religious significance of the environmental crisis, examining their own scriptures, rituals and ethics in order to articulate responses to the ecological crisis.
While respecting the distinctiveness of each religious tradition, this course compares their teachings and examines the following issues:
- Religion as the cause of the environmental crisis
- The resources for ecological responses within each tradition
- The emergence of new religious ecologies and ecological theologies
- The contribution of world religions to environmental ethics
- The degree to which the environmental crisis has functioned—and could function better—as the basis of inter-faith collaboration.
Religious traditions can, at times, provide wholesale transferrable solutions to environmental problems, but, as thought-partners and as ethical prompts, they do something deeper: they offer disruptive, radical new ways of thinking, acting, and imagining our place within the nonhuman world.
