Spirit of the Environment: Religion, Value and Environmental Concern

Spirit of the Environment brings spiritual and religious concerns to environmental issues. Providing a much needed alternative to exploring human beings' relationship to the natural world through the restrictive lenses of 'science', 'ecology', or even 'morality', this book offers a fresh perspective to the field.
Spirit of the Enironment addresses:
* the environmental attitudes of the major religions;
* the relationship between art and nature;
* the Gaia hypothesis;
* the non-instrumental values which have inspired environmental concern.
Contributors range from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, comparative religion, education and social anthropology, providing students with an intriguing survey on the role that spirituality and religion play in nature.
This is a vital collection for those eager to examine the relationship between the spiritual and the environment.

Review: `Spirit of the Environment is a fascinating, original and profoundly creative contribution to the field of spiritual archaeology. It would be of particular interest to scholars of religion and theology, social anthropologists, philosophers and environmental academics. It could easily be used as a senior undergraduate text for a course on religion and the environment.' - Local Environment, Vol4, 1999

'the book will be a useful resource for students in environmental studies'

`Spirit of the Environment address the timley and fascinating issues of man's spiritual relationship with the world he inhabits'

`Together they challenge much of the current thinking which is restricted by the frameworks imposed by materialism, instrumentalism and secularisation and seek to make new connections and to offer us new reference point and terminology to express our desire for something beyond our everyday experience of the world'

'This book aska us to look more carefully at that taken-for-grantedness, at the esay, superficial way in which respect for and appreciation of the natural world can be assumed to be spiritual, and tries to give us a philosophical basis for the connection'

`it is very good to have a book like this to give us a wide-ranging philosophical basis for our argument to keep the spiritual in environment education'

`A book that foregrounds spirituality in an area usually hijacked by the scientists is a very useful addition to armoury for keeping spirituality as a visible and valued dimension to education'