Customer Reviews

Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future

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This is truly a remarkable work that has connected many isolated dots that have long belonged together. At first glance, Edmund Burke, radical "eco-terrorists," the Little Mermaid, surfers, Alice Walker, Spinoza and Al Gore might seem to have little in common, but Taylor brings these and many other influential persons, places and things together into a loose but convicted community of phenomena that all share a common belief: the notion that nature has intrinsic value and is worthy of reverent care. "Dark green religion" may be a new phrase, but Taylor shows that it is an ancient force that has been rumbling in the depths of human consciousness for centuries. Now, in 2010, in the context of our growing incredulity regarding revealed religions and our increasing anxieties over the ecological crisis that confronts us, the elements that comprise dark green religion just might be poised to make their way to the forefront.

In his work, Taylor serves as an erudite and impassioned tour guide of the "deep roots and modern expressions" of this hitherto unnamed religion, providing, along with his powerful yet undogmatic analysis, an instructive compendium of ideas and actions that cogently legitimize dark green religion as a concept with significant explanatory power. Through this book we hear of 18th-century philosophers expressing sensations of oceanic unity, modern-day mainstream scientists reflecting upon the "being-ness" of trees, surfers earnestly scrambling to find words to explain the satori that occurs inside the tube of a wave, and Disney's Pocahontas imploring Western colonialists to stop and "ask the grinning bobcat why he grins." It is precisely this diversity of thinkers coupled with the synchronicity of their thoughts that makes Taylor's thesis so compelling. While some may feel that the Earth is sentient and/or animals have souls, and others might take a more naturalistic approach, most all of the "practitioners" of dark green religion share a sense of felt kinship with nonhuman life and a sense of wonder at the structure and flow of the interconnected Earth and cosmos. This religious, or "para-religious," cosmological outlook occasions an ecological conscience that sensitizes humans to the condition of the planet with a depth of feeling that secular, humanistic concerns of sustainability might have a hard time matching. Many of the excerpted passages from Taylor's book are not only extremely convincing, but also extremely moving. If you are at all receptive to these sorts of sentiments, you might find Dark Green Religion to be a source not only of information, but also inspiration.

On a personal level, for most of my life I have found myself violently vacillating between a soothing belief in a supernatural power and a sort of dreary conviction that there is nothing "more" to the universe than the atheism that meets the human eye. Taylor's work implicitly addresses this existential quandary and posits a resolution to it by reconceptualizing the definition of religion, releasing it from a requisite belief in a transcendent sky god, effectively endowing people with the "right" to feel religious even if the lack of scientific support for traditional religions alienates them from what they might sense to be "sacred" in the natural order. In this manner, Taylor enacts an empowering, redemptive paradigm shift, one that enables people to worship the creation even if they're not sure about the existence of a creator. After reading this book, I have looked at the world through slightly more enchanted eyes, as I now find cosmogonic merit in reading "the odyssey of evolution," for example, as a sacred text, and contemplating the simple fact of existence as a miracle comparable to anything that any saint may or may not have done.

This does not, however, mean that there is no place for the supernaturalistic in the scattered yet inclusive church of dark green religion. On the contrary, the book is replete with examples of people who believe that Mother Earth is a conscious entity and/or feel that tactile or telepathic communication between humans and non-humans are spiritual possibilities. Taylor brings to light the ways in which these forms of "spiritual animism" and "Gaian spirituality" (he shies away from such terms as "paganism" and "panentheism" because of the baggage they carry), have manifested themselves throughout history, and muses on the role that such beliefs may play in "the planetary future."

There does seem to be a bit of tension between what Taylor calls dark green religion and the Abrahamic religious traditions. Many -- if not most -- of the scholars, scientists, surfers and activists that Taylor references express a potent condemnation of the overall effects that the Abrahamic religions have had on the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants, criticizing these faiths for their hubristic anthropocentrism, which allegedly led to the domination and desecration of entire continents and the brutal persecution of indigenous peoples who live(d) in a more ecologically sustainable manner. Taylor notes that these Abrahamic religions have experienced a kind of "greening" in the past few decades in response to such criticisms, but he appears to be skeptical that these established traditions can, on balance, ultimately play a constructive role in the protection and restoration of the environment. While this is not the main focus of Taylor's book, it is important to open this subject to debate. Many environmental observers feel that the human species will not be inspired enough to save the planet unless they consider it to be sacred, in one way or another, to the degree that its ruin would be regarded not only as a physical, but also a spiritual tragedy.

In sum, this is a groundbreaking work that comes to us at a crucial moment. By the time you come to the end of this book, you feel as if "the planetary future" is just about to begin, and its outcome is in many ways up for grabs. If you have any interest in how this larger story will unfold, Taylor's book is a must read.

This is a fascinating and even inspiring book.

In it, Taylor analyzes individuals and groups whose participants express strong feelings of belonging to nature, kinship with other organisms, and consider nature to be sacred. He provides lots of examples from around the world, and not only environmentalists. He discusses scientists, writers, filmmakers, surfers, museum curators, artists, and even surfers! Taylor argues that, despite many differences, those involved in dark green religion are promoting reverence for all life and dramatic action to defend it. Toward the end of the book, he also speculates that dark green religion may, eventually, lead the way to a green future.

Part of what makes this book so remarkable is that it is both scholarly and a great read! This is in part because you feel like you have your own personal tour guide, because Taylor tells personal stories along the way. A friends who does not normally read scholarly books but did read my copy agreed that even the scholarly framework was interesting. And it was great to see that entirely new forms of religion are spreading that embrace science!

I also found very helpful Taylor's view that it is not as important to determine where the boundaries of religion are as it is to understand people's emotional connections to nature and the ways this can resemble religion.

In the book Taylor mentioned that he would put video, music, and photographs that illustrate the book on his website. The stuff there is very cool, especially the Symphony of Science and other music-videos. I also really liked the section on the film Avatar, which Taylor thinks is a recent example of dark green religion.

I came away from reading this book feeling a lot less lonely and a little bit more hopeful.

In the opening pages of this book, dark green religion (DGR) is defined as the belief that nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and deserves reverent care. It is then divided into four varieties based on two choices: naturalism or spiritualism, and animism or Gaian. These merge and overlap, and I didn't find the division served much purpose except to make the DGR term an inclusive one. They are however enjoyably explored by looking at the beliefs of people the author places in the different types.

A look at the growth of DGR in North America is done primarily through the works of Thoreau and Muir. Of Thoreau, Taylor writes, "He is properly considered to be the most important innovator of American environmental thought." Eight themes of DGR found in Thoreau's writing are explored with a twenty page appendix of Thoreau excerpts presented as evidence. Muir doesn't get his own appendix but his importance is stressed, especially in terms of his effect on environmental activism.

A chapter on radical environmentalism provided many names to explore as sources of ideas in a wide range of fields from ethics to anarchism and science to psychology. This is also the first book I've read with information about Bill Rogers, the ELF activist who apparently killed himself in jail in 2005. The info is less about him as an individual than about the photocopied material he included in a couple compilations he distributed. This chapter also has a powerful excerpt from Paul Watson. The full article is in The Encyclopedia Of Religion And Nature which Taylor edited.

After these obviously relevant topics, Taylor begins searching for evidence of the influence of DGR in other areas from surfing to politics and United Nations conferences. I most enjoyed the sections about the arts which included looks at Disney films, David Attenborough documentaries, Alice Walker novels, and Ansel Adams photography among others. I would have liked this section to have been much longer. For example, music isn't explored at all although it is one of the many additional topics to be added to the author's website.

The religious and political concerns some have about DGR are lightly examined, often coming to the obvious conclusion that no compromise is possible between these world views. The possibility/likelihood of DGR becoming a dominant force of world change is considered in the book's final pages.

The book would have benefited from better proofreading. For me, admittedly a perfectionist on the subject of typos in a book, there were too many cases of double words, missing words, and wrong words (assent for ascent, for example).

What a gift, Bron Taylor's Dark Green Religion! What he has done is to draw together threads of environmental thinking, writing and activism over the past two hundred and fifty years or so, and stitched them into a pattern of meaning and cohesiveness.

I was fourteen years old when I first encountered the Transcendentalists, falling vicariously in love, first with Jonathon Edwards, later Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Through these magical writers, I connected with my own very young mystical core, and produced my first (and only) major painting. I remember it as a pen and ink outline of a Celtic cross filled with tiny creatures including humans - in laborious detail - held within the waters of earth and air. I cheered the triumph of nature and emotions over logic and reason. I knew the earth community as one, and whole.

That passion was not to last in any coherent way. Segmented as I seemed to be, I could not make the later connections to, say, a John Muir or a Farley Mowat, a Joanna Macy or even a James Lovelock.

It was not until I discovered Bron Taylor's Dark Green Religion that I could realize the pattern of my own deep earth attractions - to the spirituality of the Celts, particularly Druids and Shamans, and of indigenous peoples around the world.

I have been stunned to discover the integrity of the conversation which has been going on all around me for years, without my participation. The absence of conversational partners has blanketed me with a loneliness and isolation which my ordained ministry of more than twenty years has not only been unable to mitigate, but has served to point me away from my early loves.

What a treasure this book is. Rich in history, rich as a tapestry is rich, with notes pointing in myriad directions, it is as though I have wrapped myself with T. S. Eliot's words in Little Giddings,

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

When I first picked up DGR I was afraid that I was going to be disappointed with a dry, boring, scholarly work. While DGR is a meticulously researched and documented scholarly work, it is anything but boring!

It became quickly apparent that DGR is a work of love. And not a work by some distant scholar but by someone who is part of the phenomenon of which they are documenting.

For good or bad, law enforcement officials and others will find the background on radical environmentalism invaluable for their understanding of the mindset that leads to violent direct action.

For anyone interested in Wilderness Spirituality this book is a treasure trove of references, quotes, writings, and ideas. There are some notable authors missing, such as Sigurd Olson, but there are so many gems from surfers to resistance fighters that this hardly detracts from the book's value.

Personally, I have noticed for well over a decade now, a common philosophical thread winding through various social groups and institutions. Taylor does an excellent job of spotting and trying to define these common ideas. While, I didn't necessarily care for his semantics and reductionist categorizations of Earth Spirituality, I have to admit these concepts are difficult to put into words for a scholarly discussion.

DGR is an excellent reference book for anyone interested in environmentalism, Earth based spirituality, and the political and social conditions surrounding them. Don't let the semantics or scholarly aspect scare you off, this book is well worth the read. I suspect that it will inform many readers that they are far from alone in the way they feel and see the world around them.

I am so glad Dr. Taylor wrote this book and firmly named the concept of "Dark Green Religion." I'm glad he defined and delimited its boundaries, but left passageways to other green spiritualities - notably gardening and birdwatching, two of the closest ways, I think, a person can get to 'nature'; and above all, I am glad he gave our vague feelings of 'caring more for the earth than being traditionally religious' a name, a heritage, an academic rigor with a vast bibliography, and a path to the future, cleared of dead ends, such as New Age spirituality (which was no longer working for me) consisting only of altars, candles, incense and chants, lovely though they are. The other dead end I am glad he especially clouted was 'greening Christianity'. The more I study Christianity, especially the virulent fundamentalist evangelism so prevalent today and so opposed to environmentalism, the more I know Christianity is an opponent, not something to 'make nice with'. Dr. Taylor gives us a coherent foundational history, which I had only known as scattered actions, such as tree sitting escapades, and towering personages, such as John Muir, so lofty and inspired as to be intimidating, but now I know him and the other pioneers as family. I am more firmly on the "Dark Green Path", and am henceforth fiercely inspired and spiritually armed to help fight environmentalism's battles for the rest of my life.

This is a wonderful, deeply inspiring book. It covers the western world's most pro-environment and pro-nature thinking, some of which is explicitly religious, some more spiritual and reverent without being overtly religious. It is a great counter to the idea that "the west" has always been hostile to nature.

I have little to add to the several excellent reviews already posted, except to say that we now can go on to a worldwide survey, looking at Chinese environmental writings, Native American myths, Celtic epics, and other vehicles. Also to the more practical but still spiritually informed literature in the western world--all the farmers, ranchers, fishers, and other workers on the land who have written their stories. Taylor has given us the ideal platform to go on to personal growth and ideals as well as further research.

I am seriously interested in learning more about and participating in co-creating a universal green religion. Listened to one of Willi Paul's permaculture videos (see YouTube if you're interested) and learned about this book. Am VERY glad I did. Granted, it is written in an academic's style--wanting to categorize the specific style of green religion in every description of what the author has found--but it's the broadest overview of green religion I've found to date. He goes to great pains to be objective. I've highlighted so much of it that the UNhighlighted areas may be standing out more! Am going onto my second read right now. A really great education about what's been happening 'round the world up 'til 2010. I hope the author creates his blog on his website soon so that all interested can contact one another and brainstorm. Thanks for this vital book.

The reviewers here have made excellent detailed insights into why this is a great book - I won't repeat that.

What Bron Taylor has done, much in the mold of Paul Hawken, is seen connections which are not easily seen using the standard categories of nation, religion, economics, etc...

Green religion and spirituality is exploding into the lives of people in the developed world who are sick and tired of mind-numbing and spirit-crushing ideologies and religions. Let's hope the momentum continues until it changes the entire ethos of humans on the planet.

"Dark Green Religion" is a scholarly study of Green, Earth-centred spirituality. The author, Bron Taylor, is a scholar of ethics and religion. He is relatively sympathetic to his chosen subject, and also turns out to be a surfer. And yes, that detail is significant.

There are several differences between Taylor's approach and the standard view of religion. Like most other scholars of religion, Taylor makes no distinction between "religion" and "spirituality". However, he then takes the necessary next step, and asks why everyone else *do* make this distinction, and what it can possibly mean. The standard answer is that it doesn't meaning anything at all, except that some groups for tactical reasons refuse to be called "religious". Taylor believes that the difference is more robust, and points out that even people who consider themselves religious sometimes make a distinction between religion and spirituality, even within the same tradition. Although Taylor's book is titled "Dark Green Religion", a more apt title would have been "Dark Green Spirituality".

The main thing that marks this book out, however, is not the (perhaps too in-house) distinction between "religion" and "spirituality". It is Taylor's strong emphasis on the fact, that religion/spirituality can be naturalistic. This is something the New Atheists would hotly deny, and the author does indeed polemicize against Richard Dawkins on precisely this point. Christians probably wouldn't deny that religion can be naturalistic, but they might want to claim, that such "religion" is actually a form of idolatry. Taylor has identified two forms of dark green religion, which he calls animism and Gaian religion. Both can exist in a naturalistic version, as well as a more standard, spiritual version.

I believe Taylor is on to something, since many of the people and groups he's describing do have the same psychological/sociological reflexes towards Nature, animals at large or individual animals as traditionally religious believers would have towards God, the saints, the Church, etc. Even the more coherent ideological statements of such groups are strongly metaphysical, for instance attempts to derive an objectively valid morality from the real or percieved workings of Nature.

With definitions like these, Taylor's who's who of dark green religion is pretty broad, compared to more standard approaches. Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd, Earth First, Marc Bekoff, Daniel Quinn and James Lovelock (or at least his admirers) are all seen as representatives of naturalistic religion. I got the same uncanny feeling about Bekoff and Quinn myself, when reading their books! (On balace, though, I'd say Bekoff is a naturalistic animist for real, while Quinn's Gaian spirituality is a pure metaphor.) Even Al Gore, Walt Disney and Hollywood lurks in the background, perhaps menacingly, as Taylor makes his inventory of dark green religious influences on our contemporary culture. Strangely, Taylor doesn't consider Deep Ecology to be a form of dark green religion, although he admits there are similarities. Personally, the very first thing that struck me when looking through the standard Deep Ecology anthologies was precisely their spiritual or quasi-spiritual character. It's therefore not clear to me why Taylor has left them out of the picture. Perhaps he simply hasn't had the time to read the relevant material?

Taylor also reveals that many well-known environmentalists are or were religious or spiritual. The list includes John Muir, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall and (perhaps) Aldo Leopold. Muir's spirituality, which the author believes was anti-Christian and pantheist, is common knowledge. But how many people know that Carson, Goodall and Leopold had religious/spiritual affinities? Goodall, at least by Taylor's account, sounds almost New Age! This, incidentally, explains both the co-operation between Bekoff and Goodall, and some rather curious traits of their books, such as the claim that chimpanzees worship waterfalls.

The most intriguing chapter of "Dark Green Religion", at least to me, is titled "Surfing Spirituality" in which Taylor (a surfer himself, remember?) investigates the connections between surfing, Hawaiian religion, the New Age/hippie scene in California, environmentalist activism, Edenic myths, and so on! I readily admit that I had no idea. I always pictured surfers as tanned sociopaths with too much money and too much spare time, busy killing sharks and swordfish when not preoccupied with finding "the perfect wave". One of my co-workers has actually tried surfing, although he's personal perfect wave is skateboarding. Perhaps I should ask him if he ever met Bron Taylor?

;-)

"Dark Green Religion" is divided into nine chapters. Of these, chapters 2 - 5 are the most interesing. The remaining ones sound more like encyclopedias of dark green influence on pop culture, and get frankly tedious after a while. The book is at bottom a scholarly study, but it's consciously written in a style directed at the more general reader as well, and it seems to be popular among people who actually believe in the "dark green" message themselves (see the other customer reviews). I also consider the book to be very useful and interesting.

Five stars.