Nature Spirituality and Environmental Crisis

Roger Gottlieb’s prophetic voice has been our companion for decades, holding in tension the awesome with the awful, the quiet solitude of nature spirituality with the loud call to link arms for justice for all. His work is a much-needed companion for the crises we face. -- Laurel Kerns * Laurel Kerns, Professor of Ecology, Religion and Society, Drew University, USA *
In this beautifully written and deeply reflective work, Roger Gottlieb confronts the entangled crises of ecological devastation and spiritual disconnection with both urgency and poetic clarity. Moving beyond conventional scientific and religious frameworks, he invites readers not only to reckon with their own complicity but to feel the depth of our shared condition, holding space for grief, wonder, and the fragile persistence of hope. At once sobering and encouraging, this book is a powerful meditation on what remains of nature spirituality and how it might still guide us toward compassion, resilience, and a renewed capacity to heal a wounded world. -- Morgan Shipley * Inaugural Foglio Endowed Chair of Spirituality and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, USA, author of Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America *
Limned with impossible hope, Gottlieb’s book is a heartfelt call to courage and love in spite of the ongoing degradation of our planetary home. -- Mark I. Wallace * James Hormel Professor of Social Justice, Department of Religion, Swarthmore College, USA *
For several decades, Professor Gottlieb has been at the forefront of the discourse on religion and ecology. In this thoughtful and elegiac book, Gottlieb ponders the spiritual meaning of living through the environmental crisis that challenges the future of life on Earth, including human life. Exploring the moral, psychological, social, and existential dimensions of human-nature relationship, Gottlieb encourages us to understand what we have destroyed and how the loss has negatively impacted our lives, cultivate nature spirituality that allows us to grieve the loss while accepting the new reality of living on a wounded earth, and turn our moral outrage and grief into constructive spiritual resistance that leads to political action. The book compels us to examine our values, policies, and practices regarding nature, of which humans are a part and without which humans cannot survive, let alone thrive. -- Hava Samuelson * Regents Professor of History, Arizona State University *