Nature Spirituality and Environmental Crisis

Reframes humanity’s spiritual relationship with the earth—while offering hope.

For millennia nature has provided spiritual experiences of wonder, gratitude, and peace. Now nature is being burned, poisoned, and rendered extinct. This book asks: Can nature still provide spiritual inspiration?

Drawing on decades of original work in environmental ethics, religious environmentalism, contemporary spirituality, and fiction, Roger S. Gottlieb explores how ecological crisis reshapes spiritual life. What we trusted would nourish us and our descendants forever is diminished and threatened. We seek a refuge from the cruelties and madness of human culture and find bird species disappearing and oceans filling with plastic.

Gottlieb begins by clarifying what spirituality is and why nature has played a central role in it for religious believers and non-believers alike. He then examines the environmental crisis as a civilizational rupture that transforms hope, grief, meaning, and moral responsibility.

Nature spirituality, he suggests, must adapt to ecological loss and vulnerability. Difficult as it may be, we can nourish a spirituality in which grief coexists with gratitude, compassion with moral outrage, and acceptance with active solidarity and love for all of life.

The book concludes with a fictional narrative illustrating how each of us might face overwhelming environmental realities with a transformed spiritual vision.