Nature Spirituality and Environmental Crisis : Embracing a Sacred, Wounded Earth

Gottlieb, Roger S.

Bloomsbury Academic（2026/09発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 192 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9798216372592

Full Description

This book confronts a central spiritual question of our time: how can reverence for nature can survive when the natural world itself is deeply harmed? Across cultures and religious traditions, nature has long been experienced as sacred—an enduring source of awe, gratitude, and belonging. Yet climate change, pollution, mass extinction, and environmental injustice have fundamentally altered that relationship. Forests burn, rivers are poisoned, species disappear, and even the most intimate forms of human embodiment are marked by environmental toxicity. What does spirituality rooted in nature mean under these conditions?

Drawing on decades of scholarship in environmental ethics, philosophy, and religious environmentalism, Roger S. Gottlieb offers a searching but accessible exploration of how ecological crisis reshapes spiritual life. He begins by clarifying what spirituality is and why nature has played such a central role in it, for both religious and nonreligious people. He then examines the environmental crisis not simply as a technical or political failure, but as a civilizational rupture that transforms how humans experience meaning, hope, grief, and moral responsibility.
Rather than abandoning nature spirituality, Gottlieb argues that it must be reimagined. Traditional forms of reverence, gratitude, and contemplation must adapt to loss, uncertainty, and ecological vulnerability. At the same time, new spiritual practices and virtues—grounded in honesty, courage, solidarity, and care—become essential.

The book concludes by showing how these transformed spiritual responses can take shape in everyday life, helping individuals face despair without denial and sustain moral commitment amid overwhelming ecological realities. It offers readers a framework for spiritual life that neither retreats into nostalgia nor surrenders to hopelessness, but learns how to live meaningfully within a wounded world.

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

1. A Glimpse of What we Face
2. Spirituality and Nature Spirituality
3. The Environmental Crisis
4. What We've Lost: Nature Spirituality Today
5. Spiritual Life Transformed by the Loss of Nature: And What Remains
6. A Day (week, month, year) In the Life

Notes
Index
About the Author