Now that we characterize nature by flux rather than stability, what are we to do? This question is the focus of Religion and the New Ecology, edited by two professors at the University of Notre Dame, David Lodge (Department of Biological Sciences) and Christopher Hamlin (Department of History). The book grew out of a Lilly Fellows conference, “Ecology, Theology, and Judeo-Christian Environmental Ethics,” held at Notre Dame in February 2002.

Because many of the matters “conspicuous in environmentalism are genuinely religious,” Hamlin and Lodge draw moral implications of “flux ecology” from religious sources, specifically Christian ones. Despite this Christian emphasis, the book is excellent. In particular, it is refreshingly multidisciplinary, incorporating three chapters by historians, two by ecologists, one by a philosopher, and two by ecotheologians, in addition to bookends by Hamlin and Lodge. Although I am not convinced that this topic is particularly new—historians have been analyzing and considering these issues since at least 1990—the topic still merits ongoing reflection and dialogue.

The first question that readers of BioScience might ask, however, is “Why would a nice person like me be caught dead with a book like this?” There seem to be too many good reasons to doubt that traditional religion is the place to find out how to act ethically with regard to the environment. As Gary Belovsky points out, the Bible's repeated advocation of human fertility surely would not be viewed as environmentally friendly today. More incisively, Belovsky examines whether we can find a basis for environmental ethics in Christianity, given that biblical authors largely ignored environmental change, attributing it to an angry God rather than to their own actions. Kyle Van Houtan and Stuart Pimm demonstrate how scripture is selectively quoted to support the ties between some Christian organizations and politically conservative think tanks. Elsewhere, John Haught questions whether belief in the “next world” lessens our devotion to this world, which might be served best by radical naturalism.

Overall, however, the authors firmly believe that religion has much to offer to modern environmentalism. They pragmatically argue that we need to engage with American Christians specifically, simply because of their prominence. More important, the authors genuinely believe that Christianity has the potential to contribute to a renewed environmental ethic; they unanimously dismiss Lynn White's infamous thesis that Christianity is essentially the cause of ecological degradation. Van Houtan and Pimm, for example, review Christian environmental worldviews, concluding that they “cannot be placed in one simple box” and arguing that ecologists and Christians need to work together in the interest of conservation.

Several authors consider the transformative potential of religion for inspiring “changes of human identity,” perhaps reincorporating the classic virtues (especially humility and moderation, and even antimaterialism). In the introduction, for example, the editors claim that the tenets of religious leaders throughout history imply “a greater accountability to creation—a degree of accountability that sits uncomfortably with contemporary American culture but that is familiar to religious people.” While such accountability would be welcome, this statement uses a particularly narrow version of “religious people” if it at the same time excludes the forms of Christianity that to a large extent define contemporary American culture.

Whether or not one agrees that we need to draw on the tenets of Christianity to think about the environment, this volume further asserts that we cannot draw just on science. A number of contributors demonstrate that science is a value-laden enterprise, meaning we must reflect on its processes and findings ethically. Mark Stoll, for example, points out that the guiding ecological notion of a “community” derives from the Protestant background of founding ecologists, in which lies “the taproot of modern American ecological science.” Because “community…implies morality,” ecologists' faith led them to value their object of study, and therefore made them want to conserve it. Though study of the “Book of the Bible” was gradually replaced by study of the “Book of Nature,” these historical roots are still evident: ecologists undertake study of the natural world to conserve it, as “priests of nature.” More fundamentally, Larry Rasmussen demonstrates that ecological science, in the service of managing natural resources, exemplifies the belief that we can control and master nature through technology to increase human well-being (“ecomodernity”). To rectify this, he calls for a new “moral habitat,” one that questions our secularist and scientistic assumptions as much as problematic religious ones.

The morals we can derive from flux ecology are even less certain. This is particularly true given that, as the volume points out, the myth of stability is entrenched and comfortable. Peter S. White examines some of these ethical challenges, including the paradox of “extend[ing] the human hand…into ecosystems we want to see free of human influence,” the lack of a “reference state by which to evaluate human-caused change,” and the challenge of thinking in terms of dynamic stability on a multi-patch scale rather than on the scale of individual patches. Nonetheless, he seeks a way to assess change in terms of “bounds of natural variability,” while at the same time recognizing that the scale of change is more important than whether its source is in humans or in nature.

In one of the more creative flourishes in the book, Patricia Ann Fleming inquires into some of the moral hypotheses that might be consistent with flux ecology, showing how challenging this extension will be and how it must extend to questions about the moral actor himself or herself, a stronghold of traditional religion. A greater problem comes from the naturalistic fallacy, the question of whether we should move between “is” and “ought.” Fleming's chapter addresses this issue most acutely, asking whether we are justified in building ethical superstructures on the foundation of this new flux view.

Lodge and Hamlin, for example, see the flux of nature as “closer correspondence to reality,” thus giving it a certainty that seems at odds with what a more encompassing view of flux might allow. I can imagine a social constructionist replacing “ecologist” in the following sentence of theirs—which is meant to apply to ecologists' relation to the general public—with “social constructivist”: “If we follow Dostoevsky, the right thing for ecologists to do might be to keep the unsettling new truths secret, to recognize that stable equilibria are the bread and circuses of our time, and that faith and hope are essential to human sanity, however ill founded” (p. 9).

By applying the flux paradigm more broadly to human knowing, we might obtain a more radical uncertainty, and perhaps an even more “honest ecology[,] by ceasing to disguise those moral problems as somehow [resolvable] in the natural order of things.” In this regard, it is telling that Lodge and Hamlin downplay the more constructivist claims of several authors. Elsewhere, however, they recognize that the flux paradigm will devolve the focus of responsibility from the “experts” to a more “communitarian” model.

Although I sympathize with the authors' intention to appeal to Americans, many of whom adhere to Christianity, I wonder whether something was lost with the Christian focus, and whether the conceptual foundation of the book would have been more defensible if built less on the expediency of appealing to the dominant tradition. In this respect, it was surprising that neither Buddhism nor Islam even appears in the index, and that Hinduism appears only once, in connection with a single sentence in the book. Yet these religions certainly have something to offer. For example, one of the key doctrines of Buddhism is anicca (impermanence), which has tremendous relevance to the arguments made in this book. Although the editors can be commended for focusing on one tradition, and they would be justified in deferring to the comprehensive “Religions of the World and Ecology” book series, I concur with Belovsky, who points out that the global environmental problem requires “an environmental ethic suitable for all people, not just a single culture.” This is especially salient, given that sociologists of religion have shown American Christianity to be unusual in many respects.

In summary, this book is engagingly written, and the editors have ensured that chapters based in the humanities engage with the biological sciences, and vice versa, which is no small order. Consequently, a wide range of chapters should be of interest to readers of BioScience, and I encourage them to look through the volume for sections that whet their appetite. Ultimately, our concerns about biodiversity do not arise solely from the natural sciences—they are moral concerns, too. We therefore cannot avoid questions about the relation between “is” and “ought” in this domain, and Religion and the New Ecology is a good entrée into the relevant issues. It raises important questions about how we are to relate to this world, especially in the sense entailed by the Latin root of the word religion, meaning “to bind.” Some readers may find the scriptural quotations outlandish, but there is much to be said for the editors' opening argument that the scriptures are nonetheless the cultural context in which much biodiversity discussion must be understood. If we can't engage Christians in conservation—maybe even “convert” them to it—we're not going to get very far.