For more publications by Bron Taylor, including

Dark Green Religion: Nature Religion and the Planetary Future

Religion (2001) 31, 225–245 see www.brontaylor.com
doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0257, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part II): From

Earth First! and Bioregionalism to Scientific Paganism
and the New Age
B T

Earth and nature-based spirituality is proliferating globally. In Part I of this study, I

argued that although participants in these countercultural movements often eschew the
label religion, these are religious movements, in which persons find ultimate meaning
and transformative power in nature. Focusing on the deep ecology movement, I
further argued that (1) experiences of nature spirituality are evoked by practices as
diverse as mountaineering, neo-shamanic ritualising and states of consciousness
induced by hallucinogens; (2) earthen spiritualities are often contested and may be
viewed as inauthentic or dangerous by practitioners of other forms of nature
spirituality, and (3) despite significant diversity, a sense of connection and belonging to
nature (sometimes personified as a transforming if not transcendent power) unites these
cross-fertilising, and sometimes competing, spiritualities. Part II examines additional
forms of nature-oriented religion, searching further for continuities, discontinuities and
ironies among its diverse forms.  2001 Academic Press

From Earth First! to Bioregionalism—Kindred Forms of Earth-Based

Spirituality
I begin Part II of this study by comparing the earth-based spiritualities found in the
bioregional and radical environmental movements.1 Most participants in these move-
ments recognise that they share many affinities, and indeed, many participants identify
themselves with both movements. Both draw on the diverse spiritualities to be found in
the ‘cultic milieu’ discussed in Part I. ‘Pagan environmentalism’ is an apt label for both.
Each has had serious internal disputes over countercultural lifestyles and the value of
overt pagan ritualising.
There are, however, important differences that keep these movements from fusing
completely. Bioregionalists emphasise creating sustainable lifestyles and communities,
ones separate from the dominant society. They also tend to be more directly engaged in
promoting spiritual consciousness change in various ways, often through overt ritual
work, and they are often more hopeful that positive change is possible than are most
radical environmentalists. Earth First’ers, however, emphasise political action to defend
the biotic diversity of the planet. They are generally less optimistic than bioregionalists
that education and ritualising can facilitate a dramatic enough change to arrest species
extinctions (see Taylor 1999).
Illustrating the affinities and tensions between these movements, Dave Foreman once
praised bioregionalism while complaining that it was ‘mired in its composting toilets,
organic gardens, handcrafts [and] recycling’, ignoring the duty to defend the biotic
diversity of the planet. ‘Bioregionalism is more than technique’, Foreman insisted. It
should also be ‘resacralization and self-defense’.2

There are two things to do right now. One is this self-defense of the wild. More of us
need to do everything we can to try to ensure that wild places remain, and that’s
whether you monkeywrench, or just buy wild land, or whether you work through the
political process for better management, whatever. The other is what the bioregional
movement is doing: trying to re-connect with our tribal roots, trying to recreate, to

 2001 Academic Press

0048–721X/01/030225+21 $35.00/0
226 B. Taylor

grope towards, that kind of society. . . . I see ecodefense and bioregionalism as being
two sides of the path towards whatever society will become in the future, once we’re
through this catastrophic event that’s coming up. (Foreman 1990, p. 65)

Apocalypticism explains why Earth First’ers give priority to ecological resistance over
lifestyle activism. Despite differing general priorities, many bioregionalists have taken
these criticisms to heart, participating in direct action environmentalism. Meanwhile
most Earth First’ers strive to live low impact lifestyles and to support bioregional
initiatives. There is a significant and increasing overlap and collaboration among activists
in these movements.

Perception, Invention and Expression in Earth-Based Spirituality

Earth-based spiritualities are based on personal experiences that foster a bonding with
nature. These experiences are diverse, take place in different venues and are expressed
in plural ways that are sometimes contested. These feelings may be intentionally
precipitated through a variety of practices that are themselves a creative bricolage
assembled from older religious traditions, especially Eastern and indigenous religions,
combined with new inventions, such as neo-paganism, all stirred into an eclectic
spiritual stew.
Road Shows and Ecovangelism
Like evangelistic circuit riders, environmental pagans travel from town to town trying
to inspire greater activism in defence of the earth. Some, like Howie Wolke, eschew
overtly religious language, speaking at length about the ecological characteristics of the
specific areas for which they are campaigning, and speaking more obliquely of the
‘intrinsic value’ and ‘magic’ of the natural world, and of the need for greater ‘passion’
and ‘wildness’ in her defence.
Others have expressed more openly their earthen spirituality. In a song called ‘Magic’
the folksinger Dana Lyons speaks of ‘feeling love’ from the forest. Lyons recalls receiving
another song from a tree that is expressing its sadness about its impending doom as
loggers approach. Another Earth First! musician, Jesse ‘Lone Wolf Circles’ Hardin, has
expressed both pantheistic and animistic perceptions in his pulsing ballads, urging
listeners to dig down deep to connect with their own wild animal selves, which are
capable of defending the earth. Joanne Rand’s songs, like Lone Wolf’s, express the
animistic and spiritual perception that our ancestors inhabit this world with us. Her
songs proclaim that we are ‘never alone’ and that ‘the ancient ones’ surround us and are
‘in our bones’.
Still others, including the late Judy Bari and her protégé Alisha Little Tree, wove their
critique of patriarchy into overtly pagan songs. They especially liked the Charley
Murphy song, ‘Burning Times’, which equates the burning of witches with the
desecration of nature and expresses the ecofeminist conviction that the close, cultural (or
‘natural’) association between women and nature links them together, whether in
destruction or in liberation. Along with diatribes against the timber corporations and
corrupt pro-industry governments, their program included a number of deeply reverent
songs. One, for example, exhorted listeners to humble themselves before the forest, the
rivers and the oceans, so that all could be healed. A more playful ditty celebrated three
important pathways to spiritual insight—marijuana, magic mushrooms and trees—and
referred to them as the Holy Trinity.
What unites these diverse road show performers is their belief that the arts—especially
music, poetry and photography—can transport persons imaginatively into the
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 227

wilderness, evoking in them deep, intuitive and mystical knowledge of the sacredness of
earth and of all life.3 For example, Alice DiMicelle, who fuses radical environmentalism
with ecofeminist lesbian activism in a song written after spending five days alone in the
Kalmiopsis wilderness of southeastern Oregon, sings of the ‘magic’ and ‘miracle’ of
nature. In another song used to score a number of movement videos, she urges action:
‘Do what you can, do what you must, but do something to defend the earth’.
Describing a European road show, DiMicelle explained that her role was to bring
persons ‘experientally into the wilderness’ through her music and photographic slides.
‘That was fine with me’, she said, ‘for the wilderness is my church’. Strategically, she
places her most mystical music towards the end of the show, ‘because we wanted to send
them away with the mystical’.4
DiMicelle’s religious experiences, like that of many others involved in earth-
spirituality movements, began in childhood. She grew up in a ‘normal dysfunctional’
middle-class family in industrial New Jersey but recalls that nevertheless she could
‘always . . . feel the planet. I always knew mother Earth was under the sidewalk’. The
knowledge that she was ‘living in a spiritual world’ helped her to survive in a place that
was so badly desecrated, but most of all ‘it was the trees that saved me in New Jersey.
I had some connection with living plants’. She also knew that ‘there is life in the soil,
even in New Jersey. You can’t take life out of the dirt’. She grew up speaking and
singing to trees, she recalls: ‘The maple trees [got] me through, they spoke to me’.
Moreover, like Dana Lyons, trees gave her music: ‘My first song, in seventh grade, came
from a tree, ‘‘Celebrate the Rain’’ ’. DiMicelle now lives in Oregon, watching her new
homeland increasingly resemble the desecrated landscapes of New Jersey. Nevertheless,
she is hopeful. ‘People are waking up’, she says. ‘The earth is sending out signals, and
people are responding’.5
For these ecovangelists (a term likely coined by Dakota Sid Clifford, another green
balladeer), earthen spirituality is both the source and the goal of the itinerant green
touring that is a critical part of contemporary grassroots environmentalism.

Wilderness Ritualising
Songs, poetry, dancing, erotic play, mythic pageants and simple conversation bond
activists together and reinforce their spirituality and activism, especially at Earth First!
wildlands ‘rendezvous’, where the kinds of spiritual practices described below occur.

Song and Poetry, Campfires and Rallies. Song and poetry fests, held around campfires,
are the most common and important means of expressing the earthen spirituality and
sharp political criticisms common within radical environmental movements.6 Some-
times more reverent campfires are interrupted and lampooned by inebriated revellers;
some revellers view themselves as Mudhead Kachina’s, or trickster figures, doing
important ‘spiritual work’ by making sure that participants do not take themselves too
seriously. Others participate just for fun or because they think that spirituality is best
reserved for one’s own time in the wild. One rowdy interruption occurs when an
‘amoeba’ (made up of an ever growing circle of activists, hands on shoulders and around
waists, chanting repeatedly ‘eat, excrete and die’) swirls around the penumbra of the fire,
absorbing all in its path. The amoeba expresses humorously the kinship—based on the
common experience of eating, excreting and dying—of all life forms.
Other ritual processes, apparently borrowed from the American fraternity system,
involving the drinking of shots of Tequila from increasingly intimate body parts,
become a form of erotic play. These activists view the body positively and view
228 B. Taylor

sexuality as a delightful aspect of being an animal. Some of them also know about
Tantric mysticism, at least enough to be intrigued by it, and learn about sex and
spirituality at movement workshops. Some view sexuality and sex play, even gay or
group sexuality, as potent if dangerous pathways to greater spiritual connections with
the earth’s sacred energies. It is not uncommon to happen across, or hear later, that
erotic ‘experiments’ have occurred at wilderness gatherings or at other venues. Sexuality
as spirituality is an important aspect of the movement’s anti-dualistic attitudes, one that
rejects any dichotomy between spirituality and the body.
The various forms of ritualising occuring at movement events and the feelings of
connections with nature and fellow activists that occur within radical green groups are,
for some, facilitated by hallucinogens and alcohol. Both play a role in earth-focused
spirituality, and some consider them to be sacraments. But for greater numbers seeking
ecstatic experience at these gatherings, it is the music, drumming and dancing that
evokes and intensifies their spiritual experiences. This music is often orchestrated by
religious elites comprised largely of musicians and a few ritual experts, mostly wiccan
priestesses, on the last night or two of these gatherings.

Mythic Pageants, Tribal Unity and War Dances. For over a decade now there has been
a growing emphasis on ‘tribal’ ritualising in the form of mythic pageants and ecstatic
dances. One recurring pageant represents a form of radical environmental myth-making.
Actors recite a story that follows this basic pattern: primal humans in egalitarian foraging
societies were living in spiritual harmony with the earth, but they were eventually
driven to the brink of survival and enslaved, first by agriculturists and eventually by
corporate elites in industrial society. Eventually, a group of feral humans, led by children
waving monkeywrenches (the archetypal sabotage symbol) rise up in rebellion.
Empowered by the earth’s sacred energy, they dismantle the oppressive regime and
bring back to life all repressed creatures, restoring harmonious lifeways on earth. A great
tribal celebration ensues, drawing everyone into a great victory dance.
Other times ‘tribal unity’ or ‘war’ dances are held separately from this theatrical
prelude. Fuelled by hard-driving music and drumming, some activists report mystically
fusing with the cosmos, ‘losing themselves’ and their sense of independent ego, as they
dance into the night.
On other occasions, usually in ceremonies designed to honour and support
imprisoned comrades or to empower others fighting for specific places, circles are
formed. Energy is drawn—down from the moon, from the four directions, and most
commonly from earth itself—and is then cast from the group outward to those who are
engaged in specific struggles or to persons known to be in need. This kind of ceremony
is usually led by one or more of the movement participants who are trained as wiccan
priestesses.7
Although not all activists participate in this ritualising or believe in the efficacy of it,
movement dances and ceremonies go forward. Sometimes movement ritualising is
criticised afterward, often for failing to transcend what are perceived to be regressive
gender hierarchies and stereotypes, other times for disturbing the nearby non-humans.

Sweat Lodges, Sacred Saunas and Hallucinogenic Earth Bonding. Sweat lodges, held at
many Earth First! gatherings over the years, have become increasingly controversial.
Some activists argue that the rituals steal from Native American cultures. More recently,
there has been an effort to remove from sweat lodges symbols that were previously
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 229

borrowed from Native Americans and to rename them ‘sacred saunas’, in a gambit to
borrow instead from Scandinavians, who presumably would not object. This switch
reflects a general trend in green religion to draw spiritual practices less from American
Indians and more from one’s own ethnic heritage, however problematic the endeavour
might be in its own right.8

Ritualising in and Beyond Wilderness Settings

The Council of All Beings: Neo-Animism and the Consecration of Scientific
Narratives
Perhaps the most important of all the ritual processes is the Council of All Beings, an
innovative form of ritualising that promotes mystical identification with non-human
species. Since 1988, the creators and followers of the ritual have facilitated this rite
widely in Australia, Europe and the United States. Radical environmentalists, sometimes
as a follow-up to forest-related roadshows, usually host the Council. It has appeared in
diverse venues, including those populated by New Agers, moderate environmentalists,
Unitarians, and even liberal Christians.
The Council uses ‘experiential exercises’ and meditation techniques adapted from
Buddhism and other traditional religions as well as from humanistic and transpersonal
psychology. Some of the rituals are drawn from Native American vision quests or
involve guided meditations based on science, focusing attention on the evolution of the
cosmos and life on earth. Neo-pagan chants and songs are also often woven into the
ritual (see Taylor 1994; Seed and others 1988). The heart of the ritual occurs when
individuals assume the identity of non-human nature e.g., animals and plants, as well as
non-animate substances such as air, water and DNA. Some participants report being
taken over by the spirits of the being for whom they speak in a kind of shamanic trance.
For others, participation is more like animistic performance art. In either case, the
process facilitates leaps of moral imagination whereby participants deepen felt under-
standings of and sympathies for the nonhuman world. Often the ritual ends with the
assembled beings endeavouring to impart their special gifts to the humans present,
empowering them for the ecological struggles in which they are engaged.

Advanced Ritualising in Earthen Spirituality

The Council itself is viewed by many as a rite of initiation into earthen spirituality. Deep
Ecology and other green retreat centres are experimenting with what are considered to
be more advanced forms of green ritualising.
Some of these practices are borrowed from New Age gurus and groups. Given the
penchant of many to emulate indigenous societies, the work of anthropologist Michael
Harner has been influential. Harner promotes what he calls ‘core’ shamanism, a kind of
trance-like soul travel that he says he adapted from indigenous shamans. Harner and
others call this practice neoshamanism, which involves ritualised, meditative breathing
and is said to induce paranormal experiences, ‘shamanic journeying’.9 These experiences
may foster spiritual or communication with ‘power animals’ or other ‘intelligences’ in
nature. As with the Council of All Beings, neoshamanism has an animistic dimension:
wisdom may be sought and provided the human seeker by such animals. Other
participants may journey widely through the cosmos, perhaps connecting with ancestors
or remembering past lives. These experiences enhance the awe and love these activists
feel for the earth and the cosmos.
230 B. Taylor

What seems to distinguish these rituals from similar ones held in New Age enclaves
is that they usually include a ‘sacred intention’ for planetary healing and for participants
to find clarity about their own earthly duties. Sometimes these intentions are informed
explicitly by ecofeminist beliefs and the process is designed to overturn an internalised,
oppressive ‘logic of domination’ that encourages men to oppress women and the earth.
Sometimes participants believe that these rituals can magically contribute to earth
healing by manipulating the energies of the universe, thereby transforming human
consciousness and fostering greater environnmental sensitivity.
What is crucial to ritualised experimentation in earthly spirituality is that it is believed
to promote a needed global ‘paradigm shift’, one that resacralises human perceptions
towards earth and thereby fosters both personal and planetary healing. One way that
earth-based ritualising promotes earth healing is by fostering environmental action.

Direct Action as Ritual of Resistance and Connection

Bonding with Trees and Earthly Energies
Environmental action is not only an outcome of earth-based ritualising. Direct action
resistance also is an important form of earth-based ritual. One example can be seen in
the longest ‘tree sit’ trespass in the history of direct action environmentalism. On 10
December 1997 Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill climbed a giant redwood tree that had earlier been
occupied by Earth First! activists, extending their desperate effort to prevent the logging
of these giant trees. Hill endured El Nino enhanced winter storms, frostbite and a
broken toe before descending from the tree named Luna on 18 December 1999, after
negotiating an agreement to save it and a two hundred foot buffer around it.
Meanwhile, she had become, even if briefly, the most famous radical environmentalist
in the world. Her campaign was carried over the Internet and was broadcast widely by
print, radio and television media in the United States and abroad. She spoke often of her
spirituality, and more than in any previous example of environmental resistance, the
media reported this aspect of her motivation.
Some were intrigued by her nickname, reporting that she had adopted it after an
intense childhood experience with butterflies. Hill also explained in her interviews that,
although she had grown up in Arkansas, she had been sent ‘by the spirit’ to the
redwoods, via a vision quest, after a life-threatening injury convinced her of the
meaninglessness of her prior, everyday experience.
She reported another profound epiphany upon arriving in the redwoods:

The first time I entered into a redwood forest—it was Grizzly Creek—I dropped to
my knees and began crying because the spirit of the forest just gripped me. The
knowledge, the spirituality, the power that has no words, that power that makes your
hair stand on end, see? The power that gives you goosebumps. (Custer 1998, p. 8)

She became even more connected during her tree sit. As the San Francisco Examiner
reported,

Julia ‘Butterfly’ says she is so attuned to her host that she believes she has felt its tears
with her bare feet and body. Butterfly [reported], ‘I was scared at first, and then I just
started paying attention to the tree, drawing strength from the tree,’ she said. ‘I could
see all her scars and wounds, from fires and lightning strikes. I was making a spiritual
connection. . . . Eventually, I took my shoes off so I could feel the tree and started free
climbing around,’ she said. When Pacific Lumber started logging the steepest part of
the ridge and hauling logs out by helicopter, ‘I found myself crying a lot and hugging
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 231

Luna [the name given the tree when first occupied during a full moon] and telling her
I was sorry. . . . Then, I found out that I was being covered by sap pouring out of her
body from everywhere, and I realized, ‘Oh, my God, you’re crying too.’ The sap
didn’t begin pouring out until the logging started.10

This article, which provides an unusually detailed exploration of the kind of earth-based
spirituality that often motivates environmental action, included Hill’s animistic assertion
that ‘Trees pass information on how to hold up hillsides and how to grow, and they also
know how to communicate feelings’. The reporter also noted that Hill, with the
exception of wearing wool, is a ‘vegan’, consuming neither meat nor other animal
products. For most vegans, this choice to reduce animal suffering is an important aspect
of their spirituality.
Hill is not the only activist to report mystical experiences during direct action protests.
Some five years earlier, Alisha Little Tree also experienced a profound bonding with a
redwood that she occupied during an eleven-day tree occupation. Sitting on a massive
redwood tree stump along a river in Northern California’s Sinkyone wilderness, she
explained how her perceptions changed as a result of that experience:

I stopped being a vegetarian after that tree sit because I connected with that tree so
intensely. . . . it has really changed my whole reality. Now I’m thinking of beings not
as conscious creatures, but as life-force. There’s a really strong life-force in all of us, and
in this forest in these trees. Connecting to the tree is not [hesitating] it’s like just being
[pausing] it’s not like you talk to the tree, because it can’t hear, but there’s this feeling,
I don’t know how to describe it, [it is] like a deep rootedness, very powerful, not
superior to us, but certainly not inferior to us and more primitive or less evolved
than us.11

When asked why this experience led her to renounce vegetarianism, she replied,
‘Because I just started to appreciate the incredible life-force in plants . . . and the line
between animal and plants blurred. Its all just different forms of life-force’. Like Little
Tree, many activists speak of epiphanies in nature, of feeling intensely a ‘life force’ that
infuses and imbues all living things with value and evokes feelings of awe and reverence.
Little Tree’s path to Earth First! is also of interest. It illustrates the ways that
countercultural streams can forge earthen spirituality and shape a radical earth activist.
Her pilgrimage story emerged in response to my question about why she had become
a vegetarian. She responded that she was an alienated teenager in Sacramento,
California, who became a ‘Grateful Dead hippie’ and also hung out with punks. The
punks were vegans, refusing to eat any meat or dairy products in order to reduce animal
oppression. She became one, too. In 1991 she became even more politically radical
while protesting the Gulf War. Her protest group then visited an Earth First!
direct-action base camp. There, because of ‘the tribal context’, she ‘connected to people
like never before’.
But it was earlier experiences that had awakened her to earthen spirituality. As an
eight year old, she became interested in ‘crystals and New Age stuff’, and after reading
Ram Dass’ Emmanuelle a few years later (at about age 13), she ‘got into loving the god
in everybody. I was ‘‘woo’’ to the max . . . trying to find something inside myself I
knew that was there, a spirituality, a holiness. I know I’m holy. Anyway, these people
[the Earth First’ers] added another element to it’.
She continued by further exploring what could be called an axiology of embodiment:
‘I think there is knowledge in our bodies that tell us what’s right’. She added that this
knowledge can come in many ways, including through dance and song, but that
232 B. Taylor

however it is discerned, ‘the knowledge is in our bodies, because our bodies come from
Earth . . . [and they] know how to keep us alive’.
Graham Innes is an Australian radical environmental activist whose spirituality
connected him directly to the earth. While buried up to his neck in an Australian
logging road providing access to a rainforest that he sought to protect, he experienced

a slow dawning of awareness of a hitherto unknown connection—Earth bonding

[when the Earth’s] pulse became mine, and the vessel, my body, became the vehicle
for her expression . . . it was as though nature had overtaken my consciousness to speak
on her behalf. (in Seed and others 1988, pp. 91–2)

I asked Little Tree whether she knew of Innes and his experience, knowing that an
account of it had been published in Thinking Like a Mountain, a book describing the
Council of All Beings. She responded that she had read about it before she did her tree
sit and that ‘I’m sure that it affects my perceptions about what happened between me
and the tree’. This is a striking acknowledgment of the suggestive power that the
experiences of others can have (expressed through conversation, the arts and books) in
opening persons to spiritual experiences in nature. Perhaps hearing about or from Little
Tree, Innes, John Muir or others who had been transformed during direct action ‘rituals
of resistance’ shaped Hill’s own spiritual sensitivity.12

Ritual Circles and the Metaphysics and Magic of Resistance

Sometimes activists experience the earth’s sacred energies, or life force, during direct
action resistance to deforestation or other environmental defilement. They may also do
so during what might be called ‘magical direct actions’, where the goal is to seek,
explore and direct the sacred energy of the forest (itself an expression of the earth’s
energy) towards specific ends. In a way similar to some of the earthen ritualising
discussed earlier, direct action might be directed towards personal healing (e.g., helping
persons to transcend their anger and manifest the loving energy of the universe) or
towards planetary healing. This action may help activists reach out to their most bitter
adversaries through a kind of prayer-as-energy-manipulation that seeks to focus the loving
energy of the universe in an ecologically salutary way.
During the summer of 1997, for example, I spoke with three men deeply involved in
the direct action defence of the Headwaters Redwood Forest in Northern California.13
A small man calling himself ‘Reverend Fly’ spoke about some very intense conflicts in
the woods, asserting that ‘because we’re unpredictable’, the cops and loggers ‘are really
scared of us. We walk and get there before they do in their trucks. They know how
strong we are. . . . They know our motives come from another energy level. They don’t
grock [understand] that [we act] from love.’14
As they spoke about the spirituality of activism, the men described ritual circles they
have sat in while engaged in their activist encampments and how these circles have
helped them get in contact with the spirit, the consciousness, of the forest. Fly explained
that

What we know about Redwoods is that they sprout; they hold on to each other. Its
part of this continuous, spouting, living being, or consciousness, that once covered
millions of acres. And all of this knowledge has been chewed up and chased into small
pockets.
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 233

He then described experiences with other activists, how during a meditative circle in the
redwoods among ‘the tall ferns’ the forest ‘echoes like a cathedral’. On one such
occasion,
I don’t know what kind of woo we’d been engaged in at the time, this cold, icy breeze
came through the camp, washed over our knees, a long rolling moan, and every one
stopped talking—then afterward—we said—‘did you hear that? That was no breeze.’
I didn’t try to give it a name. There’s lot of old energies, old pain, there, that I can’t
name. Their memory is fucking old. And lots of the spirits that have dwelled there a
long time—they have a lot to say.

Goat, who was also in that circle, added, ‘I felt such [deep, forest] consciousness in
that group—heavy consciousness. We were addicted to it. Talking about conjuring
about things—we were even praying for [Charles] Hurwitz’, referring to the Texas
tycoon who controls Maxxam Corporation and Pacific Lumber, the logging company
they were fighting.
Their activism is all about love and healing, Goat explained. ‘In the circle we’d sing
out, ‘‘We love you Hurwitz—we’ll take you in here any time.’’ It was amazing, there
was a pretty pure love and intent. It was the most love I’ve ever tried to conjure up for
such a dick-head.’
Redwood forests are transformational, and time there is sacred. ‘Back in there’, Fly
continued, ‘you are on forest time’. Goat added, ‘You get wood-like—We called the
encampment Ewok village’. These activists spoke of forest time as ‘strong medicine’ that
‘takes hold of a person’. As Fly put it, ‘Nobody can go in there and not be transformed’.
Indeed, those involved in the resistance can be empowered by the spirits of
non-human world. Fly and Goat, for example, discussed an activist who was in charge
of ‘ground control’ during backwoods actions. He ‘became an animal’ and could
‘evaporate’ in the face of their enemies. Fly commented and Goat agreed, ‘He’s totally
a shaman’. This idea, that the ability to elude capture is a shaman-like skill, is
reminiscent of ecoteur Peg Millett’s ‘flight in the desert’ after being ambushed by FBI
officers while attempting to topple a power line.15
For these activists, cultivating spirituality is not narcissism—it is activism. A former
Greenpeace activist, Goat explained that in Europe, spirituality changed consciousness
fast enough to save the whales. Moreover, he explained, ‘You have spiritual experiences
in direct action’. It’s like ‘getting naked with the pagans in the woods at the Ruckus
camp’, he said, referring to direct action training camps held throughout the United
States by the radical environmentalist ‘Ruckus Society’. ‘I was looking for a spiritual
path when I left Greenpeace. I’ve just started finding it’.
When asked what he meant by spirituality, Goat answered, ‘It is honoring the
universal power, the flow, the power far beyond me, [the power] that I exist in’. Asked
for his understanding of spirituality, Fly replied,
I guess I dovetail a lot with what brother Goat was saying. I feel really nascent in
spirituality. I’m just coming out of the self-hating industrial energy I was raised in.
[Spirituality is] when I know what the trees are saying, when I know what my friends
are thinking, when they aren’t speaking. It’s not just a hocus-pocus thing, it’s just that
somehow I and the people I’m with open ourselves to other energies or to a higher
vibrational level. People call them all sorts of things. Ghosts. Fairies. Telepathy. It has
[convinced] me that I have a divine purpose. My growth is removing layers of illusion,
from spirit, from places, from the illusion that [we] are separate from each other, and
from the rocks, and everything else. It’s curing me of the illusions of linear time, of
causality, opening my awareness to all beings, all time, all space.
234 B. Taylor

Then, like all good mystics, Fly cautioned, ‘The more words I put on this the farther we
can go from the reality I refer to’. And then he offered his spiritual prescription: what
we need to do is ‘just sit down, shut up, breath, have eye contact, touch’, and falling
silent, he put his hands on the earth in front of him.
In a follow-up letter I received a few weeks later, Fly added, ‘My articulation, my
voice for social change, comes from the elements, from the energies present in a
situation where there is wrongness’. Working intentionally with such energies has led
him to involvement with a ‘Pagan Anarchist Network [of] spiritual working groups
from all over California who are either finding guides so that they may conduct
ceremonies in the forest or are preparing solidarity rituals in their home spaces’. He
concluded by articulating his understanding of the connections among ritual, magic and
environmental action, ‘Yes, tactical magic is underway’.

Understanding Direct Action as Ritual: Stirring Scholarship into Earth-Spirituality

Stew
Some activists make the connection between ritualising and direct action by studying
scholars who have focused on ritual. Thus does scholarly work contribute to the
bricolage of contemporary earth-based spirituality. This is true not only of Michael
Harner and Theodore Roszak, who promote animistic spiritual experiences, but also of
the writings of Mircea Eliade which are appropriated to affirm beliefs that humans can
learn to recognise sacred places.
More surprising, activists describe as ritual their direct action campaigns. Sometimes
they even cite ritual studies experts such as Ron Grimes to show their awareness that
rituals of disobedience and resistance can promote life-transforming experiences as well
as personal and social healing.16
Earth First’ers are relatively well educated group17 whose participants often study the
natural sciences and anthropology to learn about small-scale societies and their
putatively sustainable lifeways. Adopting a certain interpretation of tribal societies,
radical greens are often enamoured with foraging societies, viewing them as more
egalitarian than, and ecologically superior to, agricultural or industrial societies. There is
often a keen interest in ritual and rites of passage, and curiosities about how such rites
might be integrated into activist communities. Both monkeywrenching and civil
disobedience are described as transformative ritual actions, and sometimes rites of
passage to adulthood are invented that involve such acts of resistance.

Science as Nature-Based Spirituality and the Ascent of Scientific Paganism

Despite the pronounced nature mysticism and occasional distrust of rationality and
science found among radical green groups and participants in earth-based spirituality,
nature spirituality can be compatible with science, which can even inspire proper
spiritual perception. Indeed, contrary to Colin Campbell’s (1972, p. 122) belief that
spirituality in the cultic milieu is grounded in ‘unorthodox science’, the science drawn
upon for contemporary green spirituality is increasingly, although not exclusively,
orthodox (namely, congruent with prevailing scientific views).18
Jaspar Carlton is one of the most passionate advocates of science as a basis for an
activism-inspiring, earth-based spirituality. He is a former Earth First! activist who
founded the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, one of the most effective groups using
litigation to defend endangered species. Strategies that he helped pioneer are
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 235

now increasingly emulated by a growing number of grassroots, biodiversity-defence

organisations in the United States.
In the summer of 1992, as we sat in a mountain meadow in Colorado’s San Juan
Mountains, Carlton reflected on the increasingly overt spirituality of radical environ-
mentalism. He asserted that a preoccupation with spirituality has reduced the movement’s
‘scientific competence and effectiveness’.19 Nevertheless, he claimed, that the move-
ment’s strength lies in its ‘spiritual connection, in the woo woo’. For Carlton,
spirituality and natural science are mutually dependent: Those who are ‘truly spiritual’
can ‘feel the living wilderness [and] know the land so well that they understand all the
plants and their ecological place and thus actually become a part of the habitat of the
ecosystem’. Commenting on activists in the meadow who were trampling the rare, blue
lupine, Carlton bitterly stated, ‘I can’t respect those trashing these plants. We are in a
sacred area here. All this stuff is sacred. We need sensitivity to the smaller life forms’.
The crucial question for humans today, Carlton continued, is ‘biologically, legally,
morally, how ought we to manage our sacred wilderness ecosystems?’ We will not be
able to figure this out, Carlton believes, if we cannot ‘integrate science and spirituality’,
for ‘science without heart is worthless’. There are many ways to resist environmental
destruction, he says, but ‘you gotta listen to the music [and be spiritually attuned] before
you can join the dance of resistance’.
Carlton’s attitude was mirrored by a number of scientist-activists I subsequently
interviewed. For some scientists, the intricacies of nature, learned through scientific
investigation, evoke feelings of awe and reverence akin to those gained by activists
engaged in direct action, wilderness pilgrimages, neo-shamanic trips facilitated by
‘sacred’ hallucinogenic plants and other green rituals. Perhaps the best published
example of this science-based, spiritual epistemology can be found in The Sacred
Depths of Nature (1998), a book by the University of Washington biologist Ursula
Goodenough. As more and more scientists express awe and reverence for nature
and become involved in earthen spirituality and ritualising, we may be witnessing
the emergence of a new religious movement that can be called ‘scientific paganism’.
There are various pieces of evidence for such speculation. Writing during the early
1990s about the overlapping reciprocities between the feminist spirituality and New
Age movements, Mary Farrell Bednarowski suggested that,

the New Age movement and various kinds of women’s spiritualities operate out of
similar worldviews—a holistic universe in which all parts are valued and internally
related to the whole and to each other. These overlapping worldviews of relationships
and correspondences are not so different, moreover, at least in spirit, from that of the
contemporary ecology movement. (Bednarowski 1992, p. 177)

New Age theorists generally believe that they are basing their spirituality on ‘new
physics’ or quantum theory, which illustrates scientifically the interrelatedness of all
matter and energy (see Albanese 1992). This recognition is said to be precipitating a
paradigm shift in human consciousness such that the universe, earth and all its denizens,
severally and together, will be recognized as sacred and treated accordingly.

Deep Ecology, New Physics and the Greening of the New Age
Environmental and political progressives have criticised New Agers for their other-
worldliness, naive optimism, ecological ignorance, exploitation of and romanticism
towards Native Americans, and lack of concrete political action to redress social and
environmental inustices. Yet radical green activists are often influenced by New Age
236 B. Taylor

ideas and sometimes participate in their ceremonies and workshops. By participating in

these New Age processes, ecologically minded and politically radical greens have
contributed to an ‘ecologisation’ of some New Age religion. Mutual influence occurs
through conversation and modelling, as persons in the cultic milieu cross paths,
communicating their concerns and ideas for right action.
I have witnessed such dynamics at Council of All Beings rituals and at neo-shamanic
workshops, where New Age and radical greens sometimes meet. There are often initial
tensions between them, but by the end of these ritual processes, participants have
considered new perspectives. It is not unusual then to find ‘New Age’ devotees staffing
the front lines of anti-logging or blockades or otherwise becoming environmentally
involved.
Some New Age literature reflects growing alarm with environmental degradation and
encourages environmental action. For example, James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophesy
(1993) and its sequels stress the potential for a transformation in human consciousness
but make clear that the desired transformations are dependent on the preservation of
sacred forest ecosystems.20
The novelist Daniel Quinn also fuses radical green and New Age ideas. In Ishmael,
a noble gorilla eloquently articulates the radical environmental myth of a fall from
an egalitarian, foraging paradise, blending this with a New Age-like prescription that
humans resacralise their attitudes towards nature as the first, necessary step toward
reharmonising life on earth.21 In The Story of B, Quinn’s heroes and heroines are
revealed to be animist missionaries, subverting ‘totalitarian’ monotheistic (sky-god)
agri-cultures, justly earning the ‘antichrist’ label used by their Christian enemies to
justify their violent repression.
Some of the strongest evidence for a nascent ecologisation of New Age religion is
that many of the most important centres for New Age thinking have begun to
embrace deep ecology and to express alarm about environmental decline. Some of
these thinkers and institutions were pioneers in contemporary efforts to consecrate
scientific cosmological and evolutionary narratives, for example, Fritof Capra, with his
Elmwood Institute;22 the Naropa Institute (of Colorado); the Institute for Noetic
Sciences; and more recently, the Epic of Evolution Society, inspired by the work
of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme and supported by many scientists, including
E. O. Wilson and Ursula Goodenough.23
A mid-1990s brochure from the Institute for Noetic Sciences illustrates this increasing
fusion of the cosmological New Age emphasis on transforming human consciousness to
a deep concern for planetary biota:

We are explorers and the most compelling frontier of our time is human consciousness.
Our quest of a vision for humanity which integrates science and spirit and illuminates
our connectedness to each other, to the Earth, and most particularly to our inner self.
. . . All life forms are sacred. The outer world that we experience is closely aligned with
our inner lives. We have the capacity to examine, research and understand our inner
world as rigorously and thoroughly as we have our outer world. We have a unique
historical opportunity for individual and societal transformation as a result of the
convergence of Western science, the major religious traditions, and diverse cultural
traditions. . . . As we deepen our personal lives, a new collective energy is generated
that results in glimpses of healing, wholeness, clarity and connection. . . . We are
personally and collectively seeking to expand our minds, deepen our values, recover
our spiritual lives and use our full capacity as human beings to affect the world around
us. . . . Our vision is a cautiously optimistic one [and when you join us] you know you
are part of a meaningful whole.
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 237

Founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the mission of the Institute is
‘to expand knowledge of the nature and potentials of the mind and spirit, and apply that
knowledge to advance health and well being for humankind and our planet’. By the
mid-1990s, it reportedly had over 50,000 members. Although the initial orientation
may have been cosmological, with its expressed concern for nature, it is drawing closer
to an earth-focused spirituality akin to the deep and radical ecology movements.
Another recent development is the 1998 formation of the ‘Epic of Evolution Society’.
It was established to promote the ‘evolutionary epic’ as an ecologically salutary myth for
our time, one to which people of widely divergent spiritualities and cultures can adhere.
It is one of the most interesting initiatives of a nature-based spirituality yet to unfold, and
one that fits the rubric of ‘scientific paganism’.24
In a striking, related development, a draft ‘Earth Charter’ has been making its way
through a long process of consultation and revision that proponents hope will lead to its
ratification by the United Nations.25 Heavily influenced by Thomas Berry and Brian
Swimme, its language provides another example of the consecration of scientific
narratives in an ambitious effort to inculcate nations in reverence for life on earth. Its
promoters hope that the ratification of the charter will yield more ecologically
responsible international resource regimes.

From Humpsy (Humanistic Psychology) to Transpersonal and Ecopsychology

Although a detailed discussion of green psychology is impossible here, it is important to
observe that leading figures in Jungian and transpersonal psychology have endorsed deep
ecology, including James Hillman.26 Part of the greening of humanistic and transper-
sonal psychology can be seen in a growing body of literature now called ‘ecopsychol-
ogy’. This new movement is working out its theoretical framework while contributing
to earth-based spirituality movements. Ecopsychology offers a diagnosis for an assumed
human estrangement from nature and offers prescriptions designed to help industrial
humans re-connect to earth. Often these prescriptions include ritual practices derived
from and similar to those found in New Age groups, overlaying them with an overtly
environmental intention and meaning, often with pantheistic and animistic overtones.27
The blending of ecopsychology with a radical environmental-style deep ecology can
be seen at two conferences sponsored by the International Transpersonal Association,
one in Ireland in 1993 and another in Brazil in 1995. Both conferences included an
eclectic mix of New Age/transpersonal psychology proponents. The one in Ireland, for
example, included Ram Dass, Stanislav Grof and Roger Walsh, along with such radical
environmentalists and indigenous environmental justice advocates as Vandana Shiva,
Winona LaDuke, Millilani Trask and David Abram.28 Ralph Metzner, the ecopsy-
chologist most responsible for the effort to build bridges between the New Age/
transpersonal psychology and radical environmental subcultures, reported a few years
later that his bridge building had limits. A number of Transpersonal Association Board
members felt that he had taken the organisation too rapidly in a radical environmental
direction. Partly as a result, further conferences have not been held.29

Trends and Tendencies in Earth-Based Spirituality Movements

There is a continuum among earth-based spirituality movements from those groups
oriented to paranormal and mystical realities to those explicitly incredulous about
mystical experiences. Some earth-based spirituality involves communication with
non-human or superhuman beings, paranormal journeys and altered states of conscious-
ness. Others express awe and reverence towards evolutionary processes that are
238 B. Taylor

conceived in purely naturalistic terms. In a diagram (see Fig. 1) this continuum can
be seen in the axis between ‘supernaturalistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ nature-spiritualities.
There is also something of a parallel continuum between those whose spiritual focus is
cosmological and those for whom it is earthly. In this diagram specific nature
spiritualities are depicted with open boundaries, illustrating the bricolage and reciproci-
ties among various forms of earth-based religions.
Despite differences over what might be considered paranormal or even paranatural
phenomena and whether devotees dwell more on cosmological or biological processes,
there is a feeling or perception around which these diverse forms increasingly converge.
It can be stated succinctly: The earth and all its life forms and processes are sacred. We belong
to them and they to us—we are kin. We should, therefore, act lovingly, reverently, and respectfully
toward them. We must not unnecessarily injure these beings and processes when we take from them
what we need to live. In The Story of B, Daniel Quinn captures such a formula, ‘The world
is a sacred place and a sacred process . . . and we’re part of it’ (1996, p. 189),30 as do the
new physics and systems theorists Fritof Capra and David Steindl-Rast in Belonging to the
Universe. The following text under consideration in early 2000 as an official Sierra Club
poster, printed over a graphic with a person’s legs intertwined with a tree, further
suggests that a convergence towards earth-based spirituality is underway31. The full
poster is reproduced in Figure 2, and it includes the remarkable prose:

This is not about getting back to nature.

It is about understanding we’ve never left.
We are deep in our nature every day. . . .
This connection is as personal as it is fundamental.
It can’t be proved with theorems and diagrams.
You either feel it or you don’t.
Sierra Club members feel it. . . .

Maybe it came to you on a mountain trail, or on a riverbank, or at a windowsill

watching a spider’s unthinking intelligence unfold. Simply put, it’s the sudden
conviction that there is something out there, something wonderful. And it is
much, much bigger than you.

A revelation like this could easily overwhelm a person.

We choose to let it inspire us. . . .

When you accept your connection to nature,

suddenly you can’t look at the work
without seeing something very personal in it.
You are part of it, and you work for the planet because it gives you joy to do so.
You work for the planet because you belong to it.

Earth-based religion is escaping its countercultural breeding grounds.

Whatever the extent of this convergence, however, tensions remain. Devotees of
the more mystical and supernaturalistic forms of nature-based spirituality, those with a
more cosmological or astrological referent, or those that tend to personify Gaia as
goddess more than as an ecological process are more likely to be optimistic about
humans and their ability to manipulate nature’s energies, mentally or technologically,
in a beneficent manner. They are likely to believe that positive social change can
be created by ‘magic’, defined within this world view as not an exception to
nature’s laws but rather as a path that shapes the future by working with such laws.
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 239

Figure 1.
240 B. Taylor

Figure 2.
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 241

The more paranormal–sympathetic forms of nature spirituality tend to be less

apocalyptic in tone, partly because of their belief that magic and miracles are real
possibilities.
Those engaged in the most naturalistic forms of nature-based spirituality tend to take
the earth and its biological processes as the axis of their worldview of nature. They are
likely to discuss Gaia more as a living, biological system than as a goddess. They tend to
eschew optimism about human capacities to solve environmental problems. Conse-
quently, they are more prone to apocalyptic expectations and are more likely to think
that humans will cause further extinctions and disruptions to living systems. There are
no miracles available to halt environmental degradation. Individuals resonating with
more naturalistic forms of nature spirituality are more likely to use activism to defend
and restore ecosystems as the central, venerating activity, stressing that the laws of nature
cannot be overridden by human ritualising or paranormal experiences.
Yet all these diverse nature spiritualities are fused in a quantum universe, sharing the
metaphysics of interrelatedness. Since everything shares a common origin (in the big
bang), and since everything is interrelated subatomically, kinship and even communion
are the appropriate moral sentiments and goals. This worldview provides also a
metaphysical basis for many perceptions: animism, sorcery, shamanism, pantheism and
panentheism, to name just a few. But the key is a felt sense of ‘connection’, kinship and
loyalty to earth and all her life forms and living systems.

Notes
1 See Taylor (2000a) for the history and spirituality of bioregionalism and Taylor (2000b) for a
critique of bioregionalism as social philosophy.
2 Conservation biologist and Earth First’er Edward Grumbine argues similarly that bioregionalists
and Earth First! activists need each other and their complementary emphases. ‘Bioregionalists
need to hear from us about big wilderness and we must listen to them about healthy human
economies embedded in the natural world’ for ‘if, as Gary Snyder suggests, the bioregionalist
vow ‘‘is to say to yourself that you won’t move anymore’’, then the Earth First! vow might be
‘‘defend the territory’’ ’. (Grumbine 1987, p. 27). Both perspectives are critical, Grumbine
concludes.
3 As artist Karen Coulter explained, ‘We are writers, artists and musicians because there has to be
value change. . . . The art and writing . . . sometimes can reach people on an emotional basis
that you can’t on an intellectual basis.’ She then mentioned the ‘Warrior Poets Society’ which
‘looks at poetry as a way to monkeywrench things.’ (interview with Karen Coulter, 4 July 1992,
San Juan Mountains, CO).
4 Notes from roadshow and subsequent interview, 9 October 1992, Oshkosh, WI.
5 We need to learn to be attentive to such signals. DiMicelle believes: ‘One of the major problems
with the world is that people are too much in their heads. We have to get out of our heads if
we are to see that we are all a part of every living thing.’ Voicing a typical criticism of Western
religions, which she believes separate humans from earth and lead to environmental exploi-
tation, she asserts that her religion, Earth Religion, has been around much longer than
monotheistic ones. ‘I’m really just a witch,’ she says, summarising her spiritual orientation
(interview with Alice DiMicele, 9 October 1992, in Oshkosh, WI).
6 For movement poetry, see Fritzinger, Coulter and Metzger 1998.
7 One of these priestesses, known by her earth name, Sequoia, was part of the original Susan B.
Anthony Coven (with Z. Budapest) in Los Angeles. She later participated in anti-nuclear
demonstrations with Starhawk at the University of California’s Livermore laboratory. Wearing
a stud monkeywrench in her nose and driving a motorcycle, she explains that the most decisive
moment on her path to earth-based spirituality was direct experience with the energies of
redwood trees (interview, 10 February 1994, in Fountain Valley, CA).
8 For a detailed treatment of this issue, see Taylor 1997.
9 For introductions to neoshamanism see Walsh 1990, Harner 1990 and Noel 1997.
242 B. Taylor

10 Eric Brazil, San Francisco Examiner, 12 February 1998, p. A1.

11 Interview, 6 June 1993, with Alisha Little Tree, Sinkyone Wilderness, CA.
12 The parallels between Hill’s injury and Muir’s life-changing industrial accident are notable.
When I asked Little Tree if the experience reported by Innes might have planted a seed, she
replied, ‘Probably,’ adding that although she ‘sometimes uses the term ‘‘goddess’’ ’ for the life
force it all ‘seems less and less personified, less like something we can name or know, something
more like life. . . . And I don’t even know what ‘‘it’’ is.’
13 5 July 1997 conversation at the national Earth First! Rendezvous, with ‘Reverend Fly’ (Chris
Bennett), ‘Goat’ (John Sellers), and John ‘Jake’ Kreilick in the Nicole National Forest,
Wisconsin. Fly later explained his name; he is training himself to be a priest of Headwaters, to
learn to listen to the spirits and perform rituals, to do magic there.
14 Fly later explained that the term ‘grock’ comes from Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel,
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). If some of the loggers and cops feared them, however, it might
also be because radical environmental activists often place icons on logging roads such as
pentagrams, skulls and voodoo dolls, evoking in the minds of their adversaries paganism and
even Satanism.
15 For a description, see Taylor 1995.
16 This from a 4 July 1992 interview with ‘Doug Fir’ or Christopher, one of many Earth First!
activists who have participated in the ‘Hundredth Monkey’ anti-nuclear testing protests at the
Nevada test site. His understanding of this story illustrates not only the metaphysics of
interdependence that permeate earthen religions but also the way metaphysics provides a basis
for a hoped-for paradigm shift that can precipitate a greening of human lifeways. The
Hundredth Monkey story, he explained, has to do with paradigm shifts. ‘I’m trying to
remember if it was a myth that became a scientific experiment, or a scientific experiment that
became a myth, but during the ’50s, there were studies on these monkeys on an island off the
coast of Japan. The scientists gave the monkeys potatoes to see what they would do with them,
and they would eat them whether they were sandy or not. Then one day a girl (sic) monkey
took her potato . . . and washed it off and ate it, preferred it, showed her friends, then the
parents, and they caught on, and pretty soon all the parents, and the whole island washed the
potatoes, and then [as if by magic] monkeys on all the other islands begin doing it, even though
there was no physical contact.’
I responded, ‘So this shows interconnectedness of all beings?’ He replied, ‘Oh yes. The magic
of these paradigm shift stories shows that a lot is going on we can’t easily feel, touch and taste.’
A little later, I asked, ‘Do you remember the first time we talked and you found out I was a
religious studies professor, and you said, ‘‘We have to overwhelm them with woo’’?’ He
laughed and replied, ‘We first have to find that [woo] in us. We have to transform
consciousness, and rendezvous like this help us to gain strength and courage. I’ve been thinking
all year long about this, about revolution, and about what revolution is . . . and it’s not external.
Gil Scott Heron has this song, ‘‘The Revolution won’t be Televised.’’ [This means] that the
revolution is an internal one, and by the time we find this out it will already be over, there will
be no way to capture it, not even on television . . . because it will be a paradigm shift that
happens within us.’
In a remarkable article on shamanism and ritual Michael Lewis (1989) endorsed a similar
metaphysic in comments about the ‘one percent effect’ popularised by Transcendental
Meditation. He wrote that the ‘one percent effect . . . demonstrates that when 1% of the
population in a given area practices meditation, or some form of contemplative activity, crime
rates decrease along with instances of mental illness and disease. We literally can [therefore]
dream back the bison, sing back the swan.’ John Seed, Australian Deep Ecology author and
activist and populariser of the Council of All Beings, also refers to this ‘one percent effect’
(Lewis 1989, pp. 27–8). He did so while asserting that the environmental crisis is so grave that
only a miracle precipitated by spiritual consciousness change can prevent massive extinctions
and even greater suffering (interview, 5 November 1992, Osceola, WI).
The Hundredth Monkey story has been attributed to a book by Lyall Watson (1979).
17 This impression has been gained by years of fieldwork and received some empirical
confirmation in Kempton et al., and others 1995, who in a limited sample found the average
education level of Earth First’ers (15 years total) to be only one year less than among Sierra Club
members.
18 See Part I of this study for an introduction to Campbell’s cultic milieu theory.
 Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality 243

19 Carlton’s views are from a 19 June 1992 interview.

20 Indeed Redfield himself is increasingly involved in supporting financially a number of
progressive, grassroots environmental groups, and such activists, recognising a kindred spirit are
strategizing how to involve and solicit donations from him.
21 See Quinn 1992, 1994, 1996, 1997.
22 For his embrace of Deep Ecology, see Capra 1996 and Capra and Steindl-Rast 1991.
23 On the Epic of Evolution and other recent efforts that consecrate scientific narratives, see
Barlow 1997 and Rue 2000. See also Epic of Evolution newsletter Barlow edits and the
‘cosmogenesis’ internet, email discussion group (list serve).
24 Even the Tielhard Society, widely seen as anthropocentric and unduly optimistic about humans
by radical greens, has come to earth. According to Connie Barlow, a science writer who attends
closely to such groups, this society at least informally has adapted deep ecological concerns for
non-human species into its overall mission (personal communications late 1997 and 1998). The
society has been well received by prominent supporters of the deep ecology movement, some
of whom, however, are technophobes suspicious of its scientific orientation. For recent efforts
to consecrate cosmological narratives, see Barlow 1997.
25 For a journal issue including a ‘Benchmark Draft’ and much discussion of the charter and the
process involved in its creation, see Earth Ethics 8 (Winter/Spring 1997).
26 During our 2 June 1993 discussion, George Sessions expressed surprise at the rapidity with
which deep ecology was making inroads in New Age enclaves, as seen, for example, in the
adoption of deep ecology by Fritjof Capra and James Hillman.
27 For a clear and representative introduction to the ecopsychology literature, see Theodore
Roszak’s Voice of the Earth. In this extraordinary work Roszak defended the idea of earth as Gaia,
an intelligent being, basing his argument on the anthropic principle. He then forthrightly
promotes animistic spirituality and a pantheistic world view. For other key ecopsychology
works, see Roszak 1972, 1978; Shepard 1982; Walsh 1985, 1990; Fox 1991; Keepin 1991;
Walsh and Vaughan 1993; Glendinning 1994; Roszak, Gomes and Kanner 1995; Metzner
1994, 1999; Wilber 1995; Adams 1996.
28 For a unique and provocative book promoting animistic spirituality, see Abram 1996.
29 Email correspondence, January 1998.
30 See also pp. 160, 182–3, 324–5.
31 Sarah McFarland Taylor alerted me to this poster’s draft-text. Shortly before completing
revisions on this paper, in early March 2000, I confirmed with the Sierra Club in San Francisco
that the poster is presently under review for possible publication. To make it easier reading, I
modified slightly the format but not its content.

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BRON TAYLOR is Oshkosh Foundation Professor of Religion and Director of

Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. He is the author of
Affirmative Action at Work: Law, Politics, and Ethics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992)
and is editor of Ecological Resistance Movements: the Global Emergence of Radical and Popular
Environmentalism (State University of New York Press, 1995) and of the Encyclopedia of
Religion and Nature (Continuum International, forthcoming 2003). His last contribution
to Religion was ‘‘Earthen Spirituality or Cultural Genocide: Radical Environmentalism’s
Appropriation of Native American Spirituality’’ (April 1997). He hopes to publish Dark
Green Religion, a study exploring in more detail the themes of the present study,
sometime in 2002.

Environmental Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, WI 54901, U.S.A.

E-mail: bron@religionandnature.com