Cultural ecology asks how belief systems shape the way people use land, water and animals. Few belief systems are as influential as the world religions, and since the 1980s a movement has grown that reads environmental care as a religious duty. It has its own theology, its own institutions and, increasingly, its own measurable projects.
From stewardship to creation care
The idea that humans are stewards of creation rather than its owners appears in Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, and in the 1970s theologians began to use it explicitly against the environmental crisis. Coalitions of churches in North America and Europe formed in the 1980s and 1990s; the World Council of Churches adopted “justice, peace and the integrity of creation” as a programme in 1983. The Roman Catholic Church’s most visible contribution is the 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, which frames climate change as a moral question and has been cited in climate negotiations.
Beyond the churches
Islamic scholars issued a declaration on climate change in Istanbul in 2015, and “green mosque” programmes in Indonesia and Morocco have installed solar power on thousands of buildings. Hindu, Buddhist and Jain teachers draw on doctrines of non-harm and the sacredness of rivers; the Ganga and the Yamuna were granted legal personhood by an Indian court in 2017, although the ruling was later stayed. Indigenous spiritual traditions, long treated as folklore, are now consulted in conservation planning from the Amazon to Australia.
Congregations as practical actors
The practical side is mundane: energy audits, solar roofs, divestment from fossil fuels, community gardens on church land. Eco-congregation certification schemes exist in Britain, Scandinavia and North America. Faith-based investors control assets worth trillions of dollars, and coordinated divestment announcements by religious institutions have become a regular feature of climate summits. Sacred groves in India, church forests in Ethiopia and temple lands in Southeast Asia are among the oldest de facto protected areas on earth.
Why cultural ecologists take notice
Religious norms often outlast laws. A taboo on cutting a sacred grove, a fasting season that reduces meat consumption, or a pilgrimage route that keeps a landscape intact all shape ecosystems in ways that survey data on income and technology cannot explain. That is the reason religion sits inside cultural ecology rather than beside it.
This site is an independent reference on cultural ecology. It is not affiliated with any religious coalition or with earlier organisations that used the NACCE name.
