Abstract
Political ecology has grown rapidly over the past four decades, incorporating insights from wide-ranging swaths of the academy. One topic it has not yet substantively engaged with, however, is religion. This article argues that the failure to critically engage with the study of religion has led political ecologists to neglect important factors in their analyses and has resulted in incomplete conceptualizations of interpersonal power relations. It does this by first reviewing the scattered literature across political ecology engaging with religion before suggesting potential paths for scholars interested in further incorporating religion into political ecology.
I Introduction
Since it first emerged in response to nominally apolitical, overly technical analyses of human-environment relationships, political ecology has become a prominent academic project (Watts, 1983; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Robbins, 2012; Perreault et al., 2015; Bryant, 2015). Initially focused on environmental hazards and land use change, political ecology’s scope has constantly expanded over the past 40 years to now cover agriculture, food, water, energy, labor, climate change, resource extraction, environmental justice, social movements, and the politics of environmental knowledge and discourse –to name but a few (Perreault et al., 2015; Bryant, 2015).
Political ecology’s theoretical foundation has grown as a consequence of this broadened empirical focus. At its outset driven by Marxian political economy and class analysis, political ecology is now grounded on a convoluted yet fecund synthesis of a range of (at times seemingly incompatible) post-positivist theories (Peet and Watts, 1993; Rocheleau et al., 1996; McCarthy, 2002; Agrawal, 2005; Mollet and Faria, 2013; Heynen, 2014; Perreault et al., 2015; Bryant, 2015; Loftus, 2019). Gender, race, and colonial experience are now analyzed alongside class as vectors of oppression and injustice (Rocheleau et al., 1996; Pulido, 2000, 2015; Wainwright and Bryan, 2009; Mollet and Faria, 2013; Heynen 2014, 2016, 2018). As seen in two recent anthology reviews, this theoretical multiplicity has itself furthered political ecology’s methodological and empirical expansion by forging many new cross-disciplinary connections (Perreault et al., 2015; Bryant, 2015).
Yet despite this rapid expansion, several topics remain marginal to the field. Key among these is religion, itself a complex topic long central to the academy yet largely absent from contemporary environmental geography and especially political ecology. Across the 95 chapters in Perreault et al. (2015) and Bryant (2015), religion is only central to one and a tertiary analytical factor in another – the remainder of these anthologies barely mention the word. With few exceptions, political ecology’s major journals are similarly disengaged. Whether as an object of study, analytical framework, or multifaceted, theoretically robust academic discipline, religion is missing from contemporary political ecological scholarship.
Addressing this gap could substantially benefit key investigations within political ecology. This includes especially the social construction of nature, as religious organizations influence not just ideas and beliefs but are themselves material actors controlling vast amounts of resources, land, and capital. Religions affect how people understand disasters (Abram, 2019; Nunn et al., 2019), shape livelihoods and economic activities (Keister, 2008), alter consumption (Lofton, 2017), and have numerous other consequences for social, political, and ecological relationships around the world. This is particularly prominent concerning religion’s intersections with marginalization, for they can both legitimize oppression and provide crucial support to those facing such violence. Even when not explicitly tied to the environment, such processes are crucial for political ecologists given that environmental governance is inextricably intertwined with other interpersonal systems of governance (Agrawal, 2005; Bridge and Perreault, 2009; McCarthy, 2019). Put bluntly, religious institutions, organizations, and other actors have and consume a great many things in a great many places with significant political-economic and environmental ramifications, and religious organizations and religiously-motivated actors are affiliated with a wide range of social movements around the globe engaged with the same injustice, poverty, and development crises as political ecologists. Despite this, political ecologists have not yet seriously studied these dimensions of nature–society relationships.
This article contends that political ecology would benefit from stronger engagements with religion. It begins by reviewing the limited literature on religion within the field, first assessing religion’s general treatment before focusing on a few cases of stronger engagement with religion. Finding no coherent theoretical approach to religion in political ecology, this article turns toward religious studies to discuss how political ecologists might engage religion before discussing potential paths for future research.
II Religion in political ecology
1 General trends
Political ecology’s engagements with religion were reviewed most recently –and for the first time – by Shanti Nair in 2015 (Nair, 2015: 218–32). Nair found that political ecologists often only engaged with religion when working ethnographically with indigenous communities (Nair, 2015: 218–20). There have been a few exceptions – Nair mentions Li (2007) alongside a pair of dissertations – but generally political ecologists have not engaged with religion or religious actors. Consequently, the field’s theoretical engagement with religion has been severely limited to the detriment of its holistic analyses.
Over the past few years political ecologists have begun addressing this lacuna, at least in its empirical dimensions (Baillie Smith et al., 2013; Yeh, 2014; Hopkins et al., 2015; Nair, 2015: 222–30; Hall, 2017; Rajasri et al., 2017; Fernandez, 2018; Anthias, 2018: 79–83; Dukpa et al., 2018; Rumsby, 2018; Lahiri-Dutt and Chowdhury, 2018; Collins and Grineski, 2019; Darrah-Okike, 2019; Braverman, 2019). Ranging from discussions of the relationship between contemporary degrowth movements and historical monastic practices (Hall, 2017) to analyses of the role of the sacred within Hawai’ian indigenous resistance (Darrah-Okike, 2019) to discussions of pilgrim’s environmental impacts (Nair, 2015), these articles demonstrate the wide range of ways religion affects political ecologies. Frequently, however, these engagements are fleeting and rarely engage one another despite working in the same subdiscipline. As a result, political ecology remains theoretically disengaged from religion. Moreover, critical analysis of these cases underscores how ignorance of contemporary debates in the study of religion – a problem across geography as a whole (Kong, 2010; Tse, 2014) – restricts those analyses political ecologists do conduct.
2 Attempted engagements
This is particularly evident when political ecologists engage with religion within indigenous communities (Nair, 2015: 218–20). Political ecologists often frame local narratives, perspectives, and morals as inherently religious or spiritual and consequently crucial for communal cohesion (Nair, 2015; 219). Doing so uncritically relies on superficial understandings of religion critiqued as, at best, merely second-order academic analysis mischaracterizing how communities understood and categorized themselves (Asad, 1993; Forsyth, 1996; Wenger, 2009; Lokensgard, 2010; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; Tafjord, 2013; Nair, 2015: 219; Johnson, 2015). There is an even worse side to this academic colonialism, however, as religious categorizations were frequently used to marginalize indigenous communities and practices by demarcating them as historical relics to be replaced by first Christianity and later secular modernity (Asad, 1993, 2003; Forsyth, 1996; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; Tafjord, 2013; Johnson, 2015). Uncritically using religious terminology when working with indigenous communities reinforces their colonization and consequently directly contradicts political ecology’s key theoretical tenets (Nair, 2015: 218–20; Perreault et al., 2015). This is not to say political ecologists can never use religious terminology when working with indigenous communities – particularly when such terminology is claimed by communities themselves (Frankenberry, 2002 ; Deloria, 2003; Howe, 2016; Darrah-Okike, 2019). However, the category must be subjected to greater critical scrutiny when deployed analytically by scholars in such instances.
In other cases, religion is referenced in order to denote the boundaries of political ecological analyses. Penelope Anthias (2018), whose monograph eloquently discusses the intersecting politics of indigeneity, territory, and hydrocarbons within decolonial geographies, provides one such case. Her engagement with religion is limited to a brief interlude (Anthias, 2018: 79–83) concerning tensions between a community’s self-articulated spiritual geography and neoliberal attempts to assert territorial control. In part, admittedly, Anthias’s brevity stems from her interlocutors’ reluctance to discuss these topics and signals a laudable methodological commitment to respecting others’ secrets.
However, Anthias never interrogates why the spiritual geographies historically central to this community’s conceptualization of land and territorial rights are absent from their attempts to secure territorial rights. It is not difficult to guess why this might be – the Bolivian state and multinational corporations intent on hydrocarbon extraction are unlikely to respect spiritual claims to territory – yet it reveals an additional dimension of the continued colonization of indigenous communities. This community’s perceptions of their own spiritual geography have been dramatically reshaped through the colonial imposition of extractive industry and neoliberal environmental governance. Further analyzing shifts in communal geographical perceptions, including with respect to religion and spirituality, could significantly broaden analyses of resource extraction and other environment–society relationships among local communities, particularly in light of Bridge and Perreault’s (2009) approach to environmental governance as interpersonal governance through nature (see also McCarthy, 2019).
In other cases, religion and especially religious identities are flattened in order to elaborate other facets of a case study. Bina Fernandez’s (2018) otherwise strong article discussing links between dispossession and social reproduction provides a particularly clear example of this. Fernandez (2018) draws from research with Muslim Miyana women in Gujarat, India, to argue that social reproduction must be further incorporated into livelihood and dispossession studies. She effectively demonstrates how Li’s (2010) three prongs of state-legitimated rural dispossession are compounded by gendered difference concerning social reproduction and familial support (Fernandez, 2018).
Yet Fernandez (2018) does not discuss the state’s relationships with both Hindu nationalists and Muslims as another potential vector of dispossession and oppression. 1 These relationships have been particularly tense in Gujarat, where only a decade before Fernandez’s research a series of violent riots saw thousands of Muslims murdered, injured, and/or displaced while current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister (Mawdsley, 2006; Mann, 2014). Scholars have also shown how the Gujarat government’s marginalization of Muslims has occurred through diminished access to development projects and aid following disasters (Manor, 2015; Palshikar, 2015; Pelling and Wisner et al., both as cited in Collins and Grineski, 2019). Taken together, these findings suggest that religion influences the dispossession Fernandez observed, and indeed one of her interlocutors appears to suggest this when remarking that ‘[violence] tends to happen more among our Muslims’ (Fernandez, 2018: 151).
In all fairness to Fernandez, analyzing religion was not her intention, and her work linking social reproduction to dispossession and livelihood studies has provided invaluable insights. Nevertheless, by not discussing religion, Fernandez’s case study’s geographic contextualization and analysis remain incomplete as interlocking forms of dispossession and marginalization lie unaddressed. Even though religion is mentioned, far more is needed to critically assess its influences on livelihoods and the embodied experiences of political ecologies. Religion is not merely part of the background or a flat identity but instead is key to how people experience the world around them.
3 Liberation theology’s absence
The political ecological treatment of liberation theology provides another example of this erasure through both flattening and, at points, wholly ignoring religion within political ecological analyses. Liberation theology was a popular mid-20th-century attempt, largely concentrated within Latin America, to bridge Christian theology with historical materialist analysis of class oppression and systemic poverty. A few political ecologists have empirically engaged liberation theology when analyzing Latin American social movements (Olson, 2006; Lyons, 2006), while several others have fleetingly referenced its importance for one or another case study, especially the widely studied Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil (Rocheleau and Ross, 1995; Radcliffe, 1999; Navarro, 2000; Bebbington, 2004; Karriem, 2009). Though as it grew MST moved away from churches, the logistical and ethical support provided by Catholic and Lutheran organizations inspired by liberation theology was indispensable in the early movement (Navarro, 2000; Karriem, 2009). However, political ecologists have not yet critically assessed liberation theology’s influences, both positive and negative, on Latin American political ecologies. Even the classic Liberation Ecologies, a text seemingly begging for engagement with liberation theology, mentions the topic only twice in passing without reflection (Peet and Watts, 2004: 370, 385).
Wendy Wolford’s (2010) persuasive and insightful study of the internal dynamics of MST engages liberation theology better than other political ecological texts. Wolford (2010) at several points mentions the important roles religious leaders, inspired by liberation theology, played in these movements, particularly highlighting their positive relationships with labor unions. Wolford (2010) also discusses the Catholic Comissão Pastoral de Terra’s status as a key precursor for MST as well as the general importance of churches as meeting places for local communities.
Nevertheless, while she describes the important role Christianity played in the early movement, Wolford (2010) does not analyze religion’s consequences in particular. She briefly mentions that ‘the Catholic Church was the main site of opposition to the military dictatorship’, but does not discuss either why this was the case or how the funneling of resistance through the Catholic Church may have affected these efforts (Wolford, 2010: 128). Elsewhere when mentioning that churches were common meeting sites within the early movement, Wolford (2010) does not analyze whether particular characteristics and alternative uses of these spaces influenced how resistance movements formed and which voices and perspectives had greater or lesser authority as a consequence of the spaces within which these meetings occurred. Similarly, Wolford (2010) does not discuss whether the increasing conservatism of the Catholic Church during John Paul II’s pontificate may have influenced how religious members and leaders of these movements understood and articulated themselves. Addressing this could expand analysis of MST’s internal political dynamics and tensions. Moreover, these questions are all pertinent to Wolford’s project of attempting to understand the internal ‘war of position’ within MST (Wolford, 2010: 9); stronger engagement with them would only strengthen Wolford’s already compelling analysis.
This political ecological disengagement is all the more problematic given what liberation theologians themselves were doing – their actions and writings are wholly absent from contemporary political ecology. For decades, liberation theologians vehemently fought capitalism and colonialism as systems constructed on dehumanization and oppression (Gutierrez, 1988; Boff, 1995a). The leading liberation theologian Leonardo Boff began explicitly linking liberation theology to ecological concerns during the 1990s, arguing that poor communities are doubly oppressed by processes of neoliberal globalization that sacrifice the poor for the sake of profit and degrade environments they need to survive (Boff, 1995a, 1995b). As in political ecology, international development projects were particularly decried by liberation theologians who argued these were often little more than strategies for the rich to benefit from exploiting poor countries’ labor and resources (Gutierrez, 1988: 16–17). Drawing heavily from Marxian class analysis, liberation theologians called for the oppressed to liberate themselves from these systems and bring about the necessary structural change through ‘a social revolution’ (Gutierrez, 1988: 54–7).
Liberation theologians were for a while partially successful in engaging communities across Latin America, often in the face of violent authoritarian repression (Gutierrez, 1988; Navarro, 2000; Lyons, 2006; Karriem, 2009: 319). Yet sustained analyses of these efforts’ successes and failures is missing from political ecology. By ignoring religious institutions, movements, and actors such as those involved with liberation theology, political ecologists miss a great deal of how people engage with each other and the ecologies they are enmeshed within. The successes, failures, and structural limitations of these attempts to enact radical change based on historical materialist analysis are worthy of greater political ecological attention.
Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, ignorance of liberation theology within a field purportedly foregrounding marginalized voices erases the very voices it seeks to highlight. Liberation theologians have voraciously critiqued the same global capitalism driving the privatization and extraction of resources as political ecology, yet these voices from the Global South are almost entirely ignored within the field. Religion has played an important role in community responses to and interpretations of development and extraction yet, when neglected, those using religion to understand or express their resistance are unduly flattened.
Over the past decade, political ecologists have begun mentioning religion and religious actors more frequently than their predecessors. However, these engagements remain largely descriptive and lack substantial theoretical analysis. Moreover, there remain a great many cases where religion is wholly ignored. Consequently, religion’s importance for people’s lives and their relationships with their environments – not to mention perceptions thereof – is again neglected.
III Stronger engagements with religion
There have, however, been a few times political ecologists have more substantively engaged religion. The following section details these cases when political ecologists have begun analyzing religion’s influences, though in each instance more work is required.
1 Environmental justice
Anyone trained in political ecology might expect this discussion to begin with environmental justice – after all, the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) 1987 report Toxic Wastes and Race is widely recognized as a key early text for the movement. However, while actors and organizations motivated by religion have been central to environmental justice movements in practice (Binder, 1999; Glave, 2004; Glave and Stoll, 2006; McCutcheon, 2011, 2015; Stoll, 2015: 233–40), religion is rarely discussed within academic literatures concerning environmental justice (Immergut and Kearns, 2012; Kearns, 2014; Perreault et al., 2015: 593; Pellow and Guo, 2017; Collins and Grineski, 2019; Smiley, 2019). As with liberation theology, this academic disengagement is especially problematic given the practical importance of religious communities and spaces to environmental justice movements (Nagel et al., 2015; McCutcheon, 2015).
Additionally, religion’s effects on environmental justice are far broader than just inspiring, organizing, and legitimating resistance. Religious affiliations and actors may also directly influence the siting of environmental injustices, potentially as an underlying vector of oppression (Pellow and Guo, 2017: 342). Examining air quality in Salt Lake City, Utah, Collins and Grineski (2019) demonstrate that a higher prevalence of Mormonism is correlated with improved air quality independent of race. Though not the only engagement with religion in the distributive environmental justice literature (Smiley, 2019), Collins and Grineski (2019) push scholars to more carefully consider religion and religious actors as potential, if perhaps unintentional, producers of environmental injustices. Similarly, the environmental justice literature has not substantially incorporated the destruction or degradation of sacred spaces when assessing whether and to what degree environmental injustices have occurred (Pellow and Guo, 2017). These remain important yet understudied ways religion/s shape environmental injustices so often central to the lived experiences of political ecologies around the world.
2 Sacred groves
The literature concerning sacred grove conservation provides a strong example of how political ecology can benefit from incorporating religion. Forests have long been central to political ecology (Peluso, 1992; Escobar, 1998; Vaccaro et al., 2013; Turner, 2014, 2016), and others have frequently used religious studies perspectives to understand forests’ intersections with religion (Albanese, 1990; Suzuki and Knudtson, 1993; McLuhan, 1996; Stoll, 2015). Over the past two decades, these literatures have converged to assess sacred forests’ effects on conservation (Narayanan, 1997; Byers et al., 2001; Dudley et al., 2009; Daye and Healy, 2015). Much of this work has examined either how sacred spaces limit the consumption of certain plants and animals or their indirect effects on local ecological stability and long-term forest productivity (Wadley and Colfer, 2004; Campbell, 2005; Salick et al., 2007; Waylen et al. 2010; Ormsby and Bhagwat, 2010; Brandt et al., 2013, 2015; LoTemplio et al., 2016; Jana et al., 2017; Rajasri et al., 2017). They can also improve local water quality and protect old growth from timber and other resource extraction (Campbell, 2005; Ormsby and Bhagwat, 2010; Brandt et al., 2013; Woods et al., 2017). Sacred forests significantly shape ecological communities and human actions therein (Dudley et al., 2009).
Sacred forests are frequently able to avoid becoming ‘paper parks’ as their boundaries are both created and enforced by local communities (Klepeis et al., 2017: 716; Waylen et al., 2010; Kent, 2013; Daye and Healy, 2015; Woods et al., 2017). They are thus crucial community-developed techniques for environmental governance, at times directly conflicting with multinational actors seeking to change (and often increase) resource extraction (Brandt et al., 2015; Klepeis et al., 2017; Woods et al., 2017), and further research into these processes can benefit literatures on environmental governance and governmentality heretofore disengaged from religion (Agrawal, 2005; Bridge and Perreault, 2009). It is simultaneously crucial to recognize that the sacrality of a forest is not innate but instead produced and imbued through sociopolitical processes political ecologists are well positioned to investigate. Further understanding the contextual production of sacrality is an important, if neglected, direction for the sacred groves literature and political ecology’s socio-political analyses more broadly.
In addition, examining why sacred forests are more successful than scientifically motivated conservation may provide important insights into the efficacy of using religion to inspire responses to environmental problems, something many scholars have suggested as a key way to address crises, including climate change (Hulme, 2009; Weber, 2010; Kahan et al., 2012). Several scholars have examined how claims to religion and the sacrality of forests have inspired local environmental movements, often finding that initial goals of protecting sacred spaces have sparked movements with far broader aims (Clifford, 2011; Kent, 2013; Stoll, 2015). Others have argued that the production and protection of sacred forests can be closely tied to nationalistic territorial claims and communal identity (Rots, 2015). While given the sheer number of sacred forests and the paucity of scholarly work engaging them it is impossible to speak uniformly about the motivations underpinning such practices here, further research into sacred groves is poised to benefit theoretical scholarship concerning the social production of nature and its associated politics.
The sacred forest literature shows several potential benefits stemming from further incorporating religion into political ecology, though even here the fruit remains more potential than actual. Many of its insights stem from a small handful of ethnographic studies, and more comparative work is needed to understand how sacred forests influence political ecologies globally. Furthermore, that literature which does exist could be empirically expanded through both conducting case studies in the Global North and incorporating assessments of non-forest sacred spaces (Frascaroli, 2013; Kumar, 2014; Koch and Perreault, 2019: 618; Braverman, 2019). Additional research into the effects of sacred environments will benefit political ecologists and others seeking to understand how people produce and understand their relationships with the non-human world.
3 Development
The benefits from incorporating religion into political ecological analyses are not limited to such obvious cases as sacred spaces. Elizabeth Olson (2006) approaches religion from a different angle when assessing transnational religious organizations as part of her research into development in southern Peru. Specifically concerned with how Catholic and evangelical organizations produce different narratives of development among adherents, Olson (2006) shows how religious framings have changed what development means. She argues that religious spaces were often key to how the Quechua communities she worked with formed and mediated their understandings of development (Olson, 2006). Her project revealed that, while development itself is a transnational and modernist European project, among communities and within particular spaces it is articulated in very particular forms that political ecologists must be attentive to (Olson, 2006). Crucially this includes religion, as religious leaders significantly influenced communal narratives to frame development projects as local rather than global processes. Religion played an important role in how development projects were known and legitimized among communities, again providing crucial community consent for the re/production of transnational hegemony.
Andrew McGregor has similarly addressed religion’s role in development, though in his case at its juncture with hazards research (the latter itself an area where religion is similarly largely absent; see Gaillard and Texier, 2010). Working in Aceh, Indonesia, following the devastating 2004 tsunami, McGregor (2010) examines how religion shaped local responses.
The most direct consequence concerned responses to the destruction of local sacred spaces, especially mosques, which were previously key sites for social cohesion and community support (McGregor, 2010). As a result, formerly cohesive communities dispersed and many people, especially those marginalized before the wave struck, lost access to their thin pre-disaster support networks (McGregor, 2010). Consequently, community members asked relief organizations to prioritize rebuilding mosques and other religious centers (McGregor, 2010). However, due to both Indonesian and home government restrictions, only 17 of the 572 relief organizations working in Aceh were legally permitted to engage in religious rebuilding (McGregor, 2010). The other 555 organizations were unable to provide what the community needed, and these organizations thus had trouble establishing trust with a community as their resources were directed toward projects perceived as less important (McGregor, 2010). Engagement with religion was thus a substantial division between those needing help and those seeking to provide it (McGregor, 2010). 2 On one level a critique of relationships between international nongovernmental organizations and local communities, this episode also demonstrates how the secularism underpinning global development projects can contribute to the further alienation and marginalization of local communities (McGregor, 2010).
The religious affiliations of communities, local and national governments, and development organizations led to disengagement, suspicion, and outright conflict between these actors even when they professed otherwise almost identical values and, as a result, played an important role in shaping how people experienced and navigated this post-disaster landscape. Many donors give to relief efforts not from pure altruism but to advance some personal agenda (Olson, 2006; McGregor, 2010; Schnable, 2015; Blackman, 2018). Frequently this includes shared religious ties between donors, the relief organization, and recipients, which in turn can further divide post-disaster communities and increase the local influence of external actors (McGregor, 2010). At times these agendas can be even darker, as some organizations envision post-disaster settings as ideal sites for proselytization (McGregor, 2010; Schnable, 2015; Blackman, 2018). Several organizations in Aceh did this in order to establish a foothold for future missionary activity, including one extreme case where an organization intentionally sought to place Muslim children in Christian orphanages to convert them (McGregor, 2010). Unsurprisingly, this sparked severe opposition from Muslim communities and led the Indonesian government to investigate and restrict the actions of all organizations perceived to be acting in religious fashions (McGregor, 2010). This in turn led several faith-based organizations to suggest they might be reluctant to return following future disasters (McGregor, 2010).
Since religion influences how development organizations act and are interacted with, fully appreciating its effects is crucial for understanding how and why nongovernmental organizations act as they do (Olson, 2006; Clarke and Jennings, 2008; Baillie Smith et al., 2013; Hopkins et al., 2015). However, though Olson and McGregor each bring religion into conversation with development studies, both note that far more is needed to understand global variations in how religion influences development projects and individual perceptions thereof. Examining the divergence between secular and faith-based organizations is but one way incorporating religion could strengthen the already robust literature on development and nongovernmental organizations.
4 Myth
Religion has not only intersected political ecology as an empirical object of study. Haripriya Rangan’s (2000) engagement with myth as a lens for analyzing the Chipko movements is a particularly clear example of how engaging religion can methodologically benefit political ecology. Rangan (2000) argues that understanding the international narrative surrounding these movements as mythic helps explain why there remains striking dissonance between the community’s material experiences and global perceptions lauding it as world-changing. Rangan (2000) found that the Chipko movement’s mythologized narrative failed to adequately encapsulate what was actually happening. Myth provided Rangan a useful framework for understanding how this story of success was split from its empirical origins and could be used to mask very real inequalities. This occurred in a manner persuasive and pervasive enough to change the global narrative so that a project of development continued under the guise of successful resistance.
Rangan (2000) also shows that this mythic framing has had additional ramifications by discussing how a key movement practice – tree hugging – came to be equated with environmentalism globally. This practice was a highly visible strategy for the Chipko movement and came to represent their resistance to externally-driven development. Such tree-hugging was then picked up to discursively symbolize environmental activism, often in order to otherize environmental activism and hamper its efficacy (DeLoach et al., 2002; Kyser and Salzman, 2003; Hutchings, 2005; Black and Cherrier, 2010; Whitehouse and Evans, 2010). Understanding this process through a methodology attuned to myth allowed Rangan (2000) to understand how and why this narrative was transformed and imbued with meanings far beyond those initially associated with it.
Others have similarly found myth a useful methodological lens when assessing how socio-environmental relationships are constructed and construed in various communities (Denevan, 1992; Brass, 1997, 2014; Watts, 2001; Klepeis and Laris, 2006; Magrin, 2016). Moreover, myths themselves continue to be used to legitimize dominant narratives concerning human-environment relationships (Essebo, 2019). Further political ecological engagement with the construction and consequences of contemporary myths concerning human-environment relationships would strengthen the field’s understanding of how subjective environmental knowledges are produced and accepted as truths (Essebo, 2019).
The preceding sections have reviewed political ecology’s limited scholarly engagements with religion. It has demonstrated how religious terminology and identities are often uncritically applied or missing entirely from political ecological analyses. Yet while this reveals an incompleteness within the contemporary field, several scholars have illustrated how political ecologists can critically engage religion. The remainder of this article provides both theoretical and practical suggestions for those interested in further addressing this gap.
IV Approaching religion
It is important at this point to clarify what exactly this call for increased political ecological engagement with religion means. I expect this suggestion to have raised the hackles of readers themselves critically engaged with religion, as it leaves open the potential misinterpretation that religion exists trans-historically. This is, however, far from my perspective: I am thoroughly convinced by Talal Asad’s (1993, 2003) argument that religion as a concept was produced by and through European political processes and cannot be understood independently of this historical context (cf. Smith, 1998).
Yet Asad’s genealogy reveals precisely why academic political ecologists should engage religion. While it may be ontologically vacuous and by no means a universal anthropological category, it is a very real product of European historical processes and continues to be deployed (with significant consequences) by many both within and beyond the academy. In these cases, the category religion exists just as much as any other socially constructed category. 3 Nothing is innately religious nor does the category religion necessarily signify anything but as historically constructed and construed.
And religion has had very real consequences. Religion has been an important tool for the construction of Other and Self and, as such, was (and remains) key to European colonialism and imperialism (Said, 1978; Long, 1986; Asad, 1993, 2003; Chidester, 2014; Johnson, 2015). The category was produced during European expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries as explorers, missionaries, academics, and others tried to understand and classify the world by applying categories, including religion, developed through Europe’s history (Asad, 1993; Smith, 1998; Chidester, 2014; Johnson, 2015). Following papal acceptance of the doctrine of discovery, the religious classification of non-European communities was frequently used to justify imperial claims and the violent conversion, enslavement, and oppression of communities around the globe (Greenberg, 2016). This was compounded by the growing popularity of evolutionary theories of religion, especially those developed by academics during the 18th and 19th centuries, framing Christianity and especially Protestantism as the pinnacle of religious development – all other religions were outdated relics to be overcome (Bellah, 1970; Asad, 1993; Greenberg, 2016). Colonial powers argued that Christianity was required for modernization and that any other religion would impede this process. Resistance to the colonial church’s authority was thus used to justify increasingly oppressive colonial governance (Asad, 1993; Chidester, 2014; Johnson, 2015; Greenberg, 2016).
This understanding of religion’s interconnectivity with colonial power has led to wider conversations about its linkages with the European social construction of race (Goldstein, 2006; Walker, 2009; Meer, 2013; Chidester, 2014; Dwyer, 2016; Clark, 2017; Gökarıksel and Secor, 2017; Klingorova and Gökarıksel, 2018). Beginning with the European use of religious terminology, especially fetish and witch, to classify non-European bodies, practices, and things in order to control them, Johnson (2015) discusses the colonial implications of religion. Religion as a descriptive category allowed European colonizers to make sense of the material realities they encountered in a manner they could use to legitimate subsequent violence and European control (Johnson, 2015). This continues to be especially important for European relationships with indigenous communities, as religion has long been used to govern, discipline, and infantilize these communities (Pagden, 1986; Rhodes, 1991; Wenger, 2009; Greenberg, 2016). Religion’s function as a political technology was further compounded by its construction as a legal category where significant material consequences stem from judicial decisions concerning whether some thing, person, or process is religious, though all too often this legal process neglects contemporary critical academic perspectives concerning religion (Levy, 1994; Edge, 2006; Hunter, 2013; Laborde, 2015; Howe, 2016; Moustafa, 2018; Pew Research Center, 2019). Thus, though entirely socially constructed, religion as a category is quite real and has serious implications in a wide range of geographies.
I expect this theoretical reconceptualization of religion as a historically and politically produced category rather than something extant may be largely unfamiliar to many political ecologists. Thinking about religion’s similarity with culture, itself long critiqued as the objectification of political and economic processes, may help political ecologists come to terms with the deconstruction of religion as a universal or natural category. Don Mitchell (1995) vigorously critiques notions of culture as a unique, important, independent, and yet undefinable sphere of human life and argues that it should instead be understood as the product of particular historical processes. Many of the same problems Mitchell (1995) has with the concept of culture – particularly its uncritical reification as a distinct domain of human life – resonate with Asad and other’s deconstructions of religion.
Crucially, however, Mitchell (1995) does not suggest altogether dismissing academic analyses of culture but instead pushes scholars to critically analyze how and why culture-as-idea functions in specific contexts. A key aspect of this paper’s call for further engagement with religion within political ecology can thus be understood as extending Mitchell’s (1995) call for critical cultural geography to religion. 4 This would involve assessing how notions of religion, spiritual, and sacred (along with their obverses) are deployed with significant consequences for political ecologies. In practice, studies could range from assessing repercussions from framing certain nature-society perspectives as spiritual or religious while discussing others in purely scientific terms to interrogating how claims to religious authority can legitimate domination and violence. Combined with the robust training in historical materialism many political ecologists share, this approach could allow insights concerning how religion is used to influence and produce the world. Analyzing the political production and use of religion is necessary for theoretically comprehending power and the political, but it is at present largely undertheorized within political ecological discussions of power (cf. Svarstad et al., 2018).
Noting the similarities between the critiques of religion and culture as categories both produced through particular historical processes raises the question of whether this distinct call for political ecologists to engage religion is needed. After all, the call for critical engagement with religion echoes critiques of ahistorical cultural approaches to understanding nature-society relationships.
Yet the preceding sections have shown that, despite this theoretical rationale, political ecology’s critical engagement with religious things, bodies, and processes is severely limited in practice. Regardless of whether analytical attention to the political causes and consequences of religion should be differentiated from culture, that which comprises the scholarly category religion often falls to the wayside in political ecological analyses and critiques. As such, this paper’s call for further studying religion in political ecology takes on a second meaning – political ecologists should more carefully consider whether and in what ways that which they have learned to see (Haraway, 1988) as religion may influence important interpersonal and nature-society relationships. Though perhaps not his intention, Harvey’s (1979) discussion of the Basilica de Sacre-Coeur provides a partial model for such an approach by assessing the very real and serious political causes and consequences of particular religious expressions.
That is not at all to say these things, bodies or processes only exist as religion or that their categorization as religious is necessarily how they affect political ecological relationships, for that entirely misses the point. They are produced through material social relations, just as the category religion is, and consequently should be approached through an analytical lens attuned to such broader social production.
When discussing, analyzing, and writing about things, bodies, and processes they perceive as being religious, political ecologists have a few options concerning how to linguistically engage religion within their writing. At times, some may find it useful to deploy religion, contributing as appropriate to theoretically deconstructing the category, assessing the consequences of framing something as religious, or even potentially contextually reconstructing it. In other cases, particularly when religion is not present emically, it may be better not to use the category when engaging whatever phenomenon the political ecologist perceives as religious through their own subjective lenses – in these cases, my call is largely to engage these phenomenon often neglected within political ecology.
This paper’s call for increased political ecological engagement with religion thus has two prongs. It is first a call for political ecologists to more carefully consider the political causes and implications of the category religion as something produced by and intertwined with historical political processes. Consequently, political ecologists should pay more attention to the category religion when theorizing power, interpersonal governance, and the construction of social difference. In its second instance, this paper calls political ecologists to interrogate whether that which they perceive as being religious has consequences in their research sites. Political ecologists should incorporate processes and things they perceive as manifestations of religion into their analyses, critically assessing their consequences for interpersonal and political ecological relationships instead of relegating them to the background or ignoring them entirely. By responding to both of these calls, political ecologists can continue to strengthen their interdisciplinary analyses of the ways in which people produce, perceive, and respond to nature and their relationships with the non-human.
This section has provided a brief introduction to contemporary critical theory of religion so as to clarify what this paper intends when calling for political ecological engagement with religion. It began by considering the historical production of the category of religion and its political consequences before suggesting how political ecologists could better incorporate the study of religion into their analyses. The following section discusses in more detail a few specific instances where religion (and religious actors, things, and processes) substantially shape political ecologies.
V Potential research paths
Stronger engagement with religion can open up numerous opportunities for political ecological research moving forward. While scholars have begun researching a few of these – sacred groves, environmental justice, and development – many more opportunities remain. This section focuses on a few specific suggestions for further incorporating critical analyses of religion into the subfield.
Before getting into the weeds of specific research suggestions, however, I want to take some time to reflect more broadly on how increased engagement with religion can benefit political ecology. Further critically engaging the category of religion can improve analysis of how people perceive nature-society relationships and their roles within them. Assessing how people come to perceive and categorize themselves, others, humanity itself, and consequently the non-human – and how these processes are intertwined with the re/production of political ecological hegemonies – is incomplete without including religion. While as both an abstract category and in concrete manifestations religion is entirely socially constructed, such perceptions are inextricable from how people interact with the world around them. This is especially the case concerning the relationships between religion and power, for religious identities and affiliations are frequently used to delegitimize, marginalize, and exclude not just people’s perspectives but their bodies themselves. Put plainly, attending to religion allows political ecologists to more holistically understand the people we speak and work with and the contexts within which they live their lives.
Religion’s historical roles in shaping how people engage with political ecological processes are perhaps clearest (and closest to the core of the discipline) when it comes to the social construction of nature. A number of scholars from across the academy have long written about how religion has shaped people’s conceptions of nature (see, for example, White, 1967; Tuan, 1968; Albanese, 1990; Merchant, 2004; Hulme, 2009; Taylor, 2009; Veldman et al., 2014; Ghosh, 2016; Gould and Kearns, 2018). These conversations, however, have remained largely disconnected from political ecology’s own assessment of nature’s social construction. As a consequence, there remains a gulf between these two analyses, which in turn hampers holistic analyses of both how nature is socially constructed and what the consequences of that construction are. Further research into this intersection could happen across a wide range of scales, whether by asking local questions concerning why certain crops can only be cultivated in certain fields or how labor is divided with certain communities to interrogating how leaders have used claims to religious and divine authority to legitimate dehumanizing and oppressive practices while themselves accumulating land, resources, and capital for their own interests.
Understanding religion’s roles in producing and de/legitimating perceptions and engagement with nature can thus complement recent calls to recognize the co-existence of multiple ontologies. These calls, which have been particularly prominent concerning water governance (Yates et al., 2017: 807; Linton, 2019), emphasize the need to attune to the multiple realities simultaneously extant and take seriously the viability of worlds other than those the scholar can most easily see. Their hope is to move past a focus on knowledges to begin focusing on what is being done and enacted (Yates et al., 2017: 809), a project strikingly similar to critiques Asad (1993) and others have long raised concerning the importance of moving beyond belief when discussing its influence as a social construction in the world today (Bell, 2008; Orsi, 2011). As Yates et al. (2017: 806) note, this analysis cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy between Western and Indigenous ontologies, for ontologies are far more multiplicitous than such a binary suggests. Attending to how religions have produced ontologies – such as Patton (2007) did when discussing how the ocean’s perceived power to purify and wash away evil has contributed to its use as a dumping ground for so many different pollutants – can substantially bolster assessments of the consequences of ontological conflict.
Moreover, appropriately engaging with multiple ontologies requires understanding how certain ontologies came to be privileged over others, especially traditional and indigenous knowledges (Yates et al., 2017). The category of religion has historically been central to such processes and thus, yet again, further critical engagement with religion can substantially benefit this research. Beyond ontological erasure, religious actors have also long re/produced various forms of oppression and exclusion in deeply material ways (Saeed, 2007; McCloud and Mirola, 2009; Klingorova and Havlicek, 2015; Hopkins, 2016; Srinivas, 2018). Approaching religion as an interlocking vector of marginalization can thus improve understandings of the political contexts within which nature-society relationships are produced.
Simultaneously, understanding how religious actors have at times worked to overcome such divisions may help broaden political ecological engagements with social movements. Several scholars working in cognate fields such as religion and ecology have begun assessing the effects of religious environmentalism, frequently finding that the presence of religions within such movements dramatically influences their aims and efficacy and, depending on the context, either brings broader coalitions together or prevents their formation (Taylor, 2007; Ellingson, 2016; Nita, 2016; Witt, 2016; Baugh, 2017; Gould and Kearns, 2018). A key subset of this field has begun interrogating whether religions can ever be “green” and how they might participate, either productively or divisively, in addressing ongoing and ever-unfolding environmental crises (Taylor, 2004, 2009; Veldman et al., 2014; Taylor et al., 2016a, 2016b).
Religion and ecology’s engagement with such questions, however, remains detached from how political ecologists approach them, for religion and ecology is almost exclusively concentrated in the Global North. 5 Extending analyses of how religion intersects environmental social movements elsewhere, whether through facilitating consent or resistance, will be key for understanding how religion shapes political ecologies and people’s perceptions thereof. This might, as an example, involve using Witt’s (2016) study of long-term religious resistance to coal mining across Appalachia to model research concerning attempts to make sense of extraction in communities elsewhere. It alternatively could involve assessing how prohibitions concerning the use of specific foodstuffs and other consumables – such as cattle within Hinduism or alcohol among many traditions, including evangelical Christianity and Mormonism – might influence resource use and livelihoods in spaces far beyond their immediate contexts. Doing so could in turn allow political ecologists to better convey the importance of their findings concerning environmental degradation to publics who might not otherwise understand their personal relevance.
There are countless additional ways political ecologists may (and likely already do, if perhaps unconsciously) encounter religion through their work. The above section merely highlights a few possible opportunities where assessing the social construction of religion may allow for particularly insightful contributions to the field. Together, however, these demonstrate three key conversations opened by stronger engagement with religion. Firstly, the historical construction of religion and specific religions has dramatically influenced how people perceive and interpret political ecological processes including environmental governance, resource use, climate change, and nature.
Secondly, and relatedly, religion/s influence how people act, both as individuals and collectively in communities and relationships built through and among religious actors and institutions, in manners that substantially shape nature-society relationships. And finally, the category of religion and specific religious affiliations have long been central to how the exclusion, marginalization, and oppression of many communities have been both morally and legally legitimated. Further appreciation for the historic and contemporary roles of religion/s is thus crucial for developing a more holistic approach to the political within political ecology.
VI Conclusion
At present, religion remains at the edge of political ecology. Consequently, many political ecologists are disengaged from important actors and processes that nevertheless comprise key parts of their empirical work. Thus several analyses, though quite strong and insightful, remain unfinished. Moreover, this disconnect from religion unnecessarily and artificially restricts political ecological understandings of power relations, both contemporaneously and historically.
The past few years have seen marginally increased engagement with religion among political ecologists. However, these discussions are often descriptive without sustained critical analysis concerning religion, and much of this scholarship remains disconnected from contemporary theories of religion. As a result, the field lacks a coherent theoretical understanding of how religions influence and are influenced by various political ecologies.
Consequently, this paper calls for a stronger critical consideration of religion and religious studies within political ecology. Religion, especially organized religion, will certainly not be a central factor within every analysis, and at points may be entirely extraneous. In many cases, however, religious actors and organizations are important parts of political ecological processes. This includes the articulations of individual positionalities, the production of various theoretical and corporeal constructions of nature, the legitimation of interpersonal governance through environmental forms, and as catalysts for resistance movements.
This paper has provided an overview of the scattered scholarship engaging religion within political ecology before focusing on the few effective examples where political ecologists have engaged with religion. It then briefly discussed several theoretical and empirical approaches political ecologists can take to better engage religion. This remains only the beginning, and further research into the intersections between religion, power, and environments will only strengthen political ecology.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Tom Perreault, Noel Castree, and those who anonymously reviewed this paper for their insightful comments and suggestions. All errors contained within are my own.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
