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RELIGION AND ECOLOGY Judit Farkas This chapter surveys the concepts held by different religions and belief systems on nature. Recent decades have shown that in addition to technical and technological results and political desires, there is also an urgent need to transform the human system of values so that people can comprehend environmental problems as legitimate problems that are in need of solutions. An eco-conscious religious or spiritual system of values and the technological solutions to environmental problems both aim at the same goal, yet they encounter difficulties in understanding one another. Their rapprochement and reconciliation could largely be promoted by the attitude of EH with its multi- and cross-disciplinary efforts. This is the reason for the chapter devoted to religion in a reader of EH. Ecology and religion Both concepts in the chapters title — religion and ecology — are difficult to define. In a narrow sense, ecology designates a branch of the natural sciences: it studies the space of living, the relationships between living beings and their environment. At the same time, the term is often colloguially used to denote the environment (or - and this is rather problematic — as a synonym of Nature). Its contemporary interpretation is the exploration of environmental problems, concentrating on the interaction of humans and the natural environment. Religion is perhaps an even more complex notion, with innumerable different historical, scientific, theological and denominational interpretations. An examination of the definitions by a single field of scholarship (e.g., cultural anthropology — see the framed text below), reveals that the examination of religion and environmental protection is not an easy undertaking, nor is the elaboration of the theory and practice of religious environmentalism (Lodge — Hamlin 2006: 279-307). On the conceptual difficulties, see also Baumann — Bohannon — O’Brien 2017). ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, RELIGION Ecology. The term is associated with the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1866). “As a discipline of synthetic biology, it is interested in the laws of the relationship between populations of living beings (above the individual level) and the environment. Ecology’s fields of interest include the study of interactions that determine the distribution and frequency of living beings. In other words, it studies the conditions which influence the populations of living beings and their impact. The word of Greek origin means a study of the milieu, environment. More recently, the importance of the issue has
