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62 — JUDIT FARKAS creation. There are some who avow an anthropocentric ethic, but they look upon the distinguished place of humans not as a right to power but as a source of responsibility. Both ethical stances instill in the individual a strong sense of duty that thoroughly influences their everyday practice. The most striking example is Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which presumes that the Earth is a living entity (Lovelock 1979; 2009).° Similarly radical theories of eco-philosophy are, for instance, Arne Naess'’s deep ecology or Murray Bookchin’s social ecology (see the chapter on Eco-philosophy). Eco-spirituality is most typical of diverse spiritual movements, as found by religious scholar Bron Taylor, but adherents of traditional religions also often include this sort of ethic in their worldview (Taylor 2010). The foundation for the worldviews of the conglomerate of environmentalist movements is usually eco-spirituality. In his examination of green movements, Bron Taylor uses the term green religion to designate the “greening” of historical religions, i.e., the environment-conscious turn of religious people whose ethics also imply that it is their religious duty to behave in conformity with the environment. He differentiates this from what he terms “dark green religion’, the basic tenet of which proclaims that Nature is sacred and, as such, it is to be venerated and protected. He includes in this category animism, pantheism, pagan belief systems, the neo-pagan movements, the so-called nature faiths (and the closely related traditional ecological knowledge), the New Age movement and certain new religious trends. The spiritual foundations of the environmental movements are provided by elements of dark green religiosity. In practice, the two kinds of religiosity — green and dark green — can hardly, if at all, be differentiated.® Bron Taylor is also aware that his distinction of religion, belief, spirituality, and green and dark green faiths is an effort at laying the theoretical foundations (Taylor 2010: 1). Let us briefly digress to explain the uses of the three terms — religion, belief, and spirituality. Research on religion has shown that in contemporary discourse, people speaking about their religiosity more frequently talk about spirituality than religion, stressing the difference between the two: they identify spirituality with personal experience and development and with a more profound comprehension of the world and the individuals place in it, while religion is seen as institutionalized, ritualized and impersonal (summary: Taylor 2010: 1). Since within the set of beliefs labeled spirituality are elements that interpret a person’s place in Creation, the world, and Nature, it is not by accident that this term appears more frequently in ecological movements. In the study of contemporary religiosity in the West, certain phenomena have recently acquired the term nature religion. Though the term is not new, it has acquired new content as revealed by current investigations: its users basically mean any kind of religion characterized by a profound respect for nature and a practice that manifests it.” Apart from tribal religions, researchers use it to refer to all modern religious movements which revive pagan traditions: neo-paganism, neo-shamanism, Wicca, and various New Age groups. Peter Beyer even includes revival movements > On the political impact of the Gaia theory, see Deudney 1995, Litfin 2005. ° — This is also stated by the conceptions of vernacular religion and interactive religion, see Bowman 1990. This is what the title of Catherine Albenese’s book alludes to: Nature religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Albanese 1991.
