Ignoring Religion Is Not an Option

Throughout human history, and still for the vast majority of people around the world today, especially across the Global South, religion has informed cultural understandings of the fundamental nature of reality, what it means to be human, and how we should relate to other beings and our shared environs. Research in religion and ecology has burgeoned since the mid-1990s, in tandem with the growth of faith-based environmental activism, as well as an antienvironmentalist backlash from some politically influential US evangelical Christians. This article argues that the environmental humanities should therefore incorporate ecoreligious studies more fully into its agenda.