Connecting Ecologies: Integrating Responses to the Global Challenge. Edited by PatrickRiordan and GavinFlood. Routledge, 2024. Pp. viii, 241. £116.25 ( HB ) / £ 45.99 ( PB ).

This volume emerged from a ‘Connecting Ecologies’ seminar hosted at Campion Hall, Oxford in December 2017, in response to Pope Francis's encyclical letter Laudato si’, on ‘Care for our Common Home’, released in June 2015. The edited volume represents a follow-up to a special edition of this journal (The Heythrop Journal 59, no. 6 November 2018) in order to explore and respond to the issues in a more complete way from the perspective of various disciplines. To this end, the editors brought together a group of distinguished scholars that are indeed diverse in terms of religious background (or specialisation), field of expertise, and also to some extent geography, although all of them seem to gravitate around Campion Hall. In addition to various essays from a (Roman) Catholic perspective, the volume includes Jewish (Solomon), Islamic (Dallh), Hindu (Flood), and Buddhist (Jones) perspectives, but alas no Orthodox, Protestant, or Pentecostal contributions. In addition to religion and theology, the essays bring into play agroecology (Whelan), the biosciences (Parsons), economics (Parsons and others), forestry (Stoeber, also Christie), jurisprudence (Pérez), and various social sciences. Besides the North Atlantic context, some of the essays engage with environmental issues in the Amazon (Stoeber), Australia (Jeyaraj), Chile (Pérez), India (Flood, Jeyaraj), Indonesia (Dallh), Saudi Arabia (Dallh), and Thailand (Jones). Unfortunately, none of the essays relates to the African or the Pasifika contexts. Given the situatedness of the volume in Oxford, one may have expected more of the essays to engage with the destructive legacy of British and other forms of imperialism and colonialism (see Parsons and Mulligan, though). There is also only one female contributor (Mulligan) who, appropriately, addresses concerns over the burden of women in various rural areas. The volume is held together by a common appreciation for Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato si’ and the core concept of integral ecology. This term was earlier used by Thomas Berry and Leonardo Boff but mainstreamed in Laudato si’. The connectedness of the biophysical, economic, and social environments is widely recognised in environmental education, activist movements, and in the fields of religion and theology alike. In ecumenical theology, the term ‘household of God’, derived from the Greek root oikos (household), is used to make the connection between ecology (the logic of the household), economy (the rules for managing the household), and the inhabitation of the household (the whole oikoumene) clear. Others speak of ‘transversals’ to show how issues of gender, race, class, caste, and language form a dimension of all three of these fields. For Pope Francis, two other dimensions have to be recognised, namely the moral and the spiritual. Environmental destruction is a moral issue, given an awareness of environmental and climate justice: the victims of environmental degradation typically contributed very little to causing such problems. But it is the spiritual element that forms the hinge around which Laudato si’ turns. Where can sources of inspiration, an ‘interior impulse which encourages, motivates, nourishes and gives meaning to our individual and communal activity’ (p. 128; Laudato si’ §216), be found to sustain an environmental ethos and praxis? One may say that this volume gathers together an array of such sources and that this is its most pertinent contribution. It is impossible in a review of this nature to do justice to each of the individual essays. Suffice it to say that there is a wealth of material and resources that could be explored further. In short, Matthew Whelan writes about agroecology and Catholic social teaching; Norman Solomon offers a Jewish view on cherishing creation; Minlib Dallh addresses Muslim environmentalism in the Global South; Gavin Flood critically analyses Hindu sources on nature and self; Jack Parsons confronts the challenge of global economic inequity in any green New Deal; Dhivan Jones explores what integral ecology may mean from a Buddhist emphasis on ‘dependent arising’; Douglas Christie retrieves the ecological wisdom in classic forms of contemplative spirituality; Michael Stoeber elicits some inter-religious dialogue on sacred groves, white pines in particular; Suzanne Mulligan points out the failure of Laudato si’ to do justice to issues of reproductive health and gendered justice, and proposes an ethic of vulnerability; Xavier Jeyaraj seeks to connect people's movements and their quests for justice with the vision of ‘our common home’; and Rodrigo Pérez investigates Catholic social thought insofar as it elicits sources for water jurisprudence, given the tendency to view water as a public commodity. Finally, Patrick Riordan recognises that any recovery of a notion of the good poses a profound challenge to social and economic sciences. It may be appropriate here to highlight two common features beyond those already mentioned. A first common feature is the refreshing self-critical nature of the essays. This is of a dual nature. On the one hand there is a welcome willingness to acknowledge the faultlines in the religious/spiritual traditions that are discussed. There is a hermeneutics of recovery, of course, but also one of suspicion that these traditions contributed to the underlying problem. There is a reference to Lynn White's (in-)famous essay on ‘The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis’ in almost every single essay. Such a self-critical attitude is also found in those essays that reflect on spiritual sources outside the Abrahamic faiths. On the other hand, there is a willingness to acknowledge the ecological destruction caused not only by industrialised countries but also by resource-rich countries of the Global South. A second common feature is the appreciation for the holism embedded in the notion of ‘integral ecology’. One may refer here to the concept of holism as coined by the South African statesman, Jan Smuts (1870-1950), or the holism of his contemporary, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948). Despite the undoubted recognition of multiple connections and entanglements, the concept of holism remains problematic for the simple reason that no one can see the whole, not least because the whole of history is not there yet. Such a sense of epistemic humility is found in all the essays, despite the erudition that is also evident. Here ‘integral’ ecology has an advantage over holism in that it recognises the distinctive common goods of the constituent parts (p. 229). There is an ecological need for integration and integrity (the ‘integrity of creation’) but, as an adjective, ‘integral’ is aspirational, not complete yet—eschatological, one might say. A distinctive contribution that this volume makes is to reflect critically on the notion of the common good, given the call to care for our common home. It identifies various common goods (note the plural), and finds such goods in overlooked areas such as spirituality, epistemology, and the role of worldviews (p. 2). The editorial introduction structures such goods in terms of resonances (between the contributions), resources (from various contexts and religious traditions), requirements (not least the need for conversion), and responses (to the papal encyclical) from within various disciplines and contexts. Especially in the essays by Whelan, Solomon, and Riordan, the papal emphasis on finding joy in God's good gift of creation is contrasted with modernist assumptions about the good—where all three core concepts embedded in that (joy, goodness, a gift economy) are being replaced by pleasure-seeking, utility, and competition over scarce resources. While Pope Francis frequently refers to the technocratic paradigm, the problem is not only the abuse of technological power leading to a spiral of self-destruction. The problem lies at the roots of modernity. As Riordan points out, there is a dissolution of the good that he traces back to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, with his focus on survival amid the conflicts of the seventeenth century. As a result, human life is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Agreement on what is good is impossible and can only be understood in terms of preferences, interests, and desires. Something is not desired because it is good; it is labelled a ‘good’ because it is desired (p. 217). Nothing is good in itself; value judgements indicate conflicting interests. For Riordan this forms the bedrock of modernity (p. 218), and the tacit assumption of social theory and economic theory. Agents (consumers) are rational insofar as they pursue their own self-interests. No common ground is possible on goods or the good, except in terms of a social contract. Riordan astutely observes that this is why the papal emphasis on the goods as intrinsic to creation is so radical: it challenges the basis of modern political philosophy. However, there is a real danger that such an emphasis on the common good and the call to conversion from destructive modernist ways of seeing the world would hide a form of theocracy, namely to impose such a vision of the good on all others. This would raise the suspicion that the papal call would undermine the achievements of a liberal, pluralist democracy (p. 230). We can hardly return to a pre-sixteenth-century Catholicity. How, then, is it possible to retrieve a sense of the common good in order to care for our common home? This volume confronts this challenge head-on and provides ample resources to address, if not resolve such a challenge. Overall, this is an impressive volume that invites wider contributions from more spiritual traditions, more disciplines, and other contexts further afield. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.