Ecotheology

Ecotheology, the theological study of the relationship between religious traditions and the natural environment, took much of its modern shape as a direct response to a 1967 essay in the journal Science, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, in which the historian Lynn White Jr. argued that Judeo-Christian theology, particularly the dominion given to humanity over creation in Genesis 1:28, bore significant historical responsibility for the modern ecological crisis by desacralizing nature and licensing its exploitation, in contrast to what White characterized as a more reverent, less anthropocentric orientation in other religious and pre-Christian traditions.

White's essay provoked strong responses from Christian theologians, some contesting his reading of Genesis as a serious misreading of the dominion language, others accepting the essay's challenge as a genuine call to develop a more environmentally responsible Christian theology, and this debate is widely credited by scholars of religion and ecology with catalyzing ecotheology as an organized field of theological reflection and publication across the following decades. White himself was a practicing Christian and did not intend the essay as an attack on Christianity as such, closing it instead with a call for the tradition to develop a theology adequate to the ecological crisis he described, a constructive framing later ecotheologians took up directly.

Ecotheology developed well beyond a single response to White's essay into a genuinely diverse field spanning multiple traditions and theological methods. Christian ecotheologians developed several distinct approaches, including stewardship theology, which reinterprets the Genesis dominion language as a mandate for responsible care rather than license for exploitation, and process theology, which draws on a panentheistic account of God as intimately present within and affected by the natural world rather than standing entirely outside it. Ecofeminist theology, connected to the thealogy this atlas records separately, argues that the domination of nature and the domination of women share common conceptual roots and require a common theological response.

Scholars of ecotheology have also engaged substantially with indigenous religious traditions' own longstanding ecological theologies, and with Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic ecological thought, each developing distinct religious grounds for environmental responsibility from within their own textual and theological resources rather than simply adapting a Christian framework. This breadth means ecotheology is better understood as a shared field of inquiry engaging many traditions and theological methods than as a single argument or position.