F&ES Professor Edits New Book that Ties Spirituality, Science to Environment

Strengthening the bonds between spirituality, science and the natural world is necessary to prevent further environmental decline, according to a newly published book edited by Stephen Kellert, Tweedy/Ordway Professor of Social Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

The book, “The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion and Spirituality with the Natural World,” features 20 leading thinkers and writers, including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Calvin DeWitt, Carl Safina, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and others. They examine the divide between faith and reason, and seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help society reconcile the related problems of global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality.

“Scientists, theologians and the spiritually inclined, as well as all those concerned with humanity’s increasingly widespread environmental impact, are beginning to recognize that our ongoing abuse of the Earth diminishes our moral as well as our material condition,” Kellert says in the preface of the book, which is published by Island Press.

The book was inspired by a conference at Yale in May 2000 and is co-edited by F&ES doctoral candidate Timothy Farnham. It asserts that science and religion cannot by themselves reverse environmental and moral decline. The contributors explore ways in which science, spirit, and religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examine how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment.

Kellert’s work has focused on the connection between human and natural systems with a particular concern for the conservation of biological diversity and designing ways to harmonize the natural and human built environment.

He is the author of more than 100 publications, including several books that explore people’s relationship to nature. In 1993, he co-edited “The Biophilia Hypothesis” with Edward O. Wilson, an entomologist at Harvard. The book brought together 20 scientists from various disciplines to refine and examine the idea of biophilia, which suggests that humans possess a deep and biologically based urge to connect with the natural world.

He went on to publish “The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society” (1996), and “Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development” (1997).

He is editing another book, “Children and Nature: Theoretical, Conceptual and Empirical Foundations,” to be published by MIT Press in June. The authors examine the evolutionary significance of nature during childhood; the formation of children’s conceptions, values and sympathies toward the natural world; how contact with nature affects children’s physical and mental development; and the educational and political consequences of a weakened childhood experience of nature in modern society. He is working on a new book, “Ordinary Nature: the Role and Design of Natural Diversity in Everyday Life,” to be published by the University of California Press.