15 - Religious Traditions and Ecological Knowledge

Summary

The oldest cave paintings yet discovered are in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The paintings depict other animals in symbolic forms as participant agents, alongside early humans. Such conceptions of co-agency endured throughout human history in indigenous religions, particularly culturally isolated groups dwelling in deserts, forests, islands, and mountains. This ‘original’ ontology was taken up from indigenous religions into world religious traditions first in the Vedas and then in ‘axial age’ traditions including those of classical Greece, Judaism and, under their influence, Christianity. However in Latin Christianity the cultural imaginary of participation in a shared realm of being declined in favour of a new religious narrative focused on human souls. The subsequent rise of Enlightenment rationalism and personalism conferred on modern humans a sense of control and dominance in their agency of Earthly habitats in which they have progressively sought to eradicate the agency, and diversity, of the other beings. In this chapter I outline the original participative ontology in indigenous and world religious traditions; I examine the reasons for and impacts of its decline; and I discuss ways in which it may be recovered.