Is Christianity responsible for earth’s environmental crisis?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/estgeogr.201215Keywords:
Christianity, environment, conservation, ethicsAbstract
As a result of a paper published in the sixties, Christianity has been frequently accused of being behind earth’s environmental degradation, on the grounds that it has given humans the religious support to adopt a dominant role over the rest of Creation. This paper explores some of the answers to those criticisms, both from a historical and theological point of view. In the second part, the paper explores to what extent the environmental degradation supposedly caused by Christianity has affected those countries with mostly Christian populations, comparing them with those with other religious traditions. Several indicators of environmental health and ecosystem conservation are used for the comparisons. A high correlation between per capita income and environmental performance for the Christian and Buddhist countries was observed, while poor trends were observed for Hindu and Islamic countries. Comparing representative countries of both large and medium population size, the Christian countries outperform others in most indicators. Even though it cannot be concluded that Christianity, in fact, encourages environmental conservation, the results from our analysis at least provide grounds to reject the opposite hypothesis, as Christian countries do not have significantly lower environmental indicators than those representing other major religions.
Downloads
References
Berry, R. J. (ed.) (2006): Environmental Stewardship. London, T&T Clark International.
Berry, T. (1988): The Dream of the earth. San Francisco, Sierra Club.
Chuvieco, E. (2012a): "¿Qué aportan las grandes religiones a la conservación ambiental?", en E. Chuvieco y D. Alexander, D. (eds.): Ciencia y Religión en el siglo XXI: recuperar el diálogo. Madrid, Editorial Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces, pp. 239-268.
Chuvieco, E. (2012b): "Religious approaches to water management and environmental conservation". Water Policy, 14, pp. 9-20. http://dx.doi.org/10.2166/wp.2012.000
Chuvieco, E. y Martin, M. A. (2012): ¡Dominad la Tierra!: Raíces filosóficas y teólogicas del ecologismo. Madrid, Digital Reasons (www.digitalreasons.es).
Emerson, J.; Esty, D. C.; Levy, M. A.; Kim, C. H.; Mara, V.; Sherbinin, A. D. y Srebotnjak, T. (2010): Environmental Performance Index. New Haven, Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Disponible en: http://epi.yale.edu/ (Fecha de consulta: 03/09/2012).
Foltz, R. C.; Denny, F. M. y Baharuddin, A. (eds.) (2003): Islam and Ecology. A Bestowed Trust. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Harrison, P. (2006): "Having Dominion: Genesis and the Mastery of Nature", en: Berry, R. J. (ed.): Environmental Stewardship. London, T&T Clark International, pp. 17-31.
Hessel, D. T. y Ruether, R. R. (eds.) (2000): Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Wellbeing of Earth and Humans. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Houghton, J. (2006): "Stewardship for the Twenty-first Century", en R. J. Berry (ed.): Environmental Stewardship. London, T&T Clark International.
McDonagh, S. (1986): To care for the earth: a call to a new theology. London, Geoffrey Chapman.
Nasr, S. H. (2003): "Islam, the Contemporary Islamic world, and the Environmental Crisis", en R. Folz; F. Denny y A. Baharuddin (eds): Islam and Ecology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, pp. 85-105.
Palmer, C. (2006): "Stewardship: A Case study in Environmental Ethics", en R. J. Berry, (ed): Environmental Stewardship. London, T&T Clark International, pp. 63-75.
San Agustin (413-426): La Ciudad de Dios. Madrid, BAC 171-172, 1958, pp. lib 22, cap 24.
San Francisco (1225): Cantico del hermano Sol. Diponible en: http://www.franciscanos.org/esfa/cant.html (Fecha de consulta: 03/09/2012).
Sorrell, R. D. (1988): St. Francis of Assisi and nature: Tradition and innovation in Western Christian attitudes toward the environment. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press. PMCid:2249203
Sotelo, J. A.; Tolón, A. y Lastra, X. (2011): "Indicadores por y para el desarrollo sostenible, un estudio de caso". Estudios Geográficos, 72/271, pp. 611-654. http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/estgeogr.201124
Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (ed.) (2002): Judaism and Ecology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Tucker, M. E. y Grim, J. (2003): "Series Foreword", en R. Folz, F. Denny y A. Baharuddin (eds.): Islam and Ecology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, p. xvi.
Tucker, M. E. y Williams, D. R. (eds.) (1997): Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deed. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Tukey, J. W. (1977): Exploratory Data Analysis. Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley.
White, L. (1967): "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis". Science, 155/3767, pp. 1203-1207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203 PMid:17847526
Woods, T. E. (2005): How the Catholic Church built Western Civilization. Washington, D.C., Regnery Publications Inc.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2012 Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
© CSIC. Manuscripts published in both the print and online versions of this journal are the property of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and quoting this source is a requirement for any partial or full reproduction.
All contents of this electronic edition, except where otherwise noted, are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. You may read here the basic information and the legal text of the licence. The indication of the CC BY 4.0 licence must be expressly stated in this way when necessary.
Self-archiving in repositories, personal webpages or similar, of any version other than the final version of the work produced by the publisher, is not allowed.
