Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 has a new book called Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, in which she strives to refocus the environmental movement upon its core spiritual values.
Has Environmentalism Lost Its Spiritual Core?
By Bryan Walsh in TIME Magazine
…As greens have pivoted to focus on climate change, the environmental movement has changed as well. It has become more wonky, focused on complex economic policies like cap and trade and new technologies like concentrated solar power. Its constituency has become more urban, more likely to be riding the subway than hiking the Sierra Nevada. The biggest event on the green calendar this year is the U.N. climate-change summit going on now in Cancún, Mexico, where international diplomats are jousting over protocols defining energy efficiency and technology transfer. Even one of the most promising subjects at Cancún — avoided deforestation, which allows tropical nations to be paid for keeping trees standing — turns a tree from something that should be valued for its own qualities into a living carbon bank. Not exactly romantic.
Wangari Maathai, for one, would like to change that. The Kenyan activist won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 — making her the first environmentalist to earn the award — for her work with the Green Belt Movement, a nonprofit that focuses on planting trees, conserving the environment and fighting for women’s rights. Now Maathai has a new book called Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, and she’s preaching a green gospel. To Maathai, environmental work needs to be linked to spiritual values — and spiritual values should drive us to care about the environmentalism, contributing to what’s called in Judaism tikkun olam, the healing of the world. “We’ve become detached from nature,” Maathai told me recently during a trip to New York City. “And as you move away from nature, you become lost.”