Religious ecology

The approaches that quantify human impact on nature, conservation and restoration, like carbon credits, can disconnect humans from their position and role in the universe. I think what is needed is to strengthen our connection with everything more-than-human. With awe, joy, and gratitude towards nature and the universe, taking responsibility for our actions should be direct and obvious, a priority and not an afterthought.

I’m looking at religion, myth, and ritual to recover that connection. This book has been very useful for me:

«Religious ecologies are ways of orienting and grounding whereby humans […] undertake specific practices of nurturing and transforming self and community in a particular cosmological context that regards nature as inherently valuable.»

  • Orienting through stories and practices, symbols and rituals, meditation and prayer.
  • Grounding to negotiate tragedy and loss, contingency and finitude.
  • Nurture individuals and communities to live amid uncertainty and pain with joy, hope, and even laughter.
  • Transform the human to activate healing and reconciliation so that comprehensive compassion may flow into the world.

I’m now checking out their course:

This is very challenging. How do we add a spiritual dimension to the blockchain? How do we add these rituals for connection into our game theory models? These researchers talking about the transformational power of religion use three interpretative approaches on their investigation: retrieval, reevaluation, and reconstruction. I think part of that is rewriting old maladjusted practices and creating our new solar punk mythology based on what we have learned.