Review of Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature

After eight years of work Thoemmes published the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005). The project was conceived during a 1997 American Academy of Religion conference when Professor Jerry Kaplan expressed interest in the “religion of nature” after noticing it was a worldview common to both his specialty, the racist right, and radical environmentalism, a specialty of the Encyclopedia’s editor Professor Bron Taylor.

The Encyclopedia, a manifesto of sorts, has 1,000 entries from 500 academics. Many entries were written by key movement personalities such as Arne Naess, Jane Goodall, and Steven Rockefeller. Taylor stresses, “every standard entry in this encyclopedia was fully peer reviewed”.

(1) The Encyclopedia affirms a wide connection between a “religion of nature” and fascism and an equally broad overlap between a “religion of nature” and environmentalism.

The Encyclopedia betrays environmentalism as a social movement lousy with neo-Nazis, devil-worshippers, superstitious lunatics, pseudo-intellectuals, history fabricators, saboteurs, murderers and genocidal maniacs, narcotized youth, romantic primitivists and perniciously elitist anti-democratic religious nutters who corrupt science and slander technology while offering no realistic way to live in the modern world…….

Ecology is sometimes called “the subversive science”. This is too generous because Ecology should not be grouped with the sciences at all – it is a religion.

Ecology is Pantheism and Pantheism is nature worship. Among the sciences and humanities, this highly political “religion of nature” functions like a computer virus. Many faculties over the last 40 years have imparted sub-disciplines led by the “eco” prefix or the “environmental” adjective. Ecology aspires to theocracy – to Pantheocracy. This is not some distant dystopia. Already, across the West development proposals are routinely vetted through environmentalist inquisitions where the precautionary principle, the rights of migratory animals, complexity theory and the sacrality of nature are within the realm of legitimate discourse.

Editor's Note:  And to think that some of you thought that I had strong opinions. RK