Nash, Roderick Frazier
Roderick Frazier Nash is the author of nine books and many articles. He is Professor and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Modern ecotheologians liked to point out that stewardship had an old and respected place in the Christian religion. The historical evidence for this characterization, however, is, at best, scanty. Still, it is interesting that René Dubos called attention to Benedict of Nursia as a pioneer practitioner of what Dubos called "a theology of the earth." The Rights of the Earth, 1989.Humans should understand wilderness areas not as settings for outdoor recreation but as gestures of planetary modesty, expressions of respect and reverence for the intrinsic value of nature. Ibid.
The traditional American conservation movement had relied almost exclusively on human self-interest. Society was exhorted to take care of nature so that nature would take car of society's material and recreational needs. Ibid.
Although the roots of the idea that earth is a living being are very old in Western thought, James Lovelock, an English atmospheric chemist, made the most dramatic statement of the idea in the mid-1970s with his Gaia hypothesis. Ibid.
The ancient Greeks used the term "Gaia" to refer to the nurturing earth goddess. Lovelock removed the theology and dressed this concept in the clothing of biochemistry. Ibid
The American past contains a highly visible liberation movement with interesting similarities to contemporary environmentalism. Ibid.
If the abolition of slavery marked the limits of American liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps biocentrism and environmental ethics are on the cutting edge of liberal thought in the late twentieth. Ibid.
Environmental advocates have found significant parallels between their crusade and that of the abolitionists. Ibid.
As early as the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau saw human slavery and the abuse of nature stemming from a common source: ethical myopia. Ibid.