ABSTRACT
Earth Day engages concerted action to change human environmental behavior to become greener and to generate appropriate improvements in government environmental policies from the local to the national levels. From an academic perspective, spiritual ecology focuses on the interfaces of religions and spiritualities with environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms. Each of these qualifiers is plural because spiritual ecology examines a vast, complex, diverse, and dynamic arena of interrelated phenomena. Religious naturalism has a vital role to play as well as spiritual ecology in general. Adherents of religious naturalism assert that nature alone is ultimate and sufficient for religious purpose, meaning, values, emotion, reverence, inspiration, and actions. Spiritual ecology is more inclusive, eclectic, pluralistic, and relativistic than any other approach. While in principle spiritual ecology fully embraces science, it advocates and pursues the tremendous potential of religions and spiritualities to be a positive force in relating their adherents to nature in far healthier ways, a force where secular approaches have proven insufficient.
