Arnold Toynbee, conversing with Daisatsu Ikeda in the early 1970s, declared ‘a right religion is one that teaches respect for the dignity and sanctity of all nature. The wrong religion is one that licenses the indulgence of human greed at the expense of non-human nature. I conclude that the religion we need to embrace now is pantheism, as exemplified in Shinto, and that the religion we now need to discard is Judaic monotheism and the post-Christian non-theistic faith in scientific progress, which has inherited from Christianity the belief that mankind is morally entitled to exploit the rest of the universe for the indulgence of human greed’ (Toynbee and Ikeda 1976:324). Other dedicated environmentalists, ‘deep ecologists’, self-styled ‘pagans’ and even Christian theologians have also preferred pantheism (see Wood 1985; Martin 1993). What theologians and environmentalists might mean by ‘pantheism’ remains obscure. ‘It is almost as though literary commentators [and others] have entered a kind of silent conspiracy never to challenge one another as to the exact meaning of these ideas, or to the appropriateness of their invocation’ (McFarland 1969:127).