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Has Environmentalism Lost Its Spiritual Core?
Environmentalism began as a religion. Certainly that's how paleo-greens like John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would have seen it. Muir was awakened to nature when he first explored Yosemite in the 1860s, and he felt it in a religious way — he called what would become one of the nation's first national parks "the grandest of all special temples of Nature."

Muir's biographer, Donald Worster, has written that Muir saw his mission as "saving the American soul from total surrender to materialism." David Brower, a spiritual successor to Muir who would found Friends of the Earth, would say of his staunchest green allies that they had "the religion." Environmentalism — rooted in nature and the outdoors — was an antidote to secular, technological modern life. ...

...Now Maathai has a new book called Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, and she's preaching a green gospel. To Maathai, environmental work needs to be linked to spiritual values — and spiritual values should drive us to care about the environmentalism, contributing to what's called in Judaism tikkun olam, the healing of the world. ...

...She found what was driving those who joined the Green Belt Movement — and in time, what was driving Maathai herself — wasn't just about fixing material needs. It was about meeting something intangible within people. The poisoning of the earth, the destruction of the forest — Maathai came to believe that human beings could feel these losses. "If we live in an environment that's wounded — where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust — it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological and spiritual level," Maathai writes. "In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves."

Maathai came to understand, however, that the opposite is true as well. As we work to heal the earth, we heal ourselves as well. There's even an emerging field of treatment behind this — "eco-therapists" have begun prescribing nature walks and time spent outdoors for the depressed. ...

The ethics of climate change
...The difficulty in facing the long-term future comes from the dominance of (even enlightened) economists in the discussions. The bedrock of economics is cost-benefit analysis with the benefits defined by the freely chosen, subjective preferences of living individuals, integrated through markets. The preferences themselves are generally taken as given, rooted in some unchanging psychology. These choices are said to progressively discount the future, which becomes less valuable to us the further away it is. On this logic, resources are less valuable to us twenty years hence than they are today (so savings must be rewarded), wealth we pass on to our children or grandchildren is worth less than that we consume ourselves, and the welfare of our unborn descendants drops off the map. If we did not discount in this way, the rights of multiple future generations, for centuries or millennia, must surely outweigh any current rights, and have first priority. By contrast, even though concerned economists argue about the appropriate rate, even the smallest discounting of the future progressively attenuates the interests and rights of posterity and eventually reduces them to zero....

...Climate Change and Social Justice, edited by Jeremy Moss, contains twelve chapters in sections dealing with ‘Science, fairness and responsibility’ (covering issues of responsibility, ethics and justice, intergenerational equity and distributional questions in greenhouse and carbon trading policy design); ‘Climate change and vulnerable groups’ (including discussions of justice and adaptation, primary health care and climate refugees), and ‘policy implications’ (covering key debates on climate justice, the importance of equity in international adaptation strategies and the relation of climate justice to other equity goals). It is a much needed and valuable contribution to this neglected dimension of the climate change discussion...