Thirty Years of Religion and Ecology

Thirty years ago, the Center for the Study of World Religions embarked on one of the most consequential initiatives in its history: a multi-year exploration of the relationship between the world's religious traditions and the ecological challenges facing our planet.

Under the leadership of the Center's director, Lawrence E. Sullivan, the project was led by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, the series' editors, and made possible through the convening power, resources, and institutional support of the CSWR. As Sullivan wrote in his preface to the first volume in the series, it "results from research conducted at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions over a three-year period," bringing some six hundred scholars, religious thinkers, environmentalists, and practitioners into conversation through a landmark series of ten conferences at Harvard beginning in 1996. The conferences, in turn, gave rise to the ten-volume Religions of the World and Ecology series, published by the CSWR and distributed by Harvard University Press, and helped establish religion and ecology as a significant interdisciplinary field of study.

The influence of this work traveled far beyond Harvard. It contributed to the creation of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale; helped generate new scholarly networks, courses, publications, and programs; and opened conversations about environmental ethics, religious worldviews, and ecological responsibility that have only grown more urgent.

In October 2016, the CSWR marked the twentieth anniversary of the initiative by bringing the community together again for the three-day conference "Religion, Ecology, and Our Planetary Future," hosted by then-CSWR Director Francis X. Clooney. Tucker and Grim returned to the CSWR to offer an overview of the field they had helped build, joined by participants from the original conferences, a new generation of scholars, environmental thinkers, and religious leaders. The gathering looked both backward and forward, at what had emerged from the original CSWR project and at the questions that would shape religion and ecology in the decades ahead.

This October marks the thirtieth anniversary of the original CSWR initiative, with a gathering organized by the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. We are delighted to see a project nurtured at the CSWR three decades ago continue to generate scholarship, teaching, activism, and new forms of collaboration around the world.

The CSWR is also returning to this work in a practical way, by bringing the series back into circulation in digital form. Several volumes that have gone out of print are returning as EPUB editions, and the first seven titles will be available through Harvard University Press in the coming weeks, the beginning of a longer effort to make all the volumes in the series easily and permanently available.

The anniversary is also an occasion for us to return to this remarkable chapter in our own history and reflect on what it reveals about the Center core mission of bringing people and traditions into sustained conversation, providing the intellectual and institutional conditions in which new fields can emerge, and helping ideas travel into the world, well beyond the walls in which they first took shape.