A Provocation That Started a Field

Ecotheology, the theological study of the relationship between religious traditions and the natural environment, took much of its modern shape as a direct response to a 1967 essay in the journal Science, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, in which the historian Lynn White Jr. argued that Judeo-Christian theology, particularly the dominion given to humanity over creation in Genesis 1:28, bore significant historical responsibility for the modern ecological crisis by desacralizing nature and licensing its exploitation, in contrast to what White characterized as a more reverent, less anthropocentric orientation in other religious and pre-Christian traditions.

White's essay provoked strong responses from Christian theologians, some contesting his reading of Genesis as a serious misreading of the dominion language, others accepting the essay's challenge as a genuine call to develop a more environmentally responsible Christian theology, and this debate is widely credited by scholars of religion and ecology with catalyzing ecotheology as an organized field of theological reflection and publication across the following decades. White himself was a practicing Christian and did not intend the essay as an attack on Christianity as such, closing it instead with a call for the tradition to develop a theology adequate to the ecological crisis he described, a constructive framing later ecotheologians took up directly.