Integral Ecology as Theology and Ethics of “Place”

Abstract

Studies on the significance of “place” as a theological concept are in the early stages of development in ecotheology. However, the few scholars who have provided key insights into the concept have approached it from a narrow perspective. In contrast, this article approaches the notion of “place” from a broader perspective that engages philosophy, scripture, theology, and contemporary social thought. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the centrality of “place” in relation to environmental care as the necessary enabling condition for human and ecological flourishing amid our global ecological crisis. To advance this argument, the article adopts a textual method of analysis that draws significantly on secondary literature. It begins with a brief description of what integral ecology is about; it then proceeds to provide an overview of the contemporary crisis of “place”. This is followed by an examination of “place” from biblical and theological perspectives. The article concludes by discussing “place” as an ethical praxis at the heart of integral ecology. Central to the discussion is the usefulness of talking about “place” as a site of both action and resistance in the face of our present ecological crisis.

1. Introduction

Amid the ravages of our global ecological crisis, discourse on the notion of “place” is beginning to assume an important place in ecotheological discourse. Whereas previous studies in theology have given priority attention to the anthropological dimension of the crisis of place, there is an urgent need to bring the discourse into the mainstream of ecotheology. In an age where the global forces of neoliberal capitalism and extractivism are leaving huge footprints of socio-ecological destruction of lands, landscapes, lives, and livelihoods, ecotheology is challenged to reimagine place vis-à-vis integral ecology as the necessary enabling condition for the full flourishing of humans and the ecosystem. What if humans began to look at their place on Earth differently? What if we learn to cultivate and practise the mental and spiritual discipline of remaining in our place? How can this cultivation contribute to the advancement of an eco-praxis that brings renewal to our world? These are some of the key questions that this article responds to. The article argues that thinking about place as a theological and ethical reality can ground the notion of integral ecology and provide resources for a more constructive response to our ecological crisis in this age of Anthropocene.

To advance this argument, I divide my paper into five parts. This introduction is the first part. In the second part, I provide an overview of what integral ecology is about. In the third part, I examine the contemporary crisis of place. In the fourth part, I analyze the notion of “place” through a biblical–theological lens. In the fifth part, I conclude by discussing how the ethics and praxis of place can ground the notion of integral ecology. Let us now delve into the second part of the discussion.

2. What Is Integral Ecology?

The earliest usage of the term “integral ecology” arose in the field of marine biology in the second half of the twentieth century. The concept was first used by Hilary Moore, who called for “an expansion of traditional scientific understandings of ecology” (Briola 2023, p. 68). Rachel Carson, an influential voice in environmentalism in the twentieth century, is often overlooked in the discourse on integral ecology. But she contributed significantly to this environmental philosophy even if she did not explicitly use the concept. In her 1962 groundbreaking book Silent Spring, Carson (2002, p. 51) stated: “In nature nothing exists alone.” She would go on to argue that the Earth’s vegetation is “part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and animals” (Carson 2002, p. 52). While the immediate focus of Carson’s book was the harm caused by the use of chemical pesticides, much of her analysis centered on the “relationality” and “interdependence” of the different aspects of the ecosystem—concepts that would come to characterize theological meanings of integral ecology.

Integral ecology entered theological discourse toward the end of the last century through the work of the influential Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. Boff called for an “integral ecology” that combined various approaches to hearing the ‘cry of the earth’ and the ‘cry of the poor’. He described a new paradigm that is emerging in the face of our ecological crisis, built around “a new sensitivity to the planet as a whole” (Boff 1997, p. 11). For Boff (1997, p. 11), this holistic approach to ecology overcomes the classical scientific paradigm that relies on “the division of the world into the material and the spiritual, the separation between nature and culture, human being and world, reason and emotion, female and male, God and world”. He queried the atomization of scientific knowledge and considered integral ecology, which seeks to forge a new alliance between humans and nature under a single planetary community, as an antidote to the scientific paradigm. To effectively characterize the new paradigm of integral ecology, Boff (1997, pp. 31–34) drew on concepts such as wholeness, diversity, interdependence, connectedness, shared destiny, relationship, complexity, creativity, complementarity, reciprocity, cosmic common good, entropy, interiority, and holistic ecological stance. Whereas the basic thinking of scientific modernity is “purely analytical, split up, and disconnected”, integral ecology takes a stance of “thinking holistically; that is, continually seeing the whole, which does not derive from the sum of the parts but from the organic interdependence of all the elements” (Boff 1997, p. 41).

When Pope Francis released his landmark ecological encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015, he placed the notion of integral ecology at the center of his discussion of what we need to do to holistically attend to our socio-ecological crisis. In chapter four of the encyclical, he argues that “everything is closely interrelated” and that “today’s problems call for a vision capable of taking into account every aspect of the global crisis” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 137). Although the encyclical does not define integral ecology, it does offer various insights that provide useful ways of thinking about integral ecology as a conceptual framework that prioritizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all aspects of reality: social, environmental, biological, economic, political, spiritual, cultural, educational, scientific, and technological. For this reason, Elizabeth Gandolfo (2023, p. 28) argues that instead of speaking about “integral ecology” in the singular, we should rather speak about it in the plural because “integral ecologies are pluriversal ways of being human that recognize and live into the interdependence of all reality.” Most theological engagements with the concept consider these various dimensions (Briola 2023; O’Hara et al. 2020; DiLeo 2018; Miller 2020; Pasquale 2019; Lane 2021).

Central to integral ecology is an “integrated approach” that looks at our present ecological and social crises not as two distinct and separate crises but as “one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 139). This is why in the third chapter of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis (2015b, para. 110) forcefully argues that the problems we are facing “cannot be dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests.” He laments the fragmentation of knowledge into various specializations, which “often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationship between things, and for the broader horizon” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 110). Instead of a one-sided, partial, and reductionist approach to ecological culture, Pope Francis (2015b, para. 111) calls for a broader framework: “There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational program, a lifestyle, and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm”.

In calling for an interdisciplinary approach to integral ecology, Pope Francis (2015b, para. 63) notes that “no branch of the sciences, and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes religion and the language particular to it.” The recognition that religion and theology have something significant to say about our ecological challenges has continued to grow over the last few years, giving rise to numerous publications. While other branches of knowledge are invited to take theological insights into our present crisis seriously, so is theology challenged to go beyond itself and engage issues from a broader perspective. Writing to the theology faculty of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina a decade ago, Pope Francis (2015a) stated: “We must guard against a theology that is exhausted in academic dispute or one that looks at humanity from a glass castle.” Theology must come down from the heights of its suspension and engage in real human issues and problems.

At a more practical level, integral ecology unites ecological and social approaches in paying heed to “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 49). It embraces an “integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 139). These descriptions, though not exhaustive, provide adequate insights into integral ecology. I now turn to the third part of the discussion to examine the crisis of place in our world today.

3. The Crisis of Place in Today’s World

Contemporary humanity is immersed in “a crisis of place” (Bartholomew 2011, p. 1). This crisis has to do with the loss of something that is constitutive of human existence in the world. Since to be or to exist in any way is “to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place” (Casey 2013, p. ix), the crisis of place lends itself to our consciousness as the loss of a proper human way of relating to the settings in which we live. For Edward Casey (2013, p. ix), “Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them”. Most people have places that matter to them personally, “sites that hold memories and meaning and that shape our ethical commitments” (Campbell 2024, p. 279). As such, it is not possible for anyone to be place-less, since everyone is always in some kind of place at any given time. What is thus central to the crisis of place afflicting humanity is what Walter Brueggemann (2002, p. 1) calls “displacement”.

Brueggemann uses this term to describe the existential condition of today’s humanity, characterized by alienation at the sociological and psychological levels. Ours is “a world of strangers, highly mobile and rootless” (Brueggemann 2002, p. 1). “The sense of being lost, displaced, and homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture. The yearning to belong somewhere, to have a home, to be in a safe place, is a deep and moving pursuit. Loss of place and yearning for place are dominant images” (Brueggemann 2002, p. 1). Brueggemann’s observation points to three critical issues at the heart of the crisis of place: alienation, homelessness, and rootlessness. It is the loss of a place each one can call “home”. To speak of the crisis of place is thus to speak of a crisis of identity that has become “a key ailment in the modern industrialized world” (Campbell 2024, p. 280).

The sense that the crisis of place is a crisis of identity is well captured by the Polish-British sociologist-philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. He observes that identity construction in the modern age has become a fluid game. He coined the idea of “liquid modernity”, in contrast to solid modernity, to characterize this situation. He diagnoses the modern self as a pilgrim without destination. Whereas classical Christianity introduced the figure of the pilgrim as one who leaves home without being homeless and whose pilgrimage has a fixed, determined, and predictable destination, modernity gave the idea of pilgrimage a “novel twist” (Bauman 1996, p. 19), transforming the pilgrim into a homeless and rootless being. Thus, the pilgrim’s successor in the modern era is “the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist and the player” (Bauman 1996, p. 26). While these metaphors capture something of the hypermobility of contemporary social life, they also point to the crisis of life without a sense of meaning, purpose, order, and direction.

Norman Wirzba has provided a more ecologically focused hermeneutic of the crisis of place, linking the lack of roots experienced by contemporary humanity to an educational crisis due to the fact “many of the world’s dominant cultures have done a poor job teaching their people to live in their places in mutually nourishing ways” (Wirzba 2021, p. 79). He locates the root of this problem in colonial modernity. He notes that Western colonizers “never planted both feet on the ground that they came to occupy. They kept one foot in the boat, ready to move on to the next place. They did not choose the more demanding prospect, which is to remain in a place, resist restlessness, and work with it by learning its potential and limits” (Wirzba 2021, pp. 79–80). Similarly, Willie James Jennings (2010, p. 248) argues that a defining element of the colonialist moment was “the loss of a world where people were bound to land.” Using the example of British colonists who came to America, he notes how Indigenous peoples were displaced from their land and how the colonists invented a new way of thinking about place in mathematical–commercial terms of grid, space, and price. This colonial imagination of land “destroyed the possibility of thinking of identity within land, within place” (Jennings 2010, p. 226).

In the past three centuries of Western modernity, due to the triumph of the natural and social sciences, philosophical discourse on mobility has brought about the suppression of “place” in exchange for “space.” Talk about place came to be seen as “regressive and trivial” (Casey 2013, p. 3). The result is that for an entire epoch, “place has been regarded as an impoverished second cousin of Time and Space, those two colossal cosmic partners towering over modernity” (Casey 2013, p. 3). Today, mobility seems to have become no longer an option, but a necessity. For many, it is “a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication. To ‘stay put’ is thought to reflect a stagnant, provincial spirit, or a cowering refusal to explore, experience, and annex the world” (Wirzba 2021, p. 80). The result is less and less need for most people today to cultivate the feelings, habits, and skills needed for rootedness in a place.

How does this discussion of the crisis of place connect to integral ecology? Integral ecology seeks to form a holistic picture of our socio-ecological crisis. A philosophical and socio-historical analysis of the crisis of place provides a necessary context for grasping the combination of factors that have brought us to our present state. Whereas our premodern ancestors cultivated a sense of reverence for and intimacy with place, Enlightenment modernity displaced this worldview, seeing it as primitive, backward, and outmoded. In prioritizing logos over mythos, modernity disregarded the myths that oriented and guided our forebears in maintaining a respectful, healthy, and intimate relationship with nature and with the places they inhabited (Armstrong 2022, pp. 20–28). With the long process of modernization, the loss of reverence for place has given rise to destructive human behavior toward the natural world. This behaviour needs to be countered. If place is the bedrock of human life and existence in the world, then integral ecology must theologically invest in its rediscovery and recovery as the necessary enabling condition for human and ecological flourishing. “We need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia; if we fail to do this, our concern for the natural environment will remain superficial” (Armstrong 2022, p. 17). Let us examine the discourse on place from biblical and theological perspectives.

4. Place in Christian Biblical and Theological Discourse

The belief that God the Creator is the ultimate source of placement of human and nonhuman creatures in the world has led to the view that place is “a theological concept” and that place “is never fully place without God as co-inhabitant” (Bartholomew 2011, p. 33). Thus, a good place to begin the theological discourse on place is the Bible. In the Bible, place shapes divine and human experience. Numerous biblical stories portray “a Creator who is, in the most primal sense, encountered in and through natural elements and spaces” (Myers 2016, p. 119). From God’s placement of the first created humans in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1:28–30, 2:8, 15)1 to the encounter of Israel’s patriarchs with God and other spiritual beings in specific places (Genesis 22:14, 28:10–19, 32:30), down to the theophany of the burning bush where Moses is made to realize that he is standing on “holy ground” (Exodus 3:5), the Torah and several other books in the Hebrew scriptures portray place as the ground for divine–human encounter. John Inge (2003, p. 2) is right when he notes that “place is a very important category in the Old Testament and that the narrative supports a three-way relationship between God, people, and place in which all three are essential”.

Similarly, the New Testament contains various narratives of place and place-making. It has been suggested that a Christian theological discussion on place must take Christ as its “starting point” (Lewis 2005, p. 34), for he is the Word made flesh who came to dwell among his people (John 1:14). Before his public ministry, Jesus lived with his parents, Mary and Joseph, in Nazareth (Luke 2:51). His identification as “the carpenter’s son” (Matthew 13:55) and “the carpenter” (Mark 6:3) during his public life reflects his humble beginnings and his connection to the world of labor in Nazareth. As an itinerant Jewish rabbi, he went from place to place preaching the good news and would often return to Nazareth, “where he had been brought up” (Luke 4:16, Mark 6:1).

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis develops a theology of creation in which Christ is the reference point and telos for a Christian understanding of the world. He notes that Jesus was attentive to the beauty of the natural world, was in constant touch with, and lived in full harmony with creation (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 96–100). The gospels also present Jesus as one “who clearly knew and cared about plants. When he looked for ways to describe what life is all about and what it is for, he talked about seeds and vines” (Wirzba 2021, p. 76). He spoke with tenderness about humans using the metaphors of sparrows and birds (Luke 12:16, Matthew 6:26). Many of his teachings and parables are couched in agricultural language (Matthew 13:4–44, 20:1–16, 21:33–44). When he healed the man who was born blind from birth, Jesus spat on the ground, made some mud paste with his saliva, and applied it to the man’s eyes, sending him to wash it all off in a pool (John 9:6). Jesus touched the soil and worked with his hands. “He was far removed from philosophies which despised the body, matter, and the things of the world” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 98).

An episode that bears this out is the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene on the morning of the resurrection. The risen Jesus converses with Mary in the garden of the tomb where he was buried. Not knowing that it was Jesus, Mary supposed it was “the gardener” (John 20:15). Her mistaking of Jesus for the gardener was “probably because when she encounters him he has his hands in the soil, as he so often does, caring for and healing the creation” (Tanner 2017). This portrayal of the risen Jesus as the Gardener of the New Creation, “someone totally aligned with the Creator’s intentions for the flourishing of the creation”, has led to the suggestion that “Jesus can be a model and an inspiration for his twenty-first-century followers who are learning to see Earth care as a constitutive part of their life as his disciples” (Daly-Denton 2017, p. 14). At the heart of this narrative is an incarnational nerve that embodies the deep materiality of Jesus’s life and his intimacy with place, what John Mustol (2017, p. 117) calls “the dustiness of Jesus Christ”.

While these positive appropriations of place are significant for grounding how place shapes biblical imagination, it is important to note that the picture of place that emerges from the Bible is rather complicated. From the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden after their act of disobedience (Genesis 3:23), the banishment of Cain from the land after killing his brother Abel (Genesis 4:11, 14), the wrenching and displacement of Abraham from his native land (Genesis 12), Abraham’s lifetime of wandering (Genesis 23:4), the condition of Abraham’s offspring as “strangers in a land not their own” (Genesis 15:13), the Hebrew people’s origin myth of descent from “a wandering Aramean” (Deuteronomy 26:5), down to Jesus’s admission that the Son of Man has “no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58), the narrative of displacement is ubiquitous in the Bible. Indeed, “after Eden, the challenge of implacement and the danger of displacement are a constant part of the human condition” (Bartholomew 2011, p. 33). The danger of displacement has been heightened by the nature of the Christian eschatological orientation, which prioritizes Heaven and relativizes the Earth. This reality is expressed in the New Testament: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). The distance and mismatch between the true world that is to come and this world here and now has brought about a debasement of the Earth as merely a place of sojourn (Bauman 1996, p. 20).

As a result of this, Mark I. Wallace (2019, p. 1) has accused Christianity of being “an unearthly religion with little to say about everyday life in the world” and thus “bears a disproportionate for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes towards nature through otherworldly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins”. Similarly, the liberation theologian Miguel A. De La Torre (2024, p. 108) argues: “The greatest threat to the environment is a Eurocentric Christian theology that joyfully anticipates ‘the end of time’.” He asks: “Why worry about the environment when, in the twinkling of an eye, the great late planet Earth will end in a conflagration?”.

Going back to the influential American historian of technology Lynn White (1967), who laid the blame for our present crisis at the doorsteps of Judeo-Christian anthropology, several authors and theologians have focused on the anthropological foundations of our ecological predicaments. For instance, Elizabeth Johnson (2015, p. 265) and Jason Maston (2018, p. 1) observed that the fundamental premises of Christian anthropology, based on Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, ascribe a higher status to humans in the created order, thus providing the basis for the ontological rift between humans and other creatures. This paradigm of dominion has played a considerable role in shaping our modern world and, in many ways, has lent itself to projects that promote human self-interest at the expense of nature and other creatures. This is evident right from the Bible (Exodus 9:1–6, Judges 15:4–5, 2 Chronicles 7:5, Mark 5:1–13). Little wonder the American feminist ecotheologian Sallie McFague (1993, p. 112) argues that the root of our ecological crisis is the refusal of humans to be in their place so that other creatures can have their space.

I think that the indictment of Christianity by Wallace, De La Torre, White Jr., Johnson, and others is, in many respects, warranted. In his discussion on the human roots of our ecological crisis, Pope Francis admits that the misuse of Judeo-Christian teachings down through history has played a key role in bringing us to our present state. He criticizes the dominion paradigm, noting that “nowadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 67). Three times in chapter three of Laudato Si’, in three paragraphs, Pope Francis (2015b, para. 118, 119, 122) denounces modern anthropocentrism as being a “misguided anthropocentrism”. This mindset not only compromises the intrinsic dignity of nature but also harms human beings. The problem lies in our refusal to accept our creaturely limitations as humans, which then turns us into impostor omnipotent lords and masters over creation, for, as Pope Francis (2015b, p. 115) notes, “When human beings fail to find their true place in this world, they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves”.

If at the root of our ecological crisis and our crisis of place is an anthropological crisis, what sort of persons are we called to be in order to better respond to the challenge of the present moment? In developing a coherent theology of place, it is imperative to provide an adequate anthropological foundation. “There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology” (Pope Francis 2015b, par. 118). In many ways, “anthropology forms the crux of ecological theology” (Conradie 2005, p. 3). The need for an adequate anthropology is not merely theoretical but has far-reaching implications for how we live in this world and in our places. “Whether man sees himself as a creature of God or as a highly developed ape will make a distinct difference in his attitude toward concrete facts; in each case as well, he will respond to very different inner callings” (Gehlen 1988, p. 35). It is not within the scope of this article to discuss the various classical and modern anthropologies that have tried to understand the human person. The focus here is to understand the place of humanity in the Earth community.

In his book An Ecological Christian Anthropology: At Home on Earth? Ernst M. Conradie (2005, p. 6) notes that an adequate ecological Christian anthropology must respond to these three anthropological issues: the crisis of alienation of humanity from nature, the crisis of anthropocentrism, which overemphasizes the unique position of human beings within the realm of creation, and the crisis of domination in the name of superiority and difference of the human species over the rest of the Earth community. Addressing these crises invites “a new appreciation for the situatedness of human beings within the larger earth community, for the need for a sense of place” (Conradie 2005, p. 6). Firstly, there is a need for ecotheology to recover our human identity as creatures of God endowed with intelligence and freewill and given the priestly duty of tending creation and joining with creation in giving worship to the Creator (Genesis 2:15, Daniel 3:57–88, Psalm 148). Secondly, this recovery calls for a humble recognition that as humans we are “earth-lings” (Myers 2016, p. 120), “dusty earthlings” (Mustol 2017, p. 1), formed from the soil of the earth and destined to return to it when we die. As earthlings, we “commune with the Creator not through some sort of placeless, transcendent spirit-realm, but through immanent geographies” (Myers 2016, p. 120). Thirdly, we need to recover the paradigm of creation as a community. This paradigm sees the various elements in creation as being wired together in a pattern of mutual relationships in an interdependent world. In this web of relationships, humans “are situated within, not over, the magnificent circle of life, whose center and encompassing horizon is the generous God of life” (Johnson 2015, pp. 267–68).

Aligned with this threefold anthropological recovery, Wallace (2019, p. 1) calls for a rediscovery of the animistic understanding of the world embedded in Christianity. This understanding can give rise to an Earth-based spirituality that recognizes the holiness of plants, the sacredness of animals, and the hallowed nature of landscapes. What this means is that an anthropologically founded theology of place must give “careful consideration to the natural world in its own right as an irreplaceable element in the theological project” (Johnson 2015, p. xv). The work of the contributors to the Earth Bible series aligns with this unique moral task of discerning how our biblical–theological heritage supports ecojustice and considers the intrinsic dignity of the Earth (Habel 2000). Let us now turn to the last part of the discussion to explore how some scholars and practitioners are rediscovering the significance of place and engaging in place-based ethics and praxis.

5. Integral Ecology as Ethics and Praxis of Place

The central ethical question is how human beings ought to live. To engage with this question is to ponder the kind of world we desire and the kind of world we want to leave to those coming behind us. Pope Francis (2015b, para. 160) expounds on this question when he writes: “When we ask ourselves what kind of world we want to leave behind, we think in the first place of its general direction, its meaning, and its values. Unless we struggle with these deeper issues, I do not think that our concern for ecology will produce significant results”. Evidently, Pope Francis is concerned about the way human beings are treating the Earth and treating one another. He is worried that “we may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 161). Early on in Laudato Si’, he lamented the fact that “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 21). This is due not just to the effects of pollution, loss of biodiversity, waste, and environmental degradation, but also to the mindset that sees the Earth as merely a pile of endless resources to be mindlessly extracted—a symptom of what he discerns as “a throwaway culture” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 22). Our current modern patterns of production and consumption are unsustainable because they are leaving huge footprints of socio-ecological catastrophe in many parts of the world. For people to grow in responsibility, solidarity, and compassionate care for the Earth and one another, there is an urgent need for “new convictions, attitudes, and forms of life” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 202).

In order to recover our deepest identity and kinship with nature, some have argued that we need to reimagine ourselves as particular people living in particular places—as members of local ecologies and social communities. John Mustol (2017, p. 51) frames this task with great precision and clarity:

Anthropologists have noted that people who have lived sustainably in particular places for thousands of years come to know the climate, the land, and the local flora and fauna of their regions, their homes. They understand their dependencies on the soil, plants, animals, and resources. As a result they learn how to live in a way that is aligned with the principles, patterns, parameters, and limits of their home ecosystem. Some modern farmers, ranchers, hunters, and foresters who work closely with nature also develop these connections. Although we humans have been migratory throughout much of our history, overall we have generally felt more “at home” when we settled down and became residents of particular places. Certainly, much of this sense of belonging is social—being with family, friends, and neighbors in a community—but it is also ecological. People who live for generations in a particular place come to know it well and to love and appreciate it. When this happens, we tend to take ownership and have a deeper commitment for the care and attention required in order to maintain our home over the long term. Not only does the place belong to us, but we belong to the place.

Ched Myers (2016, p. 19) suggests that today’s Christians need to learn the praxis of watershed discipleship. What is unique about this form of discipleship is that it promotes sound Christian ecological ethos and practices that honor creation’s possibilities while being rooted in a place. As a socio-environmental praxis, watershed discipleship has its roots in the bioregional grassroots movements in North America that go back to the 1970s when artists, activists, writers, natural scientists, and back-to-the-landers began to respond to the interlocking social, environmental, and economic catastrophes they were witnessing in a rapidly modernizing and globalizing world (Campbell 2024, p. 283). The Christians who are exploring the praxis of watershed discipleship are connected to place through action and resistance. They believe that in this Anthropocene era, a lot depends on whether Christians choose discipleship or denial (Myers 2016, p. 15). Despite the historical collusion of Christianity with forces of colonization, practitioners of watershed discipleship believe that Christianity can be rehabilitated and Christian theology can be decolonized and made to play a key role in the call for Christians to “reinhabit our watersheds as church, allowing the natural and social landscapes to shape our symbolic life, mission engagements, and material habits” (Myers 2016, p. 123). In this respect, Myers (2016, p. 123) offers a specific example of how the reinhabitation of our watershed can be done within the liturgy:

Why not celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration on a local hilltop, Pentecost around a fire pit, or Christmas in a local barn? Meanwhile, parish artists can imagine ways to bring bioregional symbols into conventional worship spaces, imaging the mountain peaks or offshore islands that define the horizon, or the tumbling waterfalls or braided rivers that shape local valleys… How can our music and litanies, altars and furniture, windows and statuary help (and prod) parishioners to learn about this place where the body of Christ is incarnated?

The ecoliturgical praxis that Myers suggests is one that has long shaped the liturgical sensibility and ethos of the Orthodox tradition, whereby the liturgy is not only an event of encountering God and the community but divine worship that is grounded in the land, in a place. Speaking out of this sensibility, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (2012, p. 182) explains that “the natural world acquires a deep significance because it participates in the plan of divine economy”. Bartholomew (2012, p. 96) believes that “our sin toward the world, or the spiritual root of all our pollution, lies in our refusal to view life and the world as a sacrament of thanksgiving, and as a gift of constant communion with God on a global scale”. He argues that “the final purpose of creation is not its use or abuse for man’s individual pleasure, but something far more sublime and sacred” (Bartholomew 2012, p. 195). For Orthodox Christians, the liturgy is not merely a ceremonial ritual, it is a relational architecture in which the various elements of creation are seen as icons in the relationship between God, people, and place (Chryssavgis 2019, pp. 119–22).

Awareness of the sacredness of creation has led many Christians around the world to sacrifice their lives in defense of their lands and our environment against neoliberal capitalist and extractivist forces of violence and destruction. In her brilliant book Ecomartyrdom in the Americas: Living and Dying for Our Common Home, Elizabeth Gandolfo did an impressive job of exposing the palpable dangers, threats, and risks associated with living in some places in our world, “places where the health and dignity of human beings, the land, and more-than-human creatures are sacrificed for the sake of a ‘greater good’—usually economic gain, political power, and/or the satisfaction of consumptive desire” (Gandolfo 2023, p. 12). Through her narrative of the exemplary witness of ecomartyrs in Latin America who chose to sacrifice their lives rather than allow the logic of extractivism to prevail, we are given more than passing hints of the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor. What is quite significant is that Gandolfo considers the witness of these ecomartyrs as acts of resistance that constitute a praxis that can inspire new forms of pastoral and social life rooted in solidarity with the Earth and with the poor. In addition, she shows that the production and circulation of popular narratives of the ecomartyrs through music, art, poetry, posters, murals, t-shirts, books, cartoons, documentary films, theater productions, etc., are forms and strategies of place-based resistance that can inspire the eco-political praxis of liberation (Gandolfo 2023, p. 170).

A decolonized Christian ecotheology can contribute to promoting a vision of the world as “geophany”, a concept coined by the Irish writer Tim Robinson to mean the showing forth of the Earth as a vehicle of revelation and the discovery of the sacred (Alexander 2015, p. 14). This way of seeing the world will help today’s humanity in applying the brakes on the reckless exploitation of the resources under our feet given that “any space in creation can become an axis mundi, because all spaces are alive with Spirit” (Myers 2016, p. 119). It is evident that this ideal is not necessarily fancied by people steeped in the mentality of capitalist modernity, which sees the world as merely a store of resources to be exploited and extracted for human use. It is this mentality, “based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods,” which “leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 106). A decolonized Christian ecotheology has the urgent task of deconstructing this paradigm. As Fred Bahnson asks, “If there were coal under Mount Horeb, Sinai or another place we associate with God’s presence, would we remove that mountain to get at it?” (Bahnson and Wirzba 2012, p. 55).

Furthermore, a decolonized Christian ecotheology needs to recognize Indigenous peoples and communities as producers of traditional ecological knowledge and practices that can guide us in our thinking about an ecologically sustainable future. This is because Indigenous communities have, over several millennia, endeavored to foster diverse forms of ecological stewardship rooted in the awareness of the sacredness of place. Commenting on the wisdom of Indigenous traditions in relation to environmental care, the African theologian Odomaro Mubangizi (2022, p. 93) states that the metaphysical foundation for integral ecology in Africa is vital force: “Whatever people engage in—be it rituals, prayers, work, celebrations, hunting, dance, you name it—the overall concern is the enhancement of life in its entirety.” He notes that the African ethics of ubuntu provides incentives for the reciprocity and mutuality that should characterize the relationship among humans, non-humans, and the environment (Mubangizi 2022, p. 93). The Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai (2010, p. 79) has also pointed out that the Kikuyu people nurtured and cultivated a sacred and spiritual imagination of places before the arrival of white settlers in the early 1900s. Maathai (2010, p. 79) explains:

For my mother, and the generations before her, the honoring of certain trees was part of a general reverence for nature. In the Kikuyu tradition, one was obliged to remove one’s sandals if you approached a tree during a ceremony or were climbing Mount Kenya, which at the turn of the last century was completely covered with trees. Even those elders with spiritual authority would walk barefoot if they went up the mountain; indeed, so sacred was the mountain that it was impermissible to even crush wild mushrooms underfoot on one’s journey through its forests.

Christians and others aspiring to watershed discipleship have good reasons to draw on Indigenous ecological wisdom “to provide a kind of primordial foundation for the journey of re-placement” (Myers 2016, p. 119). This is certainly not a call for us to return to the Stone Age but a summons for us to take a different road from the one that has brought us to our present crisis. This would mean looking at reality in a different way. “We may be unable to return wholesale to a premodern sensibility, but we can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the myths of our ancestors because they still have something to teach us” (Armstrong 2022, pp. 23–24).

Thankfully, one does not have to be a Christian to cultivate and nurture a place-based praxis of ecological care. In this respect, I would like to conclude by drawing on the experience of Wendell Berry, a famous American environmental activist and farmer, on how we can each live in our place. In his geo-biographical essay, “A Native Hill”, Berry narrates how growing up in the upland town of Port Royal in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky made a significant impression on his appreciation of place. Berry’s family history in this place stretches back to his great-great-grandparents. He considers the place and its history as intimately woven into the fabric of his own life. He narrates:

In my teens, when I was away at school, I could comfort myself by recalling in intricate detail the fields I had worked and played in, and hunted over, and ridden through on horseback—and that were richly associated in my mind with people and with stories. I could recall even the casual locations of certain small rocks. I could recall the look of a hundred different kinds of daylight on all those places, the look of animals grazing over them, the postures and attitudes and movements of the men who worked in them, the quality of the grass and the crops that had grown on them. I had come to be aware of it as one is aware of one’s body; it was present to me whether I thought of it or not

(Berry 2002, pp. 3–4).

After many years of living away from Kentucky, Berry resigned his faculty position at New York University and went back to take a teaching position at the University of Kentucky, against the advice of a colleague who believed Berry was making a terrible mistake to leave New York, where he had acquired a certain reputation in the literary world. Berry (2002, p. 7) narrates that returning to Kentucky, where he had been born and bred, triggered “a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice”. The rest of the narrative offers key insights into what it means to live in a place, not merely as a physical location for realizing one’s dreams, but as a committed and nurturing member of the community. Permit me to quote at length from Berry to drive this point home:

My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life. And once that was settled I began to see the place with a new clarity and a new understanding and a new seriousness. Before coming back I had been willing to allow the possibility—which one of my friends insisted on—that I already knew this place as well as I ever would. But now I began to see the real abundance and richness of it. It is, I saw, inexhaustible in its history, in the details of its life, in its possibilities. I walked over it, looking, listening, smelling, touching, alive to it as never before. I listened to the talk of my kinsmen and neighbors as I never had done, alert to their knowledge of the place, and to the qualities and energies of their speech. I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things—the wild plants and animals, the natural processes, the local places—and to articulate my observations and memories. My language increased and strengthened, and sent my mind into the place like a live root system. And so what has become the usual order of things reversed itself with me; my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation. I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn

(Berry 2002, pp. 7–8).

What emerges so clearly from this narrative is the quest for indigeneity in a place, the quest for intimacy. This is not a romantic attachment to a place. Berry understands that a place can be open to the possibilities of violence, suffering, and destruction—just as his place in Kentucky was. But what makes a difference is the deep awareness of the potential for peace, stability, and flourishing that the place also affords. Berry understands how significant place is as “the necessary enabling condition for one’s own life” (Wirzba 2021, p. 70). This is what inspired his cultivation of the habit of intimacy with this place, “for it is only on the bases of intimacy that people can develop the detailed knowledge they need to live where they are without destroying it” (Wirzba 2021, p. 70).

The praxis that shaped Berry’s relation to his place is not exclusive to Berry. Its roots go back to the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which protested the cold rationality of the Enlightenment and tried to reconnect people back to nature. From the English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) to the American Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), we have a literary tradition of poets and writers who “saw nature as organic and filled with spiritual and moral meaning” and “sought to return humans back to their place within the natural order” (Mustol 2017, p. 47). This praxis needs to be recaptured in the discourse on integral ecology in our transient and highly mobile world. While we cannot stop people from moving from one place to another in this global age of mass mobility, each person needs a place they can call “home.” Without a “home,” it is impossible for us to resist the contemporary experience of “nomads without roots” (Pope Francis 2013, para. 29). For “in a frenetically mobile and ever more porous and inexorably globalizing world, we stand powerfully in need of such stable and coherent places in our lives—to ground us and orient us, and mark off a finite arena, rich with memory, for our activity as parents and children, as friends and neighbors, and as free and productive citizens” (McAllister and McClay 2014, p. 3). We are better able to care for places we call “home” because such places are bound up with our identity and provide the necessary enabling conditions for us to live and to live well.

6. Concluding Remarks

This article has attempted to lay out the basis for thinking about integral ecology in terms of the theology and ethics of place. The conviction is that integral ecology is not a speculative task, but a form of engagement and a praxis. It is an invitation to enter into a specific location, to be rooted in a place, to touch and feel the energies of life present in the place, and to make that place the center of one’s way of being in the world. I have provided the foundation for this conviction by drawing from philosophy, the Bible, theology, and contemporary social and cultural thought. As Pope Francis (2015b, para. 147) has cogently argued, integral ecology must consider “the setting in which people live their lives. These settings influence the way we think, feel, and act.” When people build “a network of solidarity and belonging” with the environment in which they live, “any place can turn from being a hell on earth into the setting for a dignified life” (Pope Francis 2015b, para. 148).