Cultivating a Common Sacred Flourishing: A Green Orthodox Christian Perspective

Abstract

During his address to the World Council of Religions for Peace in the summer of 2025; Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople; the leading voice for ecological awareness in the Eastern Orthodox Church; issued a profound call for people of faith to unite together in common cause to develop a ‘new natural philosophy’ that unites the scientific and the spiritual and which can serve as a framework for what he called a “common sacred flourishing.” This essay seeks to contribute to this task in two ways. First; by proposing a science-engaged theological framework for the Orthodox Christian tradition; I will argue that Orthodox theology is compatible with the emerging scientific fields of biosemiotics and biomimicry; which I will suggest may serve as the basis for the new natural philosophy the Patriarch describes. Secondly; I will propose that we adopt the term euzoia to refer to this common sacred flourishing as a new ecologically synergistic state of thriving and will argue that we can work toward achieving it by following the “canon of nature’s laws” described by the biomimetic thinker Janine Benyus. In doing so; I will conclude with a discussion of how each of these “natural laws” may be applied to the organization of our social and moral lives as we all collectively pursue our common sacred flourishing.

1. Introduction

During his address to the World Council of Religions for Peace in the summer of 2025, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the leading voice for ecological awareness in the Eastern Orthodox Church, issued a profound call for people of faith to unite together in common cause to ensure the flourishing of our Earthly community. Patriarch Bartholomew believes that there already exists a “common sacred worldview” shared amongst various religious traditions that is built upon “four fundamental pillars, which constitute a holistic view of reality” (Bartholomew 2025a). Bartholomew describes these four pillars as entailing a recognition of (1) the Sacred, (2) Human ontology as relational, (3) the Common Good, and (4) Earthly Life as Sacredly Grounded and deserving of respect (Bartholomew 2025a). Consequently, Patriarch Bartholomew extended an “invitation for [the world’s religions to develop] a ‘new natural philosophy’ that unites the scientific and the spiritual,” and which can serve as “a framework that aspires to function as the theoretical foundation” for a common sacred flourishing to be shared by the various peoples and creatures of our religiously and biologically diverse world (Bartholomew 2025a). He argues that, “[t]he power of this proposal lies in its attempt to bridge the chasm between faith and science,” insisting that “[t]he ‘Common Sacred Flourishing,’ [he envisions] therefore, is not simply a theoretical conception, but a guide for collaborative action, a framework that seeks to supplement even the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, adding the critical dimension of man’s relationship with the Sacred, a dimension that is often absent from purely secular designs” (Bartholomew 2025a).

Consequently, this essay seeks to contribute to this task in two ways. First, by proposing a science-engaged theological framework for the Orthodox Christian tradition, I will argue that Orthodox theology is compatible with the emerging scientific fields of biosemiotics and biomimicry, which I will suggest may serve as the basis for the new natural philosophy the Patriarch describes. Secondly, I will propose that we adopt the term euzoia to refer to this common sacred flourishing as a new ecologically synergistic state of thriving and will argue that we can work toward achieving it by following the “canon of nature’s laws” described by the biomimetic thinker Janine Benyus. In doing so, I will discuss how each of these “natural laws” may be applied to the organization of our social and moral lives. By placing Orthodox theology in dialogue with emerging scientific fields, such as biosemiology and biomimicry, I intend to demonstrate how Orthodox Christianity can develop a science-engaged theological perspective that is rooted within the ideas of some of its most esteemed theologians, yet which also embraces a naturalistic paradigm accessible to members of other religious traditions. To this end, it is my hope that this study may serve as a model for how other faiths can engage newly emerging scientific ideas and discover ways in which each can respectively engage scientific insights and mine its own religious tradition for conceptual resources capable of speaking beyond the particularities of its own worldview in order to contribute to the development of this new natural philosophy as we collectively pursue flourishing on our shared planetary home.

2. Wisdom in the Book of Nature: Biosemiosis & Biomimesis as the Foundations for a New Natural Philosophy1

During his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize in September of 2025, Patriarch Bartholomew alluded to “the book of nature and the book of scripture” that the scientist and the theologian read “in different languages” (Bartholomew 2025b). Within Orthodox Christianity there exists what we might call a ‘two-book approach’ to divine revelation, wherein the divine will is believed to be revealed through both scripture and nature. This dates back to the Patristic tradition. Drawing upon ideas originally put forth by Anthony of Egypt in the third century, in the seventh century Maximus Confessor claimed that divine revelation is not limited to scriptural texts but may also be found within the “book of nature” in the form of the “logoi,” or “divine words” that are ‘written’ within creation itself (Maximus 2018; Louth 2013; Foltz 2013; Theokritoff 2017). As the contemporary Orthodox theologian Elizabeth Theokritoff remarks, for “Maximus…the one Logos is many logoi… the many are one. The very texture of the universe is God the Word in action…” (Theokritoff 2017, p. 226). Maximus claimed that,”[t]he logoi may be recognized in the unremitting continuance of each individual species, the laws in the consistency of its natural activity” (Maximus 1981, p. 211) because, as Andrew Louth puts it, he believed that, “the created world has value, [and] meaning… and meaning is found in the logoi: so the logoi, in one sense at least, are created; they belong to the created order…” (Louth 2013, p. 63). As Maximos Constas explains, this paradigm of thought is

based on the [ancient Greek] belief that to everything that is manifest, outward, and material, there corresponds something hidden, inward, and spiritual. That the visible world was the reflection of an invisible world implied that visible objects were physical signs or symbols… No element or aspect of the cosmos, no matter how seemingly insignificant, was without a corresponding counterpart in the realm of the spirit. Because physical objects contained intelligible meaning that were “legible,” as it were by human beings, it seemed self-evident that such objects were constituted by a kind of code or script, so that the structure of the material world was closely correlated with the structure of language and speech. This analogy was partly encouraged by the Greek language itself, in which the word for the “elements” of matter and for the “letters” of the alphabet is one and the same (that is, στοιχεία). It followed that the universe had an alphabet and was organized like a language with combinations of elements producing the physical equivalents of letters, syllables, and words.

(Constas 2018, pp. 29–30)

Within this worldview human beings possess the capacity to ‘read the book of nature,’ and to ‘listen’ to what the logoi are ‘saying to us’ because these logoi permeating all of existence are the words of a living dynamic language and not some sort of static essences.

The notion that there are in fact two sources of revelation, one scriptural and one natural, both of which are legible, is a profoundly important, yet under-examined, aspect of Orthodox thought that opens an avenue for theology to robustly engage with the life sciences insofar as there is a deep recognition that there is wisdom to be found within the “book of nature” that scientists are capable of reading. Although some sort of conflict between “religion” and “science” is often presupposed to be the default view, as the theologians John Perry and Joanna Leidenhag astutely observe, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’ could not possibly be in conflict until the nineteenth century at the earliest, because, until then, their definitions as distinct entities had not yet been developed” (Perry and Leidenhag 2021, p. 246). Commenting on the tragedy of the modern conflict between religion and science, Bartholomew has said,

we have witnessed a tragic alienation—religion withdrawing to its sanctuaries, science retreating to its laboratories, each suspicious of the other’s claims upon truth. For far too long, faith and science have circled each other cautiously, sometimes approaching mutual reconciliation, more often hardening into reciprocal incomprehension. Yet this separation was never meant to be. The fourth-century Church Father and mystic Gregory of Nyssa understood what we have forgotten: that divine grace ‘pervades the whole creation, the lower nature being mixed with the supernatural.’ There is no sacred and secular, no spiritual and material—only one truth, a single reality, shimmering with interconnection, pulsing with divine presence.

(Bartholomew 2025b)

Patriarch Bartholomew’s proclamation that, “There is no sacred and secular, no spiritual and material—only one truth, a single reality shimmering with interconnection, pulsing with divine presence” (Bartholomew 2025b) may strike some as anathema for an Orthodox Christian thinker, let alone a Patriarch, to utter, however, this is a commonly held view within the Orthodox Christian tradition that is perfectly consistent with Orthodox Christianity’s longstanding panentheism.2 The Orthodox Christian tradition not only believes that the Divine created both the entire cosmos and all that exists within it but also that the Divine permeates all of Creation, including all forms of biotic and abiotic existence in the cosmos and on planet earth, in the form of Divine energies. A panentheistic perspective has been asserted by preeminent theologians throughout the history of the Orthodox theological tradition. For instance, Maximus the Confessor3 claimed that, “The Holy Spirit is not absent from any created being… The Holy Spirit is present unconditionally in all things… and vivifies the natural seeds within them” (Maximus 1981, p. 180) because “[i]n His supreme goodness God has not only made the divine and incorporeal essences… He also permeates with echoes of His majesty things that are sensory…” (Maximus 1981, p. 208). Reasserting this view in the Medieval period, Gregory Palamas,4 a highly acclaimed theologian in Orthodox Christian circles, wrote, “All other beings are effects of the creative energy…The divine energy and grace of the Spirit, being everywhere present and remaining inseparable from the Spirit” (Palamas 1995, p. 390). Modern examples of Orthodox theologians expressing this point of view include John Zizioulas, who “regards the world as sacred because it stands in dialectical relationship with God” (Zizioulas 2006, pp. 289–90); Philip Sherrard, who believes in “a sacred cosmology—one that affirms both a sacred human image and a sacred world image” (Sherrard 2013, p. 219) and argues that “the creation of the world is… the expression of divine life” (Sherrard 2013, p. 219); as well as John Chryssavgis, who has spoken of humanity’s ability for “Discerning the face of God in the face of the world…” (Chryssavgis 2019, p. 2).

These types of views lend themselves to developing a robust science-engaged theology. Science-Engaged Theology (SET) is a newly emergent area of inquiry developed by the John Templeton Foundation and which is taking shape by scholars working under the auspices of this new moniker, some of the earliest of which were John Perry and Joanna Leidenhag when both were jointly conducting research while working at the University of St. Andrews.5 Unlike the more commonplace area of research frequently referred to as the “religion-science dialogue,” which often presupposes some sort of conflict between these two domains of inquiry, Science-Engaged Theology presupposes the overarching compatibility of religious faith and scientific inquiry. Ultimately, Science-Engaged Theology (SET), puts forth a vision of science as an authentic source of theological knowledge alongside scripture, tradition, and reason. This implies that today, theologians seeking to draw on the authority of the historical Christian tradition in their attempts to put forth an authentically Orthodox Christian understanding of theology’s relationship to modern science ought not simply cite the views of historical theologians verbatim or attempt to apply their exact views directly to modern problems. Rather, Orthodox Christian scholars working today ought to recognize the ways in which the fore-bearers of Christianity itself engaged the naturalistic theories and discoveries of their own day and therefore attempt to live and think in a similar manner by seeking ways in which scientific inquiry can help foster new theological insights as they heed the Patriarch’s call for developing a new natural philosophy.

Consequently, “Science-engaged theology identifies where theologians are already employing or presuming a certain picture of the empirical world, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not” (Perry and Leidenhag 2021, p. 247). I believe that a good place for Orthodox Christians to begin to develop a new natural philosophy is by acknowledging that within Orthodoxy there is actually a longstanding tradition of positive theological engagement with empirical inquiry. For instance, Saint Theodoros, writing in the ninth century, discussed the “use of the senses” and argued that “we should use them [the senses] in order to grasp the Creator through His creation, seeing Him reflected in created things as the sun is reflected in water, since in their inner beings they are in varying degrees images of the primal cause of all. Such, then, is our aim” (Theodoros 1995, p. 45). In our modern era, Nikos Nissiotis speaks of “the interdependence of material and spiritual life,” going so far as to use “the term ‘divine-materialism’” to describe “nature as a creation constantly being renewed through the energies of the Holy Spirit and as the supreme place, time, and means for the relationship between God and man to become a reality” (Nissiotis 2013, p. 203). This idea of divine materialism is profound, for rarely do we hear Christian thinkers use the term “materialism” in any type of positive way. But, beyond its rarity, the notion of divine materialism points to the importance of divine incarnation within this paradigm of thought and highlights the spiritual dimensions of materiality. This, is turn, enables Orthodox Christianity to view scientific analysis of material reality as imbued with a spiritual purpose.

This type of divine materialism, or theistic physicalism, as I would prefer to call it, is evident in Maximus Confessor’s Logocentric understanding of natural law. As Torstein Tollefsen explains, “The logoi therefore are the laws of the cosmos… understood as divine efficient-formal-final causality binding together created beings horizontally and connecting them vertically with the Creator without transcending the basic differences between them” (Tollefsen 2008, p. 81). And, as Andrew Louth notes, “the[se] logoi, in one sense at least, are created; they belong to the created order…So the logos of a created being means what it is, what defines its nature…” (Louth 2013, p. 63). However, since these ‘natural laws’ are actually the divine logoi, or divine ‘words’ that are not only immanently incarnate in the natural world but are perpetually being spoken, this should not be confused for some sort of essentialism, whereby the ‘nature’ of a creature is thought of as being static rather than dynamic. Despite the fact that many esteemed Orthodox theologians have used the Greek term ousia (commonly translated as “essence”) when discussing ontological and metaphysical issues, they tend to speak of the dynamism and mutability of a creature’s ousia in ways in which the Latin term substantia, which is also commonly translated as “essence” fails to capture and which go beyond any type of essentialism. I would argue that what we find operative within Maximus’ theory of the Logos-logoi is actually a form of semiotic ontological non-substantialism. As Bruce Foltz explains,

With Maximos, it becomes even clearer than before that the cosmic logoi are neither Platonic forms, nor Augustinian exemplars, nor ‘ideas’ in the mind of God… Nor are they Aristotelian essences awaiting their ‘accidental’ instantiation. Rather than essentialist, Maximos’ understanding of the logoi is intentionalistic and semiotic… For Maximos, what is truly to be ‘seen’ through nature are the divine logoi, each unique and specific to every creature…. Maximos maintains that the inner principle or logos of every being is not only intelligible to noetic apprehension, but that it is what above all is intelligible… the logoi are words, divine ‘sayings,’ the divine and eternal words spoken from all eternity, and rendered incarnate… They are in each case what God ‘has to say’ in and though particular things.

(Foltz 2013, pp. 169–80)

Insofar as Maximus’ understanding of the logoi is semiotic rather than essentialist, I believe it can be used to place Orthodox theology in dialogue with the newly emerging scientific field of biosemiotics, or biosemiology, which views “biology as a sign systems study, or, in other words, a study of semiosis in living nature” (Kull et al. 2011, p. 15). The semiotic biologists, Kalevi Kull, Claus Emmeche and Jesper Hoffmeyer claim “that life is a self-reading text, and that an aim of biosemiotics is to know what other organisms know” (Kull et al. 2011, p. 13). Elsewhere they claim that, “Life processes are not only significant for the organisms they involve. Signification, meaning, interpretation and information are not just concepts used and constructed by humans for describing such processes” (Kull et al. 2011, p. ix). Rather, semiosis is a fundamental aspect of living systems. As a non-reductionistic form of biology, biosemiotics “sees living creatures not just as passively subjected to universal laws of nature, but also as active systems of sign production, sign mediation and sign interpretation, that harness the physical laws in order to live and sometimes to make a more complex living” (Kull et al. 2011, p. 1). Expressing a view that is highly compatible with the Orthodox tradition, the semiotician, Paul Cobley, even goes so far as to liken these semiotic process to the divine Logos of the Christian tradition when he comments on the opening phrase of the “Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word…’ [writing that] [i]n biosemiotics, it would be more apposite to suggest that ‘In the beginning was semiosis…’” (Cobley 2016, p. 61). Cobley makes this claim insofar as “[t]he continuity of biological evolution would, on this account, be understood (at least in part) as a continuity of semiotic capabilities…” (Robinson 2010, p. 192), which is because “processes at all levels of organismic function are controlled by semiotic interactions between components that incessantly adjust biochemical or physiological activity to changing situations” (Hoffmeyer 2011, p. 60). This is a phenomenon that Jesper Hoffmeyer referred to as semiotic scaffolding, a concept that is crucial to understanding the non-reductionistic and relational ontology of the biosemiotic paradigm. In contrast to other biological theories, “[r]ather than reducing organismic behavior to inherited holistic lumps of reflexes, so-called instincts, biosemiotics suggests new subtle kinds of learning in situ…” (Hoffmeyer 2011, p. 62). All of this speaks to the ways in which biosemiosis may aid theological attempts to understand precisely how the logoi are embedded within nature and provide the conceptual resources that will enable humans to ‘read the book of nature’ more critically and with greater fluency.

Becoming fluent in the languages found within the book of nature is of utmost importance because I believe that which makes humans unique as a species is not our rational or linguistic capacities, but our ability to perceive the logoi inherent within natural creation as well as our capacity to both recognize and decipher the semiotic fields of meaning being generated and interpreted by both our own species as well as other species—including other animals, plants, and fungi—in ways that other earthly lifeforms are incapable of. This view is perfectly compatible with the Orthodox Christian worldview because, as Andrew Louth explains,

human beings are logikos, the adjective from logos, usually translated as “rational” but really connotating something much broader and deeper. One could say human beings, as logikos, are capable of discerning meaning…they are capable of discerning the logoi of creation, the whole depth of meaning that can be found in creation in all its manifold splendor.

(Louth 2013, p. 64)

Furthermore, learning to read the book of nature with greater fluency may actually enable us to morally improve ourselves as a species. I say this because in Ambigua 10: 1128 C-D, Maximus went so far as to claim that in regard to learning how to “live an upright and blameless life with God… the two laws—both the natural and the written law—are of equal honor…[and that] neither is greater or less than the other…” (Louth 1996, p. 109). Maximus believed “that the human person, being tutored by the natural laws and ways of visible realities, should easily find the road of righteousness which leads to Him [God]” (Maximus 2018, p. 305). That which is being suggested in these passages is that human ethical inquiry be informed by the sacred wisdom disclosed to humanity through the proper study and contemplation of the natural world. This is a profound claim because it radically challenges the prevailing view amongst many theologians and religious philosophers that the revelatory authority of either scripture or analytic rationality ought to be seen as the only means of understanding divinely revealed truths and it directly challenges the idea of the naturalistic fallacy in ethics, which asserts that we cannot derive an ‘ought’ from what naturally ‘is’ (Moore 1903). On the contrary, as Maximus claimed, it is “by means of the visible [natural] world [that] we should understand whence we came, what we are, for what purpose we were made and where we are going” (Maximus 1981, p. 147). This is because Orthodox Christianity does not view ontology and ethics as completely separate domains of inquiry so that to postulate ethical norms without first coming to an understanding of the nature of the circumstances and the beings within it would be to act imprudently for it would presuppose that “who and what we are” as beings who live our lives immersed within in a living natural environment has nothing to do with how we ought to live. The assertion that, ‘to derive normative ideas from an analysis of what is natural is a fallacy’ is predicated upon a form of philosophical non-naturalism that creates an unbridgeable chasm between the descriptive and the normative, and epistemologically separates the ontological and the ethical domains of human knowledge. The rationalistic tendency to restrict normative statements to logical abstractions is to reduce ethics to a subfield of logic and thereby robs ethical inquiry of its ability to provide us with guidance on how we ought to live in light of what the good life, or flourishing, actually is. That which is being suggested herein is a more holistic and integrated paradigm in which nature is not simply reduced to a set of ‘static’ or ‘objective’ ‘facts’ or ‘data’ but a paradigm in which nature is seen as both living and dynamic. Therefore, while the move from naturalness to normativity might not be a logical necessity, it may indeed be considered wise if one’s goal is to live well in light of who we are as a species.

From an Orthodox Christian perspective, there is divine wisdom to be discerned through the study of nature and it is through understanding this wisdom that humanity comes to understand its purpose as a species as well as the ways in which we, as humans, are to pursue flourishing and the good life. This will require humans to learn how to engage in types of ecological and cosmological hermeneutics, whereby we can interpret and translate the messages garnered from studies of the natural world as a means of learning from biological and ecological semiotic processes. In this way we can come to discover and comprehend the principles, processes and modes of flourishing that are to be imitated in our own personal and social lives as we develop a more ecological approach to ethical life and deeper appreciation of the divine wisdom permeating nature. As Saint Gregory of Sinai argued, “a true philosopher is one who perceives in created things their spiritual Cause…he interprets what is intelligible and invisible in terms of what is sensible and visible…In this way the visible world becomes our teacher…” (Palamas 1995, pp. 245–46).

This is an area where the Orthodox Christian worldview most closely resembles the point of view held by modern advocates of biomimicry. Having developed in the 1990s, the emerging field of biomimicry is an interdisciplinary area of naturalistic thought grounded in the idea that humans ought to be engaged in “the conscious emulation of life’s genius” (Benyus 2002, p. 5). Janine Benyus, one of the pioneers in biomimetic thinking, describes the field as “a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems” (Benyus 2002, p. I). Commenting on Benyus’ work, the philosopher Henry Dicks claims that the philosophical foundations of the biomimetic paradigm rests on three principles, namely: (1) nature is a model for humans to imitate, which he dubs: the poietic principle; (2) nature is a measure by which humans ought to make moral judgements, which he dubs: the ethical principle; & (3) nature is a mentor from which humanity can learn, which he holds to be the epistemological principle (Dicks 2016).

Arguing that a flaw in Benyus’ original framework is that it does not sufficiently answer the ontological question of what nature is, Dicks proposes a fourth, ontological, principle to fill this void. Dicks turns to the ancient Greeks to propose that an understanding of nature as physis—the Greek word for nature which literally means: “to grow and develop” in the sense of regeneration—serves as biomimicry’s ontological principle (Dicks 2016). This is an important addition because, following the critiques of the environmental philosopher Matthews (2011, 2019), without an attentiveness to the biosphere’s regenerative qualities as a living physiological organismic system, the biomimetic paradigm might lend itself to not simply imitating nature but also to replacing natural systems (especially in regards to the technological developments occurring within the socio-economic realm) or to imitating natural designs with the use of ecologically harmful materials or practices; all of which would lead us astray from an authentically sustainable form of flourishing. In order to remedy this, Matthews has proposed the adoption of a bio-synergistic approach claiming that, “[b]iosynergy … operates in actual partnership with existing biological systems” (Matthews 2011, p. 58) and elsewhere, claims that, “[i]n order for biomimicry to avoid being understood in such a purely human-focused sense, it needs to be supplemented with a further, explicitly ethical principle of bio-inclusiveness—a principle that urges protection for all species” (Matthews 2019, p. 574). Matthews’ concern is shared by the Orthodox theologian Elizabeth Theokritoff, who argues that, “Using the world about us in a way that is synergistic rather than confrontational points us toward the intended synergy of humanity and the visible Creation…” (Theokritoff 2017, p. 232).

I believe that the biomimetic paradigm can be bio-synergistic if instead of attempting to ‘hack’ the processes of nature, so to speak, to serve our own anthropocentric ends of pursuing pleasure or profit, any potential practitioners of biomimicry approach the study of nature with a reverent attitude and view the knowledge they derive from such study as sacred wisdom rather than as profit-bearing data. As Andrew Louth notes, “we can only understand the logoi of the cosmos if we renounce any attempt on our part to understand the world as material for human exploitation and seek to see it as expressive of the Logos of God” (Louth 2013, p. 66). Although biomimicry does not share Theokritoff or Louth’s theistic understanding of the world and is usually discussed and implemented in the context of technological or architectural design, when we begin to reflect upon the ways in which various systems of life naturally function and flourish we may realize that we have something to learn from the natural world in regard to designing our humanly constructed social systems and guiding our personal conduct so that they are more conducive to cultivating a bio-inclusive form of flourishing. This bio-inclusive form of living would be capable of positively contributing to biospheric thriving as well as our own human ability to thrive and prosper. Therefore, we may rightfully call such a bio-inclusive form of thriving a common sacred flourishing.

Yet, what type of moral knowledge could nature possibly possess? As Dicks observes, “the knowledge possessed in nature is not of the knowing-that variety but rather knowing-how” (Dicks 2019, p. 47). The know-how that natural organisms possess and display in their processes of living as well as the know-how that the biosphere possesses as an organismic entity is imperative for understanding how we can come to envision what it would mean for humanity to foster an authentic form of flourishing as a species cohabitating with myriad other creatures in our biospheric home. Keeping in mind the idea that human actions ought not merely be biomimetic—in the sense of pure imitation—but ought also be bio-synergistic, I believe we can achieve a more bio-inclusive or bio-synergistic mode of biomimetic practice by acknowledging that nature knows how to ensure that complex webs of different species survive, thrive and flourish and therefore that what we have to learn from studying nature, first and foremost, is how to flourish as a species sharing a planet with our living creaturely kin. The idea that natural organisms and ecosystems know how to flourish and that this knowledge conveys the notion that it is through synergistic relations that such flourishing is achieved is evident in the biomimetic perspective of evolution put forth by Michael Braungart and William McDonough, when they write:

Popular wisdom holds that the fittest survive, the strongest, leanest, largest, perhaps meanest—whatever beats the competition. But in healthy, thriving natural systems it is actually the fitting-est who thrive. Fitting-est implies an energetic and material engagement with place, and an interdependent relation to it

(Braungart and McDonough 2009, p. 120)

Reflecting on the same passage, Dicks claims, “nature holds important epistemological lessons for us, including the ethical lesson that the things we do should fit in to the natural environments where we do them, as well as technical lessons regarding how it is that we might go about achieving that objective” (Dicks 2019, p. 53).

Ultimately, we commit what we might call the anthropocentric fallacy when we ignore nature’s epistemological lessons and rely solely upon our own human rationality to devise our systems of knowledge. Commenting on the “false knowledge of… the wise men of this world… the worldly-wise,” who treat their own self-constructed systems of thought as if they were the ultimate authority, the medieval Orthodox theologian Nikitas Stithatos said of such people that, “they are entangled in the nets of their own concepts and reasoning, for they have rejected true wisdom and truly divine knowledge” (Stithatos 1995, p. 159). I cite this passage because it raises the idea that when we treat our humanly constructed systems as existentially authoritative (as is all too often the case in modern economics, for instance) or when we turn toward our technologies for the answers and solutions to our most existential problems (as is often the case with techno-optimists’ responses to the climate crisis) we fail to be receptive to the sacred knowledge that is embedded within the living and semiotic processes of the natural world. This speaks to another area of compatibility between Orthodox thinking and biosemiotics, especially in regard to moral inquiry, because as Paul Cobley claims, “Ethics, in the context of biosemiotics, must have consanguinity with the rest of the biosphere. This is in marked contrast to a picture in which ethics emanates from an invented human project” (Cobley 2016, p. 61). And, in the words of Maximus Confessor, to base our ethics upon our own ingenuity, “would be attributing to human ingenuity more power to establish a perfect order of things than to God, and to an ingenious mutilation of nature the ability to make good shortcomings in God’s creation…” (Maximus 1981, p. 270).

3. Euzoia: Toward a Common Sacred Flourishing Grounded Nature’s Norms

Thus far, I have been suggesting that we can cultivate the type of common sacred flourishing that Patriarch Bartholomew envisions by taking cues from the processes found within natural creation and learning how to apply what we learn to human affairs. When pondering what this mode of flourishing might actually look like in practice, I would like to suggest that we adopt a new term to capture the uniqueness of this reality because I believe that humanity’s misuse of the natural world is the result of our species having developed notions of goodness and flourishing that are tightly bound to the particularity of human personalities and sociality. Consequently, an authentically ecological vision capable of bringing forth an era in which humanity along with the natural world thrives ought to adopt a more inclusive view of what it means to flourish.

The Greek term eudaimonia, often translated as “flourishing,” is a favorite amongst virtue ethicists and may be translated as “goodness indwelling within the spirit.” It was used by Aristotle to denote the telos, or ultimate goal, of human life and has since been used to refer to the goal of flourishing on both the personal and communal levels. However, if understood from the type of naturalistic perspective being developed herein, flourishing comes to imply a multidimensional harmonious relationality: personally within our self, communally with other persons, ecologically with other living beings and all abiotic existence, and spiritually with the Divine. If eudaimonia is indeed the “indwelling of goodness within one’s person,” a genuinely ecological view of the good life will include, yet go beyond, the purely anthropological dimensions of flourishing captured by the concept of eudaimonia.

Therefore, I suggest we consider using the less common concepts of euzoia, meaning: “the good life,” and euzen, meaning: “well-being,” to refer to the goals of ecological flourishing and humanity’s wellbeing as natural creatures sharing a planetary home with our fellow creaturely kin. By adopting euzoia to refer to humanity’s ultimate telos, and euzen to refer to our more limited personal and localized communal goals, we can overcome the conceptual baggage and potential anthropocentric pitfalls of the eudaimonistic philosophical tradition by placing zoe,6 or life, at the center of our ethical considerations so that we do not neglect the ecological vitality of our biosphere when entertaining moral, social and political questions. Suffice it to say that, with zoe as the etymological root for euzoia and euzen, these concepts may retain a life-oriented ethical and existential significance that need not conflict with the bio in “biology” or “biomimicry” for instance, while simultaneously enabling us to advance a non-anthropocentric vision of flourishing rooted in our ecological intertwinement with other beings. From this perspective, all human social constructs (including economic, political, cultural, religious systems and technological innovations) ought to function in a manner that contributes to euzoia and euzen, or the flourishing and well-being of the entirety of the living Earth system itself. Ultimately, however, in order to give rise to new forms of human behavior, social organization, and governance capable of moving us toward states of euzoia and euzen, what we need is an understanding of law as natural and of nature as normative.

Espousing a vision in which nature is indeed normative, Benyus provides us with what she refers to as “a canon of nature’s laws” (Benyus 2002, p. 7). Unlike the various books of scripture found in the world’s myriad faith traditions, this canon of natural law may be shared by people of all faiths and none who seek guidance for ways in which humanity can strive for flourishing while maintaining a respect for the natural world as they do so. Benyus’ canon of natural law consists of nine precepts, which are:

(1)

“Nature runs on sunlight”

(2)

“Nature uses only the energy it needs”

(3)

“Nature fits form to function”

(4)

“Nature recycles everything”

(5)

“Nature rewards cooperation”

(6)

“Nature banks on diversity”

(7)

“Nature demands local expertise”

(8)

“Nature curbs excess from within”

(9)

“Nature taps the power of limits” (Benyus 2002, p. 7)

Despite the fact that these precepts are not explicitly ‘ethical,’ per se, they do point to a set of ‘natural laws,’ so to speak, beyond the more commonly known scientific “laws of nature,” such as gravity or the laws of thermodynamics, that may come to inform our human behavior, forms of constructing social systems, and modes of governance. At the outset of this essay, I mentioned that what Patriarch Bartholomew hoped for is the discovery of a set of principles beyond the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals that could serve as a source of moral and spiritual guidance for all of humanity. And, I believe that in conjunction with a teleological moral vision aiming toward the realization of euzoia, Benyus’ canon of natural law can help serve that role. Therefore, at this juncture, I would like to suggest ways in which we, as a human species, might go about pragmatically putting these precepts into practice in our social systems by commenting upon each ‘law’ in the ‘canon’.

(1) Nature runs on sunlight: In order to usher in a new era in which humanity and nature thrive and we achieve a common sacred flourishing, the source of energy humanity ought to use to power our technological artifacts should not only be renewable, but should primarily come from solar just as the source of energy that all land-based natural ecological and biological systems use is itself the Sun’s perpetually renewable energy through photosynthesis. Although one might try to argue that petroleum and coal reserves have also resulted from processes of photosynthesis and hence, are ultimately the effects of the sun’s self-regenerating energy, I would argue that since they require such long durations of time to build up beneath the earth’s surface, and because they require such ecologically destructive methods of retrieval, they are not energy sources whose use can be considered bio-synergistic because of the massive destruction that their extraction causes. Another reason why fossil fuels are not bio-synergistic is that they are not regenerative. Since as we saw above, a key feature of nature conceived of as physis is the principle of regeneration, we may deem the use of fossil fuels to fail our bio-synergistic litmus test. I say this to the extent that the timescale of the creation of fossil fuels and the timescale of humanity’s usage of them are disproportional to nature’s ability to regenerate them and regenerate itself at the sites of extraction. If our use of a ‘natural resource’ is not proportional to its rate of self-regeneration, one could argue that such use neglects a crucial dimension of said ‘resource,’ and hence, fails to meet the biosynergistic principle of the paradigm we have been developing.

Furthermore, by contributing to deleterious climatic changes through excessive carbon emissions, the sheer scale of humanity’s current usage of fossil fuels, such as coal and petroleum reserves, is not aligned with the paradigm being developed insofar as such usage fails to achieve a synergistic relationship with the ecological systems in which they are located as well as the overarching biospheric processes that maintain the stability of our planet’s climate. As we shall come to see, remaining within the limits of biospheric stability is another feature of nature’s canon that we must abide by in our pursuit of flourishing. I argue in favor of solar energy production systems because if performed correctly solar energy arguably results in a less harmful ecological impact. This is because unlike wind turbines, which cause ecological harm to oceanic systems (such as negatively impacting whales’ and dolphins’ use of sonar), or hydro-electric systems that rely on dams that often negatively impact fish migration and river health, for example, photovoltaic systems may be designed in a more bio-synergistic manner. While moral concerns certainly arise when considering the vast amounts of land—arable plots, grasslands or even deserts—that could be harmed or mismanaged when used solely for large-scale photovoltaic solar energy farms, if performed with prudent land-use practices in mind (such as agro-voltaic technology on farmland or the installation of photovoltaic solar panels on pre-existing structures), solar energy technologies hold great potential to be one of the most biomimetic and bio-synergistic sources of electrical energy (Sheikh et al. 2025; Ibikunle and Umoru 2025). Consequently, we ought to advance policies and provide subsidies for various forms of solar energy production, including but not limited to highly durable, localized and small-scale photovoltaic and agro-voltaic energy production and storage systems that are designed to work within existing ecosystems and to be resilient in the face of devastating climactic events.

(2) Nature uses only the energy it needs: This precept is essentially a form of what Christianity refers to as the cardinal virtue of temperance, otherwise known as self-restraint. Knowing what the necessities of life are as well as knowing how to cultivate one’s own self-restraint based upon knowledge of the natural limits of one’s self and circumstances so that all have their basic needs met was a defining feature of what was considered prudence and moderate living in the ancient and medieval periods. Not surprisingly, this is also a piece of wisdom that we are receiving from nature as well. Following the logic of this natural law, our governments ought to enact policies and provide subsidies for the use, manufacturing and distribution of energy-efficient technologies coupled with a variety of low-energy use incentives, such as personal and corporate tax deductions for low energy usage or refunds and rebates for decreased energy use from year to year. This is significant since energy-use is on the rise globally despite our growing awareness of the ecological and climatic crises. Furthermore, unlike carbon offsets, which simply encourage high carbon emissions in locations other than one’s own, low-energy incentives could actually help reduce energy consumption levels whilst simultaneously avoiding taking prohibitive measures, which are often met with greater resistance by the populace. Lastly, if coupled with the re-localization of small-scale solar energy production, those using the power will become more aware of just how precious a resource it is and may become more inclined to limit their use.

(3) Nature Fits Form to Function: The precept of “Fitting Form to Function” implies that there exists a teleological, or goal-oriented, dimension to our technological designs, developments and their applications as well as the design of our socio-economic and socio-political systems in that functionality presupposes an end, or goal, that the function itself is intended to serve. Currently, both our socio-economic system and technological development are respectively serving the goals of perpetual financial growth and increased efficiency and comfort without taking into consideration that we live on a planet with finite resources that are not always fungible, or interchangeable, due to the unique role they play within the larger ecosystem from which they are derived. Once we come to realize that humanity will only truly flourish by living synergistically with nature, we can come to a point at which we set euzoia as our ultimate measure for all technological developments and the ways in which we design and structure our socio-economic systems. In this way, both the economy and our technologies can themselves begin to become more biomimetic in design, bio-synergistic in their application and euzoic in their teleology.

(4) Nature recycles everything: This precept implies that wastefulness is itself a vice, and is incompatible with the genuine pursuit of flourishing. In a positive formulation, we could say that nature does not take anything for granted in that it treats nothing as valueless ‘waste,’ or ‘refuse,’ but rather finds a use for everything and in doing so recognizes that there is at minimum an instrumental value to everything that exists. Consequently, human societies ought to adopt zero-waste policies, enact laws that promote durability in the manufacturing of, as well as the reuse of, a variety of goods and which also prohibit the manufacture and use of ecologically unsound products, such as single-use plastics. Additionally, laws and policies requiring not simply the recyclability of products but the compostability of an array of products ought to be enacted so that when ‘recyclable products’ are not, or cannot be, recycled, which is often the case, they cause a minimal degree of long-term ecological harm as a result of being made from natural non-toxic materials that will eventually completely biodegrade instead of transforming into nanoparticles.

While ‘traditional’ recycling programs ought to be re-enacted where they have been dismantled, these should only be secondary in that recycling processes are energy-intensive and often times are far less efficient methods of reusing resources than simply designing repairable and durable goods or, when single-use is unavoidable (as is the case in food packaging, for instance), creating goods using completely natural biodegradable and fully compostable materials so that they return to the earth in ways that do not cause pollution. To this end, enacting laws and policies requiring the return and repair of things like appliances could be coupled with laws prohibiting the annual manufacture of machines and appliances such as cars, computers, televisions, ovens, refrigerators, and washing machines so that the companies producing these items can recoup, repair and return these appliances to customers. Or, at the very least, reuse the parts and materials in the manufacture and production of newer models moving forward. This would require policies that prohibit the practice of “planned obsolescence” as well as fiscal incentives for companies to adopt a dual focus on manufacturing as well as servicing the products they create, much like the Maytag company had done in the past with its “Maytag Man” advertisement campaign.

Ultimately, when we think of recycling, we need to think bigger and beyond the types of small-scale and largely ineffective ‘recycling’ programs that currently exist and need to address the entirety of our economy as a whole. That which we require to truly usher in an era of common sacred flourishing is a socio-economic system modeled upon the ways in which living organisms and ecosystems regeneratively exist and flourish in steady states of constantly flowing energy and matter which produce no waste and in which sufficiency of need is attained. One such model that shares the sentiments of the biomimetic thought patterns we have been drawing on is regenerative economics, which the economist John Fullerton describes as an economic system that uses “the universal principles and patterns underlying stable, healthy and sustainable living and non-living systems throughout the real world as a model for economic-system design” (Fullerton 2015, p. 21). Regenerative economics essentially proposes a form of economic biomimicry, whereby the principle of regeneration is used to guide the implementation of nonpolluting technologies for the reuse of waste as an energy source and the production of compostable and or reusable products as well as new systems of accounting for the value of biotic life and natural resources in our economic models.

(5) Nature rewards cooperation: The idea that “nature rewards cooperation” implies that it is through cooperative endeavors that life, and hence humanity, flourishes. Since the discoveries of Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and 1970s (Sagan 1967; Margulis 1998), researchers working in the life sciences have discovered that the phenomenon of symbiosis is not only widespread through the natural world, from the cellular level to plants and fungi and mammalian communities, but that symbiosis also lays at the heart of the very emergence of life itself, seeing as the eukaryotic cell responsible for all plant, fungal, and mammalian lifeforms was born from a symbiosis between a bacterium and a cell.

Within biology and ecology there are three levels of symbiosis: (i) the parasitic, in which one organism benefits at the expense of the other; (ii) the commensal, in which one organism benefits yet causes no harm to the other; and (iii) the mutualistic, in which all organisms involved benefit. While distinct, the commonality amongst all three forms of symbiosis is that organismic life is inclusionary. As Kent Peacock, a philosopher of biology, explains, “The central idea of symbiosis is that organisms live together in the sense that they include each other in their life cycles” (Peacock 2011, p. 224). Once thought to be a rare natural phenomenon and an exception to the largely self-interested and competitive essence of the natural world, symbiosis has been shown to be far more important evolutionarily and far more prevalent amongst living beings and organismic systems than previously thought. Because of Lynn Margulis’ pioneering work on the role of symbiosis in the origin of eukaryotic cells, which are responsible for the emergence of, and are still present within, all known complex life-forms—including: fungi, plants, and animals—we now know that symbiotic relations between organisms is far more prevalent in nature than many scientists working in the earlier twentieth could have ever imagined (Sagan 1967). There is an increasingly common view amongst scientific researchers that the very evolution of life on earth is a story of the emergence of increasingly complex forms of symbiotic relationality. Commenting on Margulis’ work, Peacock has gone so far as to say that, “the very origin of life can be understood as a symbiotic process” (Peacock 2011, p. 229).

Beyond being responsible for the origins of life itself, recent discoveries indicate that symbiosis is widespread within the natural world and hence, offer us the ontological insight that symbiosis is something shared by all forms of life from the cellular to the organismic levels of being. As the entomologist Angela Douglas claimed, “Symbioses are biologically important because they are widespread and dominate the biota of many habitats” (Douglas 2010, p. 1). Even the personal, social and cultural lives of hominid, simian and other mammalian animal communities may be described in empirically accurate ways by using the terminology of the language of symbiosis. This implies that symbiotic relations run as deep as the cellular level and extend outward as far as the socio-cultural levels of life (Margulis 1998, p. 9). Yet, as Douglas has noted, “The prevalence of symbioses is not, however, the only reason why symbioses should be important to biologists. An additional reason is that symbiosis challenges… the primacy of antagonism in interactions among organisms” (Douglas 2010, p. 1).

What all of this suggests is that prior assumptions that competitive self-interest is the predominant force that drove evolution, and consequently what defined natural creatures, seem to have missed the mark and painted a picture of the natural world that was not completely accurate and which is now undergoing radical revisions (Kim and Kisse 2018). Discoveries in the science of symbiosis as well as recent studies of cooperation across a variety of natural and social sciences become immensely important for how we conceptualize what it means to be natural creatures because it implies that the ethos of evolution, so to speak, is far more conducive with the type of relational ontology as well as the types of communitarian forms of ethics that we find within the world’s religious traditions than previously believed by advocates of selfish genes and theories of evolution grounded in violent competition (Spencer 1864; Claeys 2000; Dawkins 2006).

Currently, we have designed our social systems to promote and encourage competition—be it in the civil, political or economic sectors—rather than cooperation. What is required in order to achieve euzoia and usher in a new era in which our common sacred flourishing can be realized is an entire array of laws and policies and educational and business practices that support non-competitive forms of socio-political organization and socio-economic activity. Examples include, but are not limited to, establishing local food and energy cooperatives as a means of providing a counterbalance to the competition-based model of interaction that has come to define the global political and socio-economic orders. Any humanly constructed system that sincerely values life and truly seeks flourishing will be one that is attentive to the symbiotic nature of life’s being and beginnings and not simply the competitiveness found amongst species. It will also be attentive to the organismic dynamics of the natural world over and above the mechanistic modes of natural functionality operative in more reductionist modes of thinking. And, if, as Patriarch Bartholomew claims, it is true that within the world’s faith traditions “human beings are conceived as by definition relational beings” (Bartholomew 2025a) and that they tend to proffer relational ontologies that undergird cooperative moralities, then this precept ought to be warmly welcomed by the world’s religious communities and kept in mind when reflecting upon the next precept in Benyus’ list.

(6) Nature banks on diversity: This principle implies that pluralism is itself an inherent feature of the types of flourishing we witness in the natural world. From an ecological perspective we may venture to argue that species diversity, and the plurality of niches filled by various species, is itself necessary for the flourishing of the biosphere (Newman et al. 2017) and hence, for the realization of euzoia.

The truth of this principle tends to be observed when we witness the ecological devastation caused by the cultivation of single-crop monocultures, such as topsoil erosion and soil infertility, as well as in the ways that biodiversity is decimated in order to create the types of spaces in which industrial monocultural agriculture and industrial animal rearing (such as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations) occur (Thompson 2017). So, what is taking place in our current industrial food production system is operating according to a logic that is at odds with the diversity principle in that it relies on the clearcutting of biodiverse plains or forests in order to replace them with large-scale monocultural food operations. Completely organic biodynamic and regenerative farming systems do not require synthetic fertilizers, can produce an abundance and variety of foods, and can come to operate in synergy with the ‘wild’ ecosystems in which they exist. Therefore, the norms governing food production must operate with an euzoic teleology and with an eye toward humanity’s euzen, or an authentic vision of well-being, which can then be translated into subsidies and policies that support and encourage an array of ecologically sound methods of food cultivation, including but not limited to: biodynamic farming, agroforestry, permaculture, regenerative natural farming, open pasture free-range animal husbandry, and a diversification of the types of foods produced and consumed.

Furthermore, we have not only reduced the diversity of our foods, and the non-human life that existed in the ecosystems we destroy to grow agricultural monocultures, but our current neoliberal capitalist system and globalist mode of governance has been incrementally eroding our cultural differences along with the various types of knowledge and wisdom they held (Jacques and Jacques 2012). This is of immense importance because many traditional cultures—be they the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Africa, or premodern cultures in Europe, the Middle East or Asia—possessed wisdom of the ways in which their local ecosystems functioned and held visions of prosperity and well-being that were often far more conducive to bringing forth a common sacred flourishing defined by an euzoic mode of living than the ways of life we have come to adopt in modernity. Cultural pluralism becomes so important for our flourishing because so many cultures evolved within particular bioregions and hence, each has unique insights that may be shared with the others as well as practices conducive to life in each of their specific locales (Reyes-García et al. 2018). This brings us to our next natural law or precept.

(7) Nature demands local expertise: This precept implies that we ought not overlook the importance of local traditional forms of knowledge as well as the idea that we ought to promote forms of economic and agricultural localism that are attuned to the nuances and uniqueness of the bioregions in which economic and agricultural activities take place (Taylor 2000). Environmentalists have long promoted the ecological benefits of local food production and consumption as a means of reducing carbon emissions and fostering farming practices which are attentive to the particularities of regional ecosystems. Rather than implementing standardized industrial forms of pesticide-laden monocultural agriculture that often disregard biodiversity and ignore more sustainable and regenerative agricultural methods to the detriment of ecological and human health, we ought to relocalize our modes of production and consumption.

In addition to the ecological and health benefits of promoting localism in agriculture, promoting forms of economic localism may also help empower regional communities by fostering local entrepreneurial endeavors as well as collaborations amongst local businesses (Painter et al. 2011). This would help prevent the extraction of wealth from smaller locales by transnational corporate conglomerates and contribute to the local retention of wealth creation as well as empower local regions by making them sites of ingenuity and creativity rather than simply receptors of ideas emanating from places like Silicon Valley or Davos. While these ideas have been promoted by ecological economists and social justice advocates, they may also find support in traditional religious principles and practices.

(8) Nature curbs excess from within: This natural law seems to again conjure up the virtue of temperance or moderation, yet the distinctive element of this principle would appear to be the qualifier “within,” which ties together moderation and localism by illustrating that it must be the local or regional community itself that curbs its own excess. This implies that in order to be ecologically virtuous, so to speak, neither an individual person, nor a community, ought to rely solely on external powers, such as non-localized or non-regional governing bodies, for the impetus to act moderately. Yet, in order for this to occur, local communities need to feel that they are actually empowered to do so and hence, strengthening local and regional democratic institutions seems to be necessary for attaining the degree of local communal self-awareness and empowerment required for those persons to fully comprehend the ills of excess and engage in self-imposed forms of curbing excess. Across the board—be it locally, regionally, nationally or even globally—that which seems to be required is greater attention to the importance that education in the virtues can play in enacting this precept.

Here we must add that this in no way implies imposing a single religious or cultural tradition’s views on another. On the contrary, we find the virtues of temperance, moderation, prudence, and self-restraint across a wide array of religious and cultural systems of thought, including but not limited to the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity & Islam), the religio-philosophical systems of Northern Asia (Confucianism, Daoism & Shintoism), the religions of India and Southeast Asia (Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism) as well as myriad Indigenous religio-cultural systems of thought found within the Americas, Africa, and Australasia (Schweiker 2004). And, the cultivation of the virtues of temperance, moderation, prudence, and self-restraint entails recognizing that attaining authentic power—be it as an individual person, community, or even as a species—is not about domination nor the excessive use of force or energy, but rather is intimately bound up with acknowledging our own limitations.

(9) Nature taps the power of limits: This principle, or precept, implies that as a planetary species we ought to recognize that part of our strength is knowing our personal, communal and environmental limitations and that cultivating the virtue of prudence, or practical wisdom, enables us to know how to use our own limits, and know when to allow this knowledge to inform our practice self-restraint, in our collective pursuit of flourishing and the good life. When contemplating how this can be put into practice for our global community, a good place to begin to tap the power of limits on a planetary scale would be with those identified by Will Steffen and his team of earth-systems scientists. They have identified a set of planetary boundaries, which are: biosphere integrity (otherwise known as biodiversity loss), biogeochemical flows (otherwise known as phosphorus and nitrogen cycles), land-system change, freshwater levels, and atmospheric aerosol levels (Steffen et al. 2015). Together these boundaries represent the optimal state of the global environment as it has existed within the Holocene, the geological epoch in which humanity originated and developed, and which is the only state of the Earth that humanity has ever known. As Steffen et al. say,

A proposed approach for sustainable development goals (SDGs) argues that the stable functioning of the Earth system is a prerequisite for thriving societies around the world. This approach implies that the PB [Planetary Boundaries] framework, or something like it, will need to be implemented alongside the achievement of targets aimed at more immediate human needs, such as provision of clean, affordable, and accessible energy and the adequate supply of food.

(Steffen et al. 2015, p. 745)

By recognizing our finitude as mortal living beings, we can come to acknowledge that whilst our imaginations may indeed be limitless, in reality, in order to thrive, prosper and flourish as a species, humanity must come to terms with its own limitations as well as the limits imposed upon it by the finite resources, geological and climatic limitations, and other natural boundaries we encounter in the biosphere. Such biospheric boundaries and other ecosystem limitations may themselves be thought of as the ecological parameters of permissibility to human action that we ought not exceed or surpass if we are to achieve the good and live well. Humanity would be well-advised to imitate this natural law in our own human legal constructs.

4. Conclusions

This essay has sought to contribute to the development of the foundations of a new natural philosophy grounded within the emerging fields of biosemiology and biomimicry that may ultimately be adopted by members of all of the world’s faiths and help enable global society to pursue a vision of a common sacred flourishing informed by nature’s wisdom. With the belief that, before embracing any such new paradigm, each respective religious and cultural tradition must first establish its own relationship to the sciences so that it can engage scientific insights with conceptual resources found within its own faith, I have sought to demonstrate how Orthodox Christianity is able to do so and contribute to this overarching task. Consequently, I would like to close with a quote from Patriarch Bartholomew when he said,

we must regain humility and recognize the limits of our powers and, most important, the limits of our knowledge and judgment. We have been making decisions, taking actions, and assigning values that are leading us away from the world as it should be, away from the design of God for creation, away from all that is essential for a healthy planet and a healthy commonwealth of people. A new approach and a new culture are needed, based on the centrality of the human person within creation and inspired by environmentally ethical behavior stemming from our triple relationship to God, to self, and to creation. Such an ethics fosters interdependence and stresses the principles of universal solidarity, social justice, and responsibility, in order to promote a true culture of life… [And it requires that we] be open to study the true values based on the natural law that sustains every human culture.

(Bartholomew 2010, pp. 294–95)