ISSR 2025 Conference Report
Tim Middleton (University of Oxford)
and Fraser Watts
The ISSR’s 2025 conference was hosted at Stanton House Hotel in the Wiltshire countryside, from 30 June to 3 July. The surrounding parkland—complete with lake, woodland, and fields of sheep—proved a fitting setting for the ISSR’s new focus on ecological concerns. The conference itself—entitled ‘Ecology between Religions and Sciences: Minds and Bodies in Nature’—included seven keynote lectures, two interfaith symposia, and several short paper sessions.
Mike Hulme (University of Cambridge) opened the conference with a lecture on ‘Climate, Ecological, and Social Crises—Scientific and Religious Perspectives’, offering an overview of interactions between religion and ecology. Hulme noted how religion is often absent from conversations about climate change. But he argued that religions are of the utmost relevance because they shape people’s beliefs and values, mobilise broad movements and audiences, possess significant institutional and economic resources, and cultivate social capital. He also offered a specific case study in terms of the variety of religious responses to solar geoengineering: some theologies can lend support to such initiatives, whilst others might be more circumspect. Celia Deane-Drummond (University of Oxford) offered a short response to Hulme’s opening lecture, highlighting issues such as religious resistance to climate policies, shifting perspectives on stewardship, and the challenge of technology. In other words, religious interactions with ecological concerns are far from homogeneous. She also drew attention to the possibility that religion can sometimes be instrumentalised by scientists in some of these discussions.
Susan Power Bratton (Baylor University) gave the second keynote, entitled ‘Religion, Scientific Ecology, and Environmental Problem Solving: Shared Worldviews, Constructive Cooperation, Separation, or Conflict?’. She particularly highlighted the way in which many scholars in religion and ecology engage with a popular understanding of ecology, which typically involves a more generic green holism, rather than with scientific ecology sensu stricto. This is not in itself a problem, Bratton suggested, but the field remains somewhat limited if it does not also interact more specifically with the findings of ecological scientists. Bratton then offered prairie burning as an example where scientific ecology, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and religious ritual can all intersect.
Likewise, Niels Henrik Gregersen (University of Copenhagen) wrestled with various possible definitions of ecology in his lecture ‘Three Irreducible Aspects of Ecology: Alterity, Power, and Entanglement’. He proposed a threefold typology: the first ecology understands the environment as something other-than-human—something wild, raw, and potentially enchanted; the second ecology is about human-made environments such as landscapes, gardens, and cities; and the third ecology views all phenomena as an interweaving of human beings and their environments. Each ecology lends itself to a different ethic and a different theology. For instance, the first ecology is more about the separation of nature and an ethics of human self-withdrawal; the second ecology focusses on human stewardship and intervention; whilst the third ecology is best suited to an ethics of entanglement and a panentheist theology. Gregersen argued that no one ecology should hold sway, but rather that all three are relevant at different junctures, and that all three can be discerned in the Christian theological tradition.
Panu Pihkala (University of Helsinki) opened up a new vein of thinking with his lecture on ‘Environmental Emotions, Attitudes, and Religion’. He introduced the concept of environmental emotions via the climate emotions wheel, a segmented diagram that groups possible emotions under the broader headings of anger, sadness, fear, and positivity. He observed how such emotions can shape people’s behaviour, wellbeing, and functionality. He also noted the role of religion in influencing the way in which people experience, and respond to, these environmental emotions. There are challenging questions here about the extent to which some of these emotions—such as climate anxiety—should be treated as pathological, and the extent to which we should be allowing ourselves to feel such emotions as legitimate and rational responses to contemporary ecological breakdown. Similarly, we might ask when it is reasonable to invoke environmental guilt and shame, and when it counts as counter-productive scaremongering. Pihkala was keen to point out that no single emotion can be isolated as a perfect motivator; the answer is almost always context dependent.
Peter Scott (University of Manchester) focussed his talk on the topic of religious materialism. His lecture was entitled ‘“Matter” Between Ecology and Religion: Critical Issues in Religious Materialism’. We should not, he argued, be distracted by the apparent connections between materialism and atheism, but rather focus on the fact that all religions contain material elements (not least those associated with human embodiment). Materialism is also at the heart of the ecological conversation, and Scott particularly recommended the idea of constituted materiality. For instance, human beings are constituted by biological materiality, but not reducible to it. In noting religion’s material turn, Scott was also keen to contrast this with the turn to immanence. Immanence is always defined in contrast to transcendence (often as part of a zero-sum game), whereas matter need not be. Scholars in religion and ecology have long appealed to immanent models of the divine to undergird more environmentally friendly behaviours, but Scott suggested that a focus on materialism might provide a helpful alternative.
Arthur Petersen (University College London) gave a keynote lecture on ‘Climate Change, Worldviews and Spirituality—The Interface between Science and Public Policy’. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report included more than one million words, but only one substantial paragraph on the role of religion in this time of climate crisis. Petersen therefore proposed that much more work needs to be done on the place of worldviews and religions at the interface between science and public policy. A simplistic invocation to ‘follow the science’ is rarely sufficient. For example, Dutch advice on delta modelling has not been taken up in Thailand, quite probably because the approach to growth and development in a Protestant country like the Netherlands does not sit easily with a Buddhist kingship model.
The final keynote on ‘Planetary Thinking in a Time of Crisis’ was from Lisa Sideris (University of California, Santa Barbara). Sideris outlined several attempts in religion and ecology to think from a planetary perspective—including Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, the Universe Story, the Ecozoic, and even the geological concept of the Anthropocene. Each of these ideas includes a cosmopolitan urge to transcend parochial interests in favour of a shared planetary sensitivity. However, Sideris went on to explain the ultimate failure of these visions, illustrating how planetary thinking is increasingly dominated by populist and nationalist factions. She identified how a mix of accelerationism, techno-optimism, and extraplanetary ambition—often fuelled by certain religious logics—are contributing to what she called a new planetary nationalism. Worryingly, these new political formations are taking us further and further away from the type of thinking that is needed.
The two interfaith panels on ‘Asian Spiritual Traditions’ and ‘Abrahamic Faiths’ included presentations from Natasha Chawla (University of Oxford), Simon James (University of Durham), Pan-Chui Lai (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Noah Efron (Bar-llan University), Tim Middleton (University of Oxford), and Zainal Abidin Bagir (Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia). These talks focussed on themes such as non-dualism, spiritual detachment, nature’s value, environmental virtues, the risks of green orientalism, religious affordances, the place of constructive theologies, the success of official statements and pronouncements (such as Al Mizan and Laudato Si’), and the relationship between behaviours and beliefs.
In sum, the conference provided fertile space for thinking through a wide range of issues as the field of religion and ecology continues to respond to both ecological breakdown and changing global politics. The message was rarely one of straightforward optimism, but the range of presentations and approaches demonstrated a commitment to granularity and heterogeneity. A huge thank you to Niels Gregersen (ISSR President), Fraser Watts (ISSR Secretary), and Anthony Nairn (ISSR Executive Assistant) for all of their hard work in putting the conference together.
Fraser Watts
The discussion of environmental and ecological issues from the perspective of science and religion raises more than academic issues. The present environmental crisis is a challenge for humanity, and there is an opportunity for science and religion to come together in tackling it.
As Mike Hulme said at the start of the recent ISSR conference, religion may have the capacity to mobilise people for change. He quoted the Alliance of Religions and Conservation as saying, “the emphasis on [science], consumption, economics and policy usually fails to engage people at any deep level because it does not address the narrative, the mythological, the metaphorical… The faiths are the holders of these areas and without them, policies will have very few real roots…”
At the conference, I briefly shared my own environmental story. I became aware of the importance of environmental issues back in 1972, learning about them, not from the media or through scientific channels, but from the Christian church, through Coventry Cathedral, which has been my life-long primary spiritual community. One of the senior clergy at the cathedral, Horace Dammers, happened, through chance circumstances, to attend a conference at which he was radicalised about environmental issues. He responded by founding the Lifestyle Movement, with its slogan, “live simply that others may simply live”. We thought that lifestyle changes were essential in finding a way through the environmental crisis, and that it was important, not just to talk about that, but to set a practical example.
Dammers also planned for an international conference on Christian environmental responsibility, and arranged an educational program and exhibition in the Cathedral. Environmental responsibility is a broader and older theme than climate change. Back in 1972 we were aware of very early data on climate change, but it was not the main focus. We were more concerned about the extinction of species, and about the challenge of producing enough food to feed the world’s growing population without, in the process, destroying the natural world, and its capacity to produce food. We were impressed by the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority in nurturing a recovery from dustbowl farming.
Many places of worship are now concerned about their own carbon imprint, but their aspirations seem quite modest. In the panel on Abraham faiths, Tim Middleton talked about the move towards eco-churches, and Zainal Bagir talked about eco-mosques. However, in Coventry Cathedral in 1972, we had wider ambitions, and hoped to mobilise use the resources of the church to influence the lifestyle of as many people as possible. I would be pleased if the ISSR conference inspired some of those present to use their influence within religious institutions to bring about widespread changes in environmental behaviour.
Changing behaviour is never easy. I pointed out in my own paper that scientific data is notoriously ineffectual in producing behavioural change. Moreover, there seems to be something about the “onlooker” approach to the natural world that was an important part of the scientific mindset that developed from the 17th century onwards, and which gives rise to a kind of insensitivity to the plight of the natural world.
Can religion really help? It does not always speak with a united voice, and religion is losing its influence in the developed West. Also, I am not sure that abstract doctrinal beliefs are any more effective in changing behaviour than scientific data. However, I think there is scope for developing a kind of environmental spirituality that could enhance people’s experiential sensitivity to environmental issues. Many spiritual practices employ tried and trusted ways of damping down our human prediliction for abstract conceptual cognition, and heightening a more intuitive and embodied awareness. They could help us make more use of our animal-like sensitivity to what is happening around us.
