ABSTRACT
Spirituality is undeniably an elemental and often pivotal manifestation of human nature; even atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists may be spiritual (Sponsel 2012, 149-154). A survey of 14,527 new students in 136 colleges and universities in the US during 2003 to 2010, revealed that the majority were spiritual, but not necessarily religious (UCLA Higher Education Research Institute 2010). A survey by the Pew Research Center on “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” concluded that since the last project of its kind in 2007, the number of religiously unaffiliated adults has increased by about 19 million. By now there are around 56 million religiously unaffiliated adults in the US, a group more numerous than either Catholics or mainline Protestants (Smith 2015). These two surveys highlight one reason why it is important to consider not only religion, but also spirituality (cf. Gottlieb 2012). (For an especially useful discussion of the distinction between religion and spirituality see Taylor 1991a, 175-178.)
Spiritual ecology is carefully chosen as an umbrella term to designate the vast, complex, diverse, and dynamic arena at the interfaces of religions and spiritualities with environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms. Other authors use the term spiritual ecology as well (e.g., Laszlo and Combs 2011; Merchant 2005, 117-138; Taylor 2007). Elsewhere other labels are used instead. However, they reflect a variant of spiritual ecology and usually a narrower pursuit, such as dark green religion, deep ecology, earth spirituality, earth mysticism, ecomysticism, ecopsychology, ecospirituality, ecotheology, green religion, green spirituality, nature mysticism, nature religion, nature spirituality, religion and ecology, religion and nature, religious ecology, religious environmentalism, and religious naturalism.
