Nine Christian Responses to the Ecological Crisis

Michelle Rebidoux

For nearly five decades now, Lynn White Jr.’s influential article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”1 has been pointed to as a part of the bedrock of Christian discourse on the environment. Of course, an environmental movement was already taking shape long before the appearance of this article—largely in the form of conservationism (reaching back to the 1940s)2 and in the growing body of knowledge about the complex functioning of ecosystems. White’s article of 1967, however, is famous for defining the whole problem of the environment as a problem of “worldviews”—with the “Christian worldview,” drifting as it did historically into an “anthropocentric instrumentalist” stance towards the environment, according to White’s analysis, taking the lion’s share of the blame.