Religious Traditions and Biodiversity
Fikret Berkes, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
r 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Animism Belief in spiritual beings. The term is associated
with the anthropology of E. B. Tylor, who described the
origin of religion and primitive beliefs in terms of animism
in Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor considered animism a
minimum definition of religion and asserted that all
religions, from the simplest to the most complex, involve
some form of animism. From Latin anima, ‘breath’ or ‘soul’.
Biocultural diversity The diversity of life in any of its
manifestations, biological and cultural, which are
interrelated (and likely coevolved) within a complex
social–ecological adaptive system.
Ethics Codes that exert a palpable influence on human
behavior. Embedded in worldviews, ethics provide models
to emulate, goals to strive for, and norms by which to
evaluate actual behavior.
Monotheism Belief in the unity of the Godhead, or in one
God, as opposed to pantheism and polytheism.
Monotheism is a firm tenet of Islam and Judaism.
Christianity, with its concept of Trinity, alone among the
three monotheistic religions, dilutes monotheism. From
Greek mono, ‘one’, and Greek theos, ‘god’.
Pantheism The doctrine that identifies the universe with
God. In Western thought, the term is associated with the
Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. His view represents an
important criticism of the ‘orthodox’ view of a god whose
reality is somehow external to the reality of the world. From
Greek pan, ‘all’, and Greek theos, ‘god’.
Religion Human recognition of superhuman controlling
power, and especially of a personal God or gods entitled to
The Context: Religion for Encoding Ethics
Different groups of people in different parts of the world
perceive and value sacredness differently. Religion is a general
term that has become established in the Western world for a
whole class of cultural codes and rituals. In the West, there
often is little connection between a person’s religion and en-
vironmental ethics. In many other societies, religion is part of
a way of life as well as a worldview. For example, in Chinese
there is no one word that translates as ‘religion’ in the Western
sense. In some traditional societies, including many Amer-
indian groups, religion, worldview, and environmental ethics
and practice are inseparable. It is appropriate, therefore, to
define religion in its broader sense of ‘human recognition of
superhuman controlling power’, inclusive of both mono-
theistic and pantheistic traditions.
Religions provide a central organizing myth and include
cultural symbols for a moral code. Conceived that way, religions
can be thought to include a wider variety of beliefs, within the
definition of a superhuman controlling power. For example,
one can refer to the ‘religion of the market’. Peter Timmerman
380 Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Volume 6
obedience and worship; the effect of such recognition on
conduct or mental attitude.
Sacred natural sites Areas of land and water having
special spiritual significance to people and communities.
Stewardship To hold something in trust for another, as in
the Biblical (human) responsibility for husbanding God’s
gifts. In the present context, examples include Australian
aboriginal ‘looking after country’, Andean Quechua ‘caring
for Mother Earth’, and Canadian Ojibwa ‘keeping the land’.
Traditional ecological knowledge A cumulative body of
knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive
processes and handed down through generations by
cultural transmission, about the relationship of living
beings (including humans) with one another and with their
environment. It is a subset of indigenous knowledge, which
is local knowledge held by indigenous people or local
knowledge unique to a given culture or society.
Traditional societies Groups in which knowledge,
practice, and belief are handed down through generations
largely by cultural transmission. Tradition itself evolves by
adaptive processes, but not all tradition is necessarily
adaptive.
Worldview The larger conceptual complex in which ethics
are embedded. A.N. Whitehead called it the conceptual
order, or one’s general way of conceiving the universe,
which supplies the concepts by which one’s observations of
nature are invariably interpreted. In general, worldviews
limit and inspire human behavior, shape observations, and
perceptions. Arnold Toynbee’s Weltanschauung.
uses the term ‘econotheism’ as the adoption of market eco-
nomics ‘‘to bring the rest of the earth under new management’’.
Econotheism, argues Timmerman, ‘‘contains within it all the
elements of a religion: a priesthood, scriptures, catechisms
(Econ 100 textbooks), an explanation of happiness and misery,
a way to get to heaven, and a core model of the human’’. Eugene
Anderson (1996) holds that religion is best regarded as some-
thing providing an emotionally powerful way to ‘sell’ a moral
code. The content of the moral code is negotiable and variable;
it is not in itself a part of the religion. One can have a moral
code without a religion, as in secular humanism, but at the risk
of losing the emotional content supplied by religion.
Religion has not been a particularly popular topic among
those involved in biodiversity conservation. The index of the
1140-page Global Biodiversity Assessment of 1997 contains a
grand total of only two minor entries on religion. One prob-
lem with religion is that it has often been bent to serve all
possible ends, including those destructive of biodiversity and
cultural diversity. The role of religion in biodiversity conser-
vation, and more generally in environmental ethics, is con-
troversial. However, in more recent years, the profile of
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 Religious Traditions and Biodiversity 381

religion, as relevant to environmental sustainability, has in-
creased. Two volumes (Taylor, 2005; Jenkins, 2010) provide
details on the roles of various religious traditions, along with a
journal devoted to this area (Journal of the Study of Religion,
Nature & Culture). As well, a number of volumes examine
spiritual traditions and sacredness in various cultures (Posey,
1999; Turner, 2005; Shaw and Francis, 2008; Berkes, 2012;
Verschuuren et al., 2010).
There are several cautions in interpreting the discussion on
religion and biodiversity. First, generalizations are always risky.
As Donald Worster (1988) put it in The Ends of the Earth, ‘‘not a
few scholars have fallen into the trap of speaking of ‘the Bud-
dhist view of nature’ or ‘the Christian view’ or ‘the American
Indian view’, as though people in those cultures were all sim-
ple-minded, uncomplicated, unanimous, and totally lacking in
ambivalence. Every culture, we should assume, has within it a
range of perceptions and values, and no culture has ever really
wanted to live in total harmony with its surroundings’’.
Second, there is invariably a gap between ‘the ideal’ and
‘the actual’ in making sense of how societies deal with bio-
diversity. Ethics do not describe how people actually behave
but rather set out how people ought to behave. There often is a
discrepancy between belief and practice. Some scholars argue
that one could spend too much time on values and beliefs,
neglecting to examine behavior or the actual effects of these
values on human practices regarding the environment. The
field of environmental history studies the historical record of
changes in the landscape as a way of evaluating the actual
effects of the belief-and-practice complex of a culture.
A third caution is the intangible nature of traditions and
their record in the literature. Not only do traditions change
and adapt all the time, but the literature is based largely on
outsiders’ accounts of various religious traditions, especially
those that do not have a written record. Since traditional so-
cieties are, by definition, those cultures in which much
knowledge is transmitted orally, available documentation on
such groups is almost always suspect. This is because insiders
do not normally record their teachings in writing, and out-
siders do not always interpret these teachings correctly and
tend to add their own interpretations.
Monotheistic Traditions
Debates Over the Judeo–Christian Tradition
The controversy about environmental values in Christianity
and Judaism has centered on the appropriate interpretation of
the relationship between God, ‘man’, and nature as set out in
the Book of Genesis 1:26–28:
‘‘26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our like-
ness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and
over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God
created He him; male and female created He them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’’.
There are two widely held interpretations of the relation-
ships implied by these quotations. The ‘mastery’ interpretation
is that Genesis gives humans a unique status among the spe-
cies by virtue of creation in the image of God, and awards
humans a God-given right to exploit nature without moral
restraint, except where it affects human welfare. God, ac-
cording to this view, seems to have intended humans to be his
viceroy on earth. Humans are to the rest of earth’s species as
God is to humans. Humans are given dominion over the
earth, and are expressly asked to subdue (Hebrew kabas, stamp
down) the earth, as if nature needed humans to put it in order.
The ‘stewardship’ interpretation also relies on the verses
above, as well as others before and after it, and emphasizes
responsibility. Since humans are created in the image of God,
they have not only rights and privileges but also special duties
and responsibilities. Foremost among these is the human duty
to rule the dominion of nature wisely. To degrade nature and
destroy God’s other species would violate the trust God has
placed in his viceroy. Thus, far from giving a free hand to
exploit and degrade nature, according to this view, God ex-
pects humans to exercise stewardship in the wise use of nature.
The Assisi Declarations (1986) reproduced here are
excerpts from five of the addresses by religious leaders to their
own faithful in the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and
Moslem worlds. The Declarations were the highlight of an
interfaith ceremony at the World Wildlife Fund’s 25th anni-
versary celebrations. The three monotheistic traditions repre-
sented in Box 1, Box 2, and Box 3 (Christian, Jewish, and
Moslem, respectively) make it clear that all three strongly
support the stewardship interpretation of Genesis. It should be
noted that Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an, is similar in content
to the Old Testament, and gives humans dominion over na-
ture, but at the same time, as the declaration notes, vests in
them trusteeship and accountability.

Box 1 Excerpts from the five declarations of assisi: The christian declaration by Father Lanfranco serrini
Because of the responsibilities which flow from his dual citizenship, man’s dominion cannot be understood as license to abuse, spoil, squander or destroy what
God has made to manifest his glory. That dominion cannot be anything else than a stewardship in symbiosis with all creatures. On the other hand, his self-mastery
in symbiosis with creation must manifest the Lord’s exclusive and absolute dominion over everything, over man and over his stewardship. At the risk of destroying
himself, man may not reduce to chaos or disorder, or, worse still, destroy God’s bountiful treasures. For St. Francis, work was a God-given grace to be exercised in
that spirit of faith and devotion to which every temporal consideration must be subordinate: uncontrolled use of technology for immediate economic growth, with
little or no consideration for the planet’s resources and their possible renewal; disregard for just and peaceful relations among peoples; destruction of cultures and
environments during war; ill-considered exploitation of natural resources by consumer-oriented societies; unmastered and unregulated urbanization; and, the
exclusive preoccupation with the present without any regard for the future quality of life.
382 Religious Traditions and Biodiversity

Box 2 Excerpts from the five declarations of assisi: The jewish declaration by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg
The encounter of God and man in nature is conceived in Judaism as a seamless web, with man as the leader and custodian of the natural world. Even in the many
centuries when Jews were most involved in their own immediate dangers and destiny, this universalist concern never witheredyNow, when the whole world is in
peril, when the environment is in danger of being poisoned, and various species, both plant and animal are becoming extinct, it is our Jewish responsibility to put
the defence of the whole of nature at the very centre of our concern.
y Man was given dominion over nature, but he was commanded to behave towards the rest of creation with justice and compassion. Man lives, always, in
tension between his power and the limits set by conscience.
Our ancestor Abraham inherited his passion for nature from Adam. The later rabbis never forgot it. Some 20 centuries ago they told the story of two men who
were out on the water in a rowboat. Suddenly, one of them started to saw under his feet. He maintained that it was his right to do whatever he wished with the place
which belonged to him. The other answered him that they were in the rowboat together – the hole that he was making would sink both of them (Vayikra Rabbah 4:6).

Box 3 Excerpts from the five declarations of assisi: The moslem declaration by Dr. Abdullah Omar Nasseef
Unity, trusteeship and accountability, that is tawheed, khalifa and akhrah, the three central concepts of Islam, are also the pillars of the environmental ethics of Islam.
They constitute the basic values taught by the Qur’an. It is these values which led Muhamad, the Prophet of Islam to say: ‘‘Whoever plants a tree and diligently looks
after it until it matures and bears fruit is rewarded’’, and ‘‘If a Moslem plants a tree or sows a field and men and beasts and birds eat from it, all of it is charity on his
part’’, and again ‘‘The world is green and beautiful and God has appointed you his stewards over it’’. Environmental consciousness is born when such values are
adopted and become an intrinsic part of our mental and physical makeup. Moslems need to return to this nexus of values, this way of understanding themselves
and their environment. The notions of unity, trusteeship and accountability should not be reduced to matters of personal piety; they must guide all aspects of their
life and work. Shariah should not be relegated just to issues of crime and punishment, it must also become the vanguard for environmental legislation. We often say
that Islam is a complete way of life, by which it is meant that our ethical systems provides the bearings for all our actions.

Searching for a New Religious Base for Environmental
Ethics
The debates over the interpretations have been going on since
the 1970s. Many environmentalists do not see monotheistic
stewardship as a sufficient solution. The critics include the
historian Lynn White Jr., who started the debate over Judeo–-
Christian environmental ethics with his classic 1967 paper in
Science, ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’. According
to White, Christianity is the most anthropocentric (human-
centered) religion the world has ever seen, especially in its
Western form. In pre-Christian times every tree, every spring,
every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian
spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike
men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence.
Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook,
it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular
situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan ani-
mism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a
mood of indifference to the feelings of nature.
Since the roots of the environmental crisis ‘‘are so largely
religious’’, White continues, ‘‘the remedy must also be essen-
tially religious’’. He briefly entertains and then rejects Zen
Buddhism as a solution: ‘‘Zen is as deeply conditioned by
Asian history as Christianity is by the experience of the west,
and I am dubious of its viability among us’’. Seeking instead an
alternative Christian view, White proposes Saint Francis of
Assisi as a patron saint for ecologists. ‘‘The key to an under-
standing of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility – not
merely for the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried
to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a
democracy of all of God’s creatures’’.
White may be taken to recommend a Franciscan theology
as the basis for a Christian environmental ethic. Others have
provided other Christian theologies. For example, Rene Dubos
in A God Within (1972) recommends St. Benedict, as the
Benedictines were the original environmental managers of
Europe who drained swamps and made the countryside both
productive and beautiful. The theologian John B. Cobb Jr.,
casts his net wider, beyond European cultures, in looking for a
religious solution in Is It Too Late? A Theology for Ecology, and
others have done the same (Levine, 1994; Wirzba, 2003).
Accepting White’s (1967) view that Christianity is largely
responsible for the environmental crisis, Cobb (1995) exam-
ines in particular American Indian and Chinese worldviews.
He rejects the American Indian view because, he thinks, In-
dians did not respect human life sufficiently and because the
Indian way of life cannot support the existing North American
population. Turning to the Chinese tradition (represented by
Taoism), Cobb argues that it was unable to prevent deforest-
ation and other ecological ills. He concludes that it is more
prudent for the West to fix the Western tradition than to find a
non-Western alternative. Rejecting Francis as too radical (Saint
Francis had also preached poverty to the Catholic Church!),
Cobb finally opts for Albert Schweitzer’s Christianity and his
reverence-for-life ethic.
The historian Arnold Toynbee differs from the above-
mentioned commentators in that he sees no fundamental
problem in developing a new environmental ethic that can be
integrated with Asian traditions. As a classically educated
scholar, he sees a historical continuity from pantheistic tra-
ditions (‘the original religion of all mankind’) to the Gre-
co–Roman religion and to Asian religions. At the western end
of the Old World, this nature-worship, which is the original
religion of all mankind, has been overlaid by an opaque
veneer of Christianity and Islam. However, when a native of
the monotheistic portion of the present-day World travels
eastward beyond the easternmost limits of Islam, he finds
himself in a living premonotheistic World, and, if he has had a
Greek and Latin education, the religion of present-day East
Asia will be more familiar to him.
 Religious Traditions and Biodiversity 383

Monotheism is exceptional among the religions of the
world in its doctrine about subduing nature, says Toynbee. As
enunciated in the Book of Genesis, monotheism has removed
the sense of awe and, with it, the age-old restraint that was
once an effective check on human greed. His analysis does not
so much negate the stewardship interpretation as makes it
irrelevant. The real solution to the crisis, in Toynbee’s think-
ing, has to do with restoring a sense of sacred respect for the
earth and its creatures; the remedy lies in reverting from a
worldview of monotheism to a worldview of pantheism.
Of course, the historical roots of the ecological crisis are
not only found in the area of religion. A complex of social
changes related to the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial
Era, and the commodification of nature has been implicated,
as part of what Karl Polanyi (1944) calls the Great Transfor-
mation. A major factor, according to C.J. Glacken (1967) and
others, is the Age of Enlightenment concept of an external
environment analytically separate from humans. Many scho-
lars, including Gregory Bateson, hold that this separation is
the basis of the Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, and
hence humans versus the environment. Searching for a way to
bridge the dualism, Bateson became ‘aware gradually that the
unity of nature y might only be comprehensible through the
kind of metaphors familiar from religion y an integrative
dimension of experience that he called the sacred’ (Bateson
and Bateson, 1987, p. 2).
There is no agreement among experts regarding the relative
importance of the emergence of monotheistic traditions in the
West versus that of the Enlightenment philosophy and the
great transformation many centuries later. The change in val-
ues accompanying the former was no doubt complemented
and reinforced by the latter. Together, these two waves of
change left the Western world with a fundamentally altered
relationship with nature. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ in
modern society may be seen as a loss of spiritual enchantment
with life. For premonotheistic people, by contrast, nature was
not just a treasure trove of natural resources; nature was a
goddess and the whole of the environment was sacred.
Asian Traditions
The religious traditions of South Asia and East Asia, with their
many gods and nondominant relationship to nature, are similar
in many ways to the premonotheistic traditions of Europe, and
fundamentally different from the monotheistic tradition, as
Toynbee would argue. ‘‘Confucianism and Taoism and Shinto,
like the pre-Christian Greek cults of the corn-goddess Demeter
(Ceres in Latin) and the wine-god Dionysus, counsel man to
respect nature even when he is applying his human science to
coax nature into bestowing her bounty on man’’. Elements of
this thinking can be seen in the Buddhist and Hindu declar-
ations in Assisi. The statements ‘‘we should be wary of justifying
the right of any species to survive solely on the basis of its
usefulness to human beings’’ (Box 4) and ‘‘the divine is not
exterior to creation, but expresses itself through natural phe-
nomena’’ (Box 5) signal a worldview that is fundamentally
different from the monotheistic one.
The influence of Hindu teachings can be traced in the en-
vironmental literature regarding species preservation and ani-
mal rights. The philosopher Arne Naess (1989) adopted the
concepts of ‘‘identification’’ and ‘‘self-realization’’ from Hindu
thought and used them as central ideas in Deep Ecology. Zen
Buddhism (a form of Buddhism) is one of the few major Asian

Box 4 Excerpts from the five declarations of assisi: The buddhist declaration by the Venerable Lungrig Nmgyal
Buddhism is a religion of love, understanding and compassion and is committed towards the ideal of non-violence. As such it also attaches great importance
towards wildlife and the protection of the environment on which every being in this world depends for survival. The underlying reason why beings other than
humans need to be taken into account is that, like human beings, they too are sensitive to happiness and suffering. We should therefore be wary of justifying the
right of any species to survive solely on the basis of its usefulness to human beings. We are told that history is a record of human society in the past. From existing
sources there is evidence to suggest that for all their limitations, people in the past were aware of this need for harmony between human beings and nature. They
loved the environment. They revered it as the source of life and well-being in the world. We regard our survival as an undeniable right; as coinhabitants of this
planet, other species too have this right for survival. And since human beings as well as other non-human sentient beings depend upon the environment as the
ultimate source of life and well-being, let us share the conviction that the conservation of the environment, the restoration of the imbalance caused by our
negligence in the past, be implemented with courage and determination.

Box 5 Excerpts from the five declarations of assisi: The hindu declaration by Dr. Karan Singh
Not only in the Vedas, but in later scriptures such as the Upanishads, the Puranas and subsequent texts, the Hindu view-point on nature has been clearly
enunciated. It is permeated by a reverence for life, and an awareness that the great forces of nature – the Earth, the sky, the air, the water and fire – as well as various
orders of life including plants and trees, forests and animals, are all bound to each other within the great rhythms of nature. The divine is not exterior to creation,
but expresses itself through natural phenomena.
The Yajurveda lays down that ‘‘no person should kill animals helpful to all. Rather, by serving them, one should attain happiness’’. This view was later
developed by the great Jain Tirthankara, Lord Mahmavira, who regenerated the ancient Jain faith that lives down to the present day. For the Jains, Ahimsa, or non-
violence, is the greatest good, and on no account should life be taken. This philosophy was emphasized more recently by Mahatma Gandhi, who always spoke of
the importance of Ahimsa and looked upon the cow as a symbol of the benign element in animal life. All this strengthens the attitude of reverence for all life
including animals and insects. The Hindu tradition of reverence for nature and all forms of life, vegetable or animal, represents a powerful tradition which needs to
be renurtured and reapplied in our contemporary context. India, the population of which is over 80% Hindu, has in recent years taken a special interest in
conservation.
384 Religious Traditions and Biodiversity

religions to put firm roots in contemporary Western culture
through the writings of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Peter
Timmerman, and the poet Gary Snyder. However, ‘‘pop Zen’’ or
‘‘West Coast Zen’’, as Callicott and Ames (1989) call it, has been
used to reinforce selfish individualism already endemic in
Western culture, instead of the self-discipline, simplicity, and
enlightenment of true Zen.
Buddhism has also influenced some environmental writ-
ing. The most radical chapter in E. F. Schumacher’s (1973)
Small Is Beautiful is entitled ‘‘Buddhist economics’’. The West is
rich in technological and economic means, Schumacher
points out, but it has little clue about the ends that are most
appropriate for the use of those means. Buddhist economics
proposes the solution that appropriate means should be used
to achieve appropriate ends. The discovery of these appropri-
ate ends, in turn, can be guided through our place as care-
takers of the world around us, and the appropriate means will
then become obvious.
Taoism, one of the Chinese religious traditions, considers
nature through the concept of Tao, the way, and emphasizes
living in harmony with nature, of ‘‘flowing with nature’’. Taoism
has influenced Western culture and environmental thinking
through such books as The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
(1975). In a Taoist story told by Timmerman, a philosopher
falls asleep and dreams that he is a butterfly. From that moment
on, he is never sure if he is a philosopher dreaming that he is a
butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he is a philosopher. In
Taoist thinking, the crucial point is that there is no right answer:
the moment an answer is attempted, the original symmetry is
broken and one crystallizes out as a philosopher or a butter-
flyFbut not both. Capra, a physicist, argues that quantum
physics works in much the same way as electrons move out of a
probability sphere into determined existence.
Romantic notions of Asian religions are debunked by the
geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1974), who pointed out the discrep-
ancies between attitude and behavior. ‘‘Western humanists
commonly show bias in favor of Taoist and Buddhist tradi-
tions’’, says Tuan. But the people of China, through their long
history, have transformed and degraded the landscape in a
major way. Specifically, Taoism, with its vaguely anti-urban
and anti-humanistic stance, according to Tuan, represents little
more than a hermit’s point of view in the larger scheme of
environmental destruction. Tuan’s exposition of episode after
episode of land abuse by the ancient Chinese, long before they
were influenced by the West, leads to the conclusion that
Chinese religions are unlikely to provide a solution for all.
However, this is not to deny that there existed a tradition of
natural philosophy in China consistent with contemporary
ecological ideals. Rather, Tuan’s critique points out that there
often exist ‘‘glaring contradictions of professed ideal and
actual practice’’.
Pantheistic Traditions
Traditional Peoples, Indigenous Knowledge
Some traditional societies retain elements of pantheism, the
‘original religion’ of all humankind. In these societies, re-
ligion, worldview, and environmental practice are often
intertwined (Brown, 1953; Callicott, 1994). Religious sanc-
tions may be invoked in two ways in direct support of bio-
diversity conservation: through the prohibition of areas or of
species. ‘Sacred groves’ or sacred forests occur throughout the
world, especially in India, Indonesia, South America, and
parts of Africa (Ramakrishnan et al., 1998). Box 6 illustrates
the nature of sacred groves in one African country. There has
been increased attention given to examining the role of sacred
natural areas in conservation, and specifically in biocultural
diversity conservation (Maffi and Woodley, 2010). Even small
sacred groves may be surprisingly effective in conserving bio-
diversity (Verschuuren et al., 2010). In the case of species
taboos (the word is borrowed from the Polynesian tabu), a
study by Colding and Folke (1997) showed that about 30% of
taboos identified worldwide prohibited the use of species
that also happened to be listed as threatened by the IUCN Red
Data Book.
Traditional worldviews may also help conserve biodiversity
indirectly through the emotional involvement of people with
their land and living things. This may entail, as in some
American Indian traditions, a community-of-beings world-
view in which animals and plants are considered per-
sonsFnot human persons but persons nonetheless. Land may
also provide a strong sense of place or sense of identity for a
social group, as seen with American Indians and Inuit,
Southeast Asian indigenous peoples, and cultures in Oceania.
The report Our Common Future identified indigenous peo-
ples as ‘‘the repositories of vast accumulations of traditional

Box 6 Sacred groves and traditional forest conservation in Nigeria

Among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, there were a number of categories of traditional sacred forests, although these have fallen into disuse in recent years.
According to the study, Nigeria’s Threatened Environment (1991), land was regularly set aside as hunting forests, religious groves, and isolation and quarantine
forests, and to serve as the abode of fairies and spirits.
Igbo ode (hunting forest) was lands located at some distance from settlements and devoted to game. Igbo egan (high forest) was abandoned secondary forest.
When put to use for game-hunting activities, it became Igbo ode. Lands were often named according to their wildlife inhabitants, e.g., Igbo erin (elephant forest)
and Igbo efon (buffalo forest). Only brave hunters dared use such specialized forests.
Igbo oro (religious groves) were places set aside for religious worship of many of the elements of the physical environment. They were not extensive (usually
less than a quarter of a hectare) and were uncultivated forests located on the borders of a settlement, in as many separate locations as there were families of the
deities.
Igbo egbee (religious groves ‘‘land of sorrows’’) were reserved forests for the burial of people whose deaths were considered mysterious. Such lands, isolated
further away from settlements, were never put under cultivation in the past when diseases were rampant and sudden deaths were attributed to the anger of the gods.
Only brave hunters dared enter such lands.

knowledge and experience that link humanity with its ancient
origins’’ (World Commission on Environment and Develop-
ment 1987, p. 12) and encouraged the use of this indigenous
knowledge to develop new adaptive strategies for conser-
vation. Who are these traditional societies and indigenous
peoples? According to international criteria, four character-
istics distinguish indigenous peoples from others. They are
descendants of groups inhabiting an area prior to the arrival of
other populations; they are politically not dominant; they are
culturally different from the dominant population; and they
identify themselves as indigenous.
Indigenous peoples are found in many parts of the world.
Callicott’s (1994) book on environmental ethics and religious
traditions provides a representative survey of indgenous ethics
from various parts of the world, with major sections entitled
‘‘Polynesian Paganism’’, ‘‘American Indian Land Wisdom’’
(with major cases of Lakota shamanism and Ojibwa tote-
mism), ‘‘South American Eco-eroticism’’ (cases of Tukano
systems theory and Kayapo agro-ecology), ‘‘African Bio-
communitarianism’’ (cases of Yoruba anthropo-theology and
San etiquette of freedom), and ‘‘Australian Aboriginal
Conservators’’.
The globalization of Western culture has meant, among
other things, the globalization of Western modes of pro-
duction (e.g., monocultures) and resource conservation
(expert-knows-best positivist science). Has ancient knowledge
become irrelevant, or perhaps simply been swamped by
Western science and practice? Conversely, are there useful
lessons that can be learned from indigenous knowledge and
practice? These are some of the central questions in a growing
body of literature on traditional ecological knowledge.
The Context of Traditional Ecological Knowledge
(Indigenous Knowledge)
Berkes (2012, p. 7) defines traditional ecological knowledge as
a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving
by adaptive processes and handed down through generations
by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living
beings (including humans) with one another and with their
environment. As a knowledge–practice–belief complex, tradi-
tional ecological knowledge includes the religious traditions
of a society. It is both cumulative and dynamic, building on
experience and adapting to changes. It is an attribute of soci-
eties with historical continuity in resource use on a particular
land. By and large, these are nonindustrial or less technolo-
gically oriented societies, many of them indigenous or tribal,
but not exclusively so. Traditional ecological knowledge is a
subset of indigenous knowledge, generally defined as local
knowledge held by indigenous peoples or local knowledge
unique to a given culture or society.
Any discussion of traditional ecological knowledge and
indigenous conservation needs to be qualified. The question of
the relevance of traditional societies for biodiversity conser-
vation is confounded by what has been called the ‘noble sav-
age’ syndrome. On the one hand, there is the romantic,
Rousseauian view of ‘the primitive’, intrinsically attuned to
nature and somehow living ‘in balance’ with the environment.
Such noble savages tend to become ‘fallen angels’ when they
Religious Traditions and Biodiversity 385
come into contact with the dominant society. Lest they become
a threat to the very ecosystem in which they live, they should
continue to live as primitives, according to this view. On the
other hand, there is the view that primitive people are not
noble savages but tend to be ignorant and superstitious. His-
torically, they lived as biological populations at the mercy of
natural forces and supernatural beliefs, not as organized
communities with their own knowledge systems and eco-
logically adaptive practices. They had a tendency, even as
primitive hunters, to trigger massive species extinctions, as in
New Zealand, Polynesia, Madagascar, and perhaps the Amer-
icas and Australia.
As with all myths, there are elements of truth at the basis of
these two views, and many people, including conservationists
and indigenous people themselves, no doubt believe parts of
one or more of these views. An alternative third view might
start with the recognition that traditional ecological knowledge
is not mere tradition but a set of adaptive responses that have
evolved over time. All societies, prescientific and scientific,
strive to make sense of how the world behaves, and to apply
this knowledge to guide practice. Because people were
dependent for their survival on resources in their immediate
environments, there were strong incentives for them to use
resources sustainably. They could not mask this dependence
with fossil fuel subsidies or capital markets in a globalized
economy. Thus, the ability to nurture and sustain biodiversity
was a selective pressure on these societies. That is, there was a
survival value in conserving and augmenting local biodiversity.
Prescientific, traditional systems of management have been
the main ways by which societies have managed their natural
resources for millennia. In many cases, the main reason we
still have any biodiversity to speak about is because of these
systems of management. Within this context, biodiversity
conservation is the indirect outcome, rather than the objective,
of traditional practices, but the practices themselves had
adaptive value – biodiversity conservation was often a matter
of survival.
Such a probabilistic and evolutionary view clearly rejects
the notion that all traditional people always manage resources
well. What the literature suggests is that groups can make
mistakes but can also learn from their mistakes. They are
capable of responding to resource collapses and to environ-
mental change, along the lines suggested in the books Linking
Social and Ecological Systems (Berkes and Folke, 1998) and
Sacred Ecology (Berkes, 2012). Detailed accounts of traditional
ecological knowledge do not support the noble savage.
What they do is something very different: They provide a
documentation of extremely detailed, pragmatic, empirical
knowledge, represented in religious traditions and rituals,
bound up with an emotional tie to the land and living
beings.
Conserving Biodiversity: Traditional ‘Rules of Thumb’
How indigenous knowledge of nature and human social be-
havior is translated into resource use practices that tend to
promote sustainable use of the biota and conservation of
biodiversity is little known. Better known, many traditional
people exhibit resource use restraints that promote
386 Religious Traditions and Biodiversity
conservation. But knowledge, belief, and practice leading to
restraint tend to be intermingled, making it difficult to trace
linkages among them. Conservation researchers often ignore
social restraints on grounds that they are not considered ra-
tional in our worldview, often involving beliefs in super-
natural forces, for example, as in the case of taboos. To arrive
at an appropriate set of social restraints is an order of mag-
nitude more complicated than to employ knowledge of
habitat preference and behavior for efficient hunting strat-
egies. To implement a set of social restraints is complicated
also because it requires continued cooperation of a large
number of individuals.
The dealings of traditional societies with nature are often
hedged by prescriptions as to what, when, and how much is to
be left undisturbed. These prescriptions become part of a
culture and are mediated by religious traditions. Indian
ecologist Madhav Gadgil and colleagues (1993) identified four
kinds of widely used ‘rules of thumb’ as social restraints
leading to indigenous biodiversity conservation practice:
Provide Total Protection to some Biological Communities
or Habitat Patches
These may include pools along river courses, sacred ponds,
sacred mountains, meadows, and forests. For example, sacred
groves were once widely protected from Africa to China, and
in fact, throughout the Old World. In the tribal state of Mi-
zoram in northeastern India, they continue to be protected
even after conversion to Christianity. It is now called a ‘safety
forest’, while the village woodlot from which regulated har-
vests are made is called the ‘supply forest’. Ecological theory
suggests that providing such absolute protection in ‘refugia’
can be a very effective way of ensuring persistence of biological
populations.
Provide Total Protection to Certain Long-Lived (K-selected)
Species
Trees of all species of the genus Ficus are protected in many
parts of the Old World. It is notable that Ficus is considered a
keystone genus significant to the conservation of overall bio-
diversity. Local people seem to be often aware of the import-
ance of Ficus as affording food and shelter for a wide range of
birds, bats, and primates, and it is not difficult to imagine that
such understanding was converted into widespread protection
of Ficus trees at some point in the distant past. Taboos with
apparent functional significance may also be placed on some
less obvious species within the ecological community. For
example, some Amazon fish species considered important for
folk medicine are taboo and are avoided as food.
Protect Critical Life History Stages
In south India, fruit bats may be hunted when foraging, but
not at daytime roosts on trees that may be in the midst of
villages. Many waders are hunted outside the breeding season,
but not at heronaries, which may again be on trees lining
village streets. Cree Indians of James Bay in the subarctic hunt
Canada goose, a major subsistence resource, but rarely kill or
even disturb nesting geese. The danger of overharvest and
depletion of a population is clearly far greater if these vul-
nerable stages are hunted and the protection afforded to them
seems to be a clear case of ecological prudence.
Mandate Local Stewards to Monitor and Oversee Resource
Use
Traditional resource harvesting systems in diverse parts of the
world rely on the leadership of a traditional expert to organize
the harvest, control access, supervise local rules, and generally
act as a ‘steward’. This practice also ensures the proper use and
transmission of knowledge. Further, in some societies, major
events of resource harvest are carried out as a short-term,
prescribed group effort. Thus, many tribal groups engage once
a year in a large-scale communal hunt. Such a group exercise
may also serve the purpose of assessing the status of prey
populations and their habitat and may help to adjust resource
harvest practices to sustain yields and conserve biodiversity.
Considering that contemporary scientific prescriptions for
biodiversity conservation are, in effect, also ‘rules of thumb’,
these traditional prescriptions add up to a reasonably good set
of practices. Thus, traditional knowledge, with its time depth
of observations, and an accumulated experience of learning-
by-doing, can help us arrive at practical, locally tailored pre-
scriptions for resource use relevant to conservation needs.
Ecosystem People, Local Knowledge, and Sacred Respect
Many practices used by indigenous people contribute to the
conservation of biodiversity through the use of more varieties,
species, and landscape patches than do modern agricultural
food production systems (which tend to rely heavily on the
monoculture of a few varieties). Several volumes illustrate this
notion (Posey, 1999; Grim, 2001; Turner, 2005; Berkes, 2012).
Gary Nabhan’s (2000) work in Arizona and Mexico provides
an illustration of biodiversity enhancement due to traditional
multispecies agriculture, in this case, as compared to a pro-
tected area. Investigating two similar oases in the Sonoran
Desert, Nabhan found 32 species of birds in the US Organ
Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona side of the
desert. The other oasis, 50 km away on the Mexican side of the
border and still being farmed in the traditional Papago style
by a group of Indian villagers, supported 65 species. A possible
explanation was that the farmed oasis provided greater di-
versity and amounts of food available for the birds, as com-
pared to the protected oasis.
There is evidence that indigenous practices based on good
local observations and natural history can provide the cap-
ability to respond to feedbacks from the environment and to
ecosystem change. The book Linking Social and Ecological Sys-
tems documents examples of multiple-species management,
resource rotation, succession management, landscape patchi-
ness management, and other ways of responding to and
managing pulses and ecological surprises (Berkes et al., 2000).
Even assuming that biodiversity conservation is the indirect
outcome of these practices, for the most part, the amount of
ecological understanding suggested by these practices is con-
siderable. Social mechanisms behind these practices include
adaptations for the generation, accumulation, and transmis-
sion of knowledge and the use of local institutions and rules
for social regulation. Religious traditions are important for the
cultural internalization of traditional practices and for the
development of worldviews and cultural values appropriate
for them.

Some traditional societies have ecosystem-like concepts.
Ancient conceptualizations of ecosystems exist in several
American Indian, Asia–Pacific, European, and African cultures.
Among some indigenous peoples of the North American
Subarctic, land is more than a physical landscape; it en-
compasses the living environment, including humans. For
example, the term used by the Dene groups of the Canadian
Western Subarctic, ndé (ndeh), is usually translated as land but
its meaning is closer to ecosystem because it conveys a sense of
relations of living and nonliving things on the land. However,
it differs from the scientific concept of ecosystem in that ndé is
based on the idea that everything in the environment has life
and spirit (Berkes, 2012).
Table 1 provides a summary of traditional ecosystem-like
concepts in which the unit of nature is often defined in terms
of a physical boundary (such as a watershed) and living and
nonliving elements are considered interlinked (references in
Berkes, 2012). For example, among the Gitksan people of the
Pacific Northwest, tribal chiefs describe their land boundaries
as ‘from mountain top to mountain top’ and orient them-
selves by two directional axes within this watershed frame-
work: vertically up and down from valley bottom to mountain
top, and horizontally, upstream and downstream. Detailed
land use maps of the kinship-based house groups (wilps) of the
Gitksan show that there is a close correspondence between
watershed areas and wilps or clusters of wilps. Clearly, these are
not merely political boundaries but watershed-ecosystems-as-
territories.
In Oceania there was a wealth of ecosystem-like concepts.
Examples include the ancient Hawaiian ahupua’a, wedge-
shaped land units controlled by local chiefs, encompassing
entire valleys stretching from the top of mountains to the coast
and shallow waters. The variations of the Hawaiian system
may be found in the Yap tabinau, the Fijian vanua, and the
Solomon Islands puava. The common point in each is that the
term refers to an intimate association of a group of people
with land, reef, and lagoon and all that grows on or in them. It
is the ‘personal ecosystem’ of a specific group of people. In the
Solomons, for example, a puava is a named territory consisting
Table 1 Examples of traditional applications of the ecosystem
view
System Country/region
Watershed management of salmon American Indians of the
rivers and associated hunting and Pacific Northwest
gathering areas by tribal groups
Delta and lagoon management for fish South and Southeast Asia
culture (tambak in Java), and the
integrated cultivation of rice and fish
Vanua (in Fiji), a named area of land Oceania, including Fiji,
and sea, seen as an integrated whole Solomon Islands, and
with its human occupants ancient Hawaii
Family groups claiming individual The Ainu of northern
watersheds (iworu) as their domain Japan
for hunting, fishing, and gathering
Integrated floodplain management Mali, Africa
(dina) in which resource areas are
shared by social groups through
reciprocal access arrangements
Religious Traditions and Biodiversity 387
of land and sea, and it includes all lands and resources asso-
ciated with a kinship group.
These examples provide insights into what Raymond
Dasmann (1988) calls ecosystem people – people who de-
pend heavily on natural resources of their own localities, and
hence develop a very detailed understanding of their en-
vironment, as well as a spiritual intimacy with the land. Such
indigenous ecological understanding is different from that of
the scientist. These traditional views tend to depict ecosystems
not as lifeless, mechanical, and distinct from people, but as
fully alive and encompassing humans. In some cases, tradi-
tional concepts of land also incorporate spirits of animals and
other natural objects (as among the Dene of Northern Canada
and Alaska), and spirits of human ancestors, as among some
African groups and among the Australian aborigines (the
concept of Dreamtime).
Conclusions
In monotheistic traditions, humans have dominion over the
earth. They have a God-given right to subdue the earth, but
they are also the stewards of God with responsibility to take
care of the earth. By contrast, pantheistic traditions do not
have a dominant relationship with nature. Asian religious
traditions and pre-Christian European traditions also have a
nondominant view of nature. The record of different religious
traditions in conserving biodiversity is mixed. This is because
human behavior is conditioned not only by religious beliefs
but also by many other forces and because both culture and
science evolve over time (Capra, 1996).
Traditional knowledge–practice–belief systems, tapping the
wisdom of many traditional cultures with pantheistic tradi-
tions, offers a number of lessons. These systems are charac-
terized by a similarity of concepts of nature, in which humans
are part of nature. As well, these knowledge systems are
characterized by similarity in design. An example is shifting
cultivation, developed apparently independently, by tropical
forest peoples in Africa, South America, South Asia, and New
Guinea. At the same time, traditional knowledge systems are
characterized by a remarkable diversity in practice, even in
adjacent areas. For example, taboos used in the social control
of resources in Oceania can vary greatly from one island to
another, and even from one part of an island to another. Such
diversity in resource use practice contrasts with the relatively
uniform conservation prescriptions of government agencies,
and highlights the need for conceptual pluralism.
One important lesson from traditional ecological know-
ledge is that values and beliefs are important in encoding
ethics, including the ethics of conservation. As Rappoport
(1984) and Anderson (1996) point out, the use of emotion-
ally powerful cultural symbols is important to develop and
enforce a moral code. If this is true, the incorporation of values
and beliefs into biodiversity conservation efforts is more likely
to succeed than the use of purely scientific arguments or
purely economic incentives.
A number of contemporary concepts appear to be ex-
ploring the combination of emotions and ideas that may help
restore a sense of sacred respect. They include deep ecology
(Naess, 1989), the biophilia hypothesis (love of living beings)
388 Religious Traditions and Biodiversity
(Kellert and Wilson, 1993), bioregionalism (with its com-
bination of local self-reliance and sense of belonging), the
related notion of ‘sense of place’ (Tuan, 1974), and the Gaia
hypothesis which is the contemporary version of the Mother
Earth idea. Each provides an approach to the understanding of
reciprocal ties that bind humans with the natural world, and
these ties invariably have a spiritual or religious aspect.
See also: Conservation Movement, Historical. Ecosystem, Concept
of. Environmental Ethics. Historical Awareness of Biodiversity.
Indigenous Peoples and Biodiversity. Literary Perspectives on
Biodiversity. Social and Cultural Factors. Stewardship, Concept of
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