Karen Armstrong (2022). Sacred Nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world. Alfred A. Knopf: Toronto

Karen Armstrong is a renowned scholar of the history of religions. She has an uncanny ability to describe and compare sacred / religious experiences from the earliest oral traditions and written sources.

In this recent effort, Sacred Nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world, Armstrong traces the sacredness of nature through the world religions while emphasizing the current and expanding abyss dividing our civilization from a sustainable relationship with the environment. Her basic thesis is that to avoid the worst consequences of our trajectory, we must reconnect with the idea of the sacred in the natural world: “While it is essential to cut carbon emissions and heed the warnings of scientists, we need to learn not only how to act differently but also how to think differently about the natural world. We need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia; if we fail to do this, our concern for the natural environment will remain superficial” (p.17).

Part of what the author is advocating is to create narratives that build on compassion and solidarity, which she believes are inherent in most religious systems. She believes that our individualist and acquisitive society is a barrier to such notions: “We need good myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which challenges and transcends our solipsistic and tribal egocentricity. And, crucially, we need good myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, because unless there is a spiritual revolution that challenges the destructiveness of our technological genius, we will not save our planet” (p.24). After all, what is the point of finding technological solutions or changing our behaviours if we don’t value the goal of preserving the natural world (even for ourselves, let alone the rest of creation)?

To be clear, Armstrong is not a proselytizer, but she strongly believes that the essence of the sacred, fundamental to world religions and more secular movements like Romanticism, can be an inspiration to reintegrating within our worldview a notion of the interdependencies in nature. This renewed narrative would be a catalyst to a more sustainable relationship with our environment. “So, if we want to save our planet, we too must cultivate this ancient conviction that every natural thing is inseparable from our ultimate concern. We humans have the capacity to appreciate consciously, deliberately, and imaginatively the underlying unity of things” (p.150).

Sacred Nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world is well written, interesting and, most of all, offers a realizable pathway to walk together – in the worlds of Coleridge, it is a way to rediscover a ‘joyous everywhere’ in our values and our actions.