Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a history of organized religion’s activist engagement with environmentalism and climate change. It is brief in its limited time-span of enquiry (1967-2015), and partial in its focus on the engagement of Christian and Buddhist traditions in international environmental politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a brief and two-pronged partial history on organized religion's activist engagement with environmentalism and climate change, and it's study. The paper is brief in its limited time-span of enquiry (1967-2015), and partial in its predominant focus on Christian and Buddhist engagement in international environmental politics. A common starting point for current thinking on religion and ecology or religion and environment is historian Lynn White Jr.'s 1967 article 'The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis', which has been accused of derailing the engagement between religion and environment until the 1980s. This latter period saw rising scholarly engagement in environmental philosophy and academic-activist studies of religious ecology, as well as increased activism between religious institutions and conservation organizations. Nearly half a century after White, the 2015 Papal Encyclical can be seen as a response to his proposition, befittingly by a Pope whose namesake White had proposed as the patron saint of ecology. What developments occurred in the ensuing years to facilitate it? This paper fills this middle ground by shifting focus to Buddhist (in particular the role played by H.H. the Dalai Lama) and to ecumenical activist engagement with environmental concerns from the 1980s to the first decade of the 21st century, as well as to scholarship on this engagement. It suggests that globalization and international environmental politics have played a large role in these processes, and that an understanding of the role of the scholar-activist in this field of study is indispensible.