Detachment or Participation

The present environmental crisis is widely agreed to be attributable to the impact of technology. However, in this article, I align myself with those who attribute the environmentally adverse impact of technology to the new way of relating to the natural world that developed in the seventeenth century (Cohen 1994). One aspect of this was a more detached, less engaged sense of relationship to the natural world rather than a sense of being a participant in the natural world, what Nicholas Lash (1995) calls the “spectorial” consciousness, which is noticeable from the seventeenth century onwards. The other, closely related, change was the use of investigative, experimental methods that involved manipulation of the natural world, first to “force nature to give up its secrets” (Midgley 1992) and later to make nature serve human needs. Over the past few centuries, with the industrial revolution being one of the major contributing factors, human beings have come to see the natural world as something separate from themselves that they are free to use and abuse.

Science has made effective use of the kind of conceptual cognition that takes a detached, objective, disengaged view of the natural world of which humanity is part. Over the past 400 years, humanity has accumulated an incredible wealth of scientific understanding, including scientific data about climate change and its predictable consequences. Those data have been crucial in making humanity aware of the dangers in which they now find themselves. However, the detached objectivity about the natural world that has made science so successful may also have contributed to the insensitive, uncaring attitude to the natural world that has led to the current environmental crisis. It is possible to celebrate the achievements of science while still recognizing that the scientific mindset has contributed to our current environmental problems.

How humans think affects how they behave. Generally speaking, how they think about things (or persons or creatures) affects how they act towards them. In the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, nonhuman creatures such as dogs came to be seen as mere mechanisms, with no soul. It has been suggested, though this is hard to verify, that a mechanistic view of dogs led to changes in how people actually treated dogs. Thinking about them as mere mechanisms led to treating them more insensitively. There is a similar danger that thinking about the natural world in mechanistic terms will lead to treating it with indifference.

There has been growing awareness over the last hundred years of the problems caused by an increasingly detached mode of human cognition, and a recognition that resolving environmental problems will require a different mode of consciousness and a new and more sensitive way of engaging with the natural world. This line of thought can be found in slightly different forms in the work of Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Iain McGilchrist, and others.

Steiner (1861–1925), an Austrian polymath and clairvoyant, developed a complex narrative about the evolution of human consciousness, accessibly expounded by Owen Barfield (1957) and Charles Davy (1961). In brief, there was a gradual fading of the earlier animistic consciousness, in which humanity participated in a natural world that was experienced as being imbued with spirit. That was replaced by an onlooker consciousness, associated with the development of modern science, in which the natural world was experienced as soulless. Steiner believed that reconnection of spirit and nature was possible, but it would come with a new kind of imagination-based consciousness, what Barfield (1957) calls “final participation,” in which humanity is able to look out in the world with spirit-imbued eyes. In 1924, building on that general framework, and in response to growing concerns about a deterioration in the quality of soil, Steiner ([1924] 2004) gave a lecture course on biodynamic agriculture that was designed to reconnect nature and spirit. Dan McKanan (2017) in Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism claims that Steiner was the first advocate of organic farming and argues that his biodynamic agriculture has had an important influence on the environmental movement.

A convergent line of thinking can be found in Carl Jung’s ([1933] 2017) Modern Man in Search of a Soul, especially in the chapters contrasting archaic and modern man. Jung sketches a similar view of the evolution of consciousness, in which humanity has gradually become detached from both the unconscious and nature. In the earlier mode of consciousness, there was no sharp boundary between “I” and “not I.” The natural world was experienced as enchanted and had both soul and agency. However, with the development of scientific rationalism, the world became increasingly disenchanted. Jung maintains that this increasing detachment left modern man a “precarious creature.” Jung was writing before the present environmental crisis, and did not address it directly, but his thinking can readily be applied to it (e.g., Kiehl 2012; Yunt 2001). For example, there needs to be a redressing of the balance between the dominance of the thinking function over the feeling, sensing, and intuiting functions. Like Steiner, Jung did not think it was possible to simply go back to the earlier mode of consciousness, but considered that humanity needs a new integration of the earlier engaged consciousness with the later achievement of conceptual clarity.

Another similar approach comes from Charles Taylor’s (2007) influential work on the emergence of secularism in The Secular Self. Taylor makes a distinction between the more “porous” self associated with earlier religious cultures and the “buffered” self that has developed as a feature of secularism. Claire Gilbert (2025) has recently published an extended, scholarly analysis of the implicit porosity in the work of the late mediaeval mystic Julian of Norwich and drawn out its implications for the current environmental crisis. She suggests that a close engagement with Julian’s writings can help people recover the more porous consciousness she believes is necessary if the environmental crisis is to be resolved.

Gilbert also draws on Heidegger’s ([1954] 2013) critique of technology, which has led to a distinctive environmental philosophy and was an important influence on the “deep ecology” movement founded by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973) and developed by Rachel Carson (1962) and others (e.g., Tobias, 1989). Key features of deep ecology are biocentrism rather than anthropocentrism as its primary value; a view of nature as a web of interconnected parts rather a storehouse of resources; a goal of ecological harmony and equilibrium rather than sustainable development; and a strategy of cultural and spiritual transformation rather than technical and legal reform.

Two Modes of Human Cognition

I propose that it will be fruitful to develop these various lines of thought about how to engage with the environment by connecting them with current psychological work on two modes of human cognition (e.g., Evans and Frankish 2009), one intuitive and the other more deliberative. The most colloquial version of this distinction is as being between “head” and “heart” (Watts and Dumbreck 2013). For humanity to respond to environmental issues effectively, it may be necessary to appeal to hearts as well as heads. Dual-cognition theory can give greater precision to the kind of cognitive relationship to the environment that seems likely to be necessary if the present environmental crisis is to be resolved. The religious traditions of the world, especially their spiritual practices, are well placed to help.

Numerous psychologists have distinguished between two modes of cognition but, unfortunately, there is as yet no generally accepted version of the distinction (Evans and Frankish 2009; Watts 2013a). Different theorists make the distinction in slightly different ways, and in different terminology. Sigmund Freud’s well-known distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind was an early attempt. Another influential formalization came from the social psychologist Seymour Epstein (1991), who distinguished between rational and experiential cognitive systems.

McGilchrist’s (2009) distinction between left-brain and right-brain is currently one of the best-known versions of dual-cognition theory. In part two of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist (2009) sets out a theory of how human consciousness has changed in recent centuries, with increasing dominance of a rational and analytical mode of cognition (which he calls “left brain”), associated with the advance of science, and a growing eclipse of the evolutionarily older mode of cognition that is intuitive and embodied (which he calls “right brain”). At various points in The Matter with Things, McGilchrist (2021) explores the implications of this shift in cognition for environmental issues.

McGilchrist’s use of neuroscientific data has been criticized (e.g., Spezio 2019). Evidence from careful study of people who have suffered damage to just one side of the brain is strongly supportive of his claims about lateralization (McGilchrist 2009, chap. 2). On the other hand, empirical work using brain scanning methodology suggests a more complex mapping of modes of cognition onto areas of the brain, and there is no evidence from brain scanning studies of over-dominance of one hemisphere over the other (Nielsen et al. 2013). It is important to emphasize that the brain always operates as a whole, and each hemisphere operates in the context of the other, unless one suffers significant damage. For present purposes, I am more concerned with McGilchrist’s distinction between two different modes of cognition than with his mapping of these modes on to structures of the brain, and some may prefer to take “left brain and “right brain” as metaphors for two modes of cognition.

The version of the distinction between two modes of human cognition with which I have engaged most extensively is Philip Barnard’s cognitive architecture, interacting cognitive subsystems (ICS). One mode of cognition is intuitive, practical, embodied, holistic, affective, and participatory. It is a continuation of the phylogenetically older intelligence of our primate ancestors. In addition, humans have a distinctive rational, analytical, conceptual intelligence that works with linguistic or other symbolic representations of reality rather than engaging in a practical way with the real world. Again, both central subsystems are always active, and each operates in relationship with the other. Nevertheless, there is a lot of variability from moment to moment in how functional relationships between the subsystems are configured. There is a distinction between these two modes of cognition, but it is not being suggested that they operate separately from each other.

The clearest and most accessible account of Barnard’s distinction between these two modes of central cognition is provided by John Teasdale (2022, chaps. 2–4) in his recent book on mindfulness. ICS provides what is probably the most rigorous version of the distinction between two modes of central human cognition and can be regarded as achieving a computational level of precision, even though it has not been fully implemented in a computer program (see Watts 2024). It has also spawned a wide range of applications, including modelling the cognition involved in spiritual and religious practices (Teasdale 2022; Watts 2024).

ICS also comes with a helpful account of the evolution of cognitive architectures, from the relatively simple four-subsystem architecture of an animal such as a zebra to the complex nine-subsystem architecture of human beings (e.g., Barnard 2019). On Barnard’s account, animals such as a zebra would have three sensory subsystems (visual, auditory, and body states), feeding into a multimodal central processor. Two significant developments led to additional subsystems. The use of tools required an additional motor subsystem as well as an intermediate subsystem integrating visual input with motor output. Similarly, speech led to an articulatory subsystem as well as an intermediate system integrating auditory input with articulation. Finally, the central subsystem spawned an additional subsystem for conceptual intelligence, leaving the central subsystem free to focus on a more embodied and intuitive mode of central cognition.

Barnard’s ICS emphasizes that conceptual cognition deals with symbolic representations of the external world rather than experiencing things directly. In ICS, visual, auditory and body state all feed directly into intuitive, nonconceptual cognition. However, visual and auditory input to conceptual cognition is filtered through the more recently developed intermediate subsystems to provide us with representations of reality (or with visual or auditory imagery) rather than arising from direct experience of the environment. In a similar vein, William James ([1902] 2012), one of the pioneers of modern psychology, was well aware of the importance of conceptual cognition in human beings but, interestingly, also recognized that there was something unusually “pure,” direct, and unmediated about mystical experience (Forman 1990).

Conceptual cognition is even more cut off from somatic experience, which, in ICS, has input only to embodied, nonconceptual cognition, not conceptual cognition. McGilchrist (2009) makes a similar point about the disconnectedness of left-brain cognition when he points out that the components of the left brain are very tightly interconnected within it but have little connection with the rest of the body. In contrast, he points out that the right brain is well connected with other parts of the body, such as the guts. It seems that human cognition is structured so that the contact between somatic, embedded cognition and conceptual cognition is limited and tenuous. In addition, conceptual cognition always simplifies and filters out much of the rich meaning of more intuitive cognition.

In making claims about human distinctiveness, it is always important to distinguish between description and evaluation. Many people now say that it is pernicious to see humans as special. I would say humans are different, in that they have an advanced linguistic, symbolic, conceptual intelligence that is found only in embryonic form in other species—but that need not imply humans are better. Humans have more advanced conceptual capacities than other species, which they can use for good and ill. Descriptively, humans are different; evaluatively, they are not better. Humans may have exceptional influence on the planet, but that does not necessarily make them more important.

The contrast between two modes of cognition has a parallel in biology, in the debate between organicist and mechanistic ways of understanding life (Ruse 2010). For the most part, mainstream biology has taken a mechanistic approach, and organicist views, such as Lovelock’s “Gaia” (that the Earth is a single self-regulating organism), have been side-lined (Ruse 2013). However, as Rupert Sheldrake (1990, 3–4) argues, there has often been a discrepancy between official views of nature as “the inanimate source of natural resources” and an unofficial private world, chiefly identified with the countryside, to which people feel an intuitive emotional connection.

Sheldrake has, over many years, taken a particular interest in adaptive behavior, such as bird migrations, that are not easily explained on current mechanistic assumptions. For example, adult cuckoos migrate from the United Kingdom to Africa in July, leaving their offspring to be brought up by other species. About a month later, the offspring gather and fly to exactly the same destination without having ever met their parents. To explain how such things are possible, Sheldrake has developed a theoretical framework in terms of procedural memory (morphogenetic fields) and extended mind (Sheldrake 1995; Watts 2011).

Though biology has officially clung to a mechanistic framework, the case for allowing a broader range of explanatory factors has become increasingly strong. On many topics, there is a strong case for moving at least to an expanded version of the mechanistic approach that allows contextual and holistic factors (Reiss and Ruse 2023). Self-organizing processes are observable at many levels in the natural world (Kauffman 1996).

The contrast between these two modes of human cognition has also been played out in psychology. Psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, came to focus mainly on the conceptual capabilities of mind, learning, problem-solving, etc. Of course, emotion was acknowledged, but it was all too often subordinate to other concerns, such as the role of emotions in learning or decision making. However, more recently there has been an upsurge of interest in embodied, or “4E” (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) cognition (e.g., Newen et al. 2018).

Interestingly, an important source of this current interest in embodied cognition came from authors influenced by Buddhist thinking (Varela, Rosch, and Thompson 2017). There has been a good deal of subsequent interest in the implications of embodied cognition for theology and religious studies, by Warren S. Brown and Brad D. Strawn (2012); Jones (2019); Strawn and Brown (2020); Fraser Watts (2013b, 2021); Tobias Tanton (2023); Patty Van Cappellen, Stephanie Cassidy, and Ruixi Zhang (2023).

Environmental Applications

Human beings engage with environmental issues using both kinds of cognition. Scientific analyses of the problems created by climate change, and predictions of its consequences, are an example of the power of human conceptual cognition. Humans can think about the environmental crisis, using their special capacity for conceptual cognition, and reflect on environmental issues. For example, they can distinguish between different meanings of ecology and reflect theologically about human beings having the same creator God as the natural world of which they are a part, or whether human beings have a responsibility, under God, to contribute to the redemption of the whole of creation, not just the human race.

Human beings can also use their phylogenetically older mode of cognition to engage with the natural world around them in a way that is more similar to how animals engage with it. People can sense the world around them at an intuitive level, and respond to it instinctively, without necessarily stopping to conceptualize what they are aware of. In other words, they are capable of sensing, and responding to, what is happening around them—sunlight and rainfall, for example—in an animal-like way. They can touch, taste, and smell what is around them in much the same way as other animals do.

A central claim of this article is that the capacity of conceptual cognition to change how human beings interact with the environment is limited, and indeed that the overreliance of human beings on our rather detached kind of conceptual cognition has contributed to the widespread despoiling of the natural world. However, humans still have an animal-like intelligence available to them, even though it tends to be overshadowed by the distinctive human capacity for conceptual cognition. If humanity could recultivate a more embodied, empathic awareness of how the natural world is suffering as a result of how they have treated it, this would naturally lead to treating the natural world better. In order to cultivate environmental sensitivity, humanity needs to inhabit its animal intelligence more richly. That may involve sometimes putting conceptual intelligence to one side so that humanity can function better as animals.

Many animals seem to be well connected to planetary intelligence in a way that leads them to live alongside the planet much better than humans do (Bridle 2022). We humans need to recover our capacity to participate sensitively and effectively in that planetary intelligence. Nonhuman creatures showed evidence of a nonconceptual awareness of climate change, and started to adapt to it, long before humans realized it was occurring. In 1736, Robert Marsham, a Norfolk landowner, began keeping records of the arrival of spring, and these records were continued by him and subsequent family members until 1958. The records show clear evidence of rising temperatures, especially in winter months; and that is correlated with changes in the behavior of plants and animals, such as oak leaves appearing a little earlier. As temperatures rise, migrations occur earlier (Bridle 2022, chap. 4). Humans now tend to overprioritize propositional knowledge to the point where they fail to have the kind practical, intuitive knowledge of the changes going on around them that is evident in other species. Often, humans try to override environmental changes rather than adapt to them.

The Role of Spiritual Practices

I now explore, drawing on cognitive psychology, how spiritual practices might help people engage with the environment more sensitively and interact with it less destructively. I would not claim that spiritual intelligence is a necessary accompaniment of environmental sensitivity. People can cultivate environmental sensitivity without approaching it as a spiritual practice. However, I claim that there is a natural affinity between spiritual intelligence and environmental sensitivity, and that spirituality provides one route by which environmental sensitivity can be cultivated.

Spiritual practices are potentially most useful in cultivating environmental sensitivity, though such practices are generally supported by assumptions and beliefs. The interconnectedness of beliefs, practices, and experiences is as much a feature of spirituality as of religion (Watts 2017, chap. 8). Spiritual practices may be either located within religion or adopted by those who regard themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (e.g., Watts 2022). They can lead to the cultivation of a kind of “spiritual intelligence,” which Marius Dorobantu and Watts (2025, 5), following Robert A. Emmons (1999), characterize as having “a sense of meaning, unity and connectedness, the focus on ultimate purpose and meaning, and a set of beliefs and practices that facilitate a relationship with the transcendent.”

Rowan Williams (2023), in an unpublished conference talk, suggests that spiritual intelligence is an embodied and located kind of intelligence. For him, the key question about ourselves, from the point of view of spiritual intelligence, is not what we are, or even who we are, but where we are (Watts 2023). That implies that that environmental sensitivity is a key feature of spiritual intelligence, and that spiritual intelligence is a highly embodied kind of intelligence. Physical activities and postures play a key role in spiritual practices, especially in sacramental Christianity (e.g., Van Cappellen, Cassidy, and Zhang 2023; Watts 2021).

Spiritual practices are quite variable in their focus. So far, there has been little attempt to classify them, though Sheldrake (2019) suggests that there are three basic types: some that induce a state of deep repose, some that enlighten understanding, and some that involve activity. It is possible to develop a related classification in terms of the ICS cognitive architecture. Some spiritual practices involve conceptual cognition, but many that do not. Of those that do not, some prioritize meditative attention to sensory stimuli of one kind or another, while others focus on activity. Though it is possible that all spiritual practices may lead to increased environmental awareness to some extent, those that involve sensory attention seem most likely to do so.

One of the best researched spiritual practices involving sensory attention is mindfulness. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has a good track record of effectiveness in the treatment of conditions such as depression (Piet and Hougaard 2011), and there is growing evidence for the effects of mindfulness on the brain (Trichal 2026). In principle, people can train themselves to give mindful attention to anything, but most practitioners of mindfulness focus on somatic awareness, using a focus on breathing, or perhaps the soles of the feet, to avoid conceptual cognition and locking onto intrusive auditory or visual stimuli. John Teasdale (2022) has used ICS to develop a theoretical understanding of mindfulness in terms of its avoidance of conceptual cognition. In mindfulness, people train themselves to prioritize the more intuitive mode of cognition, which notices things without conceptualizing or evaluating them.

There is now a growing body of research on such environmentally focused mindfulness, with promising findings. Mindfulness leads to an increased sense of connectedness with nature, as well as improvements in health, wellbeing, and sociality (Thiermann and Sheate 2021). A variant of mindfulness that focuses more explicitly on environmental awareness might make an even more significant contribution to resolving the environmental crisis. Somatic awareness (or “interoception”) is an important feature of many spiritual practices (Beharrell 2019). However, it would be possible to develop a spiritual practice that enhances environmental awareness, rather than somatic awareness, but in the same mindful way. Like other kinds of mindful attention, it would involve simply noticing how things feel, noticing temperature, sound, silence, the quality of air, and the rich range of things in visual field. As with other kinds of mindfulness, it would presumably avoid locking onto any of these things or conceptual thought about them and instead simply noticing the environment.

Many religious traditions have rich frameworks of understanding that would provide background support for such a practice, as evident in, for example, The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (Jenkins et al. 2017). Buddhism is probably a particularly rich resource (Tucker and Williams 1998), highlighting the interconnectedness of all things and emphasizing that humans are not separate from nature but rather an integral part of it. Within the Christian tradition, Celtic Christianity had a particularly rich engagement with the natural world (Low 1996).

Another rich resource for developing an environmentally focused spirituality is the engagement of many Indigenous peoples with their land (Jenkins et al. 2017). Particular places often play an important role in spiritual traditions. Watts (2019) notes that in the Hebrew Bible, there is a rich set of engagements with both places in the natural world and particular buildings, such as the temple. There is a particularly rich engagement with the land to be found in Indigenous cultures, such as the Aboriginal people of Australia. Something similar can be found in the relationship of the ancient Israelites to the “land,” as evident in the Hebrew Bible. The environmental cognition of Indigenous culture is often closely connected with their spiritual worldview. For example, in Aboriginal culture, there is a sense of having a deep spiritual connection to the land. Humans are seen as belonging to the land rather than the land belonging to humans. This sense of connection to the land is rooted in the concept of the “Dreamtime” (or Tjukurrpa), when ancestral beings created the world and all life (Elkin 1956). This Dreamtime is not just a distant past but an ongoing, living reality that shapes life now.

In the Aboriginal worldview, it is believed that ancestral spirits created the land as well as the relationships between people, animals, and the environment, and that the land is not merely a resource but a spiritual and living entity infused with the spirits of ancestors. This belief fosters a sense of responsibility to care for and protect the land and waters, as people see themselves as stewards or custodians rather than landowners. Further, the connection to ancestral land is central to Aboriginal identity, so being removed from their land is seen as a separation from a vital spiritual and cultural connection. Among religious groups, a sense of attachment to the land is often particularly strong among diaspora groups who no longer live in their ancestral land but whose identity is maintained by an ongoing sense of connection to it, which can be seen as a kind of “place attachment” (Counted and Watts 2019; Counted et al. 2024). There is a growing body of empirical research on the sense of connectedness with nature (Keaulana et al. 2021), which is now quite common, and often quasi-religious.

The Need for Balance and Integration

To address the environmental crisis, I suggest that humanity will need to draw on both modes of human cognition. Humanity needs rational decision-making about technological advances, such as sustainable aviation fuel. However, I am suggesting here that it would help if human beings could also cultivate the kind of environmental sensitivity that naturally develops from many spiritual practices. I suspect that attentive spiritual intelligence is more relevant to the environmental crisis than abstract religious beliefs and offers a more effective route to changed environmental behavior via enhanced environmental sensitivity. Like scientific data, conceptual beliefs about creation are likely to be too abstract to motivate behavioral change unless they are accompanied by spiritual practices.

A key issue is how best to deliver the changed behavior necessary to deal with the environmental crisis. Scientific data seem to have limited value in motivating people to change. Humans are capable of both hot (affective) cognition and cold, detached cognition. I suggest that hot cognition is more effective in bringing about behavioral change, and that cold cognition, on its own, struggles to do that.

There is, of course, scope for crossover between the two modes of cognition, and for their integration. For example, there are ways of doing science in an unusually participatory and meditative way, such as Goethe’s way of meditating on plants. The Goethean practice of meditating on the form of plants (Bortoft 1996) is the kind of spiritual practice that would be expected to enhance environmental sensitivity. There is also currently a lot of fascination among the wider public with the interdependence found in the ecosystems of the natural world, brilliantly popularized in TV programs by people such as David Attenborough. Humanity will need to integrate all possible approaches to tackle the environment crisis.

The cognition of particular individuals is embedded in a wider societal and cultural context, with a to-and-fro between individual and societal cognition. While many of the adverse effects of human environmental behavior are indeed a consequence of blinkered conceptual thinking, this can nonetheless be balanced by constant, societal-level dialogue with belief systems about how conceptual cognition is best developed and deployed. There needs to be not only a rebalancing between conceptual and participatory cognition but a challenging of the substance of societal beliefs, such as the current widespread belief in economic growth as a panacea for all problems.

Individual minds will need to be embedded within societal enabling conditions for a trajectory to develop that will lead to better human relationships with the planet. That may involve at least five system levels. Neurological systems are nested within psychological systems, which in turn are nested within behavioral systems, which are nested within local human groups and cultures, which are nested within more global human groups and cultures. The schematic models that individuals develop are based on all the interactions they have in their behavioral world and on what filters down from their local culture and its relationship to other global cultures. Environmental issues arise at all these levels. Changes in belief systems are needed that permeate all non-brain levels.

This article argues that scientific rationality needs to be supplemented with the cultivation of the kind of environmental sensitivity that grows naturally out of spiritual practices. Humanity may be able to use its conceptual intelligence to focus attention back on the need for a more personal, sensitive approach to the environment. Perhaps humanity can cultivate a kind of science that involves a more personal sense of connection with the natural world. Humanity needs the objective, detached gaze of science, but needs to integrate it with seeing ourselves as embodied creatures situated within the environment, not outside it. Integrating these two kinds of gaze is a key challenge for scientific and religious work on the climate crisis humanity faces.

In as far as religious communities are currently responding to the environmental crisis at all, they often do so in a rather limited and unambitious way, focusing just on the carbon imprint of their own premises, such as eco-churches or eco-mosques. The scale of the environmental crisis calls for a bolder and more ambitious response, which has not often been forthcoming. An impressive (and early) exception was when, in 1972, A. H. (“Horace”) Dammers (2004, chap. 6), then a canon at Coventry Cathedral, became aware through chance circumstances of environmental issues and responded by founding the Lifestyle Movement, with its slogan, “live simply that others may simply live,” aiming to change the lifestyles of as many people as possible (Dammers 1982), and planned an international conference on Christian environmental responsibility (Lester 1975). Humanity needs more religious responses to the environmental crisis of comparable ambition. Religion connects with intuitive, embodied cognition in a way that science cannot easily emulate; and it has the resources within its spiritual practices to foster enhanced environmental sensitivity.

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.