Table Of ContentPlace, Ecology
and the Sacred
i
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY
Public Religion and the Urban Environment, Richard Bohannon
Religions and Environments, Richard Bohannon
Religion in Environmental and Climate Change,
edited by Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann
ii
Place, Ecology
and the Sacred:
The Moral Geography of
Sustainable Communities
Michael S. Northcott
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
iii
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2015
© Michael S. Northcott, 2015
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1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Losing and finding sacred place 15
2 Lament for a silent summer 47
3 Artificial persons and the political economy of place 65
4 Place, religion and resistance to corporate power 87
5 Wilderness, religion, and ecological restoration in the
Scottish Highlands 103
6 Food sovereignty from Joshua to La Via Campesina 121
7 The moral geography of sustainable communities 137
8 Re-placing ethics in the city and the countryside 163
Notes 189
Index 223
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The essays in this book reflect some years of learning to grow food in
Durisdeer, a small village in Southwest Scotland. Durisdeer means ‘gate of
the forest’ and is set in the Lowther Hills of Dumfrieshire. As I have dwelled
and dug here on weekends and holidays, its buildings, hills, inhabitants and
soils have revealed a gathering of forces aesthetic, ecological, historical
and spiritual, which mark the village as what George McLeod, founder
of the Iona Community, called a ‘thin’ place. An account of these forces in
the phenomenology of place is woven into the Introduction as a frame
for the book. The essays that follow also reflect teaching and research at
New College on the Mound in Edinburgh, situated close by Edinburgh
Castle, which stands as forbidding sentinel above the rocky crags that
overshadow Princes Street Gardens. I am grateful to successive cohorts of
students on my course Ecology, Ethics and Religion, which I have also
taught at Dartmouth College and Duke University, who have stimulated my
thinking. I am grateful to the publishers of previously published material
incorporated into the book, and to book publishers and journal editors for
permission to reproduce my work here in revised form. I am very grateful to
my friends Jolyon Mitchell and George Reiss who read earlier drafts of the
whole book and made very helpful suggestions on improving it. A version of
Chapter 3 was previously published as ‘Artificial persons against nature:
environmental governmentality, economic corporations, and ecological
ethics’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1249 (2011), 104–117;
a version of Chapter 4 was previously published as ‘Sabbaths, shamans and
superquarries in Scotland: environment and religion in a contested landscape’
in Fred Gale and Michael M’Gonagle (eds), Nature, Production, Power:
Towards an Ecological Political Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,
2000), 17–34; a version of Chapter 5 was previously published as ‘Wilderness,
religion, and ecological restoration in the Scottish Highlands’, Ecotheology
10 (2005), 382–399. Chapter 2 originated as a presentation at the conference
‘Green as a Leaf’ sponsored by the Department of Theology and Religious
Studies of Nottingham University and Southwell Minster, and held in the
Minster in April 2010; Chapter 6 was given as a paper at the CAFOD
seminar on ‘Climate, Consumption and the Common Good’ held at Kings
College London in May 2014, and I am grateful to participants for comments
on the paper; parts of Chapter 8 were presented at the symposium
‘Landscapes of Hope: Towards the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’ at
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viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of
Edinburgh, 27 February 2014. Finally I am very grateful to the UK Arts and
Humanities Research Council for funding the research project ‘Caring for
the Future Through Ancestral Time: Engaging the Cultural and Spiritual
Presence of the Past to Promote a Sustainable Future’ (AH/K005456/1),
which enabled me to bring this book to completion.
Introduction
There is a growing disconnect in contemporary life between people and the
land, or what moderns call ‘nature’ or the nonhuman ‘environment’. This
disconnect originates with rapid urbanisation, which began after 1800 with
the industrial revolution, and the Enclosures, in England.1 Globally the
majority of human beings now live in cities or suburban areas. This
population shift also marks the withdrawal of most of the human population
from participation in agriculture. In the UK and North America fewer than
2 per cent of the population are now involved in formal agriculture. The
resultant disconnect between people and the earth has effects both on human
beings and on other creatures.
It might be expected that, with the withdrawal of human beings from
rural occupations and from rural dwelling, the number of species would
increase. Those formed in the Romantic aesthetic of nonhuman wilderness
as sublime, and intrinsically valuable apart from its use to humans, assume
that human beings inevitably reduce biodiversity through their food
growing, fuel gathering and other consumption and production activities.2
But on the contrary the withdrawal of most human beings from rural
pursuits and engagement in farming has been accompanied by a decline in
the abundance of species, and in the quality of rural habitats. Key to this
decline is the use of fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and heavy machinery,
and the growing numbers of domesticated animals, sponsored by industrial
agriculture. These practices displace human labour on the land, but at the
same time they erode living soils and uncultivated areas, and hence the base
of the food webs on which insects, birds and small mammals rely. Traditional
mixed farms and smallholdings by contrast sustain a much larger range of
species, and they produce more human food per hectare than modern
industrial farming methods. What they do not produce is quantities of grains
and oils sufficient to supply the industrial-scale facilities, including cattle,
chicken and pig sheds and feed lots, in which the majority of the 5 billion
globally domesticated animals and birds are cruelly incarcerated, and the
industrial food factories that manufacture packaged and ‘refined’ foods
beloved of supermarkets and food scientists, and increasingly associated
with a range of human dietary disorders and diseases.
The great disconnect between people and the land is promoted not only
by industrial agriculture and rural depopulation but by planners and
development companies, who devote a growing proportion of urban and
1
