Education for the Ecozoic: Emerging Directions in the Study of Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion
Earth is in the midst of a great transition: humanity, having become a planetary force, is now shaping both its own future and the longterm future of millions of living species. The magnitude of this process demands broad societal transformation—a challenge that occupies many of the world’s most vibrant thinkers and visionaries. Spiritual traditions, too, are engaged in the transformation of consciousness and society. As the moral force of the world’s religions joins with the insights of the ecological sciences, humanity finds itself at the very center of the deeply mysterious process by which the Earth community is revitalizing itself.
—California Institute of Integral Studies
With these words, the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a small private university in San Francisco, California, in 2013 launched its interdisciplinary graduate program in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (ESR) offering master’s and doctoral degrees. The new program’s mission was to “explore the role of worldviews, philosophies, and religion in understanding and responding to interconnected global ecological crises . . . in service of a more just, sustainable, and flourishing future,” all in the larger context of the cosmic epic of the Universe’s 13.7-billion-year evolution (CIIS 2014).
The work of “geologian” Thomas Berry (1914-2009), who argued that the environmental ills of late modernity arose from a disconnection between religions that value the transcendent realm from the specific, material needs of the Earth and its beings, provided foundational inspiration for the program. ESR students and faculty study, among other subjects, the development of varieties of “ecologically sensitive spirituality” across various inherited and emerging traditions that contribute to renewing “religious-spiritual traditions in the context of the integral functioning of the biosystems of the planet” (Berry 2009, 135-136).