Calvinist Environmentalism?

With today’s environmentalist standard-bearers hailing from Hollywood and the political left, it is tempting to see the environmental movement as a Trojan Horse for liberalism, pantheism, and all manner of threats to orthodoxy. Those concerns are not without foundation, but we should also remember what Jonathan Edwards wrote: “God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature.” With Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Mark Stoll chronicles how conservationism and its green progeny arose from Calvinism. “When Emerson advised the solitary individual to seek mystical union with the Divine in the woods,” writes Stoll, “he simply restated long-standing Calvinist advice.”