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For millennia nature has provided spiritual experiences of wonder, gratitude, and peace. Now nature is being burned, poisoned, and rendered extinct. This book asks: Can nature still provide spiritual inspiration?

Drawing on decades of original work in environmental ethics, religious environmentalism, contemporary spirituality, and fiction, Roger S. Gottlieb explores how ecological crisis reshapes spiritual life. What we trusted would nourish us and our descendants forever is diminished and threatened. We seek a refuge from the cruelties and madness of human culture and find bird species disappearing and oceans filling with plastic.

Gottlieb begins by clarifying what spirituality is and why nature has played a central role in it for religious believers and non-believers alike. He then examines the environmental crisis as a civilizational rupture that transforms hope, grief, meaning, and moral responsibility.

Nature spirituality, he suggests, must adapt to ecological loss and vulnerability. Difficult as it may be, we can nourish a spirituality in which grief coexists with gratitude, compassion with moral outrage, and acceptance with active solidarity and love for all of life.

The book concludes with a fictional narrative illustrating how each of us might face overwhelming environmental realities with a transformed spiritual vision.

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“Roger Gottlieb’s prophetic voice has been our companion for decades, holding in tension the awesome with the awful, the quiet solitude of nature spirituality with the loud call to link arms for justice for all. His work is a much-needed companion for the crises we face.”
—Laurel Kearns, Professor of Ecology, Religion and Society, Drew University, USA

“In this beautifully written and deeply reflective work, Roger Gottlieb confronts the entangled crises of ecological devastation and spiritual disconnection with both urgency and poetic clarity. This book is a powerful meditation on what remains of nature spirituality and how it might still guide us toward compassion, resilience, and a renewed capacity to heal a wounded world.”
—Morgan Shipley, Inaugural Foglio Endowed Chair of Spirituality and Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University, USA

“Limned with impossible hope, Gottlieb’s book is a heartfelt call to courage and love in spite of the ongoing degradation of our planetary home.”
—Mark I. Wallace, James Hormel Professor of Social Justice, Department of Religion, Swarthmore College, USA

“Gottlieb encourages us to understand what we have destroyed and how the loss has negatively impacted our lives; to cultivate nature spirituality that allows us to grieve the loss while accepting the new reality of living on a wounded earth; and to turn our moral outrage and grief into constructive spiritual resistance that leads to political action.”
—Hava Samuelson, Regents Professor of History, Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, Arizona State University, USA

“Gottlieb has produced a poignant reminder that we must bring not just resolve and activism to the climate crisis but our whole selves: body and spirit.”
—Jeremy Kidwell, Senior Lecturer in Theological Ethics, University of Birmingham, UK