Joy Ackerman Department of Environmental Studies Antioch University New England jackerman@antiochne.edu

Sacred Geography: Making Meanings at Walden Pond In a given year, half a million people visit Walden Pond State Reservation, most of them for ordinary recreational pursuits. But pilgrims, for whom the meanings of Walden may be connected to Thoreau's life and work, make up a significant minority. A century and a half after the publication of Thoreau's Walden, the relevant ground is subject to ongoing concerns about development and preservation. More than ever, the meaning of this place is relevant to its conservation. But how do we speak to one another of the value of place, apart from preference satisfaction and ecosystem function? Perhaps by considering the implicitly religious nature of our attractions and attachments to secular sites, we can begin to recover a language that embraces more fully our experience of special places. Sacred geography offers a conceptual framework that assumes a connection between the values we hold and the places in which we dwell. Taking the path of the pilgrim is one way to explore the intersection of meaning and environment at Walden. This study brings the perspective of sacred space to the interpretation of Walden's changing landscape. Belden Lane outlined three approaches to the study of sacred space: the ontological, the cultural and the phenomenological (Lane 2002). In this paper, I draw on the cultural approach to examine the ways that Walden's recreation, replacement and restoration reflect the social negotiation of nature's place and meaning in American culture. In their introduction to the cultural model of sacred space, David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal outline three defining features: sacred space is ritual space, significant space, and contested space (Chidester and Linenthal 1995). This paper focuses on the themes of recreation, replacement, and restoration through a consideration of Walden as 'signficant space,' a site "subject to interpretation because it focuses crucial questions about what it means to be a human being in a meaningful world."[1] The inquiry has an academic context located in the overlapping fields of geography, anthropology, and religion, the rich ground where interest in place and pilgrimage intersect. Chidester, D. and E. T. Linenthal, Eds. (1995). American sacred space. Religion in North America. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Lane, B. C. (2002). Landscapes of the sacred: Geography and narrative in American spirituality. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press. _______________________________ [1] Chidester, D. and E. T. Linenthal, Eds. (1995). American sacred space. Religion in North America. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Joyce A. Bautch School of Arts, Humanities, and Letters Marian University Fond du Lac, Wisconsin jabautch@marianuniversity.edu

God, Grace, and Creation: Contemporary Catholic Contributions to Ecotheology This proposed paper will consider and explore significant contemporary Catholic contributions to ecotheology. In March 2008, the Apostolic Penitentiary Tribunal of the Vatican labeled environmental pollution as one of seven new Deadly Sins. While the official Catholic declaration might have been surprising to some, it was actually indicative of an important shift in Catholic perspectives on the environment. In the closing decade of the twentieth century, a theology of creation and ecotheology received a notable endorsement from Pope John Paul II's message for the World Day of Peace. The Pope identified the ecological crisis as a moral issue, a matter of Christian faith and ethics linked to the very innate dignity of the human person and the graced glory of creation. Perhaps because of its size alone, the Catholic church often plays a significant role in many ongoing dialogues that involve matters of faith and religion. When discussing the intersection of faith and the environment, this observed tendency is no less true. Accordingly, it is appropriate that the focus of my investigation will include papal and magisterial contributions to ecotheology. I will not limit my study to teachings of the Catholic magisterium, however. My paper will also devote ample time to select systematic and feminist theologians whose contributions emerge from their work in the doctrine of God and theological anthropology. Finally, an examination of contemporary Catholic contributions to ecotheology would not be complete without the insights of innovative spiritual thinkers, thinkers who have been able to articulate the link between ecological restoration and spiritual wholeness.

Alexius Andang L. Binawan Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta, Indonesia andang@provindo.org

Kicking Habits: Restoring City, Recreating Faith, Hope and Love Though it is relatively late, the ecological awareness of the Catholic Church is growing well. So does it in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is the duty of the Catholic Church, then, not only to promote such awareness, but also to participate making ecological habits among the people to make the world more comfortable to live together. Good habits actually are signs of modernity. If good habits become the parameter of a modern city, Jakarta needs such habits. Compared to other big cities, Jakarta is backward. Because of this, making (or kicking) habits is a strategic plan for the Catholic Church in Jakarta, especially in participating in building a better world. There is an awareness that the Catholic Church is part of the society. It is logical that the Catholic Church actually has participated in worsening the world, so that it is obligatory to participate in bettering it. Kicking habit is not a structural revolution. It is a evolutionary change, so it is fit with the existence of the Catholic Church, especially in Indonsia, which is merely more or less 2.1 percent of the population. The Church is not a political party, neither a business corporation, which could make a direct structural change. Since there a lot of ecological problems in Indonesia, the Archdiocese of Jakarta started from the very simple program, i.e., encourage her faithfull to have a habit of separating garbage as part of reducing, reusing and recycling garbage. Such a programme in the last two years has many meanings. First of all, since making a habit needs a long process, which means it needs patience, it could enrich the faith and hope. It could improve the pastoral strategy of the Church as well. In bettering the wolrd, it is not enough for the Church just ‘sowing the seeds’ but it needs to take care of those seeds. Such old strategy seems based on an assumption that human beings are good enough in realizing those seeds into actions and habits. Nowadays, the Church should realize better that human beings, including the Catholics, have three original sins, i.e., forgetful person, sluggard, and egoistic. Those means that human beings need external helps to build good habits. Second, since it is ecological in character, the program would ampler the very meaning of christian love, not only to God and to other human beings, as mentioned in Matthew 22: 37-40, but also to the environment, though it is not mentioned explicitly in the Bible. If loving other, especially the needy, would means loving God, in this case loving environment, in turn, would mean loving others and also loving the next generation of men. There is another meaning as well, especially in Jakarta context. In the midst of majority Muslim, and relatively modern, society, promoting ecological awareness would become an alternative way to re-tailor social cohesiveness which is getting looser. It is also the import challenge for the Catholic Church in Jakarta.

Martin Drenthen Department of Philosophy and Science Studies Faculty of Science, Mathematics and        Computing Science Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands

The Legible Landscape And Ethics of Place The term legible landscape was coined by the Dutch novelist and landscape activist Willem van Toorn. It refers to the way that landscapes - some more than others - contain signs that enable people to 'read' these landscapes as a meaningful text. The term plays an important role in the Dutch debate about landscape conservation. The Dutch government and many nature conservation groups presuppose that place attachment will increase if people can read the land as a meaningful text, and. A legible landscape is considered to be more accessible and understandable, and for that reason it is considered to be easier to 'engage oneself in such a landscape. Eventually, the legible landscape would even help the public's commitment to nature preservation. It remains unclear however, how knowledge of such legible features and the connections between them will lead to a more intimate, more engaged relationship with places. In my paper, I want to explore what could possibly be the link relation the legible landscape and place attachment or place commitment and how the act of reading the land could even be a ground for a place based ethics. I will explore different interpretations of what a legible landscape could be, and how the legibility of a landscape could help sustain an ethics of place. The dominant approach to the legible landscape is rather heavily influenced by a semiotic view on textuality. According to semiotics, landscapes - just like almost anything else - can be interpreted as a text: individual elements in the landscape refer to each other and thus together form a network of interconnected meanings. Starting from such a view on the legible landscape, in 2004, the Dutch Association for Environmental Education (IVN) initiated 'Project Legible Landscape'. In it, nature guides organize walking tours to teach local inhabitants to 'read the landscape'. IVN distinguishes 4 different levels of legibility: the vertical level, the horizontal level, the cultural-historical level and seasonal level. Together, these perspectives reveal more structure and meaning in particular places, and thus enable people to have a deeper understanding of and relationship with a particular place. In my paper I will discuss the limitations of such a semiotic approach, and focus on an alternative approach to the landscape as a text (inspired by the work of Ricoeur) that focuses on the concept of narrativity. According to Ricoeur, the meaning of a text can only be 'understood' by a reader if this reader actively engages himself in the process of understanding and at the same time is open to a meaning that is evoked by the text. Accordingly, the meaning of a landscape can only show itself to someone who is actively engaged in the process of understanding such a place. When the land becomes intertwined with my own life story (narrative identity), the a landscape can become an ethos; a true dwelling place not merely defines where I am, but also helps to define who I am and what my life is about. A narrative interpretation of the legible landscape could therefore help us understand how certain landscapes can evoke place attachment or even a place-based ethics. This does not mean, however, that the semiotic approach would be unimportant for an ethics of place. I will argue that an adequate place-based ethics has to also acknowledge a certain place as something with a status of its own. This 'otherness' of place has to somehow come into play in the narrative structure. The semiotic and the narrative understanding of legibility can therefore be seen as two complementary views. For instance, in a semiotic view knowledge of the ecology of a river system can help us understand the subtle relations between different natural features and our own actions. But such an ecology can only inform a narrative ethics of place for those who live along the river if the ecological insights are embedded in an overarching narrative about the nature of rivers that is always also about us who inhabit the riverscape. In my paper, I will illustrate this productive complementarity through the example of 'Freude am Fluss' (Joy at the river), a European Union project involved in the 'ecologizing' river management, while at the same time attempting to re-emplace river inhabitants along the Rhine by 'retelling' the river narrative.

Robin Globus Department of Religion University of Florida Gainesville, Florida rglobus@ufl.edu

Re-creation's Shadow Side: Exploring Narratives of Apocalypse When environmentalists first warned of the potentially catastrophic effects of environmental decline to human and ecosystem health, critics were quick to label them "apocalypse abusers, false prophets, joyless, puritanical doomsters, chic-apocalyptic primitives, [and] sufferers from an Armageddon complex."[1] Such critics intended to discredit environmentalists by associating them with the failed predictions, delusional thinking, violence, and anti-social behavior commonly attributed to well-known millennial movements such as the People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. While such ad hominem attacks may be philosophically invalid, they are not entirely misplaced, for indeed, there are striking parallels between religious and environmental forms of apocalypticism, not only in their common predictions of doom, but also in the dynamics of the movements both have spawned. Are such parallels mere coincidence? This paper uses insights from studies of narrative to explore the question of why apocalyptic narratives have continued to resonate with so many scientists and environmentalists. I suggest that one reason for this may be that the story of apocalypse, while not ideally suited to all environmental problems, is a relatively simple way for people to make sense of an extraordinarily complex and ambiguous situation. I then examine an important implication of this cognitive strategy: the blending of scientific and religious narratives. If apocalypticism has served as an entry-point for religion, what other effects may religious narratives of divine retribution, purification, and re-creation have on the way environmentalists conceive of and respond to the crisis? Examining the role of the apocalyptic narrative in the on-going conceptualization of the environmental crisis helps shed further light on the intermingling of the religious and the secular in environmentalism. This line of analysis also suggests that, rather than arguing that "doomster" rhetorical strategies are counter-productive, scholars, policymakers and activists should consider the possibility that such thinking is, at least to some degree, inevitable. They should also begin to examine the broader societal implications of eschatology as environmental crises proliferate and worsen. How do religious and non-religious interpretations of the environmental future affect people's behavior, and will this help or hinder the project of building a livable, sustainable world? This paper is a preliminary exploration into the shadow-side of re-creation, with its inevitable connotation of both annihilation and re-birth, and its implications for the future. _______________________________ [1] Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 20.

Mazen Haidar University La Sapienza, Rome mazen.haidar@libero.it

Reclaiming the Sacred Recreate? Replace? Restore? These are among the most controversial arguments in post-war reconstruction and the recovery of past histories. This paper will explore the contentious and multi-layered issues in 'Reclaiming the Sacred' with particular reference to three churches : Frauenkirche, Dresden, The Church of the Reconciliation, Berlin, and the Kaiser Wilhem Memorial Church, Berlin and will explore the dialogue in the reconstruction of these churches with memory, time and place. Each presents a very different case study. Fear of obliteration of one's own memory, or roots, often generates a dramatic counter reaction that aims to resurrect a specific historical moment and freeze it at a particular point in time. Rebuilding is often a naïve attempt at reconciliation with a tragic past. The act of reconstruction is itself more valuable than the actual result. The Frauenkiche is a replica of a lost original: an identical reconstruction that attempts to replace something that had been lost in a dramatic moment in history (here the Allied blitz in 1945). In Berlin the modern Church of the Reconciliation (2000), was built around the site of a nineteenth-century church that was demolished in 1985. Here there is no pretence of rebuilding the original. Instead there is the intention of suggesting and recapturing the spiritual essence of the place in a new modern idiom. The building's proximity to the Berlin Wall adds another important layer of meaning. On the other hand the Kaiser Wilhem Memorial Church has been left a ruin. A permanent monument to the demolition, which does not deny historical events. The juxtposition of the new church next door makes the argument explicit. Healing the trauma of emptiness, provoked by the loss of physical and tangible points of reference in the urban landscape, becomes urgent and an obsession in itself. Behind the attempt to replace this void, there is also the hope that the spirit of a place will be restored. The means by which this is achieved and the matter used is less important than the positive effect reclaimed by the new image substituting the lost original. But where does the material restoration stop and the spiritual regeneration begin? Aren't the tangible and intangible elements of a place strongly related to each other? Can demolition be imbedded within recreation and still confirm a sense of renaissance and mean that the spirit of a building is born again? These three churches, in very different ways, present an attempt to heal the rift between the past and the present by reconciling multi layers of memory and meaning.

Chelsea Harry Department of Philosophy Duquesne University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania harryc@duq.edu

A Theoretical Approach to Managing Introduced Species: Thinking About Re-placement Environmental scientists face the ongoing challenge of native species restoration, a precarious and questionable practice - precarious because in the act of replacing native species often comes the coequal act of displacing introduced species, questionable because there is to date no ethical model for regulating such displacement, which sometimes also involves eradication. Proponents for the displacement of introduced species argue that most introduced species threaten the future survival of native species in a given ecosystem. They take on the responsibility of regulating human impact on a region, working to maximize diversity of animal and plant life, and thus to ward off introduced species that threaten this fragile balance. The role that these scientists take on, however, presumes paternalism with regard to non-human beings, a symptom of anthropocentrism. They work to mitigate human actions within an environment, furthering the divide between what are "natural"-non-human beings - and what are not-human beings. This ultimately leads them to make decisions regarding the eradication of entire groups of animal and plant species in a given ecosystem in favor of the anticipated flourishing of diverse native species. In this paper I want to challenge the ethos behind this type of practice. Specifically, I want to particularize the debate, thinking about introduced species displacement in terms of the individual beings we are looking to displace. To that end, I want to look for the possibility in contemporary theories of place to inform the way we can think about how non-human beings find themselves "in-place," hence the ways in which displacing them may be not only detrimental to them as individuals, but unethical. In order to do this, I will bring together Martin Heidegger's definition of dwelling as he explains it in his essay, "Building Dwelling Thinking", Edward Casey's theory of "implacement" as it is discussed in his book, Getting Back into Place, and Val Plumwood's theory of "intention" in her work, Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason. This will all be with an eye towards showing that non-human beings are in fact in-place by the very fact that they exist as dwelling with intention, even if our definition of intention must shift a bit. In the end, I will consider the ethical problem in re-placing some individual non-human beings in favor of others, despite how noble the end goal may appear. My point will be ultimately to put our anthropocentrism into question, asking whether "native species restoration" would be a practice we advocate for our own species, and thus for the survival of our own species diversity.

James Janowski Deptartment of Philosophy Hampden-Sydney College Hampden-Sydney, Virginia jjanowski@hsc.edu

Bringing Back Bamiyan's Buddhas Bamiyan's Buddhas, long the treasured centerpiece of Afghanistan's material culture, were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. Since then controversy has arisen regarding whether - and, if so, how - the sculptures might be resurrected. One option would be to leave the Bamiyan site "as is." Several thinkers have intimated that the sculptures' former niches should be left empty and the sculptures' rubble left in place as a memorial, or as a ruin. These thinkers suggest - provocatively - that "absence is presence," and that both the void in the niches and the site as such are bearers of meaning and value. A second option for the site - possible in principle because of careful 20th century survey work - would be to reconstruct exact replicas, lifting them, once completed, into the now empty niches. Using the same type of material, we might seek to replace the original Buddhas with phenomenologically indistinguishable copies. This, one might suggest, would un-do the damage done by the Taliban. I urge that exercising either of these options, suggestive as they are, would be a mistake. Leaving Bamiyan as is, I argue, is to capitulate. While there is something to be said for the "presence in absence" and for the unique value of disintegration and shards - I agree that the site as presently constituted harbors a real sort of value - there is also something to be said for the "presence of presence" and for wholeness. To rest content with the status quo at Bamiyan is wrong; it is akin to a physician giving up on a patient before exhausting all possible treatments. Similarly, I argue that reconstructing the sculptures, though it might serve useful ends, is inappropriate on aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical grounds. Put simply, reconstructing the Buddhas would not replace them. Reconstruction would not recreate the meanings and values that the original sculptures manifest. Indeed, it would give rise to counterfeit sculptures and make a mockery of the originals. I close by considering - and defending - the restoration of the Buddhas. As against both leaving the Bamiyan site as is and recreating (purportedly exact copies of) the sculptures, restoration promises to (at least partly) resuscitate the various sorts of meaning-artistic, cultural, historical, religious, etc. - that now lie, largely inaccessible, in the empty niches and piles of rubble. Restoring the sculptures stands to refurbish values temporarily held in abeyance. And while restoration stands to achieve this worthy end, it would contribute as well to the economic and political well-being of Afghani citizens. In short, I argue that restoring - and thereby resurrecting - Bamiyan's Buddhas, both metaphysically possible and morally appropriate, is a win-win proposition. Afghanistan deserves our support to make this happen.

Chris Klassen Religion and Culture Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada cklassen@wlu.ca

"I Can Only Speak for Myself": The Ethics of Authenticity and "Recreating"Nature Religion In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor speaks of the malaises of modernity in which individualism and authenticity lose their moral force by becoming simply a type of relativism and/or soft despotism. In contrast, Taylor suggests that individualism and authenticity need to be understood as holding moral salience through the dialogical nature of human life and the external horizons of meaning necessary to the very formulation of the authentic self. Individual choice only makes sense when some choices are more socially, politically and/or ethically valuable than others. My paper takes Taylor's discussion of the ethics of authenticity and applies it to the religious movement of contemporary Paganism. I have been in the process of conducting research with people from a variety of Pagan traditions in Southern Ontario. My research, taking the form of focus groups discussing the meaning of "nature" in a nature religion, has turned up a marked hesitation on the part of Pagans to claim any expected responsibility on the part of other Pagans toward nature and/or the environment. Pagans largely are happy to encourage community members to believe in whatever works for them. This is couched in a rhetoric of tolerance and openness, which is perceived as largely lacking in the wider, Christian-influenced society. This rhetoric of tolerance, however, also leads to a hesitation to contribute to a discourse of Pagan ethics and, interestingly enough, environmental responsibility. Just as Pagans typically will not make dogmatic claims about what other Pagans should believe, so too they are hesitant to make claims about what appropriate social, political and/or ethical behaviour is. This is not to say they do not have some underlying expectations of Pagan behaviour; however, these expectations are not explicitly stated, or even at times admitted. I suggest that Pagans are caught in the culture of individualism which states that one needs to be "true to oneself" at the same time as wanting to be part of a dialogic community with a common moral horizon; they do not want to impose their ethics on others, yet operate from an understanding that common ethics are important. Taylor's work helps to make sense of a problem which is not necessarily unique to Pagans, but which shows up in counterintuitive ways in a movement which claims the earth to be sacred yet hesitates to proclaim common courses of action.

Adam Langridge Nipissing University Washago, Ontario, Canada alangridge@hotmail.com

Levelling in Ecological Communication: Recreation, Replacement, No Restoration Sociological theorist Niklas Luhmann's social-systems theory describes contemporary society as divided into functions systems, the economy, politics, the legal system, education, etc, none of which acts as the "center." Three implications of this theory are: (1) that there is no single perspective from which an adequate description of the environment can be undertaken, (2) that even within society the various functions systems are environment for each other, and (3), because of 1 and 2, society has no way of responding to changes in the environment brought about by social activity. In his major work on the subject, Ecological Communication, Luhmann argues that society produces "too little, and too much resonance" in its descriptions of the environment; too little overall response to the environment via society in toto, and too much between the various systems. The paper being proposing is based on Luhmann's work and argues that normative communication expressing the will to fundamentally make society friendly to the non-human world is absorbed by the various social systems and levelled of its meaning. For example, the condemnation of consumer society as innately inimical to the environment is taken up by the economy, recreated, and used to sell. What was a call for everyone to stop buying and driving cars because of the environment becomes a way to sell green, environmentally sustainable cars. The goal to stop consumer society is replaced with that of "training" educated, green, consumers. The paper further argues that the process of levelling is not a two-way street. The economy is not itself remade to become green and environmentally friendly through levelling; the move to a green economy is merely on the level of advertising, meant to convince consumers that the way to protect the environment is to buy more. There is no effort to produce in a sustainable manner, no restoration of a balance between society and environment that was before the modern period. The functions systems are monadic and can only respond to their environment by internal imperatives, by transforming environmental irritants into what works for them. A hurricane is not seen as a natural event by the economy, for example, but as a variable affecting the price of oranges. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the distinctions between the human, social, and environmental are theorized are inadequate. The traditional way of describing society as based on humanity no longer holds. Social systems are primary in the description of humanity, the environment, and in the self description of the social itself. Moreover, the social systems are "kleine Geiste," meaning systems, that paradoxically hold their various descriptions of the world as exclusive and universal; humans are automatons for them. What can be done can only be done from within the systems, and a prerequisite for a restoration of an environmentally sustainable society is a theory that grasps how social systems grasp. The view of society the paper proposes is one that is more and less spiritual than thought from a common-sense view.

Todd LeVasseur Department of Religion University of Florida Gainesville, Florida toddlev@ufl.edu

Replacing Ice with Water—Repercussions of Climate Change on a Sense of Place This paper takes as axiomatic that climate destabilization is an ongoing given. Furthermore, it assumes that we have crossed certain thresholds so that the earth, as an autopoietic system, is in the process of generating new ecological systems that humans will have to adapt to both materially, religiously, and philosophically. I argue that we, as scholars of religion, nature, science, and ethics, must embrace a likely, not too distant post-ice cap world and therefore attend to the numerous ontological and epistemological dilemmas and crises that this entails. This means that the papers we write, research we undertake, and classes we teach all should explore the ramifications of IPCC predictions and what these mean to everything from how we obtain food and water to what does a sense of place mean in a world likely to be full of ecologic refugees (another “R” germane to the conference). Issues of recreation, replacement, and restoration are ambiguous and made even more so in an unpredictable world. What might these processes entail in a world of flux and crisis? How might attending to such processes be even more valuable in a world of flux than one of assumed stability endemic to short-term human perceptions? This paper addresses these questions and offers other philosophical and religious reflections on what sort of meaning/s individual and collective places have on the human psyche in this critical century. In the spirit of the conference’s theme, and as one possible approach to dealing with the above topics under discussion, an analysis of the concept and phenomenon of an ‘ecostery’ will be undertaken. Ecosteries are “loved places where ecological values, knowledge and wisdom are learned, practiced and shared. They are sacred, respected and honored dwelling places” (www.ecostery.org). This growing movement offers a lens that can help focus discussion on the philosophical, spiritual/religious, and practical issues that face humans in a 385ppm, and growing, world. The three “R’s” highlighted in the conference should be supported by a fourth “R”: responsibility. This means the responsibility of being honest as we dialogue and theorize the problems facing us as a species, but also as a community of scholars who are discussing these important issues at such a critical time. This paper is offered in such a spirit.

Leila Beatriz Loezer School of Architecture and Interior Design University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio leilaloezer@gmail.com

Analysis of US LEED Rating System as Sustainability Guideline to Design an Office Building in South of Brazil With the popularization of the term “Green Building” and the spread of Environmental Certification systems for buildings all over the world, developing countries are facing the need to include the concept of sustainability in their agendas. As an emerging country, Brazil faces the challenge of dealing with a lack of basic infra-structure and, at the same time, establishing its own sustainable development paradigm for the future. The construction industry occupies a fundamental role toward this agenda, as it is responsible for a large share of the worldly total carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption related to buildings’ life cycle. In the last 20 years, the construction industry has been recognizing its responsibility toward the environment, at the same time that the market demand for environmentally sound products and services is increasing. Since the 1990’s, environmental rating systems have been developed with the primary objective of providing customers with information about the environmental impact and performance of buildings. Nowadays, there are no official regulations or local rating systems to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings in Brazil. Despite the evidently different environmental, economic, and social conditions existing between different countries, international rating systems are being used to assess the environmental performance of Brazilian buildings. This paper intends to analyze the major existing environmental rating systems and the attempts to implement GBA (Green Building Assessment) and a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) adapted version in Brazil. A case study describes the application of the North American version of LEED rating system prerequisites as sustainability guidelines to design the building “Primavera Office Green”, an office building to be located in the city of Florianopolis, on South Region of Brazil. The benefits and deficiencies of the usage of LEED principles are discussed and compared to the directions for sustainable development traced in the Florianopolis Local Agenda 21.

Alicia Lubowski Institute of Fine Arts New York University New York, New York alicia401@gmail.com

The Frozen Landscape: Picturing Global Warming This talk examines visual representations of frozen domains and how they have changed in the context of global warming. I will draw on imagery by a diverse group of contemporary artists who have explored the impact of drastic climate change on the polar caps, such as Subhankar Banerjee, Robert Bateman, Xavier Cortada, Sebastian Copeland, Hirokazu Kosaka, Dalibor Martinis, Jakob McKean, Gilles Mingasson, Nicholas Kahn, Richard Selesnick, Katrin Sigurardottir, Anne Senstad, and David Trubridge. Contemporary depictions of frozen landscapes differ markedly from earlier artistic formulations of the region. These images can be understood in the context of previous artistic portrayals of nature's vitality and its absence. Nineteenth-century artists characterized the polar worlds and snowcapped mountains as a lifeless ecological zone. In contrast to the biodiversity of the tropical zone, commentators equated the absence of vegetal growth in the frozen world with death. Conversely, recent depictions of polar terrains have highlighted ice's life-sustaining qualities. In addition, whereas the combination of multiple climatic zones in one landscape composition (polar/alpine and tropical) once evoked the harmonious diversity of the kingdom of nature and its transcendent grandeur, ecological juxtapositions now indicate latent danger, disequilibrium, and the ambivalence of man's power over nature. Stark climatic juxtapositions today further signal environmental conditions and man-made habitats that appear abnormal - be it artificial snow and ice in hot places or aberrant heat in cold regions. Temporal perceptions have also shifted in response to global warming. Artistic focus is on future change and preservation rather than the past. Thus, projection into a precarious ecological future has overshadowed retrospective scientific philosophies of life's evolutionary development (typified by Darwinism) and of the earth's geologic history (such as Uniformitarianism). Whereas artists once rendered catastrophic natural phenomena, such as earthquakes and volcanic erruptions, as a key to understanding the mechanisms of our planet's historical formation, the image of melting ice has become a symbol of the earth's unfolding future. Contemporary depictions of the 'alchemy' of the water-cycle (melting, freezing, and evaporating) and the indeterminate boundaries of watery reflections convey H2O as the essence of life and uncertain environmental change. Artworks utilize color, light, and movement to mimic the contractive and expansive properties of water (or the pulsations of life energy) as well as the borderlines of its delicate transformation. The lecture will address the theme of "replace" by demonstrating how new definitions of icy climes have replaced earlier perceived qualities of the frozen landscape. In addition, shifting temperatures and the "recreation" or repositioning of cold environments in warmer climes have further destabilized the idea of the geographic constancy of climatic "place".

Matt Macioge Assoc AIA Principal, Consortium Lumina Austin, Texas mmacioge@gmail.com

Worshipping the Machine: Technology, Religion, and Nature Lynn White wrote, “More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion or rethink our old one.” [1] When I first read this, I bristled at the idea that religion, specifically Christianity, would be the savior of nature. I now think differently, because religion is a subset of social values that establishes our culture’s morals and ethics. What Lynn is after is a call for ethics in nature, and to him this must come from his faith in Christianity. I take a broader perspective and see spirituality and religion as social systems that can balance our invasive approach on the environment caused by our adaptive use of technology. For me Nature is a system of everything including humans and our socio-technical systems. Each culture has their own technologies and social systems, and often these are diametrically opposed, pulling against each other for balance. Andrew Jamison discusses this as a cyclical balance between technological advancements and social change. Currently, technology appears to be more important than our social values while it consumes resources from our environment without limitation. If religion as a form of social change were to become more important in our culture, I surmise we may find a check to technology and become more sustainable. This is the essence of what Lynn White was addressing. Our culture has lost its faith and connection to nature because our current religious beliefs tell us “We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.” [2] Religion is a social system that, until industrialization, has always had strong ties to nature, acting as a moral compass in cultures. The Druids looked to the celestial heavens for answers; Judeo-Christians described Garden of Eden in their religious writings; Taoism looked at all creatures great and small as spiritual. Almost every religion described a creation myth or how we came about being. Our laws are often based on these beliefs despite the idea of separation of church and state. Religious parables instilled morals and ethics that may be shadowed by technology. As we lose a reverence for religion, we lose our reverence for the system of nature. In recent history, technology – as a means of adaptation, survival, and quality of life – has become more important than our social systems. Our dependence on technology is a large part of the ecological crisis we currently face. Relearning a spiritual reverence for nature may just be the balance we need to be sustainable. _____________________________ [1] Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in Science, Vol. 155, No. 3767 (10 March 1967): p. 1206. [2] Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in Science, Vol. 155, No. 3767 (10 March 1967): p. 1206.

Sepideh Masoudinejad School of Architecture Shahid Beheshti University Tehran, Iran s_masoudi@mail.sbu.ac.ir

The Universe Alive: Nature in the Mystical Attitude of Sohrab Sepehri Human's knowledge of self and his place in the system of Existence, defines his vision upon the circumstances, nature, and God, makes his relations with these concepts, too. This basic thought, actually, impressed by the spirit of time and therefore, the modern human who had imagined the science and the reason were the masters of his life, now, has gone the path which is ended with a chaos and a confusion, inevitably to find a solution for his behaviors. In the age of "ascension of iron" and "geometrical growth of cement ", there's a new voice coming, a man's voice who is familiar with nature. He knows the "law of earth" as he worries about his relation with it. A man who cares about "journey of this house's ivy to that house" traces the pure truth "among the flowers" of garden. Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), a contemporary Persian artist, is one of the greatest modern Iranian painters and also one of the five avant-garde poets in the field of Persian modern-poetry and He had his own specific style in these two fields. Sepehri's poems are filled with humanity, human values, and love with nature. He followed his own ideology as he pointed to "Descent", "Friction of metals" in the dark night, oblivion of live creatures, and human's breaking of nature. Sepehri was familiar with self and world as he had a holistic vision upon nature and the system of existence. He considered the inherent and the ultimate values for all phenomena as he had the sense of unity with nature. He awards people of this unity and harmony with the nature. His adorable vision upon nature had a color of mysticism. The footprints of Laozi, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mani, and Mazdak's contemplations could be found in his works. All together, these bring him a uniform ideology and as a naturalist artist, he made a comprehensive intellectual system based on nature and existence which was originated from eastern mysticism. This essay analyzes Sohrab Sepehri's contemplations, approaching their origins through the eastern culture. At first, it describes a transcendental movement from darkness to light in his soul while reaches to the inspiration moments and ends on his unique ideology. Reviewing parts of his best poems like "The Footsteps of Water" and "The Green Shape", in which his mystical attitude appears, it analyses Sepehri's thought about interaction between human and nature. And finally, the article discuses the approach of eastern mysticism to this interaction. ______________________________________ *The terms in quotation marks are from Sohrab Sepehri's poems.

David McDuffie The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina dmcduffi@email.unc.edu

Concern for 'Creation': A Religious Response to Ecological Conservation The purpose of this paper is to examine the term 'creation' in relation to efforts by contemporary religious communities (particularly Christian communities in America) to address ecological conservation. In short, I will contend that 'creation' has become a valuable concept for dialogue between religion and natural science for the common goal of protecting and sustaining ecological systems. Examples include the following: 1. 'Creation Care' as opposed to 'environmentalism' has become the preferred term among many evangelical Christian communities when referring to human action on behalf of environmental concern. 2. To use a local example, there is an Episcopal parish in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is currently in the process of discussing the implementation of a 'Creation Season' into the liturgical year. 3. In 2006, E. O. Wilson, a self professed secular humanist, published a book entitled The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which was written in the form of a letter to a hypothetical Southern Baptist minister. My argument centers on the assumption that the various interpretations of 'creation' can potentially lead to an invaluable contribution to alleviating environmental problems. In relation to the orienting themes of the conference, my paper most explicitly addresses the 'Recreate' theme. However, it is also applicable to the themes of 'Replacement' and 'Restoration.' Briefly, in relation to the term 'replace,' religious responses to the environment necessarily involve a sense of connection and an orientation of religious practitioners to the natural systems to which they are inextricably a part. In addition, conservation implies a commitment to the 'restoration' of ecosystems as well as to the restoration and maintenance of sustainable human communities. Of course, certain theological interpretations, which emphasize other-worldly, eschatological goals, can hinder efforts to restore and maintain the sustainability of our ecosystems. Some of these will be addressed. However, the overall purpose of my paper is to contend that the term 'creation' has become a unifying concept which has enriched the dialogue between religion and science. Clearly, the interpretations of this term will differ. For some the use of 'creation' involves the avoidance of conflict and the easing of tension, which has been present for many religious communities, between religion and science. However, the term does not necessarily involve the avoidance of conflict, in terms of, for example, the creationist/evolution debate, as many Christian communities have little or no problem accepting the tenets of modern science including evolutionary theory. Furthermore, views from individuals such as E. O. Wilson provide evidence for ways in which 'creation' can be translated into coherence with Darwin's theory in its present form. My conclusion is that the term 'creation' offers a valuable orienting concept, which is contributing to the perpetuation of ecological conservation from a religious perspective.

Sarah Morice University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana smorice@nd.edu

Re-Placing the Doctrine of the Trinity: Horizons, Violence, and Postmodern Christian Thought This paper explores a curious coincidence in contemporary Christian theology. In recent years, scholars in practical theology - among them John Inge and Philip Sheldrake - have called for renewed theological attention to place. Like their colleagues in philosophy, these theologians juxtapose place to space, advocating a theological retrieval of the former while bemoaning the modern assumption of the latter. Ecological concerns, postcolonial critique, appreciation of sacred spaces, and the unjust gendering of private and public places receive due attention in such conversations. Meanwhile, a separate, but similarly influential, strand of postmodern theology has lately also taken a placial turn: one that its proponents leave largely unacknowledged. Specifically, placial language has increasingly been used in contemporary descriptions of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. This is particularly the case, the author argues, for those theologians who manifest a Heideggerian worry about God appearing within ontological horizons. For them, the service into which "place" language has been pressed has been to name precisely the refusal of place, namely, of places for God. French theologian and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion is a prime example: without defining place or space, he uses the notion of "filial distance" to enshrine - in the very structure of the godhead - God's refusal to appear in any place or space. Paradoxically, however, this very refusal is placed: it is a distance, so expansive and final that it spans no place, and indeed is necessarily prior to any place. The author suggests that these two parallel conversations in Christian theology would do well to learn from each other. Scholars engaged in a practical theology of place would, she argues, find their accounts theologically deepened if their use of "place" were more clearly connected to a doctrine of God as triune. This is precisely the connection that Marion implicitly makes. Whatever the tensions in Marion's account, he is clear on one crucial point: a properly-theological account of horizons (placial and otherwise) will begin with an account of who God is. But in Marion's case, his specific account is fraught with problems, first, of coherence: How does one placially name the refusal of place? And how, given the freighting of paternal-filial distance, do we not end up with binity, rather than the trinity stipulated by most of the Christian tradition? Second, there are serious problems with the implications of Marion's account, inasmuch as it tends to underwrite a violent coding of place as thoroughly passive, and awaiting invasion/inscription. The ecological, feminist, and postcolonial objections to such a scheme, obviously, abound. Clearly, given their capacity for mutual correction, these two conversations might be fruitfully brought to bear upon each other. The author concludes by sketching some of the distinctive features that such an amended Christian trinitarian theology of place might have: one which offers a Christian theological account of placial horizons rooted in God's triunity; while also taking account of ecological, feminist, and postcolonial insistence that definitions of space and place not underwrite violence.

Frank Muscara Environmental Psychology City University of New York, Graduate Center New York, New York fmuscara@gc.cuny.edu

Restoration, Connectivity, and Expressivity: An Exploration of Urban Restorative Environments Over the past few decades, environmental psychologists have devoted much attention to studying restorative benefits of nature, specifically questioning how spending time in nature can help people regain attentional capacity and reduce feelings associated with stress. The dominating theory in this area of research is Kaplan's attention restoration theory, which posits that spending time in nature allows a person's directed attention to rest and recover. There has been very little research investigating the urban places people go to recover from effects of stress and mental fatigue. In this paper, I present findings from my research in which I qualitatively explore restorative environments in the context of the everyday experiences of urban inhabitants. My research participants have disclosed a variety of urban spaces they find restorative, including churches, homes, cafes, parks, and going shopping and on walks. My findings reveal that spending time in restorative urban environments enables people not only to restore their attention and recover from feeling stressed-out, but enables people to reappraise their lives, their stressors, themselves, and their ability to cope. This reappraisal involves changes that are more durable and that extend beyond temporarily recovering from stressful events. I use two core themes to understand and explain this reappraisal, namely connectivity and expressivity. My research has revealed that a very important component of the restorative experience is a person's feeling connected to a place and to the people in that place. Along with these feelings of connection, another important component of the restorative experience is the expression of the environment and the expression of the person afforded by the environment. My goal is that my research will expand how researchers conceptualize what a restorative environment is and can be, and provide evidence that, besides natural environments, a whole array of environments and environmental features can provide restorative experiences.

Mark Mysak Department of Philosophy University of North Texas Denton, Texas markmysak@yahoo.ca

Space, Race, and Environmental Identity In this paper I argue that spatial representations and the identity of inhabitants mutually reinforce each other through their co-constitutive social construction. Because the environment itself is a set of social relations rather than a space in which social relations occur, different groups have identities defined in terms of relations with the environment(s) they inhabit. This results in the racialization of spaces. This is to say, because often racial minorities "find their environmental identity and social location in industrial and hazardous settings" [1] due to low property costs, these spaces are conceptualized as embodying the racial signifiers of their inhabitants. Analogously, minorities are identified with the negative symbols characterizing their surroundings; i.e. racial minorities are portrayed as violent, dirty, savage, hence "black trash" littering an already dirty environment. In a way their identities are perceived as environmental problems which must be contained since they are represented as contaminating the spaces they occupy. I thus argue that representations of spaces and identities mutually reinforce each other: polluted spaces are racialized, while racial minorities are naturalized as waste. This shows that spaces are constituted by power relations because groups living in polluted or clean environments occupy different positions within the political structures which frame their struggles, and this affects the ways they perceive the "environment." This is evidenced whenever environmentalists deem polluted urban environments as "unnatural" and therefore not environmental issues. Such judgments, however, reflect privileged social locations. The basic needs of the residents occupying clean environments are usually satisfied, and overall conditions of life are more than adequate. These privileged spaces define the social location through which white environmentalists conceptualize the "environment" as pristine, undisturbed nature. To the contrary, the primary concerns of visible minorities occupying degraded spaces are to improve the quality of their urban environment; therefore they aspire towards improved housing conditions among other things. These priorities, however, are not part of mainstream environmentalism's agenda. The problem is that environmentalists fail to realize that they are speaking from a privileged (white and middle-class) social location which historically has monopolized environmental discourse. Such blindness explains why most often environmentalists are concerned with pristine wilderness areas, to the detriment of the urban environmental problems affecting minority groups. In the first part of the paper I argue that spaces are racialized, and focus on both urban and rural environments. In the second section I discuss some salient characteristics of environmental identities, and show how they can manifest themselves as "resistance" identities. Recollection of a community's place-based memories empowers and results in the creation of a distinct environmental identity. Finally, I argue that recognition of different environmental identities entails a politics of difference and a politics of space; thus the indispensability of justice as recognition in remedying environmental injustices. ____________________________________________ [1] Figueroa, Robert Melchior. "Other Faces: Latinos and Environmental Justice," Faces of Environmental Justice: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, 2nd Edition, eds. Laura Westra and Bill Lawson (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001), p. 175.

Sampson Nwaomah Department of Religious Studies Babcock University Ilisan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria samnwaomah@gmail.com

Eschatology Of Environmental Bliss In Romans 8: 18-21 And The Imperative Of Present Evnironmental Sustainability From A Nigerian Perspective Of the many natural resources that can be found in Nigeria, oil and gas are in abundance. For instance, Nigeria is the largest oil producer in the Sub-Saharan Africa and the fifth largest petroleum exporting country in the organization of petroleum exporting countries (OPEC). Nigeria also produces 30% the total oil production in the African region and of accounts for about 8 % of the oil exported to the United States. At peak production Nigeria's export is about two million barrels of crude oil per day. Thus, oil revenues have historically provided about 95% of Nigeria's foreign exchange earnings and about 85% of federal revenue. This makes oil production very central to the survival and effective functioning of state. However, the effect of the activities of the oil industry on the people of the Niger Delta, the region that accounts for the huge oil and gas deposit in Nigeria, is adverse. Since the discovery of oil in Olobiri (Bayelsa State) in 1956 to the present the question of oil production and its attendant environmental impacts of land deprivation, soil quality alteration, destruction of aquatic ecosystem and air pollution has predicated continuous friction between the oil companies and the host communities on one hand and the host communities and the Nigerian state on the other hand. This situation has led to several dialogues by environmentalist for a sustainable environment. But while some have canvassed for the implementation of responsible policies to guarantee a sustainable environment, others seem to pursue the full and unrestricted exploitation of the environment based on the biblical claim on the temporality of the earth and its system of things. For instance, if the present world would give way for a new heaven and a new earth as implied in certain Scriptural passages such as Romans 8:18-21, why must Christians show concern about the present earth? Of what relevance is the principle of stewardship in harnessing the resources of the environment? This essay therefore investigates Romans 8:18-21, in the context of the environmental quandary of the Niger Delta. We ask, does the eschatology of environmental bliss justify exploitative activities which disregard sustainability? Are there no ethical responsibilities in economic pursuit?

Jonathan Parker University of North Texas Denton, Texas jrp0184@unt.edu

Replacing/Re-placing Animal Rights and Liberation Theories In this paper I explore the conference concept "replace." My goal is two-fold - to replace a dominant means of relating to nonhuman nature, but at the same time to not wholly reject it, but rather "re-place" it within a more appropriate context. This paper examines local relationships to place, primarily through the lens of interaction with local fauna. Various theories such as animal rights, animal liberation, and animal protection theories have been proposed as ways to appropriately engage the fauna we encounter directly or indirectly in our daily experience. This paper argues that these are inappropriate means of ethically relating to wild fauna. These theories need to be "replaced" by more ecologically appropriate ethical theories of encountering and dealing with wild non-human animals. However, these theories are not to be wholly discarded. They are relevant and helpful theories, but only if they are "re-placed." That is, they are helpful theories for addressing human relations to domesticated animals that we encounter directly or indirectly in our daily lives. This paper then addresses the need to "re-place" animal rights and liberation theories within a domesticated sphere, and suggests possible "replacement" theories for our ethical relations to non-domesticated, wild fauna.

Arsenio Rodrigues School of Architecture Prairie View A&M University Prairie View, Texas arodrigues@pvamu.edu

Symbolic Structures And The Meaning Of Place: A Phenomenological Exploration Of The Deeper Meaning Of Bonfire Memorial The purpose of this study was to explore the deeper meaning of people's experiences and activities within structures of symbolic and cultural significance. The Bonfire Memorial at Texas A&M University was chosen as the setting for this study. Direct observations, kinesics, proxemics, and photography were used as methods to determine how people interacted with the physical characteristics of Bonfire Memorial. Phenomenological interviews were conducted at the Memorial to determine peoples' experiences of the physical characteristics of the Memorial, and to determine the chronology of peoples' experiences within the setting. A total of six observations and six interviews were conducted at the Memorial. The study concluded that Bonfire Memorial was associated with (among other experiences) the 'memory of the Bonfire ceremony', 'tradition', 'history', 'pride', and 'sadness'. People appreciated the Memorial and thought of it as a 'wholesome' and 'unified' place. In addition, the Memorial was appreciated for being a contemplative setting to reflect on one's own life.

Jefferson Slagle Department of English St. Bonaventure University St. Bonaventure, New York jslagle@sbu.edu

'Play the Chinook': Purpose and Place in David James Duncan's The River Why Near the end of David James Duncan�es novel The River Why, Eddy, the narrator�es female companion hooks a massive Chinook salmon on three-pound leader and hands Gus the rod, commanding him to "play the chinook!" The word play, with its multivalent potential significations.the requirement that he keep the fish on the line, the order to enjoy his monofilament connection with the salmon, the implication that he can perform as salmon, and the concept of linguistic play that provides the field for this ambivalence - is central to the operation of this episode and of Duncan's vision of the links between work and recreation, purpose and purposelessness. For Gus, who has rigidly structured his life around fishing - it is his monomaniacal purpose, his life'es work - Eddy's request seems absurd; he knows he cannot land this powerful fish using such light tackle, and for Gus landing fish has always been the purpose of fishing. In his play with and as the salmon, I argue, he discovers "play," a fusion of purpose and purposelessness that informs the pursuits of the rest of the book and advocates for a natural ethic that looks beyond use and usefulness to find fulfillment in experience. The dichotomies of the fishing episode are also represented in the divergent perspectives of Gus�es mother and father on fishing and life, and in the question the river�es form poses to Gus when he views it from altitude: why? Gus�es mother approaches fishing and life with purpose.she fishes with bait, hauls fish to shore with little complication, and "whacks" them "till one eyeball pops out." His father, on the other hand, fly fishes almost aimlessly, apparently preferring to write about fishing rather than to fish. Gus represents an attempt to fuse the two, though he accomplishes this only after he learns to "play the Chinook." The river�es question embodies a similar fusion of purpose and purposelessness in the apparent message of its form. In their essay "Against Theory," Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels argue that "to deprive [words] of an author is to convert them into accidental likenesses of language. . . . As soon as they become intentionless they become meaningless as well." Duncan would collapse this construction by suggesting that the question the river poses is simultaneously its own answer: "the answer to the question was the word itself." This formulation removes the problem of purpose, or intentionality, from the river�es apparently graphomorphic form by suggesting that its purpose is its existence; its form both asks and does not ask, answers and does not answer the unified question/answer that both appears written and cannot possibly be so. The river thus becomes the field on which the text collapses the dichotomies that often structure our relationship to place as it proliferates and finally exceeds discursivity, the river becoming its own referent. This argument is not, I must note, an ahistorical deconstruction inasmuch as meaning is not destroyed by the collapse of binary terms, but rather proliferates and comes into inarticulable being in the space between them. Indeed, it emerges in silence, through acts that serve both variably and simultaneously as forms of recreation and of work, and that thus enable "play," in its manifold significations, as both their process and their result.

Sam Snyder Department of Religion University of Florida Gainesville, Florida ssnyder@religion.ufl.edu

Gateway Activities: From Religious Recreation to Rituals of Restoration In his award-winning book Last Child in The Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder (2005), Richard Louv laments the disconnection of humans from nature, a disconnection he, in part, traces to the reality that children (and adults) no longer recreate outdoors. Recreational play, he and others note, can be pivotal for fostering ecological knowledge, environmental ethics, and leading one to engage those ethics through activities ranging from conservation to ecological restoration. In my field-based research on the work of recreational anglers and river restoration, I encountered many who noted that angling was more than simply a recreational pursuit. For them, fishing bordered on, if not fully embodied, a form of nature-based religiosity. Fishing, they explained "re-created" the self in very spiritual and religious ways. The re-creational potential of recreation, to borrow from scholar of religion Tom Tweed, is that it can aid in homemaking. Standing on the pivot of "home," for some carries with it ethical implications which many engage through ecological restoration. Beyond self re-creation, outdoor recreation can provide what I call "gateway activities" for grassroots environmental activism, in this case in the form of ecological restoration. Therefore, in this paper I will build on qualitative field work where anglers in New Mexico, engaged in local fish and river restoration projects, trace their ecological engagement to religiously conceived forms of nature-based recreation. Here I will explore how anglers play with the terms of recreation as a form of self re-recreation, which then leads them to replace non-native, invasive species (German brown trout) with imperiled native species (Rio Grande cutthroat), restore degraded rivers, and work toward the grassroots promotion of concern across lines in their communities to ensure the long term viability of their projects for the good of an entire bioregion.

H. Peter Steeves Department of Philosophy DePaul University Chicago, Illinois psteeves@depaul.edu

In the Beginning and In the End

Priscilla Stuckey Humanities Faculty, Graduate Programs Prescott College Prescott, Arizona pstuckey@prescott.edu

Knowing Earth: Animist Refigurings of Western Epistemology Animism, as derived from Ojibwa philosophy, sees the world as made up of persons, only some of whom are human. Such a relational worldview implies ways of knowing that are reciprocal and intuitive, rooted in particular places and events, and narrated in stories. These characteristics of knowing are elements of indigenous ontologies, and they present challenges to a Platonic and Cartesian framework in which knowledge is based on generalized principles, spirit is opposed to matter, and knowing is an activity that humans alone, of all the creatures, are thought capable of doing. Beginning with a story of my relationship with a weeping birch tree at my childhood home in northwest Ohio, I examine elements of an animist epistemology using indigenous philosophers such as Carol Lee Sanchez, Vine Deloria, Donald Fixico, and Makere Harawira. But to trouble the dichotomy between indigenous and Western ways of knowing, I draw also on nonindigenous scholars such as Donna Haraway and her emphasis on situated knowledges; Hugh Raffles's emphasis on affective knowing through intimacy; and Ronald Grimes's call for enacting rites that serve the Earth. My goals are to understand how Earth is knower as well as known, to situate humans as but one extension of Earth's ability to know, and to explore how we might take our places in a community of knowers, only some of whom are human.

Trevor Thompson Warming House Coordinator and Associate University Minister St. Bonaventure University St. Bonaventure, New York tthompso@sbu.edu

"Reading the Water" as Re-placement in Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It In a culture that emphasizes displacing narratives of upward mobility, intellectual and ethical abstractions, and global and consumerist identities, Holmes Rolston III, Max Oelschlaeger, Anna Peterson, Thomas Berry, and many other prominent writers, scholars, and practitioners argue that the sustainable practices that will "re-place" us must be embedded in counter-narratives, stories that would offer glimpses of the tenuous but necessary process of coming to live in one�es place. Rolston, for example, suggests that our lives and landscape are always storied and thus what we need in order to sustainably fit into our niches is a "storied residence." Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It is one such classical counter-narrative aiding our return home . our re-placement. The Macleans, the brothers Norman and Paul and their Presbyterian minister father, learn to "read the water" of Montana�es Big Blackfoot River, the "family river," through long hours of love.listening, watching, experimenting, asking questions, thinking, and talking about the river's patterns: patterns that are ethical, practical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual. However, each Maclean, according to "circumstances that widen the differences," "reads the water" a little bit differently, each choosing his own position in or near the river, gauging the kind of cast needed, and judging the best fly for the moment. Although different reads of the same river, each longs to understand and to love the "water running over the words." Norman's brother-in-law, Neal, on the other hand, visiting from the west coast, does not know how to "read the water." Although born in Montana, he leaves; consequently, he knows absolutely nothing of the river�es power or patterns, and he knows not how or what to love. He chooses the wrong fishing hole, the wrong rod, and the wrong bait; he desecrates the river; and he shames the family. With models of placed and displaced lives, Maclean's narrative offers us multiple ways we might (and might not) live the land or "read the water."

David Utsler University of North Texas, Denton, Texas dgutsler1@sbcglobal.net

Who Am I, Who are these People, and What is this Place?: A Hermeneutic Account of the Self, Others, and Environments In this paper I would like to bring together two aspects of the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and extend them to questions of environmental philosophy. Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self provides a way in which we can construct a theory of human relationships to non-human others that is constitutive of personal identity that I call environmental identity. Secondly, Ricoeur's theory of distanciation and belonging provides a paradigm to understand both dwelling in environments as well as what it is we do when we step back from the lived experience in order understand its meaning. For Ricoeur, distanciation is not antinomic to participatory belonging, but rather is a necessary step to a more profound understanding of belonging. Ricoeur rejected any notion of the self and as self-founding, self-constituting immediate subject. The self as interpreted, or the hermeneutic self, provides a more robust description. Richard Kearney explains that Ricoeur "…insisted that the shortest route from the self to self is through the other." [1] Thus, one's identity and self-understanding, or one's-self, is not just in the "I" but in relationship to the other. According to Ricoeur, the self is constituted through the dialectic of the self and the other-than-self. This dialectic obtains when the other is thought of not just in comparison but in terms of an intimacy where the other is thought of as one's self, or another self, thus constituting an aspect of personal identity. Insofar as the other in this dialectic is the environment, I call it environmental identity. Ricoeur's thought on distanciation and belonging stems from what he saw as the fundamental problem underlying Gadamer's hermeneutics. Namely, that distanciation ruins the "primordial relation" of historical belonging. Environmental philosophy does not escape this problem. Some environmental philosophers have argued that we lose the direct, participatory experience of the environment in the attempt to describe, analyze, or conceptualize it. With Ricoeur, I will argue that distance from environmental experience is not itself alienating from the experience of belonging. Indeed, distanciation is a part of the moment of belonging that allows for both a deeper grasp of the meaning of dwelling (or belonging) as well as for a critical moment whereby false environmental consciousness can be identified. Environmental identity and the function of distanciation and belonging together form a hermeneutical paradigm to think through environmental problems as well as providing a way to mediate conflicting interpretations of environments. From wilderness preservation to the designing of sustainable cities, Ricoeur's hermeneutics provides a strong analytical framework to make sense out of human relationships to the environment, aiding us to be at home with ourselves, with one another, and, together, with the Earth. _________________________________ [1] Richard Kearney, "Introduction: Ricoeur's philosophy of translation" in Paul Ricoeur, On Translation (New York: Routledge Press, 2006), x.

Cynthia A. Walter & J. Michael Atherton Department of Biology Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania cynthia.walter@email.stvincent.edu J. Michael Atherton Department of Philosophy Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania atherton@setonhill.edu

Restoration Restores Education: Using The Campus Watershed to Integrate Multiple Ways of Knowing Every learning institution is located within a watershed. Every watershed in the US is involved in restoration efforts at some level. However, there is little to no public knowledge and even less understanding of these efforts. Connecting members of the campus community to their watershed requires that we start from the sense of place they have on campus and move them to a sense of ownership for the larger watershed. To make this connection, we need to integrate watershed knowledge throughout the curriculum. Integration requires that we move beyond the limitations of bifurcated thinking along quantitative and qualitative lines to pursue multiple perspectives, for example, Howard Gardner's linguistic, logical/mathematical, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and social ways of knowing. Faculty members from many disciplines can visit the same watershed to address a wide variety of educational goals. For example, a student observing a heron on campus can see it as a thing of beauty through artistic eyes, as evidence of water quality improvement through scientific eyes, and as an ongoing nature narrative through literary eyes. Such variable redundancy not only reinforces local and immediate educational goals, but also larger and longer-term aims, such as the interconnected quality of knowledge, the fecundity of nature, and the ability to see a single event from many perspectives. We use a case study of a multi-year, stream restoration project adjacent to the Saint Vincent College campus. Public and private organizations collaborated to construct 25 hectares of wetlands to intercept drainage from abandoned coal mines and restore aquatic life to a stream while enhancing wetland acreage in the region. The site serves as the focus for multi-disciplinary summer research programs, college courses, environmental education for grade school students, wildlife watching by amateur naturalists, natural landscapes for artists, and a meditation setting for all visitors. Although most schools are not adjacent to an active restoration project, every school can use federal and state agencies to identify nearby restoration work and build appropriate curricular connections. The vast number of national and international learning institutions provides abundant opportunities for restoration research, watershed action projects, curricular expansion, and increased public awareness. The extensive and personal sense of ownership by campus communities makes the watershed a framework for both biological and educational restoration.

Mélanie Walton Duquesne University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania aquestionofexistence@hotmail.com

Elaborating the World with the World The world gives itself to us as we give ourselves to the world. While this sounds like a communitarian ethics or perhaps a cosmological formula about our creation and end, it is primarily an epistemological claim: a claim about knowledge. This proposition is a basic principle founding phenomenology. Phenomenology is a method and school of contemporary Continental philosophy developed by the German thinker Edmund Husserl in the 1920's. This principle unsettles our egoistic supremacy as sole interpreter and judge of the meaning and value of our world. Phenomenology is primarily methodological; its task is to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in this very way in which it shows itself. This poetically convoluted task is expressing nothing else than Husserl's maxim "to the things themselves!" According to an etymological interpretation of phainomenon and logos by Husserl's famous student Martin Heidegger, these things, this essential nature of the world and its contents present a "seeming" that requires a "seeing" and "discourse." In everyday language, the world seems and the way it seems requires a subject, us, to see it and listen to and participate in its elaboration. Thus, phenomenology studies everything that shows itself and explicates itself to us when we turn our focused gaze upon it. This gaze carefully suspends preconceived meanings, turns child-like eyes to view the presenting world with the aim to be able to analyze and describe our consciousness of these essences situated in their existence. It attempts to give a direct description of our experience as it is in itself without historical, psychological, or scientific origins or notions of causality. Phenomenology is an eminently useful method that can be easily applied to diverse fields of inquiry. Being primarily epistemological, it seeks to yield essential descriptions, knowledge, of the interrelationships of the world and humanity. But, this epistemology is not a removed, objective study; it is the knowledge of lived experience, of an embedded, aware subject actively engaged with her environment. This lived experience of the world is dynamic; both world and subject constitute meaning. Thus, it upsets the philosophical heritage of positing, on the one hand, the world's meaning as essentially independent or, on the other, humanity as the determinant or measure of all meaning. A rich discourse, then, is opened up when we consider the theme "Recreate, Replace, Restore" through phenomenological eyes. This paper, after an introduction to phenomenology and an elaboration of its method, will explore the creative potential unleashed when prejudice-less subjects turn towards and engage with the environment as it gives itself to us. The world, then, is not a blank canvas for us to inscribe, but an ecosystem in flux whose constancy is only in the openly definable interconnections with humanity. In order to define how we create or place or remove our mark on the world, we must seek to understand how these interconnections open and close by being able to describe them.

Johan Weber The College of Wooster Wooster, Ohio Jweber09@wooster.edu

The Awe Factor: the Role of Experiencing Nature in Crafting Genuine Concern Humanity often considers itself unique among living things occupying the world; many would argue that this is the source of our environmental negligence, but I argue instead that this requires us to reflect in greater detail (as the only species capable of appreciating "value"), on the complicated and significantly impressive natural world. It is this "awe" factor which is crucial to crafting a genuine appreciation of, and concern for, the natural environment. Many thinkers, across disciplines and throughout history, have recognized the role that experience has in our appreciation for the natural world: Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Warwick Fox, John Muir, among others, have recognized the role that this experience must have in shaping the way people consider their position within the world. My argument is that genuine concern for the environment must take place within a framework of appreciation and intrinsic valuation, and that this framework cannot be built upon a foundation lacking in true natural experiences. These experiences can range greatly from individual to individual, and no uniform experience will be suitable to craft this framework across populations, but this should not be allowed to interfere with the vital project of presenting people with the impressive natural world. I source my arguments from spiritual naturalism, Deep Ecology, and the general thoughts of a great many environmentalists who found their appreciation and concern for the environment through experiencing the natural world. I also consider the wide range of ways in which this experience can take shape (animal species, aesthetic appreciation of vistas or unique landscapes, required adaptation of lifestyle i.e., camping, and others). Crafting this genuine concern for the natural world will be of paramount importance if environmental concerns are ever to take root as a fundamental interest in our policies and everyday lives.

Michael Williams Director of the Journey Project Thomas Merton Center St. Bonaventure University St. Bonaventure, New York mwilliam@sbu.edu

"I Was Born on Wheels":Wallace Stegner and Five Ways of Relating to Place in America In his essay, "Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood," Wallace Stegner narrates the tensions inherent within his life and by analogy, American life. "My father was a boomer, a gambler, a rainbow-chaser, as footloose as a tumble weed in a windstorm." "But I was at heart a nester, like my mother." "What I most wanted�cwas to belong to something, and Mormon institutions are made to order for belongers." "I became a booster, talking up my home territory." Stegner's experience of being "born on wheels," and his attempt to make his life feel like something more than a "broken film flapping through the projector" caused him to create a new language for how Americans form identities in relation to their places and for how they embody those identities. I use his terminology of "boomer," "nester," "belonger," and "booster" to develop a typology that describes American ways of relating (or of not relating) to place, and show contemporary examples that fit within each type. Stegner's conclusion suggests a fifth "way" of relating to place - what I call "the centered approach" - "We ended up teaching at Harvard, in conformity with our pattern of moving from our center out into wider and wider peripheries. Wider worlds, but with one foot always kept in the center of the circle." I use this notion to develop a corrective to what Eric Zencey names as the "etherealizing tendency" of modern culture, generally, and of higher education, particularly - "a process by which the elements of life that used to provide orientation and grounding have been made progressively more distant, abstract, general and ultimately less than fully satisfying." I argue that the contemporary primary "etherealizing tendency" of higher education is the over-emphasis on life lived within the context of career and that Stegner�es fifth way de-emphasizes the consumer-identity implicit within this over-emphasis and provides a more apt understanding of how we go about claiming our identities that are shaped by the particularities of place while remaining committed to the broadening role of liberal education. Stegner asks us, once shaped by our places, and after we "go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give�cto return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment."

Jim Wohlpart Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Department of English Florida Gulf Coast University Fort Myers, Florida wohlpart@fgcu.edu

The Mutual Chanting of Humans and Birds: Restoring the Spirit, Restoring the Land In the 1960s, the 103 mile long winding Kissimmee River that ran from Lake Kissimmee to Lake Okeechobee was channelized, mostly a response to several years of serious flooding. The channelization, which created the 56 mile long C-38 canal, 300 feet wide and 30 feet deep, allowed for flood control and thus for cattle grazing, agriculture, and development. Within ten years of the completion of the channelization, locals recognized that the river had been so severely altered that their very way of life was gone. Scientific studies confirmed what the locals knew from their own experiences. Migratory waterfowl had declined ninety-two percent. The bald eagle population had dropped seventy-four percent. Not only had the destruction of the ecosystem affected the wildlife population, but it also meant that the aquifers would not be replenished. Without the floodplains where the water moved gently across the land, the aquifers were quickly depleted. The call from locals and scientists, and the mounting evidence of ecological destruction, eventually resulted in the 1976 Kissimmee River Restoration Act. Through this legislation, state and federal agencies began to work towards restoring the integrity of the river. Then, in 1992, Congress authorized the Water Resources Development Act to begin the Kissimmee River restoration project, the largest ever of its kind. Scientists and planners considered a variety of possible restoration methods and developed models to ascertain what would happen as a result of the restoration. Finally, in 1999, the first phase of the restoration began with the backfilling of the canal and the removal of the first of two locks — the S-65B. The second phase of restoration, originally scheduled to begin five years later, has been postponed until 2012 because of an extended drought. This essay will describe the experience of a group of students from Florida Gulf Coast University who visited the restoration project. The students experienced all three aspects of the Kissimmee River — a remnant run cut off from its traditional flow, the channelized canal, and the restored river. As the day unfolded, the students gained a stronger nature literacy — learning the names of the birds and the plants — and gained an environmental education — learning to see their own physical and spiritual connections to the land. The focus of the essay is on the way in which the students came to inhabit a new way of thinking and being during the course of this experience, one where an ecology of the spirit emerged, showing us the fragile and intimate connections between humans and the land.

Robert Zandstra Independent Scholar Hebron, Indiana robertzandstra@gmail.com

Toward a Poetics of Religious Ecopoetry: Spiritual Référance in the Poetry of Wendell Berry This paper deals with religious ecocriticism, which considers the relationship of humans, the non-human world, and the divine through literature. Leonard Scigaj's Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (1999), a benchmark ecocritical text, implicates poststructuralist poetry in the present environmental crisis because it focuses so heavily on language and Derridean différance to the exclusion of genuine relationships in and with the natural world. Scigaj, who draws on the work of Wendell Berry, argues instead for a poetry of "référance" that is rooted in natural, ecological cycles and that directs the reader beyond language to the natural, referential world. Berry's poetry, however, often refers its reader to a further spiritual reality beyond the natural, material world and the "ecogenetic," although Berry does not develop these ideas at any great length. This paper, following the lead of Lance Newman's Marxist ecocritical synthesis, will begin to formulate a definition of religious ecopoetry and "spiritual référance" by expanding Scigaj's model of ecopoetry and critically applying that formulation to Berry's own poetry. Through the explication of several representative Berry poems, this paper demonstrates the congruence of ecological and religious world and life views in, for example, Berry's concepts of grace, gratitude, Sabbath, death, and the creation of culture and community. Furthermore, the paper points toward a fuller ethical framework through which the environmental and cultural aims of ecocriticism may be advanced.