Reviews for Looking at the wild with Harry Butler

The average rating for Looking at the wild with Harry Butler based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-21 00:00:00 Felice Osborne This is one of the books that I have kept and revisited from my undergraduate degree. This book changed the way I viewed my Christian faith and how it interacts with environmental issues. It was also interesting to hear the dilemmas that other religions face when dealing with the global crisis. Worth the read, even if you only read the articles related to your particular faith.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-16 00:00:00 Juan Quezada Although I appreciate attempts at finding commonalities between conflicting groups, a lot of this stuff is really pushing it. Every religion I know of has some ideas that can be interpreted as environmentally friendly. And it is true that most indigenous, place-based spiritual beliefs that were taught by word of mouth (allowing change) did manage to produce pretty good results. But the dominant faiths of the world were intentionally designed to create empires, which is why they're now the dominant faiths of the world. There are just too many bad incentives inherent in these beliefs. A lot of this book's contributors do point out this concern themselves, but they still mostly try to show that these stories can be made to work for the environment. I personally don't see it happening. At one point I was totally against all religious/superstitious teachings, including what I'd seen from indigenous groups. In a lot of cases they seemed to only be less harmful because they lacked the modern tools that make exploitation so easy, in some environments still managing to cause great damage just with fire and grazing animals. My feelings are still sort of mixed but the fact is that all human groups create religious beliefs and rituals, and the infrastructure needed for "science" to prove its theories is not sustainable, or even ethical. We need to work with humility and leave some mysteries unexplained (and most likely even let go of some answers we already have) if we want to survive, what some environmentalists have taken to calling an ignorance-based worldview. It's my opinion that fables, myths, mnemonic songs, etc. can be sufficient educational tools for sustainable cultures. I think people will do a lot better not taking these things literally though. By the time someone reaches adulthood they should be aware that they're just stories and feel ok about tweaking them when they see that they're not producing their intended effects. Some religious ideas, like reincarnation, probably do have more environmentally friendly impacts than the more rational "who knows?" but again, I feel like it should be taught as something we hope for or maybe what's considered most likely, not dogmatic fact. Anyway, back to the book, there are some good topics brought up in here but they're too mixed up in stupid word games and indecipherable religious jargon. It also gets pretty repetitive as each contributor gives their own explanation of what they interpret deep ecology to be, and having been written like 15 years ago none of them probably give an accurate description of what is meant by deep ecology today. When this was written it would have been worth reading just for an understanding of the different viewpoints of all these groups. Now their views are most likely different, if all these groups even exist today (is existential ecofeminism still a thing?), so there doesn't seem much point anymore.