Mary Evelyn Tucker - The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology

Mary Evelyn Tucker, eco-activist, passionate educator and a leading voice in the religion-ecology movement, asserts that the world's religions must re-envision their traditional missions and begin to embrace the state of the planet's ecological—as well as spiritual—well-being. Tucker believes that such a shift in focus, activated across the vast infrastructure of the great religious institutions, would represent an evolutionary change in the consciousness of humanity and would revitalize the role of religion in contemporary culture. In this presentation recorded in Boston, Tucker articulates her deep faith in religion's capacity to help us successfully meet both the ethical and the ecological challenges we face as the caretakers of Planet Earth. Her optimism is infused with a profound sense of urgency that such a religious-eco movement emerge and begin to directly engage such planetary crises as global warming, overpopulation, and species extinction.

BIO

Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer in Religion and the Environment at Yale University, holding joint appointments as a Research Scholar in the Divinity School, the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies. With John Grim, she cofounded the Forum on Religion and Ecology (FORE). Tucker and Grim also coordinated a ten-conference series on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. Tucker has been a committee member of the Interfaith Partnership for the Environment at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) since 1986 and is vice president of the American Teilhard Association.

Author of many books on religion and ecology, she has recently published Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase (Open Court Press, 2003). She is the co-editor of books on ecological views of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. She has published the volume Confucian Spirituality co-edited with Tu Weiming, and, The Record of Great Doubts: The Philosophy of Ch'i.