A Sacred Trust

This book brings most of the major thinkers on the interface between ecology and the sacred into one volume and is based on a series of lectures held jointly by the Prince's Foundation and the Temenos Academy, of which the Prince is Patron. He contributes the preface where he stresses the need for a rediscovery of the perennial wisdom of Tradition, accompanied by humility and 'harmony with the pulsating heart of the Cosmos'.

The first person to make a major statement about the spiritual roots of the environmental crisis was Seyyed Hossein Nasr, way back in his 1967 book Man and Nature. He contributes an update to his thesis in one of the most important essays in this collection. His message is not that we need a completely new state of consciousness but rather than we need to 'rediscover the traditional way of looking at the world of nature as sacred presence'. This is no small matter in our secular culture, but increasing numbers of people are responding to the call for a deeper connection with nature which is not just environmental but integrally spiritual as well. Such people will find a feast of material in this volume.

The late Philip Sherrard, author of The Rape of Man and Nature and Human Image, World Image has a powerful essay called For Everything that Lives is Holy where he examines the metaphysical roots of our current attitudes to nature and each other. How we perceive, he argues, depends on our state of consciousness, which is in turn related to our state of being. If our normal state of consciousness is unregenerate and untransmuted, how can we hope to see into the reality of things or indeed people? He calls for a recognition of metaphysical knowledge of inner worlds as a deeper context for our knowledge of the physical world. This in turn corresponds to the traditional understanding of the human being as spirit, soul and body, with their corresponding levels of perception. And without visionary perception, we are 'blind to the inner and spiritual vision of things'.

Vandana Shiva's lecture gives a sacred perspective on food, which she bases on a 'culture of giving'. Food is more than a mere commodity, it links us to the web of life that is being ruptured by some of our agricultural practices. She explains how a natural approach to pest control comes from balance and diversity, but when you reduce the multiplicity of plants 'you also create an epidemic of pests because you destroy the habitats and homes of the diverse species; and before you know it you need to start spraying pesticides…and you say that the chemical fertiliser and the pesticides are going to give you more food'. Many 'smart technologies' take little account of local livelihoods and are designed to maximise short-term economic returns. By contrast Vandana proposes an ethic of care, both for the non-human and the human, so we come back to her key idea of a culture of giving mentioned above.

Other essays are by Brian Goodwin, Satish Kumar, Edward Goldsmith, Wendell Berry, Jeremy Naydler, Suheil Bushrui and the editor David Cadman, with Kathleen Raine's magnificent Millennial Hymn to the Lord Shiva at the end. David's essay is a thoughtful one in which he looks at the influence on our language of reductionism and economics, concentrating on deeper values and concluding that 'perhaps the most compelling idea of our time is the rediscovery of the reality of relatedness', which will give us a new way of seeing and being. The collection as a whole provides the reader with the essential elements of what Satish Kumar calls Reverential Ecology.