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From Booklist
Dunlap undertook this book in reaction to a discussion in which the argument that "wilderness" is a social construct arose. The resistance to that conception, Dunlap thought, was like Christian fundamentalists' reactions to historical-critical reading of the Bible--an analogy that prompted thinking of the resistance as "religiously" motivated. Dunlap argues that environmentalism has effectively been a religious quest, even when it has been unconscious of, or openly hostile to, religion, and he uses environmentalism as a sort of case study to turn attention to interrelations among religion, science, and technology. His definition of religion is broad but shaped by the American experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Perforce, he focuses on the individualist slant in American environmentalism, which, citing Aldo Leopold, he identifies as a problem for a movement that seeks not only to affect but also to transform society. Dunlap's accessible, informative history of environmentalism in the U.S. is particularly useful for this attention to the Americanness of the movement and its roots, via Emerson, in a distinctly American Protestantism. Steven Schroeder
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About the Author
Thomas Dunlap is professor of history at Texas A&M University. His books include DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy; Nature and the English Diaspora; and Saving America's Wildlife.
Book Description
The human impulse to religion--the drive to explain the world, humans, and humans' place in the universe - can be seen to encompass environmentalism as an offshoot of the secular, material faith in human reason and power that dominates modern society. Faith in Nature traces the history of environmentalism--and its moral thrust--from its roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism through the Progressive Era to the present. Drawing astonishing parallels between religion and environmentalism, the book examines the passion of the movement's adherents and enemies alike, its concern with the moral conduct of daily life, and its attempt to answer fundamental questions about the underlying order of the world and of humanity's place within it.

Thomas Dunlap is among the leading environmental historians and historians of science in the United States. Originally trained as a chemist, he has a rigorous understanding of science and appreciates its vital importance to environmental thought. But he is also a devout Catholic who believes that the insights of religious revelation need not necessarily be at odds with the insights of scientific investigation. This book grew from his own religious journey and his attempts to understand human ethical obligations and spiritual debts to the natural world.