Devoted to Nature

Evan Berry examines how religious belief shaped American environmentalism, following its theological character from Romantic-era roots up to present-day nature spirituality. He shows that the movement's view of nature did not simply inherit religious ideas but was built from them.

The author focuses on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, when religious sources helped define how Americans pictured the natural world. Those sources also guided how people approached forests, rivers and other landscapes, and they opened new forms of social and political activity.

Berry builds on the work of earlier environmental historians who recognized the movement's religious origins. He challenges the older account that treated religious elements as leftovers that persisted in environmentalism deep into the twentieth century.

His central claim is that a distinctly Christian idea of salvation underlies how the movement orients itself toward nature. Notions of salvation, redemption and spiritual progress, he argues, supplied both the backdrop for Americans' devotion to nature and the limits of what the national environmental imagination could consider possible.