The Lost Gospel of the Earth

by Tom Hayden

From Tom Hayden - a 1960s radical and longtime progressive California legislator - here is an impassioned plea for reclaiming our spiritual bond with the earth. Hayden argues that the basis of our present environmental crisis was laid long ago, when tribal systems of belief were replaced by formal religions. Nature-based mysticism gave way to human-centered theologies that desanctified the earth and taught people to see themselves as dominant over nature. If we want to heal the destructive divide that exists between the human spirit and the natural world, we must retrieve the "lost gospel of the earth" by which people live in kinship with a sacred natural world. Hayden finds that Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism have defaulted on the environmental crisis, but believes that their earlier currents of native mysticism can be restored and applied to the present. Technical fixes and economic incentives will not cure our pathological addiction to making progress at the expense of the eart