Sacred Nature Review: Back to the Garden – The Wall Street Journal

Scientists and tech dreamers often speak of a post-human future, in which technology reshapes the human mind or perfects the human genome, extending the average lifespan past a century. Radical environmentalists, too, imagine a posthuman future. But they mean a future after what some now call the Anthropocene Age, the era in which Homo sapiens significantly altered the Earths geology and ecosystems.

The Anthropocene Age is still being defined. Did it begin in 1945, with the Trinity atomic-bomb tests, or in the 18th century with James Watts steam pump, or even around 10,000 B.C. with organized agriculture and the first settled societies? Today, as Christianity weakens in the West, post-Christians are gripped by fears of natures revenge, the environmental apocalypse. The decline of traditional religion and a change in the weather is causing a sea change in our inner lives, our politics and our economies. What must we do to save our souls or the planet, which, we hear, are now much the same?

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Sacred Nature Review: Back to the Garden - The Wall Street Journal