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A walk through the accusation that started the field, the four families of theological answer it provoked, and a test you can run on your own work.
In 1967 the journal Science published an essay by a medieval historian, Lynn White Jr., called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," and ecotheology has been answering it ever since. I will argue that ecotheology earns its keep by naming the good that was wounded rather than by out-critiquing critique, and I will show this by tracing the four families of answer White provoked.
White's argument was historical rather than merely polemical. The ecological crisis of the modern West, he held, was no byproduct of industrial technology; it had roots in the religious assumptions that made that technology thinkable. Western Christianity, he wrote, is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. It sets up a dualism of humanity and nature and insists that it is God's will that humanity exploit nature for its proper ends. If the roots are religious, the remedy has to be religious too, since technological fixes never reach the level at which the damage was authorized. White was no outsider throwing stones; he wrote as a churchman, and closed by proposing Francis of Assisi as patron saint for ecologists.
The answering is what produced the field. Stewardship came first, granting White's point about consequences while contesting his reading of the sources. Dominion in Genesis was never a license to consume but a commission to keep. The human was placed in the garden to till and to guard, accountable to an owner who is not the human. Its critics say it leaves humanity above creation, managing an estate rather than belonging to a community, and that a steward can manage an extraction efficiently. Take those criticisms seriously and stewardship gets stronger, because now it must answer not only whether you are managing well but what you are managing toward, and on whose behalf.
The second family re-describes the relationship. Sallie McFague's The Body of God (1993) offers a model, a controlling metaphor rather than a literal identification: the world as God's body. Then God is not a distant sovereign directing an external estate but present to, and vulnerable within, the material world. Older sacramental instincts sit beside it: creatures as kin in the Franciscan sense, the human as priest of creation in the Orthodox. Here the world is not raw material awaiting a value we assign; it arrives charged with a significance we cannot cancel.
The third family refuses to let ecology float free of justice. Ecological damage is never distributed evenly; the communities contributing least reliably absorb the most. Pope Francis gathers that insight into the term the fourth family is named for, "integral ecology," in Laudato Si' (2015). Environmental, economic, social, and cultural ecologies are dimensions of one crisis, not separate files. A true ecological approach becomes a social approach, hearing the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor as one cry. Celia Deane-Drummond (plant scientist first, then systematic theologian) supplies the field's wisdom register in her Eco-Theology of 2008.
Ernst Conradie, writing from South Africa, where ecological damage and the legacies of dispossession are not separable topics, gives the field four tasks to hold together. The tasks: an ecological critique of Christianity, a Christian critique of ecological destruction, reform from within, and a contribution to public discourse. Hold all four and you avoid both failure modes, apologetics and secular environmentalism with a theological veneer.
Take whatever you are building and ask what it consumes: land, water, energy, materials, the fuel burned by everyone who travels to it. Then ask the three-way question. Is it extractive, drawing down what it does not replace? Neutral, leaving the world roughly as it found it? Or restorative, returning more than it takes? Resist grading yourself generously; an honest neutral is worth far more than an unearned restorative.
A critical theory of nature reads the natural world through capital and dialectic, and it is superb at exposing how ecological harm gets produced and who profits. Ecotheology cannot do that as sharply. What it supplies is what critique by itself never generates: a positive account of what the world is for, and therefore of what you owe it. Critique names the wound. It takes a doctrine of creation to name the good that was wounded.
The Postmodern Terminal >_