I guess what I'm wondering is whether it's right and responsible to introduce ideas premised on an ecologically stable world which no longer obtains. Wouldn't that in its way be denialism? But then I consider that most of my mostly millennial students have never experienced an ecologically stable world, have never known climate not going haywire, have never known the human relationship with the rest of nature as anything but destructive. They can hardly imagine a natural world which doesn't cringe and recoil at the thought of humanity.
My generation's memory of a stable and harmonious world, and its allied idea of human innocence, are problematic - much of the damage was already done and being done. (Settler stability was indigenous apocalypse.) But they at least offer a sense of an alternative to free fall, an image of us as other than the bull in the china shop, of relationships with our non-human kin whose rupture might be healed. Perhaps one contribution religions can make in this moment is restoring hope for the continuation of life on earth - including human life - and for the re-binding (religare) of severed relations with our earthling kin.
