On August 26, approximately 4,000 feet (1,220 meters) of ice and rock, beginning roughly 5,200 meters above sea level, sheared into Nepal’s Lhende River valley, causing widespread devastation in the watershed, both in Nepal and nearby, China-controlled Tibet.

Most of us have seen the terrifying and heartbreaking videos of water, ice, rock, vehicles, and building debris barreling down the watershed. The river rose as much as 29.5 feet (nine meters) in about 30 minutes as the torrent swept people, homes, vehicles, and bridges downstream, leaving many in deep, muddy graves.

As I write on 28 August, officials in Tibet and Nepal are reporting nearly 600 human deaths and approximately 2,500 missing. [2 September update: over 1,066 deaths and approximately 4,500 missing.] In addition to the valley’s inhabitants, scores of Hindu pilgrims and adventurous tourists are among the dead and missing. For those who died, the only mercy was that their terror and pain were brief.

Meanwhile, the collapse created a natural dam and a new lake below the failure site. On August 28, authorities warned that the overflowing lake could unleash another flood and told rescuers and communities downstream to remain on high alert.

For a concise early visual explanation see:

BBC, 27 August 2026, ‘Did a glacier collapse trigger Nepal’s deadly floods?’

For a map that helps orient you to the region involved, see this one from the European Commission Emergency Response Coordination Centre, released 27 August 2026, CC BY 4.0. The casualty figures on it have been superseded by the figures in the text.

While the immediate cause of the disaster has been provisionally identified, the more important question is: What caused the glacier and bedrock to give way?

I am a cautious scholar who dislikes the penchant of so many to rush to judgments about all sorts of things before all the relevant facts emerge. But as someone who, in an interdisciplinary way, has for decades studied environmental issues, I think there are two dimensions to an answer.

It is overwhelmingly likely that human activity contributed to the conditions that made this catastrophe possible. Our increasing numbers and many ways of transforming the Earth are warming its atmosphere and oceans. The largest driver is carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; deforestation and other land clearing both release carbon and reduce the land’s capacity to sequester it. Methane from fossil-fuel production, livestock, and other sources adds still more warming.

A warmer climate weakens high-mountain glaciers in several interacting ways. As glaciers melt and retreat, permafrost also thaws, reducing slope stability; meltwater exploits fractures; and retreating ice can expose or remove support from steep rock faces. The result can be a cascade of rockfall, ice collapse, temporary damming, and flood. Scientists have warned about these processes for decades, with increasing urgency since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990. Thousands of Himalayan sites harbor similar, and sometimes greater, risks. Researchers have not yet completed a formal attribution study of this collapse, but it belongs to a class of hazards that warming makes more likely.

Three recent events suggest that such dangers are already increasing.

In February 2021, a massive rock-and-ice avalanche in Chamoli, India, generated a debris flood that destroyed hydropower facilities and left more than 200 people dead or missing. In July 2022, part of Italy’s Marmolada Glacier collapsed and killed eleven mountaineers; researchers implicated exceptional warmth, extensive melting, and the pressure of meltwater within the glacier, although details of the failure remain under study. In May 2025, Switzerland’s Birch Glacier collapsed, burying about 90 percent of Blatten village. Only one person died because authorities had evacuated roughly 300 residents after monitoring revealed the danger.

Simply put, the higher, steeper, and more glaciated the mountains, and the more rapid the warming is in a region, the greater is the danger.

The deeper roots of the climate catastrophe

There are deeper roots to these events and trends, and they are infuriating. They boil down to profound human failures, even depravity.

The responsibility is widely shared, including:

Educators, administrators, and the politicians who constrain them. My fury toward my own profession, and those who hinder what we do at our best, knows few bounds. While universities hold a reputation for being progressive, they remain fiercely, institutionally conservative. Academics stubbornly defend their usually sequestered disciplines, actively hindering the interdisciplinary programs required to address our escalating environmental crises, while administrators routinely starve the environmental and behavioral sciences of crucial resources.

A personal example: When I arrived at the University of Florida 25 years ago, I was excited by President Charles E. Young’s strategic plan, which championed interdisciplinary environmental studies as one of five institutional priorities. A few years later his successor, J. Bernard Machen, dismantled that plan and prioritized business interests and economic development—a move in step with Republican Governor Jeb Bush’s pro-growth über alles overhaul of the state’s educational governance. Since taking office in 2019, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s current Republican governor, has used legislative action and his power to appoint the boards governing state universities and secondary schools to push climate denial into state policy. A 2024 law he signed erased most references to “climate change” from Florida statutes, and the State Board of Education, whose members he appoints, pressured textbook publishers to remove references to “climate change” and clear explanations of its causes and how it causes premature deaths. Prominent climate scientists I know describe marginalization and frustration inside Florida’s universities. Here, climate denialism includes promoting ignorance as a strategy. Relatedly, secondary education is also an abject failure when it comes to teaching the evolutionary and ecological sciences, including climate science. Consequently, when I teach environmental ethics and other classes, I typically spend valuable time providing remedial science education.

Fossil-fuel industry officials and lobbyists. As well documented in Merchants of Doubt, a documentary based on it, subsequent research, and litigation demanding compensation from fossil-fuel companies, industry officials and their lobbyists understood for decades that their emissions were dangerous to human health and the climate system, but they waged an effective disinformation campaign and secured fealty from politicians with campaign donations, all of which played a major role in limiting public awareness and effective ameliorative policies.

Politicians allied with these interests—whether for economic advantage, political power, ideological reasons, or delusional religious beliefs—have deepened distrust of expertise and science itself—many in the US accusing climate scientists of being unduly alarmist or even of perpetuating a hoax. This indictment extends beyond my own country to leaders and delegates who repeatedly fail at United Nations environmental negotiations to act with the force the climate crisis demands.

News organizations. For decades, they paid little attention to climate science and its mounting evidence of harm. Even as fires, windstorms, and floods intensify, much reporting ignores or provides anemic attention to why these disasters are accelerating. Fox News, whose disinformation campaign begins with the ‘news’ in its moniker, sprinkles news while influentially peddling anti-scientist conspiracy theories, science skepticism, and other forms of propaganda. The entire right-wing media landscape piles on the bullshit. Almost never identified are the powerful actors or their economic interests that are fueling the apocalyptic trajectory.

Ordinary citizens who refuse to learn or to press political and intellectual leaders to act also bear responsibility, although less so than those with greater knowledge, privilege, and power. Most people have some responsibility—especially those who fund disinformation, obstruct policy, or refuse to make even modest changes to their lifestyles.

What to do?

The American folk singer Joan Baez often said, and may have coined the aphorism, “Action is the antidote to despair.” Even people who know what is happening, however, often cannot conceive of anything useful and effective to do. Those feelings are understandable, but they can also become a pernicious, self-fulfilling prophecy. I can think of at least three things that nearly everyone can do.

First, deepen your understanding of the climate crisis. I often urge people to go directly to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and read the summaries for policymakers. Start with the earliest reports, released in the 1990s, and observe how the levels of confidence and the alarming tone have increased. Scientists typically write cautiously because they know that uncertainty remains and knowledge evolves, sometimes dramatically overturning previous understandings. They do not want to outrun the evidence. They also know that they are often accused of being unduly alarmist and do not want to reinforce such perceptions. In recent reports, however, their cautious prose has become the scholarly version of standing on a table and shouting.

Second, speak up within your networks. Nearly everyone knows people who have been indoctrinated into believing that climate science is unclear or a hoax. Recent events and anecdotes are not equivalent to scientific studies, but the increasing number of catastrophic events that fit climate-change predictions can open conversations and shift perceptions. Political scientists have shown that swinging a small number of potential voters can make a decisive difference. Most of us are conflict averse to some extent, but the related timidity and fear, while understandable, are among the impulses we must overcome.

Third, force out of office politicians who refuse to treat climate disruption as a threat to our own kind and the rest of the living world. Whether they are ignorant, deluded, or corrupt, they should not wield public power. Although Democrats in the United States are maddening—focusing attention on scores of relatively unimportant issues and responding anemically to the greatest existential threat we face—the Republican Party has made obstruction of climate-change amelioration and adaptation among its highest priorities. Any chance of rational and effective climate action requires that we vote most of them out of power, and then pressure the Democrats to act as though they believe what many of them say about the climate crisis.

Much of the destruction from anthropogenic climate change is unfolding before our eyes, and much of what is to come is already inescapable. But there is still time to reduce some of what otherwise will take place.

Please do not assume nothing you do will matter, for doing nothing guarantees that doing nothing will not matter!'

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Here is précis for my Substack — Who I Am and what I intend with my Substack — which may be of interest for those who do not know me already.

To help the victims of this disaster . . .

. . . here are some quality organizations worth considering:

1. Direct Relief

• Direct Relief is supplying emergency medicines and medical support through local partners in Nepal.

• Donation link: Donate to Direct Relief

2. All Hands & Hearts

• All Hands & Hearts, which has worked in Nepal since the 2015 earthquake, is supporting emergency response and recovery.

• Donation link: Donate to All Hands & Hearts

3. GlobalGiving - Nepal Flood Relief Fund

• GlobalGiving directs contributions to vetted local organizations providing immediate relief and longer-term recovery.

• Donation link: Donate to GlobalGiving’s Nepal Flood Relief Fund

4. Save the Children

• Save the Children is supporting children and families affected by the disaster.

• Donation link: Donate to Save the Children in Nepal

5. World Central Kitchen

• World Central Kitchen is providing meals to affected communities and emergency responders.

• Donation link: Donate to World Central Kitchen

Further Reading

IPCC Reports: complete archive of assessment and special reports since 1990

IPCC, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report - Headline Statements

IPCC, High Mountain Areas (Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere)

ICIMOD, Hindu Kush Himalaya glaciers losing ice at double the rate since 2000

This is my fourth Egypt-focused dispatch. The series began with The Resurrection of Tutankhamun (aka King Tut), continued with Into the Underworld: King Tut’s Burial Chamber and Its Secrets, and most recently reached the threshold of the Royal Mummies Hall in Curating Egyptian Civilization at the NMEC. New readers may want to start with them.

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In my most recent essay, I introduced the second of Egypt’s newly opened, world-class museums, and promised to guide you into its crown jewel, the Royal Mummies Hall.

A question that often arises when I encounter artistic presentations or visit museums is, What are these artists, or curators, trying to get people to think, feel, and do?

That question came to mind as I descended a tunnel that made me think of the tomb passages I’d walked in Giza and the Valley of the Kings. A signboard explained mummification, tomb robbery, and the science illuminating these rulers’ diseases, diets, lives, and deaths. The curators presumably wanted visitors to understand both the rationale and technology of mummification and what researchers could still learn from the bodies.

Signs and guards asked visitors to remain quiet and take no photographs. Each mummy lay horizontally in a sealed, climate-controlled case within a cool, dim room. The descent, darkness, and silence reminded me of how people often behave when entering religious sanctuaries. One travel writer expressed a similar perception, calling the hall “a sacred encounter with immortality, where the gods of Egypt rest within arm’s reach.” These were apt words given these bodies were once considered divine, destined for a magical, bodily resurrection.

Although one curator said that the ban on photographs was to prevent flash photography from damaging the mummies, it also seemed plausible that the curators were seeking to create a mood—to evoke feelings of respect, if not also reverence, for these ancient bodies.

The twenty displayed mummies—eighteen kings and two queens—came from two caches found in the late nineteenth century: one where priests of the 21st Dynasty had hidden royal bodies from tomb robbers, and another in the tomb of Amenhotep II. Among them were Ramesses II, famed for his long reign and grand temples, and Seti I, whose face remains exceptionally well preserved. I found especially interesting what scientific analysis revealed about several of these rulers.

Queen Hatshepsut (18th Dynasty, r. ca. 1479–1458 BCE) lay, unidentified, in an unremarkable tomb until 2007, when scientists matched a loose molar in a box bearing her name to a nearby, anonymous mummy, convincing most specialists that they had identified the queen. They also found evidence that this mummified woman had cancer. A bottle bearing Hatshepsut’s name contained a carcinogenic skin lotion, leading some researchers to speculate that it may have contributed to her illness.

A 2021 CT study documented multiple deep wounds to the face and skull of Seqenenre Taa II (17th Dynasty, died ca. 1558 BCE); I recall seeing a large opening on the mummy’s skull. The researchers matched the injuries to several types of weapons. The position of his hands led researchers to surmise that he had been captured, bound, and executed.

Most striking was Ramesses III, the warrior pharaoh I introduced in my previous essay, who died about four centuries after Seqenenre. Ancient trial records describe a conspiracy involving a secondary wife, Tiye, and her son Pentawer, but do not say clearly whether the attack succeeded. A 2012 CT study revealed a deep cut across Ramesses III’s throat, probably made with a sharp knife, and an Eye of Horus amulet placed in the wound beneath layers of linen. The evidence strongly suggests that the conspiracy ended in murder. The dysfunction and power struggle that took the life of this great Pharaoh symbolized and perhaps accelerated the decline of the dynastic period that he had, for the most part, held at bay.

The care taken with these bodies, the choices about what to display, and the science brought to bear on how they lived and died—together with the mummified cats, crocodiles, and birds elsewhere in the museum—gave me a deeper appreciation of Egyptian history and religion. But are such displays morally objectionable?

Exhibitionism as grave robbing?

Soon after I released my first essay about King Tut, Donald Murphy commented that in his view, the excavation and display of Tutankhamun’s body and funerary objects constituted a form of grave robbing. Therefore, “The tomb of King Tut should be restored and his remains and funerary objects reburied.”

I first met Murphy when he was a Training Officer at California State Parks’ training center, and I was there to add Peace Officer to my responsibilities as a State Park Lifeguard. I quickly learned that he was also a well-read and erudite cat. (See, for example, his consciousness-focused Substack, @thinkerdonmurphy.) He later became director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation—and served as one of the National Park Service’s two deputy directors.

His perspective, he explained, was rooted in decades of work with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. Enacted in 1990, the law rests on the moral premise that the dignity of the deceased and the rights of surviving loved ones must be respected, and it requires federally funded museums and federal agencies to inventory certain Native American human remains and cultural items, consult with tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations, and repatriate them when the law’s criteria are met. That work, Murphy wrote to me, sensitized him to the sacred character of graves and placed him in conflict with archaeologists who wanted broad freedom to study human remains regardless of how institutions had obtained them.

This law and views akin to those Murphy expressed have pushed museums to reconsider whether it is morally permissible to exhume, study and display human remains, including mummies, and if permissible, to rethink the ethics involved during every stage of the process.

Not long before I saw Cairo’s royal mummies, I was in Europe researching a book about how museums and oceanariums provide environmental education, evoke human connections to nature, and sometimes encourage proenvironmental behavior. In Paris, the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) happened to be hosting a mummies-focused special exhibition, titled in French, Momies.

Like the Cairo Mummy Hall, photography was not allowed.

Unlike Cairo, the Paris curators acknowledged the ethical dispute at the entrance. After noting that mummy exhibitions had fueled an “ever-growing fascination with these deceased individuals,” they said they wanted to “open a dialogue with the public: should we continue to display the mummified remains preserved in museums, and if so, how and why?” Their ethical framework, they added, was “constantly evolving” and gave priority to “the respect due to the deceased and the museum’s duty of transparency.” Near the no-photography symbol was an advance notice (and one likely provided as a kind of “trigger warning”) that “mummified remains are on display in this exhibition,” followed by a request that visitors view them respectfully. Inside, the nine mummified bodies appeared in cases much like those in Cairo. Other displays traced the mummy’s long afterlife in movies, toys, games, and books.

After seeing the Cairo and Paris exhibitions, I looked for evidence that museums were reconsidering their practices. I found no systematic study but learned that many museums around the world display mummies, and several had made changes. In 2018, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum closed the lid of Nesmin’s coffin after consultation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art now makes available, upon request, a map identifying galleries that contain human remains, so visitors choose whether to view them.

Egyptians, too, have debated what to do with their mummies. Heba Mady Khalil traces objections at least to 1925, when a member of Egypt’s parliament unsuccessfully asked King Fouad to prevent the unwrapping of Tutankhamun’s mummy. In 1977, President Anwar Sadat raised the issue publicly, and the mummy hall later closed before reopening in 1987. A 1980 fatwa—an Islamic legal opinion—prohibited display, but other Muslim authorities said it was permissible, while providing a few broad guidelines that, I think, boil down to treating the mummies with respect. During my time in Egypt, I asked two Egyptian guides and one professor whether they knew of objections to the displays; none did. One guide thought too much tourist money was at stake for such objections to gain significant support.

In February 2024, Khalil surveyed 1,301 Egyptians through a Facebook questionnaire. The sample was disproportionately young—65.8 percent were between eighteen and twenty-four—and was not randomly selected, so it did not represent the Egyptian public as a whole. Nevertheless, it helpfully revealed divergent views, ambivalence, and inconsistency in the responses. Nearly two-thirds of respondents called displaying human remains morally permissible while 12.6 percent disagreed; 23 percent thought the remains should be reinterred. Khalil found that 66 percent viewed the mummies as historical or artistic objects rather than as remains of deceased people. This may help explain the similar proportion that accepted display.

Among the thirteen Egyptian museums Khalil examined, eight displayed mummies in special rooms. Arrangements varied, however, and no national curatorial standard governed them. My hunch is that the NMEC’s recent design, with its clear effort to set a respectful mood, reflects growing international attention to the objections and ambivalence some people have about such exhibitions.

Wrestling with mummies . . . & with ethical conundrums

I have often pointed out to students in my ethics classes that although some ethical values are widely shared and largely uncontroversial, the most wrenching ones are those that involve diverse moral intuitions or cultural understandings that cannot be reconciled. This means that in specific cases, not every value that is widely accepted can be upheld. Tough ethical cases often involve morally ambivalent if not tragic decisions by whoever has the power to make them. Disputes about morally-relevant facts, can also make it difficult, in specific cases, to confidently arrive at firm conclusions about what is right or wrong, good or bad.

Let’s look at some of the complications and contentions in this case that make questions about what to do with mummified remains a real ethical conundrum. But first, a brief word about justice, as some of these questions are directly related to the notion. Without getting into different, substantive understandings of justice, procedurally, justice is about rendering to each their due, about treating similar cases equally, about considering who shares the burdens and benefits of social arrangements and personal decisions. This is worth bearing in mind as I present some difficult-to-answer questions about how we should relate to ancient bodies:

I’ll now present some difficult-to-answer questions that illustrate the conundrums about how we should relate to ancient bodies:

• What can we surmise about the wishes of the deceased? Do we think they would object to their bodies being exhumed, studied, and displayed? If so, do contemporary humans have an obligation to comply with their wishes? What weight if any should be given to the views of those who think we cannot know, or that these individuals (or some of them) would not object to such displays were they to have a voice today? Perhaps not incidentally, one curator expressed the view I would modestly expand on in this way: These were prominent people who wanted to be known and might well approve of receiving a different kind of immortality than they might have expected thousands of years ago.

• Is it a violation of religious liberty to remove bodies from tombs, when presumably the deceased and their religious caretakers believed they were destined to a bodily resurrection? If few, if any, hold such religious beliefs today, must we nevertheless do our best to respect those beliefs by restoring these bodies to the state wherein they were supposed to be resurrected? Some religious traditions consider body parts of holy people worthy of public display, veneration, and sometimes worship: Does this challenge any categorical claims that any display of human remains is universally impermissible?

• If the decisions by colonial powers to exhume, move, study, and display mummies were wrong, e.g., by violating Egyptian rights in some way (such as for self-determination), does the moral calculus change when, after independence, Egyptians themselves became empowered to make such decisions? If Egyptians decide—or, more precisely, if those empowered to decide do so—should their decisions be considered legitimate and respected? If more care should be taken to treat these remains with respect, do the efforts exemplified by the NMEC and at the Momies exhibition in Paris suffice?

• In South Africa and North America, there have been objections to the display of prehistoric human remains dated tens of thousands of years before the present. The display of the skeleton in the NMEC’s main hall, however, and of the skulls, bones and fossils of primate and hominid ancestors in museums around the world, have not usually been controversial. What is the morally relevant standard by which one type of remains—e.g., prehistoric bones and fossils, but not human remains discovered since the Neolithic revolution—can be displayed with little or no controversy? Is the permissible/impermissible dividing line when pre-history turns into history with the advent of agriculture? If so, why?

• Does the sense that disturbing a grave is morally wrong diminish as a person recedes from anyone’s concrete memory? If so and again, how can that line be determined?

• Why does the objection about displaying human remains stop at our own species? Do such objections suggest we should reconsider the display of millions of dead animal bodies? By anti-colonial logic, should such displays be taken down as they represent centuries of killing, including even precipitating the extinction of many species?

• Much of the criticism seems to hinge on claims that a particular group of humans has a biological and cultural connection to the person whose remains have been found, but does not every human have a biological and cultural connection, through a long shared process of biocultural evolution, with all previously existing hominids, including our own species? Should the views of one with a more distant kinship relationship than someone closer (biologically, regionally, culturally) have little or no weight in deciding whether to study and display human remains (of whatever age)?

• How much value should be placed on what we have learned about our own species (disease, migration, kinship, violence) and the planet’s evolutionary story and our own part of it, to which the study of human remains has dramatically contributed?

Lurking in the background to most of these questions is, Who ought to decide?

These are not the only questions that have been raised by these Egyptian mummies, but they do illustrate how difficult wrestling with mummies can be.

I will conclude with a few modest musings.

First, like all truly wrenching ethical conundrums, the moral landscape is muddy, contested, and can pull cognitively and emotionally in irreconcilable directions.

Second, the criticisms and questions that have arisen are salutary, and hopefully, through ongoing debate and dialogue, our ethical views and related practices will evolve in a way that takes seriously the perceptions and feelings of all concerned, and that most people so engaged will conclude the process has been in good faith and led to warranted and sensible compromises and changes.

Finally, I offer what may be an unusual perspective:

If we take seriously that all human beings are one species — one extended family, however distant our human relatives may be — then even where some living communities have stronger genetic, historical, or regional connections to particular remains than others, we ought not erase the importance of one of our most distinctive and grand characteristics: curiosity and the deeply related quest for meaning. Studying our hominid, primate, and indeed, all our other ancestors, is essential for a clear understanding of our place in the cosmos and biosphere – and our current obligations to the entire living world.

This may be why people continue to be drawn to science museums, including those that display human remains. This may also be why, even when expressing ambivalence about the manner of some of these displays, and even when feeling that any such science and display should be done and presented respectfully, most people appear willing to accept, even if with some ambivalence, the display of human ancestors.

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If you are new to my essays, my inaugural post, Who I Am, and What I Hope to Do Here, explains the experiences and questions that animate my sugstack writings.

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And I hope this and other essays will spark discussion; why not start one . . . as did my friend Don Murphy.

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Further Reading & Resources

On the royal mummies and forensic research:

• Zahi Hawass and colleagues, “Revisiting the harem conspiracy and death of Ramesses III,” BMJ (2012), presents the CT and genetic evidence concerning the king’s fatal throat wound.

• Sahar Saleem and Zahi Hawass, “Computed Tomography Study of the Mummy of King Seqenenre Taa II,” Frontiers in Medicine (2021), analyzes his craniofacial injuries and proposes possible circumstances of his violent death.

• The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization’s Royal Mummies Hall describes the museum’s framing and the twenty displayed rulers.

On the ethics of displaying human remains:

• Heba Mady Khalil, “The Ethical Practice of Displaying Human Remains in Egyptian Museums,” Muzeólógia a kultúrne dedičstvo (2024), reports interviews with Egyptian museum specialists and a limited public survey.

• The Musée de l’Homme’s official Momies press dossier explains the exhibition’s ethical framework, provenance work, visitor warnings, and feedback process.

• The National Park Service’s NAGPRA guidance explains the consultation and repatriation process for Native American human remains and associated funerary objects.

• Wendy Black and colleagues, “Hominin heritage: How institutional repositories are managing collections, collaboration and repatriation,” South African Journal of Science (2025), examines claims involving ancient Homo sapiens and other hominid remains.

• Joel Feinberg’s Harm to Others (Oxford University Press, 1984) develops the influential argument that some interests held during life may be defeated by events after death.

Agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

This odd thought came to me shortly after I entered the main hall of Cairo’s National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC), which opened in 2021.

This is my third Egypt-focused dispatch. My interest in Egyptian history began decades ago at a Tutankhamun exhibition in Los Angeles. It eventually brought me to Egypt and produced The Resurrection of Tutankhamun (aka King Tut), about the treasures buried with the king, and Into the Underworld: King Tut’s Burial Chamber and Its Secrets, which took readers with me into KV62, where his mummy still lies. If you have not read those, you may want to start with them.

NMEC had a broader purpose: to tell the story of Egyptian civilization from prehistoric lifeways to the present. The curators arranged the main gallery as a counterclockwise walk through that history.

After entering, I turned right into displays of predynastic Egypt. One depicted shelters used by mobile foragers. Another presented the Nazlet Khater burial: the skeleton of an Upper Paleolithic man found in Upper Egypt in 1980 and dated to roughly 35,000–30,000 years ago. A bifacial stone axe in the grave suggested that the burial was contemporary with a nearby chert mine where similar axes were found.

The next display presented agriculture as the foundation of Egyptian civilization. An English-language panel credited farming with enabling sedentary communities, an organized economy, irrigation systems, calendars, and seasonal festivals along the Nile.

The display reminded me of Jared Diamond’s 1987 Discover essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Diamond argued that farming narrowed diets and damaged health while fostering social and gender inequality, epidemic disease, and despotism. He popularized a claim anthropologists and archaeologists had developed before him and have debated ever since. In Collapse (2005), he focused on the environmental costs of agriculture, including deforestation, soil depletion, and biodiversity loss, and how these can precipitate societal collapse.

I saw no trace of such criticism in NMEC’s presentation, nor at Cairo’s older Agricultural Museum complex in Dokki; most of its un-airconditioned rooms had not been updated for decades. NMEC instead offered a proud national story of agriculture-fueled achievement while ignoring the destruction unleashed by its ever-spreading and accelerating domestication of the world.

This was unsurprising. Curators often craft museums to nurture national pride and common identity and to serve particular interests—typically those of political and social elites.

As I continued counterclockwise around the room, I passed displays about brick construction and irrigation, medicine and writing, breadmaking, and the Greek, Roman, Christian, and Islamic periods. Statues, reliefs, and inscribed stone provided a primer on several millennia of Egyptian history.

A Primer on Egyptian Religion

NMEC, however, offered no comparable introduction to ancient Egyptian religion. Its history was long, complicated, and contested, but a short primer would have helped museum visitors—and may help readers here—place Egypt within the religious history of the ancient Middle East, often called the Near East by scholars.

Across more than three thousand years, Egyptian deities changed, merged, and acquired new attributes. Beliefs also varied by place, period, and social position. Several ideas, however, endured.

The sun offered an obvious image of creative power. The god Ra was a principal solar creator. The god Khepri represented the sun’s morning emergence, while the creator god Atum represented its setting form. Amun, whose cult centered in Thebes, merged with Ra as the composite deity Amun-Ra, who became king of the gods and a dominant god of the state.

The goddess Ma’at personified truth, justice, balance, and cosmic order. Egyptian images of judgment showed a dead person’s heart weighed against her feather. A favorable judgment admitted the person to a renewed afterlife; failure brought a second death.

This renewal depended on the body, but Egyptians did not envision a mummy standing up and resuming earthly life. Mummification preserved a body so that the person’s spiritual aspects could reunite with it. Osiris, the god who ruled and judged the dead, returned from death and offered a powerful model of regeneration, as did the sun’s daily rebirth, the Nile’s floods, and the agricultural cycle.

Kingship also joined political and sacred authority. Living pharaohs were associated with Horus, the falcon-headed sky god who was Osiris’s son and embodied kingship; these pharaohs were charged with maintaining Ma’at. After death, a king was associated with Osiris. The pharaonic office carried divine power, but the king remained mortal.

These ideas did not pass intact into later religions. The ancient Near East was a churn of trade, conquest, migration, and translation. Later Jewish and Christian traditions invented their own versions, purporting to explain divine judgment, resurrection, and the renewal of the world; scholars still debate possible lines of influence, including those involving Persian Zoroastrianism. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called culture-building from diverse sources bricolage, from the French bricoler, meaning to tinker or make resourceful use of whatever is at hand.

A Bricolage of Objects

In their own ways, museum curators also engage in bricolage. They assemble fragments from broad cultural histories—and often large collections—to give visitors a rudimentary sense, and sometimes a visceral feel, for a past more complex than their limited resources enable them to convey.

Like these curators, I am constrained by time and space, so I will narrow the field of view further by selecting a few objects that I found particularly illuminating.

My long fascination with hieroglyphic texts drew me to this hieroglyph-covered black-granite pillar. Its images and inscriptions included birds and other forms drawn from the natural world.

These symbols show how the living world furnished the script’s visual vocabulary. Viewing them reminds me of David Abram’s provocative and contested argument in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). He argued that pictographic writing kept language tethered to the living world, while alphabetic writing helped detach words from natural referents and thus contributed decisively to human estrangement from nature and the corresponding decline in Earth’s diversity, health, and resilience.

Nearby, a Ptolemaic limestone plaque probably depicted the sky goddess Nut giving birth to Isis while cow-headed birth deities attended her. Today, summaries often describe Isis as a fertility goddess, but ancient Egyptians also revered her as the mother of Horus and a goddess of protection and magic who revived her murdered husband, Osiris.

Close by stood a ram-headed statue of Amun-Ra. Together, these objects evoked the polytheistic world that characterized most of Egypt’s dynastic history—a religious world that varied by place and period and whose deities often had overlapping attributes.

Akhenaten and His Hymn

Into this religious world of many gods with overlapping powers, powerful priests, and strong temple institutions, came Amenhotep IV. He became a religious revolutionary.

When the young pharaoh took the throne, probably sometime between 1353 and 1351 BCE, Amun-Ra, the composite deity formed by joining Amun and the solar creator Ra, stood near the center of the state cult. About five years later, however, he changed his name to Akhenaten and founded a new capital, Akhetaten—now Amarna—dedicated to Aten.

Aten—the Egyptian word for the sun’s disk—was not new. The name referred to the visible solar orb through which light reached Earth. Akhenaten, however, elevated Aten above Egypt’s other gods and increasingly excluded them from official worship. His open-air temples admitted sunlight directly; artists portrayed Aten’s rays as hands extending life to the royal family. Scholars still debate whether this was the world’s first monotheism. At minimum, it was a radical experiment in religious exclusivity and royal power.

Amun-Ra and Aten were related but distinct conceptions of solar divinity. Amun-Ra joined Amun, the hidden power centered in Thebes, with Ra, the solar creator. Aten centered the visible sun disk and its life-giving light.

NMEC’s label described Akhenaten as combining “the attributes of all deities” in Aten and calling for “peace and religious tolerance.” This struck me as more of an exhortation to the Egyptian populace than good history. Akhenaten’s agents erased the names and images of Amun and other gods from monuments; he was no exemplar of religious tolerance.

Despite my reservations about NMEC’s subtle pro-tolerance framing, I found the damaged statue and the adjacent Arabic and English excerpts especially compelling. The panel called its text “From the Hymn of Akhenaten.” Egyptologists generally call the surviving composition the Great Hymn to the Aten. It is inscribed in the tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna and expresses Akhenaten’s theology, although its authorship is uncertain.

Here I reproduce most of the lines the curators displayed from this lyric poem:

When you rise upon the horizon
The day breaks
And you shine as Aten in the daytime
You dispel darkness
And when you give forth your rays . . .
The entire land performs its work
All the cattle are content with their fodder
Trees and plants grow
Birds fly up to their nests
Their wings are extended in praise for you
All the kine prance on their feet
Everything which flies up and alights
They live when you have risen for them
The fishes in the river leap before your face
When your rays are in the sea
Whenever you set on the western horizon
The land is in darkness like death
And one eye does not see another
Every lion comes out of his cave
And all serpents bite
For the darkness is blanket
The land now is silent
Because he who made them
Is at rest on his horizon

The hymn began from a common-sense recognition: life depends on the sun. It then made a religious inference—that such a life-giving power was a creator god worthy of worship. Given the time and place, what more obvious god could there be? I understand why people might resonate with this observation-based worldview.

Akhenaten died around 1334 BCE. His religious revolution did not survive him. After at least one short and still-puzzling intervening reign, Tutankhaten took the throne around 1333 BCE. He soon became Tutankhamun, shifting his name’s allegiance from Aten back to Amun as the royal court restored the traditional cults, abandoned Akhetaten, and dismantled Aten’s temples.

Akhenaten’s fate after death remains uncertain. The Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamun’s tomb was found, also contained a badly damaged male skeleton in KV55. A 2010 genetic study identified the KV55 man as Tutankhamun’s father. That relationship fits Akhenaten, but the identification remains disputed, partly because estimates of the man’s age at death have differed.

About a century and a half after Akhenaten died, Ramesses III ruled a restored polytheistic Egypt. NMEC calls him the last of the New Kingdom’s great warrior pharaohs. He repelled attacks by Libyan forces and the Sea Peoples as Egypt’s imperial power weakened; economic difficulties during his reign also produced the first recorded labor strike.

Ramesses III’s mummy is among the twenty royal mummies displayed in NMEC’s Royal Mummies Hall, which the museum promotes as its “crown jewel.”

Having seen King Tut’s mummy in his tomb and, in March 2026, a very different mummy exhibition at Paris’s Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man), I was keen to see how NMEC displayed and interpreted these royal bodies. Among other things, I observed how Ramesses III’s mummy preserved evidence of his violent death.

My next dispatch will lead you into this fascinating exhibition—and into thorny ethical debates about whether it is ever morally permissible to display human remains and, if so, in what ways and under what conditions.

After that, I intend to wade into scientific understandings of how agriculture, dams, and irrigation systems have transformed the region’s socioecological systems.

~ ~ ~

If you are new to my Substack and wonder about the author and the wide range of phenomena and issues I will wrestle with here, see my inaugural post, Who I Am and What I Intend with My Substack. To ensure you get an alert about future posts . . .

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Further Reading & Resources

On agriculture and its consequences:

Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (1987) — the provocative popular essay that came to mind at NMEC.

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) — extends the discussion to environmental degradation, social choice, and the fates of societies.

James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017) — an accessible, provocative synthesis linking grain agriculture, domestication, disease, forced labor, and the rise of early states.

Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998) — his final book, synthesizing a lifetime of critiques of agricultures and their erosion of biocultural diversity, including animistic and other nature-rooted spiritualities.

On language, literacy, and the living world:

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996) — the influential argument connecting alphabetic literacy to estrangement from the living world.

Anne Zavalkoff, “Dis/located in Nature? A Feminist Critique of David Abram” (2004) — directly challenges Abram’s alphabet-and-nature thesis, arguing that how people use language matters more than whether a culture is oral or literate.

Ted Toadvine, “Limits of the Flesh: The Role of Reflection in David Abram’s Ecophenomenology” (2005) — a broader critique of Abram’s treatment of reflection and alphabetic writing.

David Abram, “Between the Body and the Breathing Earth: A Reply” (2005) — his response to Toadvine and a useful clarification of what he did and did not claim about the alphabet.

On Egyptian religion and Akhenaten:

Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (1982) — a foundational account of Egyptian conceptions of deity and divine plurality.

Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten: The Heretic King (1984) — an influential critical study of Akhenaten’s reign and religious revolution.

Marsha Hill, “Art, Architecture, and the City in the Reign of Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014) — an accessible overview of Akhenaten’s religious, artistic, and urban innovations.

UCL Digital Egypt, “Belief in One God in Ancient Egypt” — an introduction to Atenism and a translation of the Great Hymn to the Aten.

For the museum’s official site:

National Museum of Egyptian Civilization — visitor information and the museum’s official account of its collections.

A dozen days ago, I shared “Going Home to the Range of Light,” which ruminated about my own feelings of belonging to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After descending from the mountains and spending some time back along the Southern California coast, where I have similar feelings, I revisited a tabloid-style newspaper that I had picked up in Mammoth Lakes, where it is distributed for free. Its cover is the lead image for these reflections.

Exploring this issue promptly kicked me into environmental historian mode.

Environmental history is a relatively new discipline built on a simple but far-reaching premise: nature itself — from the smallest organisms to the largest environmental systems — is a critically important actor in the history of the planet, including in what we have traditionally understood as human history, which typically focuses on human actors, and indeed, elite and powerful ones. Leave nature out of the effort to understand the evolution of biocultural systems, however, and you will never fully understand human societies, let alone natural systems, let alone these socioecological systems.

Looking at the cover — see the image I’ve included as the gateway to this essay — I was struck by these words: “AWE: Eastern Sierra,” as well as by the text that is lower on the page, an aphorism that has become a ubiquitous ethical precept for wilderness lovers: “Leave No Trace.”

Turning the page, I saw advertisements for high-end hotels in Mammoth Lakes and nearby towns. Scattered elsewhere in AWE’s pages were advertisements for outdoor shops and companies that will help with mule and horse packing into the mountains, along with detailed advice for hikers, backpackers, and anglers about where to go, what to take, and how to be safe in the high country.

Prominently placed was something else that in the United States has become common in environmental, academic, and left-wing political circles: a Land Acknowledgment. After those words in large letters, the text’s authors named and honored several Indigenous groups, referring to them as the “original inhabitants of the Eastern Sierra . . . who remain here today.”

Less prominently, at the bottom of the page in smaller type — perhaps in an attempt to counteract a visceral reaction that some in the region might consider ‘woke’ pandering to the region’s Indigenous peoples — the text explained the editors’ aspirations: “This issue of AWE is meant to bring all sides of the Eastern Sierra together—hikers, climbers, cowboys, packers, and everyone in between. Different backgrounds, different perspectives, same love for the land and the joy that it brings us. It’s the Year of the Horse. Go explore it.” (According to Chinese astrology, 2026 is the Year of the Horse; this struck me as perhaps another paean to the region’s horse and pack-mule outfitters!)

Viewed holistically, the tabloid provides an excellent example of a contemporary nature spirituality, which tends to understand Indigenous peoples as especially close to the land and superior stewards of it. The presentation also suggests that (or perhaps seeks to encourage) all parties in the region to revere the land. AWE’s writers also declared on its website that they seek to promote “responsible recreation and sustainable tourism across the Eastern Sierra.”

I see no reason to doubt the sincerity behind this aim. The people who produce AWE’s tabloid and website clearly love the Eastern Sierra and want its communities, businesses, and habitats to flourish. During a brief stay at Mammoth’s Limelight Hotel, one of AWE’s advertisers, I noticed sustainability practices that went well beyond what I have encountered at most hotels. Limelight reports that its Mammoth property is all-electric; several of its other properties are LEED-certified. It also provides electric-vehicle charging, supports local environmental organizations, and promotes environmental advocacy and education aimed at addressing climate change.

I have not studied how sincere or effective these efforts are and cannot say. Such practices do not eliminate the tensions between tourism and conservation. They show, however, that commercial enterprise need not be indifferent to them. The challenge is to integrate local livelihoods with the wellbeing of the region’s habitats, the organisms that constitute them, and the global environmental systems to which they belong, through increasingly responsible practices. In this respect, AWE fits well with what environmental historians have often documented: commerce and protected-area conservation, including in our national and state parks, have long been entangled, often in complicated and contradictory ways.

Two classic examples make the point.

The first concerns the creation of the American national park idea. As historian Alfred Runte showed in Trains of Discovery, the Northern Pacific Railroad and its counterparts elsewhere in the West were not incidental to the establishment and promotion of parks such as Yellowstone. Railroad interests helped lobby Congress to preserve Yellowstone; once the park existed, railroads built access lines, financed grand lodges, and flooded the public with promotional images. A protected and well-publicized wonderland promised to fill passenger cars. In selling these journeys, the railroads helped popularize the idea of pristine wilderness as a place where experience builds character, provides meaning, and perhaps inspires a spiritual connection to the land, if not also the nation.

The second example followed a generation later, when automobile manufacturers, automobile clubs, and highway boosters promoted nature tourism along California’s coast and through its redwood groves. As historian Marguerite S. Shaffer showed, commercial and civic interests sold scenic travel to a driving public, helping produce new roads and tourism-fueled economies. Susan R. Schrepfer’s history of redwood preservation details the conservation movement that developed alongside—and sometimes in tension with—those commercial interests.

To note these entanglements is not to denigrate the connections to land that people feel in diverse ways, the need of those who inhabit these places to make a living from them, or the entrepreneurs who see potential profit in drawing on the emotional connections—even the sense of the sublime—that many people feel in and toward nature.

This observation does not mean, however, that every impulse and commercial interest has been honorable. Far from it—and uncovering exactly that is part of what environmental historians have been effective at bringing to light. The Save the Redwoods League, founded in 1918, provides a case in point. As Greg King, a journalist and formerly a prominent redwood forest activist, argued on the basis of extensive archival research in The Ghost Forest—and as I summarized in my review of King’s book:

from its founding until at least the end of the 20th century, the League functioned as a timber industry front group, directing public love of these forests toward these objectives: (1) preserving redwood beauty strips along highways to disguise the destruction and thwart the public outrage and citizen activism that visible clear-cut logging precipitates, and (2) protecting small redwood reserves for camping (typically as state parks), thus securing the League’s reputation as the champion of redwood forests.

In King’s account, these policies left the League deeply complicit in the near-total liquidation of what remained of California’s original coast-redwood biome.

These reflections and examples open a historical can of worms. I seek to provide both critical analysis and sympathy for the humans whose emotional, material, and spiritual needs are entangled, usually in complicated and not uncommonly destructive ways, in the bioregions they inhabit and share.

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Further Reading

• Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery: Railroads and the Legacy of Our National Parks, 5th ed. (Roberts Rinehart, 2011).

• Susan R. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

• Greg King, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods (PublicAffairs, 2023).

• Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Smithsonian Books, 2001).

• Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (June 2013): 94–119 — the lead essay in the symposium “State of the Field: American Environmental History,” with responses from six scholars, including my own: Bron Taylor, “‘It’s Not All about Us’: Reflections on the State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (June 2013): 140–144.

• Bron Taylor, review of Greg King, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, Special Issue on Environmental Radicalism, Journal for the Study of Radicalism 17, no. 2 (2023): 199–207.

Subscribers who cannot access my cited contributions through these links may contact me for copies or download them (along with dozens of my other publications) from brontaylor.com.

Two and a half months ago, as I began phasing out of academic life, I started this Substack. I wanted to share more widely than I ever could through scholarly publishing some of what I have learned—and some unusual experiences that I thought might be of wider interest.

I am pleased that, in this short time, as of this morning, 200 people have subscribed. To my surprise, more than 10% of you have also become paid subscribers. That is humbling. I did not begin this venture to make money but your support does cover some of the expenses that my wandering, researching, photographing, and writing entails.

I began my Substack by explaining who I am and what I intend with my Substack. I followed that introduction with a foundational essay, The Liberating Power of the Sociology of Knowledge, about how we come to believe that we know what we think we know. I also introduced readers to dark green religion, a subject I have been exploring for many years.

I then introduced “Terranaut Dispatches” by writing about my recent experiences in Egypt; another essay about mummies is still to come. Next came two dispatches inspired by an unusual journey to Iran a decade ago—with more to come about the war still unfolding there with no end in sight. And a week ago I posted Going Home to the Range of Light, musing about my return after many years to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

These initial essays have only begun to scratch the surface of the subjects and experiences I intend to ruminate over—and occasionally muckrake about.

If any of these essays has struck you as worthwhile, would you consider sending it to one person who might appreciate it? There is nothing like a personal recommendation from a trusted friend to bring worthwhile writing to new readers.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed. Your interest and encouragement have given me good reason to continue.

Persevere!
bron

California or Bust¹

This summer, after decades living in Wisconsin and Florida, my wife Beth and I returned to California to reconnect with old friends and favorite places. Although I love wandering the world, I remain a chauvinist for the state where I was born and that I served when working for its second-to-none State Parks system. Few states, or countries, have greater biocultural diversity. People from around the world contribute to its vitality and cultural diversity, and scientists have recognized the state as one of 36 biodiversity global hotspots, noting that California harbors more endemic plant, animal, and marine species than nearly any other temperate, non-tropical sub-national region.²

These species inhabit 13 ecoregions, which include chaparral, marine, desert, forest, and alpine environments.³ We also have two beloved redwood species, the coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), Earth’s tallest trees, which can reach 380 feet (116 m) and live over 2,000 years; and the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), the world’s most massive trees by volume (some 3,200–3,400 years old), which live in scattered groves along the western slope of the state’s magnificent Sierra Nevada. These mountains run some 400 miles (640 km) on the eastern side of California, rising to a dozen peaks above 14,000 feet (4,267 m), among them Mount Whitney, the highest summit in the contiguous United States, at 14,505 feet (4,421 m).

We began our reunion tour by visiting Jordan Fisher Smith, a friend and Park Ranger turned award-winning nature writer, in Nevada City, a town in the Sierra foothills which arose with California’s 1849 gold rush.⁴ Then we wandered to the northern shore of Lake Tahoe, which reminded us of the beauty of this deep blue lake, which nature created 2 to 3 million years ago by a combination of tectonic movement, lava dams, and glacial carving.

Heading south along the range’s eastern flank we passed through the bucolic alpine meadows of Hope Valley and later, to our right, drove by the eastern entrance to Yosemite National Park, cast our gaze left to Mono Lake in the Owens Valley, and then reached Mammoth Lakes, the ski-town nested below the 11,053-foot (3,369-meter) volcano-created Mammoth Mountain.

Muir at the Gate

As we entered the town, John Muir greeted us – put more precisely – one of his famous aphorisms did – declaring on a stone gateway: “The mountains are calling.” That the town’s leadership offered this greeting struck me as a kind of proselytism for a high-elevation nature spirituality.

Many interpreters understand Muir in just such a way.

Scottish-born, Muir emigrated as a boy to a Wisconsin forest, which he helped to clear, and as a young man, he wandered his way to California, arriving in 1868. He fell in love with these mountains so deeply that he thought they deserved a more aesthetically evocative name than original Spanish mapmakers who borrowed the Sierra Nevada moniker, meaning snowy mountains, from mountains in their homeland. Muir, watching how light poured through their passes and off their snowfields, searching for terminology he thought worthy of them, labeled them The Range of Light.

Muir went on to co-found the Sierra Club in 1892 and become its first president. His passion for the preservation of nature became the guiding philosophy for, but not always the practice of, America’s national park system. This philosophy also became the model for many national parks around the world.⁵

My father was a Sierra Club member and what has become an endangered political hominid – a Republican environmentalist. He had also been a soldier in WWII, about whom I earlier wrote in Antifascism & Memorial Day. After the war he became a geologist, I surmise, in part because he found solace from the horrors ­­of war in little-peopled wild places.

My brothers and I benefited from that impulse, as he took us to the West’s deserts and mountains, and sometimes, brought the family to Sierra Club wilderness trips. An early, fond memory was of a ‘wilderness threshold’ trip to Yosemite’s Cathedral Lakes and the spire above them. After reaching the spire’s summit in 1869, Muir wrote: “No feature ... seems more wonderful than the Cathedral itself, a temple displaying Nature’s best masonry and sermons in stones.... This I might say is the first time I have been at church in California.... In our best of times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.”

Indeed, Muir often depicted California’s plants and animals as kin and its mountains as sacred temples. During his first summer in the Sierra, he wrote that when there, “we feel ourselves part of wild Nature, kin to everything.”

Although I had wonder-filled wildlands experiences, including during Sierra Club trips, it would be a long time before I knew anything about Muir.

On one of those early outings, probably in the early 1960s, we met Norman Clyde. My hazy recollection is that he had camped on the shore of one of the small lakes below the Minarets. We pitched tents on the opposite shore but ended up sitting around a small campfire one evening while he told stories, which sadly, I do not remember. My father said he was a legend.

So he was.

Born in Philadelphia in 1885, Clyde made roughly 130 first Sierra Nevada ascents. In 1928 he was the first to climb the tallest of the Minarets, a 12,281-foot (3,743-meter) spire that now bears his name — each Minaret now bears the name of the first person known to climb it. Clyde was also a schoolteacher who read the classics, and a longtime Sierra Club member who led wilderness trips. He lived simply in the Owens Valley, where on a clear day he could see the Minarets and the Ritter Range. In 1972 he died in Big Pine, California, within sight of the Clyde Minaret.

Like John Muir, Clyde fell for these mountains. So have I, although given nature’s indifference and sometimes violence toward our kind, I know such affection is not reciprocal.

Not incidentally, despite his romanticism, Muir knew this as well, which he revealed in Cedar Keys, one of the most amusing and important essays in American environmental letters. I have long assigned it to my students and recommend it heartily.

Climbing Banner, Facing Ritter

Given my fondness for these mountains, soon after I connected with Beth, I took her to them. During an early trip to the Eastern Sierra, we drove past the Mammoth Ski resort to the Devils Postpile National Monument, at 7,560 feet (2,304 m), which was then the common trailhead to Thousand Island Lake. Then we hiked over 15 miles (24 km) up to this meadow-surrounded alpine lake at 9,833 feet (2,997 m), which sits directly beneath Mt. Banner. After a lazy recovery day, we set out to climb Banner.

Our route swung around to the right of the mountain’s cliff face until we were behind the mountain, and then we continued up a pitch to Lake Catherine, a stunningly beautiful, round, deep blue lake. At 11,040 feet (3,365 m), it was treeless and surrounded by black rocks, except at the lake’s opposite end from our approach, where a glaciered snowfield spilled into it. Circumventing the rocky bank on the lake’s left side, we reached and began climbing up that snowfield, with Banner to the left and the steeper face of Ritter to the right.

This face was where, in the fall of 1872, during what became the first known ascent of Mt. Ritter, Muir had an uncanny experience. While climbing he came to a dead stop, paralyzed with fear, clinging precariously to the cliff wall. (Years later, when working with California’s Park Service, I participated in a hair-raising cliff rescue of a person in this very predicament, so I have a visceral understanding of how terrifying and paralyzing such an experience can be.)

Muir wrote of the experience in terms that suggested a rescue from some kind of mysterious life-force.

When this final danger flashed upon me, I became nerve-shaken for the first time since setting foot on the mountains . . . But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness. I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self, bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel,—call it what you will,—came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do.⁶

Muir’s account, in which he seems to imply that the universe took over and flowed through him, reminds me of an experience many expert surfers report, that “time slows down in the tube,” and it also resembles what athletes and some scientists have described as a Zen-like flow state.⁷

When taking our own path up to the saddle, a ridge that at the top of this snowfield bridges Ritter and Banner, Beth and I did not know this story. Nor did we know that all the way from the Thousand Island Lake to the saddle, we had taken, essentially, the same route Muir had 154 years earlier.

What we knew was that we were ill-equipped to climb Ritter. Although the mountain’s face from the saddle is not highly technical (a Class 3 & 4 challenge in climber’s terminology), a fall from it would likely lead to death. It certainly would have for Muir, who was climbing solo. We had only ice axes, both to assist our ascent of the snowfield and to brake our butt-sliding descent down a steep snow chute—a quicker and more amusing return to Thousand Island Lake. Instead, from the saddle, we turned left and scrambled up to Banner’s 12,936-foot (3,943 m) summit, which was only a Class 2 climb. It was not, however, far below Ritter’s apex, which reached 13,143 feet (4,006 m) above sea level.

The scramble to Banner’s summit was not arduous but the wind was fierce. After reaching the summit, we lowered ourselves to avoid becoming wind-sailors to the lake below, and crawled to the edge of the mountain’s eastern precipice.

The payoff was a view of the many lakes below and a panoramic view of the surrounding mountains, the Owens Valley to the east, and beyond that, the White Mountains.

That view remains seared in my mind.

I later learned that the White Mountains are the refuge of the Bristlecone Pines, the oldest trees on Earth, one of which scientists have concluded is 4,850 years old. Several others are nearly as elderly. A dendrologist dated a specimen at 5,062 years old, but that finding remains unconfirmed (for the story, see Pinus longaeva).

Imprinting Nature

Our Sierran experiences sealed the fate of the three children who would later join Beth and me in our life-journey. A few years after moving to Wisconsin, we brought them to experience Thousand Island Lake and the region to which it belongs. Way up the steep switchback path to the lake, this time, via the June Lake trailhead, our then ten-year-old daughter Kelsey exclaimed, “You know, some families actually relax on their vacations!” After acknowledging sardonically that indeed, “It sucks to be you,” we persevered to the lake.

Despite her complaint, like a duck imprinting on and following a parent, the mountains imprinted on her, and indeed, on all of our offspring, who themselves became lovers of nature, mountains, and alpine adventures.

Perhaps it was similar imprinting that led us to return to these mountains. On our recent visit, however, road repair blocked the road to the Postpile trailhead, so to gain a view of the high country, we started further away and hiked past Lake George and up the Mammoth Crest. Finally, from a distance (and as depicted in this essay’s initial picture) Banner and Ritter and the Minarets appeared.

The next day began crystal clear. Although Beth and I, as avid hikers, felt like cheaters, we took a gondola to the top of Mammoth Mountain. Stepping out onto its 11,053-foot (3,369 m) summit, we absorbed the dramatic panorama, including a significantly closer view of Banner, Ritter, and the Minarets than we had seen the previous day.

After reveling in the scenery for a while, we descended the way we came, all the more determined to return, fates permitting, with our mountaineering offspring. Next time, we hope to hike the John Muir Trail, and then his ‘Pathless Way,’ as one of his biographers put it, to the summit of Mt. Ritter.

Homecoming­­

As we drove out of Mammoth Lakes, a sign in the same style as the one that greeted us expressed an expectation that we would soon return. It also provided a reason for this confidence, again quoting Muir, “Going to the mountains is going home.”

The words named something I have spent much of my career studying—what I long ago labeled ‘spiritualities of belonging and connection to nature’ and, in a subsequently published book, Dark Green Religion. (I summarized its analytic framework in an earlier Substack post, Dark Green Religion ~ A brief Introduction.)⁸

I think I was able to recognize in others such feelings of belonging to nature because I share them. And I am far from alone.

While still in the mountains and before writing these words, I posted on social media a couple of the photographs that I am sharing here. Several California friends who feel a connection to these mountains responded, expressing their own affection for this region and its wonders. One sent an artistic rendition of Banner, Ritter, and the Minarets, confessing that these are her favorite mountains. Knowing her, I suspect she would also consider them sacred.

The experiences I have recalled here show how nature can bring connection, contentment, joy, and purpose—and, not uncommonly, a belief that the natural world is sacred and worthy of reverent care.

There is, of course, more to say about perceptions of the sacred in nature and the contested history of protected-area conservation. That is for another day. But in my initial Substack essays, I want to provide more personal background than I typically do in academic writing—in this case, why I understand the widespread impulse to perceive Earth’s living systems as something to which we belong, owe obligations, and sometimes even consider sacred.

~ ~ ~

New here? For background, check out my inaugural post, Who I Am and what I intend with my Substack. Would you like an alert to future essays? Then . . .

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Notes and Further Reading

1. The slogan originated during California’s 1849 gold rush and it has been used subsequently to reflect a determination to overcome all obstacles to get to a specified destination.

2. See the report from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.

3. The classification is from G.E. Griffith, J.M. Omernik, and colleagues, Ecoregions of California (U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2016-1021; https://www.epa.gov/eco-research/ecoregions-california). I learned about such classifications when studying Bioregionalism, which emerged as a scientific and philosophical approach to biocultural conservation, with strong activist dimensions. If interested in this history, see Bron Taylor, “Bioregionalism: An Ethics of Loyalty to Place,” Landscape Journal 19(1&2): 50-72, 2000.

4. Jordan Fisher Smith’s writings include Nature Noir: A Park Ranger’s Patrol in the Sierra. Houghton Mifflin, 2005, and Engineering Eden: the true story of a violent death, a trial, and the fight over controlling nature, Crown Books, 2016.

5. My favorite biographies of John Muir, which also illuminate the early history of the Sierra Club, are Michael P. Cohen’s The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, and The History of the Sierra Club (1892-70). Sierra Club Books, 1988; and Donald Worster’s definitive study, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Oxford University Press, 2008.

6. The account appears in The Mountains of California. This book is included in the best collection of Muir’s writings, with a very helpful timeline and commentary from the historian and editor of the collection. See Muir, John. 1997. Nature writings: the story of my boyhood and youth, my first summer in the Sierra, the mountains of California, Stickeen, selected essays, ed. William Cronon. New York, Library of America.

7. On Zen states regarding actionless action, in which it appears the universe is flowing through one without an individual acting, see Eugene Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, Vintage Books, 1989. And for the classic study of such flow states, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row, 1990.

8. The first time I used the phrase ‘spiritualities of belonging and connection to nature’ was in this two-part study: “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part One): From Deep Ecology to Radical Environmentalism,” Religion 31(2): 175-193, April 2001, and “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part Two): From Earth First! and Bioregionalism to Scientific Paganism and the New Age,” Religion 31(3): 225-245, July 2001.

This is my third Iran-focused dispatch. The series began with two essays based on my experiences there in 2016: My Journey to Iran: Hope, Resistance & Fear and Hope and Heresy in 2016 Iran. In these I describe fascinating experiences I had exploring Tehran with Iranian activists and a subsequent UN-sponsored conference there that focused on religion and the environment. New readers may want to start with these essays. Here, in the first of two essays reflecting on the aftermath, I turn to what happened to the fragile hope I saw there for myself.

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As I boarded the plane for my return flight to Paris, the most poignant impression I had was the longing for greater freedom and engagement with the wider world that I found among Iranian activists, artists, and university students. At the conference, I found these students especially moving as they asked me how they might find opportunities to leave the country to study, or just to find the freedom for which they were longing. Such desires seemed especially intense among the women, for it was then and remains their freedom that is most dramatically curtailed by Iran’s theocratic forces.

None of what I witnessed would have happened without the deal.

As I briefly mentioned previously, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, was negotiated over nearly two years, leading to an agreement in July 2015 among Iran, the United States, and five other world powers. In it, Iran accepted deep limits on its uranium enrichment and the most intrusive international inspection regime ever negotiated. In return, the powers lifted the nuclear-related sanctions that had strangled Iran’s economy. The deal took effect in January 2016, when international inspectors certified that Iran had met its initial obligations.

The deal’s critics had legitimate concerns. The negotiated restrictions would begin expiring after ten years. The agreement said nothing about Iran’s ballistic missiles, nothing about its funding of proxy armies, some of which explicitly stated their intention to exterminate Israel.

Although the agreement was far from perfect and postponed addressing other critical issues that a true Middle Eastern peace would have to resolve, I strongly supported the deal, perhaps in part given my first-responder background, which understands the logic of triage. The agreement addressed the most lethal threat — a nuclear-armed Iran — and did so verifiably. After the agreement, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors repeatedly certified that Iran was honoring its commitments.

The second reason was apparent everywhere I went. Iran is a young country: the median age was around thirty, and most Iranians then living had been born after the 1979 revolution. Ten more years of connection, commerce, and contact with the world meant another decade for that generation — increasingly educated, urban, and chafing against theocratic authoritarianism — to grow stronger. The nuclear deal was designed to cap enrichment. The Western signatories had wagered that ten years hence the increasingly restless young — in concert with the still conservative but pragmatic quasi-reformers exemplified by Hassan Rouhani, whom I discussed in the second essay — would be stronger still, and that openings given a decade to bear fruit would be difficult to reverse and a platform for further openings.

The Wager Vindicated

The decade that followed vindicated the strategy of the Western powers that signed the agreement. In the winter of 2017–18, protests spread across Iranian cities, with economic issues in the foreground and the desire for greater freedom and international openness another key motivation. In November 2019, Iranian governmental and paramilitary forces murdered scores of demonstrators: Amnesty International documented more than three hundred killings, and a Reuters investigation, drawing on Iranian officials, put the toll near fifteen hundred.

A few years later, in September 2022, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, died in the custody of the morality police, arrested for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, as required by law. Iranians filled the streets shouting Zan, Zendegi, Azadi — Woman, Life, Freedom.

The political pressure on the regime’s conservative theocrats and their enforcers came foremost from young men and women and urban people more generally. The people I had met were no anomaly; they exemplified a trend that any close observer in the 2010s would have noticed.

In one more example of a petulant effort to reverse anything President Obama had implemented, on May 8, 2018, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement. The inspectors were still certifying Iranian compliance when he did it.

The agreement had put the brakes on Iran’s nuclear program, and the withdrawal released them. Iran continued honoring the deal’s limits for about a year after Trump’s withdrawal. Iran then began breaching them, eventually accumulating roughly 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium — the International Atomic Energy Agency’s own count, days before the June 2025 strikes — while rolling back the inspectors’ access — leaving it, by expert assessments, weeks rather than years from weapons-grade uranium. Thus, Trump’s decision not only reversed the JCPOA, it led directly to a more dangerous Iran.

The withdrawal also put the brakes on the nascent and fragile reforms underway, and cut the legs out from under the civil society actors and the cautious reformer President Hassan Rouhani and his allies, whom I described in the previous essay. Rouhani had staked his presidency on the proposition that negotiating with America could deliver a better life. The restored sanctions crushed the middle class, the same people doing the marching and the organizing. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal empowered Iran’s hardliners by reinforcing their contention that America is ‘the Great Satan’ and ought never be trusted.

The Harvest

The political harvest came quickly. Rouhani left office in 2021, term-limited and discredited by the collapse of the diplomacy on which he had staked everything. The Guardian Council, which vets every candidate, had already disqualified thousands of moderates before the 2020 parliamentary elections; in 2021 it cleared the field for the hardline judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi to take the presidency, in the lowest presidential turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Analysts across the political spectrum credit the withdrawal, and the economic collapse that followed it, with discrediting Iran’s engagers at the moment it mattered most — though the Guardian Council’s machinery needed no American help. When Raisi died in a 2024 helicopter crash, Iranian voters seized the opening and elevated Masoud Pezeshkian, a physician who campaigned on engagement with the West — to an office that proposes policy while the Supreme Leader, in conversation if not concert with the Revolutionary Guard, ultimately accepts or rejects policy proposals. Pezeshkian’s election proved that the longing I had witnessed in 2016 endured. It could not, however, restore what the withdrawal had destroyed: Iranian actors favoring a rapprochement with the West were forced to bargain from weakness because Islamic hardliners cited a decade of American bad faith.

The theocrats had predicted betrayal and Washington obliged them.

There is blame enough in this story to go around, and both governments had many years of reasons to distrust the other. No actor in this long chain of tragic events, however, has done more to prevent trust-building than Donald Trump. Under Barack Obama, the United States signed an agreement, and it was working. Trump, in synch with the right-wing forces in the US and Israel, tore it up anyway.

The Iranians who paid the price were not, of course, the clerics or the Revolutionary Guard. They were the reformers, the students, the activists, the shopkeepers producing environmental T-shirts and celebrating Western musicians in their speakeasy-like cafés, and the young people engaged in forbidden forms of mixed-gender socializing.

In the November 2024 presidential election, Trump received more votes than his opponent but not a majority of the votes cast. Nevertheless, he returned to office in January 2025. The following June, with another round of nuclear negotiations on the calendar, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sent his country’s warplanes against Iran, and days later Trump ordered American strikes of his own. This January, when Iranians, once again, rose against their government, the American president cheered them on. In February 2026, just two days after negotiators announced a breakthrough, Trump and Netanyahu launched a full-scale war.

What that war has wrought — the hubris and delusions that led to it, the strategic ledger it has actually produced, the human and environmental toll it precipitated, and the double betrayal of the Iranian people and America’s own allies — I will take up in my next dispatch.

The people I met in 2016 longed for freedom, a government responsive to their economic and environmental needs, a chance to be not only members of a great civilization but of the entire world.

Make no mistake about it: Trump and Netanyahu — and some plausibly say Trump, played by Netanyahu — were the decisive actors in the still-unfolding debacle — which, near term at least, has crushed the aspirations of the clear plurality of Iranians who have been seeking, often at great risk, to break free from clerical rule.

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The next dispatch will complete this account; subscribing (it’s free) ensures it, and other future essays, reaches you directly.

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If you are new to my Substack and wonder about the author, see my inaugural post, Who I Am and What I Intend with My Substack.

Further Reading

• Council on Foreign Relations, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?”

• International Atomic Energy Agency, Monitoring and Verification in Iran (reports archive), and the Director General’s certification, “Iran is Implementing Nuclear-related JCPOA Commitments”.

• Institute for Science and International Security, “Analysis of IAEA Iran Verification and Monitoring Report — May 2025” (stockpile and breakout estimates).

• Amnesty International, “Iran: Details released of 304 deaths during protests six months after security forces’ killing spree” (May 2020).

• House of Commons Library, “Iran: Impacts of June 2025 Israel and US strikes.”

After several days in Tehran with Iranian environmental activist friends, described in my previous dispatch, My Journey to Iran: Hope, Resistance & Fear, I entered a different world.

The venue was the Second International Seminar on Environment, Culture and Religion: Promoting Intercultural Dialogue for Sustainable Development, held in Tehran on 23-24 April 2016. The event was as revealing as it was different from my initial days wandering in Tehran.

This event was formal, diplomatic, guarded, and officially hopeful. It was sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme, UNESCO, and Iran’s Department of Environment, and it brought together Iranian and UN officials, religious leaders, environmental professionals, and international scholars working at the intersection of religion and nature. I had been invited to present my work on religion and environmental behavior.

The JCPOA and Rouhani’s Appearance

That such a meeting took place at all was surprising. It was made possible by a confluence of events that only briefly aligned.

On 14 July 2015, Iran, the P5+1 countries—China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and the European Union reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Its premise was not trust but verified constraint: Iran would accept limits and inspections designed to ensure that its nuclear program remained peaceful; in return, nuclear-related sanctions would be lifted or suspended. On 16 January 2016, after the International Atomic Energy Agency verified that Iran had met its initial nuclear commitments, Implementation Day arrived and many nuclear-related sanctions were eased. President Barack Obama and President Hassan Rouhani had opened a diplomatic channel that hard-liners in both countries, as well as in Israel, opposed or deeply distrusted.

Other conditions also mattered. The UN had just adopted its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Iran, especially under former president Mohammad Khatami, had promoted a ‘dialogue among civilizations’ to counter assumptions that different civilizations were fated to clash. And Iran faced severe environmental problems: water scarcity, drying lakes and wetlands, desiccated soils, air pollution, and biodiversity erosion. Posters at the conference venue showed that at least some Iranians understood the scale of the challenge.

Environmental concern had become one of the few spaces in which Iranian civil society, pragmatic officials, UN agencies, and foreign scholars could constructively engage. For pragmatic officials, pursuing cooperation on environmental matters was good politics: it could show that Iran took science and reason seriously and thus open doors to positive international engagement and economic opportunities. For environmentalists, this fragile trend offered real, if perilous, hope that progress could be made toward a sustainable society, and even for the social space needed to pursue greater gender equality and social justice.

I was reminded of that peril, and of the related social divide in Iran, when we were told not to bring computers or cell phones into the session when Rouhani would appear. That instruction suggested that he had reason to fear the country’s most zealous religious actors.

Rouhani was not, by any measure, a liberal democratic reformer. Within the constraints of the Islamic Republic, however, he represented a reformist-pragmatic opening. He had wagered that diplomacy, sanctions relief, and engagement with the outside world, including via this environmental conference, could improve life and reinforce his modest but real reformist agenda.

Listening to him, I was struck by what a skilled politician he was: warm and clearly aware of what would be well received by his international guests.

As fascinating as it was to see Rouhani at work, I was especially intrigued by Masoumeh Ebtekar, then Iran’s vice president and head of the Department of Environment. Americans of a certain age may remember her as the English-speaking spokesperson for the students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979.

The Revolution and Masoumeh Ebtekar

That wrenching episode needs context for anyone who did not live through it, and it helps explain why Ebtekar’s role at the conference was charged with irony and political gravity.

The 1979 revolution was not, at first, only an Islamist movement. It included secular, leftist, nationalist, democratic, and religious forces united by opposition to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose authoritarian rule had long been backed by the United States. Many Iranians also remembered the CIA- and British-backed 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and helped restore the Shah’s power. When the Carter administration admitted the deposed Shah to the United States for medical treatment in October 1979, many revolutionaries feared that Washington might again be preparing to restore him.

The embassy seizure was carried out by the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, a Khomeini-aligned student group, but it unfolded amid a broader revolutionary struggle whose outcome was uncertain. Khomeini’s movement drew support from people who wanted greater freedom and independence after the Shah. Once Khomeini’s camp consolidated power, however, it built an Islamic Republic that marginalized and repressed liberal, secular, leftist, feminist, and other rivals. The hostage crisis helped that consolidation.

Given that history, it was striking to encounter Ebtekar in 2016 as a warm and welcoming convener of a UN co-sponsored environmental gathering. Her revolutionary credentials had no doubt helped make her political career possible. Yet at this meeting she projected the opposite of the image of Iran often presented by those abroad who most feared and distrusted the regime.

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Ecumenical Environmentalism and the Universe Story

The complicated impression I was gaining deepened when Mary Evelyn Tucker was honored for her environmental work. Tucker and her husband John Grim, experts in Confucian and Indigenous traditions respectively, have for decades led efforts to mobilize the world’s religions to address the environmental crisis. They were inspired by Teilhard de Chardin and especially by Thomas Berry, who argued that scientific accounts of cosmological and biological evolution could be understood as sacred stories, and that the world’s religions should integrate this ‘universe story’ with their own sacred narratives. Naturalists, by which I mean those without traditional religious beliefs, have also taken up these stories as sacred stories, finding in them awe, wonder, and proenvironmental values.

Conservative religionists, however, would typically view theologies that consecrate scientific narratives, and evolutionar understandings of all organisms as biological kin, as spiritually dangerous if not heretical. Indeed, for the Abrahamic religions, which trace their lineage to the prophet Abraham, the greatest spiritual danger, expressed in the first of the Ten Commandments, is idolatry: worshiping, or placing one’s fidelity or trust in, anything other than God. In biblical texts and ever since, the veneration or worship of nature has represented one of the greatest idolatrous temptations. For millennia, those perceived to be idolaters have been subject to coercion and violence.

I was startled, therefore, to see Journey of the Universe featured so prominently. The 2011 film was written by mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, and narrated by Swimme. Tucker and Grim were among its executive producers. Swimme and Tucker wrote the book version, while Swimme’s earlier book with Berry, The Universe Story, provided much of the intellectual architecture behind the documentary. In Tehran, the Journey trailer was shown with Persian subtitles both days, and each time it drew robust applause.

During the concluding session, Ebtekar presented Tucker with an award from Rouhani in recognition of her efforts to enlist religious communities in environmental work.

I was astonished.

I wondered whether Ebtekar recognized how subversive the universe story could be to anything resembling orthodox Islamic metaphysics. The fieldworker in me wanted to interview her under conditions in which she did not have to worry about the political or religious consequences that could follow from views that might be considered heterodox or heretical.

My Skeptical Presentation

My own presentation pushed in a more skeptical direction. I did not come to praise what I had called the greening of religion hypothesis: the claim that the world’s religions are becoming more environmentally friendly and politically consequential in that direction. That year I published one academic article, and with Gretel Van Wieren and Bernard Zaleha a second, assessing that hypothesis. I later summarized the findings in two shorter essays on ‘Religion and Environmental Behavior,’ the first part subtitled World Religions and the Fate of the Earth, the second Dark-green Nature Spiritualities and the Fate of the Earth. We concluded that although the world’s predominant religions had ardent proenvironmental advocates, they had not become, and were unlikely to become, significant political forces for sustainability, and that significant environmental mobilization was more typically emerging from what I have called dark green spiritualities, including the universe story.

The universe story, however, had also not gained enough cultural traction to become a powerful force for sustainability, whether in its naturalistic form or when grafted onto liberal branches of longstanding religious traditions. The project was intellectually rich, spiritually evocative, and ecologically promising, but it was also culturally marginal, and when known, often rejected or demonized by religious traditionalists.

Nevertheless, in my talk at the conference and in its published proceedings, I argued that both trends mattered—or at least might matter. Religious traditions, when fused with evolutionary and ecological worldviews, can lead to felt kinship with nonhuman organisms and strong environmental commitments. Civic movements, art, education, science, and ecological activism can also inspire people who do not believe in invisible divine beings or forces to embrace deep proenvironmental values and practices.

The problem was scale and traction. None of these currents had enough cultural and political power to slow, let alone halt and reverse, the decline in the health and resilience of Earth’s life-supporting systems. A key reason, I argued, was the frequent disconnect between inherited religious metaphysics and scientific understandings of how the world came to be and how ecological systems work.

I saw a vivid example during an exchange with Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, then Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Drawing on Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, Sorondo underscored the connections among climate change, poverty, and migration. I asked how the Church could embrace consensus climate science while resisting other scientific findings that unsettle doctrine, including ecological understandings about carrying capacity and population dynamics, which illuminate the problem of human overpopulation, and research on same-sex attraction. I also invoked the longer history: the Church had once resisted heliocentrism, the Sun-centered model of the cosmos, and later struggled with evolutionary theory.

My pointed questions left Sorondo nonplussed—puzzled, uncertain how to respond and, ultimately, unresponsive. I had the impression that he was so insular that no one in his world had the temerity to pose such questions to such an esteemed religious figure. I was surprised that he seemed not to have thought hard about overpopulation as illuminated by the biological sciences, given that he was a senior Vatican science official. There is simply no way to understand environmental challenges if one does not understand population dynamics and carrying capacity. His lack of a response exemplified how common it is for religious authorities to dismiss or ignore scientific understandings when they contradict long-held dogmas.

The Possibilities and Limits of Green Ecumenism

The conference itself embodied both the possibility and the limits of official ecumenism. The UNEP report cast the gathering in broad interreligious terms and stated that representatives of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Taoism attended. In my Field Notes, based on simultaneous translation of Rouhani’s address, I recorded that he spoke of ‘all divine religions’ and specifically mentioned Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism.

That breadth mattered. But official inclusion is not the same as full representation in the actual conversation. I do not recall a Jewish presenter, nor have I found one—or any paper focused on Judaism—in the proceedings. Judaism appeared in the report’s background survey, but the conference’s opening to the world did not extend to Jewish representatives, even as Iran remained, and remains, locked in violent confrontation with Israel.

Indigenous voices did appear. Edna Kaptoyo of Kenya’s Indigenous Information Network underscored the importance of traditional ecological knowledge, and John Grim discussed Indigenous ritualization and cosmovision. But the meeting clearly favored traditions and representatives that states and UN agencies can recognize: large, official, and institutionally established. Explicitly pagan, animistic, and nature-reverencing communities not affiliated with recognized religious institutions were not visible at the gathering, likely in part because they are often perceived as idolatrous.

For decades, I have paid attention to environmental events under the United Nations umbrella because, when it comes to promoting international cooperation in response to accelerating environmental change, there is no other game in town. This event in 2016 was hopeful because, despite severe cultural, religious, and political tensions between Iran and many other countries, the environment—which all of us share—brought people together for two days in Tehran, at least to talk.

The one condition every person on Earth shares is dependence on Earth’s living systems. If that dependence were more widely recognized, many of the issues that divide us would, or at least should, become penultimate while we wrestled with the larger questions of sustainability, which is really about the flourishing of all life on Earth, and not just human life.

In 2016, I saw green shoots emerging when people, divided in scores of ways, nevertheless struggled toward agreements on which greater trust had begun to be built and could have been further developed. Greater trust, in turn, might have made wider environmental cooperation possible. That was true even given the difficulties that any dialogue across civilizations involves.

My Next Dispatch

In my next Iran-focused dispatch, I will turn to what happened to this fragile promise after November 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president through the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million ballots. The diplomatic opening I witnessed in 2016 would soon close. During Trump’s second presidential term, Israel and the United States attacked Iranian nuclear and military sites in June 2025 and then, on 28 February 2026, launched a full-scale war against Iran.

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Notes and Further Reading

This dispatch draws in part on my earlier Field Notes essay that appeared in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, and on my conference paper, Cultural Creativity and the Quest for a Planetary Earth Civilization, which was published in the proceedings of the Tehran seminar.

For the extensive research about religion and environmental behavior that I draw upon in this essay, the first part of which provides an excellent introduction to the ferment over religion and environmental behavior, see:

B. Taylor, The greening of religion hypothesis (part one): from Lynn White, Jr. and claims that religions can promote environmentally destructive attitudes and behaviors to assertions they are becoming environmentally friendly, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10(3): 268-305, 2016.

B. Taylor, Gretel Van Wieren and Bernard Zaleha, The greening of religion hypothesis (part two): assessing the data from Lynn White, Jr., to Pope Francis JSRNC 10(3): 306-378, 2016.

UNEP report page for Environment, religion and culture in the context of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.

House of Commons Library backgrounder on the 2026 Israel/US-Iran conflict

On April 17, 2016, I flew from Paris to Tehran on Air France’s first commercial Paris–Tehran flight in eight years.

The route had reopened after the United States, Iran, and five other world powers reached the nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran had met its initial obligations, nuclear-related sanctions had begun to lift, and Europeans were returning for business and diplomacy, and tourism seemed on the horizon.

I sat next to an attorney who, in 1979, fled Iran with her family to Paris when the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown during the Islamic Iranian revolution. Anticipating post-agreement opportunities, she had established an office in Tehran to complement her longstanding legal practice in France.

She told me a large plurality of urban Iranians, especially the younger ones, wanted greater freedom, equality for women, and positive and diverse engagements with the West. She spoke with cautious optimism. The following days I heard many express similar perceptions.

I had been invited to speak at the “Second International Seminar on Environment, Culture and Religion: Promoting Intercultural Dialogue for Sustainable Development.” The gathering, sponsored by UNEP, UNESCO, and Iran’s Department of Environment, brought together Iranian officials, religious leaders, environmentalists, and several international scholars known for their work at the intersection of religion and the environment.

I will discuss that meeting in a subsequent dispatch. Here, I want to provide a visceral feel for what it was like to be in Tehran during that historic, potential turning point in relations between Iran and the Western world.

I had arranged to arrive several days early to ensure I would see more than official conference events. I was especially excited to reconnect with Iranian environmental activists whom I had met in 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa.

A Surreal Entry

Immediately after the airplane pulled up to the gate, I had the first of several surreal experiences. An announcement asked everyone to remain seated but invited “Professor Taylor” to come to the front of the aircraft. I wondered whether I should be concerned.

When I reached the front of the plane, well-dressed men escorted me down a circular stairway positioned beside the aircraft door, ushered me into a waiting limousine, and drove me to a VIP reception facility.

Being treated as a dignitary was an unusual experience.

The special reception building was part of the Imam Khomeini International Airport complex, named in honor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. His portrait gazed down from the wall. I would soon see his image displayed throughout Tehran on murals, billboards, and public buildings.

After a brief reception there, the driver delivered me to my hotel. I later realized that the special treatment was, at least in part, because the security forces wanted to keep track of me.

Everyday Tehran and Its Subtle Subversions

After checking in, one of my activist friends arrived in a car from Snapp, a ride-sharing service akin to Uber. He was amazed that a woman was his driver and cited this as a sign of positive change, a small harbinger of hope.

My pre-conference education had begun.

He curated an eclectic experience. Among other places, we visited the National Museum of Iran, which was as fascinating as the Persian civilization it represented. Afterward, he pointed out two officially recognized sites of religious difference: a Zoroastrian fire temple and a Christian church dedicated to Mary.

Then we went to the White Palace, the largest residence within the sprawling Saadabad Palace Complex in northern Tehran. The palace and its extensive landscaped grounds had served as the summer residence of the Shah and his wife, Empress Farah.

It was eerie walking through rooms that Iran’s last royal family inhabited. The rooms still held so many of the family’s belongings. My host told me that they expected to return. The grand reception halls, dining rooms, private quarters, and recreation rooms offered a vivid portrait of Iran’s pre-revolutionary monarchy.

Fine Persian carpets, European furnishings, crystal chandeliers, artwork, and personal possessions remained on display, transforming the palace into a kind of time capsule of the Pahlavi era. The most arresting object, to me, was not the opulence but a full tiger skin—head intact, taxidermied to appear snarling and fierce—spread at the center of an elegant room.

A Predatory Excursus

I cannot resist a brief excursus, because that sad display was all too familiar.

Across cultures and centuries, powerful rulers and religious authorities have draped themselves in symbols of Earth’s most formidable predators. Tigers, lions, leopards, bears, wolves, eagles, and other magnificent animals have been hunted, worn, painted, sculpted, and displayed to project strength, courage, sovereignty, and dangerous, unchallengeable power.

The tiger’s body reminded me that as agricultural civilizations expanded, predators were killed, displaced, and, increasingly, driven to extinction.

Most religions that co-evolved within agricultural civilizations rarely challenged this impulse. They typically celebrated domesticated animals while treating predators as threats, competitors, or evil omens.

That tiger therefore symbolized more than a vanished monarchy. It pointed toward an older human story: the domination of wild nature that began with agriculture and continues to erode Earth’s genetic and species variety—its biodiversity.

The Nature Bridge

Most people in agricultural societies, of course, love nature, or at least some of it. This was apparent at a site that my host was especially keen to show me: Tabiat, or the Nature Bridge.

Tabiat was designed by Iranian architect Leila Araghian. It artfully crossed a major highway and connected two parks; the one across the bridge led to a forest. The city side had restaurants, viewing platforms, and broad walkways that invited people to linger.

Some women strolling there wore the required hijabs loosely and far back on their heads. Some younger women, in an even braver act of anti-clerical defiance, allowed their ponytails to escape beneath their scarves.

Six years later, after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman accused of violating Iran’s dress code, such everyday acts of defiance helped ignite the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement.

The movement became the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic in decades before it was brutally suppressed through arrests, imprisonment, lethal force, and executions.

Human-rights organizations estimate that hundreds were killed and tens of thousands detained. Many women nevertheless continued to appear in public without hijabs or in other clothing the regime deemed illegal, even as the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran in 2026 gave the regime new pretexts for brutally punishing dissent.

But the day I wandered across the Nature Bridge, what I saw was what one would find in scores of cities around the world on a gloriously temperate day: urban people drawn to a green, if human-cultivated, space; families strolling; children playing; and, although with more constraints than in many places, young men and women socializing.

Tehran’s Counterculture and its Environmentalists

Another day, my host took me to a small environmental shop. Among its offerings were green T-shirts expressing what I have called dark green sentiments: feelings of belonging to nature, affection for nonhuman organisms, and proenvironmental values. One shirt depicted joyful human figures shaped into the form of a tree. Its back side declared, “Happy sensations are mine because I protect what’s fine”—a quirky but clear expression of proenvironmental feeling.

Elsewhere, we entered a small café that reminded me of an American speakeasy. We had to knock first and be looked over before entry was granted. This delay helped ensure that the morality police, if they arrived, would not hear the forbidden Western music that guests were enjoying inside.

No alcohol was served—the proprietors were not that reckless. But the walls displayed a wildly diverse gallery of Western musicians, actors, and revolutionaries, including the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Che Guevara.

The café’s sounds and images clearly expressed a desire to belong to a world larger than the one authorized by the Islamic Republic.

In conversations with those I met during those days, I learned that some Iranians make their own hooch—alcohol, in the American vernacular—and hold private parties where women and men mix, dance, and enjoy other officially forbidden pleasures.

Exercising such rebellious freedom was dangerous. Soon after I left the country, authorities arrested more than thirty students attending a mixed-gender graduation party near Qazvin. Within twenty-four hours, each had received ninety-nine lashes. The prosecutor praised the speed of the arrests, trial, sentencing, and punishment.

An Earth Day Documentary—and Ditching My Security Detail

On April 22, the evening before the conference began, my host took me to an Earth Day screening of the BBC-produced documentary *Earth*. A Persian-language poster announced that the event supported the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, an organization devoted to protecting Iran’s threatened species.

More than one hundred people attended, including environmental activists and families with children. The film, which was in English and provided without Persian subtitles, showed wondrous images of polar bears, elephants, forests, deserts, migrations, predation, birth, and death. To understand its message about the wonder of nature and the need to care for it did not require translation.

Afterward, about a dozen Iranian environmentalists gathered outside and discussed going to dinner. Several could not go because they had to work early the next morning, so I switched cars to join those able to dine together. Over dinner, I continued to learn more about wildness in Iran. I wondered whether there was a connection between the desire for wildness among these dissident humans and their empathy for the country’s imperiled wildlife.

I did not know, however, that Iranian security officers had been following me and that I had inadvertently ditched them when I switched cars.

After returning to my hotel late that evening, I received a message from my primary activist host, a biodiversity advocate who was slated to attend the conference the next day. He said he would not be able to come and sent his regrets. He did not explain why.

After I left Iran, I learned that security officials had visited him after that dinner. They complained that they had lost track of me when we switched cars and questioned him about what we had done that evening. They also forbade him from seeing me again or attending the conference.

I was mortified that I might have gotten him into trouble. He assured me that it was no big deal—just a routine form of harassment that environmental and other activists regularly face.

Routine Harassment, and Worse

Such harassment is not unique to Iran. Around the world, land and environmental defenders are routinely vilified, criminalized, threatened, and killed. Global Witness has documented 2,253 killings and disappearances of land and environmental defenders between 2012 and 2024, including 146 in 2024 alone.

That my activist friends loved and advocated for Iranian wildlife, including the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah—the last wild population survives in Iran—put them at risk as well. Yet they continued their efforts to educate Iran’s citizens, subvert repressive restrictions, and cultivate friendships across national boundaries.

During the brutally repressed protests that preceded the 2026 U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and in the renewed crackdown that followed it, I have tried repeatedly and without success to contact my warm, fun-loving guide. I do not know whether he is safe, imprisoned, underground, exiled, or alive.

The nuclear agreement negotiated by the administration of President Barack Obama helped make my journey possible. It also seemed to enlarge the political and cultural space in which my activist friends—and the reformist Iranian officials who co-sponsored the environmental conference I attended—could breathe.

Two years after my visit, Donald Trump repudiated that agreement. In doing so he weakened the reformers who had risked making it and strengthened hard-liners eager to prove that the United States could not be trusted.

In my next dispatch, I will describe what took place at that conference. I will try to show what that opening felt like from inside the room—and what was lost when it closed.

~ ~ ~

Since publishing The Resurrection of Tutankhamun, based in part upon viewing his treasures at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, Egypt, I have been wandering up the Nile, visiting temples and tombs, trying to get my brain around the sweep of Egyptian history — the scores of gods and their roles, the varying dynasties, the way this civilization’s religious imagination kept evolving across three thousand years, and its influence on what Egyptians call the three divine religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Understanding Egyptian civilization is a daunting challenge and I am no expert. But via a narrow focus on King Tut — who has become something akin to a pharaonic rock star — I am seeking to provide some insight into this culture. Toward this end, I traveled nearly 700 kilometers (430 miles) up the Nile to the Valley of the Kings at Luxor — which for thousands of years concealed Tut’s burial chamber.

The Valley of the Kings

The Valley of the Kings is a narrow, barren limestone ravine on the west bank of the Nile — an arid, sandy, rocky, and sun-hammered landscape. Between roughly 1550 and 1070 BCE, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom cut their tombs into its cliffs. To date, archaeologists have found and explored over sixty tombs and related sites, numbering them in the order of their discovery, following nomenclature established by the British Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson in the 1820s. Tut’s tomb was dubbed KV62 — Kings Valley 62; three more were identified between 2005 and 2018, and they are revealing yet more of the Valley’s secrets.

The Pharaohs chose the valley for concealment and to prevent any such revelations . . . and especially tomb raiders. They had learned from their predecessors. Centuries earlier, the great pyramids at Giza, which were monumental and visible for miles, had been plundered by treasure hunters.

The New Kingdom tomb architects shifted their strategy; they tunnels and chambers deep into rock and camouflaged the entrances under rubble.

The site map shows that KV62 did not lie in some unexplored corner of the valley, but close to tombs, nearly all of which were plundered centuries earlier, despite the best efforts of their builders. They were also well known by modern humans for many decades.

The Discovery and Descent

In contrast, Tut’s tomb had remained hidden until November 4, 1922, when a water boy working for the British archaeologist Howard Carter stumbled upon the top of a stone step in the valley floor. By chance, earlier excavations and blowing sand buried its entrance more successfully than the rest. The lad had inadvertently discovered KV62 — the most famous tomb yet found at the Valley of the Kings.

After entering the archaeological site and visiting two other tombs, I arrived at the most famous one.

The room opened to the left for about two meters as well as to the right about four meters more. The total space approximated a standard shipping container, although it was about a meter wider and taller. This was where Carter found more than 5,000 objects, stacked floor to ceiling; they were intended for Tutankhamun’s use after his resurrection.

The Burial Chamber

After entering I turned to the right and took about five steps until a small alcove appeared before me. This was the burial chamber itself, located about a meter lower than the antechamber floor. Right below me was the sarcophagus: a grey quartzite box, still in the position the Pharaoh’s priests had it placed approximately 3,300 years ago. The word alcove derives from al-qubba, an Arabic word for vault or dome — apt, given what this one contained.

The sarcophagus below me once held the three nested coffins. The innermost one was solid gold and inside lay the mummified body of the Pharaoh. The famous death mask lay over his face, shoulders, and upper chest. Surrounding the sarcophagus were the four nested golden shrines, which the priests sealed with a papyrus rope — found pristine by Carter’s team, confirming that the tomb had not been disturbed in roughly 3,300 years. The Grand Egyptian Museum now displays the tomb’s objects and treasures. All that remains in the tomb is the sarcophagus, the painted walls, and Tut’s mummified body.

The Mythic Paintings

On each wall surrounding the sarcophagus are exquisite, still-vibrantly colorful paintings. Each wall addresses a different aspect of the king’s passage from death to immortality. Together they constitute a vision of life after death — a theology of hope expressed in gold and ochre.

Peering into the burial chamber, leaning over a rail, and looking to my left, I viewed Anubis — depicted with a jackal’s head and a human body — standing beside Tutankhamun.

Anubis was the god of embalming and protector of the dead. To ancient Egyptians, the jackal-headed figure was reassuring: Anubis was the divine embalmer who preserved the body, the guardian who guided the dead — in this case, the king — through the dangerous passage to the afterlife. The king beside him appeared as an idealized living figure, reflecting the ancient Egyptian belief that death was not the end of life but a passage to a new mode of existence.

Turning right to the adjacent wall I saw one of the most unusual images in Egyptian royal tombs: twelve seated baboons, arranged in a grid, each rendered with care.

Above them floated a solar boat carrying one of the most important symbols in Egyptian religion: the scarab deity Khepri.

Egyptian religion envisioned the sun’s daily journey as a cycle. The god Re crossed the sky by day, descended at dusk, passed through the underworld during the twelve nighttime hours, and was reborn at dawn as Khepri, the scarab deity of becoming and renewal.

This image was rooted in careful observation of nature. Scarab beetles roll balls of dung across the ground and lay their eggs within them. Later, new beetles emerge from those balls, exemplifying how life often arises directly from waste and decay.

The beetle pushing its sphere across the earth also, for some imaginative ancient Egyptians, resembled the sun’s movement across the sky.

What these mythic innovators could not have known is that some dung beetles navigate by the Milky Way, making them among the few animals known to use the night sky for orientation. The scarab’s association with the heavens has turned out to be even more apt than the Egyptians could have imagined.

In addition to this cosmic connection there is an ecological one. Dung beetles are among Earth’s organisms that break down waste, return nutrients to the soil, and thus provide habitat, a wellspring, for new life.

The scarab’s role as a symbol of resurrection makes sense.

Every sunrise, therefore, was its own resurrection. The twelve baboons represent those twelve nocturnal hours through which the sun passed before its birth at dawn.

This imagery comes from the Amduat, or Book of What Is in the Underworld — one of the oldest funerary texts, describing the sun god’s nightly passage hour by hour. The baboon was also associated with Thoth, god of writing and wisdom; baboons’ chattering at dawn was invested with cosmic meaning.

The message was direct: death and resurrection are the way of the world.

Turning again to the right, I focused my gaze at the painting over the sarcophagus; join me by focusing on this image, from which I trimmed the sarcophagus.

I thought when viewing this scene that it was making a metaphysical statement: Tutankhamun has died, gods are transforming and ensuring his safe passage through the underworld to be reborn and live eternally among them. I also wondered if the anonymous, ancient artists who painted the figures used that rich yellow-gold background to symbolize the flesh of the gods and eternity itself.

Described more specifically and reading from left to right, I saw Osiris, the god of resurrection and ruler of the underworld, with whom every deceased pharaoh sought to be identified; and to his right, Tutankhamun embracing him, symbolizing his acceptance into the divine realm. Isis, the goddess of love, healing, magic, and protection, appeared next; she would guarantee the king’s rebirth and eternal protection. After Isis, Tut then appeared again, youthful and vigorous and elevated to a life among the gods. The winged sky goddess Nut, who swallowed the sun each evening and gave birth to it anew each dawn, promising Tut the same perpetual renewal, followed. Finally, at the far right, Hathor — the goddess who welcomes the dead into the next world — facilitated the King’s passage to his new life.

Turning once more to the next, adjacent wall to the right, I viewed what appears to be the story presented with a clear political message.

First, on the left of this wall, twelve white-clad figures haul the royal coffin on a sledge toward the tomb in a funeral procession. The far right of the panel shows the sledge, carrying Tutankhamun, lying on a bier (a flat platform or frame on which a body is placed). To the lower left the figure of Ay is shown as a small blue-crowned figure, performing the Opening of the Mouth ritual for the mummified Tutankhamun, which was designed to reactivate the dead king’s senses so he could function in the afterlife.

By depicting himself performing this indispensable rite, Ay not only facilitated Tut’s passage into the afterlife — he legitimized his own rule.

Tut’s Mummy — Resting in Peace?

After dwelling on the burial chamber, I turned around and walked back through the antechamber and finally focused on the King’s mummified body. It lay in a climate-controlled glass case in a small alcove — just to the left as visitors enter the antechamber. Linen covered Tutankhamun’s body but his remarkably well-preserved head and feet were shown.

As I mentioned in my initial Tut-inspired essay, I doubt the king would have approved of this display. He expected, and certainly would have preferred, a different sort of immortality.

Tut would not be alone in his disapproval.

In many places around the world today, the display of human remains — mummified and not — has become controversial. In a future dispatch, I will discuss this contentious issue.

I will also pose and wrestle with two more religion-focused questions that, I think, are raised by ancient Egyptian religion:

• Are beliefs in the resurrection and eternal life delusional forms of wishful thinking?

• What if any relevance and value today are sun, river, oceanic, and other natural deities?

As Egyptians say as a routine greeting to English speakers, Welcome!

~ ~ ~

If you have read this far, I surmise you found something worth your time. If you are not yet a subscriber to my Substack, I would be glad to have you — this is a place for curious creatures, and there is much more to come. If you missed the first essay of this Egypt-focused dispatch, see The Resurrection of Tutankhamun.

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Further Reading & Resources

On the Valley of the Kings and royal tombs:

• John Romer, Valley of the Kings (1981) — the classic popular account of the Valley’s history and exploration.

• Nicholas Reeves and Richard Wilkinson, The Complete Valley of the Kings (1996) — the standard reference for all tombs.

On Tut’s tomb (Carter’s original field notes and photographs, free and searchable):

• tutankhamun.griffith.ox.ac.uk

On Egyptian funerary theology and nature religion:

• Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt (1982) — the foundational scholarly treatment.

• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (1999) — covers the Amduat, Book of the Dead, and related texts.

• Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (2001) — on the nature-centered character of Egyptian theology.

• Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005) — on resurrection theology and its grounding in natural cycles.

• John H. Taylor, Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (2010) — British Museum catalog, accessible and illustrated.

• For the Valley of the Kings (Theban Mapping Project):

thebanmappingproject.com

This essay is about the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun — King Tut. But as this is also my inaugural Terranaut Dispatches post, a word first about what that means.

Terranaut does not yet appear in dictionaries. I use it by analogy with Astronaut — a voyager through space — to describe a different kind of explorer: one whose subject is the Earth itself, in all its complexity.

More specifically, I mean to capture the idea that the Earth is not a static backdrop to human history but an evolving system of entangled geological, biological, and cultural processes, each shaping the others. When I speak of “biocultural processes” or “socioecological systems” — terms adopted by scholars who take such a multivariate approach — I am pointing toward this mutual entanglement.

The most fundamental trait of a Terranaut, I think, is curiosity — about living systems, about deep time, about the relationships between humans and other organisms, about what the biosphere provides and what humans make of it. If you are reading these words, I surmise you exemplify such a curious and creative being.

Terranauts tend to see themselves as Planetary Citizens: people who hold an earthling identity alongside whatever other identities — regional, ethnic, philosophical, religious — they also embrace. Another way to say this: Terranauts are Ecological Pilgrims, moving through the world with attentiveness to ecosystems, to biodiversity, and to the interdependence of all living things.

Such a disposition, it seems to me, naturally inclines one toward care for the world’s diversity — its biological richness, certainly, and much of its cultural richness too. My dispatches reflect both the emotional attachment and the attentiveness that such a disposition demands.

My first dispatch begins, improbably, with a boy-king who died at nineteen and whose successors then deliberately erased his name from history. He has spent the last century in a remarkable resurrection — not the one he had hoped for, nor the one those who entombed him worked so elaborately to bring about, but a resurrection nonetheless. This one is, in its own way, as surprising as anything the Book of the Dead ever promised.

~ ~ ~

Early in 1978, soon after I began graduate school, an exhibition arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art titled The Treasures of Tutankhamun. It included 55 objects from the burial chamber of a Pharaoh who died more than three thousand years earlier. In four months, the exhibition drew over 1.25 million visitors, breaking every attendance record LACMA had ever set. I was one of those visitors, and mesmerized. This strange world was completely out of my frame of reference and something like “wtf” kept running through my mind. Put differently, it aroused my curiosity, perhaps my most enduring trait.

What I remembered most distinctly was the King’s golden death mask, which is among the most beautiful things human hands have ever made. It kindled wondering about the place, people, and time that gave rise to it. That astonishment, that seeking to understand this variously bizarre and mysterious, sometimes violent and tragic, other times beautiful and even sublime world — that is what I have come to call the Terranaut impulse.

It took me nearly 50 years to follow that impulse back to its curious source. This week I stood before his treasures again — not 55 objects on loan but all 5,398 of them, finally united in a single gallery at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, Egypt, which gazes out across the sands to the great pyramids.

A Minor King Made Immortal by Accident

Tutankhamun was, by pharaonic standards, a historical footnote. He came to the throne around 1332 BCE, probably at nine, and died around nineteen. Cause of death remains disputed. DNA analysis and CT scanning between 2005 and 2010 revealed a young man with a possible clubbed left foot, a flat arch on the right, and evidence of multiple infectious diseases including malaria. His tomb held more than 130 walking sticks. He reigned a decade and left no military victories, no great building campaigns, nothing a successor would want to claim.

What he left behind was a name change that tells us almost everything. Born Tutankhaten — “living image of the Aten” — he carried his father’s revolution in his name. Pharaoh Akhenaten had abolished Egypt’s traditional pantheon and imposed worship of one deity: the Aten, the sun disk. Many scholars regard him as history’s earliest known advocate of a form of monotheism. He suppressed the priests of Amun and the whole apparatus of Egyptian polytheism. Tutankhaten, however, reversed course, changed his name to Tutankhamun — “living image of Amun” — and revived the whole apparatus of Egyptian polytheism, restoring the priests of Amun and reopening the temples. Henceforth I will refer to him by his now-popular name, King Tut.

His golden throne, now at the GEM, carries a ghost of the transition: made early in his reign, it still shows the Aten sun disk above the royal couple, reflecting his father’s religion, while his pre-conversion name remains legible on the back and armrests. A revolution recorded in gold, mid-stream.

Tut’s Tomb

By the time of Tutankhamun’s death around 1323 BCE, the Valley of the Kings had for centuries served as the royal burial ground. Tomb robbers plundered nearly every royal burial there in antiquity. Tut’s survived by accident. KV62 was likely a non-royal tomb hastily repurposed after his death; its entrance then vanished under debris from a nearby excavation. It stayed hidden for three thousand years until November 1922, when Howard Carter, on the last dig his patron Lord Carnarvon would fund, broke through a sealed doorway into an antechamber packed floor to ceiling with objects. Asked what he saw when he held a candle to the opening, Carter said: “Wonderful things.”

The burial chamber was small — only 6.4 meters long, 4.14 wide, 3.68 high — but what was crammed inside was staggering.

Layers Upon Layers: What Was Inside

Four gilded wooden shrines filled the chamber — imagine small shipping containers. They nested one inside another like an immense set of Russian dolls. The outermost was about 16.6 by 10.7 by 9 feet and nearly filled the room. Carter could barely squeeze along its edges. Inside those shrines sat a quartzite sarcophagus. Inside that were three nested coffins. The outermost: gilded wood, feathered rishi design. The middle: gilded wood with colored glass inlay. The innermost: solid gold, 110 kilograms. Inside was Tut’s mummified body.

The shrines were theological documents as much as objects. Every surface carried images of protective deities and passages from the Book of the Dead — whose Egyptian title translates more accurately as Coming Forth by Day — spells to guide the deceased through the underworld and into new life. Each side of the innermost shrine had a guardian goddess: Isis, Nephthys, Selket, Neith — arms outstretched, rendered in three dimensions, stepping forward from the wall as if on watch. Akhenaten had suppressed all four. Their presence, standing guard over the king’s organs in death, symbolized their restoration.

The coffins merit their own attention. The outermost stayed in the Valley of the Kings until 2019, when curators brought it to the GEM for the first time since its discovery. The middle coffin — gilded wood inlaid with turquoise, carnelian, and colored glass in a feathered pattern — to my eye is the most beautiful object in the chamber.

The innermost coffin, solid gold, 110 kilograms, rendered the king’s form in precise detail.

The Grand Egyptian Museum and the Tutankhamun Gallery

For decades, most of the tomb’s 5,398 artifacts sat in storage rooms, while a relative few were on display at the old Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. No visitor had ever seen them all. The Grand Egyptian Museum — purpose-built at the foot of the Giza plateau — displays every walking stick, every piece of jewelry, every alabaster vessel, every gilded figurine, every game board, every linen garment placed in the tomb to accompany this king into the afterlife.

One thing did not make the journey to the GEM: Tut’s mummy, which remains in its sarcophagus in the Valley of the Kings.

Standing again before Tut’s death mask, decades after LACMA, I thought about the teenager — the boy-king — who had many infirmities, some likely the result of royal inbreeding. I wondered how and why he defied and reversed his father’s religious revolution. I wondered, too, why his successors set out to reverse his reversals. Ancient Egyptian history is replete with palace intrigue, occasionally including regicide. Tut did not suffer regicide. He suffered something more insidious: a campaign of postmortem erasure.

After his death, his successors — most aggressively the general Horemheb, who eventually seized the throne — chiseled his name from monuments and dropped him from the official lists of kings. The motive was political: bury the Amarna period, reclaim its monuments and military campaigns, purge the record of Akhenaten’s heresy, and restore the supremacy of Amun. For three thousand years the strategy worked, erasing Tut from history, until Carter dug his way into the chamber.

Tut’s Burial and the Origins of Bodily Resurrection

Tut’s significance lies not foremost in the glitter of the burial chamber but in the metaphysics and theology that animated it — protective deities, resurrection spells, notions of the judgment of the soul, and eternal life. These ideas predated, and scholars argue directly influenced, the beliefs that would emerge in Judaism and later in Christianity and Islam. They originated here, in ancient Egyptian civilization, thousands of years earlier.

The so-called Book of the Dead — a term coined by the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius in 1842 — traces back to the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, around 2686 BCE: roughly 1,360 years before King Tut, more than a thousand years before Moses, more than two thousand before the New Testament. Those texts described the soul’s passage through the underworld, divine judgment, the weighing of the heart against a feather, eternal life for the righteous.

The parallels with Abrahamic traditions — a shorthand for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which trace their lineage to the prophet Abraham — are not coincidental. Scholars including James Tabor argued that Egyptian ideas about the soul’s journey, bodily resurrection, divine judgment, even a “lake of fire,” shaped the ancient Israelites, who lived in and around Egypt for centuries, and through them early Christianity. Erik Hornung provided the definitive scholarly treatment in The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (1999); Jan Assmann later offered a more accessible account in Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005).

Standing before the shrines in Tut’s gallery, we may recognize that we are closer to the headwaters of the Western religious imagination — including the doctrine of bodily resurrection — than is commonly recognized. I will return to Egypt’s religious legacy in future dispatches — the sun god, how cats became sacred, and more.

Coda: Steve Martin as the Dancing Reincarnation of King Tut

In 1978 — the same year as the LACMA exhibition — Steve Martin appeared on Saturday Night Live dressed as a pharaoh. He performed “King Tut,” an innovative song and dance accompanied by a full band and background dancers in Egyptian regalia. The song reached number seventeen on the Billboard charts and the single sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In recent years it has been viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube. Ridiculously popular, it contributed to the Tutankhamun mania that swept America and beyond.

Tutankhamun would not have approved.

A concierge at my hotel in Giza, whom I played it for — a young woman who had never heard of it — was delighted by the Saturday Night Live version. She said the Grand Egyptian Museum curators should include it in the gallery.

I agreed.

A boy-king whose successors spent decades erasing his name nevertheless inspired a Top 20 pop song three thousand years later. If the Tutankhamun Gallery presented it, that would be one more unexpected manifestation of King Tut’s resurrection.

Tut, however, would have been sorely disappointed.

~ ~ ~

Steve Martin’s “King Tut”:

~ ~ ~

If you have read this entire essay, I surmise you found something worth your time. If you would like to know more about who I am and what this Substack is about, see my inaugural post, Who I Am and What I Intend with My Substack. And if you are not yet a subscriber, I would be glad to have you — this is a place for curious creatures, and there is much more to come, including a conversations feature.

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Further Reading

On Tutankhamun and the tomb:

Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen (3 vols., 1923–1933) — the original excavation record, still riveting.

Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun (1990) — the most thorough single-volume account.

Zahi Hawass, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs (2005) — catalog from the most recent touring exhibition, illustrated.

On Akhenaten and Egyptian religious history:

Donald Redford, Akhenaten: The Heretic King (1984) — the standard scholarly account.

Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (1997) — on Akhenaten’s monotheism and the Mosaic tradition.

On Egyptian afterlife theology and its broader legacy:

Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (1999) — the definitive scholarly treatment.

Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005) — accessible and profound.

James Tabor, Paul and Jesus (2012) — Egyptian influences on early Christian resurrection theology.

For a highly popular introduction (also available in audiobook):

Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs (2007).

For the official site of the Grand Egyptian Museum:

gem.gov.eg

Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, is my most influential, widely cited, debated, and translated book, reaching both academic and popular audiences.

In this Substack section I will discuss the sorts of social phenomena that I analyze in subsequent research. Here, for those unfamiliar with the book, I will introduce the approach I took in the book and briefly describe the traits and characteristics typical of such nature spiritualities.

~ ~ ~

I began Dark Green Religion with these mysterious words:

Dark green religion is like a phantom. It is unnamed and has no institutions officially devoted to its promotion; no single sacred text that its devotees can plant in hotel rooms in hopes of reaping a future harvest of souls; no identified religious hierarchy or charismatic figure responsible for spreading the faith, ministering to the faithful, or practicing its rituals. Yet with alertness and the right lenses, the apparition appears. (Taylor 2010: ix)

I continued with a brief definition while introducing key aspects of the book’s argument:

Dark green religion—religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care—has been spreading rapidly around the world. I label such religion ‘dark’ not only to emphasize the depth of its consideration for nature (a deep shade of green concern) but also to suggest that such religion may have a shadow side—it might mislead and deceive; it could even precipitate or exacerbate violence.

Whether beneficent, dangerous, or both, such religion is becoming increasingly important in global environmental politics. It motivates a wide array of individuals and movements that are engaged in some of the most trenchant environment-related struggles of our time. It increasingly shapes the worldviews and practices of grassroots social activists and the world’s intelligentsia…. It may even inspire the emergence of a global, civic, earth religion. (Taylor 2010: ix–x)

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Dark Green Religion – The Analytic Construct and Terminology

I developed the notion of ‘dark green religion’ as an analytic construct, as a mode of analysis, to illuminate a wide array of social phenomena that exemplify its tributaries, dynamics and impacts. (Henceforth I will abbreviate DGR for the book.) Specifically, I identified a complex set of perceptions, beliefs, values, and practices, that constitute its most fully articulated expressions.

The complex that I consider to be typical of ‘dark green’ social phenomena is akin to a Weberian ideal type: I deploy this analytic construct to illuminate recurring patterns in contemporary nature spirituality rather than to reify a bounded or internally homogeneous tradition. Some features of the dark green complex are essential to the construct, such as when individuals or groups integrate scientific understandings into their meaning systems and express biocentric or ecocentric values. Other individuals and groups embrace and exemplify some but not every element of the complex features common in dark green religion. This should be unsurprising, given that human understandings are often emergent and hybridized, and sometimes internally inconsistent. Precisely because of this fluid and non-essentialist structure, the analytic approach I developed in DGR invites comparative analysis across movements, institutions, media, regions, and historical contexts. When considering the utility of the dark green construct, it is also important to recognize that I deploy the term ‘religion’ for heuristic purposes, as part of the overall analytic approach, because I think it is illuminating to compare dark green social phenomena to the perceptions and practices commonly associated with what people typically construe as religion.

As Anthropologist Benson Saler argued in Conceptualizing Religion (1993), essentialist definitions of religion hinder perception of the fluid boundary between religious and secular perceptions and phenomena and consequently, they can occlude nuanced understandings of the complicated and often inconsistent perceptual, affective, and spiritual dimensions of human lives and societies. As I argued in DGR, by eschewing essentialist definitions and analyzing the global environmental milieu for its religion-resembling dimensions, the emerging dark green spiritualities appear.

Dark Green Religion – Types, Characteristics, Arguments

As I explained in DGR, while spending considerable time studying the evolution of green perceptions and practices, I began to notice widely shared traits and characteristics that diverse individuals and groups were integrating into a coherent meaning system, an understanding of the human place in the cosmos and biosphere, an overarching ‘dark green’ worldview. Those with this worldview typically stressed ecological interdependence, had deep feelings of belonging to nature, and often expressed a belief that the biosphere is a sacred, Gaia-like superorganism.

These sorts of nature-focused spiritualities generally cohere with and draw on an evolutionary and ecological worldview, and therefore stress continuity and kinship among all organisms. These spiritualities also often have animistic dimensions, wherein people think communication (and sometimes even communion) with nonhuman organisms is possible. Both animistic and Gaian perceptions can involve beliefs in divine entities or forces (e.g., spirits animate certain organisms or natural entities) or the world as a whole is divine, as in various forms of Pantheism (i.e., the idea that everything in nature is divine). Conversely, animistic and Gaian perceptions can be entirely naturalistic, rooted in the sciences or personal experiences with non-human organisms.

This table illustrates these four types:

In DGR, I presented this table with permeable lines between the four types to illustrate that many individuals and groups have both Gaian and Animistic perceptions, and some also embrace naturalism while retaining beliefs in spiritual beings or forces. The naturalistic forms of animism draw on ordinary relationships with animals, as well as on ethology, the science of animal consciousness and behavior. Those expressing the naturalistic Gaian forms typically root these in ecology-based understandings of interconnectedness, including the Gaia Hypothesis as advanced by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Gaian Spirituality, on the other hand, may cohere with Pantheism or Panentheism, while Spiritual Animism may involve perceptions that invisible, divine intelligences of some sort animate non-human organisms or entities.

As I demonstrated in DGR, the complicated ways that some individuals blend naturalistic and more conventionally-religious perceptions and views reveals that even with essentialist definitions, the quest to demarcate the boundary between religion and non-religion is fraught. I further argued that what unites Gaian and animistic perceptions is generally a deep sense of humility about the human place in the universe, in contrast to anthropocentric conceits, wherein human beings consider themselves superior to other living things and the only ones whose interests count morally. Regardless of whether those with dark green worldviews are conventionally religious or entirely naturalistic, or are constructing some kind of hybrid between these approaches, these worldviews lead to profound respect, if not also reverence, for individual organisms and species, as well as the biosphere as a whole.

In addition to arguing that animistic and Gaian worldviews are increasing around the world, and that these have forms that are both conventionally religious and entirely naturalistic, those who exemplify these dark green trends typically express these perceptions and feelings:

1. Nature is Sacred

2. All living things have intrinsic value and deserve respect, even reverence.

3. All lifeforms share a common ancestor and thus are kin.

4. All life is interconnected and mutually dependent.

5. Feelings of belonging & connection to nature

6. Humility about the human place in the world

7. Death is the wellspring for new life (i.e., embracing the Circle of Life)

8. Awe, wonder and love of nature

Those who exemplify dark green spiritualities also typically share three specific epistemological premises about the most effective paths to proper spiritual perception: that the most effective path is through direct, sensory experience in nature, which can produce awe, wonder, and appreciation of the living world; that the sciences are also a critically important path, as they displace human beings from the center of the universe and promote understandings of biotic kinship; and that the arts can evoke and reinforce a wide range of understandings and emotions typical of dark green worldviews.

In DGR I examined the historical tributaries to such spiritualities and how scholars from diverse disciplines, scientists, as well as environmental activists, artists, musicians, filmmakers, nature writers, literary critics, museum and aquarium curators, and many others, are expressing and promoting such understandings around the world. I further argued that, although such spiritualities are nascent and relatively small compared to the world’s predominant religions, those promoting dark green worldviews are gaining adherents and cultural traction around the world, promoting proenvironmental policies and behaviors, and exercising at least some political influence.

I also addressed claims that environmental philosophies that stress the wellbeing of entire ecosystems (like other wholistic philosophies) might lead to the erosion of concern for individual humans. I noted that it is possible to fuse some perspectives that are common to DGR with indifference or hostility to certain individuals or groups (possibilities that some have labeled ‘ecofascism’). I argued, however, that it is difficult for those who embrace the full complex of typical dark green ideas, which include notions of biological kinship among all living things, including, of course, human beings, to embrace racist or other ideologies that are hostile to specific individuals and groups. I also argued that—given its rootedness in the sciences, that do not depend on religious visions of some sort and given current observable trends—dark green worldviews will be present in an increasing proportion of the human community, at least where people are well-educated in the evolutionary and ecological sciences. In DGR I even speculated that such spiritualities might gain enough adherents to provide an affective basis for a kind of civil earth religion wherein peoples and governments around the world would prioritize biological conservation and the construction of sustainable socioecological systems.

Such a turn, as well as the possibility that the world’s predominant religions will mobilize in politically effective ways to address our environmental predicaments, seems increasingly remote. Nevertheless, scores of actors, in a wild diversity of ways, are promoting dark green sentiments and finding a receptive, global, audience.

It is this wild diversity of ways, which I explored in DGR and have been expanding subsequently through research around the world, that I will bring here in future essays.

I am confident that those who subscribe will find such explorations illuminating, perhaps even hopeful.

Leave a comment

~ ~ ~

This overview is adapted from “Dark Green Religion: Framework, Evidence, Impact, and Future,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 20 (2): 174-202, 2026. DOI: doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.34938, and from this free, open access article: “Religion and climate (in)action: Assessing the obstacles and prospects for effective mobilization in response to the climate emergency . . . and facing up to our apocalyptic moment,” Global Religion and the Climate Crisis, (Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, 2026), 11-31. DOI: 10.1515/9783111453750-002

Sources Mentioned

Lovelock, James. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press).

________. 2005. ‘Gaian Pilgrimage’, in Bron Taylor (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic; originally Continuum International): 683-85.

Lovelock, James, and Lynn Margulis. 1974. ‘Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis’, Tellus [Series A (Stockholm: International Meteorological Institute)] 26.1-2: 2-10.

Saler, Benson. 1993. Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden: Brill).

Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (University of California Press).

________. 2020. Dunkelgrüne Religion (Leiden, the Netherlands: Wilhelm Fink).

________. 2026. Dark Green Religion - Spiritualità della Natura e il Futuro del Pianeta, (Brescia, Italy: Morcelliana).

On Memorial Day in the USA, where we honor those who serve and all too often die in the military, I think of my dad, James Carlton Taylor.

He was dropped into Southern France, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, then into Germany, and was on the fringe of the Dachau concentration camp, near Munich, as it was being liberated on 29 April 1945.

Because he was known to have a camera, a commander immediately ordered him into the camp, where he took 18 photographs, some of which became famous.

I will share these in some future post; most are too gruesome to share without fair warning. His photographs include trains and rooms adjacent to the crematorium full of bodies, and emaciated survivors, some of whom are shown in this photograph, celebrating their liberation.

He and his comrades soon moved on to fight in Munich. Then they headed toward Austria and when approaching the border, the German surrender took place, on 8 May 1945. He then participated in the occupation in Salzburg, Nuremberg, Vienna, and Berlin, for nearly a year.

He and his comrades, and all the others who fought the Nazi plague, were the original anti-fascists.

I never got to talk to him in any detail about his wartime experiences, he died before I could. Many GIs, including my father, did not like to talk about it nor about the medals he received for valor. But I did hear his experiences decades later, from the guys in his unit, after I had become a professor in Wisconsin, which was where he and his division were from.

But because I knew he had fought in that war, and perhaps as a way to connect to him, I have long been interested in the rise of fascism and the necessity to resist it before it metastasizes. As one who has studied that rise in Germany and elsewhere, with many others who know such histories, I have been exceptionally disturbed at the rise of authoritarianism in my own country, and their clear, fascist, resemblances.

I recognize that far too often, politicians in the USA have sent soldiers to fight in unwise and immoral wars.

But there have been times when American troops have fought on the side of the angels. I miss my dad and regret not having been able to talk about all this my father, but I am proud of what he and his comrades did, which for decades afterward secured a significant measure of peace in Europe and America.

~ ~ ~

The dangers of fascism are omnipresent, and this is one of the main reasons that at my Substack I have established this section titled Social Philosophy, the Rule of Law & Planetary Governance.

It is here that I will reflect on how we ought to organize our collective lives — examining the moral foundations of societies, economic systems, political institutions, rights, obligations, justice, authority, liberty, and the common good.

And as I mention in my short description to this section, here I will seek to bring these foundational questions into direct confrontation with political realities and ecological limits.

One way to honor those who have sacrificed so greatly to establish a more peaceful and equitable world is to wrestle honestly with such questions and act in concert with the most reasonable answers. Feel free to join me as I try to do just that.

Subscribe now

I’m writing with gratitude to my first 105 subscribers, which is a great blastoff for a substack in only one week.

I have a lot of ideas pent up to share and discuss about religion, nature, environmental futures, politics, culture, science, museums, the sea, and the planetary challenges now before us.

If you would like to invite others you can send this URL for the Substack précis:

https://tinyurl.com/brontaylor

or the one for the premier essay on knowledge:

https://tinyurl.com/SocioKnow

or provide the venue’s QR code:

More essays and musings soon (and I’ll be trying to provide substantial essays, with few exceptions, every Thursday).

For many years I have opened one of my introductory university courses with a lecture titled “The Liberating Power of the Sociology of Knowledge.” I want to reconfigure and share some of that lecture here, for my first substantive essay in this Substack section, because critical inquiry begins with reflection on how we know anything in the first place.

These reflections may be pedestrian for some readers. But they are a Grundlage, a foundation, for much of what I intend to do in this space. For others, this essay may be uncomfortable, because its implication is that what I call the happenstance of circumstance, the accident of birth into a particular body, family, culture, place, and time, can become a great barrier to truth and intellectual freedom.

In other words, before we wrestle with life’s great existential questions and how we ought to live, we need to be clear about how we know anything in the first place.

As with my students, I strive first of all to be clear about the terms of discussion, so I will start there.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and knowledge systems. Put simply, it has to do with how we know what we know.

The sociology of knowledge, by studying human beings and their cultures, analyzes how people come to know what they know. Put more skeptically, it explores how people come to think they know something, often with great certainty and sometimes at variance with demonstrable facts. It also explains how people arrive at and maintain their worldviews.

By worldview I mean an overall understanding of the universe and our place in it. Worldviews include cosmogonies: stories about how the world came to be, whether scientific, religious, or some fusion of the two. They also reflect views about human nature, what our species is capable of, and what we owe to other people, other organisms, ecosystems, divine beings or forces, or even the universe itself. They typically include ideologies.

Ideologies are ideas, aims, and assertions that constitute a social and economic program. They reflect beliefs about how societies should be structured politically, economically, and sometimes religiously and ecologically. Worldviews often include future expectations: hopes, fears, and predictions about where everything is heading. When explicitly religious, these are called eschatologies, from the Greek eschatos, meaning “last” or “final,” and logos, meaning “study” or “discourse”; conjoined, they mean the study of last things.

Put simply, worldviews provide meaning and purpose in the face of life’s mysteries. They often help people cope and hope amid suffering and death, which are, of course, inevitable parts of life on earth.

But how do people gain worldviews? From whom, and how, do we acquire knowledge?

We acquire knowledge, and especially our profoundly important worldviews, from primary and secondary socializers.

Primary socializers are our early caregivers: parents, grandparents, siblings, and all those closest to us when we are most impressionable. Their power is reflected in the aphorism that the apple does not fall far from the tree.

Secondary socializers include teachers, peers, institutions, friends, frenemies, adversaries, legacy and social media, and religious leaders and communities. These sources are also powerful, and some are increasingly so. The apple does not fall far from the most prevalent cultural tree to which people are exposed.

Sociologists call this process socialization and anthropologists call it enculturation. The two terms are closely related and often overlap; both refer to the ways people learn from and internalize the values, beliefs, norms, behaviors, language, and practices of their culture. Socialization tends to emphasize learning how to function in society—absorbing roles, norms, and expected behaviors—while enculturation emphasizes absorbing a culture’s particular values, meanings, customs, and symbolic practices. In practice, the two processes are inseparable. Through them we learn not only what is normal and proper, but also what is real, sacred (if anything), and beyond human ken, an old English word I love that means knowledge, awareness, or mental grasp.

Religion, including what some thinkers, Abraham Lincoln among them, have called political religion, can be an especially powerful form of enculturation because it comes wrapped in love, loyalty, fear, repetition, ritual, authority, belonging, and trust.

Very few worldviews claim that a child chooses the socioecological milieu into which they are born.¹ A child emerges into a world that powerfully constructs and maintains a worldview, while sometimes exposing the child to additional worldview options.

People do sometimes alter the worldviews they first absorb. Such changes may be intellectual, political, ethical, or religious. Worldview alteration typically begins with exposure to deviant understandings, by which I simply mean ideas at variance with what one has inherited. I use the word deviant descriptively, not pejoratively.

For diverse reasons, some people who encounter such ideas become intrigued. They read, listen, watch, attend a ritual, sit in a college lecture, join a protest, follow an online video, or otherwise find their way into an entirely different interpretive world. In the age of social media, such curiosities are easy to pursue.

Primary and secondary socializers often notice when someone appears to be drifting toward different understandings. They may worry that the drift is spiritually, politically, economically, or morally dangerous, and may think that the curious seeker should be rescued. Toward this end, several strategies commonly appear.

The first is therapy: efforts to repair breaches in the inherited worldview through conversations, readings, sermons, lectures, warnings, pastoral concern, or ideological correction. This often takes the form of an apologia, an effort to explain a person’s doubts through the threatened worldview’s own understandings.

The second is to attack competing understandings directly, by criticizing or ridiculing them.

The third is to attack those advancing the threatening notions. Logicians call this the ad hominem fallacy, literally the “to the human” fallacy, in which one attacks the person advancing an idea instead of addressing the idea.

A fourth strategy, which logicians call the genetic fallacy, attacks the supposed origin of an idea rather than the idea itself. A common example occurs when someone dismisses a proposal because it “smacks of socialism.” This can be effective in a society with a generally negative view of socialism, but a careful observer will note that it avoids taking the proposal seriously.

Another strategy is the straw man fallacy, which involves mischaracterizing a position one dislikes and then attacking the mischaracterization. I expect we have all experienced this infuriating tactic: “Hey, wait a second. I didn’t say that.”

There are also strategies that are not, strictly speaking, illogical. One is to make clear the costs of deviance. These may include shunning, or threats of shunning, by one’s family or community, whether religious, ethnic, political, or professional. Such costs may also be economic as trust in the deviant person erodes. Some religion scholars consider these pressures part of the rational choice that leads to, or reinforces, religious affiliation.

Not everyone succumbs to efforts to repair worldview fractures. The more practiced one is in logic, including when one learns it formally, the less likely these efforts are to work. Logic is a powerful counterweight to fallacious argumentation and authoritarian bullying.

When deployed humbly and without condescension, identifying fallacious tactics can help move conversations back toward the premises, factual claims, and moral values that deserve reasoned adjudication.

This is why I think the social sciences, and especially the sociology of knowledge, have liberating power: they can free us to pursue truth wherever the evidence leads.

This power is not merely intellectual. By reminding us how deeply worldviews are inherited, it can temper our judgments of people who believe things we find implausible or even harmful. We need not assume such people are stupid or malicious. They may simply be, like most of us, people who have not fallen far from their cultural tree. Perhaps a playful transmogrification of an old aphorism is apt: “There but for the grace of the sociology of knowledge go I!”

Such understanding can also lead to what I call epistemological humility: humility about what we currently know, or think we know. As we recognize that others are shaped by what I call the happenstance of their circumstance, it is well worth remembering that so are we. This implies neither weakness nor relativism. It means that the pursuit of truth requires recognizing that we are fallible, socially conditioned, emotionally invested, and sometimes deluded creatures. That recognition should make us more rigorous, not less.

Epistemological humility also improves communication. It is hard for people to listen, and really hear, someone who is arrogant; harder still when they feel mocked, despised, or misrepresented. Remembering how worldviews are acquired, and how effective worldview defenders can be, may help us speak across national, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, and political divides, while also helping us notice when our own defenses are unnecessarily aroused.

At their best, universities liberate students, and lifetime learners of all sorts, to what one of my earliest professors called the Great Quest: the quest to understand one’s place in the bizarre, beautiful, awesome, and mysterious biosphere and universe.

Of course, asking rigorous questions can be dangerous. They can unsettle family loyalties, religious comforts, political identities, professional orthodoxies, and cherished self-understandings. But without such questions, intellectual freedom is an illusion.

Deep questioning is something to be embraced, not feared. As the prophet Jesus is reputed to have said, the truth will set you free. The sociology of knowledge provides tools for that pursuit: not final certainty, but disciplined humility before evidence, experience, and reason.

That is the spirit I hope to bring to my entire Substack, not just this section on Knowledge, Science & Epistemology, as I pose troubling questions, advance my current perspectives, and invite reader views.

To conclude: sensory, reasoned inquiry, informed by epistemological humility and a self-conscious alertness to evidence at variance with what one already thinks, is the wellspring of wisdom. Without this, there is no real quest for knowledge, truth, or wisdom; there is only retreat into comfortable and, all too often, outdated and false convention.

This essay has benefited from suggestions from Dr. Bernard Zaleha, a former student and long-term collaborator, whose work can be found at Bernie’s Substack.

Notes

¹ The terms “socioecological” and “biocultural” recognize that human societies and cultures are a part of nature and in no way separate from nature. In other words, humans and their societies emerge from and change Earth’s environmental systems, and vice versa, in an ever-evolving, reciprocally influential process. (I did not use the term biocultural in this essay although I will do so elsewhere in my Substack.)

A few key references

Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor.

Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor.

Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Weston, Anthony. 2018. A Rulebook for Arguments. 5th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Damer, T. Edward. 2009. Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments. 6th ed. Australia & Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.

Scott, John, ed. 2014. A Dictionary of Sociology. 4th ed. Oxford paperback reference. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Wrong, Dennis. 1961. “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology.” American Sociological Review 26 (2): 183-193.

Before I became a professor I spent fifteen formative years as a California State Park Lifeguard at Huntington Beach, Ventura, and Malibu. After being promoted to a ‘permanent’ lifeguard position, I also assumed responsibilities as Peace Officer, enforcing laws designed and enacted to protect the public and the park itself. I mention this not as a quirky biographical footnote but because it shaped everything that followed. It not only provided the economic means to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees, it provided the opposite of an ‘ivory tower’ background, including a clear-eyed understanding of how troubled, idiotic, and mean people can be at their worst, and how brilliant and brave they are at their best. It also provided a visceral, embodied sense of the sea as something powerful and violent, but also beautiful and awe-inspiring and full of wondrous creatures, mysteries and energies which we can revel in and ought to respect.

These experiences have contributed significantly to over three decades of teaching, research, writing, and wandering. I have lectured and conducted fieldwork in more than three dozen countries, studied the diverse ways people relate to and sometimes fight over the environmental systems they belong to and depend on, including Earth First! radicals and those trying to cajole the world’s religions to prioritize environmental causes. The overarching question I have sought to understand is this: What might lead our species to respond effectively to the accelerating erosion of Earth’s biological and cultural diversity?

Along the way I have written scores of articles and orchestrated a number of books that have shaped my thinking, some of which are considered to be highly influential among interdisciplinary environmental studies scholars. These include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, which examined the spiritual and ethical dimensions of nature-based worldviews and their role in environmental activism, and has been translated into multiple languages and precipitated much scholarly ferment. Ecological Resistance Movements traced the global rise of radical and popular environmentalism. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature — a million-and-a-half words involving more than five hundred contributors — helped establish an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of religion, ethics, and environmental studies. Avatar and Nature Spirituality explored how popular culture reflects and shapes our relationships with the living world.

I also founded the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture and its affiliated Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, serving as its Editor-in-Chief for twenty years before transitioning to its Editor-at-Large, a fitting title for this Earth-wandering terranaut. Along the way I also founded and became the first Environmental Studies Director at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, before accepting a position at the University of Florida, where I was invited to spearhead the development of the world’s first Ph.D. program focusing on ‘Religion and Nature’, the complex relationships between the affective and spiritual dimensions of human experience and their entanglement with Earth’s living systems. For nearly 25 years I have been privileged to mentor students who are now scholars in their own right, working at the intersection of religious and environmental studies.

Now, as I approach my final semesters of teaching, I want to finish some books and increasingly bring what I’ve learned, and some of what I’ve come to think, to a broader audience than has been possible heretofore. Although my identity is still as much lifeguard as anything else, I have also become an educator — and while I will soon be stepping back from classroom teaching, I cannot imagine letting that go . . . so now, in May 2026, I am launching this Substack.

What I Am Up To Here

Think of my substack as a roving, interdisciplinary seminar — open to anyone curious enough to show up.

Here, I intend to wrestle with the ethical, political, and spiritual dimensions of our relationship to the living world. I will draw on the best available evidence and take seriously all reasonable points of view, including ones I do not find compelling. I will try to model what I have called epistemological humility: the recognition that our beliefs are shaped by forces we rarely examine, and that remaining genuinely open to changing our minds is not a weakness but a precondition for pursuing truth.

This means some posts will be timely — responses to current events, political developments, environmental crises as they unfold. Others will be foundational — slow, careful examinations of the deep questions that underlie the headlines. Still others will be dispatches from the field, as I continue wandering the Earth and Seas, fates permitting, more widely than ever, passing on what I observe in its terrestrial, aquatic, cultural, and biotic wonders.

Substack at its best facilitates honest, respectful, taboo-free dialogue. That is my goal. I would rather ask a hard question well than answer an easy one impressively.

For a fuller picture of my background and work, visit brontaylor.com. There one can download dozens of scholarly publications and book chapters. I have also recently established a venue to share lectures and additional conversations via youtube at https://www.youtube.com/@BronTaylor – more of these will be posted and announced via my Substack as they become available.

What You Will Find Here

I have organized my Substack into fifteen sections, each representing a recurring theme I have wrestled with through personal experiences and academic inquiries.

These are not silos — most posts nested in a given section will intersect with other areas of inquiry — but they give readers a way to find what speaks most directly to their own questions and interests.

Here is a brief narrative map:

The foundational sections deal with the critically important questions:

How do we know what we know (Knowledge, Science & Epistemology), what we value (Ecocentrism, Anthropocentrism & Evolutionary Ethics), and how we ought to live together (Social Philosophy, the Rule of Law & Planetary Governance). These underpin everything else. From there, sections on Dark Green Religion & Nature Spirituality, Religion & Environmental Behavior, and Radical Environmentalism & “Ecoterrorism” examine the spiritual and activist dimensions of environmental life. Sections on Conservation Biology, Climate Science, and Population & Overshoot address the empirical stakes. And sections on Media & Popular Culture, Museums & Environmental Imagination, Surfing & Aquatic Spiritualities, and Terranaut Dispatches explore the cultural, aesthetic, and experiential dimensions of living in — and being moved by — the natural world. Conversations features dialogues with scholars, activists, and artists about how their thinking has evolved over time. Memorials honors those whose lives and work have shaped our moral and scientific understandings, and/or enriched our lived experiences in important ways. And Humor provides a counterweight to the serious matters we’re engaging and ways to cope with the depression that can accompany caring about the world and paying attention to its troubles.

Here is the full list:

1. Knowledge, Science & Epistemology

2. Dark Green Religion & Nature Spirituality

3. Religion, Environmental Behavior & the ‘Greening of Religion Hypothesis’

4. Radical Environmentalism & “Ecoterrorism”

5. Ecocentrism, Anthropocentrism & Evolutionary Ethics

6. Biodiversity, Biocultural Diversity & Conservation Biology

7. Surfing, the Sea & Aquatic Nature Spiritualities

8. Museums, Aquariums & Environmental Imagination

9. Media, Film & Popular Culture

10. Population, Carrying Capacity & Overshoot

11. Climate Science, Politics & Futures

12. Social Philosophy, the Rule of Law & Planetary Governance

13. Terranaut Dispatches

14. Memorials

15. Conversations

16. Humor (Whimsical, Ironic, Sardonic & Wrong)

Join the Conversation

Over the decades I have been privileged to live a diverse life during which I have learned from co-workers during my first career, students and scholars during my subsequent career, and I hope, have reciprocated with some interesting observations and insights of my own.

All this has kindled and reinforced in me a spirit of collaboration, curiosity, and adventure that I hope you will find engaging and valuable. I would love to hear from you — of your own experiences, questions, doubts, and challenges, as a fellow terranaut, striving to understand your own place in the biosphere, the cosmos, and the meanings and felt obligations that flow from your own evolving life process.

Persevere.

Bron Taylor

Shortly after my book Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future was published, I had a brief encounter with Ted Turner. I happened to be at the University of Colorado to give a lecture about the book and discovered that he was also speaking on campus that same day, for their entrepreneurial society. His talk was about ninety minutes before mine, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to attend all of it, but I walked over to the venue anyway.

I brought a copy of my book because in it I had written about him— specifically about his creation of Captain Planet and the Planeteers, the environmental cartoon he co‐created with Barbara Pyle. All the seats had been allocated, so a few minutes before the talk was set to begin, I went up to the front, left the book with someone helping organize the event, and asked them to pass it along to Turner.

Just as I was leaving the theater, Ted Turner suddenly appeared in front of me, surrounded by a clutch of high‐ranking University of Colorado officials. He had written a memoir called Call Me Ted, and I figured I’d take him up on the offer.

“Hi Ted,” I said quickly, watching a bodyguard eye me suspiciously and edge in my direction. “I just left a book up front for you with someone, because I didn’t expect to have a chance to give it to you in person.” Pressing my luck, I quickly continued: “It’s called Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future—” at which point a statuesque woman from the Nature Conservancy traveling with him exclaimed in a delighted, high‐pitched voice:

“Nature Spirituality! I love Nature Spirituality!”

Sensing the security detail closing in and wondering whether I might soon be pushed aside unceremoniously, I pressed on: “I honestly think you and your family might get a kick out of it, in part, because in it I spent some time discussing Captain Planet and how it has kindled environmentalist passions in young people.”

“I love Captain Planet!” Ted exclaimed, after which he was hustled away.

I made my way to the overflow room where I had enough time to catch the first twenty minutes of his talk on a screen. I kid you not — and I don’t recall how he segued into it after being introduced with great fanfare for his entrepreneurial accomplishments — but he immediately started talking about Captain Planet, and how much he loved it.

Although I left a note for him and his family inside the book and, of course, asked whether he might be open to an interview, I do not know if he ever received the book, and I never did receive a response. People at his altitude are buried under things to read and consider, I know, and although the researcher in me hoped for an interview, I knew that was a long shot. But I enjoyed the encounter, and then as now, I respected the man.

· · ·

Most people know Turner as the founder of CNN, and indeed, of the very idea of 24-hour cable news, which, at its best, is no small contributor to democratic polity. But Turner also became one of the world’s great philanthropists and conservationists.

At the peak of his land acquisition efforts, Turner owned roughly two million acres across eight states. For years he was the largest private landowner in the United States; at his death his holdings still ranked fourth, behind a Walmart heir, a timber dynasty, and a fellow cable mogul. He didn’t buy land to subdivide it; he bought it to protect and restore it. Much of it is now permanently protected — his 113,600-acre Flying D Ranch in Montana, for instance, sits under a conservation easement held by The Nature Conservancy, locking in habitat for bison, elk, wolves, and grizzlies in perpetuity.

Bison (commonly called American Buffalo), are among his greatest legacies. North America’s iconic herd animal had been driven from tens of millions to a few hundred by the late nineteenth century. Turner’s herd today numbers about 45,000 head — the largest private herd in the world, and a meaningful share of the entire species’ surviving genetic diversity. He even built a restaurant chain around the project: Ted’s Montana Grill, which he founded in 2002 with restaurateur George McKerrow Jr. The premise was elegantly mission‐driven — create a market for bison meat, and you create an economic argument for keeping bison on the landscape. Single‐handedly, Turner did more to bring these magnificent animals back from the brink than any other individual. And protecting this keystone species has led to the recovery of many others.

His philanthropy stretched well beyond his ranches. He founded the Turner Foundation in 1990 to protect land, air, and water; the United Nations Foundation in 1997 with his historic one‐billion‐dollar pledge; the Turner Endangered Species Fund; and the Captain Planet Foundation. He campaigned for decades against nuclear weapons, including through the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He understood, in a way most billionaires don’t, that money can and should be a tool for doing good, and that the human commonweal depends on the health and resilience of the entire biosphere.

His five children have carried those passions forward. Laura Turner Seydel chairs the Captain Planet Foundation and helped found Mothers and Others for Clean Air and the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. Beau Turner runs the Beau Turner Youth Conservation Center, which gets young people outdoors and into the work, and serves on the boards of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, the Peregrine Fund, and the Captain Planet Foundation. Jennie Turner Garlington hosts and produces EcoSense for Living on PBS. Rhett Turner makes conservation documentaries through his own production company. And his eldest, Teddy, has been part of the family’s broader stewardship of the land. Five children, five different ways of carrying the torch.

May his memory and legacy live long.

Viva Ted Turner.