The role of sacred groves in habitat protection

May 18, 2023 2:54 PM

"Governments from across the world made grand promises... at the biodiversity conference in Montreal to save nature by protecting 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. But back home many are presiding over the destruction of some of the most ancient and precious protected areas on Earth — sacred groves and places that have long been preserved by religious fervor and strict taboos that are often far more effective than game wardens or environmental statutes."

Nobody knows how many sacred natural places there are across the world. They may number in the hundreds of thousands. Almost all societies have them — from Hindu villages in India to Catholic communities in the hills of Italy, and native tribes of the Americas to African animists. The creation and longevity of these places are testament to the power of religion as a tool for community-based conservation. Sacred natural places are “the oldest form of habitat protection in human history,” says Piero Zannini of the University of Bologna...

But Zannini warns that protecting these places will require more than simply integrating them into national protected-area networks. Many sacred natural sites, he says, are distinctive precisely because they exist separate from official conservation and may require special protection or designation. Protected areas are mostly large and remote, while sacred sites are smaller and mixed in among farms and people. The “standardized management” typical of protected areas could result in a loss of species that survive through interaction with human activities — for example, species that are cultivated and harvested for medicines or that simply find habitat around farms, homes, or temple precincts.

posted by clawsoon (16 comments total)

We can't have nice things, period. Exhibit: Ontario's greenbelt.
posted by Artful Codger at 4:00 PM on May 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

We can't have nice things, period. Exhibit: Ontario's greenbelt.

The article is literally about how we have nice things because they have been protected for centuries and millennia in this way. It's a good article and worth reading; if nothing else, the photos are beautiful.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:41 PM on May 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

I wonder if an appeal to Saint Vespaluus would help..

That picture of the grove surrounding the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tells an entire story by itself.
posted by Nerd of the North at 5:29 PM on May 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sacred Groves Among the Rungus of Northern Borneo: Relict Areas of Biodiversity, a case study of religious preservation and religion destruction of sacred groves, which references the controversial paper that started this field of study, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis [PDF], which says things like,

The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature. What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.

posted by clawsoon at 5:35 PM on May 18, 2023

That picture of the grove surrounding the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tells an entire story by itself.

A previously on the church forests of Ethiopia, which has a link to a lovely short film about them.
posted by clawsoon at 5:39 PM on May 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

But Zannini warns that protecting these places will require more than simply integrating them into national protected-area networks. Many sacred natural sites, he says, are distinctive precisely because they exist separate from official conservation

That's right. In Australia there's a great tension between Aboriginal people and communities, who retain knowledge about specific important sites, and which are often secret, or which should be known only to groups, e.g. men, or women, or Aboriginal people; and the official systems for cultural heritage conservation which is, because it's established in law, an open public list. There's also a tension between the impulse to protect Aboriginal Places, which, where that comes into conflict with a racist or ignorant land 'owner', risks them deliberately destroying the place. Many Aboriginal communities distrust the heritage system and rightly so.

The article refers to the fight in Victoria over the Djab Wurrung trees. These were assessed by [non-Aboriginal] heritage experts under the existing conservation framework, which, not unreasonably, stresses human interaction with a place (since a tree, or a forest, has a life cycle and existence entirely separate from human activity). In the Aus. heritage system a marked/scarred tree has demonstrable cultural significance, a tree alone does not—a distinction that leads to the, uh, spicy statutory consequence that Aboriginal Places are typically protected under National Parks and wildlife laws. I am a heritage expert, I read the assessment of those trees, and in the framework, I couldn't disagree with it. Australia's heritage and conservation framework is inseparable from colonialism, which doesn't, cannot, account for Aboriginal cultural connection to place.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:55 PM on May 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

That's right. In Australia there's a great tension between Aboriginal people and communities, who retain knowledge about specific important sites, and which are often secret, or which should be known only to groups, e.g. men, or women, or Aboriginal people; and the official systems for cultural heritage conservation which is, because it's established in law, an open public list.

This is a major issue in the US as well. This article about tribal opposition to an energy project that I linked in another comment the other week is a good example, where the Yakama Nation was opposed to a project and the lead federal agency insisted that only open, public comments counted, versus the Tribe's refusal to divulge protected information:

But sensitive cultural information was involved, which, by Yakama tribal law, cannot be made public. Takala noted, for example, that Yakama people don’t want non-Natives harvesting and marketing first foods the way commercial pickers market huckleberries: “That has an impact for our people as well, trying to save up for the winter.” The tribe needs confidentiality to protect its cultural resources.

"First foods," in the quoted text, refers to the specific traditional food species, and also to the ways that those foods sustain tribal cultures and practices. It's a similar interconnection between ecology and culture to what the FPP article is describing.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:33 PM on May 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

It is touched on in the article: in the Caribbean, certain species are connected to beliefs, like silk cotton trees. They are connected to spirits, so people are reluctant to cut them down.
posted by snofoam at 4:26 AM on May 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is really interesting. We have several areas in Georgia that are important to the Muscogee, including what are now Indian Springs State Park and Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, which are still visited by people making the pilgrimage from the reservation in Oklahoma back to Georgia. But so much of their importance was lost when so many Muscogee were killed in the forced move to Oklahoma and then the many years when they were not allowed to visit their lands for ceremonies. An easy beginning to Land Back is to give those public lands back to their original protectors.
posted by hydropsyche at 12:58 PM on May 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pretty much all the tree name places in Ireland, which the Catholic Church then co-opted and redeveloped.
posted by toodleydoodley at 7:08 AM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pretty much all the tree name places in Ireland, which the Catholic Church then co-opted and redeveloped.

I forget where I read it, but some article or another pointed out that snakes were often part of the sacredness/fear that helped to preserve sacred groves, and it made me think of the legend of St. Patrick clearing Ireland of snakes.

It was interesting to read in the article that churches protected forests in Italy and Ethiopia effectively as sacred groves, but beyond that the church seems to have more often been involved in cutting them down. Certainly by the time of the Livonian Crusade, missionaries were cutting down sacred groves to demonstrate that the local gods had no power, and that has continued to modern missionaries in the Amazon, and Papua New Guinea, and Borneo, and the Congo, and just about everywhere else.

I'd be curious to know if anyone has traced the political and theological changes that happened in those centuries from the earliest churches to the medieval church which changed it from pro-forest to anti-forest.
posted by clawsoon at 11:13 AM on May 20, 2023

I'd be curious to know if anyone has traced the political and theological changes that happened in those centuries from the earliest churches to the medieval church which changed it from pro-forest to anti-forest.

I looked it this up for a blogpost recently.

With the arrival of Christianity, the systematic destruction of sacred groves began. It is said that the priests' most important tool was the axe. But sacrificial trees are still standing, and there are still a few of the bear's skull pines which were an essential element of the bear myths and bear-killing rites. And there still exist quite a number of 'karsikkos', trees bearing crosses and initials and intended to ward off the restlessly wandering souls of the dead. From Tree People by Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo



Holy Trees and Sacred Groves in the Transition to Christianity in Ireland is just a conference slide set of a paper but implies that druids and paganism had a lot to do with the co-opting of trees into christianity or destroying the sites of power to retain control.


The Cross and the Rainforest by Robert Whelan builds its polemic against contemporary environmentalism on the historical Christian precedent of cutting down trees in order to save pagan souls. It represents a corporate-funded Christianity that now implicitly champions, in its support for the globalized economy, deforestation in the name of this ancient, saintly practice of felling the sacred trees. This chapter examines this modern fusion of anti-environmentalism with the enduring Christian fear of paganism. It begins by considering the history and context of this mandate to eradicate sacred groves.
posted by infini at 2:39 PM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Something weird about the last link, infini. I think this is right:

The Cross and the Rainforest by Robert Whelan
posted by clawsoon at 2:57 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, and thanks for the links! :-)
posted by clawsoon at 3:16 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm listening to a conversation with Carole Cusack, who wrote the slides that infini linked to, and I'm reminded that Asherah poles were often victims of the most aggressive monotheists of the ancient Israelite kingdom. The half-baked theory I'm forming at the moment is that this all has to do with some combination of monotheism and state power.
posted by clawsoon at 3:29 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

All these jealous sun god religions have turned out to be quite a bad idea.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:25 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]