Forum On Religion & Ecology @ Monash

Forum On Religion and Ecology (FORE) @ Monash is dedicated to promoting the multidisciplinary study of religious thought, literature, ethics and practice in relation to ecology, environmental activism and sustainability. It was established as a regional counterpart to FORE at Yale, with links to FORE in Canada, and to the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment.

This website often uses the term ‘religion and ecology’ as a convenient simplification of a field that encompasses religious and spiritual perspectives, along with the science of ecology, and the social movement of environmentalism. Our use of ‘religion and ecology’ is not intended to exclude views that might not readily fit under the concept of ‘religion’, however, the website does tend to focus more on organised spirituality, i.e. religion.

The FORE @ MONASH website was officially launched on October 28th 2011. The establishment of the FORE@Monash website was funded by Monash University, however, there is currently no  funding for the maintenance of the website, or for the moderation of the proposed member’s forum. If you or your organisation are interested in funding or partially funding these activities, please contact the project’s Director, Assoc. Prof. Kate Rigby via the details given on her Monash University website (see also the FORE@Monash ‘Contacts’ page).

The website’s content may appear biased towards the study of Christianity and environmentalism, but this is largely an artifact of the research available to us at this time, along with the dominance of Christianity in the religious landscape of Australia. Other faith traditions and even some of the smaller or more independent Christian traditions may not have organisational structures that generate a single national policy on ecological matters, and this may mean that we haven’t provided a link to that particular tradition’s views. For example, there are many Australian webpages that deal with Buddhist views of Nature, but we haven’t included these because they are too numerous. Whereas the structure of the dominant Christian denominations is such that they each have a website dealing with their ecological theologies and policies, etc. Many denominations also have related web content at lower levels of their organisational hierarchies. We hope to progressively improve the breadth and depth of content on this website such that we provide good coverage of the different faith traditions’ views on ecological issues.