Introduction

This chapter argues for the significance of faith and belief as resources for nature conservation, and introduces the various essays contained in this volume that present stories of how these have been or may potentially be drawn upon. The faiths and beliefs which constitute this volume’s theme are those that are understood to be religious – however, readers interested in faiths and beliefs that cannot be contained by the term ‘religion’ will also find much to interest them here. With a brief sketch of the urgency of nature conservation and also discussing the existential threats that the destruction of our planet’s ecosystems poses, this chapter draws out themes that are common to all the stories that this edited volume tells. These stories range from applications of rights-based conservation approaches to ecologically oriented innovations at the intersection of modernity and religious tradition, and much more. This chapter also provides a glimpse of the depth of this volume’s contents – emphasizing how voices from each of the world’s inhabited continents speak within it and acknowledging the weight of postcolonial experience that many of them carry.