This delightful plan for a comfortable existence never came to pass. My bishop, in a fit of spiritual insight, sensed my pagan heart (plus trouble ahead) and steered me away from the clergy and in to law. However, I did complete 42 hours of graduate study in philosophy at UNC-CH before switching to law school. What I absorbed there has continued to percolate in the intervening years.
I mention this in order to show that I was not a "natural" for ecofeminst theology. I thought of God as male and Earth as a convenient source of wealth that I could do what I wanted to with, period. Finding eocfeminist theology persuasive amounts to metanoia.
Rosemary R. Reuther, in her book GAIA & GOD, suggests that ecofeminist theology attempts "to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize the interrelations of men and women, humans and earth, humans and the divine, and the divine and the earth". The goal: "a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality" to produce "a healed relation to each other and the earth". A worthy goal, indeed.
While Ruether writes from a christian perspective, there are other ecofeminist writers who do not. Mary Daly and Carol Christ, for example, write from what might be termed a "neopagan" point of view. Ecofeminist theologians are not exclusively women. Also, Creation Spirituality has many points of convergence with ecofeminist theology.
Whatever the point of view, ecofeminist theology has some common premises. Generally, the ecofeminist position is that western christianity, and its hebrew and greek intellectual antecedents, constitute a system of beliefs, assumptions, ideals and symbols which are responsible for war, ecological damage and social violence (particularly toward women). These writers argue that traditional western belief and culture portrays all of nature, apart from humanity, as being soulless, inert, created stuff that man may do with as he wishes. These views create a hierarchy of domination: humanity dominates nature, men dominate women, western man dominates the non-white world, all in accordance with, and subject only to, God's will.
I think these common premises are true, and point towards needed changes
in our culture and consciousness. I come to these concepts today from the
point of view of Scientific Pantheism, the religious view point that I
see as honoring all previous spiritual traditions while being compatible with both the truth about our Universe and our need
to comfort ourselves and others.