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8 ‘An altar inside a circle’
Climate activists and green
Christians ritualising and relating
to place and planet
Maria Nita
Introduction
How do participants in ecological rituals engage with and relate to place? How
do they draw on their respective religious traditions and existing green prac-
tices in their perceptions of sacred space and ritual place? How do religious
and non-religious green activists relate to the planet, given its prominence
as a central symbol in climate change discourse? The present chapter aims to
address these three questions by applying theoretical debates on the concept of
sacred space to my own empirical fi ndings from a research project examining
the involvement of Christian networks in the climate movement in Britain
(2008–2012).
Climate activists based in the UK are involved in a great diversity of net-
works, both local and global. Climate days of action are often synchronous in
many countries around the world and presented on the Internet as a global
event. The scope of the movement is global, since climate change is a global
issue. The specifi c focus on the Earth’s globe during marches and protest events
refl ects a new concern with the fate of the planet and a realisation that conser-
vation of a locality is no longer possible in the light of a global climate system.
To understand this shift, a contrast can be made between the road protests of
the 1990s and recent climate campaigns, focused broadly on legislation con-
cerned with the sourcing of fossil fuels, carbon trading and air travel. Protests in
the 1990s were led by eco-Pagans – for example the protests on Solsbury Hill
(1994 and 1996) – and were often preoccupied with preserving and protecting
land and localities that were considered sacred, often by reclaiming an animist
and indigenous understanding of nature (see Letcher 2003: 73). Climate pro-
tests on the other hand place at the forefront of their campaigns the destruction
of the planet as a whole, through such imagery as the rising sea levels, the sick
and feverish planet affected by raising temperatures or the destruction of the
Amazon, often represented as the decimated lungs of the planet.
The emphasis on the planet, as one entity, in the broader green movement is
certainly not new since the early images of the Earth photographed from space
in the late 1960s represented important sparks in the emergence of the environ-
mental movement. Andy Letcher (2003) persuasively shows in his ‘ “Gaia Told
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134 Maria Nita
Me to Do It”: Resistance and the Idea of Nature within Contemporary British
Eco-Paganism’ that environmental protestors in these earlier anti-road protest
movements were engaging with many different and developing ideas of nature,
from conceptualising nature as ancient, forgotten, premodern, separate and dis-
tinct from humans, all the way to the more unifi ed concept of Gaia (Lovelock
1972), of nature as one self-regulating organism which includes humans (69).
Yet, while activists in earlier protest movements seemed to more readily invoke
elements of topophilia , love and attachment for a particular place (Yi-Fu Tuan,
1974), climate activists appear to be far more oriented towards the planet as a
whole, which is also refl ected in their increased mobility and global political
interests, travelling to Paris or Copenhagen to take place in global protest activi-
ties for example.
At the time of my research the Christian activists in my study were situated
at a confl uence of many confl icting discourses about nature and the planet, the
most signifi cant of these being the anthropocentric versus biocentric positions
derived from their Christian tradition on one hand and that of the green move-
ment on the other. While for many Christians the biblical stewardship model,
by which humans were made stewards of the Earth, still represented the main
or rather the offi cial platform for their environmentalism, the darker shades of
green Christian networks in my study critiqued this model by breaking it down
and asking during workshops and in interviews, ‘Where was Man when God
created the Earth?’, thus reclaiming a hegemony and sovereignty on behalf of
the planet in its relation to humans. This critique was not always spelled out
but sometimes tacitly implied by the material organisation of place. As I will
show here, rituals and performances have the role of reorienting space, asking
participants to perceive our planet and its inhabitants from a different perspec-
tive while often critiquing the anthropocentric position, which is seen as the
root of the ecological crisis.
Sacred space is often understood by scholars to have a role in reinforcing and
transmitting collective beliefs, values and identity (Smith 1982; Hervieu-Léger
2000 ; Knott 2005 ). I will enquire here into what happens in the case of syn-
cretic encounters between people or values that have not yet been amalgamated
or integrated into a coherent whole or where ideological divisions and tensions
persist, such as is the case with the Christian networks in my research (see Nita
2014 ). One way of addressing this question is to look at ways in which new
syncretic values and beliefs translate into place-making practices. I will specifi -
cally discuss how the Christian activists in my study engaged with sacred space
in the context of the climate movement as a way of representing their Christian
identity while experimenting with new models of organisation.
In the fi rst part of this essay I will examine some key theoretical positions
regarding ‘sacred space’ and enquire into the role sacred space plays in ritual
encounters by discussing two important green rituals: the Council of All Beings
and the Cosmic Walk. These rituals are performed in a variety of contexts and
have been adopted and adapted by some of the green Christians in my research.
In the second part of this chapter I will draw on my own empirical research at
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Climate activists and green Christians 135
a climate camp (2008) and Christian eco-retreats (2009 and 2012) to discuss
how activist groups construct different places for ritual and worship, outside
their traditional settings or churches. I will end this chapter with an examina-
tion of how green Christians and climate activists relate to the planet through
ritual, drawing out the role of the material objects used in the construction and
performance of sacred space.
Sacred space: ritual, relationships and identity
The construction or organisation of space, regardless of whether it is considered
‘sacred’, is a social and political process that refl ects human and non-human
relationships. The story behind place is dependent on the collective meaning
making of the people who build it. In his seminal essay ‘Language and the Mak-
ing of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach’, the cultural geographer Yi-Fu
Tuan reminds his readers that a constructed material place, be it architecture,
landscape art or a garden, tells a story about the people who created it through
its very shapes, structures and colours: ‘it is not possible to understand or explain
the physical motions that produce place without overhearing [. . .] the speech –
the exchange of words – that lie behind them’ ( Tuan 1991 : 684–685).
The actor-network theorist Bruno Latour also emphasises the ecology of
social relationships that take place in the construction of space/place. It is
impossible, Latour argues, to understand any scientifi c discovery, either theo-
retical or technical, without imagining the thousands of people and materials
that have made it possible ( Latour 1987 ). By looking at how space is con-
structed and organised we are promised a better understanding of the human
and non-human actors who took part in its construction, as well as their social
and political relationships.
Sacred spaces often communicate collective values and beliefs through their
architecture (see Holm and Bowker 1994). By providing a sense of communal
or collective identity the sacred space becomes a safe space. Thus for a Christian
community, the traditional architecture of a church may be understood to pro-
vide a harmonious space belonging to a shared cultural, historical and aesthetic
outlook. An enclosed place can provide a space of congruence for language/
meaning, ritual and participants. A church for example is not just a building
but a constructed place that refl ects and re-enforces a particular cosmology and
collective coordinates for meaning making and where participants’ personal and
social values are in harmony with each other. Relatively little effort or anxiety
is required in such a place to interpret reality in terms of collective meaning.
Sacred space is also a place where the relationships between participants are
performed, reinforced or even changed through ritual. Numerous interpreta-
tions of the ritual process point to ‘a recovered unity’ ( Turner 1969 : 93), ‘a [re]
incorporation’ ( van Gennep 1960 : 191) or ‘an assemblage’ (Durkheim 1995
[ 1915 ]: 465). Recent approaches to ritual and entrainment ( Grimes 2003 , 2005 )
suggest that ritual provides the opportunity to stop as an individual and begin
again or synchronise together. The organisation of sacred space is crucial to
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136 Maria Nita
creating and refl ecting a new order, allowing participants to leave the space
with newly acquired identities.
The present chapter investigates how sacred space comes to refl ect a new,
desired order and what role it plays in creating new relationships and new
collective identities. I will fi rst look at how green activists seek to create new
relationships between humans and non-humans by constructing new types of
sacred spaces.
Novel ways of organising space: the circle
and the spiral in green rituals
To understand how these new models of sacred space can deconstruct and
reconstruct relationships and modes of relating, it is important to fi rst look at
two key ecological rituals – namely the Council of All Beings and the Cosmic
Walk ritual. Both rituals were created around 1980 and have since been adopted
by ritualists across the world (see Edwards, 1999 ; Barlow 2005 ), partly because
of Joanna Macy’s missionary activities in green networks, as a key protagonist in
their creation and propagation ( Macy 2005 ). Both rituals focus on the planet,
attempting to unite or relate participants to a planetary community and to reas-
semble participants and the planet as one.
The rituals themselves have a unique status insofar as their performance is
often regarded with a solemnity that is somewhat unusual in the more coun-
tercultural, irreverent and playful ethos of the green movement. I attempted to
conduct research via participant observation at one Council of All Beings ritual
but this was refused by the gatekeepers of the group, who told me that members
would not want to be observed while taking part in the ritual. Since the ritual
aims to allow a change of perspective from human to non-human, the presence
of a human observer might indeed disrupt its purpose.
The Cosmic Walk ritual was inspired by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme’s
Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration
of the Unfolding of the Cosmos ( Swimme and Berry 1992 ). Berry understood the
evolution of the universe and the Earth as an epic story, ‘the greatest story ever
told’. The Cosmic Walk attempts to tell this great story through a symbolic
walk that represents the evolution of the universe and our planet. Participants
re-enact this journey by walking a marked spiral and pausing at important mile-
stones in the development of the universe. The ritual is enacted both indoors
and outdoors, while the spiral can be marked by white stones or candles, drawn
with chalk or marked with rope. The spiral represents a timeline of the evolu-
tion of the universe, beginning in the centre with the ‘great emergence’ and
continuing all the way to the present moment.
The focus of this ritual is, however, not so much the universe, symbolically
placed at the centre of the spiral, but the Earth. A narrator reads the story
of this evolution of the universe, which is accompanied by meditative music
and poetic metaphors that focus the attention of the participants: ‘Step 14 –
330 million years ago insects take to the air. The Earth learns to fl y’, or ‘Step
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Climate activists and green Christians 137
29 – 30 years ago the Earth is seen as whole from space. The Earth becomes
complex enough to witness its own integral beauty’ (Edwards 1999: 15). As par-
ticipants complete the walk slowly and contemplatively, they pause and refl ect
on some fi nal signifi cant landmarks in the Earth’s personal story, such as the
publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 or the fi rst Moon landing
in 1969. When the walkers reach the end of the walk, on the outer edge of the
spiral, the narrator ends by saying, ‘This fl aring forth continues as this moment,
with us, as one’ (Edwards 1999: 15). This merger between the two stories both
extends the individual’s identity to incorporate the collective story and makes
the story of the Earth personal to the individual.
Like the Cosmic Walk, the Council of All Beings also extends the partici-
pants’ identity, this time to the non-human world, while making ecologi-
cal concerns personal to the individual participants, by asking them to give
voice to the plight of the non-humans. Joanna Macy (2005: 425) describes the
Council of All Beings as having three consecutive stages: ‘The Mourning’, ‘the
Remembering’ and ‘Speaking for Other Life Forms’. Following the fi rst stage,
where participants lament the abuse and mistreatment of the non-humans, ‘the
Remembering’ is in essence a version of ‘the Cosmic Walk’, which helps par-
ticipants ‘remember the last four and a half billion years’ (Macy 2005, 427).
Finally during the last stage participants, wearing animal masks they have made
themselves and thus taking on their non-human identity, speak for ‘the other
life forms’, decrying the ‘changes and hardships they are experiencing in these
present times’:
The shells of my eggs are so thin and brittle now, they break before my
young are ready to hatch. . . . I am crowded in a dark place, far from grass
and standing in my own shit. My calves are taken from me, and instead cold
machines are clamped to my teats. I call and call for my young. Where did
they go? What happened to them?
(Macy 2005: 427)
Since this is a Council of All Beings, humans must be present, and so partici-
pants take turns to sit, in silence, in the middle of the circle, remove their masks
and represent humanity. Yet this movement to the inside of the circle does not
provide participants an opportunity to experiment with a dual identity because
they never give voice to the human being. This is in fact an opportunity to
relinquish their human identity; hence at the end of the ritual, Macy writes,
participants, now fully transformed, put on ‘human masks’ ‘as we re-enter the
world of the two-legged’ ( Macy 2005 : 428).
An important feature of these two rituals is the way space itself is organised.
In the Cosmic Walk, the participants walk contemplatively in a spiral, reaching
their destination or receiving their initiation on the outer edge of the spiral.
Although the story of the universe appears to be the focus of this ritual, since
the centre of this space is marked by ‘the great emergence’, the story of the
universe is just a grand canvas for observing the beauty and uniqueness of the
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138 Maria Nita
Earth. Thus the spatial model of the Cosmic Walk privileges the outer edge of
the ritual space and not the centre, which is an important reversal if we consider
the signifi cance of the centre in traditional ritual practices and organisation
of sacred space, captured by Mircea Eliade’s concept of the axis mundi and his
discussion of the relevance of the centre in the construction of sacred space
(Eliade 1963: 42–65).
The Council of All Beings similarly privileges the edges or margins of ritual
space and changes the polarity of the centre from a celebratory place to one
of lamentation and disempowerment. Thus both these rituals use the spiral and
circle to invite an equal distribution of power, constructing an arrangement in
which no one place is more powerful or more privileged. In the Council of All
Beings the place in the centre where ‘the human’ stands at the end of the ritual
is not a place of power but the exact opposite, a place where the human par-
ticipant is stripped of his or her power and isolated. This particular performance
inside this sacred space is a critique of anthropocentrism and we can talk here of
a physical, material deconstruction of the anthropocentric position: ‘the human
in the centre’ is silenced and surrounded by animal masks that are given voice
by the other participants.
I will now turn to how the Christian activists in my study made use of
ritual space to perform their hyphenated identities, as green Christians or
eco-Christians.
Christian climate activists and the climate community
The climate camp movement and the transition towns movement both started
in 2005 in Britain, and both are still very much infl uencing the green activist
networks there today. The two movements intersect in their aims and values but
are centred on protest and community building respectively. Transition towns
focus on adapting green community ideas to the realities of urban living, while
the climate camp – my focus in this section of the chapter – advocates or mod-
els a rural community. Christian activists in both movements experiment with
novel ways of engagement with space which differ from traditional Christian
settings.
Green Christian activism is an important fringe movement that demands
scholarly attention, because it represents the syncretic encounter between two
opposing ideologies: anthropocentrism and biocentrism. Lynn White (1967)
famously placed the blame for the ecological crisis on the Judeo-Christian
roots of the West and many eco-theologians responded to this challenge by
eco-reforming the Christian tradition. Grassroots Christian organisations such
as the ones studied in my research are accepting this task of greening their faith
in practical ways, such as making lifestyle changes, protesting the current cli-
mate legislation, praying and fasting for the planet.
My research with climate activists suggested that only a small section identi-
fi ed as religious. Half of the participants in my surveys self-identifi ed as athe-
ists or not religious, and only 16% of respondents stated a specifi c religious
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Climate activists and green Christians 139
affi liation.
1 Half of those who identifi ed as religious were represented by Pagans
and Buddhists, a fi nding which indicates that inside the green movement
Christians are a minority, with only 16% identifying as Christians in my study
(see also Nita 2016: 102–104). The rest of the participants identifi ed as ‘partly
religious’, ‘spiritual but not religious’ or as ‘poly-religionists’, listing a number
of religious traditions from which they drew inspiration. However, many green
Christian organisations are beginning to take a more active or political role in
the fi ght against climate change, from smaller organisations, such as the Forest
Church, Operation Noah, Christian Ecology Link, Green Spirit and SPEAK,
2
all the way to the bigger players, like Christian Aid, A Rocha, Student Christian
Movement and CAFOD (The Catholic Agency for Overseas Development).
The wide endorsement in green Christian circles of the recent papal encyclical
Laudato Si: On the Care of our Common Home (May 2015), as well as their coop-
eration and renewed presence during collective events, such as during climate
marches or the Greenbelt festival, where these distinct networks get together to
hold vigils or workshops for example, demonstrates the unity and ecumenism
of the green Christian movement in the UK.
Experimenting with living space
Climate activists, including the groups of Christian activists who attended the
protest camps, often experiment with green communes during their annual
climate protest camps across England and Wales. Eco-communes often involve
rules for all participants, usually including a vegan or vegetarian diet, common
transport (e.g. no individually owned cars) and consensus decision making –
whereby activists make decisions while sitting in a circle without a designated
leader or central authority.
3 During climate camps, climate protestors live in a
temporary version of this kind of commune for as long as two weeks.
A commune is a moral experiment in ‘an imaginary community’ (see Trem-
lett 2012 ), with a long history. These green communes build on the communes
of 1960s counterculture and the nineteenth-century socialist ideals of com-
munity. At a climate camp most of the core campers are already living in an
eco-commune or would be looking to join one, and workshops are often held
on the theme of buying land or starting a commune. Often climate camps
are opportunities to both experiment with green ideals and demonstrate these
experiments to a wider audience (see Figure 8.1), particularly to fi rst-time
campers but also to the diversity of networks taking part in this experiment
whose models of living and ritualising could thus be synchronised.
This utopian space is very strongly delimitated by ‘the gates’, like other fes-
tival spaces that are erected periodically and begin to have a ‘tradition’ in their
punctuated ephemeral existence ( Bowman 2004 ). The boundary is continu-
ously maintained by protestors on one side and police on the other. The police
can be seen as an audience, with the camp as a theatre stage and a deeply liminal
space. The enthusiastic solidarity that Victor Turner called ‘communitas’ ( Turner
1969 ) is very easy to form within the camp, provoked by isolation from society
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140 Maria Nita
and direct confrontation with the surrounding police. The motto of the camp
I attended in 2008 was ‘They are building fences – we are building a movement.’
In their experiments with living space, these climate activists modelled a
way of living that could be carbon-neutral not only for themselves but also for
the police, the media and mainstream society more widely. While the campers
performed their activist identities inside this ephemeral, liminal and powerfully
charged space, the gates allowed them to maintain a window to the very world
they set themselves in opposition to: the consumerist culture outside. Similar to
sacred space, the spatial organisation of the whole camp refl ected new desired
relationships, abounding in communal spaces that encouraged performances
and expressivity.
The gates represent an important ritual space, highly charged by the real or
symbolic confrontation with the police. My Christian informants often prayed
for the gates and for those who were going to spend their night in vigil at the
gates. One Christian informant told me that when biscuits were being passed
along the line of protestors who were defending the gates, she experienced
this as ‘taking communion’, which raises an interesting point about individual
perception of sacred space and the fact that Christians are engaged in a con-
tinuous emotional translation or calibration of their Christian and ‘dark green’
Figure 8.1 Climate campers cooking together at the Kingsnorth climate camp in 2008. Photo
by Maria Nita.
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Climate activists and green Christians 141
identities (Nita 2014). The emphasis on the gates can be considered once again
a privileging of the outer limits of the sacred space, which may symbolically
refl ect a postcolonial and countercultural focus on marginalised humans and
non-humans and a critique of the centre and the implicit power relationships
denoted or reinforced by it.
Experimenting with sacred space at the climate camp
At the climate camp the Christian activists
4 lived as a small group (around
twenty people), offering a café inside the camp as well as daily worship.
Rituals and sacred space played a role in demarcating the Christian group
from the rest of the camp and creating a sense of common identity, but also
provoked some discomfort. In one event, the Christian group prayed at the
gates of Kingsnorth Power Station, separated from the non-religious activists.
This ritual asserted the Christian identity of the group, and took place while
the other activists were taking turns to give speeches. One of the Christian
activists later told me in an interview that ‘I felt quite self-conscious, because
I am not usually one of the Christians who is in a group of Christians, being
ostentatiously Christian, at something like that.’ Yet the group also defended
their distinct Christian identity and at times they needed to defend their actions
of demarcating themselves from the wider camp. In one instance the Christian
group decided to carry a cross during one of the protest activities, a decision
which was initially opposed by camp offi cials on the grounds that other col-
lective symbols, such as a dragon and kites, had already been assigned for this
particular action. This is a clear example of the important role material objects
have in creating and challenging a sense of identity and belonging.
At the climate camp, the Christian group offered daily worship inside the
Christian tent, where they had an opportunity to draw on their own ritual
models while also experimenting with new forms of worship. Participants sat in
a circle around an altar that had been constructed by putting together two large
hay bales, covered by a large green cloth and decorated with stones and fl owers.
Evening services composed of singing Taizé songs and praying for the camp, for
people whose life had been affected by climate change, and sometimes even for
political leaders so that they could make diffi cult decisions concerning climate
change.
5 In some cases prayer was a means of asserting disapproval of corpora-
tions and politicians, a message that resonated better with the collective voice
of the camp. The service would normally end with open/free prayer, which
allowed participants to express their personal environmental concerns, and with
communion, which was not given by a leader, as might be expected in a more
traditional setting, but was celebrated by passing bread and wine around the
circle and thus by giving or offering communion to each other.
However, this democratic model of giving communion, which is practised
by many green Christians in various ways outside of the church and dur-
ing protest camps, retreats and festivals, was not upheld when green Christians
found themselves in a church building, such as during a night climate vigil at
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142 Maria Nita
St-Martin-in-the-Field in London in 2010, when the service was led by a priest
and participants received communion from him. Although there are many pos-
sible explanations for these variations, it is clear that Christians were more able
to experiment with rituals and modalities of relating to each other outside of
traditional settings, which demonstrates the ‘material’ power of place on re-
enforcing particular behaviours. It must be said that when this more experi-
mental group of Christians was joined on the last day of the climate camp by
an ordained vicar, who also happened to be the mother of one of the organisers,
they all received communion from her, a fact that highlighted for me the high
plasticity of this syncretic green Christian movement.
In Figure 8.2 the Christian group is sitting in a circle at the actual gates of the
Kingsnorth Power Station during a collective day of action. Upon arrival at the
gates, the Christian group formed a separate group, distinguishing themselves
from the rest of the climate activists, who continued their protest outside of the
station. One informant told me,
We didn’t want what we did to be a play. I mean we did think about cos-
tumes and things like that, but we wanted to be there praying, in spirit and
in truth [. . .] we wanted to do something that would set us apart and bring
Jesus in the situation.
Figure 8.2 Christians praying at the gates of Kingsnorth Power Station, Kingsnorth 2008.
Photo by Maria Nita.
15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 142 07-10-2016 16:44:38
Climate activists and green Christians 143
By inviting Jesus into the public ritual situation, the Christian group reas-
serted their own identity and also invoked a spiritual dimension which was
otherwise missing for them in secular events, making them less satisfying, as one
informant told me. They prayed around an effi gy of the power station, on top
of which they placed an apple as a symbol of nature growing on the ruins of
destruction. This arrangement is particularly interesting because of the material
use of space in which we can see refl ected the circle and centre model outlined
earlier, when I discussed the Council of All Beings. The centre is occupied by
the ruins of the power station and so it is negatively charged; it is not a place of
power but, like with the Council of All Beings model, a place of lamentation. To
some extent the apple places a positive value inside this space, yet this arrange-
ment can be seen as a model for repentance, whereby old meanings and values
can be replaced by new ones through a process of reversing the polarity of place
through symbolic representation. Another negatively charged material object
I encountered during my research was ‘coal’, which was sometimes placed on
the altar, alongside other climate symbols, such as ‘polar bears’, to represent the
crux of the problem, humans’ dependence on fossil fuels.
Green Christians represent the coming together of an institutionalised reli-
gion and a decentralised movement, and they do not yet have fi rm shared tra-
ditions in the way they organise space. When they fi nd themselves in a church,
green Christians will conform to the familiar way in which space is already
organised. Their models of organising space at the climate camp were not nec-
essarily free of traditional pressures either, since the group needed to use easily
recognisable identity markers that would allow its demarcation from the larger
group. Yet green Christians are constructing and using sacred space in novel
ways, such as by reversing the polarity of the centre and empowering the outer
circle or participants themselves, which points towards a model for transfor-
mation for green Christian activists. In the next section of this chapter, I will
discuss sacred space in the context of the green Christian retreat. This is an
alternative experimentation with sacred space in a place where external pres-
sures, from traditional material settings on one hand and non-religious activists
on the other, can be avoided.
Moving mountains during eco-retreats
and relating to the planet
One of the Christian networks in my research was the Green Christian (GC),
previously called Christian Ecology Link (CEL), a network of Christians that
has been in operation for almost three decades, and therefore has today an
older membership than the Christian participants in the climate camp.
6 Often
focused on spirituality and lifestyle rather than protest, Green Christian holds
public conferences, forums and collective worships (often ahead of major green
events) as well as private retreats and closed steering committee meetings that
are open only to members. As previously discussed when events are held in
church halls, the content and form of worship tend to be more traditional, to
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144 Maria Nita
accord with the wider community which may be attending. During private
retreats members experiment with newer, less conventional forms of worship,
such as praying through painting, offering communion to each other, doing
experimental ecological rituals and contemplating and praying outdoors.
Eco-retreats abound in workshops and commonly involve a high degree
of exploration and plasticity. The outcome of these ‘workshop rituals’ has not
been decided yet; the ritual is not fi nalised – it will be ‘worked out’ during the
workshop. The participants will have a chance to ‘remember’, ‘rediscover’ or
‘connect’ with the aid of a specially trained guide. The ‘retreat’ also involves an
opportunity for transformation, in essence abandoning the world so that one
may come back to it with a fresh perspective. These provide opportunities for
Christian participants to organise their own sacred space, a praying room or an
altar like the one in F igure 8.3 .
The ‘retreat’ provides green Christians with the opportunity to express eco-
logical beliefs which are not represented in more mainstream Christian settings.
It also provides an opportunity to organise space in ways that refl ect the group
organisation; for example in Figure 8.4 the chairs were arranged in a circle
around the altar. Often in these settings, as at the climate camp, green Chris-
tians would give each other communion rather than receive it from a vicar. As
I suggested previously, this informal way of giving and receiving communion
refl ects an aspiration towards a less hierarchical organisation of the Christian
community, in accordance with the central precepts of the green movement.
A shared practice in eco-ritual performed by members of different religious
traditions is the use of ‘natural’ materials, such as acorns, leaves, plants and trees
( Kearns and Keller 2007 ). Here ( Figure 8.3 ) the altar has been decorated with
cones, leaves, stones and feathers alongside more traditional altar furnishings,
such as candles and prayers. The altar coverings, green and blue, signify earth
and water.
F igure 8.4 depicts the room where the altar was placed. This was the main
room where participants gathered daily during this retreat, at Ringsfi eld, Suf-
folk, in 2009. In the background there is a big poster of the planet Earth. There
are chairs all around the room, again with the altar in the centre of this space.
Beside the altar there is a pile of stones placed next to a big shoe, and in front
of the pile there is a small child’s shoe. Children were invited to this Christian
retreat, and parents were given the opportunity to take turns with childcare to
allow others to attend the workshops. The pile of stones was a symbol of the
diffi cult task of shrinking our carbon footprint.
The picture depicts the setting before the enactment of the ‘Moving Moun-
tains’ ritual, on the last day of our stay. The ritual followed a day of workshops
and discussions, with opportunities for dramatic expression. The two piles break
the monadic organisation of the circle-centre model, inserting division and
movement inside this sacred space. In a traditional Christian setting participants
would walk out towards an altar to take communion and then return to their
previous seats. They would take from the centre and return to the margins, thus
maintaining the status of the altar as a central source. In contrast in the ‘Moving
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Climate activists and green Christians 145
Mountains’ ritual the objects inside the circle are again negatively charged, the
stones representing the carbon in the atmosphere, and so just like the ruins of
the power station this negative symbol depletes the centre. During the enact-
ment of the ritual participants formed an energetic conveyer belt inside the
Figure 8.3 Altar at eco-retreat organised by Christian Ecology Link (Suffolk, 2009). Photo
by Maria Nita.
15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 145 07-10-2016 16:44:39
146 Maria Nita
circle, as they shifted the stones from the pile representing the big carbon foot-
print to the other smaller footprint. The constant movement inside the cir-
cle could be understood to transform it into a dynamically charged space, in
which participants are asked to take up an active role, symbolising their personal
involvement with fi ghting climate change. When the ritual ended, our host,
who was also a vicar, praised the children who took part in this ritual for ener-
getically moving the stones and told us all, in his usual humorous way, that the
fi ght against climate change could not be won if we ‘were dragging our feet’.
In other rituals enacted during eco-retreats the central altar was missing all
together. For example during a GC retreat in 2012 participants took part in an
outdoors Eucharist celebration, forming a semicircle and looking out into the
fi elds that surrounded the house in which we were staying. There was no altar
and a row of trees in a nearby fi eld seemed to complete the circle on the other
side. Two participants, a man and a woman, stood at the two respective edges
of the semicircle and passed bread and wine in small wicker baskets. While the
bread and wine were passed around everyone remained silent, staring out into
the fi elds. This organisation of the sacred space suggested both an inclusion of
the other-than-human into the ‘communion circle’ and an equal distribution
of power among the human participants, amplifi ed by the absence of the altar
and that of a formal offi ciant; having both a man and a woman passing the
Figure 8.4 ‘Moving Mountains’ ritual (Suffolk, 2009). Photo by Maria Nita.
15031-0485-1pass-r01.indd 146 07-10-2016 16:44:40
Climate activists and green Christians 147
bread and wine could also be interpreted in light of recent debates inside the
Christian tradition concerned with the ordination of women.
Relating to the planet
Ecological rituals, which include new constructions and organisations of sacred
space, are ways in which climate activists perform their opposition to traditional
power structures and invite participants to consider a different perspective, to
change how they look at the non-human world. For Christian activists this pro-
test is twofold, as they have the added task of reforming anthropocentric values
and beliefs inside their own tradition. They have to tread carefully between tra-
dition and innovation and be able to represent or perform both their Christian
and their green identities, despite the confl icts that arise from this encounter.
Relating to the planet as a unifi ed whole, the Earth, sometimes referred to
by the participants in my research as ‘God’s creation’, is in some respects not
very challenging for Christian activists despite the obvious danger of intersect-
ing Pagan and New Age discourses of the planet as ‘mother Earth’ or ‘Gaia’.
In some Christian rituals I have observed, the globe of the planet is processed
and placed on an altar or simply placed in the middle of the space as a distinct
focus for participants. Placing the planet in the centre of a constructed sacred
space is a powerful and radical statement, since it invites participants to consider
a biocentric viewpoint in a very literal way. Yet it can also be argued that the
representation of the globe and the iconography of the planet sustain ideas of
transcendence, whereby the planet is outside of us, somewhere in the distance
of space, which is why rituals like the Cosmic Walk appear to stress this realisa-
tion of our belonging to the Earth: ‘this fl aring forth continues as this moment,
with us, as one’ (Edwards 1999: 15). At the end of the ritual the participants
can internalise the history and identity of the planet into their own history and
their own personal or group identity.
Other ecological rituals integrate the more distant and unseen places or
inhabitants of the planet and make them relevant for participants and often for
the audience. Arctic inhabitants are usual protagonists in climate rituals and per-
formances, whether activists stage protests in which they dress up as seals and
cover themselves in oil (2008) or dress up like penguins (Figure 8.5) and polar
bears during direct actions (see Avery 2012). These protest rituals have a role
in both making climate change visible for the unengaged public and enabling
activists to explore non-human identities, as is the case with the Council of All
Beings ritual.
Ritualised processions and events like the Council of All Beings try to enable
participants to experience the other-than-human world and then return to
‘the world of the two-legged’. This is less transcendent and conversely a more
immanent or embodied means of relating to the planet since the ritual can
be a way for participants to form a connection or personal relationship to
another species and have a lived experience of a biocentric world view. Dress-
ing up, walking, being silent for a few hours and being in the company of
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148 Maria Nita
fellow human-penguins represent powerful ways of personally relating to the
planet and performing the climate crisis. Green rituals are often opportunities
to extend the participant’s identities by attempting to incorporate or integrate
the planet in one’s sphere of personal concerns, thus aiming to transform both
participants and their audiences in planetary-minded-humans.
Conclusions
The green Christians in my research adopted elements from the green move-
ment and ecological ritual repertoire and performed these syncretic encounters
by experimenting with sacred spaces. Using natural materials, such as stones
or wood, green Christians physically represented their ecological beliefs by
bringing these materials into focus. By placing the altar inside the circle of par-
ticipants, green Christians combine Christian forms of organising space, in this
case the centrality of the altar, with the horizontal relationships in ecological
practices suggested by the circle. This new space refl ects changes in the relation-
ships of the participants, where leadership can be (temporarily) abandoned in
favour of experimenting with new models of organisation.
Figure 8.5 Penguins prodding the gates of Kingsnorth Power Station in 2008. Photo by
Maria Nita.
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Climate activists and green Christians 149
I suggested here that the organisation of space can represent a powerful cri-
tique of traditional structures, as is the case with the Council of All Beings ritual.
Humans are in the centre of the circle only when they are being reprimanded
by the other life forms or put on trial for their crimes. Anthropocentrism is
therefore spatially criticised and deconstructed. Thus ideas can be challenged by
challenging material space itself: by dividing space into more than one centre,
by neglecting the centre of a sacred space, by reversing the polarity or charge
of such a space, by making the central marginal and vice versa, and fi nally by
inserting a dynamic movement into established models of sacred space.
The natural materials that create and adorn sacred space are used to alter
as well as challenge what participants consider sacred. If traditionally an altar
might have been furnished with more traditional precious objects, such as
sacred books or icons, in the examples I discussed here the altar arrangement
displayed acorns, leaves and feathers. By placing these natural materials in a
sacred setting, they can undergo what David Morgan calls in his introduction a
process of ‘remediation’, whereby they begin not only to refl ect new relation-
ships between participants but also, despite their inanimate nature, to carry new
meanings that can generate cultural change.
Notes
1 I administered two surveys at climate camps in England and Wales for which I had seventy-
eight respondents. One question asked respondents to describe their religious affi liation
and these descriptions were later interpreted and classifi ed.
2 SPEAK is Christian activist network preoccupied with global justice. The name ‘SPEAK’
is inspired by the biblical verse ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’
(Proverbs 31:8), as their literature explains.
3 Consensus decision making is a process of making decisions that represents an alternative
to democratic voting. As a process, consensus relies on discussions and creative solutions
rather than winning the vote of a majority.
4 Most of the members of this group belonged to a Christian anarchist network called Isaiah
58, a small network with a young age demographic. My last attempt to make contact with
the group in 2009 was refused due to the nature of their covert activities.
5 Taizé is a monastic community in the south of France concerned with peace and
reconciliation.
6 CEL’s core membership is made up of around thirty committed members who form the
steering committee. The larger network comprises over 1,000 paying members, with a
wider readership of the network’s bimonthly magazine, the Green Christian .
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