Response to: Exploring evolving spiritual values of forests in Europe and Asia: a transition hypothesis toward re-spiritualizing forests

The subject the authors (Roux et al. 2022) courageously approached is unfortunately fraught with pitfalls. The paper deals with ontologies, their validity, and visibility. The latter is a question of power-relations, which the authors recognize when discussing the taking over of law and formal religions but fail to identify in their own argumentation.

In setting up a line of development from “nature is powerful” over “taming of nature” and “rational management,” the authors reproduce the ontology of naturalism, which has developed as a rift between nature and man since the Greek philosophers (Descola 2013), and also repeats the story of human dominance over nature, which spread with the Christian Genesis worldwide (Amery 1972) in the wake of colonialism. This stance is not softened by the remark that this development is not necessarily linear or chronological, especially because it is aligned with the forest transition theory, which is a historical concept (Rudel et al. 2020). The ontological turn, which shook up cultural anthropology since the turn of the millennium, led by authors like Descola (2013), who set up a system of ontologies, and Viveiros de Castro (2012), who challenged the naturalistic view, has seemingly not touched the argumentation of the article.

Kirchhoff (2019) has pointed out how difficult it is to think beyond the categories of the naturalistic ontology, which haunt the vocabulary used to define something like cultural ecosystem services. This gives a stark warning that one should tread cautiously when dealing with other concepts of reality. Because modern science is based on the naturalistic ontology, all other ontologies automatically fall into the spiritual category. This epistemological problem should have been discussed in detail, as the power relations between the Western-dominated discourse and the discourse contributions based on other ontologies must be considered in a worldwide application of the authors’ concept.

To place the ontology of animism in a category of “nature is powerful” is as meaningless as the statement “society is powerful” would be for a sociologist. In a network of interdependent sentient beings with whom there is the need to communicate, there might be hierarchies of power in which humans and their shamans have to maneuver but are by no means necessarily on the lowest rung (Descola 2013).

The spread of the naturalistic ontology was partly a matter of technology but foremost of (political) power, which not only left the colonialized people speechless but also made social relationships with nonhuman beings in Europe invisible, branded as superstitious, irrational, or sentimental, accepted only as poetry and pushed back into children’s books, which are awash with speaking animals. The enlightened “rationalization” of forestry, which developed in Germany alongside feudal power-politics to secure the resources for the mining of ore and salt, did not only infringe community rights in forests (e.g., Grewe 2004) but also marginalized other interpretations of forests, such as those found in Grimm’s fairy tales (Mayer-Gampe 2002). Notwithstanding they are still applied subliminally in political contexts (Mayer-Gampe 2014). In this respect, it was wise of the authors to talk of “visibility” of spirituality and not of the existence of such.

Nevertheless, their unwavering application of the naturalistic ontology leads not only to a misconception of other ontologies but falls short of grasping the full meaning of a main driver of re-spiritualization: the myth of being apart from nature and having the power over networks we hardly understand is crumbling. The authors do note, that “the realization dawns that ‘rather than a new heaven on earth, in the worst case modern science and economics could even potentially bring a new hell on earth’” (Nelson 2013, as cited in Roux et al. 2022). But they fail to see that this crisis challenges the very categories of power they apply.

LITERATURE CITED

Amery, C. 1972. Das Ende der Vorsehung: Die gnadenlosen Folgen des Christentums. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany.

Descola, P. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Grewe, B.-S. 2004. Der versperrte Wald: Ressourcenmangel in der bayerischen Pfalz (1814-1870). Böhlau, Köln, Germany.

Kirchhoff, T. 2019. Abandoning the concept of cultural ecosystem services, or against natural-scientific imperialism. BioScience 69:220-227. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz007

Mayer-Gampe, P. 2002. Wälder und Wege: Das Phasenportrait der Evolution. Libri Books on Demand, Norderstedt, Germany.

Mayer-Gampe P. 2014. Der wahre Wald: Anmerkungen zum Konflikt zwischen Forstwirtschaft und Naturschutz. Allgemeine Forstzeitschrift 6/2014:10-13.

Roux, J.-L., A. A. Konczal, A. Bernasconi, S. A. Bhagwat, R. De Vreese, I. Doimo, V. Marini Goviglio, J. Kašpar, R. Kohsaka, D. Pettenella, T. Plieninger, Z. Shakeri, S. Shibata, K. Stara, T. Takahashi, M. Torralba, L. Tyrväinen, G. Weiss, and G. Winkel. 2022. Exploring evolving spiritual values of forests in Europe and Asia: a transition hypothesis toward re-spiritualizing forests. Ecology and Society 27(4):20. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-13509-270420

Rudel, T. K., P. Meyfroidt, R. Chazdon, F. Bongers, S. Sloan, H. R. Grau, T. van Holt, and L. Schneider. 2020. Whither the forest transition? Climate change, policy responses, and redistributed forests in the twenty-first century. Ambio 49:74-84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-018-01143-0

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere: four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, February–March 1998. Hau Books, London, UK. http://haubooks.org/cosmological-perspectivism-in-amazonia/