In this book, Paul Wapner writes that “the most important distinction that American environmentalism draws is between humans and nature” (p. 35). Because nature is seen as separate from and thus “unblemished by the imperfections and incongruities that often mark human life,” it can provide “a model for those seeking to live in the highest ways possible” (p. 61). Human beings, as environmentalism teaches, should look to wild nature in order to “emulate it as a standard for living authentic, spiritually rich, and ethically upright lives” (p. 60).

In their hubris, however, and seeing themselves as free to use nature for whatever purposes they might desire, all too many modern men and women have perpetrated an immoral assault on nature—in some environmental eyes, creating even a veritable nonhuman holocaust in which numerous plant and animal species, as well as other parts of nature, are being callously eliminated from the earth. As Wapner writes, the basic goal of American environmental policy has been to minimize the extent of such human “transgressions” against nature (p. 190).

The author finds fatal flaws, however, in this standard environmental story. First, human impacts have been so pervasive—and climate change is now rapidly adding to them—that no places on earth remain outside a significant human influence. Even before modern times, native peoples around the world were setting fires, hunting, and otherwise significantly reshaping their environments. Wild nature, as envisioned by environmentalism, perhaps never existed at all; it certainly no longer exists today.

Wapner's other basic criticism, drawing on the work of William Cronon in the mid-1990s, is that visitors to wilderness areas and other so-called wild places find there a socially “constructed character of nature” (p. 17). In essence, as one might say, wilderness areas are cathedrals of environmentalism, and just as a medieval cathedral is much more than stones and glass, a wilderness conveys a powerful message that reflects the cultural setting in which it is seen. “Nature,” as an idea in our minds, is not an independent force to which we can look for moral and spiritual guidance; it is what we make of it ourselves, sinners that—unfortunately—many of us are.

As Wapner advises, environmentalism must therefore adjust its “mission to a new world … Without nature around to orient one's work and life, American environmentalists must develop new understandings of their own and humanity's place on earth, and translate that understanding into political practice” (pp. 201–2). Environmentalism admittedly may lose moral clarity in the process. But environmentalists cannot in good conscience continue to ground their core principles and actions on a set of environmental fictions—the “dream of naturalism” (p. 53), as he labels it.

The author contrasts this environmental faith with another illusory “dream of mastery” (p. 79). For true believers in this modern gospel, the applications of science and economics are transforming nature—“natural resources”—for human betterment. The ever more efficient human management of the natural world will eliminate disease and poverty across the earth, yielding a new era of human flourishing. Such a technological imperative won out over environmental naturalism for much of the twentieth century, but these two modern “deities” (p. 122) have been contested in the public arena on more equal grounds since the 1960s.

Living Through the End of Nature finds, however, that both of these “theological poles” (p. 206) must now be rejected. The necessary replacement will involve a recognition of the closely interlinked “fate of humanity/nature and then righting ourselves to the mysteries inherent in that mélange” (p. 218), as guided by core goals of “justice, economic well-being, peace, and ecological sanity” (p. 219). It will include “maintaining a love for wild things,” even while “recognizing the impossibility of sustaining that love in a straightforward” way (p. 33), given the undeniable reality of “the end of nature.”

As such passages—and these are just the tip of the iceberg—illustrate, this book is closer to a work of theology than to a standard political and economic (or environmental) analysis. At one point Wapner, briefly acknowledges the centrality of religious concerns, writing that he does not intend to “bleach out past theological categories” in proposing a new environmental worldview, although he does want to remove any reliance on old-fashioned “theistic authority,” with its explicit references to God (p. 33).

In this last respect, however, the author succeeds only in a formal sense. Consider the following statements relating to the tenets of naturalism: “[T]he human order should be based on the natural one … [W]e should turn to nature for cues to good living” (p. 62); we must “find the wisdom and humility to accept nature as our teacher” (p. 62); “we would best flourish if nature were the source of our political, social and economic lives” (p. 62); and “the nonhuman world,” as leading environmentalists believed, “had much to teach humans, and that we should look to nature for healthy, right living” (p. 63).

This nature has little to do with a genuinely scientific description. Newton was not seeking guides to good living in the workings of the solar system. Darwin revealed a natural order of ruthless competitive struggle to the finish. In Christian theology, however, nature has long been seen as a mirror of the mind of God. It is possible to learn directly about God in two main ways, by studying the “Book of the Bible” and the “Book of Nature.” Seen from such a traditional Christian (and Jewish) perspective, Wapner's many environmental references to the ethical and spiritual guidance to be found in nature have a clear—if never explicitly acknowledged, in his case—meaning: We must accept and follow God's instructions and plans for us.

This would have been a better book if Wapner had, in fact, been more explicit about all of this. He also does not mention that the progressive “dream of mastery” also implicitly invokes a Christian message. In Marxism, perhaps the extreme example of this faith, humans are alienated (sinful), but the laws of economics as revealed in the workings of the class struggle (a new omnipotent God) will necessarily bring about a cataclysmic earthly conflict (an apocalypse), yielding in the end a new communist paradise (a new heaven on earth). Human beings will then finally be reconciled with their true natures. The goal not only of Marxism but of all such forms of “economic religion” is the same as “environmental religion”—to reunite sinful human beings with their much better and truer natural state that preceded the Fall. Their actual disagreement is over the correct means—whether along an economic path or an environmental path—to the same Eden.

With a few notable exceptions such as Max Weber, the social sciences neglected religion for most of the twentieth century. Many thought that the role of religion in society was declining and might even disappear. By the end of the century, however, it was becoming obvious that this view was mistaken. Increasingly, social scientists are now taking up the study of the determinants of religious belief and the impact of religion on social and economic outcomes.

Wapner, however, is engaged in a different type of project with which social scientists are less familiar and comfortable. He is, in essence, examining economic and environmental thought as religions themselves. Rejecting each of them as inadequate, he proposes the rough outlines of what amounts to a new religious compromise. Because his intended audience is largely secular, however, and might be offended by the idea that he is proposing a new variant on Christian religion, explicitly identified as such, Wapner treads a fine line. He has written a book that is really about religion, even about God, even as he leaves out any explicit references to Christian theology, to the Bible, or to God. It is possible that he is not himself fully aware of the historical religious sources of his own thinking.

Wapner is hardly alone. In the twentieth century, secular religion replaced the traditional Jewish and Christian faiths as the leading religious influences in the public sphere. With traditional Jewish and Christian conversations largely driven out of public policy discourse, they went underground, reappearing as disagreements among forms of secular religion (see, Robert H. Nelson, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, 2010).

Secular religions, as Wapner sees both economics and environmentalism, are real religions, not just any idea or belief that may be very strongly (very “religiously”) held. As religious books (in only modest disguise) such as Living Through the End of Nature become more common (and with mainstream academic publishers such as MIT Press), this will admittedly pose major challenges for political theory. How do we justify, for example, teaching environmental religion in the public schools when any similarly energetic proselytizing of Christian religion would be prohibited there? If the whole idea of separating church and state—like separating humans and nature for American environmentalism—is actually falling apart, what will be the consequences for American political and constitutional thought?