Introduction: Spatial Turns in the Study of Religion and the Environment: Impulses for the Acceleration of a Place-Based Discourse in the Environmental Humanities

摘要

Since the 1970s, environmental challenges have led to a process of several more or less interconnected, valuable responses in research and environmental science and climatology, as well as in several social sciences and in the increasing synergy of disciplines in the so called environmental humanities. This mobilization in the sciences and humanities has gone hand in hand with the emergence and development of environmentalism in the sphere of social movements, which again has had an impact on society and culture, especially including politics—from local to global—as well as the economy. Particularly, the "spaces-in-between" are of specific interest as "nature" always takes place between people, and between humans and other beings. This "in-betweenness" exists because we are caught in the tensions between multiple levels of relationality. "[T]hese tensions become productive only when our political encounter with nature finds a unity amidst the differences in our interpretations of space" (Clingerman, 2015,135; cf. Luccarelli and Bergmann, 2015, 14-17).