This panel examines environmental justice through the intertwined lenses of political theology, ritual practice, mobility, and more-than-human agency, foregrounding how ecological crises are entangled with questions of power, belonging, and imagination. Ranging from biblical interpretation and racialized political ecology in readings of Genesis, to mutual aid food-sharing as counter-rituals of radical hospitality, the papers interrogate how communities contest exclusion and reconfigure ecological belonging in everyday life. They further explore alternative modes of dwelling beyond settlement through nomadic lifeways in the western United States, while also analyzing environmental justice struggles in the Matanza–Riachuelo River Basin in Buenos Aires, where religious and cosmological creativity is proposed as a resource for policy innovation. Finally, the panel turns to unexpected solidarities in postwar El Salvador, where alliances between religious and ecofeminist actors emerge through the agency of land itself. Taken together, these papers challenge anthropocentric and state-centered frameworks by emphasizing ecological justice as a dynamic process shaped by ritual, mobility, material relations, and multispecies entanglement.
Whether denounced or defended, Genesis still sparks interminable debate in Christian discourses of religion and ecology: Is imago dei anthropocentric? Yet when unearthing the notorious “curse of Ham” text (Gen. 9:24-27), the reception histories tend to focus—for good reason—not on the text’s environmental dimensions, but its fraught role in the origins of racialized slavery. In this paper, I contend that this separation of environmental frameworks from critical race studies, of soil questions from slavery questions, winds up impoverishing both. I explore what fresh lines of inquiry might open for the religion and ecology conversation if we read Noah’s enslaving curse as vividly disclosing the perennial human tendency toward political ecology: that is, toward the use of power, domination, and difference in distributing ecological harms and benefits.
Ecological crises increasingly displace communities into host societies that frequently conceptualize them as threats to social stability. This paper examines how host societies recast displaced populations as dangerous outsiders and justify exclusion through borders and social fragmentation. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of dirt as "matter out of place," I show how dominant narratives code displaced people as intrusions within imagined national or cultural orders, rendering their suffering morally illegible. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that confront fear and indifference through radical hospitality. These meals identify fear, exclusion, and indifference as the real social toxins and use shared food to dissolve the boundaries that sustain them. By feeding people in public spaces, these gatherings meet immediate needs and model resilient, non-state forms of collective life that embody a compassionate ecological future in the present.
Vehicle-dwelling nomads on western public lands offer a case study of ecological belonging without settlement. In contrast to ecological futures grounded in permanence, property, or linear progress, nomadic life is structured around mobility, impermanence, nonlinearity, and the constraints of state territorialization. This paper draws on participatory ethnography—including oral history interviews and my own experience living nomadically since 2022—alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology and scholarship in religion and ecology. It follows dispersed campers who cultivate temporary forms of dwelling as campsites appear and disappear and community gathers and disperses. Rather than diminishing dwelling, nomadic life intensifies ecological attunement as the quotidian becomes oriented around weather, terrain, water, wildlife, and seasonal movement across the landscapes of the western cordillera.
Industrial pollution, global-warming-intensified natural disasters, and ineffective governmental policy have converged to produce enduring environmental injustices in Buenos Aires’ Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, presenting both ethical and political. Drawing on scientific, economic, ethnographic, and journalistic sources, as well as political analyses, I argue that ongoing attempts to meaningfully improve the lives of marginalized residents have been ineffective because they fail to sufficiently (re-)imagine and innovate both in activist strategies and in policy proposals. Religion(s) can serve as (a) resource(s) for guiding responses and policymaking in the Matanza-Riachuelo, reflecting their potential to support environmental justice movements more generally. Rather than abandoning existing efforts in the Matanza-Riachuelo, this paper suggests that a strategy that both builds on their successes and drawing on religions’ cosmological creativity could best support the imagination and implementation of new political, social, environmental and economic responses.
This paper examines an unlikely alliance between a Pentecostal megachurch and an ecofeminist movement within a 2025 environmental conflict in El Salvador. Salvadoran sociologist Rafael Cartagena’s concept of socio-ambientalismo, defined as the convergence of distributive and ecological critiques, is expanded to incorporate the agency of the land in fostering this solidarity. Utilizing Actor-Network Theory, the study challenges the understanding of the social as a purely human domain by positioning more-than-human entities as actants rather than passive backdrops.
In this framework, material elements also shape the relations, mobilizations, and alliances that define the conflict. Such unlikely alliances reimagine the conceptual scope of the ecological community and planetary consciousness proposed by ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. Rather than relying on a shared progressive ideology, this paper demonstrates that within this instance of environmental resistance, ideologically distant groups can participate in productive solidarity through the agency of the land.