INTRODUCTION

Religious groups and leaders, as well as spiritual language and metaphors were important to sustainability from its earliest uses, as illustrated in Chapter 4. They variously contributed to three broad types of religious production related to sustainability discourse and practice: (a) the nature-as-sacred religion that occurs within many subcultures of resistance (b) ecological pronouncements from institutionalized religious traditions; and (c) a generic, humanistic civil religion. Each of these has consistently appeared in international political venues attended by civil society actors, and international governance and finance units such as the UN and World Bank. A discussion of major contemporary conferences, publications, declarations, and commissions (in the first section of this chapter) will bring the historical development of sustainability up to the present. With this history, and the increasingly complex web of relationships (between agents, ideas, and practices) in view, it should become clear that the political processes that some scholars (e.g. Light 2002; Light and de-Shalit 2003; Norton 2005) have pointed to as the essential elements of sustainability require inputs from the spiritual dimensions of sustainability for the formulation of sustainable public policy. Analyzing contributions to the religious dimensions of sustainability from institutional religions, political institutions, and religions of resistance at benchmark conferences and events, this chapter concludes by highlighting some contemporary developments at the nexus of civil society and international politics.