Clergy and scientists join forces to protect the world’s oceans.

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The Living Ocean Initiative was launched by Rev. Deborah Streeter, a Big Sur resident and ordained minister who sits on the advisory board of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Streeter runs a unique organization called Upwellings, which she describes as an “Environmental Ministry” with a mission “to bring faith communities, environmentalists, and the scientific community together.”

This connection Streeter is aiming toward, which took a step forward this week, is an old one. The antagonism between the world of God and the world of nature has been with us for some time, but it was not always so.

Throughout the eons before the invention of the God of the Jews, Muslims and Christians, people in every part of the world believed that nature was holy. That belief came to be seen as heresy—grounds for church-sanctioned imprisonment or mob-wrought violence. Nowadays, organized religion is softening its stand against the belief once reviled as primitivism, Paganism, and the like.

The Catholic theologian Réville offers a contemporary understanding of the ways in which Christian thought can coexist with something like nature worship: “Whether we say God or prefer to say nature, the important thing is that our minds are filled with the sense of a power, to all appearance infinite and eternal, a power to which our own being is inseparably connected, in the knowledge of whose ways alone is safety and well-being, in the contemplation of which we find a beatific vision.”

But while modern religious philosophers may again open their arms to Mother Earth, the contemporary “scientific” view of the world is still seen as lacking in spirit.

“Natural mythology has given place to science, which sees mechanism where will, purpose, and love had been suspected before and drops the name of God, to take up instead the less awful name of Nature,” Réville writes. “Nature is the residuum that is left after the elimination of everything supernatural.”

We are probably still a ways from the middle ground where scientists are willing to see a holy universe, and where clerics are able to see beyond their gods to recognize a sacred natural world. But it is heartening that some of them have begun talking.