The view from Holy Names College is at once beautiful and disheartening. Conlon does not fit the stereotype of New Age philosopher or flaky preacher, instead he puts his listeners at ease with confidence and knowledge in what he says. The Earth can teach us how to live, but we need to learn the language of the Earth - Earth literacy. Signs of environmental crisis bombard us everyday. Pollution, urban sprawl, overpopulation and deforestation are just a few of the many indicators portrayed in the media that tell us our natural world is in decline.
Environmental groups wage war with lawmakers on a daily basis, jockeying for a better world.
But this activism approach seems to have accomplished little since the movement's humble birth in the 1960s. Yet, with a small but growing number of devotees, a movement known as Spiritual Ecology is attempting to fill the void. It goes all the way back to our beginning, but with a contemporary practice. Not a particularly new idea or philosophy, spiritual ecology has been practiced by indigenous religions since their inception. However, it is somewhat fresh and unknown to Western Society.