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Solving the many environmental challenges we face will require insights from the worlds of science and technology, economics and the law. But those alone won’t be sufficient: we also need a moral force, say Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, senior lecturers and research scholars at Yale — and co-founders and directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. In this episode of the Yale Environmental Dialogue podcast, they are joined by Rev. Nancy Wright, a paster at Ascension Lutheran Church in South Burlington, Vermont, for a discussion on the role of religion and spirituality in addressing environmental challenges. They make the case that when moral and spiritual perspectives are brought into the conversation about social and environmental problems, innovative solutions often arise.

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In the past, ecologists contended that nature must be protected from humankind and its relentless drive to dominate and destroy it. That view, however, is giving way to a new vision of humankind and nature working together, each dependent on the other for its existence. In this episode, Oswald J. Schmitz, professor of population and community ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, explores this new way of thinking about nature — of which humans are a part — and its promise for ensuring a more sustainable future. He is joined by Eleanor Sterling, the chief conservation scientist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, who describes some of the dangers of separating humans from nature — including a lost knowledge of how different systems work and interact — and how some cultures across the world have successfully maintained relationships with the natural world.