Five years ago, I was winding my way along verdant Colombian mountains spotted with rows of coffee trees to collect data for my dissertation research. Every so often, I would stop at a small village square to conduct interviews with farmers who’d descended from their small plots of land.

While my objective was to gather information about climate change impacts on coffee farmers’ lives, following these interviews, something else stuck with me. At times, each farmer seemed to speak of his or her land with a kind of poetic mysticism. As if it were more than composite pieces of dirt and trees and air and water, but rather something sacred. The tendency was subtle yet prevalent. 

A PhD student at the time, I was indoctrinated in the science-spiritual dichotomy and thus prevented from brazenly naming the nature of the connection I had observed between farmer and land. What’s more, it felt too nebulous, too wispy. Spirituality hadn’t been the focus of my research, nor an area that seemed at all quantifiable nor qualifiable. Yet, I could not let go of what I’d observed. There had been something so beautiful and poignant in the surges of passion I’d detected in the faces and voices of my interviewees. 

And so, a year later, when I read a Pew Research Center study about the explosive growth in individuals who no longer belong to a religion but consider themselves spiritual—a population now counting one in four adults in the United States—my synapses started firing all over again. I knew there was something here, something I knew we needed to know more about. So I succumbed to one of the best guides—one for which there is unfortunately less and less space in academia: intense curiosity. 

As a social scientist, I’d long been committed to climate change and agricultural research, but in 2022 I quietly launched a small, exploratory “hobby” study with 28 individuals who identified as spiritual but not religious. My team and I conducted in-depth interviews, asking each subject questions about their thoughts on the existence of God (or gods), an afterlife, the meaning of life, morals/ethics, how they felt about trying to communicate their beliefs, and whether their spirituality influenced their everyday behaviors. Participants were diverse, ranging in age from 18 to 80, holding high school degrees to doctorates; they were different races and genders and had different political affiliations. 

Having completed a couple books on food security, agriculture, and communication, I understood with ironclad certainty that we have the technical solutions to climate change. The pieces, I’m confident, are all there; we know what we need to do. What we lack, however, is broad-enough social willpower and consensus. We are missing a united front built on compassion and connection and courage to do something big enough and amazing enough to confront this slowly unrolling, catastrophic disaster. The solution to climate change, I saw after launching this new study, didn’t seem to lie in technological innovation or climate modeling (not to negate their importance), but rather, in something within humanity itself.

In summary, my colleague and I found that the specific beliefs held by participants were disparate. However, we identified a few notable themes: These individuals believed in a profound connection to one another and the natural environment, and they felt uncomfortable trying to express themselves publicly, or to others, for fear of misunderstandings, inability to find the right words, or a gnawing sense that no one would take them seriously. As a result, many reported staying quiet about a belief that is growing unobtrusively, if often silently, within the hearts of millions of Americans.

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Belief in a spiritual connection to the natural world is not new. For millennia, different communities and groups around the world have cultivated powerful narratives, practices, and cultures around it. What is relatively new is the unceasing desire to stomp this connection out in the name of rigorous standards of “science” and “modernity.” A practice that has—through rationalization, rhetoric, culture, violence, oppression, earnestness, and cruelty—been highly effective in erasing, silencing, and belittling nature-centric beliefs and knowledge systems in many parts of the world.

Nevertheless, this desire for spiritual meaning and connectedness to our natural world does not appear fully repressible. Even in a contemporary America that embraces cold logic and capitalism, it burgeons. What is ever more curious is that the individual who identifies as spiritual but not religious is engaging in an evolution that is independent from organization and community. This is not a group initiative—it is a thoughtful, internal movement led by people who, disenfranchised by religion, are tentatively exploring and seeking something else.

Like many, I find myself in the strange—and difficult to explain—position of wanting to lay claim to both scientific and spiritual interests. As my undergraduate students could tell you, I do not want to live in a world that does not contain rigorous, statistically literate scientists. But neither do I want to live in a world that rejects wonder, possibility, compassion, connection, and the varied and often mystical ways of knowing. Why can’t we make space for all of this? Why does spirituality have to be a threat? What is it if not a beautiful door to explore avenues of deeper knowledge? 

I do not want to live in a world that does not contain rigorous, statistically literate scientists. But neither do I want to live in a world that rejects wonder, possibility, compassion, connection, and the varied and often mystical ways of knowing.

And from a pragmatic side, science—in its current form—is simply not enough to drive the environmental change needed to adequately address climate change.

“Science and art, matter and spirit, Indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and aster for each other?” asks author Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. In her landmark book on indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge, Kimmerer alludes to the striking contrast between the colors of said two flowers, which have evolved to grow next to each other because their beautiful color pairing draws more pollinator honeybees.

For four decades, climate change has been making the news. Researchers have identified the primary frames—i.e., the words, symbols, images, and phrases—used to portray it. Because the past decades’ primary frames used to encapsulate climate change tend to be primarily political or otherwise distant from an individual perspective, I believe these frames have failed at being effective in promoting positive self-efficacy. 

“Efficacy is your belief about whether you’re able to solve a problem,” says Abel Gustafson, an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati and an expert on climate change messaging. “When it comes to climate change, many people are feeling hopeless, powerless, and doomed—that is, very low-efficacy." Research shows that when people feel that way, they are much less likely to try to fight against the problem. Gustafson believes fear and hope “need to be presented side by side,” reasoning that, without hope, “nobody will bother to take action.” 

Could a heightened sense of spirituality change all this?

I take heart in Kimmerer, who juxtaposes our modern, Western conceptualization of nature—that of a commodity that we are leeching away—against her traditional beliefs in a sentient natural world that loves us and wants to provide for us, just as we love it and care for it back. “If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow,” she writes. “When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.… A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts.” Kimmerer has an audacious counter-proposal to the modern Western ideology that we are either (a) the stewards of Earth or (b) the leeches of Earth. Rather, she contends, the Earth loves us and wants to care for us. 

Is this something we are secretly longing for as a society? Hope? A sense of connection? Of being loved, and loving in return? Could spirituality save us?

After my first study’s findings, I launched a much larger survey to explore whether spiritual and ethical messaging around the climate crisis is actually more effective in inspiring action among Americans. The research is ongoing, but of the 370 participants to date, 59 percent report that the statement “People are a part of/one with nature” most closely matches their beliefs. This far exceeds the 38 percent who selected “People are stewards of nature,” and the mere 3 percent who believe that “People and nature are separate.” Ninety-eight percent of subjects report feeling a moral or ethical obligation to care for Earth.

After four decades of failing to take adequate action on climate change, the time seems nigh to accept that a new approach to the science and politics of climate change is due. This isn’t pie-in-the-sky thinking; it is pragmatic. And I want to qualify my use of the word new. There is, in fact, nothing new at all about seeing the interconnectedness of life and Earth. It is, perhaps, as natural as breathing. And maybe, all this time, we have in fact just been suffocating ourselves with an imposed and limited worldview of what science and society should be.