Heritage Document: Conservation and Religious Humanism

This intuitive capacity to respond to surroundings by which men used to live in primitive conditions has continued as a religious emotion which can respond to the idea of the power or the total environment which controls life. That idea in the past has been divinity. Now it needs to be the forces of nature. We need a reverence for the physical nature of our environment and veneration for the natural law by which we live. We need to develop a depth of religious feeling to express this reverence, to provide the emotional drive to adapt our political forms to the work of conserving the air, water, fertility and resources which have produced us and by which we shall continue to live.