Environmentalism is central to the discourse of much contemporary paganism. It is considered a primary source of self-identification, and Paganism potentially provides powerful resources for activist engagement with urgent contemporary environmental issues. However, a tendency towards meditative quietism among some Pagans is also revelatory of aspects of Pagan identity that are, among other things, internally divisive. Challenging questions of academic engagement as well as issues of direct action and boundary drawing within Paganism are raised here.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Here, I make no claim about the existence or not of God(s), about which I remain genuinely agnostic. But I do take the position that as this matter cannot be determined experimentally – or falsified, in Popperian fashion – it cannot be answered by, and so lies outside the purview of, science. Consequently, any final statement on the matter remains theological, an article of faith, irrespective of the weight of argument proffered.2 The psychedelic guru and proselytizer, Terence McKenna (1946–2000) drew heavily upon Whitehead.

The Green Man is a familiar image in British popular culture who is celebrated in a variety of ways, not least in an ever-growing number of festive processions in towns, villages, and cities, particularly around Beltane (May Day). Combining two scholarly voices, this article offers a survey of the Green Man image and related ritual phenomena in what we refer to as the 'Green Man complex'. Here we address the Green Man's role in what could be the mobilization of responses to the current ecological crisis, as well as his relationship to growing trends in dark green religion. Last, we turn our attention to the theoretical innovations that current Green Man phenomena invites: more than 'symbolic' or 'representational', the Green Man is a source for contemporary Pagan ritual religious creativity that is being used in animistic, embodied, territorializing, and reciprocal fashions to direct human attention toward the other-than-human vegetable kingdom.

The Green Man is a familiar image in British popular culture who is celebrated in a variety of ways, not least in an ever-growing number of festive processions in towns, villages, and cities, particularly around Beltane (May Day). Combining two scholarly voices, this article offers a survey of the Green Man image and related ritual phenomena in what we refer to as the ‘Green Man complex’. Here we address the Green Man’s role in what could be the mobilization of responses to the current ecological crisis, as well as his relationship to growing trends in dark green religion. Last, we turn our attention to the theoretical innovations that current Green Man phenomena invites: more than ‘symbolic’ or ‘representational’, the Green Man is a source for contemporary Pagan ritual religious creativity that is being used in animistic, embodied, territorializing, and reciprocal fashions to direct human attention toward the other-than-human vegetable kingdom.

One of the defining features of the 1990s in Britain was large-scale popular campaigning against the construction of new roads. In the late 1980s the then Conservative government, siding with the roads lobby in the 'great transport debate', announced a massive 23 billion euros programme of new road building across the length of the country. Protesters, variously motivated but united by the belief that road-building would create more traffic congestion not less and that the swathes of countryside lost therefore to development would be sacrificed in vain, placed themselves bodily in the way of construction. The diverse and detraditionalized nature of protest-movement spiritualities resists their easy categorization into a single label, but nevertheless certain themes predominate suggesting two broad types of Eco-Paganism. The decision to build a new road creates, in effect, the space in which alternative lifestyles and spiritualities can flourish, albeit temporarily.

This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms— and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological, psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault's sense, are imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive discourses (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses) have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse— the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the phenomenon of mushroom-induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research.

This article traces how a motif from folklore, that of the marauding dragon, became reinterpreted by UK Pagans and Earth Mystics-for whom it symbolised a mysterious 'dragon energy' circulating harmoniously through the landscape-and by a radically motivated branch of Paganism, namely Eco-Paganism. Eco-Paganism, which emerged during the environmental anti-road protests of the 1990s, advocated a blend of direct and magical action in the form of 'dragon-raising' rituals for the protection of threatened pieces of land. The history of this idea of the dragon is presented, with examples of political and dragon-raising rituals, with particular reference to those performed by the Dragon Environmental Group.

Emerging from the anti-road protests which marked the 1990s, Eco-Paganism is a collective term for the diverse set of de-traditionalised, but Pagan-like, spiritualities found within road-protest culture. Whilst the actions, and direct-action, of protesters may not always appear outwardly to be religious, many protesters are motivated by their religious convictions such as the paramount belief in the sanctity of nature. The protest lifestyle, involving an immersion in nature through living outdoors and sleeping in treehouses, reinforces these convictions. These sentiments, and the anguish felt by practitioners as they engage in environmental struggle, find expression through spontaneous rituals. This article provides an overview of the protest lifestyle, suggesting ways in which it informs Eco-Pagan religiosity. An example of a typical ad-hoc religious ritual is provided.

Environmental protest in Britain in the 1990s flourished with the growth of the direct action movement. A distinctive culture of protest emerged, particularly in response to the construction of new roads, with its own radicalised spirituality known as ''eco-paganism.'' One feature of the movement was the adoption of a fairy mythology as a significant belief narrative. This article gives examples of this mythology, showing how it was expressed, and demonstrates that it produced three responses: outright rejection; a symbolic identification with fairies; and/or literal belief. This last position was given credence by occasional phenomenological encounters with otherworldly beings, examples of which are given. The article concludes that, whether literal or symbolic, the belief in fairies helped protesters make sense of their struggles, hardships and occasional successes.

Rapoport's rule, the tendency for species' geographical range sizes to increase from the equator to the poles, holds for Palearctic mammals under four methods of analysis, each of which makes different statistical assumptions. The climatic variability hypothesis for explaining Rapoport's rule is tested. In support of the hypothesis, annual temperature range is a good predictor of range size. However, latitude is an even better predictor of range size. Because meridians do not cause ecological patterns, some other factor, for which latitude is a surrogate measure, must also determine range size; habitat size may be one such factor.

1. The amount of overlap between the geographic ranges of closely related species is thought to depend, in part, on the extent to which similar species share the same habitat requirements and on the degree of competition between them.2. The amount of overlap between pairs of closely related species is compared with an expected amount, generated using a null model. Two data sets are used: Palearctic mammals and British mammals.3. Closely related species tend to overlap more than expected by chance, suggesting that species' distributions are more constrained by niche requirements than competition. Species that overlap less than expected are more similar in body size and vice versa, leading to the conclusion that competition may cause species with similar body sizes to reduce geographic range overlap.