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Spiritual ecology explores the interface of religions and spiritualities on the one hand, and environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms on the other. As an international environmental movement, spiritual ecology involves a multitude of diverse leaders, organizations, and initiatives. They share a common concern and commitment to pursuing the vital role of religion and spirituality in environmentalism to complement secular approaches to environmental problems and issues from the local to the global levels. Here, after some background, spiritual ecology as a component of the phenomena of international environmental movements is exemplified through three cases: the Green Belt Movement beginning in Kenya, the Green Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation affiliate of the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund).

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) identifies building and development, a major corollary of population growth and urbanization, as the number one primary threat to the conservation of heritage sites worldwide. With efforts at conserving these sites focussing on anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, this study introduces and examines the role of the traditional African religion as a conservation strategy using the Osun-Osogbo grove in Nigeria as a case study.

Satellite imageries of the grove and surrounding areas were analysed for land-use and land cover change using Geographic Information Systems (GISs). A review of documentary evidence and key-informant interviews were also carried out on the state of the grove and how religious beliefs impact same.

Results showed that between 1986 and 2017, vegetal covers decreased by 77.1% while built-up areas grew by 342.4%. Despite the phenomenal rate of urbanization in the study area, the grove remained largely intact and even recorded a marginal increase in its vegetal cover and plant species. Qualitative data revealed that the fear of the religious taboos associated with the resident goddess of the grove, rather than a moral responsibility to the environment, was responsible for these outcomes.

The application of remote sensing and GIS in a transdisciplinary study of cultural heritage makes the work novel and contributes to the methodological approaches for such studies. The findings also show the potency of religion in environmental and cultural conservation.

Codes of ethics are a moral reflection centred on the duties and rights of a given profession that establishes the minimum moral standards required. These codes imply self-regulation and therefore an individual application on the conduct of professionals. In this chapter we reflect on the main values that guide PR practice based on Schwartz's theory of basic human values, which measures universal values that are recognised throughout all major cultures. A qualitative and quantitative content analysis was carried out of the codes of ethics of six national PR and communication associations and of the Global Alliance's code. The ethics codes were analysed to study the priorities of values stressed by PR professional associations and to highlight the motivational values that may be present in them. Findings show that values contained in the codes of ethics are based on a system of 32 human values; three of the values – the common good, integrity and truthfulness – are identified in all the codes; motivational values relating to universalism, benevolence and conformity are also covered to varying degrees in all the texts. It has been confirmed that the Global Alliance code is the only text that deals with the values of all the motivations described by Schwartz. The PR codes of ethics are based on a list of common ethical values of a collective nature, which are mostly contemplated by the Global Alliance; the main difference at the national level is that Latin countries include in their texts more principles of ethical universalism.

This paper aims to explore the significance of the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia for wider questions of democratization, interrogating in particular the question of the relationship between religion and politics in the aftermath of the revolutionary event. The political landscape emerging after the 14th of January Tunisian Revolution has witnessed the emergence of a new political class competing in the country’s first free democratic elections on October 23. The moderate Islamist Ennahda Party emerged victorious and obtained the majority of seats in the National Constituent Assembly. These developments in the revolutionary aftermath re-opened questions over the future of “secular Tunisia” and re-ignited the political struggle between modernist and traditionalist visions of society. As a result, religious actors have increasingly been taking to the streets alongside the general population via participation in public protests, creation of new unions and associations, presence in the media, militancy in new or pre-existent political parties, etc. In this context, this research focuses on the way in which the 2011 uprisings impacted on democratization by seeking to explain how and why religious leaders are re-emerging as influential figures in the political landscape of post-revolutionary Tunisia.

This chapter discusses the impact of tourism on the Kampong Glam Islamic heritage site in Singapore. For tourism development purposes, the main artery of the district was converted into a pedestrian mall. Planners tried to connect contemporary marketing initiatives for Islamic heritage with the historic role of Kampong Glam as a pilgrim destination, and attempted to legitimize the intense interventions. Despite these efforts, the rapidly induced changes have caused alienation of parts of the local Muslim community from the district. The chapter portrays the challenge to showcase Kampong Glam as a center of Singapore's Islamic heritage for interested tourists, while retaining the district's role as a homestead for the local Muslim minority.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

The purpose of this paper is to establish and test the role of religiosity, ethnicity, individual basic values, and consumer innovativeness in influencing consumer acceptance of novel products. This paper specifically addresses: the driving force of religiosity and ethnicity and mediating roles of individual basic values and consumer innovativeness in influencing acceptance of novel products.

A questionnaire was constructed and distributed to 700 respondents in the urban area of Malaysia based on convenience sampling. The data collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Findings show that religiosity and ethnicity are the main drivers that influence the acceptance of new products. Specifically, religiosity and ethnicity have negative relationship with openness to change (stimulation, self-direction, and hedonism) and positive relationship with conservation value (traditions and conformity); conservation values have negative effects on consumer innovativeness and acceptance of new products; openness to change values show the positive relationship with innovativeness and acceptance of new products; openness to change and conservation value mediate the relationship between religiosity and consumer innovativeness; conservation value mediates the relationship between ethnicity and consumer innovativeness; and consumer innovativeness mediates the relationship between individual basic values and acceptance of novel products. The model has been able to explain 34 percent of the variance in acceptance of novel products.

Different from previous research that often focussed on demographic and observable (e.g. age, race, religion) antecedents of innovation acceptance, the current research emphasized on the influence of behavioral and psychological characteristics (e.g. religiosity, ethnicity, values and innovativeness) on the consumer acceptance of novel products.

Throughout their histories the Evangelical and Catholic communities have been traditional opponents. Seldom have they agreed, and never have they joined to work as one within the US society and polity. However, beginning in the early 1990s some small, self‐identifying élites from each religious community sought out in the other visible persons of similar ideological and moral commitment. Advances the context of that dialogue between these micro‐élites, proposes the application of classical élite theory to explain the dialogue better. Generates a seven‐postulate hypothesis to answer the question posed by the context and the application of élite theory: can self‐selected micro‐élites maintain their alliance and accommodation for a significant period of time? Given that these are integrative and pattern maintenance élites (not the more usual ruling and adaptive ones) the application of élite theory offers an unconventional understanding of alliance building, as well as an uncommon insight into religious co‐operation and political accommodation by micro‐élites in contemporary US politics.

This chapter offers a new sustainability-oriented paradigm for cultural and heritage tourism studies: an integrated approach to heritage tourism and heritage conservation based on resilience. Its extensive literature review examines resilience in a range of disciplinary areas, including heritage conservation and tourism studies. An important aim is to “make visible” often neglected parameters in the interactions among social, cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions of heritage conservation and tourism. Within the broader concept of resilience, “cultural resilience” was identified as a crucial bridge between conservation and tourism. The study argues that resilience in general and its cultural forms in particular offer a potentially valuable framework vital for an integrated approach between the two in the common pursuit to manage change and uncertainty in cultural and heritage destinations. The chapter concludes with directions for further development of sustainability-oriented paradigm studies.

Plato and Aristotle would have found the modern effort to fuse ethics and ecology to be incomprehensible. Despite the fact that oikos—meaning house or household—is a Greek word, Greek science did not entertain a concept of ecology. Nor did Greek philosophy regard nature as morally considerable. Etymology aside, the word ecology in anything like its modern sense of “biospheric house” did not appear in European thought until 1873 when Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist and philosopher, used it, with the spelling “Oekologie,” in his The History of Creation. Furthermore, the words “ecology” and “ecological” always had exclusive reference, until quite recently, to a scientific discipline and not to a branch of philosophy. As with the Classical Greek philosophers, so it was also with modern thinkers. Ethics, they held, were concerned solely with interpersonal relations. They could not, therefore, recognize a duty to nature. That we do owe a duty to nature, however, is the carefully considered conclusion of most of the environmental ethicists.