What should be the relationship between religion and the environment?

Previously, religion and the environment have not been two related topics of interest. When one typically thinks of religion, they think of churches, preachers, and trying to prevent living a dreadful afterlife. When an average person typically thinks of the environment, they think of "tree-huggers" and nature itself. Recently, however, scholars have started to link the two entities together for the main reason that religion does have a strong connection with the environment. For example, in Christianity, God hopes to protect all of the environment and not just the humans in it. God wanted humans and various types of animals on Noah's Ark and not just humans. Therefore, Christianity is rather big on protecting all lifeforms and not just humans. Also, like the religion and environmental studies video that we watched in class dealing with Yale University, Buddhism could possibly save trees in Thailand. Since many people look to religion on how to live their daily lives and what to believe, it's important that the environment be stressed within religions in order to attempt to save the earth. For example, in the article "Faith in Conservation, New Approaches to Religions and the Environment," many Christian churches have realized that one way to help spread the word about environmentalism is to do it via churches. One church has even gone as far as promoting "What car would Jesus drive?" to try to implement proper environmental decisions on purchasing items like cars. There are also several organizations that combine the environment with religion like the World Bank, Alliance of Religion & Conservation and even the World Wildlife Fund (Worrell 365-6). Overall, I do believe that religion and the environment should have a slight relationship. Since organizations have tried other ways of marketing eco-friendly products and they haven't exactly succeeded too well, I feel as though the church could step in and make this marketing a little more productive. After all, the first religions were based on thee relationship between man and the environment and even the Christian God loves "the whole world."

Worrell, Ernst. "Faith in Conservation, New Approaches to Religions and the Environment." Resources, Conservation & Recycling 41.4 (2004): 365-6. Print.