Recent religious studies scholarship has examined the historical and cultural variability by which ''religion'' and ''the sacred'' have been constructed by scholars and by the public. This article argues that geographers of religion must take these deconstructive arguments to heart. Rather than assuming there is a universal feature of human life called ''religion,'' the author argues that the religious and the sacred should be studied by geographers as ways of distributing particular kinds of significance across geographic spaces. Rooted in modern distinctions of religious/secular and sacred/profane and in the Enlightenment urge to classify, constructs of religion are efforts to demarcate, purify, and territorialize. Postmodernization exacerbates the individualization of religion but also destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane. If religion is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, a ''recent invention'' that, with a shift in structural relations, might ''be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,'' the elements that have made up this thing called religion will certainly persist in other forms, and it is the task of geographers of religion to trace the changing orchestrations of those significances across space and place.

T he debate between realists and constructivists has polarized much environmental scholarship in recent years. Although social constructivist accounts have proven fruitful in making sense of a wide range of social phenomena, their more recent application to natural phenomena, and especially to environmental issues, has raised questions that prove discomforting for many environmental scholars and activists. The dilemma raised by constructivists is this: If nature, wilderness, ecology, and the environment are all socially constructed-ideas about the world rather than the world itself-what is it exactly that environmental protection efforts are fighting to defend and preserve? 1 This debate flared up among environmental scholars following the publication of William Cronon's (1995a) article "The Trouble With Wilderness" and the edited collection Uncommon Ground (Cronon, 1995b). Although not an entirely original argument (see, e.g., Callicott, 1991;Nelson, 1996), Cronon's cultural and historical deconstruction of the wilderness idea managed to make it into the popular press, with an excerpt published in The New York Times. In a series of articles and magazine editorials, conservation biologist Michael Soulé (1995), Earth First! cofounder Dave Foreman (1996/1997), biocentric deep ecologists George Sessions (1995a) and Paul Shepard (1995), and poet Gary Snyder (1996 responded by decrying Cronon and his postmodern deconstructionist allies as new enemies of environmentalism, responsible for what Soulé and Lease (1995) called a "social siege of nature" that ostensibly both parallels and supports the physical siege of nature by industrial society.

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