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Land‐use change threatens biodiversity and ecosystem function worldwide. These changes have impacts on weather patterns, carbon storage, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services from regional to local scales. Only 8 percent of tropical forests are formally recognized as conservation areas, however globally, there is a network of sites that are protected because they are sacred and as a result act as ‘shadow’ conservation for biodiversity. Unlike other types of protected sites (e.g., national parks), these sites are seats of religious ritual that anchor a community's cultural identity, while also conserving biological diversity and other ecosystem services. We studied the extent and status of sacred forests in northern Ethiopia, which are threatened because of their small size (~5 ha) and isolation, increasing their exposure to edge effects and human pressures. Using historical and modern imagery, we found that over the last 50 yr, sacred forests have increased in area, but decreased in crown closure. We also found that forest ecological status, via ground‐level investigation, had high mean human disturbance (e.g., trails, plantations, exotic planting; 37%); and that forests close to markets (e.g., cities) increased in area due to planting of Eucalyptus (exotic), indicating a potential threat to their persistence and value as shelters of the church.

Aims & ScopeWorldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology is an international academic journal that studies the relationships between religion, culture, and ecology worldwide. The journal addresses how cultural and ecological developments influence the world's major religions, giving rise to new forms of religious expression, and how in turn religious belief and cultural background can influence people's attitudes towards ecology.

In many Tamil villages, sacred groves are maintained in part because of the perception of the forest as an abode of forces both dangerous and crucial to the vitality of settled life. However, one scheduled tribe community, the Malaivazhmakkal Gounders, or 'Mountain-dwelling farmers', seems to have largely dispensed with such a view. In its place is a vision of nature dominated by pragmatism and rationalism, which regards as illogical and old-fashioned the taboos that once established the sanctity of sacred groves. Various historical forces have brought about this shift in mentality. Particularly powerful vectors of change, I would argue, are the tar roads constructed over the last twenty years that now connect Malaivazhmakkal villages to regional centers. These have created new opportunities and aspirations for the younger generation. Yet these same roads, with their democratizing influence, have also weakened the taboos that have . historically limited human use of the flora of the groves.

This special issue takes a new approach to the study of religion and nature in Indian Hinduism by drawing on recent ethnography to examine the meanings that priests, pilgrims and ordinary devotees attribute to forests and trees today. Attentive to the rapidly changing social and ecological environment of contemporary India, these studies investigate how people relate to forests and trees that are in various ways set apart, whether as a natural park, a verdant temple, or a deity’s embodied form. In these articles, trees and forests emerge not as peaceful retreats from the hurly-burly profane world, but rather as zones of contestation between competing definitions of ritual authority, progress, and authenticity. Hindus also appear here less as purely religious people, whose cosmologies predispose them to approach trees with reverence and restraint, and more as multi-dimensional people who are as enmeshed as the rest of us in worlds increasingly penetrated by mass media, mass transportation and mass consumption.