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Having articulated the conditions to respond to or induce environmental guilt and shame, it is reasonable to wonder how humans could develop such resources. Chapter 9 maintains that religious rituals have the ability to create and sustain the conditions. This argument is founded on two strands of thought: J. Z. Smith and Catherine Bell’s theories of ritual, particularly regarding rites of affliction, which respond to disorder or wrong and provide terminology for conceiving of ritual in general. Studies of environmental ritual, especially the work of William R. Jordan III, Gretel van Wieren, and Joanna Macy who identify ritual as a way of responding to negative experiences, affects, and states of being, enable the consideration of environmental rituals. Their work requires expansion to deal relationships between humans or involving collectives, particularly the need to apologize to those harmed and change behavior to prevent further harm. Spontaneous confessional rituals about environmental guilt and shame in popular online confessions and an apology ritual at the Standing Rock prayer camp against the Dakota Access Pipeline exhibit some of these features but are still limited with respect to the conditions required to respond to guilt and shame. Thus, intentional ritualization and using multiple rituals will likely be necessary to respond to all of the dimensions of guilt and shame.

People whose environmental concern is dominated by the impact of everyday activities such as buying and consuming food, transportation, and using water, those I name ‘everyday environmentalists’, discuss these activities online in blogs, discussion boards, and the comments sections of major news articles. In these forums, everyday environmentalists often describe their failure to live up to their own environmental standards for personal behavior using terms such as ‘guilt’ or ‘eco-sin’. This terminology, their focus on their moral and existential crises regarding their perceived sin, and the emerging patterns of responses to such confessions indicate that the framework of ‘nature religion’ can aid our understanding of this phenomenon. Such analysis suggests that a new online religious-like ritual regarding eco-confession is emerging among everyday environmentalists. Analyzing the actions of everyday environmentalists through the lens of nature religions does, however, stretch the concept of nature religion and raise questions about the online practices of everyday environmentalists.

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