Page - 23 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

Comfort the Waste Places, Defend the Violated Earth | 23www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 21–33 of the Earth Bible Project.5 It is characterised by suspicion about the biblical text and alignment with liberation and feminist hermeneutics. The Earth Bible Project has been critiqued for risking “ethnocentrism” and “anachronism”, with Hilary Marlow suggesting its underlying ideology is problematic and its method somewhat restrictive.6 She contends the Earth Bible Project approach may have the unintended consequence “of inviting rejection of the biblical text by those who consider it to be irrelevant in today’s world”, and notes, “it may also encourage the rejection of concern for the environment by those for whom the Bible carries authority as sacred scripture”.7 The Exeter Project (Sheffield University) has offered a different approach than the Earth Bible Project by affirming the authority of the biblical text, arguing for “an attempt to construct an ecological theology which, while innovative, is nonetheless coherent (and in dialogue) with a scripturally shaped Christian orthodoxy”.8 More recently Tina Nilsen and Anna Solevåg have made a case for using the Earth Charter (originating from the United Nations) as the base of their ecolo- nial approach, an interdisciplinary combination of ecological and postcolonial hermeneutics.9 Although each of these developments is informative, the Earth Bible Project principles and the connection with feminist criticism have prov- en most fruitful for this article. An ecofeminist reading, as Wainwright explains, “makes explicit the inter- connection between the violence against, and the exploitation and degrada- tion of both women and the Earth”.10 The coincidental emergence of ecolog- ical and feminist studies, along with related ecofeminist and ecojustice con- cerns, has been long explored, with tropes of sexual violence used to express ecological degradation. The conflation of mother Earth and mother Nature in environmental discourse “is widespread and generally accepted without question”, writes Tzeporah Berman.11 These associations come with assump- tions about women and the role of mothers in society. These notions, in turn, are precisely what makes a metaphor of earth-as-mother coherent, enabling multivalent but also ambiguous possibilities.12 Combining overlapping met- 5 Habel 2008, 1–5. 6 Marlow 2009, 91. 7 Marlow 2009, 94. 8 Horrell 2010, 8–9. 9 Nilsen/Solevåg 2016, 665. 10 Wainwright 2000, 162. 11 Berman 1994, 173–178. 12 Dille 2004, chap. 1.