Triptych of Mohammed, Jesus, and Buddha by Christina Varga.

Scratch an environmentalist and chances are you won't find a religious fundamentalist. Scratch a religious fundamentalist and chances are not only that you won't find an environmentalist but, that you might also find a believer in the "Rapture Index," a countdown to the end of the world based on 45 prophetic categories, including drought, plague, floods, liberalism, and "the mark of the beast."

Only rarely do the paths of those who work to save the planet and those who hope to save the world converge. But Resurgence Association, a nearly 40-year-old nonprofit organization supporting the environment and peace, and publisher of Resurgence, an environmental magazine, is working to change that.

Last month, 360 participants traveled to Bard College from throughout the US, Canada, Britain, and even Australia, to join 12 of the world's most celebrated environmental and religious thinkers at "Earth & Religion," the fourth annual Resurgence Conference. Created to bring together and uncover common ground for people of ecology and faith, the conference took place beneath gilded, life-size panels of Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed by Woodstock artist Christina Varga. A fourth panel, featuring a heart and dove, represented the compassion of the emerging divine feminine.

"Often people in the religious field think, 'We have to save our souls. We don't have time for the world. We don't have time for saving the planet. If every individual saved their souls, the planet would take care of itself,'" Resurgence editor Satish Kumar told the audience. "And people who are involved in social justice or the environment would say, 'Oh, saving yourself through your personal development and your personal pursuit of enlightenment is too selfish. We have to save the world first. But Resurgence has tried to bring these two opposites together. Saving yourself and saving the world, or the planet, are two sides of the same coin."

The conference's 12 keynote speakers represented all major world religions: Riane Eisler, lawyer, sociologist, founder of The Partnership Way of resolving conflict (partnershipway.org)  and the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (saiv.net), and author of The Chalice and the Blade; Daisy Khan, architect and executive director of the American Sufi Muslim Society; Mary Evelyn Tucker, Bucknell University professor of religion; Rabia Elizabeth Roberts, peace activist, Earth Prayers editor, and senior teacher in the International Sufi Way; Dominican Sister Miriam MacGillis, founder of the biodynamic agriculture and learning center Genesis Farm; David Suzuki, renowned scientist, broadcaster, and sustainable ecology leader; Columbia University professor of Buddhist Studies Robert Thurman; Traditional Circle of Indian Elders member Chief Oren Lyons; Interfaith Partnership for the Environment of United Nations Environment Program's Rabbi Lawrence Troster; modern-day mystic and environmental advocate Andrew Harvey; Bard College Institute of Advanced Theology executive director Bruce Chilton; and, of course,  Kumar, a former Jain monk who founded the London School of Nonviolence and Schumacher College, and whose latest book is The Buddha and the Terrorist.

"Do we care for creation? Or does creation care for us?" asked conference organizer Judith Asphar. She described the event as "an interfaith environmental quest for a sustainable world." Throughout the conference, speakers interwove spiritual and environmental concepts and concerns.

It wasn't until John Cronin, director of Pace University's Pace Academy for the Environment, went through a period of intense searching for meaning in his work in defending the Hudson River with Riverkeeper and began dialoguing with a priest at Graymoor, the Franciscan monastery in Garrison, that he discovered the right way to approach environmentalism. "He gave me a tape by Thomas Merton to listen to," he recalled. "One day while driving I was listening to the tape and I heard Merton say, 'In nature, every single moment, every single thing around you is doing God's will perfectly. And if you can find a spot to fit into within nature, then you're doing God's will too.' I pulled over and cried. The avenue to protect creation is through humanity."

Yet humanity also blocks the avenue of environmental protection. As Andrew Harvey put it, "This is the dark night of the species and the environment...an apocalyptic crisis that will destroy humanity and the world unless we wake up from our coma."

"Darwin has been dealt a great injustice," announced Riane Eisler. "He spoke 92 times of love in The Origin of the Species, and only two times of natural selection—but natural selection is all that was heard." For Eisler, healing spiritually and preserving the planet each involve "paying more attention in activism to primary human relations. The most important things about society are the things that make us most uncomfortable"—especially gender issues. "The rape of women and the rape of the earth are cut from the same masculine-dominator-society cloth," Eisler said, then suddenly smiled and drew laughter from the audience by adding, "For instance, women never would have created nuclear waste without any place to put it."

Bruce Chilton, Riane Eisler, Satish Kumar, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Chief Oren Lyons at Bard.

David Suzuki agreed. "If we don't deal with hunger and poverty, forget about the environment," he said. But the ills of society often stem from being out of "sacred balance," he explained. "We have to stop thinking we're at the top of the heap, with everything below us for us to use....There has never been a species on earth, ever, that's been capable of squandering as we are today."

But while the conference's speakers were stellar, many audience members shone, too.

Inga, a preadolescent girl helping her parents represent The US Decade for Education in Sustainable Development, led a "break-out" session on youth and sustainable development. Dick Hogan of Green Fire Farm in Ohio rode a 1974 BMW motorcycle all the way to Bard. And as special guests, Alaskan resident Jack Sibbald and his part-husky, part-wolf, Birch, sat quietly together in the audience each day. Jack and Birch are walking penniless for peace across the US, visiting with peace groups and schools along the way, having begun at Ground Zero last March on the second anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Their destination is Deer Park, the Buddhist monastery founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in Escondido, Calif. Sibbald carries everything on his back—including a banner stating "We Are All In This Together." He formulated his idea for the walk in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, having felt called upon to spread a message of solidarity and peace to counteract the despair, fear, and anger he sees everywhere, even among peace-workers, and chose to walk in order to highlight the harmful effects of fossil fuels. Sibbald heard about Satish Kumar—who walked 85,000 miles for peace in the 60s, from Gandhi's grave to John F. Kennedy's grave, after which he was invited to meet Martin Luther King, Jr.—and the Earth & Religion conference in Boston, where Birch was hit by an SUV this spring. After Birch miraculously healed, Sibbald detoured to the conference. He wrote in his blog afterward: "Meeting and listening to all these people gave me so much hope because I know their actions are spreading a ripple effect around the world."