Reviews / Worldviews 14 (2010) 267-303 301 Emma Tomalin. Biodivinity and Biodiversity: Te Limits to Religious Envi- ronmentalism. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009. Hardback, viii + 219 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5588-6. US $99.95. Tomalin has written one of the most provocative books on religion and ecology published in the last couple of years. She diferentiates “recogni- tion of bio-divinity” in religious traditions such as Hinduism from “reli- gious environmentalism”. She argues that since the latter is a product of post-materialist environmentalist philosophy emerging from the West after 1960s, the former cannot be assumed to respond to the global eco- logical problems, given its lack of awareness and adaptability to modern problems. She agrees that the recognition of bio-divinity easily fnds sup- port from within Hinduism, but there is an immense diference between the priorities and concerns of the modern environmentalist and the world-views of much earlier Hindu thinkers. She also questions whether Hindus in modern India, whom she had earlier called “environmentally illiterate” (2004) with little or no knowledge of the language and con- cepts central to contemporary environmentalist thinking, actually share the religious environmentalist’s goal of ecological sustainability. She also argues that the “subaltern” poor of India cannot aford to put the “Earth frst” since they depend on nature for their daily survival. Tis is diferent from the Western “deep ecology”, which aims to protect the earth from all human interventions. She then chooses sacred groves as a key-area where religion has entered the environmental debate in India by reviewing related scholarly writings. She notes, “To this day one can fnd patches of forest all over India that have been protected due to religious custom. Tese are described as ‘hotspots of biodiversity’ and are claimed to be of ecological signifcance” (p. 155). She then goes on to describe the continuous depletion of these groves due to ‘the dilution of traditional values, Westernization, and migration’. She also discovers with respect to the Coorg sacred groves in Karnataka that “commercialization of the land has lead to a transforma- tion in ‘traditional’ farming practices and has brought changes to the institution of the sacred grove. Before the introduction of cofee into the region by the British in 1854, Coorg was almost completely covered with forest and in its Eastern region with thick jungle” (p. 157). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156853510X507383