Nature at the Nexus of the Sacred and the Everyday: Ecological Knowledge in Contemporary American Druidry

Contemporary American Druidry in all its most populated orders—the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids; the Ancient Order of Druids in America; and Ár nDraíocht Féin—posits connecting to and serving the earth as core spiritual practice. These ideals, however, must be articulated with individual and collective behaviour within a capitalist and consumerist national overculture. Drawing from mixed methodology and a combination of subjective and objective approaches—autoethnography and phenomenology, targeted participant observation, and survey research (N = 137)—this chapter explores how Druids in the United States relate to other-than-human beings spiritually, politically, and practically. Druids predominantly hold an understanding of relationships between human and other-than-human beings that is uncommon in the United States, and this informs and is informed by the production and transmission of folk ecological knowledge about plants, animals, and places. At the same time, the discord between ideal Druidic values and ethics arising from their relational epistemology and ontology and a conflicting, often competing socioeconomic and cultural structure, can generate disparate political and practical practices in individual practitioners’ lives.