Quakers and the environment

From 17th century plain living to 21st century climate justice commitments, Quaker care for the earth has developed as a steady moral witness across the centuries.

Stewardship and sustainability in Quaker testimonies

In modern shorthand, Quaker testimonies are often summarised as SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship or Sustainability. The final ’S’ is sometimes expressed in two closely related ways, reflecting both older Quaker practice and modern environmental understanding.

Stewardship speaks of responsibility. It reflects the belief that the earth is not owned by humanity, but entrusted to it, and that people are accountable for how land, resources, and living systems are treated. Sustainability extends that responsibility through time, asking whether present ways of living can continue without causing harm to future generations.

Quakers strive to do both. Stewardship grounds care for the earth in moral and spiritual responsibility, while sustainability translates that responsibility into long-term patterns of living, decision-making, and collective action. This shared framework helps connect early Quaker restraint with modern challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice.

Early Friends and the moral limits of consumption (1650s - 1700)

The Society of Friends emerged in England during the 1650s, a time of social upheaval, enclosure, and expanding global trade. Early Quakers did not speak in ecological terms, but they were deeply concerned with how people lived in the material world.

Quaker plainness discouraged excess, waste, and luxury, not as an aesthetic choice but as a moral discipline. To consume more than was necessary was seen as spiritually damaging and socially harmful. These early practices placed ethical limits on accumulation and encouraged attentiveness to how wealth and resources were obtained.

Although not framed as environmental concern, this restraint created an important foundation for later Quaker thinking about land, labour, and responsibility, especially as the English Civil War Period and its aftermath reshaped political, economic, and religious life.

18th century witness: justice, diet, and creation (1700 - 1775)

By the early 18th century, Quaker concern for justice and the treatment of creation becomes more explicit. This period is especially important for understanding how environmental responsibility became linked with equality, integrity, and everyday choices.

One striking figure is Benjamin Lay (1682 - 1759). Lay lived deliberately simply and is among the earliest clearly documented European settlers in North America to adopt vegetarianism as an ethical witness. His refusal to eat meat formed part of a wider rejection of exploitation, linking violence toward animals, harm to the earth, and injustice toward enslaved people.

Lay believed that moral consistency required attention to everyday consumption. What one ate, wore, and used mattered because it reflected participation in systems of harm. His vegetarianism was not a private preference but a public testimony, anticipating later concerns about ethical diet, resource use, and responsibility toward living beings.

Alongside Lay stands John Woolman (1720 - 1772), whose writings explicitly connect consumption, inequality, and damage to the earth. Woolman’s 1772 warning about outward greatness and impoverishing the earth remains widely quoted:

“The produce of the earth is a gift from our gracious creator to the inhabitants, and to impoverish the earth now to support outward greatness appears to be an injury to the succeeding age.”

Quaker botanists and attentive study of the natural world (18th century)

The 18th century also saw Quakers contributing to the study of the natural world, particularly botany. Their approach was often marked by careful observation, respect for living systems, and an interest in understanding rather than domination.

John Bartram (1699 - 1777), a Quaker from Pennsylvania, is widely recognised as a major early American botanist and the founder of Bartram’s Garden (established 1728).

Sydney Parkinson (1745 - 1771), born into a Quaker family in Edinburgh, trained as a botanical illustrator and sailed on James Cook’s first voyage aboard the Endeavour (1768 - 1771). His drawings of plants from the Pacific contributed greatly to botanical knowledge, and his life offers a reminder that Quaker engagement with nature could take the form of patient attention and careful recording.

Industrialisation and practical responsibility (late 18th - 19th centuries)

From the late 18th century onwards, industrialisation reshaped landscapes, communities, and patterns of consumption. Quakers, often involved in business and manufacturing, faced new moral questions about pollution, labour conditions, and resource use.

Environmental concern during this period rarely appeared as nature protection alone. Instead, it emerged through practical responsibility: improving working conditions, addressing sanitation and housing, and responding to the local impacts of industrial growth. The same ethical instincts that had earlier shaped plain living were now applied to factories, towns, and transport systems.

This period reinforced a lasting Quaker insight: harm to the earth and harm to people are closely linked and must be addressed together.

The environment named and organised as Quaker witness (1960s - 1980s)

By the mid 20th century, environmental damage had become visible on a global scale. From the 1960s and 1970s onward, Quakers increasingly named environmental concern explicitly as part of their public witness, alongside peace and social justice.

This period marked a transition. Long-standing Quaker instincts about restraint, responsibility, and harm were no longer expressed only through personal discipline or local action. They began to take organised, collective form, shaped by the scale and urgency of ecological crisis.

The founding of Quaker Earthcare Witness in 1987 represents a key moment in this transition. It gave organisational shape to concerns that had long existed within Quaker life, bringing together spirituality, ethics, and ecological awareness. Quaker Earthcare Witness helped Friends name environmental crisis not simply as a scientific or political issue, but as a spiritual challenge requiring transformation of values, habits, and systems.

In practice, this meant encouraging meetings and individuals to integrate earthcare into worship, discernment, and everyday living, while also supporting public witness on environmental justice. Quaker Earthcare Witness (opens in new tab) has continued to emphasise that ecological breakdown is intertwined with inequality and violence, echoing older Quaker insights while addressing modern realities.

The Canterbury Commitment and corporate low-carbon Quakerism (2011)

In the 21st century, Quaker environmental witness increasingly takes the form of shared commitments and long-term sustainability planning. In Britain, a defining modern statement is the Canterbury Commitment, also known as Minute 36 of Yearly Meeting in 2011.

The Canterbury Commitment calls Quakers to become a low-carbon, sustainable community and frames this as a spiritual task rooted in Quaker testimonies. It also points to the way environmental crisis is bound up with global economic injustice, reinforcing the Quaker habit of holding earthcare and social justice together.

Global Quaker statements: the Kabarak Call and beyond (2012 - present)

At the global level, a key milestone is the Kabarak Call (opens in new tab) for Peace and Ecojustice, approved on 24 April 2012 at the Sixth World Conference of Friends at Kabarak University near Nakuru, Kenya (organised by the Friends World Committee for Consultation - FWCC). It links environmental destruction with injustice and conflict and calls Friends to act as patterns and examples in a decisive global campaign for peace and ecojustice. A part of it states:

“We are called to be patterns and examples in a 21st century campaign for peace and ecojustice, as difficult and decisive as the 18th and 19th century drive to abolish slavery.”

In 2016, Friends at the FWCC World Plenary Meeting in Pisac, Peru agreed a Sustainability Minute, and in 2017 FWCC launched a sustainability programme in response.

These global developments show Quaker environmental witness moving beyond individual concern into shared international commitments, while keeping the same inward logic: spiritual responsibility, truthfulness about harm, and practical change.

Continuity rather than novelty

Across the centuries, Quaker concern for the environment appears less as a sudden innovation and more as a steady unfolding. From 17th century restraint and plainness, through 18th century ethical diet and opposition to exploitation, to organised earthcare and modern sustainability commitments, the underlying questions remain consistent.

How should people live without doing harm? How should present needs be balanced against the future? How should faith be lived in the material world? Stewardship and sustainability offer modern language for these older responsibilities, keeping Quaker witness grounded in both justice and the limits of the earth.