The Cathedrals of Cascadia

To visit Stanley Park, the Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson wrote over a century ago in Legends of Vancouver, was to enter an “atmosphere of holiness.” Just as “viewing a stately cathedral” improved us, so “none of us can stand amid that majestic forest group without experiencing some elevating thoughts, some refinement of our coarser nature.” In equating and perhaps conflating the spiritual effects on humans of trees and cathedrals, Johnson sketched a piety with a long future in Vancouver, where Blundstone boots sit next to Buddha statuettes on many a patio.

For the sociologist Paul Bramadat, the concept of reverential naturalism — a “way of physically being, or being physical, in a particular geography”— best evokes the distinctive relationship between institutional religion, spirituality, and nature in Canada’s Pacific Northwest. In the 2021 census, 52 percent of British...