Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity presents the Mother Earth Gaia idea as a cornerstone paradigm. This favored worldview entwines various co-evolutionary and Mother Goddess concepts around a self-organizing Earth principle. The United Nations Environmental program encourages a shift from a conception of God as holding all sovereign power outside of and ruling over nature to a conception of God who is under and around all things as an Earth goddess. This shift replaces the fatherhood of families and God the Father with feminism and goddess worship. The period of environmentalism coincides with a period of New Age thinking that equates pagan religions with positive models for an ecologically sound world-view.

The media references to the wrath of Mother Nature in connection with recent tornadoes trace back to the personification of nature that originated in Greek and Roman mythology and most specifically in the Greek goddess Gaia, who the Greeks considered the goddess of Earth and the mother of all life. To this day Gaia forms part of the Greenpeace movement among those who worship the creation rather than the Creator and who promote evolution. In the early 1970s James Lovelock published a book entitled Gaia that proposed with biologist Lynn Margulis the hypothesis that life on Earth self-regulates its environment to create optimum conditions for further advancement of life through concentration and redistribution of elements into water soil and atmosphere. The Roman poet Lucretius addressed the goddess Venus as the Mother of Nature in his poem De Rerum Natura. These mythological traditions developed by people without connection to or understanding of God continue to influence thought apart from God and lead to attribution of His sovereign acts in weather to creation instead.

The Green movement or Environmental movement has been shown to be a religion and a faith as well. Many of its leading proponents talk about Gaia and Mother Earth calling it a living planet and giving it human feelings and abilities and talking about Earth's retribution against the polluters. Its proponents idolize Nature in their desires and activities.