Geopiety is "the belief and worship of powers behind nature or the human environment". It was coined by the American

geographer A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...

John Kirtland Wright John Kirtland Wright (1891–1969) was an American geographer, notable for his cartography, geosophy, and study of the history of geographical thought. He was the son of classical scholar John Henry Wright and novelist Mary Tappan Wright, and the br ...

for geographical piety. The term "geopiety" comes from a combination of the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

root ''geo'', for earth, and the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

root "

pietas ''Pietas'' (), translated variously as "duty", "religiosity" or "religious behavior", "loyalty", "devotion", or "filial piety" (English "piety" derives from the Latin), was one of the chief virtues among the ancient Romans. It was the distingui ...

". As Wright explained when coining the term, geopiety is meant to refer to "emotional piety aroused by awareness of terrestrial diversity of the kind of which geography is also a form of awareness".Wright, 251. One example of geopiety can be found in the works of American preacher Jonathan Edwards:

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* * Human geography {{human-geo-stub

See also

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