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Spirituality and the Environment: Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC)

The Memo

DATE: December 12, 1991 TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. Summers (Chief Economist for the World Bank) Subject: GEP

’Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depend on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable. The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Postscript After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers: "Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ’economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear." Sadly, Mr. Lutzenburger was fired shortly after writing this letter.

Mr. Summers, on the other hand, was appointed the U.S. Treasury Secretary on July 2nd, 1999, and served through the remainder of the Clinton Administration. Afterwards, he was named president of Harvard University.

Historical roots of our ecological crisis

Lynn White. 1967. Science 155: 1203-1207.

Note: In this classic statement, White places blame for much of our on-going ecological crisis at the feet of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Your task in reading this article is to assess the merits and liabilities of White’s argument and to answer a series of questions interspersed throughout the text. You should bring written responses to class and be prepared to discuss and defend your own analysis.

A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently puts one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man’s unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, which was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits’ destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry.

All forms of life modify their contexts. The most spectacular and benign instance is doubtless the coral polyp. By serving its own ends, it has created a vast undersea world favorable to thousands of other kinds of animals and plants. Ever since man became a numerous species he has affected his environment notably. The hypothesis that his fire-drive method of hunting created the world’s great grasslands and helped to exterminate the monster mammals of the Pleistocene from much of the globe is plausible, if not proved. For 6 millennia at least, the banks of the lower Nile have been a human artifact rather than the swampy African jungle which nature, apart from man, would have made it. The Aswan Dam, flooding 5000 square miles, is only the latest stage in a long process. In many regions terracing or irrigation, overgrazing, the cutting of forests by Romans to build ships to fight Carthaginians or by Crusaders to solve the logistics problems of their expeditions, have profoundly changed some ecologies. Observation that the French landscape falls into two basic types, the open fields of the north and the bocage of the south and west, inspired Marc Bloch to undertake his classic study of medieval agricultural methods. Quite unintentionally, changes in human ways often affect nonhuman nature. It has been noted, for example, that the advent of the automobile eliminated huge flocks of sparrows that once fed on the horse manure littering every street.

The history of ecologic change is still so rudimentary that we know little about what really happened, or what the results were. The extinction of the European aurochs as late as 1627 would seem to have been a simple case of overenthusiastic hunting. On more intricate matters it often is impossible to find solid information. For a thousand years or more the Frisians and Hollanders have been pushing back the North Sea, and the process is culminating in our own time in the reclamation of the Zuider Zee. What, if any, species of animals, birds, fish, shore life, or plants have died out in the process? In their epic combat with Neptune have the Netherlanders overlooked ecological values in such a way that the quality of human life in the Netherlands has suffered? I cannot discover that the questions have ever been asked, much less answered. People, then, have often been a dynamic element in their own environment, but in the present state of historical scholarship we usually do not know exactly when, where, or with what effects man-induced changes came. As we enter the last third of the 20th century, however, concern for the problem of ecologic backlash is mounting feverishly. Natural science, conceived as the effort to understand the nature of things, had flourished in several eras and among several peoples. Similarly there had been an age-old accumulation of technological skills, sometimes growing rapidly, sometimes slowly. But it was not until about four generations ago that Western Europe and North America arranged a marriage between science and technology, a union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural environment. The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850, save in the chemical industries, where it is anticipated in the 18th century. Its acceptance as a normal pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well.

Almost at once the new situation forced the crystallization of the novel concept of ecology; indeed, the word ecology first appeared in the English language in 1873. Today, less than a century later, the impact of our race upon the environment has so increased in force that it has changed in essence. When the first cannons were fired, in the early 14th century, they affected ecology by sending workers scrambling to the forests and mountains for more potash, sulfur, iron ore, and charcoal, with some resulting erosion and deforestation. Hydrogen bombs are of a different order: a war fought with them might alter the genetics of all life on this planet. By 1285 London had a smog problem arising from the burning of soft coal, but our present combustion of fossil fuels threatens to change the chemistry of the globe’s atmosphere as a whole, with consequences which we are only beginning to guess. With the population explosion, the carcinoma of planless urbanism, the now geological deposits of sewage and garbage, surely no creature other than man has ever managed to foul its nest in such short order.

There are many calls to action, but specific proposals, however worthy as individual items, seem too partial, palliative, negative: ban the bomb, tear down the billboards, give the Hindus contraceptives and tell them to eat their sacred cows. The simplest solution to any suspect change is, of course, to stop it, or better yet, to revert to a romanticized past: make those ugly gasoline stations look like Anne Hathaway’s cottage or (in the Far West) like ghost-town saloons. The "wilderness area" mentality invariably advocates a deep-freezing ecology, whether San Gimignano or the High Sierra, as it was before the first Kleenex was dropped. But neither atavism nor prettification will cope with the ecologic crisis of our time.

What shall we do? No one yet knows. Unless we think about fundamentals, our specific measures may produce new backlashes more serious than those they are designed to remedy.

As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

Q. 1: What is meant by the statement, "neither atavism nor prettification will cope with the ecologic crisis of our time?" Briefly describe at least one current example of each approach.

The Western Traditions of Technology and Science One thing is so certain that it seems stupid to verbalize it: both modern technology and modern science are distinctively Occidental. Our technology has absorbed elements from all over the world, notably from China; yet everywhere today, whether in Japan or in Nigeria, successful technology is Western. Our science is the heir to all the sciences of the past, especially perhaps to the work of the great Islamic scientists of the Middle Ages, who so often outdid the ancient Greeks in skill and perspicacity: al-Razi in medicine, for example; or ibn-al-Haytham in optics; or Omar Khayyam in mathematics. Indeed, not a few works of such geniuses seem to have vanished in the original Arabic and to survive only in medieval Latin translations that helped to lay the foundations for later Western developments. Today, around the globe, all significant science is Western in style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientists.

A second pair of facts is less well recognized because they result from quite recent historical scholarship. The leadership of the West, both in technology and in science, is far older than the so-called Scientific Revolution of the 17th century or the so-called Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. These terms are in fact outmoded and obscure the true nature of what they try to describe—significant stages in two long and separate developments. By A.D. 1000 at the latest—and perhaps, feebly, as much as 200 years earlier—the West began to apply water power to industrial processes other than milling grain. This was followed in the late 12th century by the harnessing of wind power. From simple beginnings, but with remarkable consistency of style, the West rapidly expanded its skills in the development of power machinery, labor-saving devices, and automation. Those who doubt should contemplate that most monumental achievement in the history of automation: the weight-driven mechanical clock, which appeared in two forms in the early 14th century. Not in craftsmanship but in basic technological capacity, the Latin West of the later Middle Ages far outstripped its elaborate, sophisticated, and esthetically magnificent sister cultures, Byzantium and Islam. In 1444 a great Greek ecclesiastic, Bessarion, who had gone to Italy, wrote a letter to a prince in Greece. He is amazed by the superiority of Western ships, arms, textiles, glass. But above all he is astonished by the spectacle of waterwheels sawing timbers and pumping the bellows of blast furnaces. Clearly, he had seen nothing of the sort in the Near East.

By the end of the 15th century the technological superiority of Europe was such that its small, mutually hostile nations could spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing. The symbol of this technological superiority is the fact that Portugal, one of the weakest states of the Occident, was able to become, and to remain for a century, mistress of the East Indies. And we must remember that the technology of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque was built by pure empiricism, drawing remarkably little support or inspiration from science.

In the present-day vernacular understanding, modern science is supposed to have begun in 1543, when both Copernicus and Vesalius published their great works. It is no derogation of their accomplishments, however, to point out that such structures as the Fabrica and the De revolutionibus do not appear overnight. The distinctive Western tradition of science, in fact, began in the late 11th century with a massive movement of translation of Arabic and Greek scientific works into Latin. A few notable books— Theophrastus, for example—escaped the West’s avid new appetite for science, but within less than 200 years effectively the entire corpus of Greek and Muslim science was available in Latin, and was being eagerly read and criticized in the new European universities. Out of criticism arose new observation, speculation, and increasing distrust of ancient authorities. By the late 13th century Europe had seized global scientific leadership from the faltering hands of Islam. It would be as absurd to deny the profound originality of Newton, Galileo, or Copernicus as to deny that of the 14th century scholastic scientists like Buridan or Oresme on whose work they built. Before the 11th century, science scarcely existed in the Latin West, even in Roman times. From the 11th century onward, the scientific sector of Occidental culture has increased in a steady crescendo.

Since both our technological and our scientific movements got their start, acquired their character, and achieved world dominance in the Middle Ages, it would seem that we cannot understand their nature or their present impact upon ecology without examining fundamental medieval assumptions and developments.

Q. 2: White comments that "all significant science is Western in style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientists." Speculate briefly about why this is so.

Medieval View of Man and Nature

Until recently, agriculture has been the chief occupation even in "advanced" societies; hence, any change in methods of tillage has much importance. Early plows, drawn by two oxen, did not normally turn the sod but merely scratched it. Thus, cross- plowing was needed and fields tended to be squarish. In the fairly light soils and semiarid climates of the Near East and Mediterranean, this worked well. But such a plow was inappropriate to the wet climate and often sticky soils of northern Europe. By the latter part of the 7th century after Christ, however, following obscure beginnings, certain northern peasants were using an entirely new kind of plow, equipped with a vertical knife to cut the line of the furrow, a horizontal share to slice under the sod, and a moldboard to turn it over. The friction of this plow with the soil was so great that it normally required not two but eight oxen. It attacked the land with such violence that cross-plowing was not needed, and fields tended to be shaped in long strips.

In the days of the scratch-plow, fields were distributed generally in units capable of supporting a single family. Subsistence farming was the presupposition. But no peasant owned eight oxen: to use the new and more efficient plow, peasants pooled their oxen to form large plow-teams, originally receiving (it would appear) plowed strips in proportion to their contribution. Thus, distribution of land was based no longer on the needs of a family but, rather, on the capacity of a power machine to till the earth. Man’s relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature. Nowhere else in the world did farmers develop any analogous agricultural implement. Is it coincidence that modern technology, with its ruthlessness toward nature, has so largely been produced by descendants of these peasants of northern Europe?

This same exploitive attitude appears slightly before A.D. 830 in Western illustrated calendars. In older calendars the months were shown as passive personifications. The new Frankish calendars, which set the style for the Middle Ages, are very different: they show men coercing the world around them—plowing, harvesting, chopping trees, butchering pigs. Man and nature are two things, and man is master.

These novelties seem to be in harmony with larger intellectual patterns. What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion. To Western eyes this is very evident in, say, India or Ceylon. It is equally true of ourselves and of our medieval ancestors.

The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in the "post-Christian age". Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo- Christian theology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy. We continue today to live, as we have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms.

What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment? While many of the world’s mythologies provide stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in this respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time. In sharp contrast Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image.

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.

At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius “loci”, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.

It is often said that for animism the Church substituted the cult of saints. True; but the cult of saints is functionally quite different from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have special shrines, but his citizenship is in heaven. Moreover, a saint is entirely a man; he can be approached in human terms. In addition to saints, Christianity of course also had angels and demons inherited from Judaism and perhaps, at one remove, from Zoroastrianism. But these were all as mobile as the saints themselves. The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.

When one speaks in such sweeping terms, a note of caution is in order. Christianity is a complex faith, and its consequences differ in differing contexts. What I have said may well apply to the medieval West, where in fact technology made spectacular advances. But the Greek East, a highly civilized realm of equal Christian devotion, seems to have produced no marked technological innovation after the late 7th century, when Greek fire was invented. The key to the contrast may perhaps be found in a difference in the tonality of piety and thought which students of comparative theology find between the Greek and the Latin Churches. The Greeks believed that sin was intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination, orthodoxy—that is, clear thinking. The Latins, on the other hand, felt that sin was moral evil, and that salvation was to be found in right conduct. Eastern theology has been intellectualist. Western theology has been voluntarist. The Greek saint contemplates; the Western saint acts. The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.

The Christian dogma of creation, which is found in the first clause of all the Creeds, has another meaning for our comprehension of today’s ecologic crisis. By revelation, God had given man the Bible, the Book of Scripture. But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology. In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul’s aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and copied great numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we conceive it could scarcely flourish in such an ambience.

However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God’s communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God’s mind by discovering how his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious understanding. From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leitnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so expert an amateur theologian he would have got into far less trouble: the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.

It is often hard for the historian to judge, when men explain why they are doing what they want to do, whether they are offering real reasons or merely culturally acceptable reasons. The consistency with which scientists during the long formative centuries of Western science said that the task and the reward of the scientist was "to think God’s thoughts after him" leads one to believe that this was their real motivation. If so, then modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology. The dynamism of religious devotion shaped by the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation, gave it impetus.

Q. 3: Comment on White’s assertion that, "Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen." What does this statement mean? What evidence does White offer in support of this claim? Do you agree with White’s analysis? Why or why not? Finally, list at least three characteristic attitudes of beliefs common to the Judeo-Christian worldview.

An Alternative Christian View

We would seem to be headed toward conclusions unpalatable to many Christians. Since both science and technology are blessed words in our contemporary vocabulary, some may be happy at the notions, first, that viewed historically, modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and, second, that modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful master over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology—hitherto quite separate activities—joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.

I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. The newly elected Governor of California, like myself a churchman but less troubled than I, spoke for the Christian tradition when he said (as is alleged), "when you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all." To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.

What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one. The beatniks, who are the basic revolutionaries of our time, show a sound instinct in their affinity for Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very nearly the mirror image of the Christian view. Zen, however, is as deeply conditioned by Asian history as Christianity is by the experience of the West, and I am dubious of its viability among us.

Possibly we should ponder the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi. The prime miracle of Saint Francis is the fact that he did not end at the stake, as many of his left-wing followers did. He was so clearly heretical that a General of the Franciscan Order, Saint Bonaventura, a great and perceptive Christian, tried to suppress the early accounts of Franciscanism. The key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures. With him the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways as Brother Man does in his.

Later commentators have said that Francis preached to the birds as a rebuke to men who would not listen. The records do not read so: he urged the little birds to praise God, and in spiritual ecstasy they flapped their wings and chirped rejoicing. Legends of saints, especially the Irish saints, had long told of their dealings with animals but always, I believe, to show their human dominance over creatures. With Francis it is different. The land around Gubbio in the Apennines was ravaged by a fierce wolf. Saint Francis, says the legend, talked to the wolf and persuaded him of the error of his ways. The wolf repented, died in the odor of sanctity, and was buried in consecrated ground.

What Sir Steven Ruciman calls "the Franciscan doctrine of the animal soul" was quickly stamped out. Quite possibly it was in part inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by the belief in reincarnation held by the Cathar heretics who at that time teemed in Italy and southern France, and who presumably had got it originally from India. It is significant that at just the same moment, about 1200, traces of metempsychosis are found also in western Judaism, in the Provencal Cabbala. But Francis held neither to transmigration of souls nor to pantheism. His view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inaminate, designed for the glorification of their transcendent Creator, who, in the ultimate gesture of cosmic humility, assumed flesh, lay helpless in a manger, and hung dying on a scaffold.

I am not suggesting that many contemporary Americans who are concerned about our ecologic crisis will be either able or willing to counsel with wolves or exhort birds. However, the present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science which were originating in the Western medieval world against which Saint Francis was rebelling in so original a way. Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it; he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.

Q. 4: White says that, "Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not." Do you agree? If so, describe the kind of religious remedy that will be required. If not, explain why White’s proposed remedy is flawed or inadequate.

Taking and edited from: http://faculty.bemidjistate.edu/dsi...

Brundtland Report: A 20 Years Update

Volker Hauff

Chair German Council on Sustainable Development

Key note speech European Sustainability, Berlin 07 (ESB07) „Linking Policies, Implementation, and Civil Society Action”, Berlin, June 3rd – 5th, 2007

It is my pleasure to address this conference. This conference on European sustainability policies takes place in a extremely challenging period:

20 years after the release of the Brundtland Report,
with the report of Sir Niklas Stern and the recent IPCC findings,
with a new generation of National Sustainability Strategies,
on the eve of the G8 summit at the end of this week and the upcoming negotiations of a Kyoto follow up.

These are milestones of the period of transition we are in, with lots of things having changed in the last 20 years. That is why I am inviting you to make further use of a Report which had been released 20 years ago. I think, the key Brundtland message continues to challenge the ignorance and inadequacy of mainstream politics. I invite you:

To criticize sustainability policies where they seem to miss the point.
To discuss what should be added or expanded, or what needs to be rethought.
And to draw conclusions to upgrade the impact of sustainability strategies in politics, in the economy and in the civil society.

I

20 years ago, the World Commission on Environment and Development, in which I had the honour to be a member, released its report. The report was called “Our Common Future. A global agenda for change”. Gro Harlem Brundtland chaired this World Commission. In those times she was the Prime Minister of Norway, later she became President of the World Health Organisation. I had the pleasure to meet her recently in New York and to share experiences down the road of the last 20 years. I am glad to tell you that Gro Harlem Brundtland is back in the arena of global policy making. She is now appointed Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General on Climate Change.

The Brundtland Report marks a point in our history when awareness was growing around both the concept of environment and the concept of development. But even today – 20 years later - tensions, controversies, and gridlocks between development and environment still exist. They will continue unless we really respect the notion of sustainability. The challenge of meeting the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs was moulded by the Commission into the concept of sustainable development. 20 years ago, this was totally new.

New was the notion of equity and justice within and between generations.
New was the clear idea of developing a shared understanding of the long-term goals for human life on earth.

New was the idea of new governance instruments and of building collective action.

New was the resoluteness with which we advocated the need for leadership and building trust with others. Under prevailing circumstances, all this is still a challenge today.

3

We overstep limits of the long-term carrying capacity in the one world we share. – There is no common future, unless we adapted our use of natural resources.

The majority of the world’s population only has a small share in this overuse of resources. – There is no way towards environmental responsibility, unless we addressed unequal opportunity and unequal distribution of prosperity.

Mainstream policies are still centered on administrative command and control approaches. – There is no sustainability politics, unless we overcome this reduction and find new ways to include civil society and the private sector.

Bernhard Chidzero – one of my colleagues in the Brundtland Commission from Africa – told us: “Poverty is the main reason for the pollution of the environment”. 20 years ago I was not sure if this is true. Today I know that this is definitely true for the developing and emerging countries. And while humankind doubtless had the capacity to destroy life on earth, humankind had never had greater capacities and possibilities to safeguard the environment and to improve the living conditions for all people on earth.

Question is how to make that happen.

The most powerful recommendation we came up with in our Report was the following: “Within an appropriate period of time after the presentation of the report to the General Assembly an international conference could be convened.” This brought the Rio-process on the agenda. It provided momentum. We experienced high expectations. We also experienced the downs in the global follow up of Rio. There was a multitude of gatherings, from Kyoto to Marrakech. The world adopted the Millennium Development Goals. Johannesburg openly displayed both frustrations and unwillingness.

For updating the Brundtland-Message we have to acknowledge that the world has changed dramatically: The Cold War ended and the stalled two-block confrontation gave way to a multipolar world. The Third World is on the move. With powerful economies emerging the Third World countries are no longer a coherent unity. They differentiate actively the patterns of globalisation. Totalitarism is on the rise and persistent wars add to the opaqueness of world politics. Communications opens new ways into a totally different culture. Globalisation has added new opportunities and new questions.

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I’m convinced that the Brundtland-Report holds a basis that is still solid today. To name six key issues:

Conflict Prevention: The Report does not at all underestimate the issue of proliferation of nuclear arms. However, the situation has even worsened. Probably, the spread in use of nuclear weapon systems is already out of control. In general, arms trade is the one single problem with the most anti-development impact.

Poverty: The Millenium Development Goals are a remarkable effort. There is progress in many places in the world. However, it is very clear: The business-as-usual approach will not come to meet the MDG requirements.

Growth: Our pledge was that growth is about choice, about quality, and that means: about sustainability. Up until today, it is not yet understood nor implemented that dependence on finite resources and environmental damage is anti-growth politics. The perspective on growth is still deteriorated by inadequate economic thinking. It was Albert Einstein who told us: „You cannot solve the problem with the same thinking which created the problem.“

Energy and climate: In 1987, we compared climate change with the threat of nuclear war. This statement was highly criticized. But today we know: We were right. Now, the scientific evidence is overwhelming, and the economics of climate change are clear. The Stern report tells us, what has to be done. It is time for action for a low carbon economy.

Food security: Twenty years ago, the world produces more food per head of population than ever before in human history. However, food security and safety are today more on the brink than 20 years ago. Linking the oil price to the pricing of food is creating a new problem. That is exactly the most urgent problem of bioenergy strategies.

Urbanisation sprawl and megacities are putting themselves at risk in terms of resource consumption. In the international arena, we misjudged the importance of soil. Once soil devastation has already turned into decreasing access to agricultural land, this is likely to produce aggression. The Convention on Desertification and Soils has started out too weak and with no adequate governance.

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These are six issues of the Brundtland Report which are still valid today. But: The most powerful recommendation of our Report was not on substance but on procedure. It brought the Rio-Summit on the agenda. The Earth summit influenced all subsequent United Nations policies. Today it is beyond any doubt: Sustainable development has all characteristics that qualify for a major political momentum. And there are positive and encouraging trends.

Take a closer look into Europe. The enlargement of the European Union is a great move. It is a smart revolution. The Aquis Communitaire is an invitation to democracy and peace. We are on a good way to make it an invitation to sustainability policies as well. The EU sustainability strategy encourages us to think harder and to implement sustainability more effectively.

Take a closer look into what happens in Asia in terms of growth and sustainability. It is encouraging to learn that nowadays we discuss sustainability at eye level. We have all opportunities to merge what we still wrongly perceive as development aid into what I would say ought to be a mutual learning.

Take a closer look into what happens in the United States on the regional level and in particular in the private sector. What you see are bottom-up movements with fantastic and inspiring initiatives. You see emission trading, renewables energies increasing their share of energy supply, efficiency gains and the prospect to commercialise a low carbon power plant.

II

What does all this mean to us today? A couple of days before the Heiligendamm G8 meeting I would like to be crystal clear that now we need to draw a line in the sand.

In the run up to the G8 summit, the German EU Presidency negotiated hard for all I know. As Chair of the German Sustainable Development Council I advocated making the G8 summit a benchmark for a broader global strategy to reduce carbon emissions. This should involve both developed and developing countries, the business sector and civil society. The German negotiators introduced ambitious targets for curbing greenhouse gas emission. They proposed for G8 to commit to limit global temperature rise to below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels.

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Now, President Bush has tabled his initiative for the G8 summit. He suggests for like-minded countries to talk about an approach replacing the Kyoto-Regime. And he laid out what his approach would be about. It is technology: Technology without any CO2 limits and without any capping mechanism. Some say that the Bush initiative is an opening. But I have to say, sorry, I am not convinced.

Remember Albert Einstein? There is no solving the problem with the same thinking which created the problem.

President Bush is missing the point because he does not see the economics of CO2 reduction. Market economy created the climate disaster as it once created the environmental pollution. Fixing the problem means providing market economy with a frame, and giving it directions. That is exactly what the European ETS, the emission trading system, the carbon capping and the other climate regulations are about. We need caps and targets for market economy to function for the environment. At the end of the day, we need it under the umbrella of the United Nations.

There is no solution without any regulatory frame. Technology needs economy. And economy needs some framing.

What we do not need is continued lip service for another 18 months.

The hazards of climate change can’t be neglected; they can’t be rejected or ignored. Those who ignore the effects of climate change – I want to be very clear – they act irresponsible, irrational and immoral.

From my point of view, those who are committed to bring climate change to a halt should no longer wait for other big emitters to jump on the band wagon. I know that effective action against climate change has to be global action. So, we’d better have the big emission countries on board. But I also know that to just wait for them to step on board does not make sense. It is one of the key European historic lessons of the last century: Appeasement politics tends to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I call it an appeasement policy to talk helplessly around the issues of climate policy. We can not afford any more of this climate appeasement. Avoiding straight language

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is wrong. Avoiding a clear language towards the US Administration as regards the climate policies is as wrong as avoiding clear positions when you talk about human rights in China.

And, European economy is strong enough to lead the way forward if they link up with the emerging economies in Asia and Africa and even with some regional initiatives in US. I suggest for European politicians to feel self-confident enough to build a global low-carbon-community. Europe can achieve to be the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world – but only if Europe is actively setting the standard. A low-carbon economy is as close as you can get to set new standards and to create new markets. This is what policy makers all over the world have to learn.

I advocate two new approaches in global governance.

First, we awfully need a revival of multilateralism. There is no doubt that we have to rethink the global governance and UN institutions as regards the environment and sustainability issues. The future of multilateralism is bound to legitimacy, credibility, and trust – all of which I do not see well guarded in the current system.

Second, I suggest new stimulus and initiatives at the national level. National action towards global sustainability is the one most important factor. It has been neglected for far too long. Europe can no longer afford to wait for global conventions. From a German perspective I can tell you we know how to design a business case for sustainability. Take the example of renewable energies. To introduce a lead market for innovative technologies we do not want to wait for a world wide level playing field. Rather, it should make use of regulatory competitiveness in creating lead markets.

Globalisation does not render national state policies unnecessary. National pioneering is internationally rewarded. Sustainability strategies play an important role as drivers for innovations on sub-national, national, regional and global level. The transition towards a low carbon emission society needs to develop long term predictable policy frameworks at the national level. This is exactly what sustainability strategies are for. For this, we need comprehensive management tools, and new political thinking. Sustainability strategies are key to overcome the climate crisis.

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Many are reluctant to agree to obligations that others will escape. We must be sensitive to such concerns as we move forward. But we should not be blinded or lose faith in the cause. We must build trust, and find the common ground.

III

If I were to single out the one most important overall challenge for sustainability strategies, the management instruments would be it. In the past we have missed this point; we have underestimated the management aspect of sustainability. This was an error. For sustainability strategies the management approach is the crucial part. Measurement is a prerequisite for good management. You can only manage what you can measure. And all you can measure is therefore not already managed. You need management skills. You will need them excessively the more you deal with complex sustainability indicators, targets and performance criteria.

Since the days of the Brundtland report a lot has happened in this area. I see two management cultures emerging, one in the private sector, the other one in the public sector.

Private Sector: Frontrunner enterprises improved sustainability - and corporate responsibility – performance. We have sophisticated forms of sustainability reporting, supply chain management, and corporate sustainability indices. We see improved rating and ranking tools for measuring efforts in the business community. Best practices are used as stimulus for organizing learning processes.

Public sphere: In the public sector instruments such as quantified targets and indicators, national sustainability strategies, independent national Councils for sustainable development are worthwhile managing tools.

My assessment: There is more momentum today in the private sector than it is in the public sector. With all limitations that I clearly see and with all legitimate fears as to possible window dressing, it is my assessment that the private sector is far ahead of the public sector. Granted, it is only a minority of enterprises taking action. But at the end of the day, this minority will be setting the benchmark.

My point is: These two cultures have hardly any point of linkage. But they ought to have. In the future we should try and compile and combine these instruments. Integration of segregated policies is at the heart of the Brundtland mission. Thinking

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in silos is the basis for failure. The Brundtland Report addressed the management of the Commons. That’s what we called it: The Commons.

I do not see the missing link between private and public management tools addressed adequately. We missed the point in the Brundtland Report. And in the past 20 years no powerful initiative was take to fill this gap. The all too fragmented policies towards energy efficiency are a good example. I am afraid we will not be in the position to achieve the ambitious targets of energy efficiency if we do not develop new instruments that link the business case to the regulatory framework, and to the demand-side approaches and consumption patterns. This challenges our current policy making and administration. The challenge is to interlink administration and civil society. The challenge is to develop a new brand of management tools.

This is a challenge for elaborating and debating sustainability strategies. We have to qualify those strategies where they exist and to ask for sustainability strategies where they do not exist. From my point of view, those strategies should be empowered to create a framework for an integrative approach that binds together the public community with both the scientific as well as the business community.

We need more fantasy. We need more courage and trust to experiment with sustainability strategies.

I advocate taking sustainability strategies serious. Participation and dialogue between stakeholders from government, business, science and civil society is crucial. Leadership develops where sustainability strategies provide for public visibility and ambitious processes.

For this the Brundtland Report had laid the seeds successfully. Today, we have to move on. Today’s challenge is to engineer the common responsibility and to design new tools.

At the core of it I see independent stakeholder Councils. I encourage every Member of the European Union to involve civil society and the business community in that kind of Council. It is of high importance to create platforms for ongoing network, dialogues and sharing experience on sustainable development.

For me it is clear that an Advisory Council needs a counterpart on the side of the administration with high-level leadership. It is also mandatory that a Council is not only reporting to Government, but develops also a standing in the public debate on

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sustainability. Communication is important in a society which is highly influenced, sometimes even determined by the media.

I appreciate the initiative of the European Commission promoting the concept of peer reviews. I would like to see it expanded into what I would like to call a mutual learning experience. In this sense, peer reviews can add innovation to a national strategy.

From my experience, to find the way to cascade political action is one of the big mysteries of politics. We need the magic key to open doors for long term transition of society. We need to open doors so that business community will be attracted and encouraged to get themselves involved. The lesson of Sustainability Councils is: There is no way to attract the awareness of the private sector unless you involve civil society thoroughly and in a transparent way.

The key to open this door is leadership. This is the core of the problem of sustainability policies - constantly since 20 years. And as for celebrating the 20 years anniversary of the Brundtland Report I ask you to keep the words of the great French Jean Jaurès in mind: “Tradition means to keep the fire alive and not to admire the ashes.”

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE JOHN PAUL II FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE WORLD DAY OF PEACE 1 JANUARY 1990 PEACE WITH GOD THE CREATOR, PEACE WITH ALL OF CREATION

Introduction

1) In our day, there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional conflicts and continued injustices among peoples and nations, but also by a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life. The sense of precariousness and insecurity that such a situation engenders is a seedbed for collective selfishness, disregard for others and dishonesty. Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past. The public in general as well as political leaders are concerned about this problem, and experts from a wide range of disciplines are studying its causes. Moreover, a new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge which, rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to develop into concrete programmes and initiatives.

2) Many ethical values, fundamental to the development of a peaceful society, are particularly relevant to the ecological question. The fact that many challenges facing the world today are interdependent confirms the need for carefully coordinated solutions based on a morally coherent world view. For Christians, such a world view is grounded in religious convictions drawn from Revelation. That is why I should like to begin this Message with a reflection on the biblical account of creation. I would hope that even those who do not share these same beliefs will find in these pages a common ground for reflection and action.

I. "And God saw that it was good"

3) In the Book of Genesis, where we find God’s first self-revelation to humanity (Gen 1-3), there is a recurring refrain: "And God saw that it was good". After creating the heavens, the sea, the earth and all it contains, God created man and woman. At this point the refrain changes markedly: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Gen 1:31). God entrusted the whole of creation to the man and woman, and only then - as we read - could he rest "from all his work" (Gen 2:3). Adam and Eve’s call to share in the unfolding of God’s plan of creation brought into play those abilities and gifts which distinguish the human being from all other creatures. At the same time, their call established a fixed relationship between mankind and the rest of creation. Made in the image and likeness of God, Adam and Eve were to have exercised their dominion over the earth (Gen 1:28) with wisdom and love. Instead, they destroyed the existing harmony by deliberately going against the Creator’s plan, that is, by choosing to sin. This resulted not only in man’s alienation from himself, in death and fratricide, but also in the earth’s "rebellion" against him (cf. Gen 3:17-19; 4:12). All of creation became subject to futility, waiting in a mysterious way to be set free and to obtain a glorious liberty together with all the children of God (cf. Rom 8:20-21).

4) Christians believe that the Death and Resurrection of Christ accomplished the work of reconciling humanity to the Father, who "was pleased ... through (Christ) to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross" (Col 1:19-20). Creation was thus made new (cf. Rev 21:5). Once subjected to the bondage of sin and decay (cf. Rom 8:21 ), it has now received new life while "we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Pt 3:13). Thus, the Father "has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery . . . which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, all things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph 1:9-10).

5) These biblical considerations help us to understand better the relationship between human activity and the whole of creation. When man turns his back on the Creator’s plan, he provokes a disorder which has inevitable repercussions on the rest of the created order. If man is not at peace with God, then earth itself cannot be at peace: "Therefore the land mourns and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and even the fish of the sea are taken away" (Hos 4:3).

The profound sense that the earth is "suffering" is also shared by those who do not profess our faith in God. Indeed, the increasing devastation of the world of nature is apparent to all. It results from the behavior of people who show a callous disregard for the hidden, yet perceivable requirements of the order and harmony which govern nature itself.

People are asking anxiously if it is still possible to remedy the damage which has been done. Clearly, an adequate solution cannot be found merely in a better management or a more rational use of the earth’s resources, as important as these may be. Rather, we must go to the source of the problem and face in its entirety that profound moral crisis of which the destruction of the environment is only one troubling aspect.

II. The ecological crisis: a moral problem

6) Certain elements of today’s ecological crisis reveal its moral character. First among these is the indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology. Many recent discoveries have brought undeniable benefits to humanity. Indeed, they demonstrate the nobility of the human vocation to participate responsibly in God’s creative action in the world. Unfortunately, it is now clear that the application of these discoveries in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful long-term effects. This has led to the painful realization that we cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations.

The gradual depletion of the ozone layer and the related "greenhouse effect” has now reached crisis proportions as a consequence of industrial growth, massive urban concentrations and vastly increased energy needs. Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellants: all of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment. The resulting meteorological and atmospheric changes range from damage to health to the possible future submersion of low-lying lands.

While in some cases the damage already done may well be irreversible, in many other cases it can still be halted. It is necessary, however, that the entire human community - individuals, States and international bodies - take seriously the responsibility that is theirs.

7) The most profound and serious indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life evident in many of the patterns of environmental pollution. Often, the interests of production prevail over concern for the dignity of workers, while economic interests take priority over the good of individuals and even entire peoples. In these cases, pollution or environmental destruction is the result of an unnatural and reductionist vision which at times leads to a genuine contempt for man.

On another level, delicate ecological balances are upset by the uncontrolled destruction of animal and plant life or by a reckless exploitation of natural resources. It should be pointed out that all of this, even if carried out in the name of progress and well-being, is ultimately to mankind’s disadvantage.

Finally, we can only look with deep concern at the enormous possibilities of biological research.We are not yet in a position to assess the biological disturbance that could result from indiscriminate genetic manipulation and from the unscrupulous development of new forms of plant and animal life, to say nothing of unacceptable experimentation regarding the origins of human life itself. It is evident to all that in any area as delicate as this, indifference to fundamental ethical norms, or their rejection, would lead mankind to the very threshold of self-destruction.

Respect for life, and above all for the dignity of the human person, is the ultimate guiding norm for any sound economic, industrial or scientific progress.

The complexity of the ecological question is evident to all. There are, however, certain underlying principles, which, while respecting the legitimate autonomy and the specific competence of those involved, can direct research towards adequate and lasting solutions. These principles are essential to the building of a peaceful society; no peaceful society can afford to neglect either respect for life or the fact that there is an integrity to creation.

III. In search of a solution

8) Theology, philosophy and science all speak of a harmonious universe, of a "cosmos" endowed with its own integrity, its own internal, dynamic balance. This order must be respected. The human race is called to explore this order, to examine it with due care and to make use of it while safeguarding its integrity.

On the other hand, the earth is ultimately a common heritage, the fruits of which are for the benefit of all. In the words of the Second Vatican Council, "God destined the earth and all it contains for the use of every individual and all peoples" (Gaudium et Spes, 69). This has direct consequences for the problem at hand. It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence. Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness - both individual and collective - are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interdependence.

9) The concepts of an ordered universe and a common heritage both point to the necessity of a more internationally coordinated approach to the management of the earth’s goods. In many cases the effects of ecological problems transcend the borders of individual States; hence their solution cannot be found solely on the national level. Recently there have been some promising steps towards such international action, yet the existing mechanisms and bodies are clearly not adequate for the development of a comprehensive plan of action. Political obstacles, forms of exaggerated nationalism and economic interests - to mention only a few factors - impede international cooperation and long-term effective action.

The need for joint action on the international level does not lessen the responsibility of each individual State. Not only should each State join with others in implementing internationally accepted standards, but it should also make or facilitate necessary socio-economic adjustments within its own borders, giving special attention to the most vulnerable sectors of society. The State should also actively endeavor within its own territory to prevent destruction of the atmosphere and biosphere, by carefully monitoring, among other things, the impact of new technological or scientific advances. The State also has the responsibility of ensuring that its citizens are not exposed to dangerous pollutants or toxic wastes. The right to a safe environment is ever more insistently presented today as a right that must be included in an updated Charter of Human Rights.

IV. The urgent need for a new solidarity

10) The ecological crisis reveals the urgent moral need for a new solidarity, especially in relations between the developing nations and those that are highly industrialized. States must increasingly share responsibility, in complimentary ways, for the promotion of a natural and social environment that is both peaceful and healthy. The newly industrialized States cannot, for example, be asked to apply restrictive environmental standards to their emerging industries unless the industrialized States first apply them within their own boundaries. At the same time, countries in the process of industrialization are not morally free to repeat the errors made in the past by others, and recklessly continue to damage the environment through industrial pollutants, radical deforestation or unlimited exploitation of non-renewable resources. In this context, there is urgent need to find a solution to the treatment and disposal of toxic wastes.

No plan or organization, however, will be able to effect the necessary changes unless world leaders are truly convinced of the absolute need for this new solidarity, which is demanded of them by the ecological crisis and which is essential for peace. This need presents new opportunities for strengthening cooperative and peaceful relations among States.

11) It must also be said that the proper ecological balance will not be found without directly addressing the structural forms of poverty that exist throughout the world. Rural poverty and unjust land distribution in many countries, for example, have led to subsistence farming and to the exhaustion of the soil. Once their land yields no more, many farmers move on to clear new land, thus accelerating uncontrolled deforestation, or they settle in urban centers which lack the infrastructure to receive them. Likewise, some heavily indebted countries are destroying their natural heritage, at the price of irreparable ecological imbalances, in order to develop new products for export. In the face of such situations it would be wrong to assign responsibility to the poor alone for the negative environmental consequences of their actions. Rather, the poor, to whom the earth is entrusted no less than to others, must be enabled to find a way out of their poverty. This will require a courageous reform of structures, as well as new ways of relating among peoples and States.

12) But there is another dangerous menace which threatens us, namely war. Unfortunately, modern science already has the capacity to change the environment for hostile purposes. Alterations of this kind over the long term could have unforeseeable and still more serious consequences. Despite the international agreements which prohibit chemical, bacteriological and biological warfare, the fact is that laboratory research continues to develop new offensive weapons capable of altering the balance of nature.

Today, any form of war on a global scale would lead to incalculable ecological damage. But even local or regional wars, however limited, not only destroy human life and social structures, but also damage the land, ruining crops and vegetation as well as poisoning the soil and water. The survivors of war are forced to begin a new life in very difficult environmental conditions, which in turn create situations of extreme social unrest, with further negative consequences for the environment.

13) Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life style. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these cause. As I have already stated, the seriousness of the ecological issue lays bare the depth of man’s moral crisis. If an appreciation of the value of the human person and of human life is lacking, we will also lose interest in others and in the earth itself. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become a part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few.

An education in ecological responsibility is urgent: responsibility for oneself, for others, and for the earth. This education cannot be rooted in mere sentiment or empty wishes. Its purpose cannot be ideological or political. It must not be based on a rejection of the modern world or a vague desire to return to some "paradise lost”. Instead, a true education in responsibility entails a genuine conversion in ways of thought and behavior. Churches and religious bodies, non-governmental and governmental organizations, indeed all members of society, have a precise role to play in such education. The first educator, however, is the family, where the child learns to respect his neighbor and to love nature.

14) Finally, the aesthetic value of creation cannot be overlooked. Our very contact with nature has a deep restorative power; contemplation of its magnificence imparts peace and serenity. The Bible speaks again and again of the goodness and beauty of creation, which is called to glorify God (cf. Gen l:4ff; Ps 8:2; 104:1ff; Wis 13:3-5; Sir 39:16, 33; 43:1, 9). More difficult perhaps, but no less profound, is the contemplation of the works of human ingenuity. Even cities can have a beauty all their own, one that ought to motivate people to care for their surroundings. Good urban planning is an important part of environmental protection, and respect for the natural contours of the land is an indispensable prerequisite for ecologically sound development. The relationship between a good aesthetic education and the maintenance of a healthy environment cannot be overlooked.

V. The ecological crisis: a common responsibility

15) Today the ecological crisis has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone. As I have pointed out, its various aspects demonstrate the need for concerted efforts aimed at establishing the duties and obligations that belong to individuals, peoples, States and the international community. This not only goes hand in hand with efforts to build true peace, but also confirms and reinforces those efforts in a concrete way. When the ecological crisis is set within the broader context of the search for peace within society, we can understand better the importance of giving attention to what the earth and its atmosphere are telling us: namely, that there is an order in the universe which must be respected, and that the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future generations. I wish to repeat that the ecological crisis is a moral issue.

Even men and women without any particular religious conviction, but with an acute sense of their responsibilities for the common good, recognize their obligation to contribute to the restoration of a healthy environment. All the more should men and women who believe in God the Creator, and who are thus convinced that there is a well-defined unity and order in the world, feel called to address the problem. Christians, in particular, realize that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith. As a result, they are conscious of a vast field of ecumenical and interreligious cooperation opening up before them.

16) At the conclusion of this Message, I should like to address directly my brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church, in order to remind them of their serious obligation to care for all of creation. The commitment of believers to a healthy environment for everyone stems directly from their belief in God the Creator, from their recognition of the effects of original and personal sin, and from the certainty of having been redeemed by Christ. Respect for life and for the dignity of the human person extends also to the rest of creation, which is called to join man in praising God (cf. Ps 148:96).

In 1979, I proclaimed Saint Francis of Assisi as the heavenly Patron of those who promote ecology (cf. Apostolic Letter Inter Sanctos: AAS 71 [1979], 1509f.). He offers Christians an example of genuine and deep respect for the integrity of creation. As a friend of the poor who was loved by God’s creatures, Saint Francis invited all of creation - animals, plants, natural forces, even Brother Sun and Sister Moon - to give honor and praise to the Lord. The poor man of Assisi gives us striking witness that when we are at peace with God we are better able to devote ourselves to building up that peace with all creation which is inseparable from peace among all peoples.

It is my hope that the inspiration of Saint Francis will help us to keep ever alive a sense of "fraternity" with all those good and beautiful things which Almighty God has created. And may he remind us of our serious obligation to respect and watch over them with care, in light of that greater and higher fraternity that exists within the human family.

From the Vatican, 8 December 1989.

Sustainability: Economics, Ecology, and Justice by John B. Cobb, Jr.

Chapter 6: The Debate among Those beyond Anthropocentrism.

http://www.religion-online.org/show...

The Voice of the Church

In identifying various positions represented in this room, I have not mentioned a distinctively Christian voice. That is because thus far the energies of concerned Christians have been primarily directed to persuading the church to enter the room, rather than to engaging in the discussion already taking place there.

It is my hope that this will change The discussion needs the benefit of Christian counsel and participation. There is a wisdom in the Christian heritage that could give guidance and direction. There may also be a distinctively Christian position that could draw together insights from many of these groups while correcting their excesses. Indeed, I think there is. But until the church has recognized that it has entered the room, and until it is willing to join the existing debate, it will be hard to identify the Christian voice.

The church should not expect a warm welcome when it enters. Its reputation is poor. It has so often been silent on matters important to those in the room or even come out in opposition to them. Its historic call to subjugate the earth is known and recalled with horror. It is expected to be more concerned to be faithful to an ancient document than to the evidence of the day. It is also expected to claim undue and unearned authority for itself, to speak moralistically, and to reject new religious images and new directions in spiritual exploration out of hand. Nevertheless, if the church enters in a humble spirit, willing to learn, it will be accepted.

One contribution that the church can certainly make is to broaden the mix of people involved. Although most of those in the room genuinely believe in the importance of ethnic minority presence, for example, in fact the participants are white and middle class. The World Church is not so limited, and even the national church is far more diverse in its membership.

A second contribution will be a firm commitment to the poor and oppressed. It would be unfair to say that this is lacking among the participants already in the room. Especially the social ecologists are committed to social justice, understood in a somewhat Marxist way. But the church can and should bring into the room persons heavily involved in concrete struggles for liberation. Until they become full participants, even environmentalists who wish them well will propose policies that do not fit their needs. Also, until they are fully involved, they will remain suspicious of all that goes on in these debates. And politically, the only possibility of major changes is through a coalition with other groups who seek such changes.

A third contribution that the church can make is to throw light on the nature of the debates that are going on among the groups in the room. In specifics they are new to the church, but in form they are quite familiar. Some groups are focusing on individual conversion; some on changing social structures. Some groups are pragmatically oriented to achieving quite specific immediate goals, often through legislation. Others are concerned to develop a vision of the ultimate goal. Still others want to organize coalitions that can be socially and politically effective. The church has learned over the years how to make space for diverse programs and efforts and to see them more as mutually complementary than as mutually exclusive. That kind of vision is badly needed in the room into which the church is entering.

Thus far I have spoken of formal and methodological contributions that the church can make. Perhaps these may prove to be the most important. Nevertheless, the church brings its own heritage and resources to illumine specific issues as well. In the remainder of this chapter I will indicate my own views, shaped by my Christian perspective, on some of the issues that are debated in this room. Obviously, Christianity is far too diverse a movement for me to be able to claim that the positions I propose are the Christian ones. But I do feel free to claim that they are legitimate and reasonable views for Christians who have crossed the threshold from the anthropocentric Christianity of the past into the room peopled by others who have rejected anthropocentrism.

Q1: What does the author criticize from Christianity? What can be the main contributions from Christianity in the ecological dialogue? Do you agree/disagree with him? Why?

I explained earlier how the Bible opposes the anthropocentric view of other creatures, that is, the view that they have value only for human beings. I argued that they are also valuable in and of themselves and that this is asserted very clearly in the first chapter of Genesis when God is said to see that they are good without any reference to human beings. When the creation is completed, God views the whole and sees that it is very good. The implication is not only that species and their members are of value in themselves individually, but also that the total creation with all its complex patterns of interdependence has a value greater than the sum of its individual members.

Although deep ecologists in general do not base their views on the Bible, they could gain support from these features of the biblical account. They can argue that it is indeed the complex interrelated whole which is of supreme value. Further, the way in which individuals and species contribute to this whole is by playing their assigned roles, occupying their assigned niches, and interacting in their assigned ways. Human beings constitute one of these species. For millions of years, as hunters and gatherers, they functioned as one species among others. They thus contributed to the richness of the whole. This was the world that in biblical terms was "very good."

But at some point, perhaps ten thousand years ago, human beings began to overstep the boundaries, to cease to function as simply one species among others. They began to domesticate other species. In the process they also "civilized" or domesticated themselves. They became alienated both from the inclusive creation and from their own natural being. They undertook to gain mastery over themselves and over the remainder of creation. They prided themselves on their ability to objectify themselves and their own interior life and thus to gain control of it also.

In short, human beings made themselves sick and mad. They sought healing, often by intensifying just those things that had made them sick. The so-called "higher" religions intensified the self-transcending that separated human beings from the remainder of creation and from their own real nature. They began to seek home in another world or in an imagined future on this planet. They dismissed as "primitive" those peoples who continued to live in a natural and healthy way, and having dismissed them committed genocide against them.

The only real hope is to reverse the whole process of history and civilization, to recover the latent naturalness within us. This leads to a renewal of an understanding of ourselves as simply one species among others. We would cease to claim any special status, special privilege, or special responsibility. We would defend ourselves, as all creatures do, and use other species as we need them, as all species do. But we would not claim any special right to do so. And we would respect the other species as they defend themselves against us and seek to use us for their purposes.

If we ask realistically what steps we could take to make this kind of world possible, the first is to preserve and to extend wilderness. We could reduce the number of domesticated animals in order to make space for wild ones. And we could progressively overcome the habits of mind and social practices that have domesticated us inwardly and outwardly.

I have tried to sketch a deep ecology position. Not all who identify themselves with this label would adopt it. Indeed, some mean by deep ecology any proposal to change fundamental ways of thinking and feeling as a basis for the needed changes in our relation to the other creatures. In that sense Christians who have moved beyond anthropocentrism must be deep ecologists! But the position I have described provides an example of the kind of thinking among deep ecologists that is well worth considering. The issue now is, What can a Christian say in response to this position? When we give up our long-established anthropocentrism, is this where we move?

I have sketched the position, without distortion I hope, as one that can be readily laid alongside the biblical myth. It is an account of an initial paradise and an actual fall. In many respects it parallels the biblical account. It differs in that in the Garden of Eden it seems that human beings did not hunt the animals. It was simply a gathering society. But otherwise, the parallels are close. The domestication of plants and animals is associated with the fallen condition and is immediately connected with violence among human beings. Further, the tree on which the forbidden fruit was found was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The eating of that fruit fits well with the idea of self-transcending that is, for the deep ecologist, the heart of what is wrong with us, what estranges us from our naturalness.

Does this mean that Christianity, rightly understood, supports the kind of deep ecology I have described? I think not. There are two main differences. First, even before the fall human beings, although certainly one species among others, are also differentiated. We were not simply one species among others. We were created in the image of God. We were assigned a particular privilege and a particular responsibility. I trust I have made it clear that I believe Christianity has historically been cursed by a misreading of the specialness and an abuse of its privilege and responsibility. That abuse began in the fall. It has become more serious throughout history down to the present day. Overcoming that abuse is now the task of all concerned human beings, and for Christians that means a profound repentance. But the idea that human specialness is itself the problem, that people need to stop thinking of themselves as especially privileged and responsible in relation to other species, cannot be derived from scripture.

The second point of difference is closely related. We may agree that the fall is closely connected with a kind of self-understanding that disrupts a purely natural attitude. This is surely implied in the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But in the biblical tradition the goal is not to return to the state of innocence that preceded this knowledge. The angel guards the entrance to the garden. There is no turning back. Ironic though it may seem, the way forward is not a reduction of understanding of good and evil, a lessening of self-transcending, but a deepening of knowledge.

The difference here could be put in theological terms as follows. For the particular deep ecology position I have described, the fall is an unmitigated disaster. The only possible form of health is the one that was lost in that fall. Our only hope is to return as far as that is possible to the earlier condition. For Christianity the fall is ambiguous. Something of great value was lost. Life since the fall has been beset by great evils But the salvation that is mediated to us by Christ exceeds in value the innocence that preceded the fall.

This means that there are two sharply opposed views of history. It would be hard to dispute Hegel’s point that human history has been a slaughter bench. Hegel had in mind the mutual slaughter of human beings. We must add the slaughter of other species and the destruction of the health of the biosphere. The horrors that human beings have inflicted and are now inflicting on the whole planet can hardly be exaggerated. Nevertheless, Christians do discern in the course of events something other than progressive evil. In Christ we find a whole-making process whose potential, at least, is to attain something greater than what was originally lost. What we find in Christ is a deepening wisdom that involves a heightened self-transcending rather than a return to innocence.

The practical implications are, therefore, different. Christians seek a future wholeness, a new synthesis of what has come into being since the fall as well as elements of what existed before. The inclusion of elements that have come into being through history will not be viewed as a mere concession to necessity, but as a joyful and grateful expression of appreciation for what has been achieved. For example, the knowledge of nature gained by science should inform us ever more deeply. But the appreciation and understanding of the environment of primal peoples should be recovered and renewed in creative synthesis with what the natural sciences have learned. What we have learned about the curative power of certain chemicals is certainly worth remembering, but this modern medicine needs to be integrated with primal wisdom about the body and its health and ways of being in the natural world. More generally, the wisdom of primal people needs to be recovered within the context of a self-consciousness and self-knowledge hard-won through human history.

Q2. How did Patriarchal Religions help in the human process of becoming alienated from nature?

These differences are related also to different stands taken with respect to the concerns of those who care about animals on an individual basis and attribute rights to them. From the point of view of deep ecologists, this is an anthropocentric mistake. It is the effort to recover concern for other creatures by extending human-centered ideas to them. The whole ethical and legal way of thinking expresses the loss of naturalness that is deplored. It is therefore suspect even in its application to relations among human beings. But to extend what has its limited value within the human context to inter-species relations only worsens the situation. To respect the other species is not to treat them anthropomorphically. The need is to appreciate them in their otherness, not to exaggerate their similarities to ourselves. We should not take responsibility for them upon ourselves, but instead, by becoming again what we were intended to be, leave to them their own destiny. The problem is that we have degraded other species by domesticating them and are now extending this degradation to the remaining wild species by trying to "manage" them. It is not the rights of individual members to freedom from death or suffering that matters, but the whole pattern of human violation of limits.

In my opinion, the Christian has good reason to share with deep ecologists the concern about the degradation of other species involved in their domestication. The species seen as good by God were wild. The extension of wilderness so as to share the world with other species more equitably, so as to allow them to fulfill God’s command that they be fruitful and multiply, seems to me eminently desirable. Dominion has been badly, even perversely expressed in the destruction and degradation of those over whom it is exercised.

Nevertheless, after we have acknowledged the profound truth in the insights of deep ecologists, we must disagree. Human beings do have dominion. The question is not whether we should maintain it or relinquish it, as the deep ecologists favor. The question is how we should exercise it. We are responsible. And to carry out our responsibility, we do have to ask what rights other creatures have vis-à-vis us. How ought we to treat them? Should we treat them as deep ecologists favor, as others in relation to whom inter-species rivalry is appropriate? Or, given our enormous advantages in that rivalry, should we recognize that they have rights that should limit our use of our superior equipment? What uses of these creatures are justified? What uses are not justified?

My point is that these deep ecologists are correct that wilderness should be extended and renewed. But I see this extending as an expression of human dominion, rightly exercised. I see the same dominion requiring ethical decisions with respect to the preservation of species and the treatment of individual animals. In short, the issues that are debated among those who affirm the rights of animals are important ones for Christians to engage. To refuse to assume responsibility on the grounds that taking responsibility is the problem leaves the field to the irresponsible. We have dominion whether we want it or not.

Christians have reason for criticizing some in the animal rights movement for focusing on individuals and ignoring the more serious questions of the destruction of habitats of wild animals with the resultant decimation and even extinction of whole species. But they also have reason to take seriously the questions raised by these thinkers and to be grateful for their passionate concern. Society as a whole has been acting out its anthropocentric perceptions in ways that have been brutal indeed. They have been applied to the production of meat for our tables and to the use of animals for experimental and entertainment purposes. Unrestricted suffering has been inflicted without even evaluating its real contribution to human purposes. The church has stood silently by. We have little grounds for criticizing those who, with greater sensitivity, have forced us to attend to these matters.

Once we enter this discussion, what position should we adopt? I have described two positions. One group holds that the primary problem is animal suffering; the other believes that killing is at least as important. The latter position typically begins with the widely held assumption that we all know that killing another human being is wrong. Each human being has the right to live. This has been undergirded by Christian doctrines of human dignity as children of God. Christians and many others have taught that this right to live is an exclusive human possession. The question is whether this radical line between human beings and other species is justified.

The group whose thinking I am here summarizing argues that this is ‘speciesism’. That is, we can understand that just as it has been hard to overcome the view that only whites have the right to freedom because of racism, so it is hard to overcome the view that only humans have the right to life because of speciesism. But reason does work against this drastic distinction between us and them. When whites were forced to acknowledge that blacks shared all the relevant human characteristics, they backed down on their justifications of slavery. When humans are forced to acknowledge that other animals share the characteristics relevant to the right to life, humans will have to back down on their arrogant assumption that they have to kill them.

The form of the argument seems quite valid. The question is whether in fact other animals, or some of them, do share the relevant characteristics, that is, those characteristics of human beings that cause us to affirm their right to life. To determine the validity of the argument we have to consider first what characteristics these are.

Some may be disposed to argue that the relevant characteristic is simply humanness or belonging to the human species. Those who adopt this line are speciesists. That is, they are frankly asserting that commonality of species is the basis of rights, just as whites have asserted that being white is the basis of rights. But most theologians and philosophers have gone beyond this to identify characteristics of human beings that entail the right to live.

Theologians often appeal to the imago dei. There is nothing wrong with that. But unless one operates in a purely authoritarian fashion, one must go on to say what feature of human beings is pointed to by this term. If it is reason, then we must acknowledge that some nonhuman animals participate more in the imago dei than do some members of the human species. The same is true if we identify the imago dei with the capacity to use language.

The argument is that we do not think of the right to life as restricted to those members of the species, Homo sapiens, who are clearly rational or who are able to use language. We include infants and persons with severe brain damage. Hence it seems that the grounds of the right to life is something more elemental. Some propose that it is the capacity to have interests. If so, this is clearly shared by many animals. To hold that human beings, because they have interests, should not be killed, whereas other animals with analogous interests may be killed with impunity, is speciesism. And of course speciesism is an irrational prejudice that should be overcome.

How should Christians respond? In my opinion, Christians have no reason to reject the general nature of the argument. But Christians do have reason to reject the absoluteness that it presupposes and employs. I mean that taking the right to life of every member of the species Homo sapiens as an absolute sets up the debate in an unhealthy way.

I recognize that this absolutistic thinking is widespread. It expresses itself in the prohibition of abortion and even of contraception. It places obstacles in the way of suffering, aged people who want to die. It leads us to keep alive human bodies in which there is no longer any distinctively human faculty. I oppose all this. Once absolutistic thinking is accepted, the only way of expressing the opposition is by arguing that fertilized ova or fetuses or people who are in certain types of coma are not human, whereas in some sense they certainly are.

The effort to think absolutistically breaks down in other ways. The great majority of those who argue from the right of all humans to life do not adopt radically pacifistic positions on killing. The right to life is one that is forfeited by threatening the lives of others, or even their well-being. The prohibition of killing derived from the absolute human right to life is really the prohibition of murder, and that has to be carefully defined. A right that is forfeited when one’s nation is at war with other nations is far from an absolute right!

This means, in my opinion, that the argument for extending an absolute right to life to members of other species is poorly founded. It does not mean, on the other hand, that all killing of these other animals is justified! We need a more careful analysis of the circumstances under which killing is wrong in general. We can then ask whether these circumstances arise only in the human case or also with other creatures.

I propose three reasons why it is extremely important to forbid the killing of human beings in ordinary circumstances. First, killing brings an end to a series of personal experiences that, if continued, has unique and irreplaceable value. Second, the fear of being killed profoundly reduces the enjoyment of life and the ability to make decisions freely and creatively. Third, the death of one person disrupts the lives of others and contributes to their suffering. These reasons are so important that it is the first duty of every society to assure the basic security of its members against random killing. But it is also obvious that if reasons such as these are the ones that lead to the prohibition of killing or the affirmation of the right to live, then they do not apply equally in extreme cases. A human vegetable can be killed without ending a series of irreplaceable experiences, since those have already ended. A person who wants to die does not fear death so much as continued living. There are those whose death disrupts the lives of others very little and may even be a relief to others.

Now the question is whether the right to life, if based on considerations such as these, applies to nonhuman animals. The answer, I believe, is that it applies to some and not to others, and among those to some more than others. This is not the place to spell out a detailed application. But I suggest that the right to life applies much more to chimpanzees and whales than to chickens and sharks. Permitting tuna fishing but trying to reduce the killing of porpoises that accompanies it makes sense from this point of view.

Those who argue in this way are often accused of having failed truly to escape an anthropocentric point of view. We are told that we are making judgments based on human values, that from the point of view of the chicken, the shark, or the tuna their lives are what are most important, not those of human beings, chimpanzees, whales, and dolphins.

It is certainly true that I am making judgments based on my very fallible human perceptions. In that sense all my thinking is necessarily anthropocentric. But that is not what I have meant by anthropocentricity. The issue is not whether all my thinking is human thinking. Of course it is. The issue is whether human thinking can acknowledge that other creatures have value apart from their value to human beings. I believe they have, and that our thinking about them should begin there; the fact that we are humans does not prevent us from thinking in this way.

The question remains whether our thinking in this way gives any greater validity to our judgments than chickens’ "thinking" in their way gives to theirs. This argument is not silly. Every reason given for favoring human modes of thought over those of chickens turns Out to be circular. If in the world there are only multiple perspectives, then it can be argued that every perspective is as true as every other. This argument can be finally overcome only if there is a privileged perspective.

From the Christian point of view there is a privileged perspective, that of God. In some Christian formulations it seems to be privileged only because God has the power to carry out God’s purposes so that others are forced to conform. I repudiate that view. But I believe God’s perspective is privileged precisely because it includes all others. It includes both my perspective and that of the chicken. The divine experience includes both that of the shark and that of the whale. The judgment that the values precluded by the death of the whale are much more distinctive than in the case of the shark is finally a judgment about their respective contributions to the inclusive whole which is the divine life.

Belief in God provides a basis for dealing with another perplexing issue as well. If we recognize that there are intrinsic values in other creatures, what implications does this have for the way the surface of the earth should be allocated? Should human population be drastically reduced so that all species can flourish equally? Should we seek a situation in which the needs of as large a human population as possible are maximally fulfilled, considering the needs of other species only as they do not conflict with human ones? How do we compare the value of a large human population that is compelled to live extremely frugally at best with a small human population that has all the comforts and luxuries that people desire?

If there is no perspective beyond that of the individuals involved, human and nonhuman, then there seems no escape from simply comparing individual preferences. There can be no public discussion of what is really better. At most one can discuss what an omniscient, omnibenevolent observer would prefer. But if we believe in God, then we can ask what kind of a world would contribute most to God.

Consider a very specific and realistic issue. Many of us are concerned about the decline of biodiversity resulting from human destruction of the habitat of myriads of species. But is there any real justification for this concern? When the species that are lost are types of animals that we enjoy seeing, it is easy to argue that their disappearance is a loss to our descendants. But if they are species of which only a handful of specialists at most have any knowledge at all, and species that are unattractive to us, then this kind of reason has little weight. The only argument left is that they have some potential scientific or medical value to future generations. But it is not very convincing in most cases.

If the destruction of species entailed the reduction of life on the planet in a quantitative sense, then another kind of argument could be made. But this is not necessarily the case. With the disappearance of one species, others may multiply. Or if it could be argued that these species play an irreplaceable role in the ecology such that their disappearance threatens the health of the biosphere, a strong argument could be made. But this is true only in rare cases. No, the real intuition is that diversity has an intrinsic value, that it enriches the whole.

The argument is strong to whatever extent the diversity is known and enjoyed by human beings. But much of the diversity, in fact most of it, is not even known to human beings. In any case, the number of species is so vast that the human mind is not really able to appreciate it except in the most abstract sense. The intuition that the diversity is of value is the intuition that it contributes to the value of the whole, that the contrasting elements making up the whole have value for the whole. That is, in principle, that the whole is not merely the sum of the parts but also a unity that includes those parts in their diversity and in all the patterns of relationships that the diversity offers. This requires that there be an inclusive perspective in addition to the innumerable fragmentary ones. In short, it makes sense to one who believes in God.

I have been illustrating my contention that the church has a contribution to make to the discussion that goes on beyond anthropocentrism. Both its theism and its specific vision derived from the Bible have much to offer. The problem has not been that the church has nothing to say. The problem has been that its distorted commitment to anthropocentrism has blocked it from speaking. As that blockage is removed, there is promise of a strong voice in an important debate.

Q3. What kind of approach towards the non-human living world does the author defend? Is it anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric? Why? Do you agree or disagree with his position? Why?

Ecology and Economy by John B. Cobb, Jr. John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D. is Professor of Theology Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies there.

Dear Chinese Friends, I appreciate the chance to be with you and to share some of my ideas with you, although I realize that it would be much better to listen first, at length, to you in order to learn what you see as the major problems you face. Since that is not practical, I will speak first and then learn something from your responses.

Although there are many, many problems and issues facing humanity at this time, I believe the most crucial have to do with the deep tension between ecology and economy. This is ironic, because the root meanings of these two English words are hardly distinguishable. They both derive from the Greek word oikos, which means "household". Ecology is the logos of the household; economy, the nomos of the household. Logos can be translated as "reason", and nomos, as "law", but their connotations overlap. Yet what is now meant by ecology is deeply at odds with what is meant by economy.

Today, when we think of ecology, the household in question is the biosphere, primarily the natural environment. When we think of the economy, we think of the human production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services. The two topics are treated in such a way that they hardly touch each other. And there is the problem. We need a healthy natural environment as a context for our lives. We need to produce, exchange, and consume goods and services. But precisely because we need both, preoccupation with either one, when the other is not in view, can be disastrous.

Realistically, in the past half century at least, attention has been overwhelmingly focused on economy. The arguments have been about how to increase production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services. Some economists argued that a centralized bureaucracy could plan economic growth most effectively. Others asserted that a market free from government interference would grow more rapidly. Most economies have in fact had elements of both, but on the whole giving more freedom to entrepreneurs has proved more effective.

This debate among economists has in general presupposed that natural resources are not limited. In the West, the dominant school of neo-liberal economists is often quite explicit about this. It believes that technological advance will handle any problems that arise from natural shortages. There are no limits to growth. The more rapidly we increase production, exchange, and consumption the better. Since larger markets speed economic growth, the ideal is a single global market. We need not deal with environmental problems in terms of public policy, since the market will take care of them. For example, as petroleum becomes expensive, other sources of energy, which are now more costly, will become competitive. Then they will be widely used.

Those who look at the world ecologically see things quite differently. They see that human beings are consuming more and more of the total natural product of the world. Wilderness is growing scarce or, by some definitions, has already disappeared. Many species can survive only as managed by human beings. The oil, which has made possible so much of the economic growth, will become scarce and expensive within a few decades. Fresh water is already scarce in many parts of the world. Fisheries are declining. Agricultural production will not be able to keep up with demand. Air, water, and soil are being poisoned. The heating of the atmosphere leads to increased storms and more erratic weather. Those who see things this way urge that, at a minimum, we should focus on conservation of scarce resources, reduction of pollution, and technological innovations that will enable us to adjust to a post-petroleum economy.

Thus far, the economists are victorious. All societies make some concessions to the ecologists, but only when these are not too costly in economic terms. Economic growth is the organizing principle of society. The educational system is in its service. We judge governments primarily in terms of how rapidly nations grow under their policies.

One reason that the economists are more successful in the West is that the benefits of economic growth are immediate whereas the costs are imposed chiefly on the future. Ecologists warn that within a couple of decades our petroleum-based agriculture will not work. But right now it is very profitable for the great corporations that control it, if not for most farmers. Oil is cheap. We can continue, profitably, to displace traditional agriculture, based on solar energy and human and animal labor, with petroleum-based agriculture requiring far less labor. It is far more pleasant to leave to the next generation the task of picking up the pieces when this system collapses than to anticipate the problem now. The fact that most economists encourage faith in new technology gives moral support to sloth.

Another reason for the success of the economists and the weakness of the ecologists is that the mindset of the economists, like that of most of the population, is modern. Modern rationality has compartmentalized various realms of thought. In the university we speak of multiple disciplines. One discipline may borrow from another, but basically each is autonomous. It develops its own models of the world it studies and its own methods for studying this. It does not interfere with work in other disciplines and it rejects outside interference in its own work.

The work that is done within a discipline is technical reason. In the field of technical reason modernity has been unrivalled. Among the most successful of the disciplines is economics. It has developed a model of the human being and methods of working with that model that are brilliant and convincing within the self-imposed limits. It is a modern study par excellence. And as such it communicates well to those educated in the modern university.

The model of the human being with which economists work, Homo economicus, is also purely modern. Human beings are treated in economics only is so far as they are self-contained individuals whose relations with other individuals are market transactions. Given this model, the kinds of relations that make for human community do not appear at all. Hence, within the purview of economic theory, the destruction of communities is not a loss. A fortiori the degradation of the natural world is not considered.

Ecologists approach matters quite differently. As students of the living world around us, they found that the compartmentalized and linear thinking of modernity did not work well. In this compartmentalized way, they could study rats in mazes and individual animal behavior in laboratories. They could dissect rabbits and learn about their organs. But none of this told them much about the way life took place in nature. There, each species of animals interacted with other species and with the plants that made up the ecosystem. The behavior of each organism is deeply affected by its ever-changing environment. The effects of one change work themselves out in surprising changes elsewhere in the system. Often changes introduced with the best of intentions have unanticipated deleterious results.

As we have become aware of this, we have also become aware of the history of human degradation of the environment. We know that many of our deserts were created by overgrazing, that ancient cities were abandoned because irrigation led to salinization of the soils, that deforestation has dried up springs and rivers as well as caused erosion on a mammoth scale. We are alerted to the real possibility that our present civilization is radically unsustainable.

The debate between economists and ecologists is, therefore, a debate between modernists and postmodernists of a certain stripe. Because we still live in the modern age, the ecologists are handicapped by having to make their case in modernist terms. They have to make specific predictions, and often the course of events proves them wrong. There was a famous instance in which an ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, bet an economist, Julian Simon, that the prices of raw materials would rise during a certain decade. The economist predicted they would fall, and this proved to be correct. Ehrlich based his prediction on his correct assessment that population would rise, demand would rise even faster, and more raw materials would be needed. But the economist understood more deeply how increased demand stimulates increased production and producers compete more intensely to sell their products. Economists have again and again been justified by history, against Malthus, in their expectation that food production will increase faster than population growth. It seems that their faith in technology and the market has been repeatedly vindicated.

Despite this, ecologists are sure that, at a more fundamental level, economists are wrong. Without examining the details of history or of what is now going on, economists project the statistical patterns of the past into the indefinite future. But ecologists are sure that the patterns that worked when the human economy was small in relation to the natural world will break down as the relationship changes. They point out the high social and ecological costs of past technological solutions to the production of food, such as the Green Revolution, and the unsustainability of its practices as oil becomes scarce. The proposed technological solution through genetic manipulation will solve some problems at the expense of generating others. The whole system becomes more and more precarious. Meanwhile aquifers are exhausted and rivers run dry. The technological solution of desalinization of ocean water and pumping it to the fields is so expensive in energy that its relevance is minimal. Creating plants that can survive with reduced water goes in just the opposite direction from the green revolution. A new mindset is needed, one that locates food production in the wider ecological and social context and involves consideration of how the affluent can reduce their demands for food. Encouragement of reducing consumption cuts directly against the economist’s interest in endless growth.

Q.1 How do Ecology and Economy understand the relation and interaction between Human Being and nature? Differences and limitations.

II.

Actually there is a third important voice in the contemporary debate. This is the voice that speaks for fairness. I noted above that community has no value in neo-liberal economic thinking. But even if we think of people as individuals, related only in the market, we can ask how the market, when left to itself, distributes its goods and services. Does it do so fairly? In the compartmentalized thought world of modernity, this question belongs to political theory rather than to economics. But since we have transferred so much power to the economic order, we need to raise the question. The answer is that the strength of the market is that it encourages growth. How that growth is distributed is not a concern of economics as such. The empirical and historical fact is that the market favors the rich over the poor and tends to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

The minimum statement about this lack of equal opportunity and results is that most of the growth in the economy goes to the rich. What is debated is whether the poor benefit at all. Some advocates of growth adopt the trickle down theory. They are convinced that as there is more and more growth some of the benefits automatically trickle down to the poor. Some argue that in the long run the inequality generated by the market at certain stages lessens. Economic growth will lead toward equality.

Those who hold to this optimistic scenario point to the history of Western Europe. There is no doubt that after a period in which workers were intensively exploited, the situation changed. By the 1960s workers in Europe enjoyed the fruits of industrial development and economic growth. The gap between rich and poor narrowed markedly. One could say that fairness triumphed.

However, this was not a result of the market alone. Labor organized and struggled for decades to have a voice in political decisions. Legislation established high minimum wages and benefits. Taxation functioned to redistribute wealth. Of course, without the high level of national production, the wealth would not have been available to distribute. But it is disingenuous to describe the market as the agent of a fair distribution.

That the market works the other way can be seen in recent times. In the sixties and into the seventies the United States moved toward a reduction of poverty. For many workers, wages were good. But there were increasing pressures to free the market from political constraints. With Ronald Reagan’s election, these pressures became successful. The government has steadily reduced its aid to the poor and its support of workers. It has given a freer and freer hand to corporations. Through free trade agreements with Canada and Mexico it has enlarged the market. All this has made for economic growth. It has also made for increased inequality. Although economists dispute this, the evidence is that the market left to itself does very little for the poor.

Indeed, I believe that left to itself the market worsens the condition of the poor. In the United States in the past quarter century, working families have maintained their standard of living only by working more hours. Whereas once it was assumed that a man with an ordinary job could support his wife and children, now the standard is two incomes. There is little doubt that children receive less parental attention and that there are negative social consequences. Of course, the family is likely to have many devices in the home that did not even exist in the earlier period to which I refer. Expectations with respect to housing and motor transport have risen. Overall, it is hard to say whether the standard of living has gone up or down, but that more people work more hours at lower hourly pay is not seriously in dispute. Meanwhile, the pay of CEOs has soared.

Q.2 What is Neoliberalism understanding of Nature, Human being and Human society? What is the relation between ecology and Global Social Justice?

III.

Especially since World War II the world has been committed to economic growth. This commitment was challenged by the ideas of those shaped by ecological sensitivity. They argued in the seventies that the most important goal must be sustainability. Otherwise the whole of humanity would be involved in a boom followed by a terrible bust when the limits of growth were reached. A sustainable society would be one in which population growth ended and goods were distributed in such a way that all could meet their minimal needs for a decent life.

Clearly there is a sharp conflict here. The policies that make for continuing rapid growth and those that make for sustainability thus understood are diametrically opposed. The United Nations called a meeting at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 where this conflict was to be worked through. The United States government, under George Bush, was determined that this conference not derail the commitment to economic growth through globalization. It did not. It co-opted the term "sustainable" by using it to modify "development." And it interpreted development to mean primarily economic growth.

Even so, the use of the adjective sustainable as a modifier of growth has had some effect. The World Bank, for example, has paid more attention to the environmental impact of the forms of economic development that it supports. Many national governments have given heightened thought to what is involved. Recently many have been willing to work toward the reduction of their carbon emissions so as to slow the process of global warming.

The United States government, however, has given little but lip service to making the growth to which it is committed sustainable. Fortunately, a number of good laws and policies were in effect already, helping to maintain the quality of the environment within the United States. But the United States continues to lead the effort to reduce barriers to trade in ways that in fact lead to ecological devastation. Even within the United States the corporate lobby works, sometimes successfully, to undermine such environmental protection as we now have. Profit, not sustainability, is the dominant concern of business and of much of the political leadership that is beholden to the wealthy for funding their campaigns.

Near Rio there was an unofficial meeting of nongovernmental organizations of many sorts. Some were focused on environmental issues, often quite local ones. Others represented labor or peasants. Some were concerned about particular ethnic groups or represented the interests of fourth world groups. Still others were committed to human rights for all. These groups discovered that despite their differences, they had a common enemy in the transnational corporations that dominated the global economy. These were supported by the great Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the structural adjustment they imposed on debtor nations all over the world. The whole system designed for growth favored the large corporations and exploited workers, peasants, and the natural environment. Human rights everywhere suffered.

Prior to Rio, it seemed that the disparate voices of protest against corporation-dominated economic globalization cancelled each other out. The interests of peasants and workers differed and both groups were suspicious of middle class environmentalists. As long as these interests could be played off against each other corporate victory was assured. But at Rio a new set of connections was made. Since then it has been possible to speak of an NGO position on the issues facing the global community. And this reflects much more the aim at sustainable society than the aim at sustainable growth. Every UN- sponsored meeting has been accompanied by an NGO meeting that developed its own positions on the topic at hand. And there is considerable coherence in these documents.

NGO meetings do not accompany only those sponsored by the United Nations. Each time the leaders of the seven or eight great industrial powers gather for what they call an Economic Summit, there is also a meeting of TOES, The Other Economic Summit, which articulates the NGO vision over against the dominant one.

More recently the NGO movement has undertaken to mount major protests against the policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions. The protest against the World Trade Organization at Seattle took many Americans by surprise because it demonstrated the cooperation between labor and environmentalists. Because there were also bitter disagreements between First and Third World representatives to the WTO, the protesters were successful and the meeting was a failure. Subsequent protests in Washington, Quebec, Prague, and Geneva have been met by increasing police violence. They have had limited success, but they have forced the world to see that the policies of our global leaders are bitterly rejected by masses of citizens. The violence that takes place at these events is in small part due to the fact that the aim of the protest leaders to maintain a nonviolent movement cannot be enforced on all participants. But most of the violence is that of the police who carry out orders to make the protesters, however nonviolent, pay a high price for their protests.

Our leaders tell us that the protesters are naïve, that the only hope for attaining their goals of human and ecological well being rest in the pursuit of just the economic globalization to which they object. These leaders appeal to the dominant economic theory that teaches that the larger the market and the freer it is of governmental interference, the faster wealth is created. It is assumed that this rapid increase of wealth will benefit all.

I am one of those who supports the goal of sustainable society rather than sustainable growth. If the growth that is pursued were truly sustainable, I would have no objection. Such growth belongs to a sustainable society. Truly sustainable growth would operate within the limits of renewal of resources. We would not exploit a specie of fish beyond the rate of its reproduction. We would not cut down trees faster than new trees can be grown. Further, we would not degrade the quality of what we were exploiting. The health of the ocean and of the forests would be maintained. With respect to nonrenewable resources, we would use them as slowly as possible, developing alternatives as we proceeded.

But this is far from the case. The growth that is supported by dominant policies has wiped out the stock of certain types of fish not only locally but globally. It is reducing habitat for fish reproduction such as mangrove groves and degrading the ocean floor. It is replacing natural forests with monoculture and causing enormous loss of soil for trees through erosion. This is not sustainable. In the meantime, it renders drives many people out of their native habitats in forests, forces farmers off the land, pays laborers less than a living wage, and renders the poor more powerless.

On the other hand, it builds tall buildings, produces huge quantities of goods for those who can afford them, renders travel all over the world easy, and makes life very comfortable, even luxurious, for perhaps a quarter of the world’s population. It holds before many others the promise that they can participate in this affluence. It argues that there is no alternative.

Further, it thinks of sustainability in another way. As some species of fish are decimated and become unavailable, others are harvested. Fish farms replace wild fish. Genetic manipulation can increase the size of fish. As long as technology can keep ahead of natural decline, it is supposed, the fish harvest can grow. If this is not possible, other foods can be substituted for fish. Sustainable growth allows for unlimited substitution as long as human nutritional needs are met. Growth as increase of economic activity can thus continue indefinitely.

Those with ecological sensitivities are skeptical of this possibility. Substitutes for a healthy ocean and adequate soils are not as easy to obtain as substitutes for one form of metal or another. Even the question of substituting other forms of energy for oil will prove more difficult than economists generally seem to recognize. In addition the substitution of an artificial environment for a natural one seems to many of us a huge loss not really compensated by more gadgets.

This is not the place to pursue this argument between advocates of sustainable society and endless growth. It is, in my opinion, the most important issue facing humanity today. If the economists are correct, then a prosperous future awaits all our descendants, if only we will be patient and stay the course. There will be plenty of goods and services for all, and even the poorest will have enough. If the ecologists are correct, continuing on our present course is a sure recipe for disaster. The children of those who now sacrifice for their sake will be the first to be destroyed by scarcity and pollution. Even the rich will live in an impoverished and inhuman world.

No doubt the truth lies somewhere in between. But I have acknowledged that my judgment is closer to that of the ecologists. Perhaps China can find a way through the dilemmas posed by the clash of economic and ecological thinking and practice. Perhaps China can even lead the way for the whole world.

Q3 How will you relate wealth, economic development and ecology-environment? Is an Ecologically Sustainable Society possible or it is just a delusion?

God’s Household Christianity, Economics and Planetary Living Sallie McFague

RELIGION AND ECONOMICS

None of the world=s major religions has as its maxim: “Blessed are the greedy.” Given the many differences among religions on doctrines and practice, it is remarkable to find such widespread agreement at the level of economics. Often, however, religion is not considered to be about economics; in fact, many in most societies do not want religion to intrude into economics. It is preferable, they say, for religion to attend to “religious matters” and leave economics to the economists. But most religions know better. They know that economics is about human well-being, about who eats and who does not, who has clothes and shelter and who does not, who has the basics for a decent life and who does not. Economics is about life and death, as well as the quality of life. Economics is not just about money, but about sharing scarce resources among all who need them. Economics is a justice issue, so why would religions not be concerned with it? In many religions the concern for justice has been focused on human beings—and this is certainly the case in Christianity, at least for the last few centuries. But recently, the issues of well-being and justice have been extended to embrace the entire planet. The well-being of the planet and of people is increasingly seen to be inextricably related. In Christianity, there is a return to the cosmological context for interpreting the faith, rather than the narrow psychological focus prevalent since the Reformation. In fact, many current Christian theologies embrace all three of the classical interpretive contexts: the cosmological, the political, and the personal.i That is, Christian faith embraces the world—all of creation and not just we human beings who make up less then one percent of it. The Redeemer is also the Creator: all of creation, including dying nature as well as oppressed people, are within God’s “economy,” God’s “household.” It is no coincidence that the Greek word for house, oikos, is the source of our words for economics, ecology, and ecumenical. The three belong together: in order for the whole household of the planet to flourish, the earth’s resources must be distributed justly among all its inhabitants, human and earth others, on a sustainable basis. The three basic economic rules for all to thrive in this household are: Take only your share; Clean up after yourself; and Keep the house in good repair for those to come. These rules should be pinned up on the planet’s “fridge” for all members to memorize and follow. They are not suggestions, but necessities, the basic economic laws for long-term planetary well-being. But this economic paradigm is certainly not the dominant one in global society today. Nor is it the one that most Christians seem to be embracing. To be sure, Christians do not openly support “Blessed are the greedy;” nonetheless, that is the way most of us live. Why? Quite simply, because we are members of a society, now a world-wide one, that accepts, almost without question, an economic theory that supports insatiable greed on the part of individuals. This assumption lies behind present-day market capitalism and, since the death of communism and the decline of socialism, it is accepted by most ordinary people as a description of the way things are and must be. It is the “truth.” Although market capitalism is a “description of the way things are” in our society, it is not a description of the way things must be—or should be. It is an economic model, not a description. Market capitalism is a type of economics that allocates scarce resources not in regard to the needs of the planet’s inhabitants nor with an eye to its sustainability, but rather on the basis of individuals successfully competing for them. It is an economic model which makes a case for allocating how scarce resources might be allocated, not how they must be.

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This realization—that economics is not a “hard” science, but an ideology with an assumed anthropology and goal for the planet (summarized by “greed” and “growth”) —is the first step in seeing things otherwise. Ecological economics—economics for the well-being of the whole household of planet earth and all its creatures—is also a model with an anthropological and planetary ideology. It claims that human beings, while greedy to be sure, are even more needy (they, we, depend on the health of all the other parts of the planet for our very existence—clean water, breathable air, arable land, planets, etc.). It claims that market capitalism denies one huge fact: unless the limited resources of the planet are justly distributed among its myriad life forms so they all can flourish, there will be no sustainable future for even the greediest of us. We cannot live without these others who are the source of our existence: we can live only a few minutes without air, a few days without water, a few weeks without food. Of all creatures alive, we are the neediest.

CHRISTIANITY AND ECONOMICS

Is ecological economics “Christian” economics? No, not in any simple sense. It is, however, an emerging economic model that is being increasingly set forth and supported by a wide range of NGO=s and protest movements. Its motto is “a different world is possible” and its basic tenets are concern for fair labor laws and environmental health. Lynn White’s oft-quoted 1967 essay lay the blame for environmental deterioration at the feet of religion, specifically Christianity.ii If Christianity was capable of doing such immense damage, then surely the restoration of nature must also lie, at least in part, with Christianity. I believe it does, but also with other world religions as well as with education, government, economics—and science. The environmental crisis is a “planetary agenda,” involving all people, all areas of expertise, all religions. This is the case because the environmental crisis is not a “problem” that any specialization can solve. Rather it is about how we—all of us human beings and all other creatures—can live justly and sustainably on our planet. It is about the “house rules” that will enable us to do so. These house rules include attitudes as well as technologies, behaviors as well as science. They are what the oikos, the house we all share, demands that we think and do so there will be enough for everyone. The house rules are concerned with the management of the resources of planet earth so that all may thrive indefinitely. How does religion and specifically Christianity fit into this picture? It fits where all religions do: at the point of the worldview underlying the house rules. It fits at the level of the deeply-held and often largely unconscious assumptions about who we are in the scheme of things and how we should act.iii While “anthropology” is not the only concern of religions, it is a central one and for the purposes of the ecological crisis, the one that may count the most.

This paper will attempt to make the case that Christianity, at least since the Protestant Reformation and especially since the Enlightenment, has through its individualistic view of human life, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, supported the neo-classical economic paradigm, the current consumer culture, which is devastating the planet and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.iv As an alternative, we will suggest that Christianity, given its oldest and deepest anthropology, should support an ecological economic model, one in which our well-being is seen as interrelated and interdependent with the well-being of all other living things and earth processes.v In other words, religions, and especially Christianity in Western culture, have a central role in forming who we think we are and what we have the right to do. It is the claim of this paper that the individualistic anthropology is deep within our consumer-oriented culture and is presently supported not only by religion but also by government and contemporary economics.vi When these three major institutions—religion, government, and economics—present a united front, a “sacred canopy” is cast over a society, validating the behavior of its people. It is difficult to believe that science and technology alone can solve an ecological crisis supported by this triumvirate, for it legitimates human beings continuing to feel, think, and act in ways that are basically contrary to the just distribution of the world’s resources and the sustainability of the planet itself.

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NEO-CLASSICAL AND ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

The two worldviews—the neo-classical economic one and the ecological economic view—are dramatically different, suggesting different anthropologies and different house rules. The first model sees human beings on the planet as a corporation or syndicate, a collection of individuals drawn together to benefit its members by optimal use of natural resources. The second model sees the planet more like an organism or a community, that survives and prospers through the interdependence of all its parts, human and non-human. The first model rests on assumptions from the 18th century view of human beings as individuals with rights and responsibilities, and of the world as a machine or collection of individual parts, related externally to one another. The second model rests on assumptions from postmodern science in its view of human beings as the conscious and radically-dependent part of the planet, and of the world as a community or organism, internally related in all its parts. Both are models, interpretations, of the world and our place in it: neither is a description. This point must be underscored because the first model seems “natural,” indeed “inevitable” and “true” to most middle-class Westerners, while the second model seems novel, perhaps even utopian or fanciful. In fact, both come from assumptions of different historical periods; both are world-pictures built on these assumptions and each vies for our agreement and loyalty. We will suggest that the syndicate or machine model is injurious to nature and to poor people, while the other one, the community or organic model, is healthier for the planet and all its inhabitants. In other words, we need to assess the “economy” of both models, their notions of the allocation of scare resources to family members, to determine which view of the “good life” is better. The mention of “allocation of scarce resources” brings us to the heart of the matter. The reason economics is so important, why it is a religious and ecological issue, is that it is not just a “matter of money; ” rather, it is a matter of survival and flourishing. Economics is a value issue. In making economic decisions, the “bottom line” is not the only consideration. Many other values are present in decisions concerning scarce resources: from the health of a community to its recreational opportunities; from the beauty of other life forms to our concern for their well-being, from a desire to see our children fed and clothed to a sense of responsibility for the welfare of future generations. Contemporary neo-classical economists, however, generally deny that economics is about values.vii But this denial is questionable. By neo-classical economics we mean market capitalism as conceived by Adam Smith in the 18th century and, more particularly, the version of it practiced by the major economies of our time. The key feature of market capitalism is the allocation of scarce resources by means of decentralized markets: allocation occurs as the result of individual market transactions each of which is guided by self-interest.viii At the base of neo-classical economics is an anthropology: human beings are individuals motivated by self-interest. The value by which scarce resources are allocated, then, is the fulfillment of the self-interest of human beings. The assumption is that everyone will act to maximize their own interest and by doing so all will eventually benefit—the so-called “invisible hand” of classical economic theory. Neo-classical economics has one value: the monetary fulfillment of individuals provided they compete successfully for the resources. But what of other values? Two key ones, if we have the economics of the entire planet in mind, are the just distribution of the earth’s resources and the ability of the planet to sustain our use of its resources. However, these matters—distributive justice to the world’s inhabitants and the optimal scale of the human economy within the planet’s economy—are considered “externalities” by neo-classical economics.ix In other words, the issues of who benefits from an economic system and whether the planet can bear the system’s burden are not part of neo-classical economics. In sum, the worldview or basic assumption of neo-classical economics is surprisingly simple and straight-forward: the crucial assumption is that human beings are self-interested individuals who, acting on this basis, will create a syndicate or corporation, even a global one, capable of benefiting all eventually. Hence, as long as the economy grows, individuals in a society will sooner or later participate in prosperity. These assumptions about human nature are scarcely value-neutral. They indicate a

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preference for a certain view of who we are and what the goal of human effort should be: the view of human nature is individualism and our goal is growth. When we turn to the alternative ecological economic paradigm we see a different set of values. Are we basically greedy or needy? Probably both, but as our answers veer toward one pole or the other, we will find ourselves embracing an individualistic or a community model of life. Ecological economics claims we cannot survive (even to be greedy) unless we acknowledge our profound dependence on one another and the earth. Human need is more basic than human greed: we are relational beings from the moment of our conception to our last breath. The well-being of the individual is inextricably connected to the well-being of the whole. These two interpretations of who we are and where we fit in the world are almost mirror opposites of each other on the three critical issues of allocation of resources, distributive justice, and sustainability. Neo-classical economics begins with the unconstrained allocation of resources to competing individuals, on the assumption that if all people operate from this base, issues of fair distribution and sustainability will eventually work themselves out. Ecological economics begins with the viability of the whole community, on the assumption that only as it thrives now and in the future will its various members, including human beings, thrive as well. In other words, ecological economics begins with sustainability and distributive justice, not with the allocation of resources among competing individuals. Before all else the community must be able to survive (sustainability), which it can do only if all members have the use of resources (distributive justice). Then, within these parameters, the allocation of scarce resources among competing users can take place. Ecological economics does not pretend to be value-free; its preference is evident—the well-being and sustainability of our household, planet earth. It recognizes the OIKOS base of ecology, economics, and ecumenicity: economics is the management of a community’s physical necessities for the benefit of all. Ecological economics is a human enterprise that seeks to maximize the optimal functioning of the planet’s gifts and services for all users. Ecological economics, then, is first of all a vision of how human beings ought to live on planet earth in light of the perceived reality of where and how we live. We live in, with, and from the earth. This story of who we are is based on postmodern science, not as in neo-classical economics, on the 18th century story of reality.

NEO-CLASSICAL OR ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS: WHICH IS GOOD FOR PLANET EARTH?

In answering this question, we are asking about the most important of the three economic issues: sustainability. Can neo-classical economics as currently understood sustain the planet? In the neo-classical economic view the “world” is a machine or syndicate; presumably then, when some parts give out they can be replaced with substitutes. If, for instance, our main ecological problem is non-renewable resources (oil, coal, minerals, etc.), then human ingenuity might well fill in the gaps when they occur. Since the earth is considered an “externality” by neo-classical economics, then “good for the planet” can only mean good for human beings to use. Sustainability is not the major priority. The state of our planet at the beginning of the new millennium, however, is far different than simply the loss of non-renewable resources. In fact, that problem is of less importance than two other related ones: the rate of loss of renewable resources and the manner in which these losses overlap and support further deterioration. The big problems are the loss of water, trees, fertile soil, clean air, fisheries, and biodiversity and the ways the degradation of each of these renewables contributes to the deterioration of the rest. In other words, if the planet is seen more like an organism than a machine, with all parts interrelated and interdependent, then after a certain level of decay of its various members, it will, like any “body,” become sick at its core, sick to the point of not functioning properly. It will not be able to sustain itself. This is called the synergism of planetary operation. The various parts of the planet as an organism work together both in health and in decay to create something both better and worse than the individual

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parts. When the various members of an ecosystem are healthy, they work together to provide innumerable “free services” that none could do alone, and that we take for granted: materials production (food, fisheries, timber, genetic resources, medicines), pollination, biological control of pests and diseases, habitat and refuge, water supply and regulation, waste recycling and pollution control, educational/scientific resources, recreation.x These services are essential to our survival and well-being; they can continue only if we sustain them. This “list” of services should be seen as a “web”: none of them can function alone—each of them depends on the others. These services are the “commons” that is our very lifeblood and that we hold in trust for future generations. The most important services are not necessarily the most visible ones; for instance, in a forest it is not only the standing trees that are valuable but also the fallen ones (the “nurse logs” on which new trees grow); the habitat the forest provides for birds and insects that pollinate crops and destroy diseases; the plants that provide biodiversity for food and medicines; the forest canopy that breaks the force of winds; the roots that reduce soil erosion; the photosynthesis of plants that help stabilize the climate. The smallest providers—the insects, worms, spiders, fungi, algae, and bacteria—are critically important in creating a stable, sustainable home for humans and other creatures. If such a forest is clear-cut to harvest the tress, everything else goes as well. All these services disappear. A healthy ecosystem—complex and diverse in all its features, both large and small—is resilient like a well-functioning body. A simplified, degraded nature, supporting single-species crops in ruined soil with inadequate water and violent weather events, results in a diminished environment for human beings as well. “The bottom line is that for humans to be healthy and resilient, nature must be too.”xi An economic model that does not have as its first priority the sustainability of the planet cannot be good for human beings. The neo-classical market model does not have such a priority. Hence, it is not good for us even if we like it and we do like it. We are addicted to our consumer lifestyle and we are in denial that it is bad for us and for our planet.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE ECOLOGICAL ECONOMIC MODEL

The model we need is very different. To recall, the ecological model claims that housemates must abide by three main rules: take only your share, clean up after yourselves, and keep the house in good repair for future occupants. We don’t own this house; we don’t even rent it. It is loaned to us “free” for our lifetime with the proviso that we obey the above rules so that it can continue to feed, shelter, nurture, and delight others. These rules are not laws that we can circumvent or disobey; they are the conditions of our existence and they are intrinsic to our happiness. If we were to follow these rules we would be living within a different vision of the good life, the abundant life, than is current in our consumer culture and that is destroying the planet. Now, given these two worldviews—the neo-classical and the ecological economic ones—which should Christianity support? Presently, it is supporting the neo-classical economic paradigm to the degree that it does not speak against it and side publicly with the ecological view. Does it matter? Yes, it does if one accepts the assumption of this paper that worldviews matter. While there is no direct connection between believing and acting, thinking and doing, there is an implicit, deeper, and more insidious one: the worldview that persuades us it is “natural” and “inevitable” becomes the secret partner of our decisions and actions. Moreover, a persuasive case can be made that there is an intrinsic connection between the ecological economic model and Christianity. Distributive justice and sustainability, as goals for planetary living, are pale reflections, but reflections nonetheless, of what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God.xii Let us look at the vivid portrait of Jesus by New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan.xiii “The open commensality and radical egalitarianism of Jesus’ Kingdom of God are more terrifying than anything we have ever imagined, and even if we can never accept it, we should not explain it away as something else.”xiv For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was epitomized by everyone being invited to the table; the Kingdom is known by radical equality at the level of bodily needs. Crossan names the Parable of the Feast as central to

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understanding what Jesus means by the Kingdom of God. This is a shocking story, trespassing society’s boundaries of class, gender, status, and ethnicity—as its end result is inviting all to the feast. There are several versions (Matt. 22:1-13; Luke 14: 15-24; Gospel of Thomas, 64), but in each a prominent person invites other, presumably worthy, people to a banquet, only to have them refuse: one to survey a land purchase, another to try out some new oxen, a third to attend a wedding. The frustrated host then tells his servants to go out into the streets of the city and bring whomever they find to dinner: the poor, maimed, blind, lame, good and bad (the list varies in the three versions). The shocking implication is that everyone—anyone—is invited. As Crossan remarks, if beggars come to your door, you might give them food or even invite them into the kitchen for a meal, but you don’t ask them to join the family in the dining room or invite them back on Saturday night for supper with your friends.xv But that is exactly what happens in this story. The Kingdom of God, according to this portrait of Jesus, is “more terrifying than anything we have imagined” because it demolishes all our carefully constructed boundaries between the worthy and the unworthy and does so at the most physical, bodily level. For first century Jews, the key boundary was purity laws: one did not eat with the poor, women, the diseased, or the “unrighteous.” For us, the critical barrier is economic laws: one is not called to sustainable and just sharing of resources with the poor, the disadvantaged, the “lazy.” To do otherwise in both cultures, is improper, not expected—in fact, shocking. And yet, in both cases, the issue is the most basic bodily one—who is invited to share the food—in other words, the issue is who lives and who dies? In both cases, the answer is the same: everyone, regardless of status (by any criteria), is invited. This vision of God’s will for the world does not specifically mention just, sustainable planetary living, but it surely is more in line with that worldview than it is with the satisfaction of individual consumer desires. Unlike our first-century Mediterranean counterparts, North American middle-class Christians are not terrified by the unclean, but we are by the poor. There are so many of them—billions! Surely we cannot be expected to share the planet’s resources justly and sustainably with all of them. Yet, this historical Jesus appears to disagree: he is not, it seems, interested so much in “religion,” including his own, as in human well-being, beginning with the body: feeding the hungry and healing the suffering. Moreover, his message, according to Crossan, had less to do with what Jesus did for others than what others might do for their neighbors. “The Kingdom of God was not, for Jesus, a divine monopoly exclusively bound to his own person. It began at the level of the body and appeared as a shared community of healing and eating—that is to say, of spiritual and physical resources available to each and all without distinctions, discrimination, or hierarchies. One entered the Kingdom as a way of life and anyone who could live it could bring it to others. It was not just words alone, or deeds alone, but both together as life-style.”xvi The body is the locus: how we treat needy bodies gives the clue to how a society is organized. It suggests that correct “table manners” are a sign of a just society, the Kingdom of God. If one accepts this interpretation, the “table” becomes not primarily the priestly consecrated bread and wine of communion celebrating Jesus’ death for the sins of the world, but rather the egalitarian meals of bread and fishes that one finds throughout Jesus’ ministry.xvii At these events, all are invited, with no authoritarian brokering, to share in the food, whether it be meager or sumptuous. Were such an understanding of the Eucharist to infiltrate Christian churches today, it could be mind-changing—in fact, maybe world-changing. At the very least, it is terrifying. Is it also absurd, foolish, and utopian? Perhaps, but, as we have suggested, there appears to be a solid link, a degree of continuity, between this reconstruction of society—the kingdom of God—and what we have described as the ecological, economic worldview. This worldview is closer to that terrifying picture than is the neo-classical economic model. We might see the link as the ideal and the pale reflection; perhaps just, sustainable planetary living is a foretaste, a glimmer, an inkling of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps it is at least in the right direction and if so, how can we not try to move that way? If this is the case, then for middle-class, North American Christians it may well be that sin is refusing to acknowledge the link between the Kingdom and the ecological, economic worldview, explaining it God’s Household – McFague 7 away because of the consequences for our privileged lifestyle. Sustainability and the just distribution of resources are concerned with human and planetary well-being for all. This is, we suggest, the responsible interpretation of the Parable of the Feast for twenty-first century well-off North American Christians. It demands that we look at the systemic structures separating the haves and the have-nots in our time—those invited to the table and those excluded. And it demands that we name these structures for what they are: evil. They are the collective forms of “our sin.” They are the institutions, laws, and international bodies of market capitalism (often aided by the silence of the church) that allow some to get richer and most to become poorer. Our sin is one of commission but perhaps more damningly of omission: our greed camouflaged by indifference and denial—and even by our good works of charity for the “uninvited.”

NEXT STEPS: A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

In order to dislodge the neo-classical economic worldview and Christianity’s complicity with it, three steps are needed. The first step is becoming conscious that neo-classical economics is a model, not a description, of how to allocate scarce resources. There are other ways to live, other ways to divide things up, other goals for human beings and the planet. “Economics” is always necessary, but not necessarily neo-classical economics: ecological economics is an alternative. The second step is to suggest some visions of the good life that are not consumer-dominated, visions that are just and sustainable. The good life is not necessarily the consumer life; rather, it could include the basic necessities for all, universal medical care and education, opportunities for creativity and meaningful work, time for family and friends, green spaces in cities, and wilderness for other creatures. We need to ask what really makes people happy and which of these visions are just to the world’s inhabitants and sustainable for the planet. The third step is to re-think what such a different context—the ecological economic one—would mean for the basic doctrines of Christianity: God and the world, Christ and salvation, human life and discipleship. While this last task is a huge one beyond the scope of this paper, let us end with a few brief comments about God and the world, because this is at the heart of who we think we are and what we should do. Since our interpretive context, the ecological economic model, is about the just and sustainable allocation of resources among all planetary users, the framework for speaking of God and the world becomes worldly well-being. Or, to phrase it in terms of a gloss on Irenaeus: “The glory of God is every creature fully alive.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it “worldly Christianity:” he said that God is neither a metaphysical abstraction nor the answer to gaps in our knowledge—God is neither in the sky nor on the fringes, but at “the center of the village,” in the midst of life, both its pains and its joys.xviii An ecological economic model means an earthly God, an incarnate God, an immanental God. As we look, then, at the big picture, the general outline of this theology, we find it basically different from the theology implied by the neo-classical model. Broadly speaking, the differences can be suggested as a movement toward the earth: from heaven to earth; from the otherworldly to this worldly; from above to below; from a distant, external God to a near, immanental God; from time and history to space and land; from soul to body; from individualism to community; from mechanistic to organic thinking; from spiritual salvation to holistic well-being; from anthropocentrism to cosmocentrism. The ecological model means a shift not from God to the world, but from a distant God related externally to the world to an embodied God who is the source of the world’s life and fulfillment. The neo-classical economic model assumes God, like the human being, is an individual; in fact, the super individual who controls the world through laws of nature, much as a good mechanic makes a well-designed machine operate efficiently. This God is at the beginning (creation) and intervenes from time to time to influence personal and public history, but is otherwise absent from the world. The ecological model, on the contrary, claims that God is radically present in the world, as close as the breath, the joy, and the suffering of every creature. The two views of God and the world, then, are very different: in the one God’s power is evident in God’s distant control of the world; in the other, God’s glory is manifest in God’s total self-giving to the world.

God’s Household – McFague 8

In closing, let us note that the two pictures of God and the world suggest different answers to the question: Who are we and what should be do? In the first, we are individuals responsible to a transcendent God who rewards or punishes according to our merits and God’s mercy. In the second, we are beings-in-community living in the presence of God who is the power and love in everything that exists. In the first, we should do what is fair to other individuals while taking care of our own well-being; in the second we should do what is necessary to work with God to create a just and sustainable planet, for only in that way will all flourish. A just and sustainable planet is the great work of the twenty-first century to which all religionsBindeed, all areas of human endeavor, are called. Never before have we had to think of everyone and everything all together. We now know that if we are to survive and our planet flourish, we will do so as a whole or not at all. This common task is summed up by ecological economist Robert Costanza: “Probably the most challenging task facing humanity today is the creation of a shared vision of a sustainable and desirable society, one that can provide permanent prosperity within the biophysical constraints of the real world in a way that is fair and equitable to all of humanity, to other species, and to future generations.”xix

ENDNOTES

i.See George Hendry, Theology of Nature (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), Ch. 1. ii. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science, 155 (March 10, 1967), 1203-07. iii. Marcus J. Borg describes this well: "A root image is a fundamental ’picture’ of reality. Perhaps most often called a ’world-view,’ it consists of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about what is possible.... Very importantly, a root image not only provides a model of reality, but also shapes our perception and our thinking, operating almost unconsciously within us as a dim background affecting all of our seeing and thinking. A root image thus functions as both an image and a lens: it is a picture of reality which becomes a lens through which we see reality" (Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship [Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, Int’l, 1994], 127).

iv. The literature on the neo-classical economic model and its alternative—what I am calling the ecological economic model—is large and growing. Some of the works I found most helpful are as follows: Lester R. Brown, et al, State of the World annual reports (New York: W.W. Norton); Robert Costanza et al, An Introduction to Ecological Economics (Boca Raton, FL: St. Lucie Press, 1997); David A. Crocker and Toby Linden, eds., Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman, and David Kirion, eds., The Consumer Society (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997); Steven C. Hackett, Environmental and Natural Resources Economics: Theory, Policy and the Sustainable Society (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996); Joerg Rieger, ed., Liberating the Future: God, Mammon, and Theology (Minneapolis: MN: Fortress Press, 1998); United Nations Human Development Report issued annually (New York: Oxford University Press); Michael Zweig, ed., Religion and Economic Justice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

v. By the oldest and deepest anthropology, I am referring to what George Hendry calls the "cosmological" and "political" understandings of God and the world rather than the more recent and narrow "psychological" view (Theology of Nature, Ch. 1. The latter which supports individualism has arisen in the last several hundred years, but the other two, one emphasizing the whole creation and the other the community of all human beings, are grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as in the New Testament and early theology (especially Irenaeus and Augustine). vi. The evidence supporting this claim would take considerable space to lay out. Suffice it to say here that both the born-again and New Age versions of popular religion do so; the American Declaration of Independence’s "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" does; and Adam Smith’s description of the human being as a creature of insatiable greed makes a significant God’s Household – McFague 9 contribution. All focus on the rights, desires, and needs of individuals. vii. Milton Friedman’s distinction between "positive" and "normative" economics is typical: "Normative economics is speculative and personal, a matter of values and preferences that are beyond science. Economics as a science, as a tool for understanding and prediction, must be based solely on positive economics which ’is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments’" (Essays in Positive Economics [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], 4). viii. Hackett, Environmental and Natural Resources Economics, 33.

ix. See Daly, Beyond Growth, 50ff.

x. Janet N. Abramowitz, "Valuing Nature’s Services," State of the World 1997, ed. Lester R. Brown et al (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1977).

xi. Ibid., 109.

xii. If all contemporary understandings of Christ should be grounded in historical judgments about Jesus of Nazareth—if there should be continuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith—then we need to see if the ecological economic context is an appropriate one for interpreting Christ and Christian discipleship for the twenty-first century? I am not suggesting that a Christian’s faith is based on the state of historical Jesus research at any particular time; nonetheless, Christianity has always claimed continuity with its founder. Recent research, which has moved out of narrow church contexts of interpretation to sociological, cultural, and political ones of first-century Mediterranean society, has reached a remarkable consensus on some broad outlines of Jesus’ life; most notably, that he was a social revolutinary opposed to the structures of domination and domestication of his day. This consensus is expressed in different ways by New Testament scholars such as E.P Sanders, Burton Mack, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Richard Horsley. For an overview of the scholarship, see Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press Int’l, 1994). xiii. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harpers, 1994). xiv. Ibid., 73-74. xv. Ibid., 68. xvi. Ibid., 113-14. xvii. See, ibid., 79-81. xviii. See letter of April 30, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Collins, 1960). xix.Robert Costanza et al, An Introduction to Ecological Economics, 179.

Nature’s Services: Ecosystems Are More Than Wildlife Habitat

When you step outside, whether heading for your car or for a walk around the block, you expect to be able to breathe the air. When planting flowers in the window box or tomatoes in the raised bed in your backyard, you expect those plants to grow, flower, and produce seeds or fruit. When perusing the grocery shelves, you expect to find fresh produce, and affordable fish and meat. When you turn on the tap, you expect to be able to drink the water.

Ecosystem services are the processes through which natural ecosystems, and the plants, animals and microbes that live in those environments, sustain human life. Ecosystem services produce goods, timber, and fibers, medicines and fuels. Ecosystem services even conduct life-support activities, like filtering water and recycling all kinds of wastes. The natural services that for millennia have purified the water and air, supported the growth and reproduction of food plants, controlled pests, and even moderated the weather and its impacts are declining rapidly. Land clearing for agriculture, industry and mining, and development is affecting ecosystems worldwide. As habitats become fragmented, with only pockets left here and there, the services those natural systems provide become less effective.

Tom Lovejoy, Chief Biodiversity Advisor, The World Bank, says other natural services, like waste decomposition and flood control, are often overlooked. Technology may duplicate these services temporarily, but it’s doubtful that technological advances will be able to continually compensate for the large-scale loss of natural services. Although it is difficult to put a price tag on a wetland, forest, or river, the "price" for failing to protect or nurture these natural services could be daunting. As we populate the planet, nature’s services will become even more essential to humans and worthy of protection from even those who never leave the cities.

Wetlands: Water Purification System and Natural Flood Control

Most wetlands are linked intricately with our groundwater and surface water supplies. By the end of the 20th century, the United States had lost about 30 percent of its historic wetlands to draining, development, and agriculture. … Yet, wetlands continue to provide crucial ecological services, including filtering and conserving water, flood control, and shelter and food for fish and wildlife. Wetlands also help maintain cycles essential for life on earth, such as the carbon, methane, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles. Resource managers now realize that preservation and restoration of wetlands and natural waterways may be a more cost effective means of maintaining drinking water quality than expensive water treatment technologies.

Today, New York City faces such a choice. The City’ s clean water, which originates in the Catskill Mountains, is in jeopardy of failing drinking water standards. After exploring the technological and natural options for filtering water, New York City chose a watershed protection approach that preserves and restores nature’ s services. It’s a choice that will affect every New Yorker, as well as the state’s rural residents.

Communities across the nation and worldwide are facing similar choices between protecting natural resources that provide services humans need or implementing expensive technological solutions. The city of Arcata, California, rejected a costly plan to pipe waste from the community’s wastewater treatment plant across Humboldt Bay, and dump it directly into the Pacific Ocean. Instead, they chose the natural processes provided by wetlands to filter their wastewater. The Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary was created in 1981 and wastewater treatment was added in 1986. Both humans and wildlife benefit from the wetland’s water purification and habitat services.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, residents and businesses located on the Arkansas River floodplain were experiencing devastating floods every decade. … Tulsa decided to quit battling nature and responded by moving vulnerable buildings out of the floodplain. Managers opted for a watershed-wide approach to storing and draining the vast amounts of stormwater runoff produced during heavy rains. In essence, wetlands were allowed to become wetlands once more. As a result, Tulsa’s flood insurance rates have dropped by 25 percent and are now among the lowest in the nation. The tradeoffs for protecting natural system functions often can be win-win situations, as seen by Tulsa’s lower insurance rates and less flood damage when floodplains are protected from human development.

Forests: Our Carbon Reserves

Natural services provided by forests go beyond shade, timber, and wildlife habitat. The vast tracts of deciduous and evergreen trees that cover more than 25 percent of the ice-free land on the planet help stabilize landscapes by protecting soils and retaining moisture. Although forests today cover only about half what they did historically, they remain major sites for carbon storage, are important for nutrient cycling, and help moderate local and regional climate through rainfall. Carbon-storing forests may even moderate global warming. Boreal, tropical and temperate forests store 1,200 gigatons (billion tons) of carbon in their plants and soils. Compare that with the 750 gigatons stored in the earth’s atmosphere.

Converting the 22 million acres of marginal cropland and pasture in the southern United States to forest would increase carbon storage in the region by 32 million tons per year. This could offset 3 percent of the country’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. When forests are burned, carbon is released to the atmosphere. Researchers estimate that the yearly worldwide releases of atmospheric carbon from the burning of forests are increasing even more rapidly than the amount of atmospheric carbon released from the burning of fossil fuels.

We lose a lot more than carbon storage when we clearcut forests. Huge amounts of soil are lost when forests are cleared and erosion escalates.

Forests also help regulate the water cycle when tree roots soak up rainfall; stems, trunks and roots slow runoff; and tree leaves release water back into the atmosphere. In addition, plant and animal biodiversity depends on intact, mature forests. In some cases, even human health may rely on that biodiversity. Many medicines have been isolated from plant compounds. Deforestation can contribute to a resurgence or redistribution of infectious disease, when the ecosystem processes that allow natural pest control is disturbed. In South America, insecticide-resistance, declining investments in public health programs, and forest clearing have contributed to a resurgence in malaria.

Valuing Nature: What Would You Pay?

How much would you pay to save a local wetland or a tract of tropical rain forest? How much would your neighbor pay? You and your neighbor may not agree about what’s important in that wetland or forest. It’s not easy to put a price tag on a wetland and every wetland probably has a different value. It’s important, however, to understand the value of a natural resource if it’s to be preserved, continue functioning and effectively providing ecological services.

How do economists and environmental scientists calculate the value of the products and services provided by a natural resource? Think about the services provided by a large freshwater or saltwater wetland, perhaps one near you. Many types of fish spawn in wetlands and the young fish spend the beginning of their lives there. The annual worldwide fish catch is about 100 million tons and is worth $50-100 billion. That wetland may help contribute to this very lucrative commodity. What dollar value would you put on your local wetland’s contribution to the global fish catch? The fish from freshwater sportfishing in the United States alone may be worth as much as $16 billion. Another $46 billion is generated employing people associated with that sportfishing industry. So, in addition to providing a nursery area for the fish you eat, a local wetland may indirectly employ someone in your community. But that isn’t all a wetland provides. Flood control; water treatment and purification; nutrient cycling; wildlife habitat for hunting, viewing and photography; or other recreational opportunities, like boating and hiking, are on the short list of wetland amenities and services.

There are basically three categories of services and benefits, with some easier to price than others. Products, like fish or timber, are fairly easy to quantify, compared with services like nutrient cycling or water purification. Even harder to grasp in terms of economic value are the recreational, aesthetic and spiritual benefits humans gain from the natural world. … The following brief descriptions of several methods of valuing nature offer just a glimpse of these complicated calculations. …

Direct, consumptive use values apply to products from natural ecosystems that are harvested and sold commercially, such as fish or lumber.

Direct, nonconsumptive use values also are fairly easy to understand, but a bit harder to calculate. The benefits of bird watching, hiking and sightseeing can be calculated, based on how much it costs to travel to the accommodating habitats. For example, an Alaskan wilderness area directly benefits the residents and tourists who enjoy hiking and photography, although they leave with no products to sell. The local economy also benefits, as people dine in restaurants, stay in hotels, purchase equipment and souvenirs, and fuel their cars.

Indirect value can also be assigned to that Alaskan wilderness area if other people enjoy watching a television show about the area and its wildlife.

The contingency method is useful when it’s difficult to assign figures, because it surveys people on their "willingness to pay" for specified resources or ecosystem functions. Pennsylvania residents, for example, may be willing to pay a few cents per acre per year in taxes or private contributions to a nonprofit organization to help preserve that Alaskan wilderness area. "Willingness to pay" is subjective, however, with results depending on the concerns of the people surveyed, their proximity to the ecological service, their understanding of that service, and their personal ethics. Placing a price tag on non-use values is even more difficult. Many people say they are willing to pay for the possibility of visiting a habitat, the sheer existence of a resource, or to ensure the resource’s existence for future generations. The Alaskan wilderness may be worth funding for people who consider wild open spaces, polar bears and migrating herds of caribou important, but will never travel to Alaska. Survey approaches are often the only way to ascertain non-use values, although many experts note that surveys can provide questionable results. Still, researchers and managers view the results as at least a gauge for valuing a natural resource.

Replacement costs, like calculating the cost of preserving land in the New York City watershed versus building a filtration plant, make easy comparisons, but only tell part of the story. Avoided costs are estimates of how much money would be spent if services had to be purchased. The value of natural pest control, pollination, flood control, soil fertilization, and water filtration are hard to calculate, because actual expenditures are avoided if the natural ecological services are intact and functioning properly. As a result, the risk and degree of a malfunctioning natural service and the projected cost of a technological fix must be estimated. The Hedonic property value method uses the prices of residential property to reveal the value of local environmental attributes. This method is limited to environmental services that are located near residential areas. Property values tend to increase if they’re located near a lake or urban water amenity, or if the water quality of streams and lakes improves locally. Homeowners appear to place a value on at least the aesthetics of a wetland, although some homeowners also probably appreciate the flood control and water quality benefits of wetlands.

… Jim Salzman…notes that although these methods provide a common currency to measure nature’s worth, they fail to capture the true value of ecosystems services. In addition, many of these valuation techniques also are expensive to calculate. …

How Much is Biodiversity Worth?

The value of biodiversity is a good example of just how difficult placing a price tag on ecological services can be. Many environmentalists and experts use "biodiversity prospecting" as a significant reason for saving the world’s rain forests. Tropical rain forests harbor the greatest biological diversity of species and ecosystems. Diversity of species, in turn, houses an immense variety of genes. Since 25 percent of prescription medicines contain active ingredients derived from plants, it’s likely that the diversity of plants in a tropical rain forest will continue to offer new cures. As the use of biotechnology escalates, genes to improve agricultural, industrial, and pharmaceutical products will continue to be harvested from plants and animals. It seems reasonable to think biodiversity should carry a hefty price tag. But, Resources for the Future researcher R. David Simpson considers the contribution of biodiversity on the economic margin. Although there is no substitute for biodiversity as a whole, nature tends to create redundancy, so the benefits from saving an individual species or local habitat may be small. In the end, from an economic viewpoint, pharmaceutical companies show little willingness to pay to preserve tropical rain forests worldwide.

Simpson points out, however, that biodiversity is important for a number of commercial, ecological, aesthetic, ethical, and even spiritual reasons. Biodiversity prospecting simply may not have the economic pull needed to justify fully funding rain forest conservation. In the future, conservationists will need to look for other angles to preserve tropical rain forests, such as payment for local water purification services or international transfers from concerned conservationists worldwide.

Forecasting the Future of Nature’s Services

If current trends continue, humans could dramatically and irreparably alter the planet’s remaining natural ecosystems within decades. To determine what should be saved or restored now, politicians and resource managers need to know how their actions (or failure to act) may affect the future. …

Forecasting can determine at what point an ecosystem’s ability to provide services may break down … researchers hope to improve the predictive ability of models that integrate watershed ecosystems with their human occupants.

The precision of future forecasting is dependent on the data gathered today. New technologies are helping gather and analyze the vast amount of information necessary to understand nature’s services. Computer models can simulate some ecological conditions and economic projections, but integrating long-term environmental scenarios with economic behaviors and consequences is still in the development stage. Ecosystem model development has been going on for decades….

Global changes, from climate warming and sea level rise, to shifts in land use and population growth, will affect the flow of ecosystem goods and services. Reliable forecasting of how these changes will alter the supply and flow of ecosystem benefits requires extensive taxonomic, ecologic, economic and sociologic understanding. Accurate forecasting models require, not only understanding how the ecosystem works, but also placing a value on its functions and products, as well as predicting how things might change over time. Long-term data and strategies for future monitoring of both the environment and the economy are needed to provide an index of change.

Scientists are not deterred, however, and forecasting tools that integrate societal aspects, like food production and health, are probably just on the horizon. A recently developed model that examines the effects of climate change on rice production offers detailed scenarios of how increased carbon dioxide levels and temperature could affect major rice-producing countries in Asia. Such forecasting could give governments and farmers time to adapt their planting dates, experiment with rice varieties, and research other cropping practices to accommodate long-term changes in weather and climate.

Forecasting human health epidemics, based on weather patterns, has the potential to give governments and public health workers up to a year to get ready for a predicted disease. Climatic forecasting for southern Africa, which is affected significantly by the Pacific’s El Nino and La Nina events, could help predict droughts and floods. Droughts in Mozambique have been associated with cholera, dysentery and plague. In 1995, La Nina-caused flooding in Mozambique and South Africa spurred upsurges in malaria. …

Forecasting the future is mostly still in the future. But, the data-gathering and technology development conducted today will help create reliable models for future forecasting.

Nature as Currency

As an example of why currencies matter when referring to valuing ecosystem services, consider wetlands mitigation banking. This policy permits developers, once they have taken steps to avoid and minimize wetland loss, to compensate for wetlands that will be destroyed through development by ensuring the restoration of wetlands in another location. The regulations mandate trades that ensure equivalent value and function between the destroyed and restored wetlands. In practice, however, most trades are valued in units of acreage. Within very loose guidelines, trades between productive (though soon to be destroyed) wetlands and restored wetlands are approved on an acre-for-acre basis. More sophisticated banks require ratios, trading development on one acre of productive wetlands for, say, restoring four or five acres of wetlands somewhere else. Counting acres may make for easy accounting, but it’s poor policy. Why? The social value of the habitat is absent from the transaction. The ecosystem services provided by the wetlands — positive externalities such as water purification, groundwater recharge, and flood control — are largely ignored. Opinions may differ over the value of a wetland’s scenic vista, but they are in universal accord over the contributions of clean water and flood control to social welfare. Trading acres for acres provides an inadequate measure to capture what’s really being traded of significance. To be sure, such a simple metric allows trades, but other important, unaccounted tradeoffs are occurring. The program can suffer from a lack of accountability (or, more accurately, a lack of countability). To achieve the optimal outcome from environmental trading markets, we need to understand and account much better for the qualities being traded. …
Currency adequacy concerns selection of the currency unit. Can the metric capture the significant values exchanged or do some important features remain external to the trades? In part because of cost and in part because of technical difficulty, in practice most currencies remain crude — that is, unable to account for important nonfungibilities across space, type, and time.
Exchange adequacy addresses construction of the exchange market. In the face of a currency that fails to capture significant values, how can the market be structured to ensure trades support environmental protection? In practice, regulators use exchange restrictions to compensate for inadequate currencies. Crude currencies will result in tightly constrained trading schemes if the market maker desires to restrict environmental externalities. As with currency adequacy, however, equally strong pressures counsel loosening of trading restrictions.
Review adequacy addresses the institutional mechanisms for reviewing trades. If, in practice, neither currency nor exchange adequacy will often be achieved, then even trades of non-fungible commodities that fully comply with the trading program’s rules will occasionally, perhaps systematically, fail to increase social welfare. When currency and exchange adequacy are not ensured, the model of exchange transforms from a commodity market to a barter market, from anonymous trading of generic commodities to individuals haggling over goods and services with unique attributes. In this setting, to what extent should we be willing to let owners of nonfungible environmental features strike deals which the rest of us cannot evaluate through any common medium of exchange and which many of us might not strike? Put more generally, who should determine the equivalency of such trades?

"Nature’s Services" was written by Tawna Mertz, a freelance scientific writer and editor who lives on the Chesapeake Bay.

Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asian Settings, C. S. Song, Orbis, 1991.

The Connection between Creation and Redemption (pp. 56-57)

It has to be pointed out that the story of creation is in true sense the story of salvation loaded with cosmic and historical implications. In Paul’s words, “The whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now” (Rom 8:22). Creation is God’s response to this cosmic groaning. And as the seer of the Book of Revelation understands it, God’s work of redemption leads to the emergence of a new creation. He states: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Rev. 21:1). He then goes to say that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4). All this indicates that creation and redemption are in reality two sides of the same coin. Where there is creation, there is redemption. Conversely, where there is redemption, there is creation. Or to put it another way, creation is God’s redeeming act, while redemption is God’ creating act. To separate creation from redemption is to turn creation back into a cosmogony, to a kind of primitive science trying to pry into the mystery of the origin of the universe. It must be stressed that the Bible is not primarily interested in cosmogony as such. From beginning to end its chief concern is the creating and redeeming work of God. When God acts, something new happens –a new person is born, a new community comes into being a new heaven and a new earth, that is, a new creation, replaces the old heaven and the old earth, namely, the old creation. The whole cosmos as well as human beings in particular are sustained and renewed by this creating and redeeming God until the time of fulfillment.

Seeing creation in a close relationship with redemption we realize that in God’s creating and redeeming acts we have the very prototype of doing theology. Creation is God’s redemptive response to the pain and suffering of this world. It is not much a demonstration of God’s glory as a manifestation of God’s love and compassion for the world. God’s heart aches when the world is gripped with pain and suffering. This makes God the theologian par excellence. That is to say, in the heart of God we find the beginning of theology. Theology begins with God’s heartache on account of the world. God’s does not theologize in a vacuum or in the midst of God’s glorious splendor and light but in confrontation with the power of tehom, the darkness that poses as a real threat to the birth, growth and fruition of life. Creation redemptively carried out is God’s theology in action. God the theologian is God the Creator and God the Redeemer. God translates the aching of the heart into the making of life. Creation is the victory of God over tehom. It is the victory of heart over heartlessness, of life over death. Creation is thus the disclosure of the heart of God confronted with the powerful principle of negation. Creation and, for that matter, redemption, is the outpouring of the heart of God, the giving of God’s own self. It is the staking of all that God is in involvement with the hostile elements of this world.

In this connection I must point out that God’s creational and redemptive involvement with the world is not entirely foreign to Asian spirituality. It is reflected in Gautama Buddha’s resolve to set out a mission to preach the truth upon attaining his Enlightenment. This is how he reasons:

What could be a better way of living for others than to show them the path of attaining perfect bliss? What could be greater service to humankind that to rescue the struggling creatures engulfed in the mournful sea of samsara?... When the Perfect One considered how sorrow and suffering oppressed all beings, he became very compassionate, and made up his mind to preach to all humankind the eternal truths he had discovered. -Amongst the nations I shall go -And open the door that to the deathless leads. -Let those that have ears to hear -Master the noble path of salvation.

-....In this way Buddhism became a missionary religion. The road it trod was very similar to that of Christianity. It was carried northeastward to China and Japan. To the east it entered Burma and Thailand, and to the south it found a congenial home in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). A great part of East and South Asia came under strong influence of Buddhism. Buddhist culture imbued with Buddhist spirituality became predominant in the mind and life of hundreds of millions of people in Asia. Despite criticism of Buddhism as a religion of negation, it is basically a religion of the heart and compassion. How then could it be totally unrelated to the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ? How could we fail to see something of God’s creative-redemptive work in Buddhist spirituality?

The Heart in the Bible (pp. 73-74)

Theology is not human beings speculating on the nature and essence of God. The subject of theology is God. God does not become the object of our theological investigation. Rather theology, when conducted by human beings, has to do with the ways of God with humankind and the world. Theology is a giving account of the mystery of creation. Furthermore, it is a reflection on our experience of redemption. We simply cannot know something of God by bypassing creation and redemption. God is to be perceived and encountered at the crossroads of creation and redemption. Insofar as God in God’s own self is concerned, we must admit that God may not be the God conceived by the philosophers and metaphysicians, not even the God worshipped by believers. For this reason the birth, ministry and cross of Jesus Christ is the crossroad of creation and redemption. In him the God who creates and the God who redeems become one. What we have in Jesus Christ is the concentration of God’s creating and redeeming power. In him we are redeemed and created anew. In him an old history comes to an end and a new history begins. In the light of this supreme concentration, which s Jesus Christ, we encounter the God who created and redeemed over the long centuries before the historical event of Jesus Christ. At the same time, in the light of this concentration, we are given the assurance to be in relationship with the God who continues to deal with the world in creation and in redemption now and in the future. Creation in redemption and redemption in creation –this is the meaning of history. And it is in history understood as the meeting place of creation and redemption that God makes God’s own self known to us. That is why history –the history of all nations and all peoples- must be the subject matter of theology. Theology is a discipline through which God enables us to encounter God as the God of creation and redemption in history. To put it differently, history as molded and charter by God’s involvement should engage our theological effort.

1) According to C.S. Song, “Creation and Redemption are closely connected”. What consequences would this theological consideration have for Christian Spirituality? Does your personal spirituality echo this closeness between Creation and Redemption? Why? How? 2)According to you, how can this theological model “creation-redemption, God in the crossroad of history” contribute to the development of a more ecological Christian Theology?

HW reading 6: Sustainability: Economics, Ecology, and Justice by John B. Cobb, Jr.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D. is Professor of Theology Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies there. His many books currently in print include: Reclaiming the Church (1997); with Herman Daly, For the Common Good; Becoming a Thinking Christian (1993); Sustainability (1992); Can Christ Become Good News Again? (1991); ed. with Christopher Ives, The Emptying God: a Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (1990); with Charles Birch, The Liberation of Life; and with David Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (1977). He is a retired minister in the United Methodist Church. His email address is cobbj@cgu.edu.. Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 1992. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Chapter 7: Hope on a Dying Planet

Let thy steadfast love, 0 Lord, be upon us, according as we hope in Thee. Psalm 33:22 Earth’s Story

The universe is mostly a vast, almost empty, expanse of space-time. Scattered through it in an uneven but not quite random way are innumerable stars. Around some of these revolve satellites we call planets. One of these planets revolving around a star of modest size is alive. We call that planet Earth. Perhaps there are other living planets circling other stars in this or other galaxies. Perhaps in whatever universe there was before the "Big Bang" that give birth to this one, there were other living beings. We do not know. But indications are that the other planets in this solar system are lifeless. In an area to be measured in light years, if not in all infinities of time and space, we are alone.

This planet has not always been alive. Indeed, as Richard Overman has reminded us, if we conceive the five billion years of the Earth’s past as though recorded in ten volumes of five hundred pages each, so that each page records a million years, cellular life appears only in the eighth volume, and of this the first half is taken up with how plants became terrestrial and the amphibians emerged. Around page 440 of this 500-page volume, the reptiles reach the height of their development. It is not until page 465 that their dominance is superseded by that of birds and warm-blooded animals. Finally, on page 499 of the tenth volume humankind appears. The last two words on the last page recount our story from the rise of civilization six thousand years ago until the present.

Throughout the last two volumes life proliferated, creating an environment in which more complex forms of life could emerge and prosper. Both life and the capacity to support life increased millennia after millennia. Human life entered the scene on a planet that was biologically very rich indeed. To that organic richness we contributed little. Indeed, in certain localities over limited periods of time, our treatment of the environment was quite destructive. But only when we reach the last letter of the last word on the last page does humanity turn the tide against life; only then does the process of killing the planet begin. What is astonishing is that all that has been produced over a billion years is so vulnerable to destruction by this latecomer to the scene.

Yet it should not surprise us that what takes so long to create can be so easily destroyed. It took only a moment for an assassin’s bullet to destroy the complex richness of the life of a John F. Kennedy or a Martin Luther King, Jr. That richness of thought, will, and feeling had been many years in the making, but it depended on an organic base that could be destroyed almost instantaneously. The life of the planet similarly depends on a physical base which, now that we have to some degree mastered its secrets, is vulnerable to destruction. For at least a hundred years and with accelerating acceleration, we have been destroying it. The eleventh volume may recount the much poorer story of a lifeless planet.

This perspective on ourselves is important because of the profound illusions that Westerners, and especially we Americans, have entertained about our natural environment. We have supposed, consciously or unconsciously, that it is inexhaustible and indestructible. Or course, we have known that a few species of wild life were becoming extinct and that here and there we had turned fertile fields into dust bowls, but these were felt as isolated phenomena having nothing to do with our basic situation. We thought that we could learn lessons from our mistakes and through ever-increasing scientific knowledge and technological skill advance to new heights of prosperity and happiness. We might worry about the loss of some prized moral and spiritual values, but our pictures of future life were always in terms of fantastic progress in science and technology, comfort and prosperity. In this scenario, Nature was cast in the role of supplier of limitless resources for our use and enjoyment.

I began to realize in the 1970s how fully I have myself lived out of these basic assumptions. I used to wonder idly where all the smoke and fumes went that our industrial society belches into the air, but until I came to California I was satisfied with the answer that the wind blew it away. I used to wonder idly where all the waste and sewage went that our hygienic culture so quickly makes invisible, but until I saw Lake Erie I was satisfied with the answer that it was carried out to sea. Atmosphere and ocean seemed inexhaustible in their size. And in relation to the technology and industry of a hundred years ago, this may have been practically true (although theoretically false). But no more. The wedding of science and technology in the past century has given us the power to transform the environment radically, not merely locally, but globally. Today it is not the atmosphere over cities alone, but the planetary atmosphere that is polluted. Los Angeles smog contaminates the air of Yellowstone, and the filth that is breathed in Tokyo is blown across the Pacific Ocean to be added to the vast local pollution in California. Life in the Atlantic Ocean may be reduced to the level of that in Lake Erie within a decade or two. The Pacific is likely to survive a little longer, although the continental shelf near the United States and the coral reefs and islands of the South Seas are already threatened with extinction.

An Alternative to Complacency

Although in some respects our past actions have begun irreversible processes that must now run their destructive course, for the most part, we could prevent the further dying of the planet. We could call a halt to the poisoning of air and water, for example. But this would require the most drastic alteration of our view of the economy. For example, we in the United States would have to greatly reduce the Gross National Product, whose annual increase has been the aim of every administration and the supposed measure of national health. It would require new types of communities far less dependent on motor transportation and industrial products in general. It would require drastic alteration of our individual goals, an orientation of our lives around their contribution to the life and future of the planet rather than ourselves, our families, our nations, or even humanity.

Even this drastic and unforeseeable change of our total style of life will be insufficient if population cannot be adequately fed without the use of ecologically destructive chemicals in fertilizers and insecticides. Twice this population at the end of the century could not but accelerate the process of killing the planet in its desperate efforts to eke out a living from what is left of water and soil. The survival of humanity is bound up with the necessity of stabilizing and even reducing our population. Some of you will justifiably be thinking that my language is exaggerated. The poisoning of air and water, even when their probable side effects are taken into consideration, probably will not destroy all life. The inability of the planet to support its present human population does not mean that homo sapiens will necessarily become extinct, but only that in one way or another population will be drastically cut back — perhaps by famine, perhaps by pestilence, perhaps by war.

The problem is complicated, however, by the fact that we have at our disposal weapons capable of exterminating the human race along with our animal cousins. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have lived under the threat of a new kind of war. Thus far the balance of terror has worked, and the bombs have not been used again. We have survived the Cuban missile confrontation, and we may survive others. But can we really expect that fear will forever restrain the use of atomic weapons as they spread into more and more hands? Will nations facing genocidal annihilation or wholesale starvation restrain themselves so that others may survive? How do we react to this somber picture of our situation? Let me speak for myself while you formulate your own answer. My first and most common reaction is refusal of serious belief. The individual facts I may not be able to dispute, but I deny to myself that the situation is really that bad. The authorities, with all the power and knowledge at their disposal, will certainly take care of it. I should put in my two cents worth on this issue as on others to salve my conscience and to bolster my self-image as a concerned citizen, but beyond that I shall conduct business as usual, assuming that the future will be much like the past, putting out of my mind the truly apocalyptic threat under which we live.

However, there are times when the recognition of the planet’s dying breaks through my defenses. Then my reaction tends to be one of despair. If present trends lead toward the lessening of the quality of human life, must we not realistically accept the lessened quality of human life as inevitable? What use is it to attempt the impossible task of altering the course of history, especially when my personal influence is so slight? It is important to recognize the great similarity of these two responses of complacency and despair. Their results are almost identical. They let me off the hook. I am left free to eat, drink, and be merry — or more realistically, to enjoy my family, my friends, and my work — for there is no real problem to whose solution I am called to contribute. Either others will solve it or it is insoluble. My attention can be directed toward the more immediate and manageable issues of daily living. This chapter’s title is "Hope on a Dying Planet." Realistic hope represents a third alternative to complacency and despair. Those who hope can view the threat unflinchingly. They do not deny its seriousness either in their thoughts or in their feelings. Yet, their hope is the refusal of despair. Those who hope seek openings, assume responsibility, endure failure after failure, and still seek new openings for fresh efforts. In the depths of a depression Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Today we might say analogously, our only hope is hope itself. If we react in complacency or despair, there is no hope for human survival. If, instead, we hope, the future lies before us, full of uncertainties and desperate risks, yet containing also hope. But how can there be hope? To tell ourselves to hope in order that there be hope is, in the long run, futile. Hope rests on something other than its own usefulness. A partial answer is that hope is a matter of temperament or disposition, something to be dealt with, if at all, by psychologists. Perhaps such a temperament is closely connected with the basic trust children develop in early months of life when they are fortunate in their maternal care. But there are other grounds of hope, grounds we can call existential, or religious, or even theological. In some measure hope is a function of what we believe, and in this cosmic and global crisis, it is most clearly a function of what we believe ultimately and comprehensively. The Psalmist speaking in my text is clear that our hope is in the Lord and his mercy. He found none in the analysis of historical trends. His picture of the Lord is anthropomorphic — rather crudely so for our taste. He is viewed as an omnipotent figure standing outside the processes of nature and history and controlling them so as to help those who hope in his mercy. Few of us can live out that vision of reality, and its collapse in the last three centuries seems to have removed the grounds of hope for many people. In much of our youth culture, hope is focused on short-term goals and easily shattered when these are not realized. The quest for kicks, or mystical meaning, or celebration of life in the present moment, is in part an expression of the loss of hope, a loss we older people have bequeathed to our children. Is there, nevertheless, for us a ground of hope somehow equivalent to that of the Psalmist?

Our Hope is in More Than Hope Itself

I cannot speak for all people, or for all religious people, or even for all Christians. But, for myself, the answer is yes. The fact that, when chemical conditions make it possible, life appears, with growth and reproduction, means to me that there is that in reality that calls life forth and forward and strives against the forces of inertia and death. The fact that the human psyche is capable of being claimed by truth and touched by concern for fellow human beings means to me that there is that in reality that calls forth honesty and love and strives against the retreat into security, narrow interests, and merely habitual behavior. This power works slowly and quietly, by persuasion, not calling attention to itself. It does not present itself for observation by biologist or psychologist, yet it is presupposed in both the organisms they study and in their own faithful pursuit of truth. It is not to be found somewhere outside the organisms in which it is at work, but it is not to be identified with them either. We can conceive it best as Spirit. For me, it is the belief in this Spirit, the giver of life and love, that is the ground of hope. In spite of all the destructive forces we let loose against life on this planet, the Spirit of Life is at work in ever new and unforeseeable ways, countering and circumventing the obstacles we put in its path. In spite of my strong tendencies to complacency and despair, I experience the Spirit in myself as calling forth the realistic hope apart from which there is no hope, and I am confident that what I find in myself is occurring in you as well. Because I believe that what makes for life and love and hope is not simply my decision or yours, but a Spirit that moves us both, I do not have to suppose that my own efforts are of consequence in order to believe them to be worthwhile. I can recognize that they may even be futile or misdirected and still persist in them as long as no clearer light is given. For I see what I do as part of something much greater, something in which each of you participates also, to whatever extent each sensitively responds to the insights and opportunities that come his or her way. Belief in the Spirit is belief that I am not alone; that in working for life and love in hope I am working with something much greater than myself; that there are possibilities for the future that cannot be simply projected out of the past; that even my mistakes and failures may be woven into a healing pattern of which I cannot now form any conception. The openness of the future, the occurrence of the unpredictable, the surprising fruition of forgotten seeds, have been illustrated for me quite recently in regard to the ecology/population crisis. I myself have been aware of its seriousness only since the summer of 1969. Yet, even that summer and fall, one who was concerned felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. No popular national magazine had taken up the issue. The church seemed silent. Politicians avoided this question. Only a few weary ecologists, nature lovers, and demographers kept up the apparently fruitless struggle to alert the nation before it was too late. The very word "ecology" was hardly known. Then abruptly, that winter, everything changed. The news media took up the issue. New organizations arose, and others gained fresh vitality. Politicians vied with each other to show their concern. Ecologists and naturalists were in great demand. "Ecology" became a household word, and ears sprouted bumper stickers about the population explosion. Cynics suggest that as the novelty wears off we do-gooders will again turn our attention elsewhere — to some new movement, program, or cause. There is some evidence this is already occurring. One hears flippant talk of someone’s having taken his or her "eco-trip" and being ready now for something else. At a superficial level this is inevitable. As soon as one moves from description of the problems to proposals of action, we lose much of our confidence and conviction. No one really knows enough to answer our questions. Economists and ecologists still speak at cross purposes, and we must listen to both. This issue is tied up with every other issue, and any step we take toward its solution has ramifications in other areas that are often bitter indeed. One reason some of the energy that was once directed to the cause of racial justice shifted to ecology was that issues of race have become so complex and frustrating that the struggle gives the white idealist very little satisfaction. The struggle for survival is passing already into a similar stage. Based on past experience, the prospect of sustained effort on the part of masses of men and women is poor. But the future need not repeat the past. That depends on us, on our ability to maintain a realistic hope. If we refuse to be distracted, face the difficulties, recognize the complex interrelations of all our problems, and endure, there is reason for hope. There is danger, of course, in focusing attention on a single issue and raising it as the one of supreme importance. That seems to detract from the importance of other issues. Those who are struggling for the rights of blacks, browns, reds, students, or women, or for freedom in oppressed nations, or for the survival of Israel or justice for Arab refugees, or for peace, feel abandoned and cheated when their erstwhile allies move on to another cause while these battles are far from won.

The Spirit of Life and Love and Hope

The situation has been pictured as if the world were a ship on a long voyage. The ship has first class and steerage. The crew members direct their attention to the comforts of the first-class passengers, who have plenty of space, luxurious accommodations, and superabundant food of great delicacy and richness. In steerage men and women are crowded and uncomfortable. The food is tasteless and poorly cooked. Some suffer from malnutrition. Contagious diseases break out, and medical help is inadequate. Tempers are high, and fights occur. First-class passengers occasionally look down on the steerage deck below with amusement and even with pity, but for the most part they prefer to forget the existence of these other passengers and enjoy the gracious living for which they have paid, along with their cultivated companions. The fact that most of the steerage passengers are of different cultures and races makes this easier. Many of the steerage passengers dream of someday transferring to first class, and a few even succeed in doing so. But most resign themselves to the impossibility of such a move. They live in impotent envy, taking out their anger on each other. However, a few among them begin whispering that this is unnecessary. Why should they be crowded and poorly fed when there is so much space and food wasted on other decks? Why not share all the space and food equally? Many pooh-pooh the idea as impossible, but others listen. Of these, some want to seize by force the space and food they need, while others propose appealing to the innate sense of fair play on the part of the first-class passengers. At first these win out, and a few changes result from their humble and modest requests. The food supply and medical attention are improved. The first-class passengers expect gratitude, but in fact the slight success only intensifies the demands for an equal share. I will not detail the struggle as it grows bloody and bitter. The crew is called in by the first-class passengers to maintain order and guarantee their privileges — for which, after all, they have paid. And the crew obliges with all too little reluctance. The few first-class passengers who sympathize with the steerage passengers are increasingly ostracized. More important, many of the children of the first-class passengers believe in the cause of the steerage passengers and try to help them. Several times during the struggle the news is heard that the boat has sprung a leak. A few members of the crew are dispatched to see about it. They report that it is not too large a leak yet, although it is growing. Most suppose that the captain will see to it, and they go about their business and pleasure. But the captain is too busy trying to keep order, and the few who keep inquiring about the leak are ignored. The untended leak becomes larger. Some of the ship’s supplies are soaked in salt water and ruined. Even the boat’s speed is slightly affected. New leaks begin to appear. Although life continues to be luxurious in first class, some notice that the ship lists a little. Some of the shipboard games are adversely affected. Shuffleboard is abandoned. More voices are raised about the urgency of action, but when the crew members shoot some of the children, a new controversy breaks out which distracts attention. The first-class passengers feel guilty about the killing of these children, but they cannot bring themselves to admit that they are in the wrong. They devote their energies to self-justification. The children are deeply hurt by this attitude of their parents. Until now they have felt that the ideals on which they have acted were those of their parents as well, and that if only the parents saw the situation clearly they would aid the steerage passengers instead of using force against them. With far less confidence the steerage passengers have shared this hope. But the willingness of the parents to kill their own children in order to maintain their privileges and their subsequent justification of this act are profoundly disillusioning. A few turn to unalloyed violence. Most relapse into angry but lethargic resignation. The ship continues to list. Almost everyone recognizes it now. But in the aftermath of the intense emotions generated by the other conflicts, no one seems to care very much. Leaders vie with each other to announce their concern, but none dares to speak realistically of the risk or of the vast cost of dealing with it. The people have no stomach for great sacrifices. Their idealism is spent. This is where we are now. What happens next is still unsettled. We may continue to fragment into disgruntled and frustrated minorities while the frantic efforts of our leaders to hold us together leave them little energy to deal with the spreading leaks. Only when the water covers the lower decks will the passengers turn their attention too late to the problems of a sinking ship. With bitter mutual recriminations they will struggle for places in the inadequate lifeboats, while the sinking ship carries most to their deaths. Another possibility is that crew and first-class passengers somehow wall off part of the ship in such a way that when the lower decks are filled with water, the steerage passengers drowned, and most of the supplies lost, the ship can stay just barely afloat. That way many of the first-class passengers can survive, although at a level of subsistence inferior to that of the steerage passengers when the boat was intact. A third possibility is that the ship’s captain, as a person of wisdom and courage, persuades all the passengers of the necessity of immediate massive action. Unnecessary supplies are quickly thrown overboard, including many of the weapons used by the crew to control the steerage passengers. All able-bodied persons join together in a massive effort to pump out the water and repair the leaks. In the process, the mutual antagonisms subside. New leadership patterns are established. All the passengers and the crew as well become a single community living frugally but harmoniously together. Granted, only a miracle could realize this third possibility. Politicians would have to refrain from playing upon the mutual antagonisms of our polarized society and challenge us to extremely unpopular sacrifices. And masses of people would have to vote for and follow these politicians. Business and industry would have to adopt entirely new criteria by which to measure achievements, and those of us dependent on the present system for our luxuries would have to accept a far simpler style of life. Is all that really possible? To believe it is to believe even beyond all evidence in the power of the Spirit of Life and Love and Hope. Belief in the Spirit is no grounds for complacency. There is no guarantee that people will respond to the Spirit’s prompting in sufficient numbers and with sufficient sensitivity to begin the healing of the planet. But there is the possibility. The future can be different from the past. Therefore, there is hope. While there is life, there is hope. The Psalmist spoke of hope in the Lord. I have spoken of hope in the Spirit. There is no conflict. The Lord is the Spirit. We Christians have called the Spirit of Life and Love and Hope holy, and we have affirmed that the Holy Spirit is God. Perhaps that language bothers some of you. Perhaps we who are older have spoiled for some who are younger the word "God" that has been so precious to us. Perhaps the Spirit now calls us to trust the Reality while giving up the language we have used to name it. I do not think so, but certainly the name is not of first importance. What is of first importance is that each of us grounds his or her life in the basis for realistic hope and attends to that in reality which makes for life and love.

Ethics and Ecology

A paper delivered to the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values Harvard University, April 9, 1996

by Thomas Berry

In April of the year 1912 the Titanic on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic crashed into an iceberg and went down at sea. Long before the crash those in command had abundant evidence that icebergs lay ahead. The course had been set, however, and no one wished to alter its direction. Confidence in the survival capacities of the ship was unbounded. Already there were a multitude of concerns in carrying out the normal routine of a voyage. What happened to that "unsinkable" ship is a kind of parable for us since only in the most dire situation do we have the psychic energy needed to examine our way of acting on the scale that is now required. The daily concerns of the ship and its passengers needed to be set aside for a more urgent concern for the well being of the ship itself. Microphase concerns needed to give way to a macrophase issue. So now there was a need to recognize that the planet Earth is threatened in its survival by our industrial economy. Already the well-being and basic functioning the planet in its air, its water, its soil and its basic life systems have been so disrupted that a biologists as extensively acquainted with the life functioning of the planet as Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens has addressed scientific groups under the title We Are Killing The Earth." Other knowledgeable scientists such as Norman Myers, E. 0. Wilson, and Paul Ehrlich have told us the same thing. Recently a group of Concerned Scientists. Recently over a thousand of the most illustrious scientists have issued A Warning to Humanity. The introduction states: "Human Beings and the Natural World are set on a collision Course. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and Animal Kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know." Such is the situation in which we find ourselves just now. We have an ethics and a jurisprudence that begin with the human and determines our conduct in our relations with each other and our individual relations with the human community. These are our primary concerns. We work out our patterns of conduct simply by considering our inherent nature as intelligent compassionate beings. As such we must govern our actions by our reasoning faculty in relation to our own individual well being and the well being of the community, understanding by "community" the "human community." The natural world surrounding us is simply the context in which human affairs take place. Our relations with this more encompassing community are completely different from our relations to the human world. In the presence of the human, the natural world has no rights. We have a moral sense of suicide, homicide, and genocide, but no moral sense of biocide or geocide, the killing of the life systems themselves and even the killing of the Earth. Clearly there is something strangely wrong with such a position. There is thus no continuity in the ordering principles of the universe. In the medieval period there was a distinction made between the lex naturae and the lex naturalism. The law of nature was the physical law governing the non-human world. The natural law was the law governing human activities which were guided by reason. This supposes that there is a radical discontinuity in the governing principles of the universe. It also supposes that the natural world is somehow lacking in a spiritual mode of being, that the human did not emerge out of the normal evolutionary processes of the natural world or that the human is not integral with the natural world. This position does not accept the fact that the universe, in the phenomenal order, is the only self-referent mode of being and that all other modes of phenomenal being are universe-referent, that all beings in the universe constitute a single community of existence, a universe community that is totally coherent with itself throughout its vast extent in space and its sequence of transformations in time.

Since all living beings, including humans, emerge out of this single community there must have been a bio- spiritual component of the universe from the beginning. Indeed we must say that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. This has been recognized from an early period by the indigenous peoples of the world. If the universe is from its beginning a single universe then there is a continuity in the inner governance of the universe. However distinctive the various modes of being, their very distinctive qualities are such precisely because of their relation to the larger community of beings. The most obvious thing about the universe is that there is an absolute coherence within its total structure and functioning. While Saint Thomas is not consistent in the larger context of his thinking in this regard, he does give a remarkable presentation of the coherence of the universe in Question 47 article I of the First Part of his Summa Theologica where he is concerned with the distinction of things. There he asks why are there so many different modes of being in the universe. He answers that because the divine could not image forth itself in any single being the divine created the great diversity of things so that the perfection lacking to one would be supplied by the other and the whole universe of beings participates in and manifests the divine more than any single being whatsoever. Obviously in this view the supreme sacred community is the total universe, not any single mode of being in the universe. The purpose of the universe is caught up in the total community not in any single mode of being. Whether we consider the final cause or the efficient cause, the material cause or the formal cause, we find that the universe is intelligible only in the unity of its being. Although this view of Saint Thomas was not presented with an evolutionary understanding of the universe, it does indicate the coherence of the universe. The difficulty is that our western civilization has never taken this unity of the universe seriously because of our anthropocentrism both in our biblical religious and our Greek humanist traditions. We see the human as a princely resident on a planet that is completely lacking in any inherent rights that must be respected by humans. If there are any rights toward the natural world obliging the human it is obligations that the we owe to themselves, not to the non-human world. The universe as such has no psychic, moral or spiritual dimension. We have never felt any sense of the primary sacred community being the universe itself rather than the human community or some part of the human community. Because of this separation from and exaltation of the human in relation to the other components of the universe and of the planet Earth our western civilization has been destitute of any ethical obligations toward the non-human world. There has also been an attitude that the natural world owes to the human all the support that the human needs for a certain life fulfillment. Even beyond all this there seems to be in the western psyche a deep hidden rage against the human condition, an unwillingness to accept life under the conditions that life is granted us, a feeling of oppression by the normal human condition, a feeling that the pains of life and ultimately death are something that should not be, something that must be defeated. Although much of this has arisen in more recent centuries this radical discomfort with earthly existence originates in Saint Paul’s invention of original sin and in the millennial promises of transcending the normal human condition contained in the Book of Revelations of Saint John. This discomfort with our existence on this planet is emphasized in our religious prayers, especially the prayers of the Mass where we are constantly asking to be relieved from the sorrows of time into the bliss of eternity, our true home. This dissatisfaction with Earth was made bearable by faith and the expectation of things to come in some eternal transearthly mode of existence.

This oppression of the temporal order was enormously intensified by the experience of the Black Plague in the mid-fourteenth century when in the years between 1347 and 1349 something close to a third of the population of Europe died. In some cases such as Florence it seems that something close to half the population died within three months. Since there was no knowledge of germs at the time, the most obvious cause seemed to be a moral cause. The world had grown wicked and was being punished. Henceforth the main problem was to be redeemed out of the world rather than to learn to live creatively within the world. This is when revivalist preaching of death, judgment, heaven, and hell came into being. The morality plays such as Everyman were invented, plays based on the principle that the only things truly worthwhile were the things that we could take with us at death, that is our virtues. Everything else was proportionately devalued. We dealt with the sorrows of time by escape from time into eternity. Somewhat later as the first glimmerings of science began to appear over the horizon Francis Bacon would propose that we deal with the sorrows of life by learning how to control the world about us rather than by escaping from the world about us by some salvation program. As our modem sciences developed in succeeding centuries the natural world was seen as purely mechanistic in its functioning. This again led the religious traditions to emphasize the spiritual dimension of the human over against the non-spiritual mode of non-human beings.

Thus when the North American continent was discovered and being colonized the biblical tradition, the Greek tradition and the modem intellectual traditions, all three were in agreement that the human was a special being living on a planet to be used for human benefit. There is little wonder then that we had no ethical discipline to guide us in any effective manner in our relation with the wonderful continent before us. That the natural world was a divine communication was so over-ridden by the verbal communication of the bible, by our cultural traditions, and by our recent enlightenment philosophy, that we could not consider that the human constituted a single sacred community with the natural world that would prosper or decline, live or die, be redeemed or not-redeemed as a single sacred community. Nor could we even consider that the various beings of the natural world had inherent rights to their own proper mode of being that should be recognized by ourselves and incorporated into our ethical teachings.

We were caught up in our commitment to transcendence, to a transcendent personal creative deity, to a transcendent spiritual mode of the human - with a transcendent destiny; then with Descartes caught up in a transcendence of mind that left the natural world soulless since there was only mind and extension; and finally a transcendent technology that was no longer subject to the basic biological law that every mode of being should have opposed modes of being or conditions so that no single being or group of beings could overwhelm the entire life community. Strangest of all, our entire western civilizational tradition prevented us from recognizing that any damage that we did to the outer world of nature would be a damage to our own inner life. The devastation of the forests, the extinction of species, the poisoning of the waters, the pollution of the air, the blocking out of our vision of the stars; we could not understand that this was something more than damage to our physical being; it was also a soul-damage, a ruin within, a degrading of our imagination, our emotional life, even diminishing of our intellectual life for all these phases of our inner life needed to be activated by our experience of the outer world.

All this while, during this twentieth century especially, the two institutions that claim to be our ultimate guides as regards reality and value, the universities and the religious establishments have offered no adequate ethical guidance. The reason for this is quite simple. Neither had an integral or a functional cosmology. Neither could deal adequately with the place and role of the human in the universe. The pathos of this situation is beyond reckoning. Now we have a devastated North American continent, even a devastated planet that is finally providing in the stark reality before us the critique that has been needed. If we will not learn ourselves then the universe itself will teach us by the penalties that it is imposing upon us.

These lessons were primordial lessons that the earliest humans learned in the beginning of the human venture, lessons that even today the indigenous peoples of the world can teach us. Here I would like to quote a passage concerning the Bushmen of Africa that was written some time ago by Laurens Van Der Post. The passage describes a communication being made by a tribal elder to a young boy, a communication that we might take as a primary lesson in ethics for ourselves.

"Remember Little Cousin, that no matter how awful or insignificant, how ugly or beautiful it might look to you, everything in the bush has its own right to be there. No one can challenge this right unless compelled by some necessity of life itself. Everything has its own dignity, however absurd it might seem to you, and we are all bound to recognize and respect it as we wish our own to be recognized and respected. Life in the bush is necessity, and it understands all forms of necessity. It will always forgive what is imposed upon it out of necessity, but it will never understand and accept anything less than necessity. And remember that, everywhere, it has its own watchers to see whether the law of necessity is being observed. You may often think that deep in the darkness and the density of the bush you are alone and unobserved, but that, Little Cousin, would be an illusion of the most dangerous kind. One is never alone in the bush, one is never unobserved."

In this passage we can clearly observe that the natural world is experienced not simply as so many objects simply for human manipulation but rather as a community of subjects, each of which has rights to be revered by humans under some awesome penalty. Every being is seen as having will and power, not the type of will or power precisely as is had by the human, but will and power of a even more pervasive and more powerful modality. We can observe also that there is a pervasive order to be observed, a discipline that includes the entire order of things. The natural world has rights, inherent rights that must be respected by humans under severe penalties, for there are forces that can eventually deal with any assault on these rights.

Indigenous peoples are capable of such statements because they live in a functioning universe, in a cosmos. We no longer live in a universe, we live in cities or nations or civilizations or cultural traditions. We do not live in a significant manner with the wind or the rain or the stars in the sky. We recognize the dawn and sunset and the seasons of the years, yet these are only incidental to the major concerns of life. Our laws are the laws of human or of divine origin, they are not laws primarily of cosmological origin.

The inadequate self critique in our western civilization is finally giving way to a more adequate critique presented not by verbal analysis but by that monstrous devastation of the natural world that we witness throughout the planet but which is nowhere more severe than on the North American continent. As I look back over my own life from the opening year of the First World War and wonder at all the desolation of this continent and of the larger devastation throughout the Earth wrought by my generation I am at a loss as regards how to explain it. The difficulty is that the assault on the natural world has been carried out by good persons for the best of purposes, the betterment of life for this generation and especially for our children. It was not bad people, it was the good people acting for good purposes within the ethical perspectives of our cultural traditions that have brought such ruin on this continent and on the entire planet. At the microphase level these persons were acting admirably. At the macrophase level these persons have ruined this continent and a great part of the planet and no one and none of our social institutions seems able, not exactly to stop them, but even to provide some ethical judgment on what is happening. Biocide and Genocide are not terms within our ethical vocabulary.

My own description of what has happened is that my generation has been autistic. My generation has been so locked into itself that it was totally without any capacity for rapport with the natural world. My generation could not get outside itself and the outer world could not get in. There was a total barrier between the human and the non-human. This is what needs to be explained. This autism did not begin with the modem centuries. The support for what has happened existed within that part of our tradition that did not emerge from Rene Descartes or from Francis Bacon or from Isaac Newton.

The barrier between the western mode of consciousness and the natural world, and the consequent ethical deficiency in western conscience, began in some manner with the biblical emphasis on the perception of the divine in historical events rather than within cosmological manifestation. The entire biblical experience could be described as a movement from the cosmological to the historical which began with the Exodus experience. It was further strengthened by the historical redemption experience of Christianity; then by the emphasis on the human mode of being in the Greek humanist tradition. When in modem centuries the scientists gave us a natural world that came into being by purely random processes and without any spiritual meaning then the alienation of the human from the natural world was complete.

It is not easy for us to move beyond those basic points of reference that have guided us in the past, for these have given us our human identity and directed our religious and cultural traditions over the past millennia. These traditions have determined our language, our intellectual insights, our spiritual ideals, our range of imagination, our emotional sensitivities. Yet these traditions, the classical traditions of the Eurasian and American worlds, are all proving inadequate in dealing with the disintegrating influence which we are now having on the life systems of the earth, influences that imperil the human community itself. Yet we experience a kind of paralysis in our critical judgment of what is happening and what we need to do at this time to avoid an extensive crash of the biosystems of the planet.

In recent times as our religious traditions diminish in their influence over our lives, it is the human that dominates the scene. Nothing is superior to individual or community human values. Our legal system fosters a sense of human rights over that of natural beings. Our economics is based on our mechanistic exploitation of the earth in all its geo-biological systems. Relatively trivial human rights prevail over urgent rights of natural systems simply for survival. Disengagement from such basic commitments to the human requires an ethical stance and a courage of execution seldom found in the course of human affairs. All of these consideration acquire heightened significance when we reflect that we are not simply in another period of historical change or cultural modification such as these have taken place in past centuries in the human order. What is happening now is of a geological and biological order of magnitude. We are upsetting the entire earth system that, over some billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced such a magnificent array of living forms, forms capable of seasonal self-renewal over vast periods of time.

Most amazing is the inability of our religious or educational establishments to provide any effective religious or ethical judgment on what is happening. Yet such judgment is what two of our eminent scientists have proposed in order to cope with ecological devastation we now face. E. 0. Wilson Professor of Biology at Harvard, has said: "In the end it will all come down to a decision of ethics, how we value the natural world in which we have evolved and now - increasingly - how we regard our status as individuals." Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford, has suggested that "scientific analysis points, curiously, toward the need for a quasi-religious transformation of contemporary cultures."

The religious orientation of western society has also made us vulnerable to superficial attitudes toward the difficulties that we experience. When in a position of great danger, we are prone to believe that we will be saved by some trans-earthly intervention within the functioning of the planet. Such intervention will provide a remedy in the present as it has, supposedly, done on so many occasions in the past. The most glowing presentation of such expectation is to be found in the apocalyptic literature with its vision of the millennium wherein the human condition will attain a glorious existence. Sorrow will be eliminated. Justice will reign. Peace will pervade the land.

The means of dealing with this situation over the greater part of human history was through some inner discipline that would enable us to absorb the stress inherent in any earthly existence. Then, we began to envisage the possibility of understanding and controlling the processes of nature and thereby bringing about relief from the human condition through our own efforts. Nature now began to be looked at as the obstacle to be overcome or the resource to be exploited. The ideal of a transformed society continued to be energized by a vision of the millennium. Only now the millennial experience was to be sought not through divine intervention but through scientific insight and technological skills.

We know the story of the formation of the modem world, the dominant intellectual framework and its beginnings in the 17th century with the publication of Descartes’ philosophy and then its development in the 18th century with Newtonian physics. This mechanistic view of the world encouraged the growth of technological invention and industrial plundering, culminating in the 1880’s when the electronic and chemical research centers were established, scientific technologies were advanced, and the modem commercial corporations were formed. The objective was to make human societies as independent as possible from the natural world and to make the natural world as subservient as possible to human decisions. Nothing was to be left in its natural state. Only now can we appreciate the consequences of this effort to achieve human well-being in a consumer society by subduing the spontaneities of the natural world to human manipulation. We begin to realize that the devastation taking place cannot be critiqued effectively from within the traditional religions or humanist ethics. Nor can it be dealt with from within the perspectives of the industrial society that brought it about.

We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth’s functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself.

We have a radically new problematic. To appreciate this fully we must understand that the misuse of our scientific-technological powers has not itself come ultimately from the scientific tradition, although this is the general accusation made against the empirical enquiry into the functioning of the natural world. The danger and the misuse have come ultimately from the deficiencies of the spiritual and humanist traditions of western cultural development. These traditions themselves have an alienating emphasis. Both our religious and our humanist traditions are committed to an anthropocentric exaltation of the human.

We have always had difficulty in accepting the human as an integral component of the total earth community. We see ourselves as a transcendent mode of being. Only humans have rights. All other earthly beings are instruments to be used or resources to be exploited. Now after centuries of plundering the earth for our own advantage, we begin to reflect on who we are and what has happened both to the planet and to ourselves. A sudden reversal has taken place. Our bright, new, antiseptic, mechanical world is collapsing about us or dissolving in its own toxic wastes.

The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole earth, the integral community of non- living and living components. When we discuss ethics we must understand it to mean the principles and values that govern that comprehensive community and the manner in which the community of the entire natural world achieves its integral expression. Human ethics concerns the manner whereby we give expression at the rational level to the ordering principles of that larger community.

The ecological community is not subordinate to the human community. Nor is the ecological imperative derivative from human ethics. Rather our human ethics is derivative from the ecological imperative. The basic ethical norm is the well-being of the comprehensive community, and the attainment of human well-being within this comprehensive community. The Earth is not part of the Human Story, the human story is part of the Earth Story.

When we are faced with change at this order of magnitude we find that we are dealing with a profound reversal in our perspective on ourselves and on the universe about us. This is not a change simply in some specific aspect of our ethical conduct. Nor is it merely a modification of our existing cultural context. What is demanded of us now is to change attitudes that are so deeply bound into our basic cultural patterns that they seem to us as an imperative of the very nature of our being, a dictate of our genetic coding as a species. In clinical language we are into a deep cultural pathology. We can no longer trust our cultural guidance in any comprehensive manner. In this situation we must return to our genetic structure and rethink who we are, where we fit into the community of existence and what our proper role might be within this community.

Our genetic coding is more comprehensive than our cultural coding. It is integral with the whole complex of species codings whereby the earth system remains coherent within itself and capable of continuing the evolutionary process. For a species to remain viable it must establish a niche that is beneficial both for itself and for the larger community. The species coding of the human carries within itself all those deeper physical and spiritual spontaneities that are consciously activated by the genius of human intellect, imagination and emotion. These cultural patterns are handed down as traditions which form the substance of the initiation rituals, educational systems and life styles of the various civilizations. Our cultural traditions are constantly groping toward their appropriate realization within the context of an emerging universe. As things change, the traditions are forced into new expressions or into an impasse that demands a new beginning. The norm for radically restructuring our cultural codings forces us back to the more fundamental species coding which ties us into the larger complex of earth codings. In this larger context we find the imperative to make the basic changes now required of us.

We cannot obliterate the continuities of history, nor can we move into the future without guidance from existing cultural forms. Yet, somehow we must reach even further back to where our genetic coding connects with the species codings of the entire earth community. Only then can we overcome the limitations of the anthropocentrism that binds us.

Perhaps a new revelatory experience is taking place, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the earth process. Humanity has not participated in such a vision since shamanic times, but in such a renewal lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire planet.

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