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Where Do We Go from Here?
 AVA
TIROSH-SAMUELSON speaks for nearly all religious traditions when she writes
that for Jewish thinkers, until very recently, “environmentalism has remained a
marginal concern.” It’s not that religions ignored the natural world—indeed, if
you edited out every hymn in the Christian hymnal that testifies to God’s
presence through the thunder, the dew, or the cycle of the seasons, you would
be left with a thin book indeed. But for several millennia some of these
ancient religions took the natural world for granted, assumed it as a given,
the backdrop against which humans and deities worked out their various
relationships.
Now, responding to the urgent
alarms of scientists, historians of religion and theologians have pored over
old texts and traditions, seeking to find in them sources for a new
environmental ethics—a repair guide for what suddenly seems our most broken
relationship of all, namely, our human relationship to the natural habitat. The
splendid work of these historians, presented in a series of Harvard conferences
and books on world religions and ecology and exemplified by the essays in this
issue of Dædalus, has yielded much that is useful. It turns out that
buried in plain sight throughout our various traditions are myriad clues and
suggestions about how we might live more lightly on the planet. In addition,
the conferences and the books are documenting examples of religiously inspired
environmental projects in various parts of the world.
While scholars and environmental
activists have joined forces in these conferences, religious leaders and
laypersons still need to become more involved. So far, with notable outstanding
exceptions—like the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, the Tibetan Buddhist
Dalai Lama, and the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ismar
Schorsch—few religious leaders have stepped forward to make these new
understandings central parts of their work. Denominations that addressed
questions of social justice and civil rights have adopted a lower profile on
equally central questions of environmental ethics. They have faithfully
adopted, and then faithfully filed away, any number of right-thinking position
papers on toxic waste or global warming (which they deplore) and God’s creation
(which they cherish). But all in all, it’s been a pretty damp squib. So perhaps
a useful task, in these closing pages, would be to suggest some of the ways
these emerging insights from our texts and traditions might be translated into
action, soon enough to meet the urgent timetable laid out by Michael McElroy in
his introductory essay. We need to build on the work begun by this project to
bring together ideas and action.
My general point is simple: the
deepest religious insights on the relation between God, nature, and humans may
not emerge until religious people, acting on the terms indicated by their
traditions, join these movements. The act of engagement will itself spur new
thinking, new understanding.
Another way of saying it is this:
for many Christians, a profound understanding of the Jewish story of Exodus as
an allegory of liberation followed, not preceded, Rosa Parks’s decision to stay
in the front seat of a Montgomery bus. She sat there out of some intuitive
sense of right and wrong, of frustration and hope. But as the churches took up
her cause, they searched more deeply through their traditions, and certain
verses came to new and real life; certain themes emerged. Notably, many of the
insights formulated by the liberation theologies of Latin America, Asia, and
Africa could bring important perspectives to the question of religious
understanding of the human-Earth relationship—significantly, in regions of the
globe where that question is gaining urgency at the fastest rate.
It is undeniable, as Sallie
McFague points out in her powerful essay, that our religions help us determine
“who we are in the scheme of things and how we should act.” But of course, as
her piece makes clear, that emerges not only through proof-texting or
sermonizing. It is true, to use the words of Christopher Key Chapple in his
essay on the Jain tradition, that in order to be effective, environmental work
“must proceed from a story.” But that story, that new understanding of who we
are, will in turn emerge through action.
For instance, within fifteen
miles of the Dædalus offices, several old coal-fired power plants
continue to supply Massachusetts with a portion of its electricity. Local
environmentalists have worked for years to force the plants to convert to
natural gas, citing a series of studies showing the human health effects of
coal soot on New Englanders. But if a hundred priests and ministers and imams
and rabbis, joined by several hundred laypeople, descended on those plants in
protest, what would be the result? It might or might not change the political
dynamic (I think it would), but the act itself would certainly force those
participating to think more seriously about what their traditions demand. They
would have no choice but to begin viewing the facts about global warming, laid
out with understated power by Michael McElroy, as the story of human beings
grown too large in relation to their planet, a position that almost requires
reference to the Book of Job or Psalm 148.
Or say that the campaign against
genetic modifications in food, so far ably led by secular environmentalists,
suddenly began to draw significant religious participation. Soon these people
of faith would begin to discover what parts of our traditions are actually
resonant across secular lines (the tree of knowledge? the stewardship of God?),
and from those begin to knit together a new story of who we are and how we
should act.
The importance of religious
participation in these movements cannot be underestimated. For instance,
McFague offers a powerful indictment of neoclassical economics as being unable
to apprehend the things that make us fully human. That indictment is common
enough in environmental circles, but the search for some alternative has so far
faltered. The political Left has not been much help, offering mainly a critique
about distribution, but still tied to the idea of “more.” Only our religious
institutions, among the mainstream organizations of Western, Asian, and
indigenous societies, can say with real conviction, and with any chance of an
audience, that there is some point to life beyond accumulation. In the past,
that vision was expressed purely in spiritual and aesthetic terms; now it has
also acquired a deeply practical urgency. Those in monks’ habits are joined by
scientists in white coats, and they’re saying the same few things: Simplicity.
Community. Restraint. That confluence carries enormous potential energy.
This is not to say that there’s a
great chance this new wave of religious involvement will carry the day. At
least in the West, many religious diktats are ignored, even among the
theoretically faithful. (Consider, for instance, the powerful indictments of
neoclassical economics, on justice grounds, by the Catholic bishops of North
America.) Still, there’s a real opportunity here, one not yet fully tried, and
one that can’t be ignored, given the severity of the crisis. There are few
enough leavening agents left in our society, few enough potential goads to the
conscience of the wealthy majority. Potential activists within the churches,
synagogues, mosques, and temples doubtless fear marginalization if they get too
far outside the mainstream, but in fact they are marginalized now, invisible
within the smothering consensus of our society. It is only by getting far
enough out to risk seeming extreme that they have any real chance of
challenging our consumerist complacency.
This radical discontinuity
between religions and the secular mainstream—a mainstream that threatens,
remember, to raise the temperature of the planet five or ten degrees before the
century is out—might prove more important than the divisions between different
religious traditions. Reduced to cases, some of the theoretical conflicts
disappear: if you have to decide about drilling for six months’ worth of oil in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a stewardship view of the world might well
yield the same conclusion as a more radically biocentric vision. At any rate,
the gulfs between traditions are probably a second-order problem, one to be
worked out as the various religions get down to actual work in the territories
where they prevail.
And as they do so, I have no
doubt they will discover new and powerful visions emerging, stronger than even
the foundational work done by theologians so far suggests. Donald Swearer’s
chronicle of the controversy in northern Thailand over plans to build a cable
car up Doi Suthep, one of Buddhism’s sacred mountains, is heartening in this
regard. He quotes from local newspaper accounts of the massive opposition to
the project: The authorities had “underestimated the northern people: the soul
of northern Thailand is still alive. Although sometimes not being able to
explain why rationally, the northern people want to preserve Doi Suthep as it
was given them by Creation, as untouched as possible, as sacred.” These same
religious-environmental impulses are ingrained in billions of human beings, and
one role of religious communities is surely to give them permission to come to
the surface.
Ecology may rescue religion at
least as much as the other way around. By offering a persuasive practical
reason to resist the endless obliterating spread of consumerism, it makes of
Creation a flag round which to rally. And it is a flag planted not in the past,
but in the present and the future. It is the keystone issue for our moment, the
one that makes eco-theology urgent.
And it is to this word “urgent”
that I want to return. The poor you may always have with you, but the
atmosphere you don’t—as McElroy makes abundantly clear in his essay. Climate
change is a timed test, and so are most of the other environmental crises we
face. So we need more conferences and conclaves of religious leaders, scholars,
and activists, but we need them to be different from the meetings we’ve held in
the past. We must gather to discuss not only ideas from the past but how those
ideas can be put into action. We need to identify, as the essays in this issue
of Dædalus have done, the remarkable religiously inspired environmental
initiatives already happening in many parts of the world. But we need much more
as well.
Imagine gatherings where
theologians and scholars and activists came together—and did not leave until
they had worked out plans for closing down a polluting power plant, opening up
new funding for alternative energy, or any of a hundred other tasks: specific
actions, which they would help to carry out in the days and weeks ahead. Dozens
of strategies will emerge from such discussions: mindfulness and protest,
witness and lament, nonviolence and celebration—new initiatives like Episcopal
Power and Light, the church-based nonprofit that markets green energy; new
efforts like the Boston-based Coalition for Environmentally Responsible
Economics (CERES) to speak truth to the powerful in the corporate and political
worlds; new declarations from bolder leaders: that sport utility vehicles are
morally problematic, that the Kyoto treaty needs moral support. Most of all,
new actions. A thousand things, all done in the name of the sacredness of
Creation, all designed to make a real, visible, luminous difference.
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©
2001 by The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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