Fund for Christian Ecology

In 1971, at the age of 13, I started backpacking and fell in love with the natural world. A short time thereafter, I began learning about threats to wild places and the environment in general. Ever since, I have been pondering the causes of our environmental crisis, as aptly summarized in the Ken Wilber quote [endnote 1] that I read for today's chalice lighting. Indeed, looking back in reflection, the quest for an adequate explanation for why we're destroying the planet has taken on the quality for me of a quest for the Holy Grail.

About a year later at 14, I joined my first environmental group, the Wilderness Society. Through it, I became exposed to what is still the most common diagnosis of the problem, namely, that greedy corporations and their bought-and-paid-for politicians are selfishly consuming and polluting the planet for short term profit, leaving we innocents to pay the price. This is still the primary explanation offered up by environmental groups for general public consumption.

My interest in environmental issues eventually led me to concentrate my college studies in biology and environmental studies and it was in college that I first encountered Lynn White's famous essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." In that essay, he stated the following:

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. [Ronald Reagan,] 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.

And thus Professor White laid the responsibility for our planetary crisis at the feet of Christianity. Having a few years earlier devoted considerable intellectual and emotional energy to over-throwing the Christian fundamentalism of my youth, I found Professor White's indictment of Christianity emotionally satisfying. It confirmed my rejection of Christianity and my embrace of Unitarian Universalism and other earth-friendly philosophies and theologies. I was not alone. As Wendell Berry has noted, "the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world and uselessness of Christianity in any effort to correct that destruction are now established cliches of the conservation movement."

Implicit in Professor White's analysis is the assumption that if we change our philosophies or theologies to ones that are more humble and earth-friendly, the crisis can be averted. Given the time when White was writing, it was a reasonable hypothesis. Most historians identify the modern environmental movement as beginning with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. With the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, a full-blown political movement was born. White published his essay in 1967 during those early years of the environmental movement when various hypotheses were being advanced as the cause and basis of the environmental crisis. In the first chapter of Genesis is the following: "And God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Clearly, the reliance of some Christians on this passage as justifying an exploitive attitude toward the planet gives credence to Professor White's surmise that Christianity bears some responsibility for our environmental mess.

Professor White's critique and indictment provoked a considerable reaction within Christianity. A large volume of academic papers and books have been produced responding to White's charge. A credible case has been made that Judaism and Christianity are not so anti-environmental as White may have supposed, and that indeed Christian scripture, especially the Hebrew portion known as the Old Testament, contains some of the most strongly pro-environment sentiments to be found in any religious literature.

There has also been a response of a different sort, namely, a critique of White's assumption that anti-environmental human behavior flows out of the philosophies and theologies held by those same humans. It is this question that I desire to address today.

In White's essay, he hinted that Zen Buddhism in particular and eastern religions in general might provide more suitable philosophical foundations for more earth-friendly human behavior. A number of scholars have noted that if this is correct, then Eastern cultures such as India and China with their influence by the earth-friendly theologies of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism should have good environmental records. In fact, India and China, for a host of reasons beyond the scope of our discussion this morning, have two of the worst environmental records. This alone must lead one to question whether religion and philosophy can alone account for the poor environmental record of any given culture.

If religion and philosophy provide a poor explanation for earth-harming human behavior, what might provide a better clue? The standard culprits, greedy corporations and their corrupt politicians, also fall short of providing an adequate explanation. These proposed culprits are attractive, especially to we religious liberals, because the problem becomes basically one of education. Once enough people are informed of the damage we are causing, they themselves will spontaneously alter their behavior and, in our democratic society, will demand laws that correct the earth-harming behaviors of for-profit corporations. People are basically good, after all, and will naturally take the necessary steps to protect our life-sustaining planet.

This was a viable hypothesis in the 1970s, when all the various threats were first becoming widely appreciated and understood. Educate people, and they'll do the right thing. And now, in the year 2000, public opinion polls consistently find that 80% or more of Americans self-identify themselves as environmentalists (at least outside of Idaho and the Intermountain West). So efforts to inform the American public about the problems have been largely successful. Why then are we still headed to the brink of the cliff? We know what we are doing. We are changing the climate. We are depleting the ozone. We are, knowingly, causing the wholesale extirpation of whole classes of other lifeforms in one of the greatest extinction spasms to ever hit our planet. And the causes of all this are not complex. Paul Erhlich taught us over 30 years ago that the environmental impact caused by humans is a function of our population size, the level of affluence with which we live, and the technolgy we employ to provide our level of affluence. In short, we know what we need to do to stop the on-going destruction of our planet. So why aren't we doing it? In short, because we don't want to. And people rarely do what they don't want to do.

The horrid truth of this was driven home to me a few months ago as I was giving a presentation on the environmental effects of logging to an environmental sciences class at Mountain Home High School. I had made my standard pitch about how we could end the commercial logging of our national forests if we would just recycle more that we currently do, and begin using alternative building products. In the question and answer period, a young man declared that we won't recycle more, and won't use alternative building supplies, and that we just have to get used to the fact that its our nature to destroy the natural world. I protested, and said I was counting on his generation to start doing things the right way. I was stunned by the casualness of his statement. Humans destroy nature. That's what we do. No point getting all upset about it.

Is he right? A number of scholars think he is. And here we get to the biological roots of our ecological crisis. Garrett Hardin and B.F. Skinner have noted that the evolutionary law of natural selection has ensured that we will pursue our immediate self-interest, and that of our immediate off-spring. And zoologist Frans de Waal has noted that concern for the welfare of a member of another species is completely unknown in non-humans, and given the indifference of most people to our on-going extinction crisis, its a rather rare trait in humans as well. Further, the pioneering work in the area of sociobiology by E.O. Wilson and others has shown that even some types of seemingly unselfish behavior can be selfish in a biological sense. Much of what humans call "moral" behavior can be seen as selfishly motivated. I agree not to kill you; you agree not to kill me. I agree I won't steal from you; you agree to not steal from me. Biologists call this reciprocal altruism. The restraint I show is primarily for my own self interest. I agree to restrain myself in return for you showing restraint.

Finally, Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein hypothesize that humans are affected by a lack of natural selection for response to slowly developing threats. They explain this factor as follows:

Hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, our ancestors' survival depended in large part on the ability to respond quickly to threats that were immediate, personal, palpable: threats like the sudden crack of a branch as it is about to give way or the roar of a flash flood racing down a narrow valley. Threats like the darkening of the entrance of a cavern as a giant cave bear enters. Threats like lightning, threats like a thrown spear.

Those are not threats generated by complex technological devices accumulated over decades by unkown people half a world away. Those not are threats like the slow atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide from auto exhausts, power plants and deforestation; not threats like the gradual depletion of the ozone layer.

Thus, the human mind evolved to register short-term changes from moment to moment, day to day, and season to season, and to overlook the backdrop against which those take place.

Ornstein and Ehrlich argue further that not only couldn't our ancestors detect slow changes in their environment, there wasn't much they could do about them in any event; they either migrated or perished. Perhaps natural selection tended to favor those who didn't even bother worrying about things they couldn't change. However, since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, and especially with the industrial and public health revolution during just the last century, we have dramatically altered the evolutionary game plan. Now we are capable of and are inflicting enormous damage to planet, but our Stone Age sensibilities render most of us oblivious and indifferent to this developing catastrophe.

I believe our environmental crisis presents a special challenge to liberals in general and religious liberals in particular, with our cherished belief in the essential goodness of humans. It is now a tired and oft repeated fact that Americans account for 5% of the world's population, but consume 30 to 40 percent of world's resources. This is a staggering statistic. I think most people, especially liberals, unconsciously avoid really considering its ramifications. But like it or not, this statistic screams out an incredibly ugly fact, namely, that the lifestyle we so enjoy living is not sustainable with resources from our own country, and we are sustaining our lifestyle only by mining and stripping the rest of the planet, thereby driving other lifeforms to extinction, impoverishing cultures elsewhere, and denying future generations of humans a livable planet. And if that isn't bad enough, surveys by social psychologists reveal that whether a given household has income of $10,000 or $100,000, they believe could attain true happiness if only they had twice their current income, and could thereby double their current level of consumption.

Dan Fogelberg suggests we are "Blind to the Truth." [Endnote 2]. I would suggest that we're indifferent to it. Either way, it would seem that the Buddhists are right. "For the senses constantly ask for more by way of worldly objects, and normally behave like voracious dogs who can never have enough." (Ashvaghosha, Saundaranandakavya, XIII).

The analysis I'm suggesting here is very depressing. One commentator in a provocative article entitled "Humans as Cancer" [Endnote 3] has noted the similarity between the way humans are increasing their occupation of the planet and thereby increasing their resource use to detriment of other non-human life forms and the way a cancerous tumor increases it size and resource use within living organisms. Is it true? Are humans for form of planetary cancer? Certainly, much of our behavior supports the analogy.

Are there, then, any hopeful facts? Another item from the world of biology provides at least of glimmer of hope. Frans de Waal, in his book Good Natured, describes an experiment where a group of rhesus monkeys were placed in common living space with stump-tailed macaques. Stump-tails are easy-going and tolerant, whereas rhesus monkeys have a rigid hierarchy strictly enforced through violent behavior. Over the course of five months, the rhesus monkeys took on the more gentle, tolerant behavior of the stump-tails, and then retained those behaviors when once again put by themselves. In other words, the social culture of one species was successfully infused into a group from another species. This success shows that the typical behavior of the rhesus is to some extent culturally learned as opposed to being genetically innate. [Endnote 4].

If we were serious about creating a more earth-friendly human culture, we probably could. But what will make us serious about creating such a culture before its too late to save the diverse splendor of our planet that still remains?

I would like to say that I have a solution to this. That this policy, that new philosophy, or that old religion reinterpreted will save us. But I don't see an obvious solution. In our Choices for Sustainable Living class that about 15 of us took here at the Fellowship over the spring, we grappled with the planet's prospects. The concensus opinion was that nothing much would change until things get worse. People will change when their circumstances force them. For the time being, it seems the planet's fate is to suffer ever worsening despoilation.

Veronica and I recently listened on tape to Jane Goodall's latest book, "Reason for Hope." She suggests that we all must become at least "mini-saints", each doing our fair share to save the planet. Of course she's right. This is what must happen if any part of the remaining splendor of our planet is to be salvaged. But alas, Dr. Goodall didn't provide any real basis for how or why this needed tendency toward saintliness among a majority of humans will take hold. Saints, even mini-ones, have always been in short supply. But she asserts there's hope, and I hope she's right.

I guess I'm presenting this information for two reasons. Perhaps I've missed something and you can help me out. But even if not, I do think its important to face our situation squarely, and not avert our eyes from our and our planet's predicament. Perhaps, if we meditate long enough on what were doing, a new resolve to change our ways will at last take hold.

End Notes

1. Wilber, Ken, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, (Shambhala, 1995), p. 4: “I will not belabor the point by bringing out all the ghastly statistics, from the fact that we are at present exterminating approximately one hundred species a day to the fact that we are destroying the world's tropical forests at the rate of one football field per second. The planet, indeed, is headed for disaster, and it is now possible, for the first time in human history, that owing entirely to manmade circumstances, not one of us will survive to tell the tale. If the Earth is indeed our body and blood, then in destroying it we are committing a slow and gruesome suicide.”

2. BLIND TO THE TRUTH by Dan Fogelberg
from “The Wild Places” album

In the overcrowded cities
Where the nights are bright as day
You spend your weekly paycheck
And turn your eyes away
From the crisis we've created
With our self-indulgent ways
Living like there's no tomorrow
Well that just might be the case
Now they're tearing down the forests
In the jungles of Brazil
Without a second thought about
The species that they kill
But extinction is forever
And still the forests fall
And push it ever closer to
Extinction for us all

CHORUS
But you 're so blind to the truth
Blind to the truth
And you can't see nothin'
You're so blind to the truth
Blind to the truth
But the judgement day is coming

Now the politicians bicker
On the early evening news
Pledging their allegiance
To whoever they can use
And the corporate bosses snicker
As they watch the profits soar
They don't care what they make next month
Just as long as it is more
They take our farms and marshlands
Drive nature to the wall
Just so they can build another
Goddamn shopping mall
And it doesn 't seem to matter
If we cannot see the stars
Just as long as they can keep
On building obsolescent cars
'Cause they're so...
(repeat chorus)

Now you cannot drink the water
And you cannot breathe the air
The sky is ripping open and you
Still don 't seem to care
The soil is tired and toxic
And unable to provide
The clock is running out and
There is nowhere left to hide
Now there's laws that we must live by
And they're not the laws of man
Can 't you see the shadow
That moves across this land
The future is upon us
And there's so much we must do
And you know I can't ignore it
And, my friend, neither can you
Un less you 're
(repeat chorus)

3. MacDougall, A. Kent, Wild Earth, "Humans as Cancer", Fall 1996

4. de Waal, Frans, Good Natured: the Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, (Havard Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 178-80.

Other Sources Consulted

Gardner, G.T., & Paul C. Stern, Environmental Problems and Human Behavior, (Allyn & Bacon, 1996)

White, Lynn, Science, “The Biological Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, Vol 155, #3767, March 10, 1967, pp. 1203-07.

Links to Christian Ecology resources on other web sites