I recently attended an extraordinary symposium hosted by the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I. At this symposium, for the first time, the head of a major world religion stated clearly and unequivocally that destroying the environment is a sin. At the symposium were a number of environmental activists from a variety of religious faiths. In my conversations with them I sensed a tremendous frustration, including from Sierra Club activists, that their efforts to link their faith with their commitment to the environment were frustrated both by their churches and by environmental groups.
The Patriarch commented that destroying the environment is a sin. I would argue that for environmentalists to ignore the churches is also a sin.
Carl Pope
10 November 1997
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Remarks of Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director
Father Constantine, Chancellor Yang, Dr. Lubchenco, Senator O'Connell, Your Grace, it is a privilege to be here among you. My text this evening is an apology. The environmental movement for the past quarter of a century has made no more profound error than to misunderstand the mission of religion and the churches in preserving the Creation. My generation of environmental activists, the Earth Day generation, is deeply implicated in this error. We knew the nature of the challenge we faced, that it was moral: that the sin which tempts our leaders to despoil nature is pride, or hubris, and that the God whose worship seduces us to follow our leaders down that path is greed, or Mammon. We knew the locus of America's moral instincts: We had seen that America's impulse to redeem and transform itself arose from the churches when they tackled the legacy of slavery and challenged the War in Vietnam. My own formative experiences in social change were in Baptist and Methodist Churches in the rural South. We knew how hard it is to sustain morally driven organizatioons. As the Executive Director of a very large and complex grass-roots environmental organization, I am painfully aware that many of the human challenges we face are utterly akin to those involved in stewarding a church. I am, in many ways, trying to create a community which will serve the human functions of a church. This is not because the Sierra Club is a church, or because environmentalists cling to some religion of their own -- among our members are Episcopalians and Catholics and Jews and Orthodox and Methodists and Presbyterians and Buddhists and Mormons, as well as atheists and agnostics and an occasional true pagan. But the Sierra Club, while not a church, must be church-like, because only such a community can provide individuals with the fellowship they need to go out into the world and battle with hubris and mammon, and commit their souls and their lives to a cause whose realization is indefinite and uncertain at best. Yet for almost thirty years we stubbornly, proudly, rejected what we knew. We ignored the fact that when Americans wish to express a sense of a community that is wiser and better than they are as individuals, they gather to pray. We acted as if we could save future generations, and yet unnamed and unknown species, without the full engagement of the institutions through which we save ourselves. We rejected the churches. I recently attended a retreat sponsored for environmental leaders by the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, represented here tonight by Paul Gorman. I was stimulated, enlightened, but also ashamed at my ignorance of basic truths about the message of the book or Noah, or the teaching of St. Francis on the relationship between humanity, divinity, and nature. Why did we ignore, and indeed reject, the churches themselves? Why did neither our early experiences in social change, nor the challenges we faced within our own movement, cause us to look outward and notice the obvious. I suspect there are some complex cultural and sociological reasons growing out of the 1960's. And environmentalism has always been strongly informed by the scientific paradigm. This made it vulnerable to the deep wound that separates science and religion in our century, and which is the topic of our symposium. There are also some specific intellectual roots of this error. When I, and many of my generation, became active as environmentalists, the written literature was scant indeed. A few texts had to serve us as guides, because there were very few older environmentalists to mentor us, and almost no formal knowledge. One text guided us on the topic of religion. Everyone I have talked to of my generation remembers this text, and remembers the same lesson. It became for us a seminal work. Entitled, "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," it was by Lynn White, Jr., a historian at the University of California. It opened with a reference to Aldous Huxley, moved on quickly to Buddhism, and taught us that the Judeo-Christian tradition was the moving force between the western technological revolution and its devaluation of the natural and elevation of the human to the role of dominance. It said of technology and the ecological crisis, "Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes towards nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma." Its penultimate section closes with this statement, which shaped and informed the response of the environmental movement of the last twenty five years to both religion and the churches:
With that statement, for too many environmentalists, the subject was closed. In Islamic terms, the book of interpretation was shut. We became as narrow minded as any fundamentalists of any religion. When I received the invitation to attend this symposium, I reread Lynn White. I -- and my colleagues -- have badly misread his text. White begins with a description of Western technology, and the role that the Christian vision of time as teleological and linear played in the military and industrial dominance of Western Europe and western technology. His topic is science as much as faith, and while he decries the dominance of a particular, anthropocentric tradition in Christianity, he also acknowledges competing, more ecologically compatible traditions. He would not be surprised that we are gathering tonight around the energy which has been generated by Patriarch Bartholomew. He wrote of the Eastern Church:
Any conservation biologist worth his or her salt would be far more comfortable, I believe, with the Greek tradition. But White does not cast the Western Christian tradition into the darkness. He emphasizes the potential of Franciscan teachings to redeem Western Christianity from anthropocentrism:
While I and my fellow environmentalists remember White for his penultimate criticism of the dominnce tradition in western Christianity , we would have served our cause more faithfully had we focused on his closing comment:
I would like to close by acknowledging error. Environmentalists must engage with the churches and with faith. We have not. Indeed, if as White says, in the Eastern tradition intellectual blindness is sin, I stand here to confess that sin. But the environmental movement is changing. If the excitement and energy which I have sensed in my friends and colleagues as I have discussed this symposium is any indication, environmentalists are undergoing a transformation in their attitude towards faith and towards the churches. Indeed, your All Holiness, like the prodigal, we may yet return home. Thank you. Religion and the Environment |
