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[Woodstock Report, December 1991, no. 28]
Copyright © 1991 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
The headline of this story was the title of a Woodstock Forum on the environment held on November 19, 1991. The "Earth Summit" is the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development scheduled for June 1992 in Brazil. The moderator, Ambassador Robert Ryan, opened the evening's conversation by situating the topic and the issues. The panelists, Andrew Christiansen, S.J., Elizabeth Dodson Gray, and Rabbi David Saperstein, represent the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish traditions respectively. (Although the Muslim, Bahai, Hindu, Buddhist, Native American and others traditions were not represented, we acknowledge their important contributions to the complete picture.) Respondents to the panelists were Dr. Jane Pratt and Dr. Donald Conroy. The views expressed at a Woodstock forum do not necessarily reflect the views of the Woodstock Theological Center.
Ambassador Robert Ryan, Moderator, is the director of the United Nations Coordination Center for the Earth Summit. He has extensive experience as a diplomat having served as Ambassador to Mali, the principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, the Deputy Head of Mission to the European Development Committee, and U.S. Consul in Rio de Janeiro. Ambassador Ryan has a degree in economics from M.I.T.
Earth Summit, the United Nations conference on environment and development, is really about an idea, namely, sustainable development. The conference is supposed to design an action program to promote a transition to sustainable development and set the stage for acceptance of the sustainable development paradigm by governments, organizations, and indeed people everywhere in the world.
To me the key elements in sustainable development are:
At least three of these elements are very obviously ethical concepts. Hence the role for religious organizations of all kinds. For many environmental groups, sustainable development means sacrificing development for the sake of the environment. For my friends and colleagues from developing nations, it is development that is more important. They are both wrong in a sense. The whole concept of sustainable development is that by following proper principles, the proper ethics, the proper economics, we can integrate environmental and economic decision making, so that we can have a decent standard of living and a clean global environment.
The Declaration of Principles that is being drafted for an Earth Charter has a very obvious ethical content. Negotiations during the drafting process are coming along rather well, with countries, religious organizations, including the Vatican, and other non-governmental organizations making a number of proposals. These proposals have been grouped into seventeen categories, or seventeen general principles. The U.S. proposal for the Preamble to the Earth Charter states:
We the people of the world, understand that the earth is a unique whole and interdependent system. We are conscious that many of our past perceptions and relations are no longer adequate. We must teach ourselves and our children that whatever we humans do to the world in which we live, we do to ourselves. The light of our understanding of the planet is a functioning whole in which all of its ecosystems are interrelated. We fully recognize our mutual interdependence. We must live in balance with nature to ensure the continuity and quality of life for future generations.
Andrew J. Christiansen, S.J., is the director of the Office of International Justice and Peace of the United States Catholic Conference. With extensive background in ethics and international studies, he is the principal advisor to the Conference on environmental issues. Father Christiansen has taught at the Yale Divinity School, Georgetown University, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and the University of Notre Dame.
In publishing their new statement, Renewing the Earth: An Invitation to Reflection and Action on the Environment in Light of Catholic Social Teaching, the U.S. Catholic bishops were very conscious that they were entering into a dialogue that had been underway for a long time and a dialogue in which many Catholics were already engaged. They were aware that this environmental dialogue involves a great variety of voices coming from different local cultures and expressing different concerns and interacting with national and regional expertise.
Their recent document draws on the experience of the Catholic Rural Life Conference, the Campaign for Human Development and the Catholic Relief Services, groups that have been engaged practically, not just theoretically, with environmental issues. In the course of the development of the document, the bishops took into account the work of the Holy Father himself, many bishops' conferences, and many bishops.
Moreover, they stressed that "we recognize with appreciation the efforts of other Christian churches and people of other faiths on behalf of the planet." They also stressed, and I think this is important when we look to the future, "we accept our common religious responsibility for the shaping of an ethic of care for the earth." The statement also calls for grave social conversion to meet the crisis. They wrote, "So vast are the problems intertwined with our economy and way of life that nothing but a wholehearted, and evermore profound turning to the Maker of heaven and earth will allow us to carry out our responsibilities."
I would like to highlight three theological and three ethical themes in the document. The three theological themes are:
One of the characteristic marks of the Catholic theological tradition has been a willingness to accept God's revelation in nature as well as in history. Renewing the Earth appeals at several points to the historic use of a theology of nature: in natural theology, in the sacraments, in natural law morality. On a key issue in eco-theology it makes clear the centrality of God to the Catholic understanding of nature. It affirms that "God, the source of all that is, is actively present in all creation, but also surpasses all created things." It adds, "An ordered love of creation, therefore, is ecological without being ecocentric."
The document as a whole draws heavily on the covenant with Noah, and that covenant reads: "See, I am establishing my covenant with you and with your descendants after you, with every living creature that was with you. All the birds and the various tame and wild animals that were there with you and came out of the Ark." The bishops, I think for the first time, talk about the diversity of life manifest in God's glory. And they go on to say that by preserving natural environments, by protecting endangered species, by laboring to make human environments compatible with local ecology, by employing appropriate technology and by carefully evaluating technological innovations, we exhibit respect for creation and reverence for the Creator. I think environmentalists will find the affirmation of the value of natural diversity an important development in official American Catholic thinking on this issue.
In some environmental circles, the supreme virtue of charity has been under criticism for being anthropocentric. Renewing the Earth reasserts the love command as the center of Christian ethics. In love for vulnerable human beings we grow in the sensitivities we need to preserve the environment. The bishops appeal to St. Francis, who, before he tamed the wolf of Gubbio and preached to the birds and composed "The Canticle of the Sun," found his joy in serving and loving lepers. In the same vein, the statement insists that the choice between the poor and the environment is a false one. It also proposes that workers and environmentalists must find common ground. Clearly, the bishops say, in an application of the common good, workers cannot be asked to make sacrifices to improve the environment without concrete support from the broader community.
With respect to ethics, there are also three topics that I would cite:
For some, including myself, the great icon of the environmental movement is the view of our blue planet from outer space. But the icons of Renewing the Earth include several other pictures. There would be squatter shacks built on garbage dumps in Third World cities, mountain folk dwelling in cabins the law forbids them to repair, strip-mined hillsides, ghost towns like Love Canal and Times Beach abandoned because of toxic waste, Philippine villages buried in mudslides as a result of the clear-cutting of timber. The document is forthright about the poor suffering most from environmental damage. Following Pope John Paul II, it notes that human solidarity places special obligations on the industrial democracies, including the United States, to see that sustainable development will also be equitable development for the present generation.
I've already given sufficient indication of how Renewing the Earth utilizes the tradition of Catholic social thought. For purposes of discussion, however, let me just cite two of the principles of Catholic social teaching which are germane to the development of an ecological ethic.
In his encyclical, Pacem in Terris, John XXIII raised the notion of the common good from a political principle for the nation-state to a principle that applied to international affairs. In Renewing the Earth, the bishops go so far as to say it is a planetary principle. Not just global in the international sense, it refers to the common good of all creation. This is important as we look to saving the planet as a whole and provide a way to arbitrate between conflicts.
The bishops make very clear that a lifestyle of over-consumption is not the goal, and that authentic development involves austerity. It even involves sacrifice when others do not have the necessities of life.
This document makes a start at least toward talking about Christian environmental virtue. The bishops talk about the struggle of meeting the environmental challenge, an awesome challenge. Since it needs the cooperation of all the peoples of the earth to resolve this crisis, it can be overwhelming. The bishops point to the virtue of hope as the fundamental environmental virtue.
Elizabeth Dodson Gray is co-director of the Bolton Institute for a Sustainable Future and coordinator of the Theological Opportunities Program at Harvard Divinity School. A feminist theologian who weaves environmental and futurist concerns with the insights of Christian ethics and theology she is the author of Green Paradise Lost and Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap and editor of Sacred Dimensions of Women's Experiences.
It seems to me that the eco-crisis is about cosmology and ethics. In an interesting way, our ethics grows integrally out of cosmology. It has become apparent to me that naming is power. For interesting reasons, we humans, particularly in our religious traditions, have named ourselves on the planet in a very self-serving way. It was written in Psalm 8: "What is man that thou art mindful of him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and put everything else underneath his feet." We have named ourselves king of the mountain, top of the heap, and given dominion, kingly control, to God.
We have been socialized into this pyramid of power, in which God is at the top, men above women, adults above children, humans above animals, we call them sub-human species, animals above plants, nature at the bottom. Nature has been, in my opinion, a theological non-category, created by God, but perceived as a stage, upon which the cosmic drama of salvation between God and humans, the really important action, took place. This incredible anthropocentric illusion places humans outside this pyramid where we stand and rank the diversity of all that is.
We have confused human uniqueness with superiority. It has been the basis of our Western science and technology. But we never asked ourselves if our inventions and technologies fit into anything.
Recently, we have begun moving from this anthropocentric illusion to stewardship, but stewardship is but another version of dominion. It assumes that we know how to take good care of the complexity of the earth system we are in, when we don't.
Lately, and I'm delighted to see it so recorded in the Earth Charter, reality has been breaking in and ecology has been telling us that we are within an interdependent system. Everything affects everything else in this interconnected system. We need to fit our human operations within that system the way a hand fits into a glove.
I see Protestantism today moving away from the dominion model. See, for instance, Larry Rasmussen's article "Toward an Earth Charter" in a recent issue of Christian Century. However, there has been a mass turning to stewardship, even among Third World peoples.
My question for Protestants is, "Can we change such a deeply ingrained model of reality (dominion) and change our behavior accordingly. And theologically, I ask, "Can we repent of dominion?" I don't want us just to move on, and I don't want us to substitute other words. Speaking as a Protestant, I want the Christian church to repent.
But I have a further question. "Where did this need to rank diversity come from?" And here I refer to the theme of my book, Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap. We live inside a social construct of reality, made totally from the point of view of male life experiences, what I have called "Adam's World". All of us, have been socialized into Adam's World from birth so that we tend to feel this is the way the world is. Patriarchy is a problem related to the ecological crisis, because it has been the seedbed of the fatal need to rank diversity.
Patriarchy is a slanted society in which men are valued highly and women are valued less. Margaret Mead said that as she went from tribe to tribe, it didn't matter what was done, it only mattered who did it. If weaving was done in one culture by women, it was low-prestige. If weaving was done in another culture by men, it was high-prestige.
Patriarchy has given us a mind-set of comparison as our intellectual heritage. "Which of us are better, men or women, whites or people of color, straight or gay, humans or plants or trees?" And it is an enormously cultural exorcism in my opinion to get all that out of our heads.
So my final question is, "Will our culture's repentance ever include a gender analysis of how we got into this predicament?"
Rabbi David Saperstein is the co-director and counsel of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He has held leadership positions in national coalitions on issues as diverse as civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and energy and environment. He is a prolific writer, appearing on television network news and talk shows, authoring and editing five books on social justice issues. An attorney, he also finds time to be an adjunct professor in Comparative Jewish and American Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.
The Jewish approach to the environment, like the Christian tradition, is based on the concept of stewardship that emerges from the Bible: "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." While we are entitled to own "private property," we do so in a trust relationship with God. There are conditions and terms to that trust, one of which is the obligation to protect the corpus of the trust. We must protect this earth that has been entrusted to our care. In addition to stewardship, the Bible clearly obliges us to share God's wealth with those of God's children who are less fortunate than we. These are two compelling theological filters through which we view the issues associated with the contemporary environmental crisis.
There are a number of strains in the Jewish tradition that emerge in a variety of different ways. Let me mention some of them.
First, two contrasting stories. The first is a story in midrashic commentaries about creation. The story goes that when God attempted to create the universe, He made many different creations and finally was satisfied with this one. God took Adam and Eve by the hand and brought them through the Garden of Eden and said, "Here, this is my final creation. I have now given it over to your care. Care for it well, for if you destroy it, there will be none after you to make it right again."
The second story is found in the Talmud. A man takes a stone from his property and throws it onto a thoroughfare. A righteous man walking by says, "Why take the stone from property that is not yours and throw it onto your own property?" The property owner looks at him and says, "Fool, you don't understand. I wanted to get it out of the way of my property. I have thrown it on to someone else's property." After a few years the property owner hit hard times and lost his property. Walking the road one day he stumbles and falls over the stone he has thrown and reflects how true were the words, "I had taken the stone from property that was not mine and placed it on property that is mine."
From this comes two interwoven concepts:
Those of our relationships that are most precious are those that are the I-Thou relationships, the relationships in which we sense the presence of God and those in which we have failed to live up to God's promise. The I-It relationships are those in which we encounter something as an object to be used for our own needs and otherwise not deserving of our consideration.
How profound he was fifty years before the environmental crisis to have argued that it is possible to have an I-Thou relationship with a tree or a plant or star, just as it is with a human being, if one senses God's presence.
Dominion, in context. The concept of dominion was really not a problem to the Jewish tradition. Those who see it as a paradigm of hierarchical structure, as Elizabeth Dodson Gray does, are reading Deuteronomy out of context. It says:
Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth...and have dominion over the fish in the sea and over the fowl in the air and over every living thing that is upon the earth.
It is important for us to exercise dominion in the context of replenishing the earth. For example, we are instructed in Genesis that we are allowed to eat only herbs and greens and are prohibited from eating the meat of other animals. That, following immediately upon the words "dominion" and "subdue," clearly sets limitations to dominion.
From all of these verses, the Rabbis had no trouble in saying that the right to subdue was subservient to the obligation to subdue for a purpose. That purpose was to protect the earth, to be a guardian of the earth. Samson Raphael Hirsch, a great nineteenth century Jewish philosopher, who wrote extensively on the environment, regarded the Sabbath as an example of the protector that sets limits on the ability to subdue the earth and what it means to subdue the earth. We acknowledge that we have no rights of ownership or authority over the world. We enjoy only a borrowed authority; God remains the master of God's creation.
The Jewish legal system is a group of specific laws from which we then infer broader and more general applications.
Let me give one example related to the environment. A passage in Deuteronomy that sets the limits for war says, "Thou shall not waste. Thou shall not destroy the fruit-bearing tree." In order to wage war, you cannot cut down the fruit-bearing tree. From that the Rabbis say, "Why are we taught this first environmental regulation in the context of war?" Because, say the legal scholars, "If it is true, even at a time of war, when a life may be at stake and endangered by not cutting down the fruit-bearing tree, how much more is it true in the times of peace." Eight hundred years later in the halakic midrash of the time, it says it's not only fruit-bearing trees, but all kinds of food, any kind of trees that grow. Later the Talmud said not only can you not waste fruit-bearing trees or food stock that produces things that nurture or nourish people, but you can't waste anything that is part of useful life, whether it be utensils or dishes or clothes or anything related to ongoing normality of life. We are, by that one regulation in the Bible, forbidden to waste. And from the specific, we infer a whole group of general applications.
The Jewish religious community in America has been somewhat slow to respond to the environmental crisis. We have the ingrained attitudes toward the earth that both Elizabeth Dodson Gray and Drew Christiansen mentioned. Moreover, it has been very hard for the religious community to get hold of the issue and to motivate people. There are very complex technological arguments and also conflicting evidence involved in environmental issues.
This is tragic because you cannot really deal with the environmental crisis seriously without coming in touch with values beyond yourself and with an ethical, moral, religious obligation to care about the generations yet unborn. You cannot deal with this crisis effectively without having a sense that there is something in nature beyond its usefulness, some merit in and of nature itself.
Jewish theology teaches us that, when God created the universe, He chose to allow one part of creation to remain undone. That component of creation was justice, social justice. Then God gave humanity the ability to understand the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, between the blessing and the curse. God gave to us the rules of the Bible as the blueprint of how to complete creation. So, in the work of caring for what God has entrusted to us we are engaged in holy work. That is the driving, motivating force that has animated the Jewish tradition for three thousand years. It is a sense we need to recapture it because if we fail, there's none after us to make it right again.
Dr. Jane Pratt, at the World Bank since 1979, is currently responsible for coordinating World Bank preparations for the Earth Summit through the work of 23 separate task forces. She was previously the World Bank's chief of environmental operations and strategy. She holds a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T.
Limits of resources. At the World Bank we deal with praxis; we are not theologians. But I am acutely conscious of the limits of economics. When we first began to look at the limits of growth, we were concerned with capacity of natural resources to fuel the economic development of the world. More recent studies have revealed another challenge: the capacity of the earth to absorb the waste of development that fouls the environment.
Poverty can't wait. At the World Bank we invest $24 billion in developing countries in the course of a fiscal year, and we are becoming acutely conscious of what economics can and cannot do. So, I and many of my colleagues are looking to ethicists for guidance. We deal all day, every day, with failure. My daily bread and butter is the poorest countries in the world with the poorest people in the world. They don't have enough to eat. They have no clothes. They have no education and they surely don't have a room like this in which to come sit and talk.
Disappointment with theologians. So, I am horrified to hear that it will take five or six years to develop ethical guidance on the level of public policy. I'm sorry. We don't have five or six years! We need ethical guidance, and we need it now.
In Genesis, as we heard from Rabbi Saperstein, Adam and Eve presumably got an instruction "to go forth, be fruitful and multiple and replenish the earth." I submit that we have done that. We need to go back for a new instruction.
The answers that we have heard from theology are: Let's have the virtue of hope. Let's stop being so patriarchal. Let's stop wasting resources and let's all be good boys and girls. Then we can go on having a compatible and thoroughly harmonious marriage of environment and development. We will call it sustainability, and we will all live happily ever after. Right?
What we need ethically. We citizens and co-religionists challenge our theologians to help us discover a new ark and a new covenant that will give some guidance quickly to make practical day to day decisions. What do we want? Sustainability. When do we want it? Now.
Dr. Donald Conroy is the president and founder of the North American Coalition on Religion and Ecology. He was also instrumental in establishing the consortium on Religion and Ecology International, a network of organizations working on the ethical dimensions of the preparation for the Earth Summit. He serves on the ethics committee of the U.S. Citizens Network. He holds a doctorate in religious studies from the University of Pittsburgh and currently teaches at the Washington Theological Union.
Plan now. Why is it so important that religion get involved in preparation for the Earth Summit on environment and development? Mustafa Tolba said we have only this decade to change the lifestyle of the industrialized world to fit harmoniously with the developing and emerging world. If that is true, we do not have much time.
A Paradigm Shift. In the 13th century Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, the two great scholars of the age, were able to affect a paradigm shift in thinking by developing the theory of "hylomorphism." Jews, Christians, and the Muslims were able to live in cities like Cordoba and Toledo for two or three hundred years in great harmony, great creativity, and have a flourishing medieval culture. How can we bring about a paradigm shift that will bring together philosophers, theologians, and ethicists in dialogue with environmentalists and economists?
Biases to be resolved. To develop a new sustainable environment and economics, we have to overcome our biases. Elizabeth Dodson Gray mentioned one of them: patriarchy. Several other hang-ups can be summarized in one. I call it "exceptionalism." We each presume we will be the exception. America will be the exception, or our religious community will be the exception. God will save us, so we don't have to take accountability and responsibility for this or that.
We are not the exceptions. In environmental archeology we find that several Mesopotamian cultures perished because they did not heed the environmental warning signs of excessive grazing, land use, and use of water, as well as other environmental warnings. They did not heed the warnings soon enough to change to new and appropriate technology.