A Theology of the Environment
By Paul McCartin
Fr Paul McCartin is currently the Columban Fathers’ Coordinator for Justice Peace. He was born on 25 October 1953 in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. After ordination in 1978 he did post-graduate studies in Religion at the University of South Australia. He is currently at Chigasaki Parish in Kanagawa Prefecture.
Introduction
Thirty four years ago Rachel Carson warned us that we were poisoning not only ourselves but also our whole environment (Silent Spring, Penguin, London, 1965). The situation has not improved. It is now much worse. In The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management Norman Myers says “the data are overwhelmingly clear in their import. Most devastating are those which show rates of soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, species loss, pollution … .
Even if some estimates vary … most of them are more likely to be under rather than over estimates” (quoted in Lovett, Life, 49). “What is happening in our times is not just another historical transition … . It is a change unparalleled in the four and a half billion years of earth history” (Berry and Clarke, 4, Befriending the Earth, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, Connecticut, 1991). We have changed the very structure of our planet (ibid., 5). I think many people are overwhelmed by the litany of destruction. Many either cannot grasp the seriousness of the situation or refuse to. In Japan many people have sold themselves to their company and are not free to think, let alone act, for themselves.
The Problem
For the last few months parish council meetings here have centred on three topics: building, raising money for building and functions (the first communion party, etc.). And the biggest function in terms of the number of people who participate in preparation and the person hours given to preparation is the bazaar. It is bigger than Easter and Christmas combined. The council does not discuss what the parish can do for the environment, youth, foreign workers (these three are among Bishop Hamao’s four diocesan priorities), the poor, etc. How could we be oblivious to this crisis? Maybe it is too much for many to take in, but it was not always this serious. Why were we not aware and concerned when it was still a ‘small’ problem ?
Causes
The Bible
One of the reasons is our attitude towards our environment, the earth. American historian Lynn White describes this attitude as one of “arrogance towards nature” (McDonagh, Sean, The Greening of the Church, 119 Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1990). Some scholars trace this arrogance to the Bible: So God created humankind in his image … and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gn 1: 27 28). We have an ambivalent attitude towards the Bible. On the one hand, we believe it is the inspired Word of God. On the other hand, we do not have a tradition of reading and studying the Bible, and the reading we do is selective. We know Genesis 2: 18 22 (Adam was created before Eve) but not 1:27 (Adam and Eve were created together). So Thomas Berry can say that the Bible may be the most dangerous book in the world (Berry and Clarke, 118). I believe that we give it an unnecessarily high status. It may be one of the most sublime books in the world, but it is still no more than the record of where various Jewish and Christian communities were at particular points in history.
The communities existed before the record of their faith life was put down on paper, and they continued to exist and grow after the record was finished. Looking to the past can be a way of avoiding looking at the present. Scholars looking for something positive in Genesis point out that in Genesis 1:24 (And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind”), for example, the earth is a coÂcreator with a positive role in creation. But this should be obvious to us. Needing scholars or the Bible to tell us this is an indication of the degree to which we are alienated from the earth. While claiming that the Bible is important, most of us make no effort to study it. Some do not want to know about biblical criticism (source, form, etc.). As Basil Moore says, “in no other area of the curriculum world would we tolerate the indifference to scholarship and research as we do in teaching the Bible” ( Biblical Studies and Teaching the Bible, pp 29-38 in Readings: Part 1, URE 512, The University of South Australia, 1994). We prefer new cars to old. We buy the latest computers. We buy the newest fishing rods. But when it comes to the Bible, it seems that the older, the better.
Faith vs Beliefs
Perhaps this indicates that our faith is not that deep. Perhaps we are more insecure than we admit. Roger Haight talks about “beliefs masquerading as faith” ( Dynamics of Theology, Paulist Press, New York, 1990, 36). Some of us claim to believe in God, in Jesus, that the Bible is inspired, etc.; but we also believe that the earth is round, that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, that it is going to rain tomorrow. Our “faith” is mostly intellectual assent to propositions. I believe the old catechism approach to instruction contributed to this.
Many of us have never actually encountered God. We have never set out on the kind of journey Abraham made. We have not heard Jesus’ call to follow him. “The error begins with the social tendency of beliefs … to take the place of the transcendent object of faith. This dynamism serves as a buttress against human insecurity, and it reinforces a kind of natural desire to grasp and control transcendent reality. The result is that the transcendent object of faith in the same measure ceases to be transcendent, to break in upon the passive dimension of faith, and to draw forth ever new commitment to the ever new exigencies of its cause. But beyond the theological confusion involved, this process also has disastrous consequences for the life of faith of ordinary people, especially in a time of radical pluralism when scientific knowledge, discovery and changing world views have a high profile. Members of such a community can only be confused and threatened by the growing body of genuinely new knowledge human beings are generating about themselves and the world.
These external forces drive a wedge between a community of beliefs taken as knowledge and the competing and seemingly contradictory knowledge of the rest of the world. The result is that many people leave the Church, and what is left is a community of closed, eviscerated and impoverished faith isolated from the world on the basis of archaic beliefs” (Haight, 36 37). We have many pigeon holes in our mind. Hobbies are in one, work in another; politics in one, faith in another; and so on. Faith has little connection to this world, to everyday life. We forget that Judaism and Christianity began when some slaves managed to escape from their captors. We forget that Palestine in the time of Jesus was a Roman colony and that Jesus was executed by the Romans. A few months ago I asked the parish council here to send a letter of support to the Governor of Okinawa for his stand against the American military bases. Only two of the 15 councillors present responded, and both were against the idea.
One said we should keep out of politics. (The other said that some Catholics in France were for the nuclear tests at Mururoa. And, in the same way, the bases were not completely bad: that there was something good to be said for them). Our selectivity in our reading and our reluctance to accept the results of modern biblical studies mean that we have decided what we want to believe before we read the Bible. We choose passages that support our chosen way of life. When did Christianity become divorced from politics, economics, etc.? Joseph Martos, describing the early Church, writes that “the general population … did not always share this interior appreciation of the liturgy. The wholesale conversion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the baptism of Christians from infancy in the fifth century, and the mass baptisms of the Germanic peoples beginning in the sixth century meant that many attended the liturgy because of custom rather than conviction” (Doors to the Sacred, Triumph, Liguori, 1991, 225).
What he says about the liturgy probably applies to the faith in general. Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in 324 and “it was sometimes difficult to tell whether those who wished to join the Church did so out of conviction or convenience. In the face of growing numbers of conversions, the lengthy catechumenate was retained but the period of immediate preparation and teaching was shortened … ” (151 152). The Bible itself suffered as a result of Christianity being proclaimed the official religion. The copyists of the Byzantine texts seem to have been “more concerned to promote Constantinian orthodoxy through the text rather than faithfulness to the texts from which the copy was made” (Moore, Basil, Biblical Criticism, in Readings Part I, URE 512, The University of South Australia, 1994, p.162). Theology has lost contact with our present story of the universe (Berry and Clarke, 28). Whatever prebaptismal instruction, adult education, homilies, etc. the ordinary Catholic is exposed to, it obviously is not enabling her or him to grasp and respond to the present crisis. Nor does it encourage the ordinary Catholic to reflect on the place of the company in life. The vice director of the Columbans in Japan suggested to me that some, perhaps many, people come to the Church seeking some kind of solace, that they prefer the “old” Church of certainty and uniformity. Apparently they have the impression before they come that this is what the Church will provide, i.e., this is the image the Church projects. If this is so, we need to let people know what the Gospel is about when they first come to the Church.
God
Berry believes that our idea of God is also part of the problem. “The divine, once perceived as a pervasive divine presence throughout the phenomenal world, was constellated in the Bible in a transcendent, monotheistic deity, a creator of the world with a covenant relationship with a special people … we appear to give up that primordial, inherent relationship between the human and the divine within the natural order of things. To give up that immediacy in favour of a transcendent deity mediated by a covenant has done something profound to our relationship with the natural world, even when the natural world is explained as good and as created by the divine” (114).
The Human
Then there is “the exaltation of the human as a spiritual being to the exclusion of the spiritual dimension of earthly beings. In Western Christian thought, the human is so special that the human soul has to he created directly by the divine in every single case … there is a feeling that the human is so special that it does not really belong to the inherent processes of the natural world. This contributes to our sense of alienation from the natural world” (Berry and Clarke, 115).
Redemption
Our emphasis on the need for redemption/salvation has also contributed to our flight from the world. “The believing community put its emphasis on redemption. We are in the world but not of it … . The world, furthermore, is intransigent and irre deemable. We are stuck with earth for the present, but by being wary of it we can save ourselves for a better future life” (Farrell, 8). Christianity has indeed become “the opium of the people”.
Prayer
Our prayer also has failed us. People can say their morning and evening prayers, grace before and after meals, recite the rosary and go to Mass every day but still not advert to the environmental crisis. Can this really be prayer? Is it really God we are talking and listening to?
Science
Science also comes in for some of the blame. The discoveries of Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton undermined “the organic, holistic, though static and often erroneous, view of the world which had prevailed in the West for the previous thousand years. For the earth-centred and static universe they substituted an undoubtedly more scientific view of nature. However, because it failed to take into account a holistic view of all the living world, it contributed significantly to the development of the modern scientific and technological paradigm which regards the world as complex and intricate, but ultimately a lifeless machine” (McDonagh, Greening, 109 110).
Capitalism
Capitalism has played a large part in the destruction of our earth, and Christianity has to accept some of the responsibility for its emergence. “In the 14th and 15th centuries both ecclesial and social institutions were well and truly perverted into the apparently insatiable pursuit of wealth”. People “were exhorted to work, no longer just for a living, but for the sake of accumulation … “. Moral teaching on killing mutated from the right of the poor person to kill in self defense into “a right to kill the poor in the interest of preserving things” (Lovett, Brendan, Life Before Death, 33, Claretian Publications, Quezon City, 1986). “It is very hard for us to realize the historical negatives of the system with which we are so involved; to grasp, for example, the human cost of even the first century of this system. The population of Mexico was 16,871,408 in 1532: in 1580 it stood at 1,891,267”.
“Hans Guenther Prien gives the total population figures for the New World as 100 million in 1492: by 1570 his estimate for the total population was 10 12 million survivors”. “This is genocide of unparalleled proportions” (Lovett, Life, 35). If the system had such appalling results in terms of distribution, why did it begin in the first place? “Wallerstein suggests that the reason was to ensure precisely such bad distribution. He presents the following scenario. Economically, feudal Europe was cracking up; the pressure towards egalitarian distribution was strong; small peasant farmers were showing great efficiency as producers. Internecine strife was frequent within the ruling class, and the ideological cement of Catholicism was internally under strain from egalitarian movements. The direction of the change desired appalled the upper strata. The effectiveness of their response to this crisis is shown by Wallerstein in two sets of figures. Looking at the two hundred year period between 1450 and 1650, he finds that by the end of this period the basic structures of our system as a viable social system had been established with a reasonably high level of continuity between the families who were the high strata in 1450 and those who occupied this position in 1650. Moving on to the period 1650 to 1900, he finds that most of the comparisons with 1450 still hold true. The trend towards egalitarianisation had been drastically reversed” (Lovett, Life, 36).
Imperialism
As Lovett stays, “it is very hard for us to realize the historical negatives of the system with which we are so involved”. Most of us would not accept that the purpose of capitalism was to ensure unequal distribution. Yet the evidence is there. Noam Chomsky documents American interventions abroad. The number of military interventions alone is far higher than most people realize. It is hard to choose which examples to present. From 1849 1913 U.S. Navy ships entered Haitian waters 24 times to “protect American lives and property” (Chomsky, Noam, Year 501, Verso, London, 1993, 200). Perry forced Japan to trade with the West. Marines landed in Hawaii in 1873 and 1893. The Philippines was annexed. Troops were sent to intervene in the Boxer Rebellion. The U.S. pressured Panama to rebel against Colombia. Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, Angola, Grenada, Libya, Iraq, Panama. The list goes on. People might still say that the U.S. (or in the past the U.K. or whichever colonial power) is doing all this to defend democracy. In the 1898 debate about whether or not the U.S. should claim the Philippines as a colony, Senator Albert Beveridge argued, “The power that rules the Pacific is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic” (Asia Link, p. 2) President Taft claimed that “The day is not far distant” when “the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it is ours morally” (Chomsky, 158). But perhaps the clearest statement of the U.S.’s motives came from George Kennan. In 1948 Kennan, head of the State Department’s planning staff, stated the basic U.S. policy goals:
… We have about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its populations … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we have to dispense with all sentimentality and day dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction … . We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better (Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack, War Against The Poor, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 5).
Politics
The U.S. and other First World countries are maintaining this position. During the period 1982 to 1990 there was a net transfer of $418 billion from the poor South to the rich North (George, Susan, The Debt Boomerang, Pluto Press, London, 1992, xv). George shows how deforestation is directly linked to the debt crisis. Only by cutting down more trees and planting more cash crops can poor countries service their debts. Economic interests have come to govern the legal and political order, and the political order has displaced the function of culture. The role of politics has become repression and propaganda, convincing people that they needed what the economic system was supplying. The true role of politics should be to mediate cultural values to the shaping of economic institutions (Lovett, Life, 90).
Population
One final word about population and over-population. The proliferation of human population literally threatens planetary life itself (Rosemary Radford Reuther, inside the front cover of Berry and Clarke). (Toward an Ecological-Feminist Theology of Nature, in Plant, Judith (ed.), Healing the Wounds, New Society, Philadelphia, 1989). The Church has an aversion to tackling this issue (McDonagh, Greening, 59 72). McDonagh asks, “What does pro life really mean?” I believe it means putting our planet first. These, briefly, are the main causes of our present crisis. It is, of course, possible to inquire further. Why do we want this kind of political system, this economic system? Why do we want to have more than others? Why do we refuse to share the world’s goods? Some psychologists believe that our grasping for more and more possessions arises primarily out of our anxieties in the face of death. By surrounding ourselves with more and more things we hope to avoid the reality of death and gain some measure of immortality, at least in the things that we own (McDonagh, Greening, 162). If this is true, it means that we do not believe in God, that we do not believe that God loves us and will take care of us even after death. We have not yet heard the Gospel.
Hope
A New Story
Now for the good news. The situation is not hopeless. We can do something. The most important thing is to learn and tell others the story of the universe. Here I want to present a long quotation from Brian Swimme:
“… from a physical point of view … Different ion flows would give you qualitatively different experiences; or, equally true, a qualitatively different mood would manifest as a different movement of ions in your nervous system. The question I want to ask is simply this. What enables the ions to move? Or what enables you to think? On what power do you rely for your thinking, feeling and wondering? “Ions do not move by their own power ….
A close examination shows that an energy soaked molecule in the brain is responsible for the ion movement. Closer examination shows that this molecule is able to push ions around because of energy it got, ultimately, from the food that you eat. The food got the energy from the sun; food traps a photon in the net of its molecular webbing, and this photonic energy pushes and pulls the ions in your brain, making possible your present moment of amazing human subjectivity. Right now, this moment, ions are flowing this way and that because of the manner in which you have organised energy from the sun. “But we are not done yet. Where did the photon come from? We know that in the core of our sun, atomic fusion creates helium atoms out of hydrogen atoms, in the process releasing photons of sunlight.
So, if photons come from hydrogen atoms, where did the hydrogen get the photons? This leads us to the edge of the primeval fireball, to the moment of creation itself. “The primeval fireball was a vast gushing forth of light, first so powerful that it carried elementary particles about as if they were bits of bark on a tidal wave. But as the fireball continued to expand, the light calmed down until … the energy level decreased to a point where it could be captured by electrons and protons in the community of the hydrogen atom. “Hydrogen atoms rage with energy from the fireball, symphonic storms of energy held together in communities extremely reluctant to give this energy up. But in the cores of stars, hydrogen atoms are forced to release their energy in the form of photons, and this photonic shower from the beginning of time powers your thinking (quoted in Lovett, Life, 82 83)”.
“So fires from the beginning of time fires us now: we are cosmic fire! We are the universe come to consciousness and the psychic energy by which we live is nothing other than the energy of the whole universe” (Lovett, Life, 84). The story of the universe is our story. If we do not know the story, we do not know anything (Berry and Clarke, 7). But it is also the story of God: “… attention needs to be payed to the extreme fineness – a matter of milliseconds – of the condition of emergence and survival of the universe. To grasp the emergent probability of the universe is to experience immanent Providence, revealed in the passionate finality of the process” (Lovett, Life, 82). The story of the universe is revelation. We need to see the religious value of the scientific explanation of creation (Berry and Clarke, 26 27). We are part of the universe. The universe is bigger than we. Its concerns are more important than ours. “The universe itself is the primary sacred community” (Berry and Clarke, 16). We have to change our way of thinking from human centred to universe centred.
Indigenous People
We can learn much from indigenous peoples. The aboriginal people of Australia understand their dependence on the land. Bill Neidjie says “Our story is in the land …” (Plumwood, Val, Meanjin, 49, 1990, 531). The Navajo tell the story of the universe in their healing rituals (Berry and Clarke, 27). One of my favourites (even if its authenticity is disputed) is Chief Seattle’s letter to the President of the United States in 1854:
The Great Chief in Washington … wishes to buy our land … . The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man … . This shining water that lives in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors … . The White man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth, and it is part of us (Lovett, Life, 99 100).
Animals
Sometimes it seems that animals are more conscious of our mutual links than we are. In June 1991, Yvonne Vladislavich was aboard a yacht that exploded and sank in the Indian Ocean. Utterly terrified, she was thrown into shark infested waters. Then three dolphins approached her. One of them proceeded to buoy her up, while the other two swam in circles around her and guarded her from sharks. The dolphins continued to take care of Yvonne, and protected her until she finally drifted to a marker in the sea and climbed on to it. When she was rescued from the marker, it was determined that the dolphins had stayed with her, kept her afloat and protected her across more than 300 kilometers of open sea (Robbins, John, Diet for a New America, Stillpoint Publishing, Walpole, 1987, 24).
Conclusion
Every Catholic, from the Pope to the individual lay person, as well as our structures – Bishops’ Conferences, parish councils and schools, etc. – has to make ecology a top priority. This will necessitate changes to the Church’s structures and way of operating. We need the latest information and ideas. We need people thinking and taking initiatives. So the Church must stop trying to control what people think. We need to promote Thomas Kuhn’s notions of paradigm and paradigm shift. Our people need to know that truth is not fixed and unchanging. Faith is not acceptance of a body of doctrine, but “a struggle which is complex and historically without end” (Lovett, Earth, 5). A large part of this struggle will be trying to persuade governments and industry that the needed changes are desirable.
The task is enormous but not impossible. Perhaps the biggest hurdle to be overcome is motivating and energizing people to tackle the problem. As mentioned in the introduction, mere knowledge of the situation can be paralysing. Jay Earley (Inner Journeys, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine, 1990) has used Jean Houston’s work to develop exercises that can do this. But in the end it comes down to each of us. Are we prepared to join the struggle?
– Ref. The Japan Mission Journal, Autumn 1997, vol. 51, n. 3.
– source sedos.org
