Chuck Groom, June 1999, Presented at Pendle Hill
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INTRODUCTION
I camped a few nights in the vast wilderness of Joshua Tree National Park, a desert in southern California. When I tell someone I made this trip and they ask, "how was it?" I joke "well, I had a good time even though I didn't find God. And the devil didn't even offer me one temptation!" And we share a knowing laugh at the belief that when you leave the world of concrete and steel to an enclave of natural serenity, you will have a mystical experience that unearths the hidden face of God. I camped in the desert, and I found only the desert. I did not see God. The desert is big, the desert is beautiful; the sky is clear, and life is everywhere if you know where to look. Dried coyote shit stays on the ground for years. This is an important point; when painting the desert panorama in words, I must capture both the grand awe evoked by the landscape as well as the often harsh reality of sand, sun, thorns, and shit. One morning when I was hiking a mile or so off the trail, I found an empty tortoise shell on a hill between two gullies. It was slightly battered and sun-beaten. A coyote probably ate its former occupant. This shell was a statement of death; not death as an oppressive Grim Reaper, but death as a simple fact which this harsh landscape would not let me ignore. It was a reminder that I could break a leg and die of exposure and my death would be of no concern whatsoever to the desert. I visit the desert precisely for the quality of absolute indifference. I think religious pilgrims and mystics do not travel to the desert to discover God but to see more clearly what they left behind.1 There can be no pretense or ego when the sky is that tall, when the landscape is that huge, and when no creature or rock will bow to my presence. |
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Why do I care about the desert? What quality of this land would make its destruction an unbearable loss? On a larger scale, why protect wilderness? Why is so much of nature being exploited and destroyed? These questions ran through my mind as I trudged across the sand and bleached rock. Every time I thought of simple answers something about the steady, harsh sun forced me to admit, "no, that is too simplistic," or more often "that is wrong." By the end of the trip, the only thing I had determined was that these were important questions. Lots of people have different answers, and God somehow plays a key role. |
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I returned from the desert and looked more deeply into these questions. I am not prepared to tell you what we should do about the environmental crisis; I just hope to better understand the crisis and our reaction to it. I call this presentation Desert Thinking not only to capture the unflinching clarity of desert thought but also to indicate my concern for the land I love without truly understanding why.
PART I: ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS & RELIGIOUS DESPAIR GILGAMESH2 Gilgamesh was the real but legendary king of Uruk, a Sumerian city, around 2,700 B.C.E. His legend is one of the earliest recorded compositions, yet the themes are eternal and directly relevant to the modern environmental crisis. Gilgamesh was a great king, but he despaired at human mortality that denied him the everlasting glory of the Gods. One day he told his friend Enkidu that "I would enter the land... I would raise up my name / in its places where names have not been raised up," and he traveled to the forests of Cedar Mountain. He fought and beheaded the forest demon-God Huwawa, metaphorically chopping down the entire forest. This rebellion of killing a God only brought Gilgamesh short-lived glory, for the Gods soon took revenge by killing his friend Enkidu. Gilgamesh fell into deep despair which turned into a futile search for everlasting life, ending in his tragic death. |
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This story conveys much about the human condition. People are almost-gods, endowed with the tremendous power to shape the natural world just as the Gods originally created the world. The Gods want people to grow in stature and power to some extent. Gilgamesh's epitaph "the builder of the walls of Uruk" captures the fundamental glory of civilization, the division of the human sphere from the natural sphere. The Gods bless this particular endeavor, but later curse Gilgamesh when he oversteps his bounds to challenge the Gods. The theme of the human who wants to be like a God and struggles with the Gods for divine power persists in all traditions. As in the epic of Gilgamesh, the struggle usually manifests as a conflict over how to treat the natural world. The epic of Gilgamesh was formed as Sumerian civilization started intensive irrigated agriculture and used all the timber in the region. Massive deforestation led to erosion and salinization that turned the land into a desert, leading to the eventual collapse of Sumerian civilization. Perhaps the Gilgamesh story is not only an archetype of the human-divine struggle but also a warning that a real consequence of arrogant abuses of nature is our destruction; complete spiritual, emotional, and physical collapse.  RATIONAL THINKING Western peoples have clung to a rational mindset for the past four hundred years. The world operates on consistent rules of cause-and-effect. Humanity consists of individuals, and individual people have minds and bodies. The superior part of the mind is the rational function that lets us discover and use the rules of the world to better meet our needs. Rationalist science and God are not antagonistic, but science has informed and reshaped our understanding of God. God's immanence retreated under the unrelenting eye of scientific enquiry. Does God make it rain? Rational thinkers explained rain in terms of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Disease is not a demon, it is a parasite. And Darwin showed that our very existence is a side-effect of the property of all living things to maximize reproductive advantage. For hundreds of years, rational thought seemed to be the key to unlimited power over creation. Technology, not God, will provide. We make our own miracles. We fly through the air. We use pumps to make water flow uphill. We cure incurable diseases. Marx even outlined a perfect society that does not need God, only rational people. |
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What does God do for a society based on reason and technological wonders? God set the Earth into motion but no longer walks on the Earth. God is at best a moral guide, a foundation that explains why rational people should occasionally go against immediate self-interest when dealing with other people. The perfectly reasonable thinker sees that nature is just a resource, a thing to be used. Perhaps God made nature and nature is often pretty, so we should feel some guilt when we feed natural things to our machines. But we know what we are doing with nature, we are improving human life. And if we accidentally upset some natural function then we can apply technology to repair the natural machinery. NIETZSCHE'S INSANITY3 The 19th century philosopher Nietzsche took rational thought to its extreme. The human legacy is growth towards a better and happier state. But tradition and unchallenged conventions now block that growth. A rare person will rise above convention and morality to push human development to a new state: this is the overman (sometimes translated "superman;" German ubermensch). Nietzsche proclaims in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome... All beings so far have created something beyond themselves.... What is the ape to man? A laughingstock and a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman. The overman knows that God is an outdated convention, a deluded fairy tale we repeat to quiet our fears of storms and bad harvests. He proudly states that "God is dead" because humanity no longer needs God, it needs to reject God. God is irrelevant because we have become as Gods ourselves. This is a truly frightening step. "God is dead" throws off the mantle of divine protection and leaves us with no moral foundation. Anything is permitted; what is the fate of a world where anything is permitted? |
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In 1889 Nietzsche was walking down a street and saw a coachman whipping a horse. He ran up to the horse, threw his arms around its neck, passed out, and was never sane again for the 12 years until his death. At times he thought he was God and signed letters "The Crucified" or "Dionysus." Few people can take ideas to Nietzsche's extremes. Our society cannot embrace the idea that "God is dead." But the seed has been planted, and its fruits are insanity. Nietzsche's insanity foreshadows the collapse of rational thought in the brutal 20th century. TRINITY AND BABEL The 20th century teaches us the wisdom of rational pure thought is by no means morally "good." Clear thinkers cunningly plot the demise of tens, hundreds, or whole millions. All too easily clever minds turn from serving the "good" to serving the filthy temple of the ego and self-aggrandizement. Consider a place called Trinity in New Mexico where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb.4This bomb was the culmination of four hundred years of scientific progress. Its technology required an intimate understanding of the very foundation of reality and the motivation to make and use the bomb came from the rationalization of war. The bomb exploded in a flash of light unmatched before creation, a statement that we were now in charge of our destiny. Trinity should have been a monument to human independence and freedom; it should have been a statement that we do not need God because we are at the dawn of a new era of human development. But instead it is a monument of death, a crater of fused green glass which mutely accuses us of two craters in Japan. The atomic bomb is the 20th century tower of Babel, an achievement-turned-failure that shattered the notion of rational perfection and left us fragmented beings, lost without moral foundation in God or trust in human greatness. In our arrogance we usurped the power of God to blast meaning and rationality from the modern age. We live in an era of fear and death that mocks the post-war dream so many died for. We are not wise enough to understand the implications of the power we wield. THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS There is an environmental crisis. We use technologies on a scale that hugely impacts exceedingly complicated biophysical systems. A sudden, large assault on any complicated system will result in a multitude of unpredicted breakdowns in that system; we are now experiencing the first stages of such environmental breakdown. Ecosystems are falling apart, the planet is heating up, the air, water, and soil are polluted, and current farming practices push the limits of sustainability. If these trends continue, the quality of human life will plummet in 20 or 50 years. End of story, no question, no loopholes. Human consumption is rising exponentially. That is what it means to live in a world where national achievement is measured as a high rate of economic growth. It is simply impossible to sustain exponential growth because consumption so rapidly rockets up to infinity. Let me illustrate this with the example of a pond that has enough room for nine billion bacteria, with a seed population of one bacteria. An individual reproduces once a day. When does the pond look full? You will not see any bacteria on the 10th day or even the 20th day. By the end of a month the pond is only 20% full. On the 32nd day the pond is half full, and on the 33rd day the pond is suddenly full. Suppose the bacteria are unhappy being crowded and want to build a bigger pond. They quadruple the size of the pond... and enjoy only two days of unhampered growth. To continue this example, suppose there is a drought that shrinks the pond back to its natural size: three quarters of the bacteria die.5 We are like these bacteria trying to dig a bigger pond in a small world. Our consumption habits and population growth force us to devour resources past the sustainable limit. For example, petroleum supplies will inevitably run out in 20 year or so. Even if there were twice as much oil as predicted, that would only buy us a handful of years. We face serious problems when oil runs out because modern agriculture requires oil, most manufactured products require oil, our transportation is primarily oil-based, and so on. And this is just one aspect of the looming crash. |
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Take a minute to focus on the part of the crisis that is most real to you. I feel a terrible combination of outrage and fear whenever the reality of this crisis leaps out of tired words and abstract statistics and it smacks home that this is real. RESTRAINT The grand irony of the environmental crisis is that people have brought this crisis upon themselves precisely by acting naturally. It is natural for an organism to gorge itself on available resources and not consider the future or the welfare of others. Altruism does not exist in nature; altruistic individuals necessarily die out in favor of individuals who take advantage of altruism. I assure you, if any other species on Earth had the power to devour entire ecosystems the way we do, that species would grow to the point where it, too, would bring global environmental catastrophe upon itself. To face the environmental crisis, we must not act naturally, we must altruistically restrain our consumption and population growth and turn to low-impact technologies for the benefit of other people, future generations, and other species. How can we embrace an ethic of restraint? Why should we even care? Only religion can provide a strong enough ethic and why to carry us through this crisis. But our society suffers from deep religious despair -- partly fed by the environmental crisis -- that renders us mute spectators scurrying about in daily routine desperately trying to avoid the looming horror of the future. WHY CARE? Why should we care about the environmental crisis? Most people wave the question aside with an idle "don't worry, God will provide," or "technology will save us." Irresponsible trash! -- neither God nor technology will save us from a dedicated commitment to self-destruction. We are rationally aware that we are headed for future disaster. But it is impossible to sustain personal restraints and activism fueled only by rational ideals.6There is a deeper motivation than rational self-interest. God wants us to respect nature. Natural objects and organisms are not things to be used. Respect for natural processes is a deep and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in origin. Embrace this divine justification for an environmentally responsible life and proudly say that it is divine in origin; to crassly reduce this urge to cool logical terms is to reduce it to our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.7 |
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I believe most people feel that massive environmental destruction is a kind of sacrilege. It is generally assumed that extinction is intrinsically wrong, biodiversity is valuable, and natural processes deserve our respect, but it is rarely stated that these foundations for environmental ethics are fundamentally religious. Environmental literature depends on quasi-religious language like "the divine innate in everything" or "sacred oneness" to justify the affirmation, "I care about the environment." Indeed, extreme groups like Earth First! are a new type of religious movement.8 Respected theologians from all world religions have derived the same message, God wants us to respect nature. This is not an idealist overstatement; all world religions have strong seeds of this environmental ethics. Of course, not all practitioners or other theologians agree with this ethic. But there is a growing trend of world religious leaders, such as the Pope and protestant church leaders, who issue strong statements about the religious duty to respect nature.9 Many will object to this and will point out that for several religions, particularly Christianity, nature serves as a mere backdrop in the divine-human interaction. God is in heaven, humans are on Earth, and humans have dominion over the Earth (the oft-cited Genesis 1:28). But this is only part of the story. The natural world is alive and it responds to God. That is why God is often praised by natural things (Psalm 148, Job 12:7-10). People are never masters of nature, rather they are given limited power over nature connected with specific duties (Deut. 20:19-20, Deut. 22:6-7, Deut. 25:4, Lev. 25:1-7).10 It is utterly vain and irreverent to state that God wants us to completely subjugate the natural world because God so clearly cherishes nature and places divine limits on human power. We are not greater than the world we live in. There is a passage from the Koran that directly speaks to this: Assuredly the creation KILLING GOD "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."12 Thoreau's hundred-and-fifty-year-ago comment is more relevant than ever. We live without moral or mental foundation. We desperately need God but at the same time we shove God aside and build nuclear weapons and fight wars and ignore poverty and indulge in pettiness in the name of economic and personal growth. We do not trust human nature because we have seen that people are filled with complex urges and conflicting desires, not enlightened benevolence. And yet we do not discard all faith in the human being because we frantically pursue self-improvement, as if by worshipping our desires or intellect we can rise above the mass of people and human nature. Our society acts as though God were dead and irrelevant, but refuses to acknowledge the insanity this implies. Enter the environmental crisis. God wants us to respect nature but we destroy nature. This is spiritual and physical suicide. We are Gilgamesh, who proudly ventures into the wilderness and attacks the God who is there. We try to replace the God of nature with the overmen of technology. But the price of killing God is Gilgamesh's tragedy, Nietzsche's insanity, the dead green glass at Trinity; it is environmental collapse and self-destruction. |
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And so our society does its best to ignore the future in same way it does its best to ignore death. We numb ourselves to the absolute horror of the future so we can function in our day-to-day lives. But the knowledge still lingers and slowly gnaws on the psyche. Any serious discussion of the future brings up horror and helpless rage succeeded by absolute weariness and, for many, resigned desperation.13 |
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As the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh gently notes, the result is that We are so busy we hardly have time to look at the people we love, even in our household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that even when we have leisure time, we don't know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time -- we turn on the TV or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere. We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act as if we don't like ourselves and are trying to escape from ourselves.14We try to escape from ourselves and our future by filling life with meaningless busyness and instant gratification. We will to deliberately reject and turn away from what we know to be right and good because it does not please us. That is the very essence of sin. THE WRATH OF GOD The oceans will rise. Great weather patterns are already changing. There will be drought and deluges as never before. Intricate biological systems are falling apart, causing immense chaos. Self-regulating systems no longer regulate resource flow, placing an increasing burden on technology to awkwardly substitute for natural systems. Catastrophe upon catastrophe will hammer against and crush the bulwark of technology and we will be brought to our knees and there will be disasters heaped upon our heads. This is not mere fanciful writing, this is fact, this is real. God wants us to respect nature yet we arrogantly sin against nature. The environmental crisis is divine punishment for we truly reap what we have sown. How can we see it but as the impending wrath of God? |
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But this wrath has not yet descended. There is still time to argue with God on behalf of the world and turn away from the sins of environmental destruction. We need a prophetic voice to condemn our path of destruction, answer society's spiritual despair, and offer an avenue for hope and redemption. |
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PART II: THE PROPHET DEEP ECOLOGY Scientific inquiry and technological innovation have given us astounding insight into what the world is and how it came to be. We see that human beings are derivative results of the evolutionary process, neither inevitable nor the best. Ecology, the study of the relationships between organisms and their environment, shows that we and all organisms live in vastly complicated relation to one another. And never underestimate the impact of the first view of the Earth from space, when people saw the entire blue planet set against the backdrop of stars, an image of our beautiful, finite and ancient home. These insights affect our identity of what it means to be human. Deep ecology is a new way of rethinking the human identity that starts with the current scientific explanation of what nature is and emphasizes that the natural processes which relate humans to other organisms are fundamentally spiritual. Whereas an ecologist sees species interactions as morally neutral relationships, a deep ecologist sees morally proper connections between species.15 For the deep ecologist there is no such thing as an isolated individual person, but rather a community of people who are profoundly connected to one other and the world.16 |
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Deep ecology synthesizes science and religion to form a possible response to the problems of the 21st century. Science informs deep ecologists about where their efforts are most needed to repair or preserve nature, and the religious affirmation of nature provides the motivation to act. This practice offers a tangible way to show respect for the divine and see the fruits of such devotion. It is an active affirmation of life and right living at a time when society is committed to death. Perhaps the deep ecologist will be the prophet who calls humanity to answer for its sins against creation. WHAT IS SACRED IN NATURE? While deep ecologists agree that nature is sacred, there is deep disagreement about what is 'sacred' and 'proper.' Does each living thing have intrinsic value? What about non-living things like mountains? Or do entire ecosystems have value based on their diversity and stability? Are nature and natural processes morally "good?" How should humans properly live in relation to nature, given that we cannot just return to a primitive hunter-and-gatherer mode of existence? Many deep ecologists have developed ethics based on inadequate answers to these questions. If nature is the deep ecologist's sacred text then he must read the entire book; otherwise he will malign both the deep ecology movement and the ecological sciences he purposes to represent. A deep ecologist who stresses the goodness of nature forgets that natural processes indifferently hurt us. A deep ecologist who talks about an animal giving up its life for the good of the species has never read an ecology textbook. A deep ecologist who urges us to devolve back to a harmonious hunter-and-gatherer state of being forgets many things; nature is not harmonious, hunters-and-gatherers did not live in ecological harmony,17 and we cannot kill more than 6 billion people so that a handful of millions can live as hunters-and-gatherers. |
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I say such a strong "no!" to so many deep ecology misperceptions to affirm the deeper "yes!" that a spiritual understanding of scientific knowledge can motivate us to properly confront the environmental crisis. We need a spiritual foundation to accept and sustain the kinds of restraints and actions that will adequately deal with the environmental crisis. But only science can inform us about what kinds of restraints and actions will be appropriate or helpful. Deep ecologists need to be informed about what science really reveals about nature. They must not skip over unappealing truths that do not readily fit into a too-simple spirituality. NATURE IS NOT "GOOD" Naive armchair environmentalists often stress the absolute moral goodness of nature. But to those who say nature is "good," I respond, "go to the desert." You could die in the desert. You are helpless to chance and natural forces. Nature is neither benevolent to you nor any other organism. Look at the plants arrayed around an oasis, and you will see fierce competition for scarce water. As Emerson notes,
Nature is no sentimentalist -- does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust... The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda -- these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.18 Evolution and ecology stress that the competition and struggle of individuals acting solely from self-interest can explain the diversity of life on this planet. Scientists are careful to say that these natural processes carry no moral weight: |
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The theory of natural selection, of incessant competition and struggle, of individual self-interest as the motive force of adaptive evolution, paints a dark picture of "Nature red in tooth and claw," as dark and aesthetically unappealing, perhaps, as untrammeled capitalism. It portrays nature as utterly amoral -- not immoral... but simply lacking in any moral or ethical qualities whatever... [N]either evolutionary theory nor any other field of science can speak of or find evidence of morality and immorality. These do not exist in nonhuman nature, and science only describes what is, not what ought to be. The Naturalistic Fallacy, the supposition that what is "natural" is "good," has no philosophical foundation.19 Is it inconsistent to state that God wants us to respect nature, yet nature's laws are not moral law? Not at all. Few would argue that Newtonian physics are moral law. It is our moral duty to respect natural processes. When we must interfere with natural processes, in particular with agriculture, we should respect the natural process by promoting features like genetic diversity and biodiversity.20 Nature is not "good" in the sense that it exists to further human interests or is a human moral guide; it is "good" in the sense that natural processes deserve honor and respect for their fantastically complicated beauty and their connection to the Creator. And we are not disconnected from nature, for without it we die. With that said, how can we integrate the many deeply felt eco-friendly spiritualities that often stand in conflict with the scientific understanding of nature? Consider a passage I choose at random, a statement from Joanna Macy's Faith, Power, and Ecology:
These statements have no scientific foundation. Species interact through competition, which is domination. An individual that makes itself 'vulnerable' dies, its vulnerability genes die with it, and non-vulnerable individuals are left to propagate. And yet it would be unforgivable arrogance to dismiss Macy's beautifully articulated statements, for perhaps they capture a kind of truth about nature that will motivate many to face the environmental crisis. I can only hope that Macy and ecologists will enter dialog to deepen each other's understanding of nature rather than create a schism where ecologists reject Macy's "fluff" and she writes off science as unfeeling arrogance. THE MYTH OF HARMONY
There is no harmony in nature. Harmony implies stasis and organisms altruistically suffering for the stability of the greater system. But natural systems are always changing and organisms are never genetically disposed to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. When we see stable systems we must remind ourselves that we are seeing a complex network of organisms acting individually out of self-interest, though often this is for the unintended mutual benefit of several organisms. Stable systems develop over time simply because unstable systems collapse and are eliminated. There is neither a perfect ecosystem nor a perfect organism. |
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The undergraduate textbook Evolutionary Biology (3rd ed., Futuyma 1998) closes its chapter on natural selection and adaptation with a thoughtful conclusion addressing "a few common misconceptions of, and misguided inferences from, the theory of adaptive evolution:"
...[S]election at the level of genes and individual organisms is inherently "selfish": the gene or genotype with the highest rate of increase "wins"... at the expense of other individuals. Thus we do not expect organisms to be truly "altruistic" to other members of their species. The variety of selfish behaviors organisms inflict on [other members of the same species], ranging from territory defence to parasitism and infanticide, is truly stunning. Indeed, those cases in which organisms are cooperative require special explanations. For example, a parent that forages for food for her offspring, at the risk of exposure to predators, is cooperative, but for an obvious reason: her own genes, including those coding for this parental behavior, are carried by the offspring, and the genes of individuals that do not forage for their offspring are less likely to survive than the genes of individuals that do... Although there is no harmony in nature, should that prevent us from respecting the natural process? Do we need mythic fabrications of the Earth as a superorganism to see the movement of spirit in natural processes? The deep ecologist prophet must intimately understand the natural world on scientific terms, but care about these wondrous processes on a spiritual level. The message need not challenge as much as deepen existing religious systems. The deep ecology prophet will condemn humanity for its extreme violation of the natural processes on earth, but will also give us a way to answer our desperate need for spiritual and physical salvation. EPILOGUE: LIKE STARS Night falls fast in the desert. Minutes after the sun sinks below the horizon, the first star appears. Then another, and another, and gradually my eyes are saturated by the uncountable stars tossed across the sky like grains of sand on a beach. The hard dry air magnifies and exposes these normally hidden lights whose vastness overwhelms my comprehension. I see the sharp sky of twenty-five hundred years ago, not the modern Philadelphia haze of electric light and industry that obscures all but the moon and Orion. And I wonder at the Lord's covenant with Abraham, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them... and so shall your offspring be" (Gen. 15:5, JPS). When the day comes when we can only count a dozen stars through the blanket of filth that obscures the heavens, what will our number of offspring be? We teeter on the edge of a crisis so immense that only religious language conveys the magnitude of what lays ahead. I hear Moses' prophetic cry,
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose live -- if you and your offspring would live -- by loving the Lord your God, heeding His commandments, and holding fast to Him. For thereby you shall have life and shall long endure upon the soil that the Lord your God swore to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them.22 It is not enough to merely choose life for ourselves. If others choose death, it is our obligation to make them see the blessing they shun. And if God's curse is our extinction, then we must argue with God rather than moan in despair. Heed the wisdom of a Midrash retelling of the Noah story:
When Noah come out of the ark, he opened his eyes and saw the whole world completely destroyed. He began crying for the world and said, "God, how could you have done this?" ... God replied, "Oh Noah, how different you are from the way Abraham... will be. He will argue with me on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah when I tell him that I plan their destruction... But you, Noah, when I told you I would destroy the entire world, I lingered and delayed, so that you would speak on behalf of the world. But when you knew you would be safe in the ark, the evil of the world did not touch you. You thought of no one but your family. And now you complain?" Then Noah knew he had sinned.23The message is clear and we all know it. Respect God by respecting nature. Don't save the world for yourself or your family or even your species; save the world because to stand idly by is sin. Choose blessing and life. |
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SELF-INTRODUCTION & APOLOGY I am a computer science major at Swarthmore College (class of 2000). My background is primarily in the sciences, with a focus on biology, computers, and particle physics. I took the spring '99 semester off from college to study at Pendle Hill. In March I took a trip to the desert, and the seed of this paper was planted in my mind. After returning to Pendle Hill I gathered stacks of books and began reading and writing small essays, from which this paper is formed. There are still many problems with this paper. It uses Judeo-Christian language and archetypes, it assumes the reader is in some way spiritual, and it does not address the ethical problems of imposing restraints on other people. And many of my quotes are from secondary sources, a scholarly sin I would address if given more time.
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WORKS CITED: Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1968. David Douglas, Wilderness Sojourn: Notes in the Desert Silence. Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 1987. Friedman, Richard Elliot. The Hidden Face of God. Harper Collins, San Francisco, CA, 1995. Futuyma, Douglas J. Evolutionary Biology. 3rd Ed. Sinauer Associates, Inc, Sunderland, MA, 1998. Gottlieb, Roger ed. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. Routledge, New York, NY, 1996. Hanh, Thich Nhat. Being Peace, Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA, 1987. Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. Harcourt, Brace, and Company, New York, NY, 1948. Rhodes, Richard. How to Write. Quill, New York, NY, 1995. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1854, reprinted in Walden and Civil Disobedience, Nal Penguin Inc., New York, NY, 1980. Tallmadge, John. Therefore Choose Life: The Spiritual Challenge of the Nuclear Age, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #300, Pendle Hill Publications, Wallingford, PA, 1991.
NOTES:
2. Adapted from Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. From This Sacred Earth pp. 63-66. 3. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 1995. 4. Portions of this section are derived from Edward Abbey's essay "Bedrock and Paradox" in Desert Solitaire, 1964. 5. Please forgive this crass biological analogy that anthropomorphizes bacteria and ignores logistic population growth models, the fact that ponds don't have one single natural size, etc. 6. John Calvi, a Quaker massage therapist who specializes in treating emotional trauma, made this point in an informal presentation (May 1999 at Pendle Hill, Wallingford, PA). He commented that only therapists working for a higher goal of serving God can follow this draining calling without burning out. 7. With apologies, I adapt Thomas Merton's powerful language about the nature of religious belief to describe how we should feel about natural processes. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948, pp. 65. 8. Bron Taylor, Earth First! From Primal Spirituality to Ecological Resistance, From This Sacred Earth pp. 546. 9. I would encourage skeptics of these sweeping statements to reach parts II and III of This Sacred Earth 1996. 10. David Kinsley, Christianity as Ecologically Harmful, and Christianity as Ecologically Responsible. From This Sacred Earth pp. 104-123. 11. S.60.57, trans. Abdullah Yusaf Ali. 12. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1854, reprinted in Walden and Civil Disobedience, 1980, p. 10. 13. John Tallmadge, Therefore Choose Life: The Spiritual Challenge of the Nuclear Age, 1991. 14. Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace, 1987, p. 4. 15. Note that deep ecology vocabulary tends to be immature and vague. Since deep ecologists generally see themselves as escaping Western modes of thought, they are unwilling to use conventional terms to describe the divine. Moreover, they are excruciatingly unwilling to use terms that may offend or alienate any tradition. Hence the literature generally assumes belief in "connection," "holy oneness," "unity," "Mother Earth," or "the way of nature," without explaining or justifying these terms. This leads to a popular misconception that deep ecology is fluff spirituality when in fact there is a considerable corpus of deep ecology theology. 16. This Sacred Earth p. 405. 17. The hunting-and-gathering mode of life does not necessarily promote environmental balance. Consider the mass extinction of large mammals in North America about 30,000 years ago after hunter-and-gatherers crossed the land bridge. 18. Quoted by Richard Rhodes, How to Write, 1995, p. 128. 19. Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 1998, pp. 361-362. 20. Judith N. Scoville, Valuing the Land: Ecological Theology in the Context of Agriculture. From This Sacred Earth pp. 596-603. 21. This Sacred Earth pp. 419. 22. Deuteronomy 30:19-20, JPS translation. 23. Midrash Tankhuma, Parashat Noach. From This Sacred Earth p. 93. | |