Protected by rights in our secular democracies or obeying the enforced imperatives of dictatorships, assured of our cosmic importance by our churches and our car salesmen, busily pursuing goals set by our bank accounts or our egos, and ceaselessly increasing our technological prowess, humans have come to see themselves as surrounded by beings who lack moral standing, subjectivity, purpose, or meaning. For the most part, the industrialized world views nature as a resource to be exploited: a mass of animals and plants, minerals and water, whose purpose is to serve humanity. This fundamentally human-centered, or anthropocentric, perspective on nature, many theologians believe, is at the core of the crisis. It justifies thoughtless devastation of anything that gets in our way or looks like it might come in handy.
Ecotheology offers an enormous range of answers to this question, reflecting a breathtaking diversity of traditional viewpoints and contemporary responses. What is shared by virtually all these approaches is a commitment to take nature seriously in at least two basic ways. First, nature has, in and of itself, value. Second, one reason it has value is that nature is closer to us, more like us, more connected to us, than we have realized or admitted.
Because of its centrality to Western history, I will begin to explain these general claims by focusing on the Bible, perhaps the single most important text that needs to be reinterpreted in light of ecological problems. Is the Bible green? Or can it, without doing violence to its basic intent, become so? Given its role in a Western and capitalist culture that has been the source of environmentally destructive industrialization, this is a key question.
For some people, the answer is an unambiguous no. Historian Lynn White helped initiate the debate about religion’s environmental responsibility in a groundbreaking 1967 article in which he argued that Judaism and Christianity paved the way for the environmental crisis by “desacrilizing nature.” Once the world is viewed as the product of a transcendent, immaterial “sky God,” White wrote, once holiness is removed from our surroundings and transferred without residue to their Source, the way is paved for using those surroundings any way we wish. God’s command to Adam in Genesis 1:28—“Fill the earth and master it”—becomes a religious license for humans to dominate, to exploit, and (whether this was intended or not) to ruin. White’s criticism is echoed in an even wider generalization by Steven Rockefeller: “The social and moral traditions that have been dominant in the West... have not involved the idea that animals, trees, or the land in their own right, as distinct from their owners or their Creator, have moral standing. Only a few saints and reformers have taught that people have direct moral responsibilities to nonhuman creatures.”
Environmental Crisis and Revival of Spiritual Sensibilities
