St. Francis, who eight hundred years later would be proposed as the patron saint of modern Christian ecology, talked of “Brother Son and Sister Moon.” Maimonides, perhaps the most important Jewish thinker of the past one thousand years, cautioned people not to believe “that all the beings exist for the sake of the existence of humanity.
On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes, and not for the sake of something else.” And the Qur’an (40:57) states with surprising directness that “assuredly the creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of humankind; Yet most people understand not.” St. Francis was honored for piety, humility, and austerity, but the full implications of his attitude toward nature were generally ignored.
Maimonides’ statement, similarly, was treated as an odd exception to the prevailing Jewish attitude which held that although natural resources should not be wasted (because ultimately they belonged to God, not humans), they were devoid of sacred meaning in their own right. And few Muslims read that particular passage of the Qur’an with much seriousness at all.
More recently, institutionalized religions typically held favorable attitudes toward the rise of industrial civilization. Initial conflicts with modern science gave way to comparatively insignificant quarrels about the theory of evolution. Most religious leaders took it for granted that economic development and technological progress, as long as their fruits were distributed with a modicum of fairness, were good things.
When doubts arose, they had to do with the effects of technological society on people’s consciousness, not on what it was doing to the earth. Before the 1960s, searching questions about the ultimate fate of a world in which mechanized mass production was transforming both people and nature were much more likely to come from eccentric loners, marginal philosophers, or leftist social critics. Correspondingly, the first wave of modern environmentalism, in which the movement turned away from conserving land and toward a focus on pollution and global warming, had little to do with organized religion.
It came from naturalists like Rachel Carson, secular politicians like Gaylord Nelson (organizer of the first Earth Day), and focused environmental organizations from the Sierra Club to the Audubon Society.
People of God and the Hope for a Better Environment
