With representatives from the full spectrum of the world’s faiths, not every ecotheologian sees religion at the center of our ecological predicament. Some agree with Berry; others argue (as we will see) that traditional texts in fact contain powerful ecological messages, or at least provide some important resources to help improve our relation to nature. Many say the problem is that their faith’s teachings have not been followed widely enough; others want to take marginalized elements of the past and give them new power and presence today.
Despite their differences, one thing is constant for virtually all the thinkers represented here: the belief that whatever religion’s past responsibility, it must now marshal all its resources to respond to the crisis. These resources may include neglected parts of tradition, reinterpretation of the familiar, the adaptation of the old to the unprecedented demands of the present, or radical innovation. Why do we need ecotheology? Simply because before we can act, we must think, and before religion can act in response to the environmental crisis, it must learn to think religiously about it.
Thus, the task of the new ecotheology is to think about the environmental crisis, and our human response to it, in religious terms. In a sense, then, ecotheology is one long response to Berry’s claim that “religion cannot deal with biocide.” We will see, I believe, that if this was true in the mid-1980s, when Berry’s work was being done, it is not true now. Later chapters show what this means in terms of institutional commitment, political action, and liturgy. Here we will examine ecotheology’s profound contributions to our understanding of the world, God, and the sacred.
Of course, human destructiveness of the natural world, with dire consequences for nature and people alike, is hardly unprecedented. The ancient Babylonians decimated their fields by overirrigation. In the Critias, Plato described nine thousand years of poor farming practices, which turned once thriving agricultural land into barren wastes and ravines. Native Americans overhunted many large mammal species to extinction. And even a biblical prophet criticized those “who join house to house, / who add field to field, / until there is room for no one but you” (Isa. 5:18). What is new, however, is the unprecedented scope of the crisis. For example, no previous society could take part in the greatest mass species extinction in 70 million years.
Yet, even as the environmental crisis demands that we think in new terms, we will also have to draw on some of the theological, ethical, and political resources of the past. We can repair the boat of human culture—which carries us, as it were, on the sea of life—only as we are sailing it. There is no dry land—no life without culture—on which to switch to a totally different boat. We will have to engage our past wisdom as well as respond in ways that could not have been conceived of generations ago. Ecotheologians face the delicate task of helping us make new religious sense of the environmental crisis while drawing on existing religious sensibilities.
Environmental Enlightenment
