Nathan Vonnahme

Regent College

24 September, 1999

          Christianity has been caricatured and criticized (sometimes legitimately!) by environmental ethicists since the beginning of the environmental movement, and the result for many Christians has been a retreat from public and academic discourse about ecological issues. A primary example of this, of course, is Lynn White Jr.'s 1967 article which essentially blamed Christianity for the present ecological crisis. White summarizes the creation story so:

By gradual stages a loving and all-powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes (Schaeffer 107 [a reprint of White's famous article appears at the back of Schaeffer's book]).

Max Oelschlaeger's conclusion that the main point of the Old Testament documents is the shift from nomadic hunting/gathering to agriculture is almost as insulting in its lack of empathy:

The Pentateuch contains inconsistent ideas of the wilderness. There is compelling evidence of a wilderness religion that resonates with vestiges of the Paleolithic mind. Yet the Hebrew Bible represents the ultimate rationalization of sedentary agriculture (Oelschlaeger, Wilderness 45).

As I have read more about these issues I have realized that they are more and more complicated than I had originally thought, but I want to outline a few areas where Christianity can offer valuable suggestions to the discussion about environmental ethics.

          First of all, Lynn White's indictment of Christianity as the root of anthropomorphic exploitation of the earth has been recognized as oversimplified for some time. Theodore Roszak, for example, has convincingly shown that the semi-heroic "unyielding despair" of the logical positivists in the face of a meaningless universe is at least as culpable for ecological destruction as Christianity is (Roszak 99-101,132). Combined with Freud's diagnosis of a universal desire for annihilation (the "thanatos syndrome") (Roszak 56-50) and Nietzsche's "will to power," modern thinkers have an ample set of ideas that spell poison for the rest of creation. Martin Heidegger saw the industrial revolution (which is certainly at the root of the environmental crisis) more as a product of modern philosophy than of Christianity as such:

What is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature?
          This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past several centuries, and by which man is placed in a different world. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories (Heidegger 50).

It is not accident that Christianity was the mother of science, and Lynn White has some sound insights in this area, but to so soundly blame the Judeo-Christian tradition for being "the historical roots of our ecologic crisis" is to oversimplify things.

          Lynn White's caricature of the creation story can be a clue for us, though, in thinking about what the Bible does say. White assumes that "God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes" (Schaeffer 107). Nothing could be further from the actual language of Genesis. First, in chapter 1, God affirms after each act of creation that what has been created is "good." Man is created not first but last--last, even of all the land animals. In Genesis 2, Adam is evidently created partly because "there was no man to work the ground" (2:5c, NIV) and he is immediately put "in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (2:15). So, rather than all of creation being made exclusively for him, man is actually made for creation's benefit and God's purposes, not his own. Furthermore, the Fall is not an obscure metaphor for adoption of agriculture as Oelschlaeger suggests (Wilderness 31; by the way, how does the curse of labor pains fit in with his metaphor?), but a history of mankind's breaking of friendship with God and the curse that resulted from it.

          There is a tension between the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, between the command to "rule" and "subdue" the land and the command to "work" and "take care of" it. But, rather than two conflicting commands, the two accounts show the unique dual role that humankind has on the earth: on one hand we have, inherently and undeniably, great power over the rest of creation. On the other hand, our mandate from God is to be gardeners, to tend and till creation for God so that it continues to produce "trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food" (2:9). This unique role is characteristic of Biblical morality, especially the concept of "servant leadership."

Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:25-28, NIV).

In fact, this relationship is repeated throughout the New Testament, in the commands for husbands and wives, servants and masters, parents and children.

          The Christian theology of man's (and God's) relationship with creation is more complex than that, but at its root the relationship is that of a powerful servant whose duty toward God is to tend the inherently good creation (though it suffers some of our curse and is waiting also to be redeemed). This relationship has several implications for the discussion surrounding environmental ethics.

          First, the Bible's constant emphasis on theocentricity in all manners of life can give us a useful check against possible errors in moral judgment. One of the best programs for environmental ethics is the land ethic first developed by Aldo Leopold and later articulated by J. Baird Callicott. Callicott states the "summary moral maxim" of the land ethic as, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (Callicott 85, quoting Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac). This approach is often called ecocentrism or biocentrism because it broadens the moral community to include the whole biosphere and not just human society. Callicott explains,

[I]t would also be wrong for the federal fish and wildlife agency, in the interest of individual animal welfare, to permit populations of deer, rabbits, feral burros, or whatever to increase unchecked and thus to threaten the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic communities of which they are members. The land ethic not only provides moral considerability for the biotic community per se, but ethical consideration for its individual members is preempted by concern for the preservation of the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. The land ethic, thus, not only has a holistic aspect; it is holistic with a vengeance (Callicott 85).

One problem with biocentrism is that it is potentially in conflict with traditional human morality: from a biocentric point of view, humanity is an unchecked population that certainly threatens the integrity, stability and beauty of the entire planet, and all sorts of moral atrocities could be justified in the name of the biosphere's well-being. Callicott anticipates this, though, saying,

A zealous environmentalist who advocated visiting war, famine, or pestilence on human populations (those existing somewhere else, of course) in the name of the integrity, beauty, and stability of the biotic community would be . . . perverse. Family obligations in general come before nationalistic duties, and humanitarian obligations in general come before environmental duties. The land ethic, therefore, is not draconian or fascist. It does not cancel human morality (Callicott 94).

However, there are some times when the different spheres of morality come into actual conflict with one another, and an adequate moral theocentrism (which is even more holistic than biocentrism) can provide solid ground from which to evaluate them.

          This brings up one of the most pervasive problems in contemporary ethics, though, which is that for atheists there is no metaphysical ground for morality. Callicott traces each sphere of morality back, through the evolutionary process, to self-interest--even though he, like Leopold, prefers thinking in terms of the intrinsic worth of nature (97-99). The proclamation in Genesis 1 of the prehuman creation as "good" certainly provides that, and the divine command of God gives all of Christian morality sound metaphysical footing. And postmodern critiques of environmental ethics reveal its shaky metaphysics--Michael Zimmerman has observed that postmodern ideas deconstruct the concept of ecosystem by describing it first as a linguistic construct that signifies nothing real, secondly as a modernistic truth claim coming from the power-interested perspectives of science combined with modern social perspectives, and thirdly as an assertion of harmony and stability at odds with chaos theory. He also observes that in many ways postmodern theorists are at odds with deep ecology because of their thorough perspectivalism. They often characterize deep ecologists as "naive and utopian, whereas the latter regards the former as anthropocentric and nihilistic" (Zimmerman 104). Orthodox Christianity, in its inherent reliance on an absolute metanarrative, provides a sane alternative to this bickering. G.K. Chesterton wrote at the beginning of the modern period,

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful (Chesterton 35).

          In the face of atheism's ethical morass, many environmental ethicists have turned to pantheism as a source of metaphysical ground, as this description of deep ecology hints:

          The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual forms of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization. This basic intuition is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth (Devall 67).

Much of the thinking about pantheism is clear, but it seems to me that many pantheists make a strange leap from Unity to environmental ethics. If, as Michael Levine claims, "The divine Unity is, after all, 'all-inclusive'" (122), every area of human action is part of the Unity and inherently divine. This would seem to include all anthropocentrism, pollution, destruction and modification of nature, as well as social and personal injustice and violence--and there certainly seems to be more of that in the Unity than its complement. If the whole cosmos is part of the divine self-realizing itself, than all evil must be a necessary part of that realization, and therefore divinely good. The choice of the pantheist, who is part of the Unity, to sympathize with nature is no more or less good than a decision to destroy nature by another member of the Unity. This inherent negation of ethics reduces the pantheists' emphasis on membership in the biotic community to a personal and supremely relative ethical option and defies their attempts to find metaphysical ground for environmental ethics.

          The final way in which Christianity can inform environmental ethics is a practical one. Many people have observed the difficulties inherent in changing societal patterns of industrial consumerism. Wendell Berry corrects us,

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought globally" (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of though. Global thinkers have been and will be dangerous people (19).

Rather, Berry says,

The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous (24).

The most complete behavioral changes I've seen in people have been as a result of Christian conversion and spiritual growth. My parents, for example, were divorced when I was six and spent many years in bitter, petty resentment towards each other. While I was in college, both parents became Christians, and by the time I graduated they, together with my stepmother, were meeting to pray together, though they are still working through reconciliation. This is the kind of change that Berry (and many others) see as necessary--there must be a reconciliation between humankind and the earth, and it will require constant steps of daily care, restraint and devotion. Without a cosmological shift, those small behavioral changes are not going to happen. Robert Royal observes,

          Metaphysical notions shape our vision of the world, often covertly, so that what may seem abstruse questions of the theology of human and nonhuman nature have become quite important. Most Americans form their moral judgments on religious grounds. The late Carl Sagan, no friend to religion of any kind, was instrumental in setting up a joint scientist-believers environmental organization, he admitted, because religious passion was the only force likely to mobilize Americans for the environmental work he thought needed to be done (Royal 37).

Finally, the power of God to work through his people to achieve moral reform is the most practical tool of all, even if not seen as such. As Oelschlaeger writes in a later book,

          The idea that religion might give environmentalism political potency should not be dismissed out of hand. Religion has played a crucial role in national affairs time after time. Martin Marty points out, for example, that "the black civil rights movement was a development of the stories of Sinai and the Promised Land, of American slavery and liberation, of suffering and triumph, of evil surroundings and potential virtue in the activities of the black community and its allies" (Oelschlaeger, Creation 50).

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. New York: Pantheon Books 1992.

Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1995.

Callicott, J. Baird. "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." in Planet in Peril: Essays in Environmental Ethics, Dale Westphal and Fred Westphal, eds. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace 1994.

Devall, Bill and George Sessions, eds. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith 1985.

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row 1966.

Levine, Michael P. "Pantheism, Ethics and Ecology," Environmental Values 3 (1994): 121-138.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness. New Haven: Yale University Press 1991.

--------. Caring for Creation. New Haven: Yale University Press 1994.

Roszak, Theodore. The Voice of the Earth. New York: Simon & Schuster 1992.

Royal, Robert. The Virgin and the Dynamo. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1999.

Schaeffer, Francis. Pollution and the Death of Man. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale 1976.

White, Lynn Jr. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (March 1967) 1203-1207.

Zimmerman, Michael E. and J. Baird Callicott, eds. Environmental Philosophy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall 1993.