Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Geography, space and the sacredâ 491â

Werbner, P. (1996) ‘Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah: Zikr and the Sacralizing of Space among British Muslims’, in B. Daly Metcalf (ed.) Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Suggested reading

Knippenberg, H. (ed.) (2005) The Changing Religious Landscape of Europe, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. A collection of essays by geographers on religion in various European countries.

Knott, K. (2005) The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, London and Oakville CT: Equinox.

A spatial methodology for the study of religion developed from social and cultural theories of space, with a case study on the location of religion in discourse and representations of the left hand.

Knott, K. (2008) ‘Spatial Theory and the Study of Religion’, Religion Compass 2:6, 1102–1116. A discussion of spatial theory and its application in the study of religion.

Kong, L. (2001) ‘Mapping “New” Geographies of Religion: Politics and Poetics in Modernity’, Progress in Human Geography 25:2, 211–33.

A new agenda for the geography of religion in the context of modernity.

Park, C. (1994) Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion, London and New York: Routledge.

A textbook which briefly charts the history of the geography of religion and reviews its many empirical studies up to the early 1990s.

Proctor, J. (2006) ‘Introduction: Theorizing and Studying Religion’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96:1, 165–68.

An essay which considers new theoretical directions for geographers studying religion. It is followed in the same volume by several exemplary articles.

Stump, R. W. (2008) The Geography of Religion: Faith, Place and Space, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

The most recent book to chart the scope and contemporary agenda of the geography of religion.

Tweed, T. A. (2006) Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press.

A new definition and theory of religion which uses spatial and aquatic tropes, particularly the concepts of crossing and dwelling.

Chapter 29

Religion and the environment

Roger S. Gottlieb

This chapter focuses on the way the environmental crisis is challenging and profoundly altering every aspect of religious life: theology, institutional self-definition, the everyday conduct of religious people, and ritual. Religious environmentalism as a global movement is described and some interesting problems which the movement faces are discussed.

What’s the problem here?

Why does a book like this one need a chapter on religion and the environment? For two reasons: first, because humanity now faces an enormous challenge to its continued existence, a challenge it has created itself. Second, because responding to this challenge is profoundly altering every aspect of religious life: theology, institutional self-definition, the everyday conduct of religious people, and ritual. Along with these profound changes there arise serious questions the answers to which are deeply in doubt. All of these are the subject of this essay.

The environmental crisis has a number of by now familiar, frightening dimensions. Global climate change, species extinction, wildness loss, and the trillions of pounds of toxic chemicals we have pumped into the air, water, and earth. Future prospects of genetic engineering and nano-technology loom devastatingly larger than present and past consequences of other “miracle” developments such as nuclear engineering/armaments (uncounted tons of as yet undisposable long term poisons, massive contamination sites around nuclear labs, etc.). If the reader has become numb to these generalities (certainly a forgivable response given the overwhelming character of the crisis) one simple “fact” may help focus attention. In 2004 a test of the umbilical cord blood of a dozen randomly chosen newborns at a St. Louis hospital revealed a total of 270 toxic chemicals – with each infant averaging nearly two hundred: carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, substances which adversely affect neurological development or immune system functioning. No one can be sure how these affect developing foetuses – either singly or in concert. (Indeed, what would “experiments” to determine this look like?) But, the chemicals’ track records in the labs and for adults are clear.

What does such a dreadful reality mean to religious people in particular? Well, for one thing it means something to all of us simply as people. Insofar as Christians or Jews or Muslims have bodies of their own and love their children, this should galvanize immediate and drastic action.

But there are other, specifically religious, reasons as well. First, as members of the Abrahamic tradition, Jews, Christians, and Muslims think of the world not simply as a collection of inert material lying around for human use, but as the gift of a loving God. The

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world is “creation” – an act of generosity. Even more, the traditions often teach that the world is ours only temporarily – it still belongs to God. Is this any way to treat the gift of the Master of the Universe?

Second, there are specifically religious practices which are called into doubt. Can Jews sanctify wine if they know it contains poisonous pesticide residues? Can the communion wafer really be the “body of Christ” if it was grown with destructive chemical fertilizers and the people who worked the farms on which it was grown suffer from disproportionate amounts of cancer from using those fertilizers?

Third, religions – all religions – share one basic belief: that they have some kind of privileged knowledge of what God wants and how a person should act. What happens to this theological and moral self-confidence when, for example, a fourth grader in religious school asks: “Why have you let this happen?” How much respect can religious teachers demand of a younger generation of future members of the faithful when the older generation seems, rather obviously, to have failed so dismally?

Finally, religions must ask themselves the embarrassing question of how they could have been so dumb about all this for so long. It was, after all, not the leading religious authorities or theologians who noticed that modern industrial practices had some real problems. It was freelance mystics and nature lovers, the single believer with no institutional clout, anticommunist western Marxists, and the occasional more or less pagan phenomenologist, who raised questions about what humanity was doing to nature and what that might presage in terms of humanity’s treatment of itself. For their part, religions concentrated on whether or not the fruits of industrialization were being distributed with a modicum of social justice, that’s all (see Berry 1988; Harrison 1998).

For (at least) all these reasons the environmental crisis is not just a crisis for our health care system, economy, politics, and recreation, but for religion as well. The good news, however, is that over the last twenty years or so religions have risen to this challenge. There now exists a vibrant, worldwide movement of religious environmentalism, one encompassing virtually every faith on every continent, and one which means that religions, even as they were and in some ways continue to be part of the problem, have become part of the solution as well.

Theology

The environmental crisis demands – and has occasioned – some profound theological changes.

In the most general terms these changes involve a denial of centuries-old ideas asserting that humans are different from, better than, or independent from nature. In turn, these changes are accomplished by four different types of theological strategies.

To begin, there has been an active attempt to recover ecologically promising, even powerful, elements of tradition that have been marginalized. To take but three examples: The Jewish philosopher and commentator Maimonides, a twelfth-century Egyptian generally thought of as the most important Jewish thinker in a millennium, cautioned Jews quite clearly: “Do not think that the rest of the earth was made only for you. Each created thing has its own purpose” (in Hadassah 1993: 110). St Francis, the thirteenth-century mystic and spiritual teacher whose life and teaching became the inspiration for an entire religious order, preached to flowers and would move worms out of the roadway to keep them from being trampled (Sorrel 1988). The Koran flatly declares that “Everything is a community like yours” (6:38) and “The creation of Heaven and Earth is of greater importance than

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humanity, yet most people realize this not.”(40:57). Jains and Buddhists both have deep traditions of non-violence towards all of life.

Such statements, and many more that could be offered, provide an initial basis for ecotheology. They are undoubtedly part of the tradition, no fancy footwork of interpretation is needed to give them an ecological direction, and thus they can be (and have been) standard-bearers for a greener version of tradition.

More challenging is the need to reinterpret tradition. This does not mean the importation of essentially new ideas, but rather a significantly different orientation and emphasis in the understanding of what is there already. Ecological motifs in the Torah provide a convenient example, not only because of the centrality of the Torah in the Western tradition, but because a great deal of work has been done on it already.

The dominant theme in Biblical understanding of the human relation with nature has been (unfortunately) the classic passage Genesis 1: 26–28, in which God proclaims:

Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

In the context of two millennia of a human struggle to survive with limited technological power, it is not surprising that this passage was generally taken as license to use nature in a purely instrumental fashion. Thus Nachmonides, an important thirteenth-century SpanishJewish commentator, argued that this passage gave people the right to mine the hills and plow the fields to get what we wanted.

However, there is a good deal more to the Bible and in fact to the Torah in particular, than this passage. For one thing “in our image” can be seen in a variety of ways – (particularly because virtually no one wants to take it literally!). Indeed some read it as conferring responsibility rather than simply unbridled power. We are to act, Lawrence Troster (Troster 2001) suggests, as God’s representatives on earth, carrying out God’s purposes here.

How then does God want us to treat nature? The mere term “dominion” does not tell us much. As a matter of fact many other passages in the Torah suggest that God has in mind both clear limits for what we may do and also a clear sense of moral concern that extends to the non-human.

For instance, when the Israelites rest on the Sabbath, they must rest their animals as well. If you see your enemy’s donkey fallen under a heavy load, you must help raise it up – not just the donkey of your friend, but of someone you really do not like. And, to my mind best of all, during the Sabbatical year, when no crops are planted, the food that grows from last year’s fallen seeds is to be left not only to the usual code names for the powerless – “the widow, the stranger, and the orphan” – but to “wild animals” as well (Exodus 23:5–12).

What these (and other) passages indicate is that the Bible often teaches respect for nonhuman nature, and that “care” (as in Adam and Eve’s initial responsibility to care for the Garden of Eden, Genesis 2:15) rather than “dominion” is the rule. The point is not that this is the “true” interpretation, and that somehow theologians, rabbis, and popes missed it all these years. For clearly there are other biblical passages which support the dominion thesis quite easily. Rather, what is crucial is that one can, by focusing on passages which, even if

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they have not been used this way before, are legitimately part of the tradition, find a biblical basis for an ecological oriented religion. One does not have to invent new sacred texts or sweep away the past – one merely has to focus on parts of the tradition that are there already. This work of interpretation has been a central task of ecotheology, one so well performed by this time that there can be little doubt that the most conservative, “orthodox” religious person can also be an environmentalist. (Pope John Paul II used God’s response to creation “And God said that it was very good” (Genesis 1:31) as a prooftext for his own ecological turn. Think of how many other Popes read that verse and made no ecological sense out of it whatsoever. Yet clearly the Pope was not inventing anything new, except the meaning that he was taking from a very old verse (Murphy 1989).)

That said it deserves mention that ecotheologians also do a fair amount of both rejection of the past and invention for the present and future. Not everything that has been part of the tradition will remain, and some important new concepts and values must emerge.

For example, we can note the position of Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, who helped create the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an interfaith coalition with a wide range of educational programs for religious groups and society as a whole. Schorsch, for many years the chancellor of Conservative Judaism’s leading educational institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, is not hesitant to take Jewish tradition to task and advocate a fundamental transformation. It is a mistake, he argues, to use Judaism’s rejection of paganism to propel Judaism into an “adversarial relationship with the natural world.” When that is done

the modern Jew is saddled with a reading of his tradition that is one-dimensional. Judaism has been made to dull our sensitivity to the awe inspiring power of nature. Preoccupied with the ghost of paganism, it appears indifferent and unresponsive to the supreme challenge of our age: man’s degradation of the environment. Our planet is under siege and we as Jews are transfixed in silence.

(Schorsch 1991)

This statement is all the more significant because Conservative Judaism was, as much as any other form of Judaism, a longstanding adherent of the very “one-dimensional reading” of tradition that Schorsch is criticizing. His claim, then, suggests that Jews have been theologically and ethically misguided.

In the Christian world, the long-standing tendency to make categorical distinctions between body and spirit, the world and the soul, the moral status of people and the nonmoral status of everything else, has been sharply criticized. Protestant theologian Sallie McFague (2001), for example, urges us to imagine that far from being simply an immaterial transcendence outside the physical universe, God is also a part of our physical reality. The earth, she suggests, can be thought of as “The Body of God.” After all, if God is not part of the world as we know it, how could we ever encounter Him/Her? John Cobb, one of the earliest voices in ecological theology, admits that with regard to anthropocentrism: “As a Protestant Christian I am impelled to move quickly to acknowledge that Protestant theology has been an extreme case.” This anthropocentrism, he argues, must change (Cobb 2004: 249–50).

Given the different theological orientation of Eastern religions – which have not tended to make such rigid distinctions between humans and the rest of the natural world – the Buddhist and Hindu response to environmental issues necessarily takes a different form. Also, the technology and social forms which have brought about the environmental crisis