Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
Religion and the environmentâ 501â
This fascinating history begins with a 1984 struggle in Warren County, North Carolina, that state’s most concentrated African-American region (Gottlieb 2006a: 134–138). The state government decided to locate a toxic waste facility there, which already had the largest number in the state. Fed up with the environmental effects of such facilities, and (rightly) surmising that the racial make-up of the area had something to do with the siting decision, the residents of Warren County mounted fierce resistance. The Social Justice committee of the United Church of Christ was an active participant in the protests, with some members of the Church going to jail for civil disobedience (along with a few congressmen as well!). Surmising that racial inequality in the distribution of toxic materials was not limited to one county in one state, the UCC then commissioned and helped prepare a nationwide, county by county study of Toxic Wastes in the United States (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). The 1987 study established that African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans were more likely to live in an area damaged by toxic wastes than were whites, and that this was true even for middle class non-white communities. Out of this study came the now widely known concept of environmental racism, and the related term “environmental justice,” which refers to what we would like to see replace the former. In 1991 the UCC sponsored a widely attended and publicized national meeting of People of Color Environmental Activists, which produced a document defining Principles of Environmental Justice. Interestingly the first of these principles, which have been disseminated throughout the world and helped define the parameters of a fundamentally new way of looking at both environmentalism and social justice, emphasizes the “sacredness of Mother Earth” (Gottlieb 2004: 729). In other words, this fusion of resistance to oppression, now combined with an awareness of how modern industrial society hurts both people and other forms of life, was initially couched in a spiritual vocabulary, and sponsored by, of all things, a particular Christian denomination.
Finally, it is important to note that the activist involvement and the leftist (or at least more to the left) political orientation of religious environmentalists is not limited to what we might call the “usual suspects” of liberal Protestants, social justice oriented Catholics, and Reform Jews. In the U.S. there has been a significant, and generally increasing, presence of Evangelical Christians in the environmental movement. For over a decade now the Evangelical Environmental Network has issued some quite strong statements, signed by leaders of Evangelical seminaries, editors of newspapers, and widely respected ministers, making clear that humans have an obligation to protect God’s creation and change their ways. In 2004 Evangelicals initiated the compelling campaign “What Would Jesus Drive?” They began with public events in Detroit, challenging America’s auto manufacturers to produce more earth friendly cars, proceeded to cavalcade through the south and ended at the nation’s largest Christian rock festival. The theme of the campaign was that basic Christian values – as familiar and essential as the Golden Rule – required basic environmental values. A few years later several Evangelical leaders held a joint press conference with (of all people) some leading lights of Harvard University’s science departments, issuing a collective call for immediate and significant national action on global warming (Gottlieb 2006a 128–30).
On one level, of course, this kind of expansion of social concern, ecumenism, and openness to the secular world is hardly surprising. The environmental crisis is the most equal opportunity of threats. Racism and class domination will afflict some groups more than others, wars can be localized, and human rights have a drastically unequal distribution. Yet while some regions and groups (as we saw in our account of environmental racism) will suffer more immediately from environmental damage than others, the crisis as a whole affects us all. Global climate change is, well, global. The enormous weight of pollutants affects the bloodstreams of the rich as well
502â Religions in the modern world
as the poor. The earth is precious to everyone. If there is anything that can bring human beings closer together, willing (for once) to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, the environmental crisis might just be it. In the secular realm of international law, there are, after all, some 300 environmental treaties which did not exist thirty years ago. The few examples sketched above indicate that similar changes are happening in the religious world. Perhaps this crisis will also be, as the Chinese say, a great opportunity.
What religion brings to the table
As a human being who values my own health and that of my loved ones, and cares greatly about the fate of the rest of life, I would be truly delighted to see every religious person rush out and become an active member of some environmental organization. Yet religious environmentalism means a good deal more than that. Religions have distinct institutional, cultural, and moral resources which promise to make critical and very particular contributions to environmentalism, contributions which in many cases will be unlikely to come from other sources.
To begin, there is the rather obvious point that religion – if not always or always as strong as it might – is a powerful motivator of behavior. In an environmental context often plagued by the phenomenon of “everyone knows about it but no one does anything” a religious motivation can push people to act when other considerations – including economic and health motives – do not. As we saw in the example from Tanzania above, people will sometimes heed religious calls when they do not listen to anything else. Other examples range as far as Beijing, where appeals to traditional Taoist values allow Chinese medical authorities to authorize substitutes in remedies that used to call for parts of now endangered animals; and Saudi Arabia, where Islamic teachings are used to justify nature preserves; to the way even as anti-environmental a president as George W. Bush had to pay some attention to the environmental concerns of Evangelicals (Palmer 2003).
As well, there are important resources from what might be called the “culture” of religion: values and practices which are not necessarily limited to faith traditions, but which as a matter of fact are most widely present in them. For example, there are religious practices which stress the need to confront life’s most difficult aspects, including deficiencies in one’s own moral character. These practices are important because, in a sense, the most significant environmental problems are not present on the usual list of climate change, pollution, species loss, etc. Rather the worst threats are the human habits of avoidance and denial. It is above all our inability and unwillingness to face the truth that keeps the environmental crisis in play (Gottlieb 2003: Chapter 2). While in some ways religions – with their emphasis on other-worldly and after-death realities – are prime examples of socially passive escapism, there are in fact some powerful religious resources which move in the opposite direction. For example, the Catholic practice of Confession can be trivialized, but if it is not it provides a profound psychological and moral experience in real self-examination and commitment to personal moral improvement. The sincere Catholic really looks at him/herself, and is willing to acknowledge and change where s/he is doing wrong. In Buddhism, similarly, there is traditional training – e.g. meditating in graveyards to cultivate an awareness of the finitude of life – in being able to be emotionally present to distressing realities. This is a capacity of which anyone who studies environmental issues needs a great deal. Reading about something like the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” – a thick soup-like collection of plastic refuse that is larger than the United States – takes an enormous amount of emotional strength.
Religion and the environmentâ 503â
Otherwise we simply blot out the distressing reality or imagine that surely “somebody else” will take care of it.
Religious culture is also a repository of values which stress that there is more to life than accumulation. A secularized, globalized world (more on this later) tacitly assumes that the goal of life is money, toys, pleasure and power. Religious values – rest on the Sabbath, the joys of contemplation, quiet enjoyment of family love, focused study of spiritual texts – are more reliable sources of human happiness. If environmentalism is to achieve the truly global level of support it needs, it cannot simply be the political movement whose catchwords are “No,” “Do not,” and “Stop.” It must offer alternative forms of life which provide real pleasure and prospects of human fulfillment. Religious fellowship is – or should be – pretty cheap, and may involve no more consumption than a modest church supper or the cost of some long lasting hymnals.
Ritual
If rituals are not confined to the sphere of religion, they are among religion’s most cultivated specialities. From the Passover Seder to the Hajj, cultures of faith have produced forms of prayer, meditation, celebration, contrition, and mourning that provide a sense that the world of human experience, no less than the physical world, can be ordered.
In the face of the environmental crisis ritual forms are being devised that meet the distinct emotional needs of our situation. These include special prayers which express our awareness of our individual and collective sins and our commitments to change. A new emphasis on celebrations (e.g. the Jewish practice of holding a special service-and-meal for Tu B’shvat, the new year of the trees) connecting humans with nature joins with the creation of specifically new forms. These latter include, for example, weekend workshops in which people try to imaginatively take on the identity of other forms of life, and engage in a Council of All Beings (Macy 1991) in which each of them will address humanity with their pain and hope that people can change their ways.
The new rituals are supported by religious authorities. For example both the National Council of Churches and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops have produced tens of thousands of copies of congregational resources which include prayers and services for Earth Day and other opportunities to focus attention on ecological issues. Leading Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh, have offered environmental “Gathas” – short meditative verbal formulas to raise awareness of our environmental situation.
If prayer is the opportunity to open our hearts to God, then the environmental crisis engenders prayers that have never been heard before. In Zimbabwe, one of the leaders of the remarkable tree planting coalition I described above, in the course of a “tree-planting Eucharist,” offered the following:
You, tree, I plant you. Provide us with clean air to breathe and all the other benefits which Mwari [God] has commanded. We in turn will take care of you, because in Jesus Christ you are one with us. He has created all things to be united in him. I shall not chop down another tree. Through you, tree, I do penance for all the trees I have felled.
(Daneel 2001: 185)
Sadly, in the new green liturgy we can also find appeals to heaven that indicate the way victims of environmental suffering can come to feel that only God can help them. In Nigeria’s
504â Religions in the modern world
Niger Delta province, where oil extraction by global oil companies working in concert with local governments to repress resistance, has devastated the health and culture of the local population, a minister beseeched God in a way that may never have been done before:
We pray to God on this holy morn that no petroleum oil will be discovered in our communities. Indeed, Lord, let the oil underneath our houses and farms drift away from us. Lord, spare us the pains and the misfortunes and diseases that petroleum oil brings to our people and to our farms and rivers. Lord, protect us from further harm in the hands of those who want our properties, Amen.
(in Fields 2003)
What stands in the way?
The information sketched so far describes a dramatic shift in religion’s moral values and public identity. Given the public commitment of its recognized, institutional leaders, there can be little doubt that religion’s self-understanding now includes the obligation to value, and work to preserve, our planet’s web of life.
As positive as these developments are, it is necessary to conclude this essay with a brief sketch of some powerful social forces which stand in the way of everything religious environmentalism stands for.
Perhaps most important is the force which obstructs every form of environmentalism: globalization. By this term I mean the generalized imposition of market relations throughout the world, the drastic erosion of subsistence labor in favour of wage labor and the orientation of production to global exchange rather than local consumption; the rise in scope and power of transnational corporations and globalizing institutions (World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund) which drastically limit political sovereignty of local communities or even national governments; and the spread of a media-dominated culture of spectacle and endless distraction. For globalization the whole world is a collection of resources to be bought, used in production and sold; and every human being is essentially a consumer and a wage worker. The value of both people and things is measured in money (Steger 2001; Stiglitz 2002).
Globalization has been an environmental disaster. Alliances between local and international economic and political elites make the force of globalization often impossible to resist. Local communities are devastated by the mammoth economic projects it favors: huge dams, ruthless oil and mineral extraction, export agriculture. Yet I believe that the struggle against the values and dynamic of globalization appears as the most important political struggle of our time. If its imperatives are not replaced by humane and sustainable ones, all forms of environmentalism are doomed to at best extremely limited success. For that reason it is at least a little comforting that through the widespread adoption of the concept of ecojustice most religious environmentalists are able to name and, as best they can, resist the forces of globalization. As religious environmentalism continues to develop, this will provide a basis for continued engagement among different religions and between religious environmentalists and a whole host of secular political groups. Such alliances will, if my analysis is correct, be a very strong element in the resistance to globalization.
On the personal level, religious environmentalism, again like all other forms of the movement, finds in an increasingly widespread consumerism a rigid barrier to needed personal and social change. While people have liked “stuff” for a very long time, and conspicuous
Religion and the environmentâ 505â
consumption by the rich is nothing new, consumerism in the present is quite different from anything we have encountered in the past. First, what we have now is the identification of desired relationships and personal qualities with the acquisition of material objects. Health, sexual attraction, social acceptance, intelligence, love of family – these and other good things are represented and experienced as commodities you can buy. Second, an unending, addictive attraction to the very act of buying has been engendered. It is not the desired object which is the key, but the experience of desire itself. As a result of these two features, consuming is not simply a wanted pleasure, a pastime, or a benefit of a little disposable income, it has become a way of life, seemingly essential to one’s sense of self. Against this entrenched attachment, this powerful addiction, calls to care about climate, cancer rates caused by pollution, or the vanishing rainforest may stand little chance (Miller 2003; Kaza 2003).
There is hope, however. A life defined by trips to the mall or one-clicks at Amazon.com simply does not make people happy. There is a growing realization of that fact in the West – and one hopes that some spread of this insight will spread to India, China and other developing nations before the human race completely overwhelms the biosphere. As I have argued above, religious environmentalism, often more than other kinds, is particularly fitted to offer an alternative to consumerism. Rather than represent itself as the stern voice of a judgmental divine force, it will be the task of religious environmentalists to remind people that a spiritually oriented life, if it is anything at all, offers more lasting happiness, contentment, and healthy loving human (and non-human) relationships than lives oriented solely to pleasure or status. In order to make this argument, however, religious environmentalists must themselves communicate – in their person and in the programs they support – precisely the values of calm acceptance, compassion for weakness, self-awareness, at least occasional joy and frequent sincere laughter. Only in this way can they really support their claim that a spiritual approach to living on this earth not only bodes well for forests and trout, but for us as well.
A few tough questions
Any large change in a cultural structure as significant as religion, especially when the change involves profound connections to the worlds of science, politics, economics, and health, is bound to raise all sorts of critical, difficult questions. I will conclude this essay by looking at two such questions.
First, there is the seven hundred pound gorilla in the room that people often ignore: the issue of capitalism. Can our environmental woes be significantly mitigated as long as the forces of production are privately owned, the economy is geared to continued growth, and an enormous political power flows from enormous wealth? Can capitalism be environmentally reformed by cap and trade schemes for greenhouse emission, or severe fines and jail terms for pollution? Or does the social influence which stems from corporate power require that such power be removed before anything but the most modest reforms occur? Can capitalism accommodate clean production? Can it limit its drive towards endless growth and the inculcation of limitless needs to consume?
On the other hand, non-capitalist economies have often been accompanied by economic stagnation, terrible human rights records, and the creation of political elites which function all too much like the ruling class of capitalist societies. Further, in much of the world, including and especially the U.S., the very idea of a serious attempt at socialism is simply not on the political landscape (though with the recent bailouts of major corporations, this might change a bit).