The Bible’s eschatological hope never leaves earth behind. A planetary ethic is required for a biblical ethic. Some leaders of the Christian Right have called global warming a myth, a fiction created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and economic stability. Or an excuse to grow big, regulatory government. On the environmental left, activist-scholars like Bron Taylor have pioneered the concept of “dark green religion,” in the hope that it might precipitate a global, civil religion of the earth. This view perceives nature as sacred and alluring, with its own intrinsic value, believes humans and the environment are interconnected and mutually dependent, imagines all life sharing a common ancestor, and posits a kinship ethic with responsibilities to all living things. Such perceptions lead people to see more continuities than differences between their own and other species, and this perception generally leads to humility about one’s place in the grand scheme of things.
Environmental recovery requires celebration and consciousness-raising. The newly focused attention to planet earth led to the first Earth Day, held in 1970. It gave birth to the insight that we are not living daily on present income, the continuous energy from the sun, but on accumulated capital, for example ice age water, oil, and minerals. A look to the future requires a reappraisal of the past. We began to see that we have mortgaged our grandchildren’s future. The concerns of environmentalism are energy, global warming, ozone depletion, pollution, available and safe water, sustainable agriculture, and population control. These bracing new insights were answered with counter-delusions: that over-consumption is an interesting moral issue but not a biological one (Dick Cheney); that nature can best be addressed in aesthetic terms; that if there were real environmental problems, signals from the prices of commodities would alert us; that the past sheds sufficient light on the future; and that rapid economic growth is actually good for the environment.
To the free market mentality, natural resources seem infinite and therefore economically valueless: ecological considerations are “externalities” beyond the scope of economic calculations and that do not show up on balance sheets. Meanwhile, interest and profits escalate the pace of exploitation. A society that extols unlimited acquisition cannot be expected to honor the integrity of life on earth. Capitalism’s great myth is the self-regulating, self-healing mechanism of market growth, and it has degraded and debased cultures everywhere—and the earth as well. An ecological economy must be a moral economy, in which economic relations are expressions of care and interdependence, not aggression and exploitation.
While contemporary biology and earth science are now leading the way in the environmentalist movement, it has also been recognized that modern science had contributed to the earth’s denigration by imagining nature as a place of human conquest and by a secular philosophy that “dis-enchanted” the earth, stripped it of the presence of God, and stole its mythological story. Women especially noticed that the earth long ago had often been identified as a cosmic mother and that deities connected to nature were typically feminine. It did not escape their observation that both women and earth had become subject to ruthless male domination., that alienation from the body and its wisdom is the inner aspect of the ecological crisis. They noticed that what happens to bodies, to women’s bodies, and to nature are all connected. Until women led the way, no one, including no one representing biblical religion, was mourning the lost mother.
James Lovelock is one of the early tellers of earth-story. He writes: “The idea of Gaia was born in my mind in 1965 while I was at NASA in the Jet Propulsion Labs. It was a personal revelation, an idea that suddenly appeared like a flash of enlightenment. I was reflecting on earth’s reactive, unstable atmosphere, compared to Mars. Such an unstable atmosphere could not stay constant unless something was regulating it. Somehow life keeps our atmosphere constant and favorable for organisms. Life on earth not only created our atmosphere; it also regulates it. I perceived Gaia as a single living entity consisting of earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, land. Its entirety constitutes a feedback system that creates optimal physical conditions for life on the planet.” Gaia is a whole far beyond its constituent parts, and its condition parallels our own. If life contributes to creating the conditions for its survival, then enhancing living organisms improves our shared environment. Lovelock came under enormous pressure from scientists to color within the lines of scientific orthodoxy and to avoid mentioning anything nonscientific regarding Gaia. They encouraged this resolve by refusing to publish his work in peer-reviewed scientific journals. So he wrote a famous book.
A fascinating example of spiritual sensibilities brought in defense of the earth is the tree-hugging movement initiated by indigenous women in northern India in the 1970s. It combined Hindu devotion to the integrity of the forests with Gandhian non-violence. The women fasted, embraced ancient trees, lay down in front of logging trucks, and uprooted eucalyptus plantation seedlings. They simply defied Western dualisms of public-private, morality-self-interest, biocentrism-anthropocentrism, militancy-pragmatism. The third world, they saw, was being turned into an international debtors’ prison, and a vast plantation run for the benefit of masters far away. They believed that the earth cannot and should not be owned, but respected and cared for. Their intuitions are remarkably similar to those of the Hebrew prophets speaking on behalf of a liberal God.
Progressive religion, finding God in all things and all things in God, wants to re-mythologize earth and nature. It recovers the imagination of the earth as God’s body. The monotheistic terror of pantheism, so characteristic of Western religion and so convenient for the plundering of the earth as safely “not-God,” can give way to a new cosmogenesis. The archaic sacrilization of earth is reasserted against the tendency of Western religions to privilege history over nature as the locus where God is to be encountered. Everything is holy to those who open their eyes and take off their shoes.
