Plundering Eden

A Subversive Christian Theology of Creation and Ecology

G. P. Wagenfuhr

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532677427, 9781532677434
• eBook ISBN: 9781532677441
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christian ecotheology runs the risk of making God himself a resource for human exploitation as a means to species survival. The world of climate change, soil depletion, and mass species extinction reveals a frightening conclusion--humans act as cosmic parasites. The problem is not with the world--talk of climate change blames the symptoms displayed by the victim--but with human epistemology. Humans are systematically incapable of rightly perceiving reality, and so must socially construct reality. The end of this epistemological problem is necessary ecological devastation by the development of civilization. In Plundering Eden, Wagenfuhr traces ecological problems to their root cause in the broken imagination, and argues that reconciliation with God the Creator through Jesus Christ is the only means to ecological healing through a renewed, kenotic imagination expressed in the creation of an alternate environment that reveals the kingdom of God--the ekklesia.

Part I

Cosmic Parasites

chapter 1

Evidences and Questions of Parasitism

The notion that humans are parasites is bound to raise objections. It seems incredibly counterintuitive to what we believe and think about ourselves. Human civilizations have, for as far back as we have surviving cosmological myths, believed that they were on the side of good and order. But we will briefly look at some scientific studies that strongly suggest that humans are currently behaving as parasites. We will then explore the more philosophical questions, like whether this parasitism is a metaphysical problem, an accident of history, growing pains of a species closing in on transcendence, or an epistemological problem that may be healed.

Climate Change

Although climate change is a prevalent conversation in politics and the media, there remain misunderstandings of the theory, which has not changed in decades. Basically, specific molecules in our atmosphere interact with solar radiation in specific ways. Some of these molecules are called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane. These molecules absorb heat energy produced by the sun, energy that otherwise would move back into outer space. The higher the concentration of these gasses in the atmosphere, the warmer the global average climate becomes. Not all of these gasses behave in the same way. Methane is far more potent than carbon dioxide, which means that it takes a fractional amount of methane to cause similar warming as carbon dioxide. This warming effect has significant consequences for all life forms on the planet who have adapted themselves to a specific temperature range. It threatens to raise sea levels by melting water that is stored on landmasses in the form of ice. By warming the oceans, it threatens to intensify natural weather-related disasters, and to disrupt an extremely complex weather system. Warming will likely produce vicious feedback loops which will lead to runaway warming. A major source of the problem is easily identifiable, but extremely difficult to change because human civilization across the globe has become dependent on the use of energy through burning of fossil fuels. Hydrocarbon combustion produces carbon dioxide, and thus nearly all methods of transport and energy generation for electricity have been dependent on the production of greenhouse gasses. This civilizational dependence has meant that there is a significant motive to deny the reality of the problem, and if acknowledged, to take responsibility for changing it. It is worth noting that carbon dioxide and methane are also products of natural processes of digestion and composting that occur in animals and in the soil. Fossil fuels are ancient stores of decomposed organic material sequestered away out of the regular lifecycles of ecosystems. Hence, their use leads to artificially reintroducing vast amounts of carbon into the lifecycle of ecosystems, which produces unintended consequences. However, another major source of climate change is land specialization, chiefly for meat production, which eliminates carbon processing forests while itself producing more carbon and methane.

Humans have unwittingly altered the climate for millennia. One interesting, though contested theory of the Little Ice Age holds that the near elimination of pre-Columbian civilizations in North and South America by European diseases led to a period of prolonged global cooling. The reason is that these pre-Columbian Native Americans engaged in slash and burn agriculture, which involves the use of fire for clearing agricultural space.1 The reasoning is that the massive reduction of fires and massive forest regrowth reduced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, which in turn led to notable and significant cooling.

Unique to modern times is the incredible scale at which combustion is used for nearly all aspects of modern life and the corresponding rise in global population. While slash-and-burn agriculture can be a parasitic practice that sometimes leads to complete desertification of an area, indications are that ancient practitioners of this form of “shifting agriculture” used it in sustainable ways. Today, however, the evidence has significantly mounted to show that climate change is already having disastrous effects, and that radical change must come within a decade to prevent the possibility of runaway and potentially civilizational-level disaster.2

Parasitism is seen not simply in these unintended consequences of the Industrial Conversion.3 No one intended for climate change to happen. And that’s part of parasitic existence. Parasitism is demonstrated, perhaps best, by the confidence humans have in adopting new ways of living, creating new techniques and technologies, with minimal consideration of the costs. Parasitism is evident in the way of thinking that simply follows the research, the product, the market, the people. It is a specific and conscious denial of responsibility for future results of present decisions, intended or unintended. As we’ll see, one fundamental aspect of human history and imagination is the consistent and conscious desire to reduce its sense of responsibility, often to nothing.

But the problem of parasitism is not restricted to parasitism itself or the unintended consequences. The problem lies primarily in the human imagination. This means that the proposed solutions to the problem do more to reveal parasitism than often the problem itself does, the most obvious examples of which are those that continue to avoid responsibility and seek quick-fixes. These are found most clearly in ideas like carbon capture technologies. Such technologies aim to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The companies currently developing such technology specifically aim at enabling the continued use of greenhouse gases by reducing their harmful side-effects, while crucially making a financial profit. Other parasitic responses involve the move to renewable energy in solar and wind. Rather than seeking a reduction of consumption as a key component of change, the move to renewable and “clean” energy sources will inevitably increase consumption, leading to more and more land transformed for the purpose of energy production. Unintended consequences, such as the death of birds by wind turbines, are written off as part of the price that must be paid. Similarly, skyscrapers are responsible for billions of bird deaths per year due to collisions.4 If one person systematically killed billions of birds, that person would clearly be prosecuted as a sadistic animal torturer. If our skyscrapers do the exact same action with the exact same result, it is simply a sad reality. Parasitism comes in the distribution of responsibility. Although no one person can be held responsible for these bird deaths, that does not mean no one is responsible. Architects, builders, developers, owners, tenants, all engage in a systematic killing of birds. That’s simply one moral cost of building. This small example is instructive for the way in which the vast costs of civilization are ignored by distributed responsibility.

Because we all use energy derived from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, we are all culpable for the problem. We contribute to climate change simply by participating in the world, the more so the more “developed” we are.5

Efficiency is another excellent example of parasitism. Increased fuel economy, for example, has not reduced carbon emissions in the transportation sector. Instead, they have increased. Efficiency simply creates room for increased consumption. People tend to consume what is available and feasible to consume without thought, foresight, or future planning. As our population size and way of life have become entirely dependent on complex technologies of efficiency, minor problems tend to become exaggerated. Population sizes become more fragile the closer they are to the carrying capacity of a system, and technologies of efficiency are not aimed at increasing the reliability of the system as much as they are the productive capacities. Such is the case with industrial agriculture, which has become dependent on a very few number of cultivars specifically engineered for annual average yield and thus ironically fragilized.

Much of the language around climate change focuses on the environment or the climate. Indeed, the very phrases that have been used, “global warming” and “climate change” are themselves evidence of a parasitic imagination in that they imply a victim-blaming attitude. The problem, we are led to believe, is that the earth’s climate is warming. That is a symptom of a wide variety of human problems. Climate change, as deniers often note, has always occurred. What has not always occurred is the human capacity to make the climate change by normal, everyday behaviors. The focus of a parasitic imagination is on the external world. But climate change is not an environmental problem, it is a human problem that victimizes the wider environment. That means solutions that focus on the climate are irresponsible. Solutions must focus on humans and our behavior.

Such lack of responsibility is seen further in bad-faith “green” advertising. For years hotels have explained that they are “going green” by asking customers to reuse towels and bedsheets for multiple night stays. If the hotels were concerned with reducing their environmental footprint in earnest, they would condemn the travel culture and industry that has created their raison d’être. In any case, not washing linens reduces costs which are not likely passed on to conscientious consumers, thus increasing the profit margin. Hotels, tourism, and travel are part of the problem, and it is duplicitous for them to, in any way, consider themselves as environmentally friendly. But many industries do this, industries whose very existence is predicated on environmentally unhealthy human behaviors. This is a further example of parasitism, the appropriation of a consumer trend t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Part I: Cosmic Parasites
• Part II: Cosmology and the Human Imagination
• Part III: A Subversive Theology of Creation
• Part IV: A Christian Ecology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography