The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology

John Hart, John Hart

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118465530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religions asiatiques

In the face of the current environmental crisis—which clearly has moral and spiritual dimensions—members of all the world's faiths have come to recognize the critical importance of religion's relationship to ecology. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology offers a comprehensive overview of the history and the latest developments in religious engagement with environmental issues throughout the world. Newly commissioned essays from noted scholars of diverse faiths and scientific traditions present the most cutting-edge thinking on religion's relationship to the environment. Initial readings explore the ways traditional concepts of nature in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and other religious traditions have been shaped by the environmental crisis. Readings then address the changing nature of theology and religious thought in response to the challenges of protecting the environment. Various conceptual issues and themes that transcend individual traditions—climate change, bio-ethics, social justice, ecofeminism, and more—are then analyzed before a final section examines some of the immediate challenges we face in caring for the Earth while looking to the future of religious environmentalism. Timely and thought-provoking, Companion to Religion and Ecology offers illuminating insights into the role of religion in the ongoing struggle to secure the future well-being of our natural world. With a foreword by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and an Afterword by John Cobb

III. Ecological Commitment
Contextualization of Traditions in Diverse Contexts, Cultures, and Circumstances

CHAPTER 18
From Social Justice to Creation Justice in the Anthropocene

Larry L. Rasmussen

Our whole point is that this is a sacred universe. Cosmology without ecology is empty. Our future is at stake. Is there anything more important?

Mary Evelyn Tucker (2014)

On September 21, 2014, 350,000–400,00 people took to the streets of New York City for the Peoples’ Climate March, held with a view to the UN Climate Summit of September 23–24. Self‐identified faith communities were present and well represented. Many joined the evening multi‐faith service of global religious and environmental leaders at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was their conclusion to the Religions for the Earth Conference hosted by Union Theological Seminary.

In addition, the Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’ Council issued a declaration at the United Nations. In a statement of just over two pages the words “sacred,” “sacredness,” and “sanctity” appear 25 times, including in the title itself: Beyond Climate Change to Survival on Sacred Mother Earth (American Indian Institute, hereafter AII). Were “the sacred” or “sacredness” itself the subject, it might have been even more prominent. But it is not—getting beyond climate change to survival is the whole point. Much of the text is thus descriptive of changes to “Sacred Mother Earth” that follow on “modern living and all that it encompasses”; that is, changes that follow on the global reach of the Industrial Revolution and centuries of conquest, colonization, and “progress.” “The Air is not the same anymore. The Water is not the same anymore. The Earth is not the same anymore. The Clouds are not the same anymore. The Rain is not the same anymore. The Trees, the Plants, the Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects and all the others are not the same anymore. All that is Sacred in Life is vanishing because of our actions” (AII, 1).¹

“There is no more time for discussion on preventing ‘Climate Change,’” the paragraph begins. “That opportunity has passed. ‘Climate Change’ is here” (AII, 1). “Not the same anymore” is both the consequence of the extractive global economy and the new normal.

This is not the declaration’s first paragraph, however. That one sets the foundation and framework for what follows: “All Creation has a right to live and survive on this Sacred Earth and raise their Families where the Creator placed them to be” (AII, 1).

“Raise their Families” means the families of “all Creation.” Insects, birds, fish, plants all have families. Citizens of Sacred Earth, all of them, are personal in the manner of family members. Members of the community of life, all of it, are the relatives. So are the primal elements—earth (soil), air, fire (energy), and water.

The declaration goes on to name changes to the planet beyond the ones cited above. There is no need to list them here, only the need to say what the document says. They all follow from the kind of economy that has ravaged Sacred Earth and its families; that has brought climate change and survival stakes in its wake; and that violates the sacred with its way of life.

The gravity and urgency the Indigenous People’s Council seeks to convey is spelled out with the one sentence that it is in upper‐case and bolded:

TO SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE AND SEE THE FUTURE WE MUST RESTORE THE SACRED IN OURSELVES AND INCLUDE THE SACREDNESS OF ALL LIFE IN OUR DISCUSSIONS, DECISIONS, AND ACTIONS. (AII, 2)

A longer title for this essay would be: “Getting from Social Justice to Creation Justice: What Would it Take?” If the People’s Climate March, the Religions for the Earth service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the statement of the Indigenous Peoples’ Council are any measure, it would take a transformation of social justice to become creation justice. That likely entails a different cosmology from the one assumed by the Protestant social justice traditions I treat here, a cosmology in which all Creation, not human beings only, is sacred—a sacred universe.

What planetary developments make such justice compelling? Is social justice as we have known it insufficient, at least conceptually? Are there clues in the declaration that the air, water, earth, clouds, rain, trees, plants, animals, birds, fish, insects, and all the others “are not the same anymore?”

“Not the same anymore” introduces the Anthropocene, a prospective new geological epoch. The Anthropocene, if it is imminent, would be the successor to the epoch that has hosted all human civilizations to date, bar none: the late Holocene. Definitive word was expected in 2016 when the official keepers of geological time, after the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) had voted whether or not to plant a new “golden spike.” For the ICS “golden spikes” signal when geological epochs end and begin.

But does an official word matter? In 2012 the 34th International Geological Congress had declared that “For the first time in geostory [their word for Earth history] humans are the most powerful force shaping the face of the Earth.”²

“The most powerful force shaping the face of the Earth”—thus “Anthropocene” from anthropos, Greek for “human” and so‐named because of the “pervasive human influence throughout earth’s systems” (Jenkins, 2013, 1). This anthropos has modified the flows of most rivers and changed the catchment areas of the world. This anthropos has re‐engineered more rocks, soil, and landscapes in the last century than volcanoes, earthquakes, and glaciers have. The role of the carbon cycle in the acidification of the oceans and the re‐regulation of solar radiation has fallen to this anthropos because this anthropos has taken it. This anthropos is now the main agent in the planet’s nitrogen cycle. This anthropos now drives innocent species into extinction at an ever‐quickening pace. This anthropos, in fact, seems to be bringing on a geological epoch whose tattoo is not like that of the Holocene—climate stability—but climate volatility and eco‐social uncertainty. It is not a metaphorical creation that groans in travail, awaiting the redemption of this anthropos. It is the literal one (Rom. 8: 22–23).

The summary from climate science, in the words of Robert Stavins, one of the authors of three Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, is harrowing:

The world is now on track to more than double current greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere by the end of the century. This would push up average global temperatures by three to eight degrees Celsius and could mean the disappearance of glaciers, droughts in the mid‐to‐low latitudes, decreased crop productivity, increased sea levels and flooding, vanishing islands and coastal wetlands, greater storm frequency and intensity, the risk of species extinction and a significant spread of infectious disease. (Stavins, 2014, 6)

Elizabeth Kohlbert, calling species extinction at human hands “an unnatural history,” captures the significance of the collective human impact well. In the last pages of The Sixth Extinction, she writes: “We are deciding, without meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open, and which will forever be closed. No other creatures have ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy” (Kolbert, 2014, 268–269).

In sum, three epochal developments scramble the reality for social justice as we have known it. At the same time they create the mandate for Creation justice in an emerging epoch.

• Humanity is now the single most decisive force of Nature itself. Most systems of the natural world are currently embedded as part of human systems, or profoundly affected by human systems—the high atmosphere, the ocean depths, the polar regions. It was never thus but it is now, and for all foreseeable futures. Some “evolutionary pathways will remain open,” others “will forever be closed” (Kolbert, 2014, 268)
• Nature has changed course. After graphing long‐term trends in 24 areas, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the present, scientists of the International Geosphere‐Biosphere Program concluded that “[e]vidence from several millennia shows that the magnitude and rates of human‐driven changes to the global environment are in many cases unprecedented.” “There is no previous analogue for the current operation of the Earth system” (Steffen et al., 2004, v). Industrial humanity has brought on a non‐analogous moment, a unique epoch
• In contrast to the climate stability of the Holocene, the mark of the Anthropocene is climate volatility and uncertainty. The importance of this contrast can hardly be overstated, since it was the relative climate stability of the late Holocene that made possible the rise and spread of human civilizations from the Neolithic era (c. 10,000 BCE) to the present

What civilizational transitions are required if climate volatility and uncertainty belong to the new normal? More pointedly, what does this non‐analogous time, with these three developments, mean for notions of justice? If our swollen powers are, to cite Willis Jenkins (2013, 1), now exercised “cumulatively across generational time, aggregately through ecological systems, and unintentionally over evolutionary futures,” then the time and space dimensions of collective human agency and responsibility are stretched beyond anything we have known so far. If no natural terrain is left untouched by both human goodness and human molestation, then everything turns on our actions and choice, with consequences not only for present as well as future generations of humankind, but for the other relatives aboard the ark, together with the primal elements of earth, air, fire, and water.

Let me bare my soul: I find this burgeoning of human impact and responsibility frightening. While the new reality means the ascendency of ethics for our era, as an utterly practical affair, because everything turns on human choice and action, our canons and institutions of moral responsibility and justice do not begin to match the down‐and‐dirty consequences of actual human power. The neighbor we are to love as we love ourselves is no longer (only) the neighbor close at hand in time or space, but the neighbor in distant space and deep time. We will be the cause of unknown Jericho road victims generations hence, because we left them a changed, diminished, and dangerous planet.

Here, then, is the test for justice in the Anthropocene: What canons and practices of present love and justice reach across generational time to gather in the needs of future populations, human and other, and do so under the conditions of Nature on a different course? What canons and practices, for example, readily identify the following as violations of due justice? Shrinking habitat, disappearing species, eroding soils, modified gene pools, collapsing fisheries, souring seas, environment‐related diseases, receding forests, melting glaciers, delta dead zones, migrating pests and diseases, rising sea levels, environmental refugees, biodiversity loss, vanishing wetlands and bleaching...