Eco-Faith and Sustainability
How Religion and Poetry Can Help Save the Planet
Leadership and expert technology are needed to solve environmental issues. But faith traditions can also help, by changing thinking and showing new ways of living.
Political and scientific initiatives to tackle environmental problems must be anchored in a shift in human attitudes, theologians say. Faith traditions around the world are being re-examined to find the resources to achieve the changes in world-view necessary to prevent environmental disaster.
World leaders are beginning to unite with scientists in devising ways to combat global warming and other critical environmental issues. This coming together is illustrated by events such as the recent signing of the Kyoto Protocol by Australia, and the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to former United States Vice-President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
With experts agreed that achieving a sustainable environment depends on changing behaviour (and thus patterns of production, consumption and distribution), the question is how to persuade people to re-examine how they live. In a 2001 Harvard Divinity School Publication (Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: the Interbeing of Cosmology and Community), Lawrence E. Sullivan wrote that religion can bring about “spiritual modulations that unveil attractive new images of well-being and prosperity, respecting the limits of life in a sustainable world while revering life at its sources.”
The theme of revering life echoes American theologian Thomas Berry, who wrote in 1991 of the importance of joy and poetry in our relationship with the earth, and the need for “religious sensitivity to the sacred, a deep emotional imaginative sensitivity to everything.” (Befriending the Earth. A Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Faith. With Thomas Clarke).
Religious Ideas That Can Change Minds
In seeking the religious tools to change earth-unfriendly attitudes, religious communities around the world have many resources on which to draw. The kinship of all living things along with the inter-dependence of humanity and the “sacred” earth are central traditions for many indigenous peoples. For example, the word whenua is used by Maori people in New Zealand to mean both land, and the placenta or afterbirth. In the Christian tradition, Lloyd Geering in his 2005 book The Greening of Christianity argues that the development of Trinitarianism (God as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) implied there was no longer a gulf between earth and heaven, the supernatural and the natural worlds.
According to American writer on Christian ethics Larry Rasmussen, speaking at the 2008 Lloyd Geering lecture series in Wellington, New Zealand, there are a number of “deep Christian traditions” that can help to address forces that are destructive to the environment. One of these is the tradition of sacramentalism, the idea that creation is good and has a value that humans are part of but did not create. In particular, the sacramental vision of “the Web of Life”, symbolised by the knot in Celtic Christianity, stresses the co-existence of all that exists.
Rasmussen considers that the web of life (also a central tenet of the Unitarian Universalist religion) is a good argument against the commodification of goods, services and ideas, which he defines as the expression of the value of things only in terms of their usefulness. Commodification means that people are unaware of where something comes from and its true cost to other people and the environment.
The argument is not that political and economic change are unnecessary or even less than critical. However, through drawing on earth-honouring religious traditions around the world, Rasmussen and other similar-thinking theologians believe that religious communities can play their part in changing attitudes destructive to the environment.
