"Environmental, Religious and Political Values
"
Jim Farrell
Sunday, September 17th 2006
"Environmental, Religious and Political Values
"
Jim Farrell
Sunday, September 17th 2006
All of our readings today are about standing by words. Wendell Berry suggests that the primary value for people and the planet is health, which means healing and wholeness and holiness. And yet he suggests that the standard operating procedures of modern life contradict the ideal of health and make it difficult or impossible to honor it in practice.
St. James says simply that faith without works is dead. And in the gospel, Jesus suggests that Christians will be known by their imitation of his life, and not just by the words of faith. All of our readings ask us to think about the practicality of the gospel—not whether or not we think it can work, but whether or not we have the will to practice it. Thomas Merton once said that “We cannot begin to know ourselves until we can see the real reasons why we do the things we do, and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation" Today, I’d like to take these readings in an environmental direction, and ask “What is our situation? What are our intentions? And how would we contrive to have our actions correspond to our intentions?”
I’d like to begin by suggesting that our situation is not good. We’re in a situation that ecologists call “overshoot,” in which a species increases beyond the carrying capacity of its environment. But I’d also like to suggest that we’re already in the midst of the 21st century ecological revolution, whether we like it or not.
This ecological revolution will be the third such revolution in North America since Columbus arrived in 1492. The first revolution was the Columbian exchange, the combination of two biospheres that had been separated for centuries by the Atlantic Ocean. The second was the capitalist ecological revolution. In this revolution, people commodified all of nature, and brought it to market, with earth-shattering results, both positive and negative. Starting in the 19th century, railroads and steamships enabled the construction of national and international markets, and the consumption of coal and oil and lumber and land on an unprecedented scale. All of this activity was governed by what William Cronon calls “the geography of capital,” in which places were valued not for their intrinsic biodiversity, but for their ability to produce a crop of money.
Today, I want to suggest that we’re approaching the end of that capitalist ecological era, and that we’re in the process of shifting from this freakological era—a freakish period in which people didn’t think about living their lives within the boundaries of the biosphere—to an ecological era, in which human purposes nest gently within nature’s cycles.
The first two ecological revolutions were essentially economic, powered by people looking for profits—in the New World, on the American continent, or across the globe. But the ecological revolution of the 21st century will be cultural, and it will spring from our answers to basic questions: What’s the nature of human beings? What are people for? What environments allow human beings to achieve their full humanity? How can we increase the health of human beings and the planet? How can human beings become a vital part of what Aldo Leopold called “the land community?” How does human diversity contribute to biodiversity and vice versa?
Answering these questions, we will need to think about ideas and institutions, values and virtues. We’ll need to consider faith and works —what we say and what we do. We’ll need to think about crafting human institutions that work, for a change, with nature’s purposes on this planet. We’ll also need to have some images of the future, some sense of the trajectory of this ecological revolution.
So imagine the United States of America at the end of this century—94 years from now. America is now spelled A-m-e-r-e-c-o—because it’s an America defined by ecological consciousness, culture and conscience. What is that America like?
First, it’s characterized by a worldview that isn’t personal or proprietary, but planetary. According to Christopher Uhl, the author of a stunning book called Developing Ecological Consciousness, this world view will be grounded in an understanding and appreciation of nature, especially the synergies of interdependence that characterize the natural world. This ecological consciousness will involve human humility instead of domination and dominion. It will entail appreciation of all of nature, and not just of splendid scenery or natural resources.
This planetary perspective will be rooted in local landscapes. People in the new America will understand themselves, as Aldo Leopold did, as members of the land community. We will be more grounded, more connected to particular places and processes of the earth. As we come to understand our place on earth (both geographically and ecologically), we will be capable of adapting to our places instead of exercising brute force to overcome local conditions (like air-conditioning the gym).
By the end of the century, we’ll have the knack of whole-system thinking. We will see that you can’t do just one thing. As John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Understanding the interconnection of things, we’ll get rid of the language of “side effects,” which is inaccurate and irresponsible. These days, for example, we think of global warming as a side effect of burning fossil fuels, because it’s an effect that car companies and utilities can’t sell. But physically speaking, it’s as much an effect as a warmer house or an air-conditioned car or lights in a skyscraper.
The ecological culture of the late 21st century will be much more materialistic than our current culture because it will express a reverential attitude for the limited materials available on God’s green earth. In this new materialism, the amounts of what we call waste will decline precipitously, because as architect William McDonough says, “waste is food.” Instead of designing things to be disposable, we will design them from the very beginning to be repairable and even regenerative. When your shoes wear out, we’ll already know where the materials can be used again.
At the same time that Americans get more materialistic about the stuff in stuff, we’ll get less materialistic about status and esteem. We’ll be working toward what Robert Paehlke calls “a [new] measurement of esteem, including self-esteem and social merit, in terms of such nonmaterial values as skill, artistry, effort, or integrity." Jane Hammerslough calls this idea “dematerializing,” the process of making meanings without things. In the era of consumer culture, we’ve been taught to materialize our inner lives with commercial commodities. But do we really need roses from Ecuador to tell someone we love them? Can’t we make meanings without making things?
In an ecological future, kids will grow up differently, learning the lessons of life both at home and at school. Currently, our kids grow up mostly inside, and with few of the practical connections to nature that farmkids enjoyed for hundreds of years. They suffer from what Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.” This is, of course, good for the economy: “Indeed,” says David Orr in The Nature of Design, “capitalism works best when children stay indoors in malls and in front of television screens or computer screens. It loses its access to the minds of the young when they discover pleasures that cannot be bought.” But it’s not good for kids or for the planet that they need for healthy and holy lives.
So at home, kids of the future will learn responsible consumption, which involves patterns and practices of health and wholeness and holiness, as Wendell Berry suggests. In eating, for example, we’ll begin to notice that there are intensive and extensive pleasures of food. The intensive pleasures take place in our mouth, where the flavors and textures of food have an immediate sensory impact. The extensive pleasures take place in our brain, when we realize that good food can be good not just because it tastes good, but because it does good, for people and the planet. Kids will also learn lessons of enoughness, and the peer pressures of conspicuous frugality. If you want to be cool at the end of this century, you’ll need to find more satisfaction with less stuff.
Our schools will undergo their own ecological revolutions. Right now, most schools focus on facts and abstract thinking skills. But in the future, the first lessons at every level will be wonder and hope and problem-solving. Some education will take place in classrooms, but more education will take place in the spaces of everyday life—in the local forest or wetland, in the community garden or the cafeteria—where students can see how ecological literacy works its way into the design of landscapes and institutions.
A biology teacher in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams tells her high school students that "What you people learn for a test you forget the next day. That's a waste of your brains and my time." Codi insists instead that "Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die." And educators of the future might revise that by saying “Ongoing life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.”
One thing we’ll teach students by word and by example is that politics matters as a collaborative way of way of designing institutions that make it easier to be good. At the national level, we’ll teach students about the three most radical words of the 18th century—“we the people.” Today is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the day on which the drafters of the Constitution signed the document, and sent it off to the states for ratification. The Constitution, like other technologies, is a tool for getting things done—in this case, for creating a community to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, defend ourselves from attack, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
That word posterity is important. Most Americans now have never heard of the word. But the Founding Mothers and Fathers used it all the time. It meant the long-term future. At the beginning of the 21st century, it’s clear that we’ve secured the blessings of liberty for ourselves. But it’s also clear that we’ve used our own freedoms to compromise the freedoms of the future, our posterity. In terms of environmental justice, our consumption threatens the quality of life of our grandchildren and their children. The founders would be ashamed of us.
Right now, in America, politics is a four-letter word. And, as William McDonough suggests, it should be—but the four-letter word should be love. In a beautiful essay called “A Boat for Thoreau,” architect McDonough contends that, in reforming our institutions, “our primary design assignment, and the question we should ask ourselves . . . comes down to this: how do you love all the children? Not some of the children. Not just your children. All of the children.” How do we love all of the children of all time? McDonough contends that we do it by design. By applying our designing minds to the re-creation of our institutions, procedures and products, we can love our children—and nature’s children—and their children, and so on, forever and ever.
A child-centered politics will help us to establish an economy that works with nature instead of against it, with our children instead of against them. During the ecological transition, we’ll institute “green taxes” so that we’re taxing things we don’t want, like greenhouse gases and pollution, instead of things we do want, like income and property. We’ll create markets in things like pollution and carbon emissions, which will allow us to use the efficient mechanisms of the market to reduce environmental impacts instead of increasing them.
And we’ll pass laws that require retailers to tell the truth about the costs of things. In The Nature of Design, David Orr says that Americans are a people who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing. We need a system that reminds us of the social and environmental costs that are currently ignored in our pricing system. We need big tags on clothes, for example, say something like this: “This garment was produced from cotton grown in Egypt using toxic chemicals, and made in China by a 14-year-old girl who works 12 hours a day, six days a week in a factory powered by coal which contributes to acid rain and global warming. Nobody cheapens the world like Wal-Mart. Do you still want to buy it?” This would give us the information we actually need for responsible consumption—the information we never get now because advertising and marketing are designed to decontexualize products from their real world consequences and recontextualize them in a fantasyworld of “cool” and comfort and convenience and romance.
This vision of the ecological revolution of the 21st century may sound like a fantasyworld itself—and maybe it is. But there are lots of signs that we’re moving in this direction. At St. Olaf, we just erected a wind turbine that will generate a third of our electricity, and other schools are taking similar initiatives. We buy produce from a student-run organic farm, and we compost all our food waste—including meat and dairy—so that it’s food for our fields and flowers. If this institution can change, other institutions can too. Organic food is the fastest-growing sector of the grocery business. Green building is more and more common. Businesses are committing themselves to environmental improvement. GE is touting its eco-imagination, and Honda claims to be practicing “environmentology.” And—most miraculous of all—even the Bush Administration is beginning to believe in global warming. Some of this, of course, is greenwashing, but the fact that greenwashing makes sense as a successful business strategy is a sign of how far American environmental consciousness has already progressed.
This ecological revolution depends on our ability to express our faith in God’s creation in all the works of our lives. It’s a large task, but no greater than the American Revolution or the civil rights revolution. And the nice thing is—this time, it’s not just a revolution of altruists and idealists. This time it’s a revolution of idealists and realists, because this time, realistically, there’s no viable alternative. "Ongoing life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die."
I’d like to close with a benediction sometimes called “A Franciscan Prayer:”
| If this print button does not work(older browsers), right mouse click anywhere in the window and print. |
An audio version of this presentation is available for 4 weeks on our
highlights page.