Deep Ecology: The Rights Of Earth

Given by James Covington on May 20th, 2007

I believe global warming poses the greatest moral issue of our time. I say that advisedly, as there are so many other moral issues requiring urgent attention: poverty, AIDS and genocide to quickly name three others. But I consider the global warming issue to be at least as urgent because the challenge of global warming calls upon us to act in ways that transcend our narrow self-interest. It calls upon us to make changes and sacrifices to prevent the massive global suffering , death, and extinction of others. We can argue as to how much the global warming phenomenon is a natural event and how much is caused by human pollution. It is nevertheless a reality. And we have a moral responsibility to respond.

Global warming will disproportionately afflict the world’s poor, future generations, and other species. Our faith calls us to compassionate action on their behalf.

The good news, according to Thomas Friedman in his rousing Sunday Times essay (The Power of Green) a few weeks ago, is that the term “green” has become mainstream—more Americans than ever now identify themselves as “greens” and that in fact, a “more muscular green ideology can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.” The bad news is the “inconvenient truth”—to borrow Al Gore’s well-known movie title—“that we have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years. And I am preaching mostly to myself when I say that.

The sense of urgency about this matter is born out by NASA’s chief climatologist James Hansen (a brilliant man considered by some as eligible for the Nobel prize): Hansen says we have ten years—ten years to be emitting less carbon dioxide into the environment—or it will be beyond turning around. In fact, I read just last evening a new science report that the southern ocean around the Antarctica is completely saturated with carbon dioxide, caused mostly by human actions. This means more carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere creating more unstable climate conditions. Add to that the fact that India and China are rapidly industrializing, and are just beginning to use power in appreciable quantities—and not for luxuries, but for that second light bulb or that first small refrigerator, one can begin to see the seriousness of the challenge before us. Hansen says that we must make policy change at the highest levels of government, and we must do so now. The United States must lead. We use twice as much energy per capita as do Western Europeans—I think it’s ironic that Tony Blair is the one who has done the economic analysis and in a major report to the world has called attention to this crisis.

Unfortunately, the present White House administration considers James Hansen an extremist and has censored his reports from White House analysis. President Bush did announce the other day that he had ordered federal agencies to “work together” to devise regulations reducing greenhouse gases and renewed his call for greater investments in alternative fuels. However, he offered no details as to how he envisions these goals being met.

I don’t know what the green future will be like—but I do know this: the green future is not determined entirely by forces outside human control—not yet, anyway; we have made certain choices which have brought us to this point, and we can make other choices that will shape our future. As a religious people, and I mean by that, a people of conscience, it is incumbent upon us to do three things.

  1. We must face this crisis and no longer live in denial. We can no longer go on with business as usual, either in our personal lives or in our national policies. And I think we are in massive denial.
  2. We must get in touch with our deepest and truest values—justice, responsibility to others, compassion and the inter-connectedness of all of life. We must support and protect those places where these values are preserved—the home, the schools, the church, the institutions that are life-giving.
  3. We must become citizen activists in regard to the environment in whatever way our lives allow. We are way beyond the time when we can say, “My family, my children, my community—even my country.” We are quite literally in this together. Right now one of the best strategies seems to be leading from the bottom up, where people have control, and pulling the Federal Government along later. Let’s keep the focus on what is really important. I’ve got news for some folks—stem cell research is not the core issue of our time. Pay attention—the house is on fire.

I have said that we must respond as a religious people to this crisis. We are gathered here today as a community of faith, many beliefs–one faith. Our faith is a conscientious one. We are a people of conscience, and that should make a difference in how we approach this critical issue. Let me be clear. As I see it, the church is not here to please congregants, as though you were good consumers of a product. The church is here to be faithful to its mission, to speak the truth to power—yes, to provide a caring community for its members, where they can grow spiritually, but not to participate in the massive denial of this society. If we do that, why even call ourselves a church?

So for me, the question is this: "Does the Earth Have Moral Rights?"

While we agree persons have rights, do birds and bees and trees and rivers and mountains have a right to exist on their own? Are they here solely for our pleasure or do they have intrinsic worth, so we must use them conservatively? When we see a redwood, do we think picnic table? When we see a field of flowers, do we think housing development?

We are nature. We are part of the earth family. When we wantonly and needlessly take non-renewable resources from the earth; when we transform affluence into effluence, we are guilty of ecocide - which is but another form of suicide. Actions have consequences. We are all downstream. The earth bats last.

This new found sensibility of our responsibility to all creation is coined as deep ecology and has been the primary focus of our environmental study group and led by member of the Fellowship–Peter Callaway. Fritjof Capra, physicist and systems theorist, says it this way: Deep ecology is supported by modern science, but it is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual. Our seventh principle– respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part — already embraces this insight. Let us start to act upon it, and in so doing we will provide a guiding light for our society, our world and our children.

So how do we think about and approach this issue. The ways are many, I am sure. For today’s purpose I choose to focus on the sage of ancient China, Lao Tzu who I think gives us spiritual and ethical direction in this work: "Nature sustains itself through three precious principles, which one does well to embrace and follow. These are gentleness, frugality and humility." These are not popular virtues in our time.

Gentleness is something of which we see little. It is a lost art. Look about you and one can see how hard we are on the earth. Lakes and streams continue to be poisoned by chemicals and DDT washed from the farmlands. Forests are decimated by acid rain and merciless deforestation. The air we breathe continues to be polluted with chemicals and fuel emissions.

I know there are those who believe I, like some others, am one of those Green Cassandras shouting "Ain't it awful!" There are those who believe global warming is a huge farce; that the earth can sustain still more people; that everything is getting better. And there are substantive debates on all these issues. I am not technically competent to resolve them, much less choose between competing experts. I can only ask - what if the optimists who deny the depth of these problems are wrong? What if they lose the bet? The consequences are harrowing. Living gently on the earth not only gives us better odds of sustaining a congenial environment, but it is spiritually more fulfilling at the same time.

Frugality is what was practiced in the Great Depression - out of necessity - but it is rather ignored in our time. Our national savings rate is abysmally low, and why not? We are bombarded day after tiresome day with messages urging us to buy - why wait? Enjoy the good life - the consumer life - now. I agree with whoever said, "Shopping is a form of mental illness." If this is true, and I think it is, then the whole nation is caught up in a frantic produce-consume cycle - a buying frenzy.

We are victims of an attitude of endless expectations, somehow believing each of us is going to have more of everything. God has evidently taken up residence in one or another shopping mall, so pervasive is our worship of them. We are being malled to death. We are infected with instant gratification. We consume with reckless abandon, acting as if we were the last generation to inhabit the earth. And the result? I noticed a headline this morning as I was leaving home: “We Are Becoming One Giant Garbage Can!”

In the words of an old Kenyan proverb, "Treat the earth well. . . it was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children."

The third principle, humility, is a virtue sparsely distributed in the human race. American destiny was to conquer the wilderness. There is precious little wilderness now, but we are still in a conquering mood. We conquer mountains instead of befriending them. In 1969 the Pope congratulated the astronauts for "conquering the moon." I didn't know we were at war.

We tend to believe that we are the apex of evolution - what God had in mind all this long time. But as one zoologist wrote, "The direction of evolution . . . has not been oriented toward (us). (We were) not planned. Nature chanced to discover (us) in her somewhat random search for better models."

What does our society teach its young? Gentleness, frugality, humility? Hmmm…An interesting question.

Here is something I believe our faith teaches us: a religious vision is one that sees the natural world as a gift, a kind of grace that we have neither created nor earned. And the nineteenth century’s most influential theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, said religion was about having “the consciousness of being absolutely dependent.” This is how I interpret that statement:

If we are a religious community, we know what touches one, touches all. We are not a bunch of interest groups, not a bunch of people vying with one another for our various causes. No, we have a radical devotion to the whole of creation, which we see as sacred.

If you are here today, and you are thinking that you want to be more intentional than you have been in living out of these principles, then I suggest you become involved in our environmental study group and there learn of the concrete choices we have to care for our environment. Read about the Green Sanctuary program and decide if and how you think this congregation can participate and activate itself beyond making a statement. The task will be challenging. We will not always agree with one another about what needs to be done. Tackling the challenges and questions of global warming will require the open-mindedness that our faith cherishes, as well as the sacrifice and discipline that have been at the center of all faiths throughout history.

This is the way I see it: In this Fellowship, we work from a positive vision—a prophetic alternative.

We must re-imagine our world, according to spiritual values, human values. And as we do, a new world can arise, as it always does, out of the human imagination. As conscientious human beings who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of persons we are always asking questions: “What gives health? What gives life? What gives hope?” And always we must ask, “And how are the children?” How can we not think about the kind of future that we’re creating for the children among us?

For me, in fact, the biggest reason for us to turn things around is our children. We want to pass on to them a world where they can breathe the air, where they can drink the water, where they can feel safe in purchasing food. One day they will ask questions, awkward questions. A twelve-year-old girl gave a remarkable speech at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992. She said, "I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realize, neither do you. You don’t know how to fix the holes in the ozone layer. You don’t know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream. You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can’t bring back a forest where there is now a desert. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it . . . . You teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us not to fight with others; to work things out; to respect others; to clean up our mess; not to hurt other creatures; to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?" Why, indeed.

I ask you: What do the times that we live in require of us? What does Gaia require of us? What does our faith require of us? What do our children require of us?

We’re not talking about giving a donation to Greenpeace once a year, or the Sierra Club. We’re talking about seeing the earth as holy and us as conscious participants in its holiness. We’re talking about the moral rights of the earth. We’re talking about passing on to the next generation a viable living space for them and for their children. What, I ask you, could be more important than this?

So be it.