A growing number of prophets have warned of the pressures that human activity is putting on the planet’s systems and resources. Among them are Rachel Carson, Arnold Toynbee, Martin Rees, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, locally Lloyd Geering and Dave Lowe, climate scientists, United Nations panels, NGOS – all calling passionately for humanity to turn away from destructive technologies, life-styles and values. Turn away: the biblical word for that is ‘repent’.
Sketching the scene all too briefly, homo sapiens has taken the biblical advice to be fruitful and multiply so much to heart that the world’s population has mushroomed from around 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8 billion today. Meanwhile advances in farming and industry have produced not only the standard of living we enjoy in the West, but also technologies that pollute air, water and soil on a grand scale, deplete the ozone layer, warm the oceans and make them more acidic, and generate climate change. In the name of progress and economic growth, developers raze rainforests, destroy long-established communities, and wipe out whole species of life.
Burning fossil fuels is tipping the balance against our children’s future. According to James Hansen, a leading climate scientist, carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere at a rate equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima bombs every day. The gases form a greenhouse blanket around the Earth that distorts the balance between solar energy coming in and Earth-generated energy escaping from the atmosphere. We’re already seeing the consequences in hotter, longer and more frequent heat waves and droughts, fiercer bushfires, harsher winters, wilder storms and flooding, and melting permafrost and glaciers – on one day in 2019, according to Nasa, Arctic glaciers lost an estimated 12½ billion tonnes of ice. The Antarctic is also carving ice at an alarming rate. The polar glaciers are disappearing six times faster than in 1990, and sea levels are set to rise, some say by three metres, by the year 2100.
A multitude of organisations campaign to reverse the process, but governments seem readier to listen to economists arguing for growth at all costs ahead of ecologists pleading for sustainability. Governments promise much, but continue to dither. A Guardian investigation revealed in May this year that the world’s biggest fossil fuel corporations have 195 projects on their books, most of them already under way. Each would detonate carbon bombs of at least a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. ‘Unchecked greed,’ says the Guardian, ‘is driving us ever closer to the abyss.’ Thomas Berry, an American monk and eco-theologian, dismally sums up: ‘Our ultimate failure as human beings is to become not a crowning glory of the Earth, but the instrument of its degradation.’ A new word has come into the language to describe what’s happening here: ‘ecocide’.
The idea developed in Christianity that the Earth is a ‘vale of woe’. Human fulfilment does not lie here, but in the soul’s release from Earth into the bliss and purity of heaven. Spirituality is other-worldly. That idea has been given new life by fundamentalist Christians wedded to neo-conservative economics, especially in the United States. So when the Bible says ‘Have dominion over everything in nature’, by hokey, they will – that’s the way to economic growth, jobs, prosperity and riches.
It’s not so long since the US Secretary of the Interior during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, James Watt, was eager to give developers unlimited access to national parks and resources. His reasoning was that the Earth ‘is merely a temporary way station on the road to eternal life. It is unimportant except as a place of testing to get into heaven. The Earth was put here by the Lord for his people to subdue and to use it for profitable purposes on the way to the hereafter.’ President Bolsonaro of Brazil echoed that when he contemplated burning the forests of Amazonia, mused on the mineral resources that may lie beneath and said: ‘Let’s use the riches that God gave us for the wellbeing of our population.’ Bad theology has a lot to answer for.
Of course the big mining, manufacturing and agricultural companies don’t rely on a theological argument to pursue their interests. Making money is reason enough. But common to both the idea of the Earth as a ‘vale of woe’ and the modern economics-above-all-else approach is the view that nature has no intrinsic value: it is there to serve us, its masters, in whatever ways we wish. Why hold back? Spirituality has nothing to do with the Earth.
Here we should acknowledge that Christianity has unwittingly played a role in the development of such destructive thinking. Our Judaeo-Christian heritage got rid of all the animistic gods and spirits that kept people’s rapport with the natural world respectful. This was liberating because it was the emergence of a monotheistic worldview that freed scientific inquirers to explore without fear of upsetting any deities or haunting spirits. And look at the human progress – and I mean that quite seriously – that has flowed from that!
Nevertheless, that view of the natural world as sitting there waiting for humans to conquer and quarry won’t do any more. In this present era we’re being catapulted into a paradigm shift in human understanding. We’re being forced to go right back to first principles and redefine the relationship of our species to the Earth. The benefits of that relationship have to be mutual, not all one-way in our favour. The evolving modern consciousness of the way humans might relate more positively to the Earth grows out of a new story of how we came to be here in the first place. That transforming story, which takes not six days but 13.7 billion years to unfold, is the great gift of science to our understanding of the planet and everything on it. It exalts the Earth and gives us an exciting new perspective on our place within the wondrous miracle of life.
Our new story tells us that along with the universe, along with this planet, along with all the life forms present on Earth, we humans are products of stardust and time. From the Big Bang at the very beginning, Earth has been continually evolving, geologically, physically, biologically, and human life is a unique part of that process – not above it or below it, but an intrinsic part of it. We’re not creatures poised halfway between demons and angels and with the potential to go either way: we’re earthlings. Earth is not a mundane stepping-stone on our way to a realm beyond death.
Our life here is almost certainly all the life we shall ever know. It’s here that we must find meaning and purpose. It’s here we must work out our salvation, which means finding our wholeness as creatures of the universe. It’s here we must make sense of God, and find a spirituality that fits with all this. Many who claim the name ‘Christian’ now find they are subtly changing the way they think about God, including a huge shift in our consciousness of power. Once God, conceived theistically, was assumed to have all the power. Only God was almighty. Only God was all-knowing, Only God was all-wise. Not quite any more. Humans now have knowledge unimaginable to previous generations and power to manipulate genes, cure once-deadly diseases – and destroy en masse with nuclear and biological weapons. Where we fall short is in the wisdom to marshal all that knowledge and power for the betterment of our species, and of the planet that we share with all life.
We must rid ourselves of any lingering notion that the human species is free to lord it over nature. We have to replace that with a living awareness that we’re but one strand – an important strand, but still only one strand – of the grand reality of nature, and every strand is to be nurtured and valued. We’ve become used to the word ‘humankind’ referring to our own species: there’s another new word embracing this wider, all-encompassing dimension: ‘lifekind’, which must include the planet on which lifekind depends.
It’s fair, though, to acknowledge that although we’re basically a product of stardust and time, just like everything else, the human species has developed one unique attribute: we are the consciousness of the planet. The consciousness; but not yet the conscience. We make up what the French priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere, that envelope of awareness of the Earth, and increasingly of each other, in a way no other life form shares. And it’s that very attribute, our consciousness, that’s now being challenged to respond to what has emerged as the great salvation/destruction question of our time:
Has our Christian heritage anything useful or distinctive to offer? I believe it has – as long as we’re willing to expand our understanding of religion and spirituality to embrace the new story of creation, the new challenges, the new responsibilities that our new millennium presents. For me, the role of religion is central because, properly understood, it touches every aspect of our lives as individuals, societies, and denizens of planet Earth. It’s not some kind of spiritual clip-on to so-called ‘real life’ experience, nor even to do with a supernatural dimension to life (though some will insist on seeing it that way). It’s something integral to our very being. It joins the rationality of our left-brain logos with the imaginative creativity of our right-brain mythos.
An Italian orientalist and religious historian, Carlo Della Casa, defines religion aptly as ‘a total mode of the interpreting and living of life’. That total mode obviously begins with our immersion in the material world, and builds from there. We see that clearly in Christianity, for at the heart of Christian faith lies the concept of the Incarnation – that is, God or Godness enfleshed in our human and material world. That means we live within a ‘divine milieu’ (to borrow a phrase from Teilhard de Chardin), which I think of as an active, all-surrounding, constant, force-field of love. The social gospel, important in my own Methodist upbringing, preached to raise ordinary people out of poverty and despair in this life, and give them a new dignity within society. Excellent as far as it went, but missing was concern for the Earth on which life pivots. A modern spirituality needs the gospel as ‘good news for the poor’, but it also needs more.
Of course, the scale of the climate crisis demands much more than each of us doing a bit better with our household waste. Government action to curb fossil fuels, protect key environments, penalise pollution, limit population growth, re-orient business towards carbon neutrality – all that and more are urgently needed. There are mountains of reports and recommendations in this area, but here I want to focus on the positive role that spirituality can play. First, and crucially, let’s reorient our theological or philosophical approach from being human to being eco-human. This is the bedrock for evolving a new dimension in our spirituality, and so towards a new humanity. Lloyd Geering touched on this when writing of The Greening of Christianity: ‘Ecological spirituality,’ he says, ‘will focus on the nature of our relatedness, not only to one another as humans in human society, but also to all living forms of life in the ecosphere, and to the forces of nature.’ Relatedness. That’s the key word here.
As for a new humanity, isn’t that what Christian faith is all about? Traditionally the focus has been on new individuals, their lives inspired by the archetypal Christ of love, grace and transformation, and by a vision of a new society, a society living by the highest values we know, of compassion, justice and love. In Christian shorthand, that’s the kingdom of God on Earth. Today, however, a society centred on our relatedness as humans to human society is not enough, and perhaps the supreme calling of the church in this generation is to broaden its vision to give equal emphasis to a spirituality that relates us to all living forms of life in the ecosphere.
In opening ourselves to this, there’s wisdom to be drawn from indigenous communities who’ve come close to achieving that in their own environments, such as the Omaha and the Maori. As a secular Christian, I see no problem in conceiving of a mauri, a life force, at work in an ocean, a river, a mountain, the forests of Te Urewera – a life essence to be respected, a life energy we can live alongside, respond to and enjoy. To the Maori that’s the mauri, and it’s everywhere in the natural world, in birds and animals, the plants in your garden, the soil, each has its own mauri. Allow that in your thinking, and you’ll find yourselves subtly, profoundly, changing the way you relate to an ocean, a river, a mountain, a forest, your pet, your rose garden, your friends, yourself: ‘an indivisible community of all living systems, sharing a common destiny.’
You might ask: Am I trying to sell a new animism? Have I joined those who call for a re-sacralising of nature, reviving old gods or creating new ones after the monotheistic religions swept them away? Absolutely not. I’m just urging a re-set towards a new balance between us humans and all of nature, not a wholesale flip that would undermine not only the spirit of scientific inquiry that has served us so well, but also our Judaeo-Christian heritage. I shy away from acclaiming Tangaroa as god of the ocean. But how about Tangaroa as symbolising the life force of the ocean?
In Sacred Nature, published in 2022, Karen Armstrong, an English scholar of all religions, offers some suggestions towards a spirituality befitting an eco-human future. First, she says, take your ego out of the centre of your being: ‘Many of us are eager to achieve spiritual enlightenment of some kind, but often we don’t realise that this entails the loss of the self that we so busily and inventively preserve and promote.’ That’s also key, of course, to living with compassion. As to nature, she suggests we begin simply by ‘looking closely at our immediate environment, making ourselves aware of the magnificence of trees, flowers, birdsong and clouds, until they are no longer just a backdrop to our lives but a daily marvel’.
When that’s embedded we are ready steadily to expand our consciousness, rippling out to make room for all our fellow-beings, beyond our own ethnicity, our sex, our nationality, our politics, our religion, and our species. We are one in a global world. These are steps towards achieving a new balance between humanity and the wholeness of the natural world – a balance that will spur us, in Thomas Berry’s words, to ‘renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.’
This is a shortened version of the Sir Lloyd Geering Lecture Ian Harris gave to the New Zealand Sea of Faith Network’s annual conference in October 2022. He was founding chairman of the NZ SOF Network’s steering committee in 1993 and is now a life member. He edited the New Zealand Methodist newspaper, was Director of Communication for the NZ Presbyterian Church, and with others initiated the Ephesus Group. The full lecture is available at: nyurl.com/I-Harris-Lecture