56 – Ecology and Theology

Editorial

The Environment ~ and Development Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1891 (prologue §3) At the close of the World Summit on Sustainable market economic system was the right means to Development in Johannesburg, in August 2002, there overcome economic inequality, since free trade and the was much comment and disagreement as to its free exchange of currency disadvantages the poorest achievements and its failures. The politicians of various while trade barriers to finished and processed protect countries and political persuasions and the the richest. Environmentalists (and increasingly, developmental charities and standing with them, insurance companies) environmentalist left the summit still arguing for their cause while demonstrating an inability to understand the other. But it was not noted that this failure in understanding each other revealed a religious and philosophical problem. In spite of the many translators’ hard work, the problem was a linguistic one of ideology and theology.

Soon public attention turned to the political debates about Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein by September.

Understandable as such pressing international concerns are, they too relate to the very same issues of development and even to our attitudes to the environment, to ideology and theology.

Language does not describe reality: it interprets it. Moreover, it interprets it within world-views, which are created by language and condition how we think and direct how we live. Politicians of the economically advanced nations were seeking to sustain our present "advanced" (or "Western" life-style and our global were arguing that we need to sustain our environment while extending health and economic benefits to underdeveloped nations. From that environmental commitment they were hoping both that developed nations would recognise the need to change Western lifestyle and reduce the global transportation of goods and that underdeveloped nations would not accept current ideas of what "developed" is taken to be. The problem, then, is of worldviews and priorities, not simply the failure of political will or lack of affordable technology.

The suffragettes and other early movements for women’s emancipation sought equality with men, but the feminist movement soon realised that for women’s position to change society needed a revision of our languages, to change our ways of thinking and our attitudes. This went far beyond "politically correct" language: it challenged and overthrew a whole way of thinking; from the god we had market economic system, and from that worshipped, the way we had thought, to position were looking to extend heath and economic how we shared employment, housework and childcare. benefits to underdeveloped nations, while limiting the It was a revision of relationships and lifestyles, of environmental impact of development. Developmental spirituality and theology. Similarly, environmentalists charities and leaders of underdeveloped nations were have recognised that we can neither simply substitute aware of the political situation of underdeveloped solar panels and wind turbines for gas and nuclear countries and, while wanting to extend heath and power, as we earlier substituted gas and nuclear fuel for economic benefits, were questioning whether a global coal and oil, nor can we simply fit catalytic converters to 3 Sof 56 November 2002 cars and develop lower sulphur fuel so as to extend our current energy use. We need to rethink again our social and personal lifestyle, our use of roads and consumption of produce transported across the globe, our use of chemical pesticides and slug poisons in farming and in the garden. This requires another extensive and ethical revision of our spiritualities, theologies, and political ideologies that will call into question all our relationships, between peoples and places. And this is why military intervention in other nations is a related theological issue: not simply for the morals of a just war, but for the possibilities of a just peace.

Only a new ideology or new religious consciousness will change the present environmental and international situation. Yet the green movement is a growing movement, green political parties are growing political parties, and environmental spiritualities have been emerging in the "developed" countries, with developments in Western and Christian thinking by Teilhard de Chardin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Only a new ideology or new religious consciousness will change the present environmental and international situation nuclear bases or in treetops in the paths of road building programmes are seen to be a costly public nuisance.

Those who try to live in sustainable eco-village communes find opposition from local authorities for using new building styles and materials. And academic writers, exploring new and imaginative concepts that could offer creative and helpful theories, are not (yet) taken seriously by peers in academia, though the idea of an interpersonal consciousness or such models of earth as a living organism (Gaia) might just possibly be as revolutionary a myth as Freud’s idea of the unconscious and of the dynamics of desires and drives within an individual. But a change of our attitudes regarding the environment and our life-style is urgent, such pioneers are needed, and the argument must ultimately be won, for the sake of the poor of the earth.

Only when our idea of what it is for a society to be "developed" has been changed and a new world-view has emerged, will politicians be arguing for the same things as environmentalists and developmental charities. For the ground to be laid for significant advance at the next World Summit, religious practitioners as well as theological and philosophical theorists will need to work with developmental charities, environmentalists and political parties to develop the emerging eco-friendly worldview of sustainable development. The Sea of Faith networks in the UK and overseas may be comparatively small at just a few thousand Fox, Jiirgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. There has also been a discovery of older traditions such as those of Native American religions or British earthcentred Wicca; the Christian heterodoxy of Meister Eckhart; and the Asian systems of Jain and Taoist thought.

The pioneers of new thinking are understandably thought to be odd by others and find themselves sidelined by conservative thought. Nietzsche’s ideas found little acceptance among his contemporaries and his ‘revaluation of all values’ did not come in his day, but it later arrived and is still taking place. Freudian psychology once looked like thermodynamic psychobabble to academics (such as Althusser), but the general outlook of psychology became accepted: it has changed how we view ourselves and is now a part of many academic disciplines. Feminists were mocked for their zeal in "burning bras" and for what was once thought to be excessive political correctness, but the arguments were ultimately compelling and so our ways of thinking, of living and of relating to each other is changing. Facing such ridicule or rejection is the lot of pioneers of new ideas, but thank the gods for those pioneers and their revolutionary ideas!

Those who explore pagan ritual the native spiritualities today may well fear ridicule, hence the desire to do so unobserved. Those who protest at So 56 November 2002 4 people in all, but by networking with other radical groups (such as GreenSpirit and others in the ‘Roundtable’) and organizations we could offer an important theological contribution to this environmental re-evaluation of values.