The biggest battleground for conservationists remains the church, or moreso the hearts of churchgoers. In my daily experience, Christians are the most often to espouse a "Drill Here! Drill Now, Baby!" ideology, that puts human-centered desires (oil and the accoutrements of modern civilization) before the needs of natural systems that have sustained both human and non-human generations for millenia.
Here is an example that lays the case plain for all to see. According to this guy, the living Earth is the dominion of Satan, and Jesus came to save souls, not the planet. So curse, rape, pillage, destroy as much as you can my friends, so long as you pray and are faithful, you'll inherit a heaven free of ruin! How neat! How nifty! A religion to encourage the ongoing infantilization of whole leagues of people! "Don't worry, Daddy will come and pick up this mess for you . . ."
As it is now the Christmas Season and there's a lot of babble about remembering, as one billboard put it, "the first 6 letters of Christmas," I thought I'd share this letter and address to all the Christians out there who share with me the belief that "God Is Love."
P.S. The quote is from Dave Foreman's excellent Confessions of an Eco-Warrior.
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Dear Anonymous Christian,
After our conversation the other day, I have been mulling over some of the reasons why, even in a God-centered Universe, defending wild places and protecting habitat for "wild life" would be within the purview of Christian service.
I think to Jesus's words about the "least of these" and how his defense of the voiceless among men finds a suitable corollary in wild places and wild creatures. Is "environmentalism" (though I honestly hate the term, and will touch on that more later) a pantheistic cult to put Earth-worship at the center of our lives, and exalt man's place in the universe above all things God-directed? Or is it instead an attempt to force an unredeemably anthropocentric (that is, man-centered) culture to come to terms with the physical and spiritual consequences of our civilized myopia? And is such an attempt not somehow allied in its very biocentricity with the creative force at the center of all life, with the Creator himself?
I believe I need more scripture to back up my argument. But I want to make clear first off that what is often touted in the media as "environmentalism"--I think of Glenn Beck or other Fox Newscastsers and their depiction of "environmentalist wackos"--is really more truly called "reform environmentalism," in that it seeks to reform the over-arching society to include a little bit of regard and respect for the sanctity of places where man does not dwell. This environmentalism does not seek to do anything to over-turn the man-nature dichotomy that has arisen during the 2,000 year reign of Christian civilization. It does not question the fundamental right of men to manipulate their world as they see fit, for the sake of enhancing their comfort, convenience, or creative capacity, rivers, mountains, oceans, deserts be damned.
What role do wild places play in the Book of Books? Often we read of prophets, seers, and the Savior himself heading out "into the wilderness" to seek insight into the One True God. Does this mean that God is the Trees? Of course not! But, does this mean that the Spirit dwelleth most potently where man dwelleth not? Indeed. That means the Spirit would much rather speak to one, move one, arouse one to faith-based action when standing by an untainted river than sitting before the TV.
In a mere 200 years we have managed to subdue this continent to the will and whim of European notions of Historical Progress. 2 million dams have been erected on rivers that only knew the barriers of fallen ancient trees and beaver houses. Here is a good tale to relate to our children, which reminds one of the tale of the Garden of Eden, and yet was here, on this continent, not more than 4 or 5 generations ago:
"Only 150 years ago, the Great Plains were a vast, waving sea of grass stretching from the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico to the Boreal Forest of Canada, from the oak-hickory forests of the Ozarks to the Rocky Mountains. Bison blanketed the plains--it has been estimated that 60 million of the huge, shaggy beasts moved across teh grassy ocean in seasonal migrations. Throngs of Pronghorn and Elk also filled this Pleistocene landscape. Packs of Grey Wolves and numerous Grizzly Bears followed the tremendous herds.
"In 1830, John James Audobon sat on the banks of the Ohio River for three days as a single flock of Passenger Pigeons darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. He estimated there were several billion birds in that horde.
"At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, an estimated 100,000 Grizzly Bears roamed the western half of what is now the United States. The howl of the wolf was ubiquitous. The California Condor sailed the sky from the Pacific Coast to the Great Plains. Salmon and sturgeon populated the rivers. Ocelots, Jaguars, and Jaguarundis prowled the Texas brush and the Southwestern mountains and mesas. Bighorn Sheep ranged the mountains of the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Southwest, and the Pacific Coast. Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and Carolina Parakeets filled the steamy forests of the South. The land was alive.
"East of the Mississippi, giant Tulip Poplars, American Chestnuts, oaks, hickories, and other trees formed the most diverse temperate deciduous forests in the world. In New England, White Pines grew to heights rivalling the Brobdignagian conifers of the far West. On the Pacific Coast, redwood, hemlock, Douglas-fir, spruce, cedar, fir, and pine formed the grandest forest on Earth.
"In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall Grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Short Grass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinatti zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. The only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than 1,000 Grizzlies remain. The last twenty-five condors are in zoos. Except in Northern Minnesota and in Montana's Glacier National Park, Gray Wolves are known merely as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and perhaps the Mexican borders. Four percent of the Coast Redwood forest remains, and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn, and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other "varmints." Dams choke most of the continent's rivers and streams.
"Nonetheless, wildness and natural diversity remain. There are a few scattered grasslands ungrazed, stretches of free-flowing river, thousand year-old forests, Eastern woodlands growing back to forest and reclaiming past roads, Grizzlies and wolves and lions and Wolverines and Bighorn and Moose roaming the backcountry; hundreds of square miles that have never known the imprint of a tire, the bite of a drill, the rip of a 'dozer, the cut of a saw, the smell of gasoline.
"These are places that hold North America together, that contain the genetic information of life, that represent the eye of sanity in a whirlwind of madness."
Now I realize that was quite a list of the alterations that have been made to the North American landscape since the arrival of European Culture and European Syphilization. But I think consciousness of the vast transformations (deformations) our culture has exacted on the natural landscape is sorely lacking among "modern" Americans. How many actually remember the Passenger Pigeon? Billions that blotted out the light of the sun for days! What a living monument to the power and abundance of the Creator! And with what impunity did we trap, club, net, shoot them for the sake of their feathers that made a neat addition to hats for fashionable women in New York, Paris, London, Milan!
Of course to everyone living through these years, this march of destruction was seen as "Progress." But I have been puzzling for days about how I could convey to the lot of modern Christians our deep-seated responsibility as believers to care and provide for these lesser denizens of the Earth. I think of Noah, who was enjoined by God with the task of saving two of every living creature for protection from the flood. God didn't save just man! And this lends itself to the interpretation that the non-human means something to him, and perhaps should mean a lot more to us. If you accept the timeline of science, it's believed that we are now living through the 6th largest extinction event in the history of this planet . . . Only this time, and for the first time ever, the annihilation is not at the hands of a super-volcano or a meteor, but of another species, humanity itself!
Having been born as a generation to a world paved over and dammed, a world depleted of large predators and thousand-year-old trees, it's easy for us younger ones to feel a deep sense of loss, of disenfranchisement, of our experience of life on Planet Earth. Although a lot of conservationists tout the need to preserve bio-diversity in order to keep evolution going, I moreso see it as a matter of divine respect--here we have inherited a planet with billions of creatures, each one designed by God, only to eliminate their habitats, hunt, trap, kill them, or consign them to viewing cages at the zoo? Surely "Compassion" demands more of us, and Love can surely encompass more than a Love of Man and his technological inventions. Also, the life-support systems on Planet Earth are very intricate, stunningly so, and to dismantle them systematically seems foolish. The Colorado river no longer reaches the Ocean; the Gulf of Mexico has a 10,000 square mile "dead zone" (Where NOTHING lives) due to chemical run-off from the Mississippi. Am I to think that the Good Father in Heaven, who sculpted the Colorado, who filled the Gulf of Mexico with diverse sea and air life, feels no compunction at Man's technology hazarding these living systems to a point of veritable (and terrible) collapse?
It's not really about paper towels, though I loved your joke the other day. It is more deeply a spiritual battle that is waging on the physical plane. What is humanity's relationship to the non-human? Is it one of respect? Benevolence? Utility? Disregard? Ambivalence? Malice? What value do we accord ancient groves of 300 ft. tall trees? Purely economic? Is there spiritual insight to be gained from studying the subtle intricacies of the Creator's very own handiwork? Or are we consigned to studying God from the pages of books and under the fluorescent lights of modern church buildings?
I have searched my soul for the answer. I have prayed, and I have wandered, and a kind of conclusion has come to me. There is good work to be done for the sake of the More Than Man. Without a world beyond man, how are the young today ever to envision a World Beyond Man?
Too often these reform environmentalists find their one issue, be it paper towels, global warming, oil drilling, what have you. But often that allows the media to obfuscate the real point, which is what value do we accord to wild, uninhabited, unutilized wild places? Is the Wild where we can truly come closer to the silence needed to hear the voice of the creator? To witness, in living metaphor, the genius of his love? I believe so. But as long as people ignore this burning question, we will continue to elevate man as the Lord of Earth, and the Determiner of his Own Destiny, and we will have to witness the coming fall from this great technological tower of Babel.
For now, I remain allied with truth, with the spirit, and with the wild. Something tells me its the right thing to do. In the same way Noah was ridiculed, I'll take the conceited admonitions of other believers, skeptics of a dangerous truth. What else can I do?
I am sending this without edits, and in love. God Bless you all have a Merry Christmas!
Love,
Hud
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