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Archbishop -
Environment is "an issue of justice"
The Ebor Lectures for 2008-09 examine the roots and causes of this global emergency from a variety of perspectives andlook at the implications of the crisis for future sustainable living on the planet. For further
information on the Ebor Lecture
Series: www.yorksj.ac.uk/eborlectures Full text of the Archbishop’s
lecture is below: Renewing the Face if the Earth: Human Responsibility and the Environment Some modern philosophers have spoken about the human face as the most potent sign of what it is that we can’t master or exhaust in the life of a human other – a sign of the claim upon us of the other, the depths we can’t sound but must respect. And while it is of course so ancient a metaphor to talk about the ‘face’ of the earth that we barely notice any longer that it is a metaphor, it does no harm to let some of these associations find their way into our thinking; because such associations resonate so strongly with a fundamental biblical insight into the nature of our relationship with the world we inhabit. ‘The earth is the Lord’s’, says the twenty fourth psalm. In its context, this is primarily an assertion of God’s glory and overall sovereignty. And it affirms a relation between God and the world that is independent of what we as human beings think about the world or do to the world. The world is in the hands of another. The earth we inhabit is more than we can get hold of in any one moment or even in the sum total of all the moments we spend with it. Its destiny is not bound only to human destiny, its story is not exhausted by the history of our particular culture or technology, or even by the history of the entire human race. We can’t as humans oblige the environment to follow our agenda in all things, however much we can bend certain natural forces to our will; we can’t control the weather system or the succession of the seasons. The world turns, and the tides move at the drawing of the moon. Human force is incapable of changing any of this. What is before me is a network of relations and interconnections in which the relation to me, or even to us collectively as human beings, is very far from the whole story. I may ignore this, but only at the cost of disaster. And it would be dangerously illusory to imagine that this material environment will adjust itself at all costs so as to maintain our relationship to it. If it is more than us and our relation with it, it can survive us; we are dispensable. But the earth remains the Lord’s.
And this language is used still more
pointedly in a passage like Leviticus 25.23: we are foreign and
temporary tenants on a soil that belongs to the Lord. We can
never possess the
land in which we live, so as to do what we like with it. In a
brilliant recent monograph, the American Old Testament scholar, Ellen
Davis, points out that the twenty fifth chapter of Leviticus is in fact
a sustained argument about enslavement and alienation in a number of
interconnected contexts. The people and the land alike belong
to God – so that ‘ownership’ of a person
within God’s chosen community is anomalous in a similar way
to ownership of the land. When the Israelite loses family
property, he must live alongside members of his family as if he were a
resident alien (25.35); but the reader is reminded that in relation to
God, the entire community, settled by God of his own gratuitous gift in
the A primary and defining relation: this is the
core of a biblical ethic of responsibility for the
environment. To understand that we and our environment are
alike in the hands of God, so that neither can be possessed absolutely,
is to see that the mysteriousness of the interior life of another
person and the uncontrollable difference and resistance of the material
world are connected. Both demand that we do not regard
relationships centred upon us,
upon our individual or group agendas, as the determining factor in how
we approach persons or things. If, as this whole section of
Leviticus assumes, God’s people are called to reflect what
God is like, to make God’s holiness visible, then just or
good action is action which reflects God’s purpose of liberating persons
and environment from possession and the exploitation that comes from it
– liberating them in order that their ‘primary and
defining relation’ may be realised. Just action,
towards people and environment, is letting created reality, both human
and non-human, stand before God unhindered by attempts to control and
dominate. II It is a rather different reading of the
biblical tradition to that often (lazily) assumed to be the orthodoxy
of Judaeo-Christian belief. We hear regularly that this
tradition authorises the exploitation of the earth through the language
in Genesis about ‘having dominion’ over the
non-human creation. As has been argued elsewhere, this is a
very clumsy reading of what Genesis actually says; but set alongside
the Levitical code and (as Ellen Davis argues) many other aspects of
the theology of Jewish Scripture, the malign interpretation that has
latterly been taken for granted by critics of Judaism and Christianity
appears profoundly mistaken. But what remains to be teased
out is more about the nature of the human calling to further the
‘redemption’ of persons and world. If
liberating action is allowing things and persons to stand before God
free from claims to possession, is the responsibility of human agents
only to stand back and let natural processes unfold? In Genesis, humanity is given the task of
‘cultivating’ the garden of Eden: we are not left
simply to observe or stand back, but are endowed with the
responsibility to preserve and direct the powers of nature.
In this process, we become more fully and joyfully who and what we are
– as And all of this suggests some definitions of
what unintelligent and ungodly relation with the environment looks
like. It is partial: that is, it refuses to see or understand
that what can be grasped about natural processes is likely to be only
one dimension of interrelations far more complex than we can
gauge. It focuses on aspects of the environment that can be
comparatively easily manipulated for human advantage and ignores
inconvenient questions about what less obvious connections are being
violated. It is indifferent, for example, to the way in which
biodiversity is part of the self-balancing system of the world we
inhabit. It is impatient: it seeks returns on labour that are
prompt and low-cost, without consideration of long-term
effects. It avoids or denies the basic truth that the
environment as a material system is finite and cannot indefinitely
regenerate itself in ways that will simply fulfil human needs or
wants. And when such unintelligent and ungodly relation
prevails, the risks should be obvious. We discover too late
that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is
essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or
we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form,
animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or
neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near
the end of supplies – of fossil-fuels for example –
on which we have built immense structures of routine
expectation. Increasingly, we have to face the possibility
not only of the now familiar problems of climate change, bad enough as
these are, but of a whole range of ‘doomsday’
prospects. Martin Rees’s 2003 book, Our Final Century,
outlined some of these, noting also that the technology which in the
hands of benign agents is assumed to be working for the good of
humanity is the same technology which, universally available on the
internet, can enable ‘bio-terror’, the threat to
release pathogens against a population. This feels like an
ultimate reversal of the relation between humanity and environment
envisaged in the religious vision – the material
world’s processes deliberately harnessed to bring about
domination by violence; though, when you think about it, it is only a
projection of the existing history of military technology. A.S.Byatt’s novel The
Biographer’s Tale tells
the story – or rather a set of interconnected stories
– of a writer engaging with the literary remains of a diverse
collection of people, including Linnaeus, the great Swedish
botanist. Late in the book (pp.243-4), Fulla, a Swedish
entomologist, holds forth to the narrator and his friends about the
varieties of devastation the world faces because of our ignorance of
insect life, specifically the life of bees. ‘She
told fearful tales of possible lurches in the population of pollinators
(including those of the crops we depend on for our own
lives). Tales of the destruction of the habitats by humans,
and of benign and necessary insects, birds, bats and other creatures,
by crop-spraying and road-building…Of the need to find other
(often better) pollinators, in a world where they are being
extinguished swiftly and silently. Of the fact that there are
only thirty-nine qualified bee taxonomists in the world, whose average
age is sixty…Of population problems, and feeding the world,
and sesbania, a leguminous crop which could both hold back
desertification, because it binds soil, and feed the starving, but for
the fact that no one has studied its pollinators or their abundance or
deficiency, or their habits, in sufficient detail.’
It is a potent catalogue of unintelligence. Earlier in the book (p.205), Fulla has said
that ‘We are an animal that needs to use its intelligence to
mitigate the effects of its intelligence on the other
creatures’ – a notable definition in the
contemporary context of what the Levitical call to redemption might
mean. We cannot but use
our intelligence in our world, and we are bound to use it, as
Fulla’s examples suggest, to supply need, to avoid famine and
suffering. If the Christian vision outlined by Aquinas is
truthful, intelligence is an aspect of sharing in God’s Ecological questions are increasingly being
defined as issues of justice; climate change has been characterised as
a matter of justice both to those who now have no part in
decision-making at the global level yet bear the heaviest burdens as a
consequence of the irresponsibility of wealthier nations, and to those
who will succeed us on this planet – justice to our children
and grandchildren (this is spelled out clearly in Paula
Clifford’s new book, Angels with
Trumpets. The Church in a Time of Global Warming).
So the major issue we need to keep in view is how much injustice is let
loose by any given set of economic or manufacturing
practices. We can’t easily set out a
straightforward code that will tell us precisely when and where we step
across the line into the unintelligence and ungodliness I have
sketched. But we can at least see that the question is asked,
and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of
manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence
– and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably
bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee
that the world we live in will ‘tolerate’ us
indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its
constraints. Is this – as some would claim
– a failure to trust God, who has promised faithfulness to
what he has made? I think that to suggest that God might
intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as
unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the
results of our individual folly or sin. This is not a
creation in which there are no real risks; our faith has always held
that the inexhaustible love of God cannot compel justice or virtue; we
are capable of doing immeasurable damage to ourselves as individuals,
and it seems clear that we have the same terrible freedom as a human
race. God’s faithfulness stands, assuring us that
even in the most appalling disaster love will not let us go; but it
will not be a safety net that guarantees a happy ending in this
world. Any religious language that implies this is making a
nonsense of the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament and the
urgency of the preaching of Jesus. But to say this is also to be reminded of
the fact that intelligence is given
to us; we are capable of changing our situation – and, as
A.S.Byatt’s character puts it, using our intelligence to
limit the ruinous effect of our intelligence. If we can
change things so appallingly for the worse, it is possible to change
them for the better also. But, in Christian terms, this needs
a radical change of heart, a conversion; it needs another kind of
‘redemption’, which frees us from the trap of an
egotism that obscures judgement. Intelligence in regard to
the big picture of our world is no neutral thing, no simple natural
capacity of reasoning; it needs grace to escape from the distortions of
pride and acquisitiveness. One of the things we as Christians
ought to be saying in the context of the ecological debate is that
human reasoning in its proper and fullest sense requires an awareness
of our participation in the material processes of the world and thus a
sense of its own involvement in what it cannot finally
master. Being rational is not a wholly detached capacity,
examining the phenomena of the world from a distance, but a set of
skills for finding our way around in the physical
world. III The ecological crisis challenges us to be
reasonable. Put like that, it sounds banal; but given the
level of irrationality around the question, it is well worth saying,
especially if we are clear about the roots of reasoning in these
‘skills’ of negotiating the world of material
objects. I don’t intend to discuss in detail the
rhetoric of those who deny the reality of climate change, except to say
that rhetoric (as King Canute demonstrated) does not turn back rising
waters. If you live in Bangladesh or Tuvalu, scepticism about
global warming is precisely the opposite of reasonable:
‘negotiating’ this environment means recognising
the fact of rising sea levels; and understanding what is happening
necessarily involves recognising how rising temperatures affect sea
levels. It is possible to argue about the exact degree to
which human intervention is responsible for these phenomena (though it
would be a quite remarkable coincidence if massively increased levels
of carbon emissions merely happened to
accompany a routine cyclical change in global temperatures, given the
obvious explanatory force of the presence of these emissions), but it
is not possible rationally to deny what the inhabitants of low-lying
territories in the world routinely face as the most imminent threat to
their lives and livelihoods. And what the perspective of faith
– in particular of Christian faith – brings to this
discussion is the insight that we are not and don’t have to
be God. For us to be reasonable and free and responsible is
for us to live in awareness of our limits and dependence. It
is no lessening of our dignity as humans, let alone our rationality and
liberty as humans, if we exercise these ‘godlike’
gifts in the context of bodies that are fragile and mortal and a world
that we do not completely control. A couple of weeks ago, I
suggested that the current financial crisis had more to do with pride
than with greed – understanding pride as the attempt to
forget or obliterate our sense of living within limits and lacking
total control. Intelligent life in these circumstances is not
the triumphant imposition of human will upon a defeated natural order,
but the reasoned discovery of how we live in such a way as not to
destroy a balance in the natural order which we sense rather than fully
grasp. It is to turn away from denial – from all
those denials of our finite condition that were summed up many years
since in a famous book by Ernst Becker,The Denial of Death,
in which he identified the basic pathology of the human mind as the
fantasy of being ‘self-created.’ Such denial is not properly understood as
deliberate refusal of the truth; it is in large part a consequence of
the perceived complexity of the global situation, a complexity that
produces both paralysis in some areas and a stubborn adherence to
failed or outdated paradigms. Jonathon Porritt, in his
magisterial essay on Capitalism as if the
World Matters,
ascribes the ‘continuing, utterly perverse denial on the part
of politicians’ to a failure to grasp that much of the very
complexity which makes people stick to policies they think they
understand is itself the result of ‘the dominant paradigm of
progress through exponential economic growth’
(p.215). Unfortunately, he goes on, too few politicians who have grasped
the issue have worked out carefully enough what ‘transitional
strategies’ would be possible for the reimagining of a
broadly capitalist practice (i.e an economic practice that values risk
and innovation and enables increased collective wealth through
trade) that was not systematically disastrous for the
environment. His book attempts to offer some starting points
for such work – noting, soberly, that denial of a different
kind afflicts many Green movements, whose campaigning style allows them
to be dismissed or at best patronised by actual
decision-makers. Among the strategies discussed is the
crucial call to alter the way in which we calculate cost and profit so
as to include some sort of monetary valuation of the depletion of
natural capital and also some way of assessing impacts on individual
and social well-being. One consequence of taking this
seriously would be one or another form of carbon taxation. In
the same way, more positively, we need ways of redefining business
excellence in terms of sustainability and deliberate encouragement of
low-carbon technologies (ch.14). An economic world in which
environmental responsibility was rewarded, was assumed to be a routine
aspect of practice that was both ethically defensible and profitable,
would have a very different flavour from what we have generally seen
for most of the last couple of centuries. And it is also an
area in which the pressure of the ‘ordinary’
consumer can make a perceptible difference. More broadly,
Porritt rightly underlines the close connection of all this with what
we ought to be saying about ‘political
virtue’. We must find ways of opening up a proper
discussion of how to restore a sustainable democratic politics in a
world where unbridled economic liberalism has in many contexts eroded
the authority of elected governments and led some to believe that there
is no alternative to current global capitalism but economies of the
most static and protectionist kind. All these proposals illustrate what an intelligent response
to the environmental crisis might look like. Porritt is clear
that this needs grounding in carefully defined common values and in the
renewal of civil society through the articulating and promoting of such
values – including the recognition of the interdependence of
all things and of the equal significance of diverse kinds of
‘capital’ – social and human as much as
material or natural (see p.293 for a summary of the argument of Part II
of his book). In other words, intelligence comes to life when
a kind of empathy and imagination is stirred by a new vision of things:
intelligence alone does not generate new vision, and bare argument does
not on the whole change things; but vision displayed in new forms of
human life and engagement can renew intelligence in the sense I have
been giving to the word. And this is where the significance
of the perspectives of faith is most obvious. IV Renewing the face of the earth, then, is an
enterprise not of imposing some private human vision on a passive
nature but of living in such a way as to bring more clearly to light
the interconnectedness of all things and their dependence on what we
cannot finally master or understand. This certainly involves acreative engagement
with nature, seeking to work with those natural powers whose working
gives us joy, as All this echoes what Which is why Christians are bound to set all
this discussion in the context of that divine practice which decisively
redeems humankind. God restores relationship with himself
through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus: he shows his face to
us and – as The contemporary Greek theologian, Christos
Yannaras, has developed a rich and complex metaphysics of relation,
stressing that Christian theology sees the human person as purely
abstract if cut off from relation with God and others and the
material world. He diagnoses the malaise of modern Western
society (in politics, philosophy, art and religion) very much in terms
of a loss of relation and what goes with it, a loss of the sense of
vocation to a sort of ‘artistic’ transformation of
the world. Technology, Yannaras argues, is toxic when it
forgets this artistic and transformational dimension – that
is (in the terms I’ve been using here) when it loses its
proper human intelligence. But it is a particular image used
by Yannaras that perhaps expresses most simply what a Christian account
of responsibility in our environment comes down to. In his
book of meditations, Variations on the Song of
Songs,
he speaks of how love compels you to see things differently –
to love ‘the landscapes we have looked at
together.’ And so if we fall in love with God, even
fleetingly, all the sense impressions of this world become part of such
a common ‘landscape’ (p.67). We love what
we see together with God; and – as I have argued before
– if God sees the world he has made as ‘very
good’, I must begin to see it with his eyes and so to sense
in it the promise of his beauty. It becomes, in
Yannaras’s vocabulary, ‘a gift of erotic
joy’ – an encounter with something that generates
desire beyond utterance or final fulfilment. Now it may be a long way from the
technicalities of recalculating economic gains in terms of
environmental cost to the experience of ‘erotic
joy’ in relation to God. But the distinctive
Christian approach to responsibility for our environment has somehow to
hold these two languages together. Finally, our care for the
world we inhabit is not simply a duty laid upon us but a dimension of
life made whole: a redeeming activity grounded in the character of our
own redemption, a revelation of the true ‘face’ of
creation as we ourselves undergo the uncovering of our own human face
before God. Going back to the root meaning of the Hebrew
word, what we’re asked to undertake is in fact a conversion
– a turning – towards the
truth: towards the God who is eternally active and giving in ways
beyond our concepts, towards the hidden depths of who we ourselves are
– and thus towards the face of the earth, seeing it freshly
in its unfathomable interrelatedness. As Ps 104 (vv 29-30)
has it, when God hides his face, creation is locked in fear and slips
towards death; when he breathes on creation (when he ‘sends
his spirit’), creation happens all over again, and the face
of the earth is renewed. That turning of the Spirit towards
the earth is the movement that carries our love and intelligence in the
same direction, so that we can properly make answer for, be responsible
for, our
world. © Rowan Williams
About the Ebor Lecture Series: Ebor Lectures on Theology & Public
Life The Ebor
Lectures are a response to the
growing need for theology to interact with public issues in
contemporary society. Public theology
is about engaging in
dialogue with a range of communities on issues wider than narrowly
defined religiousmatters. This
series of lectures aims to
promote public conversation and to contribute to the formation of
personaldecisions and collective
policy-making in
economic, political and social spheres. It is also an ecumenical
project that seeks toexchange
insights between academic and
religious traditions and to build bridges between church and other
religious groups. The lectures
relate faith to public concerns
including politics, economics, contemporary culture, religion and
spirituality,society and
globalisation, local and global
Christianity. Theme for the
2008-09 lectures: The
Challenge of Climate Change: Eco-crisis, Sustainable Livingand the Future of the Planet.The reality of climate change, and the
challenges it presents to sustainable living, is perhaps the key issue
facing humanity atpresent. The
developing ecological crisis
raises profound questions for theology, religious traditions, politics
and economics.The Ebor Lectures for
2008-09 examine the
roots and causes of this global emergency from a variety of
perspectives andlook at the
implications of the crisis for
future sustainable living on the planet. For
further information on the Ebor Lecture
Series: www.yorksj.ac.uk/eborlectures
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