Sermon
As you may remember from last week's eco-fantasy, there was a person from Detroit who had bought a parcel of land in Charlotte County, and upon inspecting it for the first time, discovered on said property a woman espousing the principles of deep ecology and trying to convince him to turn the land over to the Nature Conservancy to be kept perpetually wild so as to protect a rare species of butterfly.
To refresh your memory, the first principles of deep ecology are:
How many of you think you might hear these points outlined in a speech by Pat Buchanan? Bob Dole? Steve Forbes? Alan Keyes or Lamar Alexander? While I was sick last week, I watched CSPAN and a lot of the New Hampshire Primary stump speeches. None of the Republican candidates were worrying much about snail darters and spotted owls. Deep ecological thinking is anything but mainstream in our current political climate, as the only currency of political exchange these days seems to be reducing government, increasing jobs and economic growth and raising our morals.
This may, in part, be due to the rise of the Christian Coalition and their regressive social agenda. The Fundamentalist Christianity of today is focused on escape from this world, not how to make it fruitful for future generations. For them the world is either sinful or, at best, just a necessary instrument of salvation. We need not worry about the environment, as God is ultimately in control and will redeem his handiwork when and if he so chooses. We should be focusing on our own salvation, not the salvation of the planet. Our time on this world is only temporary, but the life after death, eternal.
This critique isn't going to wash with many UU's but a slightly different version of it may. Many of us choose to put our own well- being and spiritual growth at a higher priority than the well-being of our planet or our neighbor. Many participate in the dualistic view that the concerns of the ecosystem are remote from us. An individualistic U.U. philosophy allows one to delude oneself into thinking our bodies are separable from the biosphere and society, our bodies separable from our minds, and our minds from the misery of this world. Deep ecology's serious challenge to personal freedom doesn't mesh easily with the individualistic vision of Unitarian Universalism.
We have long put the human person at the top of the value pyramid. Our purposes and principles focus on the inherent worth and dignity of every person (not life form or being). Our purposes and principles are anthropocentric, centered on human needs and aspirations. We do mention respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part but this respect is colored by distance and fear. Webs are a dangerous metaphor after all -- they have spiders in them!
The biocentric egalitarianism of deep ecology, on the other hand, is accused of being misanthropic, anti-people, fearful and distrustful. Certainly comments by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, an environmental eco-terrorist organization, about the benefits to the planet of the AIDS virus thinning the human herd don't sound very friendly. This organization drives metal spikes into old-growth redwood trees to destroy the blades of chain saws and saw mills. These spikes can also become quite dangerous if they shatter in the cutting process, and people can get hurt.
The objection here is that human beings are demoted in value to just another species competing for food and shelter. Our status at the top of the food chain and our power over the environment is to be abandoned for the good of the whole. The native intelligence of the eco-system is postulated to be much greater than our wisdom to strike a harmonious balance between different competing species. We should reduce our demands because we are smart enough to understand the consequences of our actions.
The major problem with this is just who determines what is the appropriate role for human beings in the ecosystem? There is a dimension of coercion which enters the picture to which many object. If we can't all have 400-horsepower speedboats, who does get them? If our population becomes too large for Charlotte County by some environmental yardstick, who decides who can move here, who must leave and who may stay? Who determines if I can plow up my backyard and can cut down a tree? It must either come from the inside, from a sense of environmental altruism or from outside by those dreaded burdensome government regulations the Republican candidates for president complain about constantly. As we know from the tangled web of regulations we already have, they may end up being unfair as well.
Deep ecologists will dodge these coercion questions by saying that a change of heart is needed in the human race, the same spiritual shift that moves the deep ecologist to want to change eco-destructive habits. Certainly our process of democratic government would be much more pleasant if we could all just get along better. But the reality of being a creature of any kind is having competing desires which may not be mutually compatible. The lion's hunger is not compatible with the gazelle's desire for peaceful grazing. Climbing vines have no concern for the host they choke from the light. The spider sheds no tears for the fly caught in its web. Human desire and aversion show no sign of being tamed anytime soon, especially here in this country where stimulating desire is raised to a cultural icon by advertisers.
This is an appropriate place to insert the critique of deep ecology by the social ecologists led by Murray Bookchin. In the late 80's, Bookchin began to distance himself from the deep ecologist view because he felt it was a misanthropic departure from the real ecological villains: capitalism, the maldistribution of wealth and our classist society. As he puts it:
"They are barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones and outright social reactionaries who offer a vague, formless often self contradictory and invertebrate [movement] and a kind of crude eco-brutalism similar to Hitler's. Deep ecologists feed on human disasters, suffering and misery…[and are guilty of thinking which]…legitimates extremely regressive, primitivistic and even highly reactionary notions.[2]
Strong language with perhaps more heat than light, but it does join with the eco-feminist critique which points out that not enough analysis is done by deep ecology of the social forces at work in the destruction of the biosphere. Certainly the waste inherent in capitalism is an important factor for consideration but communism and socialism are hardly immune from ecocide as we have seen with the end of the cold war. The valuing of people as a collective rather than individuals still doesn't change the anthropocentric view into an ecocentric view.
The platform the social ecologists reject as genocidal is the reduction in world population. Typically when we read this we think of the teeming masses in underdeveloped parts of the world. But measured in ecological impact, the impact of one American child is equivalent to the impact of maybe 50 babies in Bangladesh, Namibia or Pakistan over the course of their lifetimes. Each American consumes an enormous amount of resources directly and indirectly. If there is a place that needs to depopulate for the good of the ecosystem, it is America first. The politics of limiting family size are difficult at best, even in a socially conformist nation like China. Evidence suggests educated and employed women have smaller families, so the solution to this one may be voluntary. What is unlikely to happen any time soon without coercion is the reduction of the world population to the levels deep ecologists hope for.
One of the biggest problems I've had with deep ecology is the celebration of the good old days when indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes covered a world which was a Garden of Eden overflowing with a cornucopia of abundance. These tribes are celebrated for their harmonious relationship with their environment and the spiritual world-view from which comes much of their meaning and satisfaction. A kind of wisdom is posited in these tribes which we supposedly have lost. Implied in the praise of indigenous peoples is the message that we should cast off our suits and ties, don a loincloth and return to the jungle. The villain of course is technology, the apple of knowledge, which ejects us again and again from the Garden.
First, many primitive tribes were not and still are not terribly wise in being ecocentric. Sam's rule is this: The good old days are rarely as good as we might wish they really were.
Riane Eisler (author of the Chalice and the Blade) is specific: "If we carefully examine both our past and present, we see that many peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often been blindly destructive of their environment. While many indigenous societies have a great reverence for nature, there are also both non-Western and Western peasant and nomadic cultures that have overgrazed and overcultivated land, decimated forests, and where population pressures have been severe, killed off animals needlessly and indifferently. And while there is much we can learn today from tribal cultures, it is important not to indiscriminately idealize all non-Western cultures…For clearly such tribal practices as cannibalism, torture, and female genital mutilation antedate modern times.[3]
Rene Dubos summarizes the available evidence, "All over the globe and at all times in the past, men have pillaged nature and disturbed the ecological equilibrium, usually out of ignorance, but also because they have always been more concerned with immediate advantages than with long-range goals".[4]
I think it is tragic for us to idealize the past. Yes, let us learn from it, but with our superior knowledge we can create a better understanding which integrates old and new. Ken Wilber makes this point colorfully:
My point is that it is one thing to remember and embrace and honor our roots; quite another to hack off our leaves and branches and celebrate that as the solution to leaf rot.[5]
This leads into my final critique of deep ecology: its anti-industrial and therefore anti-technological bias. As one who has spent a lifetime engaged with technology, I'm not quite ready to just toss it over the side of the boat.
There is no question that technology is complicit in the current rape of the environment. Without the machines, the forests couldn't be so easily leveled. Our use of internal combustion engines to generate power is driving global warming through the emission of carbon dioxide. The modern weapons of war take a high toll on our environment.
The critique of technology is myopic, though, if it doesn't also enumerate the many benefits of better food production, better health care, better methods of transportation and communication which have improved our lives. Imagine what old age would be like without the assortment of medicines which manage medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. The ability to replace a joint can greatly improve quality of life.
Technology is a tool no better or worse than the person who uses it. A shovel can be used for landscaping or as a weapon for murder. Factory automation can be used to improve the quality and productivity of workers' jobs or to replace people with machines. This was an area of concern for me as a former manufacturing engineer. One of the reasons I wanted to get out of the world of engineering was because I saw our technical ability growing much faster than our ethics to guide its wise use. Rather than using my abilities to advance technology, I thought a better use would be in the ethical domain as a minister working to see technology used to serve the well-being of people rather than exploit them. Technology such as is used in tracking animal and bird migrations or cleaning up oil spills can be part of the solution to reverse some of the damage we do and have done.
Deep ecology is also attempting to serve the well-being of the human and nonhuman alike by identifying what is of highest value and naming the threats to these values. The critique you have heard this morning is of some of the weaknesses of deep ecology's analysis and solutions, but not of its identification of the problems and assertion of values. Whether we are enamored with technology or not, diversity and richness remain high values of the ecosystem that should be cherished. The deep ecologists' concern for preservation of wilderness is an important value we too should respect. By valuing wilderness, we do not devalue people but rather elevate the value of the species which can't coexist with us as neighbors.
Everything that lives, yearns to continue to exist, create and procreate. The greater the richness and diversity of an ecosystem, the more it is able to find stability and harmony which affirms the whole system. Greater novelty is supported by richness and diversity. It is possible for human beings to live more harmoniously with the ecosystem and it is imperative we find ways to do this without a priori solutions. As much as possible, we must seek win-win solutions that allow us to share the planet with the rest of the species of plants, birds, fish and animals rather than selecting one as a winner and the other as the loser to be driven to extinction.
Is there a potential win-win solution for our retiree from Detroit? Perhaps he can set aside a section of the property (the swampy bit especially) to be kept wild with native plants that will shelter the butterfly in question. Perhaps several of the gopher tortoise's homes need not be taken and certainly the ones that are disturbed can be moved to another site and not killed. The home can be designed in a way to preserve the oaks, the slash pine and palmetto. The use of native landscaping can invite more butterflies to feed and breed.
The work we have done to accommodate the many native species on our grounds here can serve as an example to our community of our ability to co-habitate with the ecosystem. Charlie Miller and I have described our efforts in this regard in the chapter we wrote for our eco-book "Go Native with your Plants".
Well, now you've heard a case for and a case against deep ecology. It isn't the final answer to our ever-deepening ecological crisis, but it has some good ideas and asks deeper questions of us than previous eco-philosophies. Deep ecology is very young and bound to have further development which we can track in the future. Let us do with deep ecology what we do with every system of thought, take the good and leave the bad.
Most important, let the engagement with deep ecology challenge us deeply in how we interact with our environment on a daily basis, and move us toward more respect for and greater harmony with our ecosystem.
Closing Words
I close with the words of Grandon Harris:
Our honeymoon with the planet earth is over.
We must take our marriage
with the earth seriously.
We cannot divorce it, but it can divorce us!
Copyright (c) 1996 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.