A Thinking Reed

Category: Environment

  • HSUS for Obama-Biden

    Not that animal protection is likely to be high on the next President’s list of priorities, but, for what it’s worth, the Humane Society recently endorsed Obama-Biden. Interestingly, it seems this is the first time they’ve ever endorsed a presidential candidate (they routinely endorse congressional candidates), but were moved to this time in large part by the sheer awfulness of Sarah Palin’s record on animal and wildlife issues. Joe Biden, by contrast, appears to be a strong supporter of animal protection measures.

  • The Groaning of Creation 8: The ethics of the Ark

    Throughout this series we’ve seen two intertwining themes. First, death and suffering are necessary parts of the process–perhaps the only possible process–by which finite selves are brought into existence. Second, however, this process involves the (seemingly) permanent thwarting of many of those selves as well as the disappearance of entire ways of being (species). And humanity, in partnership with God’s redemptive purposes, has an obligation where possible to alleviate these side-effects of the evolutionary process.

    In the last post we saw how Southgate applies this insight to our practices of raising animals for food. Any system–like our current factory farming system–that permanently frustrates the abilities of billions of sentient creatures to live lives according to their kind perpetuates (and indeed exacerbates to a tremendous degree) the natural ills of creaturely frustration and suffering. As participants in God’s healing of creation, we should work to reform or abolish such systems.

    Next Southgate turns to the ethics of extinction, considering what role human beings have in preventing the disappearance of entire species. Most non controversially he contends that we are obliged to prevent the extinction of species threatened by human activity (anthropogenic extinction). But he goes beyond this with a confessedly “bold” proposal: “a sign of our liberty as children of God starting to set free the whole creation would be that human beings, through a blend of prudential wisdom and scientific ingenuity, cut the rate of natural extinction” (pp. 124-5, emphasis in the original).

    This intriguing suggestion is based on a heavily eschatological reading of natural history:

    […] the Resurrection of Christ inaugurates a new era of redemption, in which all creation is to be renewed. Extending this thought, I hold that the phase of evolution in which new possibilities are explored via competition and extinction is coming to an end, and it is to be superseded by the final phase in which new possibilities of reconciliation and self-transcendence among already existing species will be explored. The hymn in Colossians 1 stresses that this transformation is first and foremost the work of Christ. However, the enigmatic passage from Romans 8 that has informed this study implies that human beings have a key role in this phase; the labor pains of creation await our coming to live in freedom. And a sign of that freedom would be that we seek to prevent any species presently companioned by the Spirit from disappearing from the network of possibilities within creation. (p. 127)

    In practice this requires an extremely ambitious project of conserving what E.O. Wilson calls the “hotspots” of biodiversity and the “frontier zones” of existing wilderness; a vast transfer of resources from rich nations to poor ones, enabling the latter to preserve the biodiversity where they live while escaping grinding poverty; and a determined scientific investigation to catalogue existing species in order to understand how best to preserve them.

    My biggest worry here has to do with Southgate’s apparent optimism about what large-scale human management of the natural world can accomplish. Preserving species threatened by anthropogenic extinction makes perfect sense to me, as does preserving existing wilderness areas to the greatest extent possible. But can we rely on the comprehensiveness of our understanding and the purity of our intentions to micro-manage competition between species in the wild?

    This may stem from a difference in theological opinion: I’m less confident than Southgate seems that we can unambiguously enact the possibilities for transformed ways of living made available by the death and resurrection of Jesus. We remain, in other words, simul justus et peccator, and I think our persistent fallibility and self-serving tendencies need to be taken into account when considering such ambitious schemes. That said, it’s clear we have a mandate to reduce our impact on the natural world to make room for the species that we threaten to crowd out. It may be that we can do far more good this way than by trying to bring to an end a fundamental process of natural selection.

    I’ve probably got one, maybe two, more posts before I wrap up this series.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 6: Priests of creation

    Having offered an account of why God permits the suffering and frustated lives of so many non-human animals, Southgate turns to the question of what role humans might play in alleviating their plight.

    Key to his understanding once again is the notion of creation in travail, or “groaning.” Creation is good, but it’s destined to be redeemed, to be made into something better.

    Southgate’s touchstone biblical passage is from Romans 8:

    I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (vv. 18-23, NRSV)

    Southgate suggests that we can understand “futility” here as the evolutionary process with its attendant death, suffering, and frustration. Yet this process has led to the incarnation of the Son of God and the new age that his dying and rising inagurates. New possibilities for transformed living have been made available, and humanity is called to participate in God’s redeeming work.

    In light of this, Southgate goes on to consider what role humanity has with respect to the rest of creation and non-human animals in particular. Human beings can’t bring in the eschaton–that’s God’s job–but they can anticipate it to some extent and live as signs of the dawning age. And this includes “having some part in the healing of the evolutionary process” (p. 96).

    What does this mean, specifically? Southgate suggests that humanity actually has several different roles in respect to creation:

  • First, we are responsible for the well-being of the entire biosphere, simply because our actions can affect and profoundly change it (as in the case of climate change). So, we’re called to preserve the biosphere’s ability to support and nourish a wide diversity of life.
  • Second, we are called to make room for wilderness, for parts of the Earth that serve no utilitarian human purpose. These serve as a reminder that creation doesn’t exist solely for our sake and that other creatures have a right to live flourishing lives in our shared world.
  • Third, we need to find ways of living with our fellow creatures that are respectful of their God-given natures and existence. Our occupation of much of the Earth’s surface requires us to live alongside with–and make use of–our fellow creatures, but this isn’t a license for exploitation. Southgate quotes Wendell Berry: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such a desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want” (quoted on p. 106).

    • Southgate proposes two ethical concepts to illuminate these duties: ethical kenosis and priesthood. Ethical kenosis means just what it sounds like–a kind of self-limitation; we have to limit our own desires and will to mastery to make room for the flourishing of the rest of creation. This includes

  • kenosis of aspiration–or the desire to grasp at a role for ourselves that fails to respect other creatures;
  • kenosis of appetite–our seemingly bottomless desire for the good things of this world; and realtedly
  • kenosis of acquisitiveness–our desire for the material trappings of life (see pp. 101-102).

    • Priesthood is a way of understanding our role in God’s world that stands somewhere between anthropocentric views of creation as existing solely for humanity’s sake and the radically egalitarian perspective of “deep ecology” that sees humans as merely one species among others.

    Against the second view, Southgate points out that humans are the de facto stewards of creation simply in virtue of our ability to understand and affect the workings of nature, and that, contrary to deep ecologists, the workings of nature can’t provide us with ethical prescriptions.

    While the notion of priesthood doesn’t offer any neat ethical prescriptions, it does suggest some broad themes in our relation to the non-human creation (Southgate is drawing here particularly on Eastern Orthodox theology):

  • Humans can reshape the world in certain ways, through agriculture, culture, scientific understanding.
  • Humans can bless creation and offer it back to God in contemplation and worship.
  • Humans can sacrificially offer themselves for the good of creation.

    • There is a tension here between a more passive and activist stances. To the extent that creation is good, we receive it and contemplate it with awe and thanksgiving. But to the extent that it is “groaning” we may be called to a more activist intervention in light of the norms of God’s promised new creation. In the next post I’ll discuss what Southgate thinks this might look like in particular cases.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 3: God so loved the world

    In Chapter 4, Southgate develops a trinitarian “theology of creation,” an admittedly speculative enterprise that seeks to shine some light on the relationship between the triune God and an evolutionary process that operates according to Darwinian principles.

    Taking up the theme of kenosis, Southgate suggests that God’s self-emptying love is foundational both to intra-trinitarian relationships and to the relationship between God and the world. God the Father pours out his love, the essence of his being, giving rise to (begetting) God the Son, who, in turn, returns all that he is to the Father. And this intra-divine relationship of self-emptying love constitutes God the Holy Spirit.

    Southgate suggests that this inherently self-emptying, or kenotic, character of the divine love is the ground of God’s desire to create the genuinely other. And this desire is realized in the creation of the world and in the evolutionary process where God “lets be” a great variety of creatures.

    Following Irenaeus, Southgate calls the Son and the Spirit God’s “two hands” in creation. The Son, or Word, provides the intelligible pattern for species, which, in tune with modern biology, Southgate sees not as static essences, but as “points and peaks” on an ever-shifting “fitness landscape.” The Spirit, meanwhile, both provides creatures with their “thisness,” or particularity as unique individuals, and lures them onward toward new possibilities of fulfillment and self-transcendence.

    At any given time living creatures are in one of four states:

  • fulfilled (flourishing as the kind of creature they are)
  • growing toward fulfillment
  • frustrated (prevented from flourishing)
  • transcending themselves (either by chance mutation or some new learned capability)

    • While God takes delight in fulfilled creatures, there always remains an ambiguous note in creation. As Southgate observes, the divine love may be kenotic, or self-emptying, but Darwinian pressures require organisms to be self-assertive, if not downright aggressive. So, while the creatures praise God simply by flourishing as the type of creatures they are, there is a tension between their self-assertive fulfillment and the kind of selfless love that God is.

    This is where the element of self-transcendence comes in: Southgate sees God as luring creation– through the messy, ambiguous, and painful evolutionary process–toward a point where genuine self-giving love becomes possible: love of the other for its own sake. We see traces of this love in some of the higher animals, perhaps, but only in humanity, Southgate maintains, does this kind of love become a permanent possibility (though one that is all too infrequently realized).

    As God draws creations forward toward self-giving love, however, God endures the persistent self-assertiveness of creatures. If flourishing as the type of creature it is can be seen as the creature’s “Yes” to God, the “No” is a refusal of God’s invitation to self-transcendence, rather than selfish and preferential behavior:

    God suffers not only in the suffering of myriad creatures, each one precious to the Creator, and the extinction of myriad species, each a way of being imagined within the creative Word, but also the continual refusal–beyond creation’s praise–of God’s offer of self-transcendence, the continual refusal, beyond all creation’s flourishing, to live by the acceptance of the divine offer that would draw the creature deeper into the life of the Trinity itself. It will be apparent anew how paradoxical the theology of evolutionary creation must be, given the Christian affirmation that a good God has given rise to a good creation, and yet as we have seen the creation is shot through with ambiguity. The purposes of God are, and are not, realized in the life of any given creature. God delights in creatures in and for themselves, and yet longs for the response of the creature that can become more than itself, whose life can be broken and poured out in love and joy after the divine image. (p. 68)

    This creaturely “no” is experienced by God most powerfully on the cross of Jesus. In sketching a theology of the Atonement, Southgate says that the cross is God bearing the brunt of creation’s “no,” and taking responsibility for the pain and suffering etched into the process of life. In becoming incarnate in Jesus, God identified not just with humanity, but with all creaturely suffering, loss, and failure. “The Incarnation is the event by which God takes this presence and solidarity with creaturely existence to its utmost, and thus ‘takes responsibility’ for all the evil in creation–both the humanly wrought evil and the harms to all creatures” (p. 76)

    Southgate calls this “deep incarnation”–“the Christ-event takes all creaturely experience into the life of God in a new way.” In dying and rising, God in Jesus inaugurates a new age in which creation will be freed from its travails–humans freed to love selflessly, and non-human animals freed from the ambiguous nature of the evolutionary process in which they are caught up.

    Questions and considerations:

  • Does it make sense to say that creatures who aren’t capable of self-transcendence are frustrating God’s intentions for them?
  • How does Southgate’s theology of creation relate to a scientific explanation of the evolutionary process? Are there “gaps” in the process that require divine intervention to move it forward? Or does it operate according to purely naturalistic laws? And, if so, what explanatory power does the theological description add?

    • Regarding the first point, Southgate acknowledges that, of course, no moral blame attaches to creatures for failing to transcend themselves. However, he says, it still makes sense to speak of a certain “recalcitrance” in nature as it presently exists that resists the shape of the “peaceable kingdom.” This is in keeping with his general emphasis on creation’s “groaning”: of being in process toward something that will be fully transparent to God’s will and is foreshadowed in some of the eschatological passages in the Bible.

    In response to the second concern, Southgate says in a footnote that “theology of creation is a different sort of discourse from scientific explanation […], so the two can coexist without there necessarily being conflict between them” (fn. 56, p. 161). This needs to be fleshed out more, however. Does he mean that the two “discourse” are just two ways of describing the same phenomena? In which case, why prefer one or the other? Or does he mean that the theological discourse gets at an aspect of the total process that the scientific discourse leaves out, and is therefore necessary to give a complete account?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • Tragedy of the commons

    I picked up this little primer on climate policy at the library and it offers a very lucid, and surprisingly substantial given its length, introduction to the various tools for responding to climate change (carbon tax, cap-and-trade, renewable energy investment, etc.), their pros and cons, and which players support or oppose which policies. He convinced me that a cap-and-trade system (with auctions) is probably preferable to a straight-up carbon tax, and much more politically feasible.

    You can read an excerpt here.

    More recently, the author, Peter Barnes, has also written an interesting-sounding book called Capitalism 3.0.

  • Where the wild things are

    I don’t know what I think of the idea, but this is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while. (In other words, it’s not about the election.)

    “Re-wilding,” in the words of one of the scientists interviewed, is the “super-colliding superconducting experiment of ecology.”

  • Food for the faithful

    Bls points us to an article from the Post on how religious believers are reflecting their faith in their food choices.

    I think the idea of having a church garden that supplies all the food for a seasonal picnic is fantastic. Not least because it resulted in an all-veggie potluck, about the opposite of most church potlucks I’ve been to. 😉

    I’m sensitive to the concern voiced by the African-American pastor quoted in the article that many congregants might not have the resources to eat healthy. But surely that just highlights that this should be a pressing issue for churches: not only to embody principles of just and healthy eating in their own congregational lives, but to work for a more just, sustainable, and healthy food system. In fact, many mainline congregations are already involved in “fair trade” campaigns; this would seem to be a logical extension of that work.

  • Myths we live by

    There’s been a lot of loose talk from both parties about “energy independence,” so I thought it’d be worth linking to this piece from Paul “The End of Oil” Roberts that appeared in Mother Jones a couple of months back: The Seven Myths of Energy Independence.

  • The “empire of consumption” and Obamanomics

    John Wiener interviews Andrew Bacevich on our “empire of consumption” and the limits of Obama:

    But he’s not one of those radicals who argue there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. “I call myself an Obama-con, Bacevich says, “a conservative who will vote for Obama – because of the Iraq war. He has vowed that he will end the war and withdraw US combat forces. If he does that, it will render a verdict on the Iraq war: that it was a mistake and a failure. That verdict might open up the possibility for a debate about the fundamentals of US foreign policy. If McCain gets elected, the chances of us having that debate are close to zero.”

    Interestingly for a self-identified conservative, Bacevich cites Jimmy Carter as the one president in living memory who really understood the predicament we face: an unsustainable way of life that drives our quest for military hegemony.

    At the risk of being overly optimistic, though (not usually my problem), I have read some things recently that suggest that Obama may grasp the need for for a major shift in our economic life. This interesting piece on his economic philosophy, for instance, ends on this note:

    Shortly after I boarded Obama’s campaign plane this month, one of his press aides warned me that the conversation might not last long. She explained that he was exhausted from two days of campaigning in Florida and might decide to nap as soon as he got on the plane. But a few minutes later he summoned me to the plane’s first-class section, evidently choosing an economics discussion over a DVD of “Mad Men,” which was sitting on his side table. His eyes were tired, and he looked a good deal older than he had only four years ago, on the night that he became famous at the 2004 Democratic convention. But we ended up talking for an hour. After I returned to my seat, the press aide walked back to tell me that Obama had more to say.

    “Two things,” he said, as we were standing outside the first-class bathroom. “One, just because I think it really captures where I was going with the whole issue of balancing market sensibilities with moral sentiment. One of my favorite quotes is — you know that famous Robert F. Kennedy quote about the measure of our G.D.P.?”

    I didn’t, I said.

    “Well, I’ll send it to you, because it’s one of the most beautiful of his speeches,” Obama said.

    In it, Kennedy argues that a country’s health can’t be measured simply by its economic output. That output, he said, “counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them” but not “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.”

    The second point Obama wanted to make was about sustainability. The current concerns about the state of the planet, he said, required something of a paradigm shift for economics. If we don’t make serious changes soon, probably in the next 10 or 15 years, we may find that it’s too late.

    Both of these points, I realized later, were close cousins of two of the weaker arguments that liberals have made in recent decades. Liberals have at times dismissed the enormous benefits that come with prosperity. And for decades some liberals have been wrongly predicting that economic growth was sure to leave the world without enough food or enough oil or enough something. Obama acknowledged as much, saying that technology had thus far always overcome any concerns about sustainability and that Kennedy’s notion had to be tempered with an appreciation of prosperity.

    What’s new about the current moment, however, is that both of these arguments are actually starting to look relevant. Based on the collective wisdom of scientists, global warming really does seem to be different from any previous environmental crisis. For the first time on record, meanwhile, economic growth has not translated into better living standards for most Americans. These are two enormous challenges that are part of the legacy of the Reagan Age. They will be waiting for the next president, whether he is Obama or McCain, and they’ll probably be around for another couple of presidents too.

    Obama hit these themes pretty hard in his acceptance speech, but whether as president he would really be interested in using his clout to mobilize the country behind this kind of paradigm shift, and what that would look like, are, of course, big questions.

  • The end of (cheap) meat

    I’m agnostic, because under-informed, about whether “free-range” meat would result in higher meat prices than the factory farmed variety once you’ve taken into account all the hidden costs. But Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil and The End of Food, contends that, even under the best circumstances, making the (necessary) switch to free-range alternatives will result in higher prices.

    Creating more humane conditions for farm animals is just the right thing to do, and if that means we have to pay higher prices (or eat less meat), we would simply be returning to the norm that prevailed for most of human history. Cheap, plentiful meat is an anomaly, not a necessity for living a full, satisfying human life. (But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)

    (Link via Erik Marcus)