Kanuga Conference Addresses Theological Dimensions of Ecological Crisis
Episcopal News Service. April 29, 1991 [91113]
Virginia Barrett Barker, Editor of The Diocesan (Florida)
A deep concern for the global environmental crisis drew over 120 participants to a five-day conference at Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina where they heard eight experts explore the crisis, its origins -- and a possible Christian response.
In his summary of the conference and its major contributions, the Rev. Dr. J. Carleton Hayden of Sewanee concluded that the central thrust of the conference was the urgency of a major change in beliefs and attitudes. "Almost everyone speaks to the need for some kind of new consciousness," he observed.
Author Sue Monk Kidd, for example, said that the patriarchal attitude of dominance that organized life from the male perspective led to detachment from nature and a hierarchical control over the earth. By devaluing feminine aspects of both sexes, humanity has become like the Tin Woodsman of Oz, a rusted machine in search of a heart, unable to weep while the dolphins die by the hundreds of thousands in polluted oceans.
Dominican Sister Miriam MacGillis found the cause of the ecological crisis in our outdated cosmology. "Splitting the atom brought us into a confrontation with our perception," Sister Miriam said, and our perceptions are inadequate for today's reality. "We don't know the voices of the natural world; we are like elephants in a tea shop. Everywhere we step, we are a disaster."
Author and activist Jeremy Rifkin advocated a leap of consciousness, a new sensibility: the entirety of the human race experiencing ourselves as a single species living inside of a single organism -- planet Earth. Sister Miriam called for a radical shift in perspective, to gain the correct view of the reality in which we live.
Looking at needed change in more detail, Rifkin saw particularly the need for a shift from efficiency to sustainability. Efficiency is production at the least cost, at the greatest speed, for the largest quantity, like high-rise buildings thrown up rapidly from prefabricated parts. Efficiency, like a digital watch, indicates only the present moment. But sustainability is like a round watch with numbers and hands. Its roundness relates it to the sun, to the orbits of the universe. Its hands tell the present moment, but point back to the past and forward to the future.
Sustainability, like Washington Cathedral, is built to last, carefully, with an eye to the future, and represents quality, not quantity. It is sustainability that represents good human relationships, Rifkin said.
Sister Miriam said we need to realize that time and space are still expanding, that the earth is itself a living thing. It has evolved a brain and a nervous system complex enough to become self-aware -- to think, to plan, to possess spirituality; and that expression of the planet Earth is in humankind, which is a part of planet Earth. This is a oneness that all religions knew, but it is now verifiable. We must go into the future as one single, sacred community, or we will perish, she said.
For Kidd, masculine consciousness must be balanced with feminine consciousness that is nurturing, relating, and linking. Earth must be seen as Mother Earth, with whom we are interconnected. Pyramidal, hierarchical relationships must be replaced with circular, consensus relationships, and particularly in this task must be recovered the feminine images of God. God, Kidd said, is neither male nor female, but because patriarchal images have been so overwhelmingly dominant, the feminine must be emphasized and recovered.
Native American culture shares with traditional African culture a pre-scientific, pre-industrial, pre-technological society. Canon Precentor Michael Sadgrove of England's Coventry Cathedral said that Celtic traditions of prayer and worship also have similarities to Native American rituals. Dr. Martin Brokenleg, associate professor of Native American studies at Augustana College and member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, said that the cultural dynamic is taught and learned by being part of the community, and therefore can be taught outside that culture.
Brokenleg described Native American emphasis on kinship -- a Lakota family embraces about 300 people; leadership evolves by consensus. In kinship with all nature, Lakota have a category not for "animals," but for "two-legged things," like bears, birds -- and people. The successful hunter offers something back to the earth to replenish it. Making no distinction between the spiritual and the material, Sioux culture prefers spiritual interpretation over scientific explanation.
Science itself should be part of solving the crisis, said Hayden, quoting speakers that Einstein and quantum physics saw reality not as matter, not as material, but as motion, and in a sense as spiritual. Why, Hayden asked, if quantum physics played such a significant role in ushering in this new consciousness, could or should it not continue to play a constructive role in dealing with the ecological crisis?
The Rev. Dr. H. Paul Santmire, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, Hartford, Connecticut, and author of books on ecology and nature, said, "In the inner city, animals are first rats," and people want to kill the animals, not defend animal rights. Nature is ambiguous, capricious, and sometimes evil, he said. Santmire suggested Thoreau as a paradigmatic figure for today, contemplating wilderness and oblivious to the ugly realities of life.
Dealing similarly with Matthew Fox, author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Santmire said struggling Christians find comfort in the crucified Lord and the classical theology of fall and redemption.
"Without the poor, the oppressed, and their participation, their interest, there comes to be a kind of romanticism in the treatment of the ecological crisis," Hayden warned. The ecological concern at a meeting of the Anglican Peace and Justice Network in Brazil was the great garbage dumps, he said, but people were more concerned about the homeless that eat the garbage in the dumps. "Poverty and racism are very much a reality and must be dealt with in any consideration of the ecology," Hayden said.
"I believe there is within the teaching and tradition of the church, all that's needed for addressing the ecological crisis," Hayden continued. "It is very central to the tradition that God created everything... out of nothing, and therefore he sustains all.... Human beings are called to be stewards of the earth. The question is whether we are good stewards or poor stewards."