The Judeo-Christian Roots of Eco-Theology

The following speech by Robert H. Nelson was given before the blank organization on blank date. Robert H. Nelson is an economist with the United States Department of the Interior. Editor

When the possibility of a luncheon talk arose, I have to admit that I wondered about getting into theology. After all, it's not your normal luncheon topic. Qn the other hand, it's also good to have some change of pace. And in the midst of all the discussion here of the science and economics of global warming, I'm certainly going to take a different direction.

My starting point is that you really can't understand what is going on in the environmental area today without recognizing that the environmental movement is in many ways a religious movement. You can talk all day about the science of environmental issues, but if you, don't recognize that religion is involved, you will never really be able to get a handle on what is driving a lot of environmental policy. Much of it will simply seem irrational and incomprehensible from a scientific standpoint. However, If you study the theology of environmentalism, many things can come into focus. There is a set of premises and a logic which yields certain policy conclusions.

I also happen to think that in the end it may be in the arena of theological discussion that some of the most important issues of environmental policy will have to be resolved. I don't subscribe to the view that environmental or any other religion is simply a matter of personal faith and beyond any reasoned discussion.

Having made these observations, I should also say up front that the environmental movement is very diverse, so any one broad generalization will probably fail with respect to some portion of environmentalism. There are probably even several basically different varieties of religion within environmentalism. But in this talk I am going to argue that the most important religious element in environmentalism is that it has given a new voice in American public life to an outlook traceable to Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the Protestant Reformation. The environmental movement is helping to revive what you might call a secular Puritanism.

In fact, there seems to be a general Puritanism of this kind sweeping across American society these days. We have new crusades against alcohol, against drugs, against pornography, against the wrong kinds of speech, and against a whole host of other seemingly immoral acts. In the Calvinist and Puritan view, and now in the view of many environmentalists, the world is filled with evil. To use the highly moralistic language of much of current environmentalism, nature is constantly being raped, assaulted, murdered, pillaged, destroyed. Indeed, society is basically an immoral and sinful place. It is filled with corporate profiteers, callous government bureaucrats, and other self-seeking types. Their immoral actions end up brutalizing nature and may even set mankind on a path of destruction.

Environmentalism has many doomsdayers of a secular kind. Once again, they see floods covering the earth—perhaps due to global warming. Or maybe instead it will be drought that will parch the land. There is a long list of possible disasters reminiscent of biblical warnings of catastrophe brought on by evil ways. As God directed Noah to save two of every species, we now have the Endangered Species Act to perform this mission.

At times environmentalism even uses the old Puritan language. The Puritans, you may recall, placed a great emphasis on the idea of a calling. The Sierra Club recently wrote to enlist help from those who were being "called to action" to deal with the problem of global warming. Calvin saw any grand efforts at human improvement as inevitably undermined by the pervasiveness of human depravity owing to original sin. Many in the environmental movement today see the optimism and high expectations for (economic and technological) progress in the modern era in a similar light. What had been thought to be a great forward movement in the modern age now seems to many environmentalists as delusion and retrogression. The result of economic and technological advance has been the destruction of the natural world and the spread of a false set of values.

Calvinists regarded human reason as a frail instrument, easily undermined by human weaknesses. The true religion was grounded in faith, not in rational analysis. The modern era, by contrast, has exalted reason and especially science. But now many environmentalists fear that science has been a snare, creating instruments of mass destruction and a technocratic world which has yielded mass alienation. The scientific way of thinking about the world is seen as having a mechanistic quality that reduces humanity to collections of atoms and to the products of the workings of formulas.

Calvinism saw the answer to the problems of society in a return to a better condition in the past. The original Christians had been truer to the valid faith than their successors—especially those in the Roman Catholic church. For Calvinists, history was a record of decline, not ascent. These features are also found widely in the environmental movement of today. As I already mentioned, there is a strong sense in the environmental movement that recent centuries have seen things getting worse rather than better.

To sum it up, some key outlooks of the Calvinist and Puritan mentality have today reappeared in a secular context within the environmental movement. There are also some broader and more general parallels with Christianity.

In the Christian religion, the ultimate goal is to recover the condition of the original creation as it was found in the Garden of Eden. In environmental religion, the Garden of Eden is transposed to become the world df nature as it existed before human impacts changed the character of the earth. Environmental theology tells a story of mankind living at first in happy harmony with nature, then the fall, of man owing to the spread of organized society, the in creasing depravity, of earthly existence, and finally the hope of redemption by recovering an original nature that existed long ago. The close parallels with Christianity can hardly be missed.

In, this scheme, wilderness areas, I might note, are the cathedrals and churches of environmentalism. They are the most sacred places. And they are defined by the fact that they are minimally touched by human hands. In other words, like an ordinary church, they are places of spiritual inspiration where the presence of sin is minimized. And in environmental theology such places are where humanity has had the least impact in changing nature.

I have been offering just a sample of what strikes me, whenever I look at environmentalism as a pervasive set of religious metaphors and themes. Quite a few others have also seen this religious element. A number of them have then gone on to suggest that environmentalism as a religion is some kind of foreign and pantheistic import from the east—that it worships nature. To me, however, this has always seemed unlikely on its face. An eastern religion would not have the obvious attraction that environmentalism holds for so many Americans. In fact, as I have been indicating, environmentalism seems to me deeply rooted in western thinking. It is a derivative from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The orthodox would probably say it's a heresy within this tradition.

Before delving further into the specific theology, it may be helpful if I relate a little bit about how the contents of environmental theology are often a major factor in the formation of government policy today. Looking at some policy areas may also help to explain how an economist such as myself ended up spending a lot of time thinking about theological questions.

When I arrived at the Interior Department in 1975, my first assignment was to work on the livestock grazing program of the Bureau of Land Management. One of the first things that I discovered was that the BLM was dominated by people who had gone to western schools of natural resource management where they had typically specialized in rangeland science. In essence, their view of proper BLM management reflected a certain moral vision. They believed that more livestock forage and more production from the rangeland meant social progress. More forage represented their small contribution to the forward advance of humanity—in some sense they were part of another concept of a secular salvation.

By the time I got there, however, BLM was encountering increasing opposition. Environmentalists had a different moral vision. Cows for them were evil because they had no place in the original natural ecology of the rangeland. Moreover, they had overgrazed and otherwise altered the original rangeland conditions much for the worse. And all this had occurred on publicly owned land. Where progressives saw a redeeming path of economic progress, lots of environmentalists saw this same path as the very route of immorality.

For many environmentalists, human impacts on the range were per se bad; the result of human intrusion had been to violate and destroy nature; and the correct public policy for the future would be to get rid, as far as possible, of the unnatural and artificial human activity represented by livestock grazing. So far, while pressures to remove livestock have been growing, they have had limited practical impact. Matters have already moved farther in another area where I started working not long after joining Interior in 1975.

No one can deny that clear cutting for timber harvesting is ugly. As a symbol, it would be hard to find a more powerful representation of human intrusion on nature. Today, under strong pressure from environmentalists, the Federal Government is eliminating timber harvesting over large areas of the Pacific Northwest The ostensible reason is the preservation of the spotted owl as a species. The real reason is the growing power of a new morality in American life. To cut an old growth forest—a forest never harvested before and where the trees may be 200, 300 or even more years old—is to commit an evil act, an act really of desecration.

I see a similar morality at work in the current debate over the fate of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska: ANWR is so remote that hardly anyone is likely to visit there. So by an ordinary test of utilitarian benefits and costs, oil development is almost certain to win out. But, as I said, there is a new Puritanism in the air these days. ANWR has come to be seen as a virgin land, nature little touched by human impact, and one of the few such pure and innocent places left on earth. And oil companies now want to rape and defile this virtuous place.

So far, the new Puritanism seems to be winning out over the old utilitarianism.

Finally, I will mention one of my favorite examples of the power of environmental theology in government policy making. Going back to the 1960's, Yellowstone National Park has had a policy to allow literally the destruction of mountain goats coming in from the northeast and south sides of the park. The identical mountain goats coming in from the west side, however, are to be welcomed and energetically protected. You might well, ask, what is the difference, since the goats from any side are going to have the same impacts on the park. Well, it turns out that the mountain goats on the west are considered a natural population, while the goats on the northeast and south sides were introduced some years ago by hunters. Hence, environmental theology regards the western goats as candidates for sainthood, while the southern goats are evil influences to be purged.

I could cite a lot more examples from Interior EPA, and other government experience. To sum it all up, and I am not the first by any means to say this, a moral criterion of naturalness is today driving government policies of all kinds. In the area of global warming, for instance, the public and government responses would undoubtedly differ considerably if the warming were deemed a natural event, as opposed to the identical warming caused by human actions.

What I want to do next is to examine how this naturalness criterion is derived from a specific theology. I'll use as an example the writings of Dave Foreman, a founder of Earth First.

As Foreman sees things the world was a blissful place until about 10,000 years ago. It was then that the beginnings of organized agriculture commenced the corruption of original nature that led to the current condition of so many evils. As Foreman writes, "between the wilderness that created us and the civilization created by us, grew an ever widening rift." It is the rift that grew between man and God following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Environmentalism has its own story of the fall of man. The original environmental sin is the pursuit of knowledge, leading to technology and economic organization, much as the original sin in the Garden of Eden was also related to the pursuit of knowledge. In Christianity the New Testament prescribes a path of salvation which will restore the original condition and absence of sin that characterized the Garden of Eden. And environmentalism has a path of salvation as well. It also requires the recovery of the original conditions of natural innocence found before the fall of man into the evils of industrial civilization. Thus, you get people like Bill McKibben saying things like "it is not utter silliness to talk about ending—or at least transforming—industrial civilization." McKibben wants "a different world, where roads are torn out to create vast new wildernesses, where most development ceases, and where much of man's imprint on the earth is slowly erased." This would bring humanity back to what McKibben sees as the "blooming, humming, fertile, paradise" that existed before the earth was corrupted by human activity.

Some of you might think all this is pretty far out and irrelevant to the mainstream of American life. But a new book called Green Rage expresses an opinion that my own experiences have led me to share. The author, Christopher Manes, writes that, although often implicitly and indirectly, "radical environmentalists now exert a growing influence on public lands and environmental policy." Further, he says that "increasingly grass roots activists like Earth First are setting the environmental agenda."

The mainstream environmental groups try to minimize this because they are uncomfortable with explicit statements of radical views and fear a backlash among the general public. But in order to make sense out of the current positions of many environmental groups, you have to recognize that there is a theological and moral core that is typically left unstated. I tried earlier to illustrate this with my examples from rangeland, timber, and other areas of public policy.

So what do we make of all this? What kind of environmental policies do we get out of our process of disguised theological controversy? In my opinion, they are all too often bad policies: They are certainly inefficient policies and irrational by economic criteria. But I have to admit that the reason I think they are bad is partly because I think they reflect a weak theology. If I accepted all the premises and values of environmental theology, then many of the current policy directions in which I see environmentalists pushing would appear in a more favorable light. In other words, it seems to me that the only really effective rebuttal that can be made to many environmental positions has to be another theological argument.

I know this may seem like a radical view. For one thing, it raises some doubts about the whole idea of the ability to separate church and state. But I see no obvious alternative. Without trying to give an exhaustive treatment, I can at least offer several basic criticisms that I have of environmental theology.

First, the vision of original nature is not realistic. The environmental view of original nature is the Garden of Eden, but in my view original nature was more like the jungle world of competitive survival described by Charles Darwin.

Second environmentalism ends up in a contradiction by preaching that people should behave naturally while exhibiting an attitude towards the world that is in itself very unnatural. Environmentalists believe that mankind should assume special burdens for other species, sometimes at its own expense. But no other species is expected to do this and it is not really natural. Environmentalism, in fact, proposes a special moral responsibility for the world that is similar to the unique role suggested for humanity in the Bible.

There, man alone among species shares in the special divine responsibility for the world. But by and large, environmentalism does not acknowledge the Bible as the authority for its views.

Third; there is an anti-human quality to environmental theology. It takes an extreme form in the environmentalist references, which seemingly are becoming more frequent, to the human species as the AIDS or cancer of the earth. Pressed to its ultimate logic, radical environmental theology even raises the question of whether there is any real and positive role for mankind on earth. What is the argument for preservation of the human species? Some environmentalists don't seem to be clear on this. The anti-human element also comes out in the frequent proposals to depopulate much of the earth.

Of course, the question of which populations will have to go is left unspoken. I can tell you the answer however, if matters ever get that far. It will be the poorest and weakest who will be sacrificed first. We have already heard prominent environmental spokesmen suggesting that we should not do anything about starvation in Bangladesh and other impoverished areas around the globe. It is still another reminder of Calvin and the Puritans. In Calvinist theology, the poor were afflicted because they were sinners—and thus were headed for hell sooner or later.

Fourth, environmental theology is to my mind hopeless when it comes to economics. There is a deep antagonism to the market, a revival of an attitude that I have to acknowledge has been surprisingly prevalent in some of the main lines of Christian thought, The natural utopia to which environmental theology aspires will be one where there is no economic problem. It is a lot like Marxism in this regard. The human condition will be transformed, the economic problem abolished, and humanity will live in happy natural innocence and harmony forever after without having to face any problems of production and consumption. At a practical level, this shows up in environmental opposition to steps to improve economic efficiency in various ways.

Many environmentalists are opposed to using benefit cost tests to decide the proper level of environmental protection. Instead, they suggest a wholly impractical notion, that environmental protection is priceless and can not be weighed against any cost. Similarly, environmentalists are often opposed to creating any markets in the rights to pollute. Many environmentalists take a very moralistic view here as well. To sell pollution rights, one critic wrote recently; would be the moral equivalent of having government sell permits to commit felonies. Partly as a result of these attitudes, environmentalism tends to win a lot of symbolic victories but sometimes gets much less real environmental improvement. Yet, there is still an enormous social cost, whether or not much environmental improvement eventually results. If the funds now being spent for environmental purposes were spent more wisely, the potential gains could be very large.

Finally, the result of actually trying to follow radical environmental theology would be not only economic chaos but a widespread loss of personal freedoms. We have already seen in this century lots of cases where the highest ideals were in a sense too high for the current condition of humanity. They led instead to a new hell on earth. Radical environmentalism would probably have similar consequences if anyone ever actually attempted to organize a whole society on this basis.

In wrapping up, I should emphasize once again a point I made earlier. Environmentalism is a diverse movement. There are many environmentalists today who see improvement of the environment as part of the forward march of economic and social progress. I like to think that I see the matter much like that myself.

But a newer type of environmentalism has been gaining a growing influence from the mid-1960's onward. It has a much different outlook. The distinctive feature is the view of modern civilization as corrupt, humanity as a frequent force for evil in the world, and the pursuit of redemption through the curtailing of human impacts in order to try to recover a utopia that is found in an idealization of original nature. This pursuit is, as I have said, yet one more search for the Garden of Eden; or equivalently, for heaven on this earth.

Congress reflected such outlooks as early as 1964, when it declared in the Wilderness Act that wilderness areas should be defined by their condition of being "untrammeled by man." In the years since, my sense is that the impact of this kind of thinking has steadily become greater in the development of government policy.

...Robert H. Nelson...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility