Uniting Earthweb

From time to time I am asked about the relative importance Christians should give to care for the environment on the one hand and care for one's fellow humans on the other. Or, if the question isn't directly asked, it is often implied by people's reservations about the stress that Earth Ministry gives to ecological matters. The query goes along these lines: shouldn't we worry first of all about human justice and human welfare before we expend our energies preserving other aspects of God's creation like animals and trees? Isn't it better to hug people than to hug trees? Isn't the Red Cross more important that the RSPCA or the Australian Conservation Foundation? Isn't there enough human misery and injustice in the world to occupy us fully without diverting our attention to the non-human aspects of the natural world? Why should the environment be considered in the same breath as justice in society? These appear to be reasonable questions and have potential repercussions on our conduct towards the environment, so they need to be addressed.

Despite their apparent validity, I believe that these questions are misguided and betray a blinkered view of the present day ecological situation in our world. Let me present to you two main reasons why I believe it is not a question of either ecological responsibility or social responsibility. For me it is a question rather of being concerned about both our ecological responsibility and ensuring that there is justice and compassion in our society. Indeed, I become increasingly convinced that you can't have one without the other. Both are inextricably intertwined and interdependent. As one social campaigner for the poor recently said:

[…] liberation theology [that is to say a theology that asserts the rights of the poor and the dispossessed] and ecological discourse need each other and are mutually complementary ”. (Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor . P.114)

Justice for Future Generations

My first reason for claiming that care for the environment goes along with promoting justice in society has to do with the generations that will follow us on this earth. We need to recognise that what we do with God's creation around us will have a tremendous effect, for good or ill, on the lives of our grandchildren and on the generations of their children and grandchildren. By our attitude to God's creation now, we in fact determine the nature of the society that will be inherited later in the twenty-first century. Will it be a society that has to contend with pollution of the air, the earth, the rivers and the seas? Or will it be a society which retains the fullness with which God has endowed it and to which the psalmist refers when he proclaims: “The earth and its fullness are the Lord's”?

From this perspective care for the environment and social justice cannot be separated. Social justice is not just a question of having sufficient money to buy all the necessities of life. Social justice also means having the possibility of living in an environment where the natural world is respected for its own sake and where its beauty and intricacy can be admired. When Jesus was resisting the first of Satan's temptations—to turn stone into bread—he quoted the words of Deuteronomy 8:3:

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Bread is recognised by Jesus as important, but he stresses that there is more to life than bread. Every expression of God must be respected since it is by all these expressions that humans live.

A few years ago Paul Collins quite forcefully made this point about the injustice of passing on a polluted world to the generations of our children and grandchildren. In his book God's Earth he wrote:

Those of us whose lives span the second half of the twentieth century will be among the most despised and cursed generations in the history of mankind. The reason why we will be hated by our children's children and by those who come after them is simple: never before have human beings exploited, damaged, and degraded the earth to the extent that we have. […]Historically, we are part of the most destructive phase of human history ever known.

These very strong words effectively make the link between our present treatment of the earth and the social well-being of those humans that come after us. It is not enough to leave money and property to our children and grandchildren. For them to live well, we need to leave an earth that is in a healthy condition. Care for the earth and social justice for the generations that we produce are closely linked.

As long as ago as 1991 the Assembly of our Uniting Church in Australia resolved to affirm the rights of future generations. In that resolution one finds listed the following:

• Right to a rich plant and animal world
• Right to healthy air and to an intact ozone layer
• Right to clean and sufficient water, and, in particular, healthy and sufficient drinking water
• Right to healthy and fertile soil and to healthy woodland

These are rights related to God's creation that we now need to reaffirm fifteen years later, since without these rights all other rights ultimately are lost. What's the point of rights in society if the earth becomes unlivable?

Link Between Social Justice and Ecological Abuse

The second reason for the claim that care for the earth is intimately linked with social justice relates very closely to the current world situation. In our day, social injustice and destruction of the environment tend to be connected in immediately obvious ways.

In many parts of our world economic deprivation and economic exploitation have for some time provided strong motivation to destroy forests and to pollute air and water. Not so long ago there was a lot of publicity about the destruction of rainforest in countries to our north, notably in Indonesia and Malaysia. This destruction takes place in order to “harvest” the valuable timbers that are so much in demand in affluent countries, particularly in the Western world including Australia . Such practices have not only depleted the world's rainforests. They have destroyed the traditional way of life and the means of subsistence of numerous indigenous tribes. In many cases this loss of livelihood has led the tribes to adopt other ecologically disastrous practices as they desperately try to survive in the new social order that is engulfing them. This seems to be at the origin of the disastrous fires that, in two successive years, burnt across some of the islands of Indonesia several years ago. Similar exploitation is occurring in the rainforests of Brazil where, for short term benefit, the burning of enormous areas of rainforest in what has been described as “the lungs of the planet” continues apace. In these situations it is obvious that environmental irresponsibility and social injustice are intimately linked.

The situation of many Pacific islands provides us with a further example on our doorstep of the link between care for the creation and social justice. Many scientists are now convinced that global warming is occurring at an increasing rate because of our production of carbon dioxide and because of deforestation in so many parts of the world. This, they believe, will result in significant climate change in many countries, including Australia, where the climate will become even drier. However, global warming will also lead to a rise in the level of the world's oceans. This will have disastrous consequences for many Pacific islanders, whose territory will in some cases be completely covered by the sea. They will have lost their home altogether because of the environmental irresponsibility of the rest of the world.

Kiribati Slide

Small wonder that the representatives of the countries affected protested so loudly at Earth Summits at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Kyoto in 1997 and Johannesburg in 2002, and more recently in Seoul. Can one blame them for being resentful that such countries as the United States and Australia, who per capita are among the highest producers of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, are reluctant to make serious attempts to reduce the extent of their production?

I am sure that you can think of many more examples of the convergence of ecological irresponsibility and social injustice. You may be aware of the desecration of the environment in Nigeria through the extraction of oil; and several years ago you doubtless followed the environmental disaster of the Ok Tedi mine in New Guinea in which BHP was involved.

Ok Tedi Slide

Here the lives of many indigenous people were dreadfully affected by the poisonous pollution. And a third case is that of Nauru, where the extraction of phosphate has left an environmental moonscape for a people that now has nothing left of the money given by the exploiters of the fertiliser deposits.

Nauru Slide

Faced with the ecological disaster in Nauru, one is reminded of Jesus' words:

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? (Mark 8:36)

The life of Nauru is gone and now with it the money that was to have brought security and a more comfortable existence.

The feature common to all these examples is that it is always the poor who suffer most. Ultimately all of us are affected by lack of care for the environment and our society as a whole suffers. However, it is the underprivileged, the politically weak and the socially unsophisticated that suffer first and pay the price for our common ecological sins. And it is not just poor individuals that suffer. In our time there are whole nations of the Third World who find themselves obliged to destroy the resource base that constitutes their wealth, their forests and their soil, in an effort to repay to the First World debts that were often incurred in quite dubious circumstances. This shows quite dramatically the close link that exists in the contemporary world between care for the environment and social justice. One recent commentator put it this way:

If we pit the struggle for human survival against the struggle for a living planet, we are all losers. The Earth cannot be separated from the poor; the poor cannot be separated from the Earth!” (Jane Blewett p.40 Section One)

It is no accident that the Social Justice Sunday celebrated in our churches in 2002 adopted the ecological theme of “Sustaining Creation”. Ultimately, how we deal with the environment reflects our attitude to others.

Biblical Links between Care for Creation and Social Health

We may be tempted to think that this link between care for God's creation and social health is a modern discovery. In fact it is a truth as ancient as the Old Testament prophets. In the 8 th century before Christ the prophet Hosea proclaimed:

Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or kindness, and no knowledge of God in the land; there is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds and murder follows murder. Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air; and even the fish of the sea are taken away. (Hosea 4:1-3)

In this short but highly significant passage Hosea highlights the sins of swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery - the social sins castigated in the Ten Commandments. But with the word “therefore” he makes a clear causal link between their frequency and the state of the environment. We are discovering the profundity of this insight in our day, as we discover the fundamental links between care for the earth and social responsibility.

What we need to do at a time when parts of God's creation are under threat from our affluent way of life is to extend our sphere of concern to include the earth, its creatures and its vegetation, which with us form the web of creation. If we insist in choosing between humans and the rest of creation to exercise our care and sense of responsibility, we shall end up by destroying both.