Of course I’m a public champion of Earth Day! Many decades ago, privately, I took it as a heavenly sign – not just as a coincidence – that my first book, Brother Earth: Nature, God, and Ecology in a Time of Crisis, appeared in the very year when the first Earth Day was launched. Since then, I’ve encouraged as many Americans as I could to support the ensuing Earth Day movement, along with a range of other urgently needed ecojustice commitments.
So I begin this insiders’ conversation with this reminder to all, insiders or not, that this year’s Earth Day is April 22nd. Put it on your calendar, if, for some reason, it’s not already there.
Still, to all ecojustice insiders, I also have a word of caution. Consider this slogan of earthday.org, one of the U.S.’s premiere ecojustice coalitions: Our Power, Our Planet. If that’s meant to suggest that planet Earth doesn’t belong to global capitalism or to a congeries of powerful nations, say, to the U.S., the U.K., the E.U., India, China, and Russia, okay. Every ecojustice activist, I’m sure, would want to agree with that.
But if the Earth doesn’t belong to the rich and the powerful, to whom does it belong? Many would want to specify that the Earth belongs to all the people of the Earth, especially to the downtrodden. Well no. Most Earth-friendly people I know would prefer to say that, while the Earth does belong to all the people of the Earth, and especially to those masses of humans who are poor, it doesn’t belong just to humans. In some sense, the Earth in fact belongs to all the creatures that inhabit the planet, along with us humans. Let’s hear it for the gigantic blue whales!
And more. Although Christianity has famously been blamed for fostering, if not causing, our global ecojustice crisis, a critique launched in the last century by the historian Lynn White, Jr., and then tirelessly, not to say tediously, cited by many ecojustice advocates ever since: the theological or the metaphysical or even the deeply poetic witness needed in these times of global emergency is in hand. We now know how to make a case that the Earth is not ours, that it’s not in our power, certainly that it’s not our planet.
We now understand that while historic Christianity, in particular, has condoned, if not caused, all manner of noxious “isms” over the centuries – all those things that so many of us love to hate, such as anthropocentrism, sexism, and dualism, along with hierarchy and patriarchy, this particular religious tradition cannot totally be identified with that kind of spiritual toxicity.
That’s a theme that I, myself, have been publicly addressing my whole adult life, beginning in 1970, and to which I have returned in my most recent and my final book, The Earth is the Lord’s and the Fullness Thereof. And I am by no means alone in making this kind of argument. Many thousands of Christians today, led by Pope Francis and sparked by his encyclical Laudato Si’, have long been doing the same.
But what about the rest of the Earth’s human population? What, in particular, are U.S. citizens of every other religious persuasion, beyond Christianity, or of no religious persuasion at all, to believe – so that we all might work together to foster a thoroughgoing national mindshift (we used to call this a “conversion”) away from the Our Power/Our Planet kind of thinking in order to foster a driving public vision of what must be, for Americans of all spiritual persuasions, a powerful, post-anthropocentric, new-earth kind of thinking? Even as an ecojustice insider, however, I’m not sure how to answer that question.
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