Of Ants and Men: A Greener Daydream

by Doug Bandow, special to AIA

Reading A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future (Oxford University Press, 2006, 288pp.) reminds one of the advocates of civil religion: it’s important that Americans believe in God, whichever one they choose. Roger S. Gottlieb, a philosophy professor, wants believers to be green, and Greens to be believers, whichever God they choose. The book offers a read that is simultaneously entertaining and surreal.

Perhaps no surprise, Gottlieb is suffused with all of the usual liberal nostrums. The environment is under catastrophic attack; capitalism is environmentally destructive; globalization wreaks havoc around the world; only draconian regulatory mandates can save us.

Yet these all are standard fare on the left. Other people have made the same arguments—which are perfectly legitimate, if not terribly persuasive—in the past and will do so again in the future. Gottlieb adds a spiritual twist, one that is fundamentally anti-human. At least, it rejects the belief that there is anything particularly unique about mankind, recognized as the central element in God's creation by Christians and Jews.

Gottlieb complains of “an unthinking and unprincipled anthropocentrism in which only human beings have any moral value.” More specifically, he writes:

It seems that when almost all ecotheologians talk about reverence for life or rejecting anthropocentrism, they generally mean that all species, all arrangements or collections of life, have value. Yet, when they apply these ideas of reverence to human beings, it seems that it is each individual, and not the species as a whole, that is the focus. Even if animal rights are defended and veganism proposed, our buildings, transportation, and production dislocate and devastate countless other beings. This is accepted as a matter of course, or, if it is lamented, there still remains a critical difference betwen our concern with people and our concerns with nature. Running over a human child will always provoke more distress than running over ants. As it should, of course.

Although Gottlieb doesn’t actually advocate treating children and ants on the same moral level, it’s not entirely clear how he would distinguish between them. He advocates “communion” with natural things and hopes to “help establish the expectation that hurting or using other beings is a moral matter that requires reflection, honest self-assessment, and at times public justification.” What would this mean in practice?

At the very least it presumes accepting the Democratic Party platform. The Catholic church should treat politicians who “gut” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the same as it does those who support abortion; “CEOs of clear-cutting logging companies or pesticide manufacturers” should be “turned away by religious institutions.” Drilling should not be permitted in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Etc.

By succumbing to the temptation to turn prudential policy issues into theological matters, Gottlieb undercuts his own case. Is the EPA an effective, let alone the most effective, means to protect the environment? How big should its budget be? What should its regulations say?

Are all man-made pesticides verboten, even though natural pesticides are a common mechanism by which plants protect themselves from insects? Is clear-cutting prohibited even on lands where the trees have been planted and cultivated?

Is every existing wildlife refuge sacred? And every inch of every existing sanctuary (only a very small percentage of ANWR's land would be explored and developed, for instance)? Do ecoreligious principles require that we double, triple, or quadruple the number of reserves?

Which sacred religious texts give us Gottlieb’s specific environmental policy agenda?

It is quite easy to speak generally about the spiritual nature of the world around us. But unless one is willing to claim that ants are man’s moral equal, then there is no predetermined “right” environmental policy. Some approaches are manifestly better than others, at least in the sense of delivering greater environmental protection at less cost. But they can be discovered and implemented only by assessing often complex facts and balancing competing desires.

Here Gottlieb fails, rather dramatically. His rhetoricmirrors that of the usual “the world is ending” activists. Everywhere he sees crises, crises threatening to overwhelm the planet.

He approvingly cites the list offered by a Protestant theologian: “Global warming, holes in the ozone, toxic wastes, oil spills, acid rain, drinking water contamination, overflowing landfills, top-soil erosion, species extinction, destruction of the rain forests, leakage of nuclear waste, lead poisoning, desertification, smog.”

One of the characteristics of eco-alarmism is to mislead by mixing very different issues together into one apocalyptic whole. American air has gotten cleaner, scientists disagree over the rate of species extinction, there is plenty of land for landfills, CFCs have long been banned out of concern for the ozone layer, toxic wastes can, and usually are, disposed of properly, and so on. Gottlieb’s credulity also is on display when he cites the three decades-old Club of Rome report, which incorrectly predicted imminent shortages of numerous resources, ranging from oil to gold, which remain in abundant supply.

Yet Gottlieb’s desire to infuse religion with environmentalism, or environmentalism with religion, almost forces him to cry crisis. If the sky is not falling, it is much harder to suggest that churches revise traditional theologies, liturgies, and rituals. And this churches most certainly must do. Writes Gottlieb, “in most religious narratives we can experience life beyond the ego only after, and in part because of, some kind of crisis,” such as Jesus’s death. He adds, “What those events and processes were to traditional religions, the environmental crisis is to religion now.”

Gottlieb may come closest to traditional religious concerns when he advocates that people use less and do less. He rails against consumerism which, he complains, “has become an enormously powerful social and psychic presence.”

To his credit, he recognizes that there are increasing numbers of “new consumers” in such countries as China and India. He even admits that the ecological faithful do not have clean hands: “Each religious environmentalist in the developed world, and probably many in other places as well, plugs into the same power grid, drives a car, eats food produced by unecological agribusiness, and in all likelihood doesn't recycle every little bit of paper used in writing the rough drafts of his or her impassioned statements on ecology and faith. From the Pope to the rabbis to the world-famous Buddhist teachers (and the author of this book), we are all involved, all somewhat guilty.”

Concern over turning material desire into a de facto idol goes back to the Greek ascetics. It has always been an important Christian concern; as the Apostle Paul observed, love of money is the root of evil. But Gottlieb wants to add another element, basing today’s alleged environmental crisis, or crises, on consumerism. Moreover, writes Gottlieb, religious environmentalism “offers real alternative sources of pleasure: reconnecting with earth community can provide a kind of deep joy that makes yet another trip to the mall seem pretty pale.”

Maybe, though traditional faiths should be wary of people who find their reason for living in undertaking ecoadventures as those who view life as one unending shopping spree. Gottlieb really does want a new and different religion, proposing ecorituals that he admits might look “hokey” and “quasi-new age fluff” as a complement to the Passover seder and Christian communion.

In this way Gottlie’'s approach is basically inconsistent with the traditional Christian and Jewish faiths. He wants to do more than simply cause believers to be more concerned about environmental issues. Stewardship is an inadequate model, he argues. Answering questions on what people should use turn not only on continually more detailed and sophisticated accounts of the human nature relationship, but on moral teachings about wealth and poverty, justice and oppression, temperance and greed, and the connection between moral values and material ones. Our relations with nature are not just about penguins and brooks, but about outselves. Getting a rational and moral sense of what is responsible treatment of the earth depends on our getting a responsible and moral sense of what it means to be human and of how we ought to treat each other as well as the rest of the earth.

Indeed, Gottlieb makes his views of traditional faiths quite clear. He dislikes fundamentalism, for instance. He talks up alternative theories of the Trinity. And leftish rhetoric about globalization, Third World poverty, gender discrimination, war, social reform, and more occasionally wafts through the volume. Gottlie’'s bottom line is politics rather than spirituality.

To his credit, he believes that religious people can appropriately bring their values to the political process, somewhat reluctantly defending the Religious Right in the process. But he expects a particular outcome: “ecotheology’s social critique makes it the contemporary heir to the fusion of religion, social action, and moral teaching found in the work of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Latin American liberation theologians.”

Exploring the relationship between religion and the environment need not be solely a project of the left. Even the most theologically orthodox have good reason to respect environmental values. Gottlieb takes a very different perspective, however, viewing nature as much divine as Jehovah, Jesus, or Allah. He writes that religious environmentalists sense a call from “both Spirit and Earth.” But in reading A Greener Earth one senses that Gottlieb personally feels more of a call from Earth than Spirit.

The great monotheistic faiths have at their core a concern with man’s relationship to God and to each other. The environment matters because it is God’s creation, held only in trust by succeeding generations of men charged with being good stewards. People of serious faith and good will can disagree about what this means in practice. But the essential theological truths for all of them are the unique moral value of every human being and the central role in creation played by mankind. Gottlieb's failure to recognize these basic truths is the most fundamental flaw of A Greener Earth.

Doug Bandow is Vice President of Policy at Citizen Outreach and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Leviathan Unchained: Washington's Bipartisan Big Government Consensus (Xulon Press). He is also an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which arranged the publication of this review.