Forget the environment

I've just come back from hearing a sermon by Peter Owen-Jones entitled "Christianity and Environment". It was absolutely the best talk I've heard in a church, or probably anywhere, for at least several decades, which is about as far back as I can remember. His tone was very quiet, very thoughtful, very serious. Three things stayed with me; I didn't take notes, so the following may only be an approximation, and I apologise for any inaccuracies.

One: "Make no mistake -- catastrophe is coming". Said not at all in the traditional thundering tones of apocalyptic preaching, but with great sadness.

Two: an exhortation, many times repeated, to allow ourselves to feel the harm that is being done to others, other species, future generations. He quoted Wendell Berry a lot. All four of the main power structures that drive Western culture -- its governments, corporations, universities, and religions -- are united in completely disregarding our inclusion in all of life and our dependence on the non-human. Christianity is stuck in a cul-de-sac of intellectualism which prevents it from the depth of feeling that is warranted.

Three: there is no salvation for the individual that does not include the whole of life.

Some reflections, which owe more than a little to the writings of the Archdruid.

Survival is in the balance. Survival of what?

Not of the planet, or of life on it. Life will go on, in some form, and exhortations to "save the planet" are as silly as they are misleading. People who exhort us to attempt it usually really mean they want us to try to save the planet's ability to support the current numbers and lifestyle of homo sapiens, which is something quite different.

Nor, secondly, of that lifestyle. It cannot survive. The opportunity to save it, if it ever existed, was jettisoned around 1980, when neoconservatism (oddly named, since it had very little intention of conserving anything) came to the fore and encouraged us to conveniently forget any notion of living within limits. In the ensuing thirty years, human numbers and consumption have mushroomed, resources have been depleted, and greenhouse gas concentrations have climbed way past the danger level. Catastrophe, as Peter said, is coming.

Nor, probably, of our species as a whole. The feedback mechanisms set in process by the global warming might make the planet unlivable for humans, but we are a global species, and the chances are that some places will remain habitable for at least small numbers.

But what we do still have a choice about is whether and how we manage the "long descent" into whatever deindustrial future awaits us. Are we going to pretend that journey never has to happen, make no preparations for it, and thereby worsen its effects still further? Or is it time to start packing whatever we think is most worth saving from our cultural heritage?

For me, the thing that is (in principle) most worth saving is Christianity itself. I don't dispute the responsibility the church bears, both past and present, through its myths and its behaviours for bringing about the multiple crises that threaten us. But somewhere inside the morass of confusion, rubbish and sheer poison is buried a pearl of great price which it would, to understate the case absurdly, pay us not to lose hold of.

And I don't think it will survive unless it can transform itself to the extent that sermons like Peter's are commonplace, rather than the exception I have been waiting twenty years to hear.

As a minor corollary of all this, I would like to make a modest proposal: that we forget the "environment", in the sense of dropping the word from our vocabulary. It really isn't helpful. It means "that which is around (us)"; it implicitly encourages a focus on humanity as the principal actors on the world stage, with the rest of physical reality clustered around in a rather shadowy supporting role. That is precisely the attitude that has got us into our current predicament.

So just as soon as I can think of a suitable alternative term, I had better retag several dozen posts in this blog, including the one you are reading now. The fact that I can't immediately come up with a suggestion myself is an indication of how deeply immersed in the anthropocentric world view I myself am. Less enmeshed readers may wish to help me out here.