All Things for an End

I find it interesting that, at the end of his life and after a mystic encounter with the living Christ, Thomas Aquinas named all of his painstakingly developed systematic theology "straw". (Gay, 265) In that moment, his own finite humanness was revealed to him and his detailed attempts to define God dissolved - truly we are born from dust and to dust we shall return.

But, whatever hill of straw his ideas may have been, I think - or I hope - that he was right about one thing:  that the ultimate purpose of all creation (including us) is to be part of God's Goodness, to rest in that Goodness, and to fully realize its full potential.  (Donnelly, 56)  Whether or not we have any part in realizing that Goodness is purely speculative (and, if our past behavior is any evidence of our ability to create Good, very doubtful).  Still, it seems to me that we deny our Creator if we don't give it our best shot to do right by Creation.  Its not just about polar bears or better drinking water or some tree-hugging hippie idea of Nature.  Its about our very survival.  And its also about God's concern for those on the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy - as emphasized again and again in Hebrew Scripture and in the teachings of Jesus.  If we fail, the cities of the poor will be the first underwater.  But our own cities of affluence won't be far behind.

Its About Time

Well, it only took 22 years.  And the courts have had to get involved because, it seems, government can't do its job without them.  But the EPA is finally ready to set national limits for toxic air pollution - including mercury, arsenic and other bad boys - even for the big energy companies which have heretofore managed to avoid meaningful regulation.  The agency wants to set a deadline of three years to comply.

While the NPR story quotes one CEO as saying the three year deadline will be "impossible" to attain,  Sr. Vice President of Constellation Energy, Paul Allen, who's made the switch already, refutes that statement.  Allen says that it took his company only a little over two years to comply with his state's standards (which are similar to those the EPA is proposing) and, at "the peak of construction, put 1,300 people to work."  Sounds like good news to me.

As a mother and asthmatic, I take a hard line on this.  The article reports that the lawsuit which initiated this order (in 1990!) came about when Native American children who lived near a contaminated lake were showing much higher than healthy levels of mercury - because their families caught and ate a lot of fish from the lake.  Because of the high level of pollutants, the families had to stop fishing and lost a high quality, low cost source of food.  Once again, the poorest of the population suffer for pollution from those who are the richest. I have no sympathy for the power companies - or for their whining.  What made them think it was ok to dump mercury, arsenic, and acid gas into the atmosphere, the water and the land in the first place?  I would go even further and order that the companies themselves have to absorb the cost of the change - and not allow them to pass the buck yet once again to the struggling members of society by upping the cost of energy.

Durban or Bust

This article by Tom Zeller, Jr. from the Huffington Post bemoans the results of the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.  The article quotes Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists:  "We are in grave danger of locking in temperature increases well above two degrees Celsius, which would foreclose our ability to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."


The talks did manage to pull negotiations out of the fire at the last minute but delayed any real consequences of the agreements for almost a decade.  One great success was an agreement that all emitters (even those in developing countries like India and China) will be held to an agreed upon limit for greenhouse gas emissions.  What that limit will be will not need to be finally decided until 2015 - when the final document is due.  And how that limit will be enforced remains vague as the term "legally binding" was dropped from the agreement upon threat of total dissolution of negotiations.  


The agreement also "produced a path" toward providing "up to" 100 billion dollars annually to poorer countries (like our friends in Bangladesh) to produce green technology and to adapt to the changes that global warming will inflict upon them.  Sounds like great news - but what exactly does "produced a path" mean?  And the fact that no provisions for how such funding would be provided is also troubling.  This funding is particularly important alongside the agreement to hold all developed and developing countries to a standard.  The wealthier nations should have gotten on board with that standard years ago and the developing nations will have a much harder time complying with the standards than those with greater resources.  Still, without a global agreement - particularly with China surpassing the US in total emissions as of 2007 - the hope of achieving global climate change seems slim.  The uncomfortable truth is that the nations with deeper pockets are going to have to foot the bill.  And we're not really good at agreeing to pick up any tab - not even those that we've initiated.  


In essence, it seems that the talks ended with an agreement to come up with an agreement within the next decade.  With the waters already rising on Bangladesh, such a conclusion seems inadequate at best.

Aquinas Help or Hindrance: Part III

I actually found an article discussing environmentalism within the context of patristic theology.  Low and behold, our friend Aquinas was one of those theologians discussed - with some promising results!  The article, entitled "Valuing Earth Intrinsically and Instrumentally:  A Theological Framework for Environmental Ethics" and written by Jame Schaefer, appeared in the scholarly journal Theological Studies in 2005.  Schaefer argues that Aquinas held a "sacramental view of creation." As a creation of God, the earth allowed human beings access to God by observing God's handiwork.  In that regard, creation was holy to Aquinas.  Schaefer quotes Aquinas as naming "exorbitant use of God's creation . . . wasteful, immoderate, disordered, and vicious."  (792) So, if we take Schaefer seriously on these points, Aquinas is our ally in this environmental battle.

On the other hand,  Schaefer also credits Aquinas with a hierarchical view of creation, with humans at the top. (790-791)   Though he is clear that Aquinas believed that "use by humans is limited to using other creatures to sustain human life, not to satisfy superfluous desires", it provides a possible springboard for those who would say that creation is useful only in the ways that it is useful to human beings.  If one argues that clear cutting of the Rainforest is necessary to sustain human life, then said clear cutting becomes reasonable under Aquinas' theology (though Aquinas might argue the viability of that necessity).

However, even using this loophole to excuse consumption of the planet, the buck stops when we get to Bangladesh.  Here, it is apparent that human survival is imperiled by our imprudent use of resources.  At that point, the only possible recourse for those who would continue to plunder the earth is to argue hierarchical value among human beings.  If some human beings are more "perfect" than others, as Aquinas would have put it, then those more "perfect" humans would have a greater right to sustain their lives than those who are less perfect.  Our society seems to argue by its actions that it believes this to be true.  That those who have greater access to the world's resources, those who control a greater percentage of wealth, are, in fact, intrinsically more valuable than those who control little to no wealth and resources.  That, perhaps, is what is most disturbing about this crises.  Certainly, if asked point blank if they believed themselves to be more valuable than the poor, most anyone living and consuming in the world's wealthiest nations would answer an emphatic 'no'.  Sadly, what we do argues otherwise.

Aquinas: Help or Hindrance Part II

So, if we buy that modern science was set into motion by Aquinas (wouldn't he be so proud?), then we can trace some culpability back to him.  We can also, as I discussed in Part I of this discussion, trace at least part of the idea of an immutable God (which, to be fair was in existence long before Aquinas) who creates an unchangeable creation to Aquinas.  Another strike against him - as to believe that the only change that comes to creation must be from God is to believe that any attempt to 'fix' or alter the course of that creation would be 1) impossible and 2) a direct defiance of the Creator.

But, according to Gonzalez, Aquinas helped to promote study of creation as a study that could reveal God.  This may be an 'in' for environmentalists.  Certainly, science, technology, and human 'advances' in manipulation of our environment are responsible for getting us into this mess.  They are also, as I stated in the previous post, responsible for our current awareness.  Those who are suspicious of the reality of global warming these days also tend to be suspicious of science in general - an attitude of the religious right that probably goes back to the fundamentalist movement and the "Scopes Monkey Trial."  However, in Thomas Aquinas, we have a precedent that goes back to the 13th century for the study of our environment.  Current observations suggest a world in peril - in direct relation to the amount of greenhouse gases that we pump into the atmosphere.  If we rationally examine the data - and it is my understanding  that Aquinas was all for rational thought - it seems almost unavoidable that we will come up with pretty solid evidence that we are altering the climate.  I'd like to think that if Aquinas could get his head around that challenging idea - that humans are actually capable of changing creation - then he would also be in favor of returning the climate to God's original intention.  Tune in next time to see if I can find any evidence that he would, in fact, support such a notion.

Medieval Theology, Science, and Our Fine Mess

I just finished an article given to me by a third level Eden colleague, Tommi Boeder.  It's written by the late Lynn White, Jr., a scholar of medieval and Renaissance thought and former professor at Princeton University, and is entitled "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." (Applied Ethics, 155-162) White roots the attitudes that led to our environmental crisis first with the Jewish myth of Creation, found in Genesis 1, and then with the interpretation and appropriation of that myth in combination with the beginnings of scientific thought in the Middle Ages.

On the one hand, one could argue that Genesis 1 and its affirmation that all things (including humans) are created by God and are Good is beneficial for the environmental cause (as I did, in fact, argue in a previous post).  On the other hand, the often problematic translation of the Hebrew word "radah" - to have dominion over, or to 'scrape out' as in hoe, plow, till -  leads medieval theologians (and many of those before and after) to conclude that humans are at the top rung of creational hierarchy.  Nature subjugated to humanity instead of humanity subjugated to nature as in many other primitive myths of creation (Gonzalez, Justo.  A Concise History of Christian Doctrine.  p. 36)

White traces modern science and technology - the major perpetrators (and the whistle blowers) of global warming - to medieval thought.  Gonzalez (see above) goes so far as to trace science to Thomas Aquinas, my esteemed conversation partner in this project (47).  Much of this shift to 'scientific thought' in medieval Christianity occurs with the acquisition of Islamic texts on the disciplines of math, medicine, and their translations of Aristotle.   In addition to having access to this scholarship (most of which was far superior to its Greek counterparts), medieval theologians were in the thick of some advances that put humans in control of nature instead of vice versa.  In the late 7th century, northern European peasants had developed a new plowing technology that, rather than just scraping the upper layer of sod, actually turned the earth over.  It doesn't seem like much of an advance until one considers that the earlier plow only required two oxen and limited the size of a farm to what was necessary to provide for a single family while this new invention required eight oxen (a number no single peasant would have been able to maintain) and enlarged the farm to a size that provided for multiple families.  Not only was the plot enlarged and the friction and violence of the plow increased, but the division of the shares was now shifted from provision for each family to proportional harvest to each farmer according to his contribution to the labor (and livestock) required to work the larger field. So, we see not only a shift in the domination of the environment but also a system that rewards those who have more and penalizes those who have less. (White, 157)

Within this context, medieval theologians such as Aquinas develop the idea that creation can be studied as an exercise that reveals God's own intentions (Gonzalez, 47; White, 160).  As White states, natural theology "was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how (God's) creation operates,"  thus, "Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology."  If creation is Good, then surely the study (and consequent manipulation)of creation must also be Good.    This is the slippery slope that will eventually lead to our current crisis.  It is said that the road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions.

"Maybe We Are Cursed"

This article, published March 26, 2009 on the US News and World report website, lists many of the losses that Bangladesh was already experiencing due to climate change.  The rise in salinity in their aquifers were already leading to salty drinking water and failing rice crops.  Some farmers shifted to shrimp farming, an ingenious adaptation, to be sure.  The downside of the switch, however is that shrimp farms are less labor intensive, leading to diminishing rural jobs and increased migration to cities like Dhaka, which were already overcrowded in 2009 and stand to be underwater in a few decades.

Meanwhile, people have lost their homes, their livelihoods and their lives.  The article reports that in 2007, 5000 people lost their lives in a deadly weather combination of a Category 4 cyclone and increased flooding.  Scientists blame the increasing severity of storms on the stresses of climate change.  A change that the people of Bangladesh have little or nothing to do with.

When the article was written, the government of Bangladesh was seeking additional aid from industrialized countries, those that are responsible for the climate shift.  Though no amount is mentioned in the more recent National Geographic article, it does state that the innovations that are currently happening in the country are at least partially funded by industrialized nations.  So, we can at least affirm that those of us responsible are stepping up to assist in cleaning up our mess.  Or at least in adapting to our mess - it may be too big to clean up.  It seems small consolation when you consider that, in an impoverished country like Bangladesh, even small decreases in productivity can wreak havoc on an already precarious lifestyle.  We're not talking a mere inconvenience to the people - which ironically may be the most that developed countries will need to endure to actually make a dent in environmental responsibility - we're talking catastrophic loss.

Jehangir, a 62 year old farmer and father of six from Khajura,  has watched his crop yield shrink and the crops he does produce decline sharply in quality and, consequently, market value.  His home has been carried away by floods, four of his relatives were lost in the 2007 storm, and he wonders if the losses he has experienced are punishment from God.  "Maybe we are cursed."

If they are cursed, we surely are.