Ecocide – a religious (but non-Christian) view

Posted by

Patrick Curry

9 June 2023

What follows is a slightly expanded version of a ‘lay sermon’ I delivered at the Chapel at Churchill College, Cambridge, on Sunday 28 May 2023, at the invitation of the chaplain, the Reverend Canon Nigel Cooper. I would also like to thank him for one or two suggestions I have taken up.

It’s an honour to be here tonight, and I am grateful for the invitation to speak. My subject is a grave one, but fortunately I shall be brief. The first thing to add, given my title, is that I am not going to present an anti-Christian view. I have too much respect for Christianity, whatever my concerns might be, and too much affection as well as respect for the specifically Anglican church, to do that.

Nonetheless, in this or any other matter I cannot appeal to God. It has nothing whatever to do with the plausibility or otherwise of God’s existence – as if, absurdly, the human animal could ever know enough, and with enough certainty, to pronounce on such a question. No, it’s something more serious: an emotional disaffinity, and consequent bafflement. To quote an entry found in the poet Edward Thomas’s last notebook, ‘I never understood quite what was meant by God.’

This may well be a failing. It is certainly not a virtue. But be that as it may, let me turn to my main subject this evening. Unfortunately, ecocide is a useful, even unavoidable term. In case there is anyone present who still underestimates the gravity of the situation, according to the best estimates human beings have so far reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half. A sixth mass extinction, entirely anthropogenic, is already well underway. The rate of deforestation has recently slowed, but it still increases, just as the rate of human population growth has slowed but the numbers keep on growing. When it comes to the planet as a whole – as sooner or later it must – humanity collectively is behaving like the rapacious 1% of which we have heard so much.

We, like all other animals, are completely and utterly dependent on the Earth, especially on the health of its ecosystems of which we are necessarily a part. That is what makes life possible. (Of course, nature sometimes also makes life impossible; but that does not materially alter my point.) Yet for many of us, probably most, it is not what we feel most makes life worth living. This is an understandable but deeply worrying disjuncture, because if we value principally other things for their own sake, and only value nature insofar as it supports us in doing so, how then can we avoid treating the natural world as merely a means to our ends? But such an exclusively human-centred and instrumentalist or utilitarian mind-set is a key driver of the ecocidal dynamic. When intent on usages for our benefit alone, our criteria for what to protect are far too narrow, truncated, and short-term to support even us.

Somehow, and soon, more people must to come to value the Earth, its places and creatures as not only what make life possible, and indeed not only what make life worthwhile, but also to take the next step: which is to value them for their own sakes, regardless of what they can do for us, in all their point-less and price-less intrinsic value.

But given the terrifying ingenuity and industry with which capitalism instils and encourages an ecocidal attitude and way of life, how can we hope to inspire, encourage and protect an ecocentric one? Ultimately, I think – and by ultimately I mean after all truly necessary allowances have been made for practical exigencies and defensive measures – only, I say, by apprehending nature, as a whole and in its parts, as sacred. I once defined the sacred as ‘Not for sale!’ That will do in a pinch, but let me add that the sacred is that which is of ultimate value, and therefore cannot itself be further grounded or justified. (This is probably the point at which a theist might invoke God, but as an ecocentric I cannot. I don’t want to, because then nature is not the ultimate value, rather God is.)

Valuing nature as sacred is no mere cognitive or psychological phenomenon. It is something that is felt as much as recognised, and it is recognised not merely attributed or projected onto an inert and meaningless world. (That strategy is one of the ways modernity defends its agenda and excuses its bad conscience). And natural sacrality entails reverence as well as, but not only, respect.

By the same token, a living nature cannot be measured or calculated – which, in the context of our extreme circumstances, is a good thing! Not without reason, Max Weber attributed what he called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ to the belief that in principle, all things can be calculated. Not so oddly, that is also the motto of the McKinsey global management consultancy, serving 90 of the 100 largest corporations and many governments: ‘Everything can be calculated, and what can be calculated can be managed.’ Rendering the world fully calculable, along with the disenchantment that results and the universal apparent fungibility that this creates, is, of course, a necessary prior step to commodifying, exploiting, and selling it off.

Natural sacrality therefore cannot be appropriated and incorporated into a calculus (let alone an algorithm) which, in its binary digital abstraction, is inherently hostile to life. Rather it remains an enduring reminder of that fatal flaw, and a basis for critical resistance.

There is also then such a thing, respecting nature, as desecration – equally felt and recognised, but where the appropriate response is revulsion.

I am not suggesting that reverence for a sacred nature will suffice to turn the tide, rather that it is what philosophers might call a necessary but insufficient condition. We will need all that scientific knowledge, progressive political and economic policies, and vigorous eco-activism can bring. But without it, I don’t believe even these (already a big ask!) will suffice.

The values of the dominant order – anthropocentric, materialistic, and rationalistic –constitute a crypto-religion. It is monist and universalist, with a priestly caste plus enforcers and followers, preaching not love (however on occasion hypocritically) but money, and frequently ruthless (without ruth: that is, pity). The Megamachine therefore needs to be contested by counter-values which are equally radical, which is to say, equally religious in terms of ultimate values. We need to assert the love of life. And – if only to avoid cooption into yet another profitable but narrowly focussed and ultimately destructive programme – it needs to be personal.

Witness – if, as an outsider, I may be so bold – the Cambridge councillors who have apparently decided to destroy hundreds of living trees, along with the creatures for whom they are home, in order to build a bus route for electric and hybrid buses. The only value recognised here is a single good – the new Holy Grail of a net zero economy – to be attained through bureaucracy and technology, while whatever cannot be calculated – such as the value of life itself, to life – is ignored. And although the canvas for HS2 is much larger, the picture is exactly the same. (High Speed 2, a new fast rail service in the UK whose construction has required the destruction of innumerable woods, many of them ancient.)

Or witness President Biden’s administration justifying a massive oil drilling project in a hitherto wild part of Alaska on the basis that it is smaller than the ConocoPhillips corporation originally wanted. So the pass was already sold before deliberations began; the starting-point, or the premiss, is again already utterly skewed, therefore so too is the reasoning that follows. And what is the true starting-point, in relation to which this one is skewed? It was stated with concision by John Ruskin: ‘There is no wealth but life.’

To be sure, we cannot live without an economy. Nor, however, can we live in, or as part of, an economy alone. For that we need a whole living world. But here we may ask with Luke (23:31), ‘If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?’ For assuredly we are still in a time of green trees, but the dry, I fear, is coming. And who can doubt that instead taking it as a warning – perhaps a final warning – to radically change course, it will be interpreted by the powerful as licence to press on, and to be still more ruthless, on an even bigger scale? (There are significant resonances here with Iain McGilchrist’s reflections on the fatefully different modes of right and left brain hemispheres and their social consequences.)

Such incidents should also remind us that to allow carbon to stand in for our ecological problems as a whole is a serious mistake. Doing so not only ignores all the other destructive activities taking place; the concrete (to pick an example that can stand for many) may be ‘up to 85% carbon free’ but the damn stuff keeps on coming nonetheless. It also plays directly into the hands of business-as-usual, which is happy to ‘solve’ a problem it largely created while spawning new ones elsewhere and disguising human overshoot as a whole. And carbon is much easier for techno-science to quantify and systematize, and then for capital to monetize, than a host of things which need to not be done: over-consuming, over-developing and, far from least, over-breeding. To intelligently leave things alone, to refrain, to desist – in a word, self-restraint – is almost certainly the hardest challenge for humanity of all.

To sum up, I believe an apprehension of the sacrality of nature, held sufficiently deeply and widely, even if not, of course, universally, would slow the rate of destruction, would resist ecocide sufficiently, to give the Earth and its creatures, including ourselves, a fighting chance of surviving – maybe even, in time, of flourishing, under the aegis of a new civilisation which has learned (the hard way) to be more ecocentric than ecocidal. Ironically for something that sounds so fluffy, the effects could be powerfully practical. And while I find, regrettably, that I don’t actually have much hope, I suppose you could say that this is my faith.