Good Stewards of God's creation, they honor the Creator of this
marvelous natural order. (And Judaism, too, has its
environmentally focused communities of belief, who see in the fostering
of reverence for nature, and a harmonious relationship with it, a
profound connection with traditional Jewish ethics.)
For those who see nature less in terms of the role of the Creator in
fashioning the profound beauty of the natural world, but who focus
instead on what science has shown about the development and workings of
this amazing order, another mind-boggling and spiritually numinous
vision can open up.
In contemplating the miracle of life's rise on this planet over the
past almost-four billion years, one can experience the sacred.
Over this vast stretch of time, there has grown up on the surface of
this planet an order of almost inconceivable intricacy-- from the
molecular level within the cell to the essential flows of matter and
energy at the global scale. Overcoming planetary traumas that
have occasionally assaulted the earth from outside the biosphere, the
increasingly integrated systems of life have created a self-sustaining
foundation supporting all earth's creatures.
As with other religious visions, this understanding leads us to see
ourselves in a larger context. This living order deserves our
reverence for many reasons, not least because it is out of that order
that we came into existence, and not least because we still depend on
that order for every breath we take and every bite of food we eat.
That dependence engenders another reason one besides awe and
gratitude, one based in prudence--why we are called upon to give the
living system of the earth deep respect. We are the creatures who NEED
to be inspired by such reverence.
That's because, of all the creatures this system has produced, we
humans are the ones who have innovated and stumbled our way into a
situation where we, as a species, now wield power sufficient to disrupt
and destroy the biosphere's life-sustaining wholeness.
Our beautiful earth now reels under our wanton exploitation: the
species are going extict, the reefs are dying, the fisheries
disappearing, the climate undergoing changes too swift for life to
adapt.
We need to transform ourselves from acting like weak creatures eking
out survival any way we can, as we were when we emerged onto the scene,
to conducting ourselves like the mighty creatures we have become and
who --out of a sense of the sacred values at stake-- align our powers
with the needs and the structure of our planet's natural order.
Thus it is at this point in human history where our impact has become
so great, but where we so clearly have developed collectively neither
the wisdom nor the moral discipline to exert our powers in a harmonious
and sustainable way--that the religious dimension of the environmental
ethic becomes not only justified but essential.
Throughout history, it is when people contact that deep place where
spiritual meanings come alive in their hearts that they find the
motivational strength to overcome the destructive forces around them,
and within themselves as well. It is from a rightly constituted
sense of the sacred that people and cultures have been able to
transform themselves.
In the face of this rapidly developing emergency, therefore, we need
those passions of reverence and awe and love and loyalty, that the
sacred inspires, to give us the strength of will and character to make
a profound and life-serving change in ourselves and in how we act on
our planet.
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