c. 1996 Religion News Service
PHOENIX (RNS)-Contending that divergent views on the environment have the nation caught”between the flood and the rainbow,”U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt urged American religious bodies to join the fray over conservation laws and stand fast in efforts to protect natural environment.
Speaking Thursday (April 11) to the annual convention of the Associated Church Press, an umbrella organization of mainline Protestant and Catholic publications, Babbitt described his own developing sense of environmental spirituality.”We all remember the Deluge as an account of sin and punishment, of destruction followed by hope and renewal,”Babbitt said, referring to the story of Noah in the Hebrew Scriptures.”But upon reading it once again, I saw more meaning.” That meaning, said the Notre Dame-trained geologist, was that God’s covenant, symbolized by the rainbow that appeared at the end of the 40 day flood, was for the whole of creation.”Our creator did not specify that Noah should limit the ark to two charismatic species, two good for hunting, two species that might provide some cure for cancer down the road, and say, two that draw crowds to the city zoo.” The covenant, Babbitt said, was with”all living things”on earth.”Why is this relevant in the modern political arena, as the religious community speaks to and from the pulpit?”he asked.”Because today, we are still living between the flood and the rainbow: between threats to creation on the one side and God’s covenant to protect life on the other.”Only two things stand between these two visions,”he added.”The first is our secular conservation laws, laws which preserve habitat, protect national parks, and restore our lakes, rivers and shores. …”But the second is something less visible and more fundamental than the laws themselves: It is the spiritual and moral values that are embodied in those laws,”he said.”Without those values we cannot develop as responsible stewards of the land.” Babbitt was sharply critical of efforts on Capitol Hill to”dismantle”the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
The landmark act has become the object of bitter political debate, pitting environmentalists against Republican lawmakers who argue the law is a prime example of over-zealous federal regulation that retards economic development and that values species such as the spotted owl over jobs for people.
Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona, was for most of his political career not considered an environmentalist. But in the course of his travels since joining President Clinton’s Cabinet, he said he began to reread the biblical book of Genesis.
Babbitt said he saw signs that America’s religious community,”convinced of scientific evidence … and acting across a remarkable spectrum of faith groups, is arraying its ancient and authoritative teachings for action in response to the crisis of the planetary environment.” Babbitt said his own environmental awakening was gradual. He grew up near Flagstaff, Ariz.,”entranced by the out-of-doors”and”shooting everything that moved.” Raised a Catholic, Babbitt said he had never put his faith together with any spiritual sense of the environment.”I made that connection by a kind of detour,”he said after being”profoundly moved”by the”religious values and the way they were integrated into the landscape”of two Hopi Indians with whom he worked.”I began to go back and recanvas my own education, to look again at Genesis, but it wasn’t that I suddenly was transformed,”he said.
JC END ANDERSON
