c. 1998 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ As the religious community becomes increasingly involved in the environmental movement, it must not forget its commitment to social justice, especially the problems of the poor, according to an international panel of theologians and ethicists.
Many African-Americans, black liberation theologian James Cone said, think”white people care more about the endangered whale than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation’s cities.”At the same time, he added,”`blacks don’t care about the environment’ is a typical comment of ecologists.” Cone, the author most recently of the book”Malcolm and Martin and America,”called the division disturbing.”Justice fighters for blacks and the earth have tended to ignore each other,”Cone said.”Their separation is unfortunate because they are fighting the same enemy _ human beings’ domination of each other and nature.” But Cone, speaking during the Oct. 23-24 conference,”Ecumenical Earth: New Dimensions of Church and Community in Creation,”said he believes the separation is narrowing because of the growing awareness”that ecology touches every sphere of human existence. What good is it to eliminate racism if we are not around to enjoy a racist-free environment?” The conference, held at both Auburn and Union theological seminaries, brought together 170 participants from 10 nations, many of them longtime activists and academics involved in the twin issues of social justice and the environment.
It comes in the midst of a new flurry of environmental activism on the part of religious groups, including an interfaith campaign to drum up grassroots support for U.S. ratification of an international accord on global warming and a series of conferences conducted by the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, which concluded at the United Nations just before the UTS-Auburn meeting.
No one at the UTS-Auburn gathering had to be convinced either that there was an environmental crisis or that religion had a role to play in resolving the crisis.”Ecologists have been so effective in raising environmental awareness that few people deny that our planet is in deep trouble,”Cone said.”For the first time in history, humankind has the power to destroy all life _ either with a nuclear bang or a gradual poisoning of the land, air and sea.” Such profound threats to human existence challenge religious bodies in fundamental ways.”Everyone has a list of 150 things they’d like the churches to DO,”said Larry Rasmussen, co-chair of the conference and author of the prize-winning book,”Earth Community, Earth Ethics.””But what is essential is for the churches to risk asking what it means to BE the church at this point. Do we think differently about ourselves as a church?” Christian ethicist Dieter Hessel, who has written widely on environmental matters, offered a suggestion. He talked of an”Ecological Reformation”to create churches that recognize the interdependence of humans and nature.
The churches, among other things, would rethink a”theology of domination”taken from the first chapters of the biblical book of Genesis 1 and consider more seriously chapters 2-4, where humans”share the same Creator’s breath as do other animals.” Churches should develop liturgies and theologies that expand the spiritual resources of individuals and congregations to respond to”the theological and biological fact of human kinship with other creatures.” A number of the UTS-Auburn participants were exponents of various strains of liberation theology _ Latin American, black, feminist, gay and lesbian _ and, as Cone noted, who traditionally viewed the environmental movement with skepticism.
Charity Majiza, the new general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, for example, gave participants a view of the environmental issue seen through the eyes of the anti-apartheid struggle in which the SACC played a key role.”The ecumenical community,”Majiza says,”has a special potential and obligation to contribute to the liberation of the environment.” Pollution and global warming and loss of species are problems in South Africa, she said, but added that South Africa faces a different kind of environmental challenge: Millions of South Africans have been driven off their land by apartheid and other forms of misdevelopment.”In many areas the environment was reduced to barren waste.” It was the”eco-justice”issues that dominated the UTS-Auburn conference _ issues the participants said made religious participation in the environmental debate unique: Why is it that toxic waste dumps occur overwhelmingly in poor and minority communities? How can the rich countries that have created most of the carbon monoxide pollution fix the problem they cause? Does the”global economy”threaten”re-colonization of poor countries,”as Manchala Deenabandhu, from Madras, India, charged at the conference?
Rasmussen said he thought the conference was given energy by the unusually wide variety of voices influencing”the way the environmental issues pushed us toward the core of our faith.”People made deep connections between the ecological challenge and the classical doctrines of the Christian faith _ confession and repentance, sin and salvation, baptism and Eucharist, blasphemy, connecting spirit and matter.”Now we are moving to the center of what we believe,”he said.
DEA END HOWELL
