Eco-Myths, eco faith

When in the late 1970's my existing commitment to environnmental integrity was potentially put in conflict with my growing desire to follow Christ by Lyn White Jr's attribution of environmental degradation to cultural attitudes borne of Christian theological understandings of humanity in relation to environmental matters, principally the doctrine of dominion. At that time I was not convinced that even if Christians in an earlier age made some bad interpretations, it did not fatally injure Christian faith as a viable path for an environmentalist because that understanding did not seem to me to be of the essence, and indeed it seemed to me that there were ways to understand Genesis that did not require a degrading attitude to nature.

So I am pleased to add to my tagged articles, this one by Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson which problematises White's thesis and demonstrates that the church is not only not the the baddie it has been painted, but that there are a number of Christians who have contributed to the reverencing of creation. They show how the degrading attitudes have a lot more to do with other historical forces than to Christian ideas. In fact, an interesting cross cultural perspective seems to lodge the blame in human nature more thoroughly.

The work of Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan throws doubts on White's thesis in a different way. Tuan scrutinized the environmental situation in Asia and discovered that, despite its different religious traditions, practices there were every bit as destructive of the environment as in the West. Tuan clearly showed how the "official" pro-nature line in Chinese religions, for example, was actually vitiated by behavior. Deforestation and erosion, rice terracing and urbanization have all exacted an immense toll on the environment and effected a gigantic transformation of the Chinese landscape. Nor is Tuan's an isolated judgment. Erich Isaac speaks of the destruction wrought by Arab imperial expansionists on vast tracts of the Old World and of the devastation of central Burma by Buddhists. Such are ignored, if not suppressed, among critics of the Judeo-Christian West.

It was my understanding in my youth that the real cause of creational degradation is human greed, selfishness and stupidity. Christian faith offers a path which analyses the root cause of such things and a real remedy for them. That was why I stuck with it.
Eco-Myths - Christianity Today magazine - ChristianityTodayLibrary.com:
Filed in: Christian, environment, apologetics, White