Nine Christian Responses to the Ecological Crisis

2 See, for example, the work of forest conservation done by Aldo Leopold, as well as Walter Lowdermilk's work on soil erosion.the Christian "worldview" that is at the heart of White's critique.6 Bacon-the "father of the modern scientific method"-and the utopian vision of his The New Atlantis, in which the elite rulers of society are scientists who not only investigate and contemplate nature but also manipulate it, forcing plants and even animals, for example, to grow larger and more fruit-bearing than their nature would otherwise allow.Such marks the explicit beginnings of the Western ideology of instrumentalist mastery, in the development of which, says White, Christianity, or at least Christian culture, played a significant part-not least because the very idea of a utopia accomplished through science and technology could not even have been possible without the traditional Judeo-Christian orientation towards the future Kingdom of God in the eschaton.The early Modern period, with the Enlightenment and its accompaniment of deism following close on, merely secularized that orientation, brought it back down to earth from its medieval place in the heavens, and placed the Kingdom of God in the hands and under the powerful mastery of human beings-with, of course, the final securing of this mastery, and therewith of the instrumentalist worldview, through the advantageous marriage of science and technology in the Industrial Revolution.6 Actually, it is not as if White was the first to make such an "anthropocentric instrumentalist" charge.A decade before White's article, Joseph Sittler, in his "A Theology for Earth," already denounced the reduction of "nature" to a resource for man's needs.Sittler's main concern in the article is to, on the one hand, reject the strong orthodox emphasis of his day on the "other-worldliness" of salvation which abandons the earth and in so doing devalues it (so that it might be reduced to a mere resource to serve man's interim needs), while on the other, to safeguard core orthodox doctrines from liberalizing tendencies which might either 1) also reduce nature to a resource (for example, in the service of liberal individualism which subjectivizes religion while outwardly promoting capitalism) or 2) invoke a return to a more "pagan" understanding of the environment which appreciates the earth as filled with nature spirits or even as a Mother Goddess.To avoid all these stances-i.e.other-worldly orthodoxy, liberal individualism/subjectivism, and a return to "paganism"-Sittler promoted instead, inspired primarily by St. Francis of Assisi, the image of "nature" as "beloved sister," who, alongside her brother "man", also requires redemption.In this way he intended to both preserve core orthodox doctrines (of original sin and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ) while revaluing the earth as having an inherent value, and indeed an eschatological destiny, of its own.See, Joseph Sittler, "A Theology for Earth," Christian Scholar 37, No. 3 (Sep.1954), 367-374.Why, then, was White's article so pivotal and Sittler's not?Perhaps for two reasons: 1) Sittler's article was published before and White's article after the appearance of Rachel Carson's highly influential book of 1962, Silent Spring, which warned of the disastrous effects of the use of pesticides on the bird population.This book is today considered a classic that helped to launch the environmental movement in the 1960s; 2) Sittler's article was published originally in a Christian journal and White's article in a scientific one, so White's article may have been received far more readily by people who were already involved in environmentalist science and associated conservationist activities, and who might also have been more "secular" in their outlook and thus more ready to accept White's critique of Christianity (of course, themselves disregarding the fact that the very idea of a "secular" critique of "religion" is itself a product of the Modernist worldview which itself developed out of Christian culture).This second reason is further accentuated by the fact that while

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