By Isaiah Menning ’24
We live in an age of extinction. At 1,000 times the average historical rate, the current biological extinction crisis places the present moment on par with the event that killed the dinosaurs.1 With atmospheric carbon dioxide levels higher than any point in the past 800,000 years and the world expected to warm by 3° C in the next eighty under current trends, it is clear that human-caused climate change is a real phenomenon with impacts beyond daily temperature.2 Warming, combined with rampant habitat destruction, is so dominant in fueling the sixth mass extinction that some have suggested renaming the present geologic epoch the “Anthropocene” after the human species’ utterly dominant impact on Earth.3 Our evolutionary history is one of ascension: from relative obscurity to widespread distribution in a few thousand years; from widespread distribution to dominance even in the atmosphere in only two centuries. To our honor or shame, the “Anthropocene” is a well-deserved title. For better or worse, humans are dominant, and how we conceptualize our place on the planet has profound implications for Earth’s future in our hands.
Some have suggested that the West’s devotion to human exceptionalism, the idea that humans are unique and superior to all other life, is in large part to blame for this crisis. Not entirely wrong in their diagnosis, many modern environmental thought leaders have argued that an abandonment of human exceptionalism is necessary for the ecological health of the planet. While recognizing the role that anthropocentrism has played in our present ecological crisis, I respectfully disagree; a bounded view of human exceptionalism that casts man as the responsible caretaker of Earth is in fact necessary to build an environmentalist ethic.
In this article, I argue that one must first view humans as exceptional and human actions as separate from nature to restrict ourselves in the name of environmentalism. Secondly, in order to build a robust environmental ethic, one must assert reasons for environmental restraint grounded in objective morality. As such, one cannot hold humanity morally accountable for its destruction of nature if humanity itself is seen as undistinguished from it. Beyond this, I argue that a religious worldview is necessary for environmental action and that the Christian brand of human exceptionalism, which demands people as those uniquely tasked to care for the global garden, offers the best keys to a flourishing future.
Human Exceptionalism and Modern Environmentalism
Materialist environmentalism has emerged as a synthesis between atheistic materialism and the ethical calls of environmentalism. It attempts to build an environmental ethic while also maintaining that humans are not morally distinct from animals. A synthesis of these two common philosophies presents two premises: firstly, that humans should abandon any sense of our exceptionalism to better protect the natural world; secondly, that the universe is exclusively matter, with people being of no unique worth.
Firstly, modern environmentalism often claims that an emphasis on humanity has sown the seeds of the ecological crisis. In his 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Present Ecological Crisis,” Lynn White argues that the West’s historic belief, “that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man,” has laid the groundwork for vast environmental destruction.4 White effectively makes a pragmatic case against human exceptionalism, arguing that an abandonment of pagan animism—which views all of nature as divine—and an embrace of the Christian idea of imago Dei—which claims that people are made in the image of God—gave the West moral permission to use the natural world with impunity, leading to an ecological crisis. Instead, White argues that the West should shed Chrisitianity’s historic anthropocentrism and rather adopt a religious focus on humanity’s connectedness with nature to build an environmentalist ethic.5 Prominent atheist thinker Richard Dawkins extends White’s critique of human exceptionalism, saying that the “discontinuous gap between humans and ‘apes’ that we erect in our minds is regrettable,” and that this gap is “arbitrary, the result of evolutionary accident.”6 According to Dawkins’ logic, it makes perfect sense that a culture built on the idea of its own superiority to the natural world would destroy it. Indeed, that is exactly what has been observed, especially in the last century. Both Dawkins and White suggest that an emphasis on our connectedness to nature, not superiority to it, would allow for better environmental conservation.
With a more materialist bent, in his 1995 book River Out of Eden, Dawkins extends the idea that not only are humans far from transcendent, but that morality itself is nonexistent, saying, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”7 A valueless universe is, in fact, the logical conclusion of a completely materialist worldview, but it proves difficult to build any ethical system on the cosmos’ pitiless indifference. The claim that humans are no different from nature and that the universe, at its core, has no moral quality demands this consideration: if humans are as natural of a phenomenon as apes, then their world-threatening pollution would logically be another natural byproduct. Given this, climate change is of no more moral consequence than that of a natural extinction event like an asteroid. If humans are simply another force of nature, then, why should people protect the natural world?
One answer to this objection lies in the biocentric environmental philosophy of Deep Ecology, which emphasizes the intrinsic value of all life and biological systems. The first of the philosophy’s eight tenets states that “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves … These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes,” and that “Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.”8 While this line of thinking may be consistent with a type of nature-worship or other religious systems, including even Christianity, it is fundamentally incompatible with a Dawkins-style brute materialism. It assumes both transcendent values and humanity’s unique obligation to follow them. In order to hold this position, one must disagree with the first premise of a wholly materialist environmentalism—that the universe is devoid of any transcendent values. Deep Ecologists disagree with Dawkins on the point that there is no core purpose to the universe; rather, they simply find purpose in the intrinsic functioning of all life. In this way, Deep Ecology certainly rejects the moral-less universe of strict materialism.
By effectively equating human and nonhuman life, one cannot create an environmental ethic where humans are held uniquely responsible for environmental destruction. Ignoring the materialist position for a moment, Deep Ecology holds that humans, unlike other parts of the natural order, are still uniquely made responsible for enacting those values. For instance, an asteroid would not be held morally responsible for inducing a mass extinction, but if humans somehow directed that asteroid to hit Earth, all would agree where the blame would lie. Under Deep Ecology, humans are assumed to be non-natural actors, in some sense uniquely responsible and therefore exceptional. While certainly not a Christian worldview of humanity, Deep Ecology depends on an absolute morality, which people are uniquely beholden to, unlike all other nature. Even the traditionally anti-anthropocentric brand of Deep Ecology eventually appeals to human exceptionalism in a call for environmental action.
Another argument more faithful to the tenets of materialist environmentalism is that humans’ simple connection to the natural world demands environmental action. In the Huffington Post article, “Green and Atheist,” David Horton argues that religion and environmentalism are fundamentally incompatible and that atheism offers far better philosophical tools than those who believe the Earth is destined to burn anyways. Horton says that truly atheistic conservationists “really understand the proposition that all these species are in it together, that we are all cousins, that we all come from a common ancestor, and that all have either a complete right to exist or no right to exist, not some of one and some of another.”9 This proposition, just like Deep Ecology theory, offers a morality that cannot be justified by materialism; it is impossible to say that animalshave transcendently objective rights in a universe that is exclusively non-transcendent. Even so, Horton tries to justify environmentalism by commonality—that all organisms, as parts of nature, are “in it together.” But what moral imperative is there in simple connectedness?
The connectedness of two things is only descriptive; it makes no moral statement about any duties or values between the objects. For example, common heritage binds families and cultures, but only because one assumes that duty to family and culture is morally right. This is not the case between arbitrarily connected objects, like two boards from the same tree, who have no moral obligation to each other. True, humans are deeply and biologically connected to other living things that have no moral duties, but it is in spite of this fact, not because of it, that we dohave the moral obligation for their care. In order to possess that unique moral obligation that sets limits on our own non-natural actions, we must be exceptional.
The philosophical tools of materialism are simply insufficient for an environmentalist ethic. Firstly, according to materialist environmentalism, natural processes should be preserved by limiting a humanity that is just as natural of a feature as the “nature” it is harming. Secondly, people are allegedly beholden to a morality in a universe void of morality. Better options exist. In order to build a robust environmental philosophy where humans are different from an extinction-inducing asteroid and truly responsible for environmental destruction, we must be distinguished from the rest of the natural world.
Logos from the Beginning
But are we? Dawkins is correct to highlight the similarities between humans and great apes. Further, it seems that the distinctness of modern Homo sapiens becomes blurred the more we consider our human-like relatives of the recent past. In his book, Masters of the Planet, American Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall paints a picture of an ancient planet shared by many hominids but argues that there is a singular trait that distinguishes Homo sapiens: the ability to think abstractly, particularly through language. Specifically, language allowed people not only to imagine the present world, but also those that could be. Using an example to envision the human mind before language, he shares the story of Jill Bolte Taylor, who lost her ability to speak at age 37 but later made a full recovery. He recalls Bolte Taylor’s testimony that her loss of language made her feel more connected to the environment, and that her lingual recovery “compelled her to distance herself from her surroundings.”10 Here, Tattersall finds the essence of the symbolic faculty: “the capacity to objectify oneself and remain apart from one’s universe.”11 The removal of oneself from the universe, accomplished by language, is remarkably close to our conceptions of consciousness and a marker of our perceived non-naturalness. It is also absolutely key for building a sense of morality, and according to the available evidence and Tattersall’s argument, is unique to people.
In a striking complement to the Christian imago Dei idea, Tattersall’s language hypothesis offers two steps to building a species that thinks itself to be morally bound. First, by separating oneself from the environment, a sense of free will is created. To be independent of the world is to be an agent apart from it and therefore responsible for personal actions apart from natural forces. Second, abstraction via language allows individuals to think not only of the present, but also to imagine future realities, introducing intent. Ultimately, the introduction of both agency and intent creates a sense of morality that, if Tattersall’s conclusions are correct, is totally unique to humans.
Humans, at least as a species, are exceptional. The scientific evidence suggests that while people are undeniably the biological results of evolution, one aspect of humanity’s uniqueness is each individual’s conviction that she isunique from the surrounding world. While Tattersall himself falls short of coming to these explicit conclusions, this is in remarkable congruity with the Judeo-Christian framework which White argues against. But while science can describe the origin of morality and our perceived self-identities, it hardly prescribes anything about human conduct. The observer finds herself in the same conundrum of the nihilistic materialist environmentalist, albeit a bit inflated due to the thought of her exceptional self. After all, the sense of morality could simply be just that, a biological adaptation among unique animals unrelated to any transcendent law at all.
Human: Gardener of Earth
But what if this internal sense of responsibility is both a biological adaptation anda moral reality? The basic Christian proposition both highly reflects the relevant science and solves for materialist environmentalism’s philosophical shortcomings: it claims that humans are both common in origin with all of life anddivinely appointed to care for it.
The tools of the Christian story allow for objective moral realities which are denied under strict materialism. The Genesis creation narrative opens with the creating God forming chaos into habitable order through speech, culminating with the creation of humans uniquely made “in the image of God.” Now, I do not mean to deeply discuss the proper hermeneutics of the Genesis creation stories, but it is crucial to recognize these texts for what they are: a worldview statement about God and His relationship to the world in the context of Ancient Near East cosmology, to paraphrase biblical scholar and Bible Project cofounder Tim Mackie.12 Taken under this view, the student of the Hebrew Bible finds how being made “in the image of God” might relate to the Creator’s actions and authority. The story begins with God speaking order into the universe, creating three domains: light and dark, sky and water, and land. He then adds greater amounts of order to each, forming the lights in the vaults of the sky, occupying sky and water with birds and fish, and finally ordering animals out of the land. Each of these are split into a respective day, and God progressively describes His work as “good,” adding moral values to reality. Throughout, the creating God uses speech to order the universe. On the sixth day, along with the animals, God makes people.13 Ultimately, they too will be tasked with the responsibility to use their unique abilities of speech to rule the creation.
Here the story pauses. In what is clearly the narrative’s climax, God distinguishes humanity from all other creation. He says, “‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image.”14 Scholars have debated the exact theological meaning of the image of God, or imago Dei, but as Tim Mackie points out, the text directly relates this trait to caring for Creation. Humanity is made in the divine image “so that they may rule.”15 In the second creation story, God forms man from the same dust as the animals.16 This serves to emphasize both the earthly and spiritual natures of man. Humanity, the image of God on Earth, is where the two realms meet. Calling His finished work “very good,” the Creator makes humanity—common in origin but unique in purpose from all other things.17 In this way, the Christian sees humans as the images of the creating God—connected to but distinct from all other life and morally responsible for their care.
Ultimately, by establishing the possibility of moral reality and distinguishing humanity from the rest of Creation, Christianity introduces a global “garden ethic” which both esteems humans with dominion over Creation and holds them responsible to the Creator to maintain its goodness. For all the esteeming of humanity that the Judeo-Christian position posits, it introduces an infinitely higher rung of being in the character of God. It is God who directs the purposes and responsibilities of people and also God to whom exceptional humanity is totally answerable. If one truly believes that humans are nothing more than space chimps that threaten biodiversity, environmentally friendly decisions like veganism may be grounded in a sense of vague connectedness to other animals, but this would be void of any objective morality. By contrast, if one truly believes that humanity is morally mandated to care for the divine garden, then food choices have a much deeper moral stake. Humans are both biological participants in the global garden and the global gardeners. Human actions are not natural, but humanity is also responsible to be an active participant in the natural world. Thus, as fundamentally separate from our surroundings, people can fail, fall short, and sin environmentally as—and only as—the rightful rulers of Earth. Christianity plainly holds what materialist environmentalism rests its case on but will not utter—that environmental sins are real and that the human-induced mass extinction is one of them.
The Global Garden Ethic
The Christian idea has better footing to explain the position of moral responsibility and the possibility of environmental sin––but does it offer any practical principles? Even if one assumes the biblical Eden to be analogous to the broader world, the simple idea of “dominion” bounded by humans’ vague mandate to work and care for the Earth is hardly a certain moral pathway to the Paris Climate Accords. After all, as Lynn White posits, the same arrogant Christian idea about human superiority caused the present crisis simply by using different definitions of good care.18
Assuming the Christian position that humans are morally bound to care for the Earth, multiple powerful principles for good care become apparent. Christians can recognize the act of conservation in global gardening as an act of worship. In 1536, John Calvin argued that “the most perfect way of seeking God,” is “for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he rendered himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself.”19 To Calvin, God’s creation naturally provokes Christian worship. Finding support in Psalm 19, which triumphantly states how “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” a natural conclusion is that the Christian should preserve manifestations of the God-exalting created order.20 Indeed, many of Calvin’s successors adopted his theology to be the “steward of God in all things,” and many of the Calvinist communities in New England and beyond codified forest preserves and common green spaces. Christians today would do well to sound from the pulpit as fervently as the early Calvinists the duty to preserve pieces of “his works” as an act of worship.21
Next, nature conservation is a necessary part of Christians’ practice of Sabbath. In his 1984 book God in Creation,Reformed theologian and Calvin successor Jurgen Moltmann wrote about how the principles found in the Genesis story itself can inform Christian environmentalism.22 In reference to God’s rest on the seventh day of creation and the longstanding Judeo-Christian practice of Sabbath, Moltmann proclaims that “In the sabbath stillness men and women no longer intervene in the environment through their labour. They let it be entirely God’s creation.”23 In this ideal, men and women made in the image of God limit their labor in Creation and simply let it be, exactly in the pattern of their Creator. This idea is deeply biblical, echoing the ideas not only of Genesis 1, but also all references to the Sabbath contained in the Bible. Possible approaches abound for what this may mean for Christian environmentalist action, whether by a commitment to preserve some seventh of land, reduce consumption on a patterned basis, or some other combination. Under the biblical worldview, cycles of work and production, including that which transforms natural resources, is good when limited by the good periods of rest. Finding our purpose as God’s Creation-caretakers in the Genesis story builds into the narrative that the good creation process depends on the gardener limiting her own ambitions.
The Christian story allows genuine environmental accountability far beyond what most forms of modern environmentalism can offer. Because it offers no possibility of objective morality and yet calls for human action, the materialist environmentalist vision of man as nothing more than a creature among animals internally collapses without human exceptionalism and morality. By contrast, a proper view of the Christian vision of people as Earth’s responsible rulers reinforces the goals of environmental stewardship. The Christian perspective asserts human dominion along with a mandate to rule over the Earth. Biologically and spiritually, humans are of the earth and its masters. It is no arrogance to say that humans are the most important creatures on Earth, but crucial under this framework is the bedrock reality that people, even as Earth’s rulers, are far and below the standard and authority of God. Undoubtedly, this duty involves gardening, both working the bounties of Earth and also promoting its preservation. Christians are called to adopt the standards of Moltmann, to take seriously the command of Sabbath, and respect the dignity of the whole of Creation, especially our fellow human beings. If the assertions of Christianity are true, and if humans are the representatives of the ultimate Ruler before His coming, the honorable work of tending our garden-Earth and preventing the sixth extinction is pressingly real and far from over. Through the fulfillment of Jesus, the true man, true God, and true gardener, the people of God must lead the way in restoring the global garden, fulfilling our task of dominion.
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References
[1] S.L. Pimm et al. “The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection,” Science 344, no. 6187 (2014): 1246752, doi: 10.1126/science.1246752.
[2] Rebecca Lindsay, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” News & Features, Climate.gov, August 14, 2020, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide; “UN Emissions Report: World on Course for More than 3 Degree Spike, Even If Climate Commitments Are Met,” United Nations, November 26, 2019, https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1052171.
[3 Ilkka Hanski, “Habitat Loss, the Dynamics of Biodiversity, and a Perspective on Conservation,” AMBIO 40, no. 3 (2011): 248-255, doi: 10.1007/s13280-011-0147-3; Joseph Stromberg, “What is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?” Smithsonian Magazine, January, 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/.
4 Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1207, doi: 10.1126/science.155.3767.1203.
5 White, 1207.
6 Richard Dawkins, “Gaps in the Mind,” in The Great Ape Project, eds. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993), 81-87.
7 Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133.
8 George Sessions and Arne Naess, “The Basic Principles of Deep Ecology,” University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 1984, https://www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/barnhill/ES-243/pp%20outline%20Deep%20Ecology.pdf.
9 David Horton, “Green and Atheist: The Incompatibility of Religion and Environmentalism,” HuffPost, Buzzfeed, Inc., last modified July 8, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/green-and-atheist_b_582344.
10 Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2012), 219.
11 Tattersall, 219.
12 Tim Mackie, “Interpreting the Bible’s Creation Narratives” (lecture notes, Bridgetown Church Midweek Lectures, Portland, OR, January 20, 2016).
13 Genesis 1:1-25 (NIV).
14 Genesis 1:25 (NIV).
15 Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, “Image of God,” BibleProject, March 21, 2016, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbipxLDtY8c&t=317s&ab_channel=BibleProject; Tim Mackie, “Lecture on the Early Church & Politics: Tim Mackie (The Bible Project),” Tim Mackie Archives, August 15, 2017, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXcSJVW8rg4&t=2s&ab_channel=TimMackieArchives.
16 Genesis 2:7,19 (NIV).
17 Genesis 1:31 (NIV).
18 White, 1207.
19 Mark Stoll, “The Environment Was a Moral Issue Long Before Pope Francis,” HuffPost, Buzzfeed, Inc., last modified July 2, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-environment-was-a-mor_b_7716102.
20 Psalm 19:1 (ESV).
21 Mackie, “Lecture on the Early Church & Politics.”
22 Ryan Patrick McLaughlin, “Anticipating a Maximally Inclusive Eschaton: Jürgen Moltmann’s Potential Contribution to Animal Theology,” Journal of Animal Ethics 4, no. 1 (2014): 18-36, doi: 10.5406/janimalethics.4.1.0018.
23 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 277.