DARK GREEN RELIGION:
NATURE SPIRITUALITY AND
THE PLANETARY FUTURE
Chapter 8. Terrapolitan Earth Religion
(Listed In Order of Page and Paragraph Number In Dark Green Religion)
In Dark Green Religion (p. 192-94) I discussed the Welcome Ceremony at the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002. This pageant was a remarkable example of dark green ritualizing within the international environmental milieu.
Put simply, the performance tells the story of the emergence of life and of an harmonious, Edenic existence, eventually disrupted through greed and a callous indifference to Mother Earth. Yet, the performance also offered hope, as the nations were gathering to put things right, to learn again how to care for Mother Earth.
Excerpts from the performance follow in two parts; Part One:Par. 3, the World Sustainability Hearing was “comprised [of] a panel of scientific, religious, political and environmental leaders, and other eminent persons, who served as a council or grand jury before which these testimonies were heard. Each day was dedicated to different nexus of environmental and social justice issues.” Examples cited included the "Day of the Forests and Forest-Dependent Communities," and the "Day of Energy and Climate Justice." The description continued, “The role of each the panels was to ask questions that fully draw out the experience and views of each person giving testimony, guide reflections and discussions on the themes heard each day, and provide synthesis statements summarizing the testimonies and issues discussed each day.” (Quote is from an online Earth Island Institute article, no longer available.)
The Goldman award program was created in 1990 and it is awarded annually to six or seven grassroots environmental activists from around the world. Award winners have included a number of activists who have become famous, including Lois Gibbs (1990), Wangari Maathai (in 1991, who in 2004 also won the Nobel Peace Prize), and Ken Saro-Wiwa (1995), who was executed the same year by the Nigerian (military) Government, which had alleged that this author and activist had incited the murder of four adversaries from his own ethnic group. The trial was widely viewed as unjust and his execution, with eight others, caused an international furor, including a campaign against the Shell Oil Company, which many believed were ultimately responsible. On Saro-Wiwa, see the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro-Wiwa.Par. 3, for another book focused on sustainability, see Herbert Giradet, The Gaia Atlas of Cities: New Directions for Sustainable Urban Living (New York: Anchor, 1993).
E.F. Schumacher’s widely reprinted "Buddhist Economics" article can be found (in its first printing) in Asia: A Handbook, ed. Guy Wint (New York: Praeger, 1966); and later in Resurgence 1, no. 11 (1968), Toward a Steady-State Economy, ed. Herman E. Daly (San Fransicso, California: W. H. Freeman, 1973), and Ernest Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).Par. 2, “A Walk Through Time” is available online at http://globalcommunity.org/wtt/walk_menu/index.html. The Walk was later entrusted to the Foundation for Global Community; see http://globalcommunity.org/. Its mission is another reflection of the kind of biocentric spirituality of belonging and connection commonly found in dark green religion:
As humans, we believed our highest purpose is to discover, live, and communicate what is needed to achieve the world functions for the benefit of all life.
Our home is a water planet called Earth, cradled in a universe of beauty, mystery, and unfolding drama.
We know that everything in the largest galaxy to the smallest particle is part of one unified, whole, interconnected system. . . .
Recognizing our common destiny, we envision a world in which love becomes the prevailing human function, cooperating together with all cultures, races, nations, and religions for the benefit of all life.
A quotation from the foundation’s mission statement evidences its biocentric spirituality of belonging and connection:
As humans, we believed our highest purpose is to discover, live, and communicate what is needed to achieve the world functions for the benefit of all life.
Our home is a water planet called Earth, cradled in a universe of beauty, mystery, and unfolding drama.
We know that everything in the largest galaxy to the smallest particle is part of one unified, whole, interconnected system . . .
Recognizing our common destiny, we envision a world in which love becomes the prevailing human function, cooperating together with all cultures, races, nations, and religions for the benefit of all life.
Par. 3, more from Steven C. Rockefeller on the Earth Charter effort:
Rockfeller also told me that the despite Gorbachev’s effort the Roman Catholic church urged president of Costa Rica not to support the Charter. The president, nevertheless, made some of the strongest statements in its favor; see Steven C. Rockfeller and Earth Charter Steering Committee, "The Earth Charter at the Johannesburg Summit: A Report Prepared by the Earth Charter Steering Committee and International Secretariat," (2002). In this report Rockefeller documented seven other national leaders who spoke in its favor.
Rockefeller also expressed frustration that the conservative Protestants and Catholics who were articulating the two criticisms mentioned in the Dark Green Religion text (p. 194), and putting them on the world wide web, refused to respond to his point by point responses, including his explanation that the capitalization of Earth was due to the recommendation of a scientist who explained a convention that a small “e” refers to dirt or soil and a capitalized Earth refers more to the biosphere as a whole.Par. 1, additional Daniel Deudney quotes explaining why Terrapolitan Earth Religion is less dangerous than most political religion:
Earth-centered identity and community claims are not likely to enhance and intensify existing national identities, but rather to displace or color them. The crucial reason is [that] . . . all previous nationalisms contain pre-ecological or anti-ecological understandings of place and human links to place, but the emergent earth nationalism integrates scientific ecology into its claims about place. Environmental awareness contains a major strain of ecological and earth-systems natural science, and these scientific constructs are fundamentally incompatible with the parochial orientations of all existing national identities. . . The unmistakable message of ecological science is that the earth is the only integral bioregion, and that the homeland of all humans is the planet rather than some piece of it. [Deudney, "Gaian Politics," 289-90.]
The ideologies of the modern nation-state assert ‘one place, one people,’ and proceed to homogenize diverse places and diverse peoples. The ‘nation building’ of modern states usually entails extinguishing or marginalizing the group identities of diverse people unfortunate enough to be caught within the internationally recognized borders of the state apparatus with ‘modern’ ambitions.
In contrast, topophilic environmentalists assert the existence of place claims that are diverse and overlapping as well as distinct. [Deudney, "Global Village," 315.] Deudney also asserted, “Modern cosmopolitanism, the principle competitor and alternative to existing nationalism, is weak and relatively ineffectual as a source of political identity because is based on a [Cartesian] sense of space . . . incapable of evoking or sustaining a robust ‘here-feeling’ of place.” [Deudney, "Ground Identity," 130.] This is a key reason Deudney thinks earth religion is needed: secular understandings simply cannot inspire the feelings of belonging to nature that is needed to undergird the widespread transformations upon which the planetary future depends.