All attempts to change the world assume some notion of how the world works. All attempts to bend the arc of history toward justice require strategic choices about where and how to push. It is not enough to know what the world should be like; we have to know why it is the way it is, what is required to change it, and the possibilities for success. Being right about the factors that make possible and resist the achievement of our ideals is critical if we are to approximate them. Even if our ideals and values are pristine, mistaken assumptions about the drivers of human behavior and human history can lead to actions that are ineffective or even counterproductive.
My assignment for this column was to write on the fires in the Brazilian Amazon. What jumped out at me as I began my research, however, was the rapid increase in deforestation occurring in neighboring Colombia. The main catalyst of this increase was the ending of hostilities between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016. The demilitarization of FARC opened new territory for logging and mining and the rate of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon has tripled since the ceasefire. The achievement of the human good of peace has proven to be an evil for the landscape in which it occurred. This drove me to reflect on the connections between human goods and environmental goods.
My research is in religious environmental ethics, a field with longstanding assumptions about what drives our environmental behavior and history. The field has long been preoccupied with articulating appropriate theological images (we are stewards of creation, the Earth is God’s body, and so on) in order to generate salutary non-anthropocentric values, improve our treatment of nature, and save the world. If we could just get the theology right and fix our beliefs, liturgy, and praxis, so the thinking goes, we could begin to reverse the tide of environmental destruction. Implicit in these hopes is the belief that the arc of history proceeds down tracks laid out by religion, in particular by ideas drawn from religious teaching.
Over the years, the field has shifted from a narrow focus on our ideas about nature itself and toward the way our imagination, valuation, and treatment of nature intersects with the way we imagine, value, and treat people. Our orientation toward nature and toward human beings are now often understood as entailing one another.
The effort to make moral and religious sense of our environmental situation and to connect it to human goods and evils has been, to my mind, one of the most fecund and important sites of creativity and development in religious ethics over the last several decades. That said, I have two worries about the increasing focus on the intersection between human justice and environmental sustainability.
My first worry is that it can miss the most significant factor that gives the arc of environmental history its shape: the powers and propensities of human beings. Yes, how we think and what we value are important, but the more we learn about the deep history of human life on earth, the harder it becomes to deny our perennial and relentless tendency to disrupt and degrade the ecosystems in which we live. When we zoom out from the last few centuries and look to the last 70,000 years it becomes less and less plausible to appeal to problems in religion and values to explain the swath of destruction we have carved across the globe. Human beings have been, in the words of Yuval Harari, “ecological serial killers” for tens of thousands of years, across various continents, cultures, and religions (67).
In fact, all that seems necessary to account for most of our environmental history are two facts: 1) humans are driven to secure our goods in a hostile and indifferent world, and 2) humans have increased relentlessly our power to render that world hospitable and amenable to our wants and needs. If we grant that we are driven to pursue goods like food, family, friends, shelter, security, self-expression, creativity, and so on—in short, to sustain, enrich, and give meaning to our lives—and that we have the power to overcome barriers to these pursuits, little else is needed to explain the stunning expansion of the human project at the expense of other creatures.
If much of our impact on nature emerges from the pursuit of real human goods, it follows that our impact results not just from what we do wrong (greed, misogyny, imperialism, etc.), but from what we do right. As we have solved creatively the obstacles to our growth that we have encountered, we have exerted more and more pressure on our ecological life-support system. The irony is that the same mastery of nature that has made civilization possible now imperils us. We will fail to grasp this irony and the depth and intractability of environmental problems if we assume that environmentally significant actions are mere products of our religious ideas, which can be changed to address the current crisis.
That irony is the basis of my second worry about religious environmental ethics: the field’s turn to intersectionality can lead us to overlook the tragedy of our environmental condition. If our environmental problems are of a piece with human problems, then addressing those human problems should help the environment. However, while human problems like poverty cause environmental problems, so do successes like economic development. War disrupts nature, but so does peace. Moral evils can exacerbate natural evils, but moral goods can as well. Our successes in reducing predation, food scarcity, disease, and violence represent undeniable human goods, but they have turned a species that was once just one land ape among others living in southeast Africa into the most dominant and disruptive species on earth. Too strong an emphasis on the intersection of different types of evil may lead us to miss the reality that human goods can drive environmental disruption, perhaps as much or more than human evils. In the Amazon, we see deforestation driven by both.
Of course, human and natural goods and evils do intersect. The extraction of resources and the disposal of waste, for example, is a significant mode in which systemic racism and classism are structured. Poor and minority communities benefit least and suffer most from society’s disruptions of nature. Addressing environmental problems can therefore be a crucial way to work toward justice in human communities. Reflection on the intersection of different types of evil is critical to realistic analysis. I am not denying the importance of such thinking.
I mean only to raise the possibility that, if we assume too great a coincidence between human and natural evils, it may at times lead to the mistakes laid out here. We can miss the fact that environmental destruction emerges from human goods as well as evils. Yes, the human good is imperiled by the destruction of nature, but the current scale of such destruction is possible only because of the great success of the human project at the expense of nature. There is no guarantee that solving problems of justice within human societies will result in environmental goods; we are only capable of destroying nature because of the extent to which we have solved the problems of human cooperation at a grand scale. Whether we can learn to cooperate and pursue justice in a way that sustains natural goods remains an open question. We have no assurance that achieving cooperation and justice will result in environmental sustainability on its own. Ensuring that it does is the most important challenge of our time.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Barr is a Teaching Fellow at the Divinity School, University of Chicago.
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