Being For A Place: Without It, Nothing Else Matters
The Relationship Between Ecology, War, and the Human Place in God's World
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This edition, broadly, is part of our ongoing look at what obligations are like, continuing to look at what kind of obligations we have to particular places. We’ll get at this through the pastoral letter of Fr. John Wester’s pastoral letter on nuclear disarmament, a letter which invites us to consider how nuclear war affects the land.
Welcome Home: The Relation Between Land and Place
For the last week, we looked at this question of what it might mean that we owe certain places something, and with that, what it might mean that we owe the land something. The two are distinct: the land is the land, and places are the way we live in the land—to make a “place” is to change the land according to needs, memories, and desires. And so, I might return to Shreveport to see my parents, but it’s never the Shreveport I grew up in: that place, that Shreveport, is gone, replaced by places that other people call home.
But places are built out of land, out of topographies and climates that are less easily swayed. Though the neighborhoods bear the marks of great change, the trees persist. The Red River is lower and pocked with sand bars, and the cicadas come out on time. These are stubborn features, governing aspects of a place which dictate the times in which things can be grown and times of year when places might be built more readily.
I’m not trying to be nostalgic: should I say that, when Shreveport was a literal swampland, that it was ecologically better? Should I say that, when mosquitos ran rampant, it was more true to form in some way? There’s a school of thought in which the natural world is better when more wild, but that seems an overreaction to a pathological view of creation as nothing but pure resources to be plundered: to assume that an untouched nature is “pure” attributes a weird notion of goodness which says that a thing is best when either detached from humans entirely, or (more broadly) able to exercise pure freedom.
Neither of these make much moral sense: humans and the non-human world are given together, and there’s very few instances in which we would equate “goodness” with an unfettered act. Even the natural world, in the absence of humans, species don’t exist in an ungoverned sense: they are impinged upon by other species, made to flourish or extinguished. The natural world—the non-human creation—is bound up with humanity, for better or worse. And so, the question emerges: how do we rightly account for what land give to place-making, to the ways in which humans make their home in the world?
Where I Lay My Head is Home: Human Life and Ecological Embeddedness
In John C. Wester’s “Living in Light of Christ’s Peace”, the Archbishop of Santa Fe extends the logic of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si, by tying together two issues near and dear to the pope: ecology, and violence. As I indicated in the first installment of this, Francis’ approach of integral ecology ties together our life of faith and our lived world in its totality: there is no aspect of our lives of faith which are not related to the material conditions in which they are lived. Now, we can take a more deterministic approach here, reducing all God-talk to just cultural factors, or the integral one Francis and Fr. Wester take: that we can no more separate out Abraham’s life of faith from being in the deserts of the Middle East than we can contemporary American Christians living in a country dominated by economic special interests and an out-of-control military spending policy.
With that in mind, Wester approaches his letter by asking a simple question: What does all the nuclear research in his diocese of Santa Fe mean for the way we are Christian? Multiple times, he references Francis’ letter, calling Earth “our common home” (the subtitle of Laudato Si), and traces how nuclear weapons research and proliferation have manifestly harmed the land around Santa Fe. His argument does not focus, as others prior to him have argued, primarily about the questions of discrimination within nuclear war, or about whether nuclear war approximates justice: we know that nuclear war simply doesn’t do these things. There’s no way, in nuclear war, to not have fallout on civilians or to be proportional with something which can incinerate whole populations.
Wester’s approach is, rather, to discuss the effects of uranium mining, of exposure to nuclear weapons workers, the effects of waste pits on New Mexicans, and New Mexican poverty relative to the sheer amount of money poured into the research laboratories. Catastrophic climate change, he writes is “now a real national security threat, and even more, a real global security threat (33)”, and one which nuclear weapons research continues to contribute to by degrading water supplies, land prospects, and life expectancies.
Turning back to the question of the obligations we have toward the land, the way in which Wester’s document focuses on the ways in which humans are affected by ecological impacts of nuclear weapons development seems to work rhetorically, but answer the question at hand: “What could it mean that we owe creation something?” The effects above of mining and development continually center on the downstream effects on human life; tellingly, his closing remarks center on replacing nuclear development with other forms of income for New Mexicans:
Improved verification technologies will be needed to support future arms control treaties. The design expertise of both labs will always be needed for the dismantling and disposal of existing nuclear weapons. All of these technical means are necessary to underpin a verifiable, future world free of nuclear weapons while providing high-paying jobs into the future.
Economy Pulling the Strings: Humans Remaining King of Ecology
My concern with the approach which Fester unwittingly takes, in speaking as a pastor and arguing on behalf of his parish, is that he ultimately undermines a basis for acting differently. While he is right to center our attention on the ways in which nuclear weapons affect not just human life as such, but the very ecology that supports human life, by centering human life here, he offers no theological basis for not turning again to a “stewardship” model of creation.
The stewardship model emphasizes that humans are the caretakers of creation, the ones entrusted with the world’s cultivation and care, and there is some truth to this. But what this model misses is, as I argued in the last installment, if humans are given together with creation, then there is a relation between God and creation which bypasses humans and which humans correspondingly should respect because it is of God. That doesn’t map very well into political discourse, but remains true none the less, I think.
By ending with a concern for employment, he addresses an integral concern: our ethics must not ignore the ways in which our moral lives intersect with questions of economy and distribution. But his concern for the economic lives of New Mexicans comes by way of centering humans in the moral discourse of creation. And once again, we’re back in the same problem, only lodged differently: humans deliberating about how viable we need to keep creation in order to keep lives sustainable.
What if the key problem to be addressed wasn’t how to maintain high paying jobs?
What if ecology wasn’t a question of keeping financial standards, but something like growing smaller?
What if a moral approach to ecology, one which acknowledges our debts to the land, acknowledged further that even the land is God’s, and might be God’s independent of us? And that this has something to do with how we conceive of a just economy and the limits within which we live justly with one another?
That would be a revolutionary ecology.
P.S. I’m running a group discount for the paid edition, if, like me, you go for bulk discounts.
Reading: Still plugging through Green Ember Rises, the third book in the series, with the kids in the evening. Anne Carpenter’s Nothing Gained is Eternal for review. I’ve had the same seven books in my backpack for months, but am about to dig into Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole: thanks to the six people who sent me screenshots of the book finally shoving me over the edge. Alongside that, Andrew Root’s The Church After Innovation and Dustin Benac’s Adaptive Church. I swear to my editors at Baker Academic, if you read this, that I really am going to finish the ecclesiology books: this is all related.
Writing: Next week, I’ll link to what I think is one of the best book reviews I’ve written in a minute, on a book that I found to be well-intended but which ultimately fails. Submitted some short pieces, coming out soon-ish, on loneliness and church, and on war and ordinary violence.