Being For a Place: When Good Will Gets in the Way

Further Explorations in Ecology, and Our Obligations to Creation

What are obligations to places? What does this have to do with ecology? And isn’t centering the human part of the problem? Further examinations of this conundrum, and announcement of our next Zoom book club.

The Problem of the Individual in Ecological Thinking

A reader writes about Tuesday’s piece:

It seems our efforts to live more relationally with creation or the "environment" have tendency to keep us at the center of making our own worlds. A new/old discipleship strategy is trying to play up the confession of Jesus as Lord as being the hinge that makes all the difference. I'm partially concerned that in a world still tainted with a Christian history that confession is prone to being too easy and connected with an individualistic vision of what it means to follow Jesus.

Couldn’t agree more: trying to get people to see their relation to creation as an integral one—and that how we approach ecology is indicative of how we should live more broadly—can be taken in a decidedly individualist direction. If you simply say that “we need to have a more integral approach”, the default mode of being integral is being more personally integrated.

This, of course, just magnifies the problem in its own way: ecological problems are partly a result of not being integrated with creation in our living, but related to this is the problem of not being integrated with others. This, I think, is the larger framework of the “integral ecology”: that we get there, together. Politics always involves living together in ways appropriate to certain places, and so, inevitably, how one community determines appropriate ecology will diverge from others: it is, at some level, an ongoing work of making neighbors into friends. But to ignore the need to do this work at a communal level as opposed to an individual one, because the questions of scale get to be too hard, isn’t the right move either.

But the question here isn’t ultimately whether or not people live in communities, but whether the problem of ecology is centered around people: does all this just continue to put people at the center of the ecological problem? Is asking people to have a relationship to a place just re-centering people in our moral thinking?

Human Knowing and Divine Care of Creation

So, the problem then isn’t one of even community versus individual, but of centering humans in the problem itself. Moral thinking always happens from some particular location, and so, the only way I can do moral thinking—I think—is as a person: a human in relation to others. There is, inevitably, some anthropocentricism to this, but not necessarily in a bad way: as much as Disney encouraged us to “sing with all the voices of the mountains”, I’m not sure exactly that would mean. To say that a mountain has a “voice” is to say that it makes claims which are recognizable to me as a human.

This isn’t me mocking the prospect so much as acknowledging that whatever I might understand about the non-human world occurs as a communicative venture that I undertake as a listening, knowing being, a human who listens in human ways. Having an integral relation to creation, then, would have to seek out of sorting out obligations that makes sense of both humans and non-human beings. For reasons I’ll state momentarily, I don’t think the above sentiment is wrong so much as needing of clarification.

This is, I think, what a Christian theological vision of creation gives us, but only if we’re willing to set aside the kinds of problems our readers suggest: that people—even in their placemaking, in establishing certain places as our homes and our lives—are not all that creation consists of.