Our Obligations to Places: Being For Somewhere
What Do We Owe to Land and Place? What Could We Owe to It?
This week, we return to our ongoing series on the nature of moral obligations, the basic contour of which you can find here. The next few parts will turn over the question of what we might owe to particular places.—The Management
Beginning to Think About the Ecology of Life
I work on a variety of questions in my writing, and the theme of most of them, I realize, is the transitory nature of the moral life. In my writing on war and peace, the presumption is that war uproots us and displaces us both physically and morally. In my ongoing writing and concern for migration, much of the same dynamics are in play. Similarly, when I’m writing about the degradation of church communities, my key concern is once again the way in which we attempt to mitigate rootlessness through digital technologies, through short-term fixes that kill our ability to have more deep communion with one another.
I’ve never been particularly drawn to figures like Wendel Berry, not because I think he’s wrong, but because I don’t know what it would mean to be a farmer or to disentangle myself entirely from urban life as a professor.1 And as central as ecological issues are to the modern world, it’s not something I feel have any expertise in or really much to contribute intellectually speaking. But it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about the centrality of place and ecology. Over against the way in which war and migration make people endlessly without roots, to be transitory beings, ecology forces us to think in terms of being rooted, of limits, and of long term commitments to a particular place.
One of the key documents of Pope Francis I’s ministry is the encyclical Laudato Si: On Care of Our Common Home. As is the case with encyclicals, the primary intent is to cast a theological vision with practiced implications: the Pope, before all else, speaks as a pastor. This document, published in 2015, has been the subject of a great deal of debate and discussion, as it introduces a key theme into Catholic moral teaching: intregral ecology. It’s not a completely new approach within Catholicism per se: the encyclical tradition of the Catholic Church frequently draws together fragmented discussions into a singular vision. But the application of this approach to ecology was a signature contribution of Francis: previous popes had briefly addressed issues of the environment, but Laudato Si provides a framework for approaching ecology as a theological concern of the moral life.
By integral ecology, Francis means the way in which human flourishing and the flourishing of creation are not competitive concerns, but must be thought together:
Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality. If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes religion and the language particular to it. The Catholic Church is open to dialogue with philosophical thought; this has enabled her to produce various syntheses between faith and reason. The development of the Church’s social teaching represents such a synthesis with regard to social issues; this teaching is called to be enriched by taking up new challenges.2
Note here the interconnected vision: human cultures, natural ecology, theological wisdom, the mutual growth of reason and faith. There is a way in which this can become a kind of moral porridge, bland and tasteless, but what Francis has in mind is more along the lines of theological wisdom being able to mend divides which sin has created.
Can We Owe Something to Ecology?
It’s common in ecological discourse to talk about what we “owe” to the earth, or what we owe the ecosystem. But one of the things about Francis’ writing that is compelling is the way that it transposes the language of debt into the language of integration. To imagine the world as a place which humans have trespassed on isn’t quite right: for humans to be at all involves some yielding of what a place would have been otherwise, and for humans to be somewhere is to be changed by that place.
This isn’t a zero sum game, as Francis notes: for one to “win” doesn’t make sense, in that what could creation do with such a win? What would it mean for humans to “win”, for our existence depends on a cosmos which we’ve always been a part of? The reason that culturally we frame questions of ecology in the language of “debt” and “obligation” come from one of three possible origins, I think:
We, by and large, live in a world in which we feel that we owe little to God, and yet feel debts of our existence. The world becomes a stand-in for that sense of unpaid gratitude.
For those who believe in God, the sense of estrangement—and not companionship—to place and space runs deep. And so, we see our relationship to even the places which make us who we are as a competitive one. In that framework, we can only think of what debts we incur against one another and how to possibly repair those harms.
Even if we do think of our relation to the world as an “integral” one, it’s hard to think of something we are in relation to without personalizing it. Thus, the language of debt and obligation sneaks back in.
And so, the frame of “obligation” and “debt” with respect to creation doesn’t quite work, and yet, the language of debt gets at the sense that humans are not self-made, that everything is borrowed, and that nothing is ours to keep. There is, to borrow the analogy, an ongoing debt of love which we can never repay. But what Christians mean by this notion that the world “loved” us and calls for our love in return assumes that God works in material ways, through material means, such that the world itself is an act of God’s love toward us. To live with that world well is a response born out of love, for why else could the world or anything within it exist?
In any event, “integral ecology”, living as if our relation to the world was not one of “debt”, but one of partnership seems a long way off. But what I want to suggest is that Francis’ way of approaching ecological issues is both appropriate for humans, and productive.
Making the World Personal: The Origins of Place
“Place” is something built, not something which is natural: the study of “placemaking” begins by assuming that particular spaces must be cultivated in accordance with the needs and aspirations of the people there. In other words, don’t treat spaces as if they’re just spaces for maximizing profits: that’s actually terrible for people.3 Part of what's compelling to me about migration is that it's a study of how people live in a way which they're not meant to live for the long term: constantly on the move, in-between. But so few of us, I think, consider where we do live as "places".
As such, we’re always thinking of the spaces in which we live as that which we’re intruding on, as opposed to a space which both works with us and against us, with which we live in relation to. This, of course, comes with all manner of changes which have to come: the spaces in which we live by choice or commerce are not endless in resources, and have limits—to live there well means to respect these things and be changed accordingly.
It also means that we have to be willing to commit to the world, not just as spaces, but as places, in order to have that kind of relation to it. We have to recover the gift and hardship of being somewhere in particular, and not—and I have this phrase—a citizen of the world. There is a sense, particularly with ecology, that our determinations have “citizen of the world” impacts, but these impacts are always built out from a particular space, with disproportionate liabilities and benefits: not every place in the world contributes or influences global ecology in the same way. But we have to begin from somewhere, and that means recovering place, that we might recover ecology not as a competition but as an integral vision.
Reading: Reading a manuscript on violence and rhetoric, commissioned by a university publisher. Sometimes this happens: presses will ask “experts” to provide evaluation and advice on a thing. The pastoral letter by John C. Wester on nuclear disarmament, which we’ll talk about next week: it raises these questions of obligation, place, and ecology in great ways.
READING GROUP: Paid subscribers get to participate in the first book group, on Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, tonight! Looking forward to chatting about this with some folks. Next up, I think, will be Abigale Favale’s The Genesis of Gender, which I found really intriguing and persuasive on a variety of things.
This is more a confession of my lack of imagination than it is a critique of Berry, though there is something to say for the way in which urbanism continues apace and has for centuries, while agrarian visions persist as a remnant. Whether environmental collapse will push more to toward the agrarian vision or whether we’ll all just make do in the ruins of cities unable to provide water for their inhabitants any longer: we’ll have to see.
Laudato Si, para. 63.
Fruitful labor? Yes. But the world doesn’t exist for profits. You know all this.