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Daniel Maguire’s “ More People: Less Earth The Shadow of Mankind” begins with a short and memorable catechism of basic planetary facts as “essential and ethical equipment” for an informed ethical discussion (1). Mr. Maguire, like any good teacher, knows that one “has to do this without numbing the mind with statistics............(1)” This is truly a herculean task. Moving from the specific geographic examples of Chesapeake Bay, to China, and the world’s seventeen major fisheries we are shown examples of severe water pollution, topsoil depletion, and the depletion of major sources of food. Moving from geographic specifics to global statistics is just as chilling. “When it comes to impoverishment, the rule seems to be women and children first! Four million babies die yearly from diarrhea in the euphemistically entitled ‘developing world’......Women constitute 70 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor, own less than 1 percent of the world’s property but work two thirds of the world’s working hours (3).” He ends this very broad introduction to global issues by focusing on the staggering rises in world population. “ A new Mexico us added every year; a new China every ten years. And over 90 percent is in the poorest parts of the world (3).”
The next sections of the essay, “Nations as Parables” and “Government As An issue of Ethics” looks at the examples of Egypt, China, and the Indian state of Kerela. In each example Maguire looks at the interlocking problems of economic, politics, social justice, overpopulation, and environmental degradation. In particular, he focuses on Egypt as a clear example of “the six most common interrelated social mischiefs that underlie the ruination of the earth and its peoples (8).” These interlocking “mischiefs” provide a wonderful framework for illustrating to students how deeply connected issues of social justice (economic and gender based) are with to issues of politics, globalization, and environmental degradation. Using the Indian state of Kerela as an example of what can “go right” he continues to show how not only are problems related to this interconnected model but solutions as well.
The last half of the essay tackles the role of religion as an agent for healing and change in the face of these global problems, and delves into our collective constructions of God. Mr. Maguire begins by reporting on the 1992 “Warning to Humanity” “signed by 1,600 scientists, including 102 Nobel Laureates, (that) called on religious communities to rise to meet the challenge to our planet. If the world’s religions can reverse the fossilization process to which many have succumbed and rise to this occasion, an audience awaits (19).” Again by moving from the specific to the general. Mr. Maguire makes a case for the central role of religion in redirecting how we think about ourselves, others, and the communities of life that surround us. “The world’s religions are and will be players in the population, ecology, and consumption issues. Two thirds of the world population are mentally and emotively linked to these powerful symbol systems.( Even the avowedly secular are under the spell of these ideological, culture-permeating-
symbol-generators.) The only question is whether the religious influences will be noxious or helpful (20).” For the effect of religion, especially in Mr. Maguire’s mind, the western Abrahamic notions and symbolic representations of God, powerful mental idols if you will, “fashioned and shaped by men (25)” must be seriously reconsidered.
His critical diagnosis is these religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, suffer from images and symbols that build a picture of “over confident dogmatism (27)," “God as a personal being/existent-person (28),” and “supreme/male master (29)” that have resulted in helping “shape the Western definition of human freedom as untrammeled mastery (29)” and collaborated in the “reification of social individualism (29).” Knowing full well that theologians and saints (Augustine, Aquinas) clearly knew the limitations of words and definitions in discussing the nature of God, Mr. Maguire briefly outlines an epistemology that moves from descriptive to affective symbolism. He contends that we need a little “cognitive modesty (33)” because we have confused, especially when talking about God, descriptive and affective definitions. Because of the definitional limits of nouns and the wrong directions they can take us in, especially when talking about God, Mr Maguire suggests we may be better served by considering God-talk in adjectival form.
“They must face the possibility that God is an adjective, not a noun. The sacred and Godliness may best be seen as a dimension of our life experience, a way of describing the mysterious preciousness that fills our natural ambience. Sacrality in this understanding cannot be reduced or concretized in a cause, a person, a God, or in multiple Gods. It cannot be shrunken to the way we understand a pencil or even a friend. To do so is to slip from the difficult but rich affective-symbolic level of knowing to the simpler descriptive level. More seriously from the viewpoint of ecology, to project the experience of the sacred onto an immaterial God is to shortchange sacredness as a dimension of material life and turn it into another object of worship that is beyond our world and thus alien to life. Sacrality hypostatized (or reified) can easily be sacrality lost (37-38).”
The second essay is Larry Rasmussen’s “ Next Journey: Sustainability for Six Billion and More.” He frames the essay around two issues: (1) How can humans live in a sustainable relationship with the rest of the earth, and (2) How do we live with the play of human power, both in human-human configurations ( the nature of society) and in human-biosphere configurations (society in nature).
He opens the essay with a discussion that links the notion of economic development to 17th century western colonial expansion. The three centuries that followed are the ones that most altered the environment. He links Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx to Alfred Crosby’s notion of ecological imperialism that saw Europeans in unprecedented global numbers migrate to other locales. He moves then to discuss four major revolutions of humankind. The fourth, called the ecological, has not yet occurred, but must occur if humanity is to survive. Most interesting and certainly will be a hot topic of conversation with our students is his list of the assumptions that underlie our “economic materialism and market rationality (88).” Selections from the list are certainly worth repeating here:
- Nature has a virtually limitless storehouse of resources for human use.
- Humanity has the right to use nature’s resources for an ongoing improvement in the material standard of living.
In this milieu of economic materialism Mr. Rasmussen wants to ask where is the concern for others, where is the concern for the world around us? In considering ethical responses to these problems he suggests a series of “moral norms for policy formation (119).” These moral norms would include participation, sufficiency, accountability, material simplicity and spiritual richness, and responsibility on a scale people can handle (120). He then goes on to explain in detail what all these terms mean.
He concludes the essay with concrete suggestions for solutions, based on principles of intelligent design to his two major concerns. Simply, he suggests we seek visible, local solutions, that follow the patterns of nature. Most moving is his optimistic theology of life which dominates the conclusion:
“Said differently, the religious consciousness and dream that generates hope and a zest and energy for life is tapped in life itself. The finite bears the infinite, the transcendent is as close as the neighbor, the soil, air, and sunshine itself. God, like the devil and life itself, is in the details. A turn to earth is thus also a turn to those sources that enable what has yet not come to pass to do so (129).” return to Environmental Ethics |
