This brief volume in the "What Are They Saying About;" series provides an overview of theological trends and patterns in the very active and fertile area of religion and ecology. Smith overcomes the limitations of such general surveys by providing lively debate and insightful coverage at several key points in the book, notably her first chapter "Deep Ecology and Its Radical Vision" and in her fifth chapter,"Liberation Ecotheology." Overall, Smith provides a valuable introduction to the field, its controversies, and its promise.
It is gratifying to see a Catholic theologian set the terms for debate by starting with what one could call a pagan movement. Smith does a particularly good job of describing the "deep ecology" or "ecosophy" trend commissioned in the manifesto-likework of Norwegian Arne Naess. The second half of this opening chapter deals with the controversy both within and from outside this "deep ecology platform" over the question of "rights," who has them and how do we delineate them. Since even some deep ecologist seem to have a hierarchy among species, the ground of rights thinking in relation to elements of the biotic community is a lively debate.
Chapter Two throws "ecofeminism into the mix and adds to the debate a critique of "androcentrism" that seemingly can be a bigger problem than anthropocentrism, suggest writers like Sally McFague and Rosemary Reuther. Chapter Three returns to the key ethics category of "rights" and considers the varying schools of thought applied to questions from vegetarianism and the meat industry to policies over endangered and threatened species to controversies over animal experimentation. The critical examination of "speciesism" continues to thread through this discussion.
Chapter Four is a fine appreciation of Aldo Leopold and his heritage with its broad ecology-based land ethic and aesthetics. Smith closes the chapter with a challenge to the adequacy of such a balanced, reassuring naturalist approach in the face of the scale and of environmental problems. She takes up these in her next and perhaps strongest chapter "Liberation Ecotheology." Smith's introduction to this volume began with a litany of ecological disasters ("Times Beach/Bhopal/Chernobyl...") and this chapter picks up the implications that the most pressing questions for an environmental ethics involve the tendency of environmental abuse and degradation to create and exacerbate poverty. After giving some space to the important work of Leonardo Boff, Smith has an intriguing section on Sean McDonaugh, an Irish missionary to the Philippines who brings a career of observation and reflection on the degradation wrought by development in the name of progress. He criticizes previous theological approaches from the overdependence on reworking the Genesis accounts to marginalization of environmental concerns in the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. McDonaugh seeks new scriptural foundations in other biblical books including the prophets and speaks for a "pastoral ministry of sustainability" that draws on indigenous and sacramental ritual practice for guidance. One of the values of books like Smith’s is that one can find a thinker like McDonaugh who you may not be familiar with compellingly summarized so that to read McDonaugh's work directly becomes a pressing interest.
The penultimate chapter is on "World Religions" response and the final one on the magisterial statements of the Roman Catholic Church (the WATSA series is of course from a Catholic publishing house with particular mission to address that body.) The general norms agreed upon at the Parliament of World Religions dominates the first of these two discussions and far too little space is devoted to the work that comes out of renewed efforts to interpret the specific traditions. This section could be much expanded now with the continuing publication of the "World Religions and Ecology" series edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. The final chapter on Catholic statements is definitely anticlimactic after the vibrancy and promise of the liberation ecotheology chapter, which perhaps represents the most important of (largely) Catholic contributions to environmental ethics.
Smith’s "Conclusion" intends to be sobering rather than optimistic, citing progress made being principally "visional." She discusses "profound entrenchments" of the different schools of thought and interests, and she concludes that "no approach to environmental ethics seems altogether capable of negotiating these complexities." Her final note suggests a possible common ground in agreement on "environmental virtues." Hopefully we can come up with something with a little more teeth in it than that! Or perhaps she had in mind the virtues portrayed in her brief but compelling portrait of the "martyred" Chico Mendes, the nonviolent direct action Brazilian rubber-tapper who embodied a loving respect for both the trees and the people as one community. Maybe as Smith suggests in her discussion from Chapter 5, we can take heart and take to the struggle with, following Mendes, a "reconception of power."


review ©2002 by Jim McGarry and RSiSS
Mercy High School