THIS PAPER IS NOT FORMATTED CORRECTLY...IT'S MISSING ALL THE APPROPRIATE FOOTNOTES ON PURPOSE TO AVOID PLAGIARIZING. :) THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING MY INTELLECT
The Power Past Coal Coalition states on its website, “We are an ever-growing alliance of health, environmental, clean-energy, faith and community groups working to stop coal export off the West Coast.” In December of 2012, I was invited to give testimony at a Department of Environmental Quality hearing in Portland, Oregon about the spiritual impacts of coal exports on our communities. In March of 2013, I was then invited to speak at a local Power Past Coal rally in Hood River. Having read the Episcopal Church’s Resolutions from the 2012 Convention regarding the environment and having just started reading Ivone Gebara’s Longing for Running Water, I felt empowered as the only female clergy invited to speak. In my brief talk I stated:
The question is often asked, “Why is the church getting involved in all this environmentalism stuff?” The answer is simple. If we believe that we are created in the image of God and that we are called to be stewards of God’s good creation, then we have a responsibility to get involved in the care of our environment. And when we start caring about our environment, then we realize how much we are deeply connected to one another. Ivone Gebara, a Latin American theologian said, “We are here because we realize that [environmental stewardship] can be a way toward solidarity, mercy, and reconciliation…We are here because we love life and do not want to see it snuffed out on account of our human whims and our destructive tendencies….We participate in this struggle because it is the very meaning of our life.”
The varied religious and spiritual communities who come together as George Ecumenical
Ministries have a responsibility to call attention to the importance of caring for God’s good creation. We have a responsibility to care for and advocate on behalf of “frontline” communities (those already experiencing the impacts of climate change) and “fence-line” communities (those suffering in body and spirit for their proximity to the extraction and processing of fossil fuels). We have a responsibility to work for the just transformation of the world’s energy beyond and away from fossil fuels (including all forms of oil, coal, and natural gas) and toward safe, sustainable, renewable, community controlled energy. And we have a responsibility to resist the development and expansion of ever more unconventional, dangerous, and environmentally destructive sources of fossil fuel and move toward conversion to more sustainable sources.
So why is the church getting involved with all this environmental stuff? Because it is the very meaning of our life.
Little did I know that this rally would be the beginning of my work towards developing an Episcopal ecofeminist theology.
In this paper, it is my hope to begin to develop an Episcopal ecofeminist theology based on the work of Goddess activist Asphodel P. Long, ecofeminist poet Susan Griffin, ecological activist Charlene Spretnak, and Latin American theologian Ivone Gebara, while incorporating ideas from Desmond Tutu’s Ubuntu theology from South Africa, and the mission goals stated in the Episcopal Church’s Five Marks of Mission. I am aware that some of this work has already been done by my predecessors, so in referencing this work, I will be focusing on newer models of change such as Ubuntu theology and the Five Marks of Mission to begin to develop an Episcopal ecofeminist theology. By drawing on the work of Long, Griffin, Spretnak and Gebara, I will examine their critiques of the environmental devastation we face, while at the same time look to them for guidance on how to reclaim our relationship to the environment.
How have we, as human beings, gotten to this place? In other words, how is it that our environment is facing such a crisis? We have and continue to participate in the destruction of habitats, unsustainable uses of fuels, natural gas and coal, logging, mining, and overfishing. There is also the reality of toxic nuclear damage from Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and nuclear warfare. Scientists can provide statistics that show how greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, water pollution, and waste have all contributed to the problem of environmental devastation, and these are important statistics that point to a primarily human-created problem.
In 1940, Simone Weil wrote The Iliad or The Poem of Force. While she may have intended this text as an indirect commentary on the fall of France, I believe that there is wisdom to be learned from Weil’s understanding of the dynamics of humanity’s disregard for other humans, and that this dynamic can also be seen to be reflected in our disregard for the environment. Weil stated that force: turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.
Can this statement be read this way: “force turns the environment, which is subjected into a thing… and is made into a corpse? The healthy, sustainable environment was here, and the next minute there is nothing at all”? Can we understand that as human beings, we have separated ourselves from nature in such as way as to be dominant over it, subjecting it to our will, and that therefore we are in the process of destroying it?
The feminist writer Asphodel P. Long dedicates a chapter of her book, In a Chariot Drawn by Lions, to the decline of nature. Long reminds the reader that, in the ancient world, Wisdom goddesses were recognized as the creators and teachers of the world; they were the earth and nature. With the veneration of the Wisdom goddesses, nature was considered a guide and source of wisdom. However, with the Greeks and early Christian period, she writes, “the notion took root that the earth and this world were of little importance.” By the seventeenth century, she states, “the notion of mastery and domination were translated into the actual destruction of Nature.”
Since the seventeenth century, our mastery and domination over nature has continued. Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature, challenges the history of this mastery and domination over nature and seeks out a new vision for reclaiming our connection to the earth. Early in her book, Griffin states that “It is decided that matter [nature] is passive and inert.” This passivity allows humanity to violate and destroy the earth because it is “decaying and corruptible.” Griffin even postulates that we have been given permission to violate nature because in traditional Christian theology, the contours of the natural world reflect the effects of God’s punishment for the sins of humanity:
The face of the earth is a record of man’s sin. That the height of mountains, the depth of valleys, the sites of great boulders, craters, seas, bodies of land, lakes and rivers, the shapes of rocks, cliffs, all were formed by the deluge, which was God’s punishment for sin.
When we consider our history in terms of our relationship with nature, it is no wonder that we have become so separated from it. Even if we are not explicitly told that nature is to be subjected to human force because it is corruptible and decaying, even if we are not consciously aware of our attitudes toward nature as being framed by traditional Christian theology, for many women, myself included, there is a sense of disconnection between ourselves and our environment. What does this disconnection mean? What does it point to?
According to Spretnak, modernity has taught us that all beings in the natural world are separate. However, she posits that there is a new idea emerging—“that all entities in the natural world, including us, are thoroughly relational beings of great complexity, who are both composed of and nested within contextual networks of dynamic and reciprocal relationships.” In other words, we are all connected. If this is true, then can we continue in good conscience to use force to subjugate the natural world? If this is true, can we continue to act as if we have mastery and domination of the earth? If this is true, can we continue to understand nature as passive and corruptible?
It is with these questions in mind that I turn to the ever-developing ecofeminist movement. Ecofeminism asserts that within the “Western model of development, sources, living things that can reproduce life—whether forests, seeds, or women’s bodies—are turned into resources to be objectified, controlled, and used.” In “The Ecofeminist Imperative”, the pioneering ecofeminist author, teacher and activist Ynestra King states:
Ecofeminism is about connectedness and wholeness of theory and practice. It asserts the special strength and integrity of every living thing….We see the devastation of the earth and her beings…as feminist concerns….We have to be the voice of the invisible, of nature who cannot speak for herself in the political arenas of our society, of the children yet to be born and of the women who are forcibly silenced….To create such a web of life is a precondition for freedom.
In Woman and Nature, Griffin writes about both her disconnection from and reconnection with the earth: “I become aware of all that has come between us, of the noise between us, the blindness, of something sleeping between us. Now my body reaches out to her.” This noise and blindness, the “something” between Griffin and the earth, has been the subjection of and violence towards the earth which has been taken by force. It is this subjection and violence that ecofeminism seeks to address and correct.
Spretnak’s Relational Reality, takes Griffin’s poetic truth a step further to help us begin to understand the importance of our connection to the environment. Spretnak emphasizes the importance of the interconnectedness of all beings: “Every aspect of human life, as well as the life of every species and the ecosystem on Earth, is literally composed of interactive, organic relationships, which are always changing creatively and are alive with responsiveness.” Spretnak goes on to say that nothing exists outside this web of connectedness.
Long also speaks of the need to reconnect to the earth and the work of ecofeminists to bring about change and healing:
A relationship needs to be re-established with the earth, in which men take a humbler part than they have done up until now, and where women’s voices and everyday experiences are heard and taken into account….Nothing less than a total reversal of the exploitative attitude to Nature and to women has any chance of re-setting the balance so that the world itself can continue to exist.
King, Griffin, Spretnak, and Long all speak to the interconnectedness of human life and the environment, and especially the historic violation of women and nature which needs to be reconciled and changed in order to more fully realize and sustain the web of life in which we are all a part. It is with this foundation in the ecofeminist movement that I now move to a developing model of Episcopal ecofeminist theology.
Ivone Gebara, a Latin American ecofeminist and liberation theologian, identified some of the challenges that Christians—particularly women—face when trying to examine their relationship and response to the natural world. Due to the fact that traditional theology separated the human being from the natural world, reconnecting the two beings can be difficult. Among these challenges are “I can’t pray to an energy flow….We must not fall into pantheism.” Given these types of concerns, Gebara works within the frameworks of traditional theology to help create a Christian ecofeminist theology.
Similar to the ideas posited by Spretnak, Gebara suggests that “relatedness is the primary and the ultimate ground of all that exists… [and that] God is relatedness.” Gebara defines relatedness as “utterance, word, attraction, flux, energy, and passion.” In trying to reconnect humanity with the natural world, she suggests that human beings are not only co-creators of this relatedness, but also participants in this relatedness. She also suggests that unlike traditional theology which believes in a God that is separate from the world and existed before creation, belief in a God who is related to and simultaneously exists within creation begins to address some of the above named concerns of Christian women.
Gebara also examines the traditional theology of the Trinity and suggests five reconstructions of the Trinity, one of which speaks specifically to some Christians’ concern regarding pantheism—that the Trinity can be found in the earth. Gebara states:
Plants, animals, forests, mountains, rivers, and seas form the most diverse combinations in the most remote and varied places.…
….The Trinitarian earth is a movement of continuous creativity, unfolding processes of creation and destruction, expressions of a single vital process….
….In calling ourselves terrestrials, we accept the responsibility of knowing and loving the earth as a living being, and of refraining from manipulating its secrets and destroying it.
I believe there is still room to continue developing a Christian ecofeminist theology. It is at this time that I turn to Ubuntu theology. In his work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu brought to the attention of the world the South African concept of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is defined as a “concept of personhood in which the identity of the self is understood to be formed interdependently through community… [it] is about symbiotic and cooperative relationships.” Tutu explains it like this: A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Tutu’s believes that God created us to be partners in creation, and that creation is an expression of God’s love; therefore humans are called “to love in such a way as something new and alive is always created…” I understand Tutu to mean that we are called to work in relationship with others and the earth to bring about healing of our planet.
From 1984 to 1990 the Anglican Consultative Council developed the “Five Marks of Mission” as a tool to help guide churches in their mission activities. The first four marks of mission address the specific ministries of the church: proclaiming the Gospel, teaching and baptizing, responding to human need through love, and pursuing peace and reconciliation. The fifth mark of mission is “To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.” Then in 2000, the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals to reduce extreme poverty by 2015. The seven of eight goals is to “ensure environmental sustainability” with a focus on accessibility to clean drinking water.
Given the work of ecofeminists over the last thirty years, along with the foundational work of Desmond Tutu, the development of the Five Marks of Mission, and the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals, how does one begin to create an Episcopal ecofeminist theology? For me, my work begins with Alice Walker. In her introduction to Anything We Love Can be Saved, Walker states, “My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings.” When I read these words, my heart skipped a beat; I knew that my Episcopal ecofeminist theology had to be rooted in my love of the earth and other human beings. Given that this is the premise by which I understand my activism, I now return to the work of my predecessors and begin to link concepts as I work towards developing an Episcopal ecofeminist theology—the tradition of which I am a part.
As described above, Tutu believes creation is a sign of God’s love, and that a person with Ubuntu understands that when others are diminished, they too are diminished. What if Ubuntu theology was expanded to include the earth? If this is true, then an Episcopal ecofeminist theology might agree with Gebara’s thinking that “relatedness is the primary and the ultimate ground of all that exists… [and that] God is relatedness,” suggesting that if creation is diminished, then God is diminished, and if all beings are connected (as Spretnak posits), then we too are diminished. Indeed, it makes us responsible co-creators to care for one another and our planet. This takes Gebara’s statement that “in calling ourselves terrestrials, we accept the responsibility of knowing and loving the earth as a living being, and of refraining from manipulating its secrets and destroying it” a step further because it also connects God with the earth.
When considering the fifth mark of mission and the seventh Millennium Development Goal, there is a calling for Christians to be responsive to the earth, its devastation, and the impacts that has on every living being. It calls all Christians to remember that they are a part of a symbiotic and cooperative relationship. It calls us to rethink our relationship with the earth as not one of force, but one of love. I believe the wisdom of the ecofeminist movement combined with the teachings of Gebara and Tutu can empower Episcopal ecofeminists to work and advocate on behalf of “frontline” communities and “fence-line” communities for the just transformation of the world’s energy and toward safe, sustainable, renewable, community controlled energy. I believe that an Episcopal ecofeminist theology truly can be rooted in the words of Gebara: “We participate in this struggle because it is the very meaning of our life.”
References
Battle, Michael. Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me. New York: Seabury Books, 2009.
Gebara, Ivone. Longing for Running Water. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.
Griffins, Susan. Woman and Nature. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.
King, Ynestra. “The Ecofeminist Imperative.” In Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, edited by Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey, 559-561. New York: McGraw Hill, 2010.
Kirk, Gwyn and Margo Okazawa-Rey, eds. Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, 5th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2010).
Long, Asphodel P. In a Chariot Drawn by Lions. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1993.
Power Past Coal. Accessed April 5, 2013. http://www.powerpastcoal.org/about-2/
Spretnak, Charlene. Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Relatedness That Are Transforming the Modern World. Topsham, ME: Green Horizon Books, 2011. Kindle Edition.
The General Convention of the Episcopal Church. “Resolution B023.” Accessed April 5, 2013. http://www.generalconvention.org/gc/resolutions.
The Episcopal Church. “The Five Marks of Mission.” Accessed April 5, 2013. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/five-marks-mission.
The Episcopal Church. “The Millennium Development Goals.” Accessed April 5, 2013. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/millennium-development-goals.
The Worldwide Environmental Crisis. Accessed May 2, 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-environmental-crisis/12268
Walker, Alice. Anything We Love Can be Saved. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.
Weil, Simone. The Iliad or The Poem of Force. Wallingford, PN: Pendle Hill, 1991.