Ecotheology: Why don't we discuss it very often?

As I stated earlier, the topic of caring for the earth is rarely a subject of public religious discussion.  I don't remember it being a topic of any Sunday school lesson or church talk in my memory; and to my knowledge, environmental consciousness has never been the subject of any general conference talk in my lifetime, though several LDS church leaders have made statements about it.

Caring for the environment is something that a majority of people have to be on board with before it can be really successful.  It doesn't do to have an extremely vocal, radical minority who are complete conservationists when the rest of us waste resources like it doesn't matter.  There are many possible ways that Americans could be motivated to be more caring towards the earth; and while our society is becoming increasingly secularized, I think that religious motivation can still inspire many people to action on this matter.

Admittedly, I speak mostly from personal experience; since it was digging deeper into my religion's teachings about the value of the earth and its inhabitants that finally made me care about this when I didn't before.  But I've found at least a few teachings in several major world religions that can inspire believers to be more unselfish; not only towards other people but towards all life on earth.  Nearly every religious tradition has examples of loving, unselfish people who sacrificed much so that others could avoid suffering.  Whether the exemplar is Buddha, Mohammed, or Jesus, there's no reason not to extend that example of compassion to all life.  So why isn't there more effort to promote the idea of caring for the earth through the religious atmosphere?

Honestly, I don't know how well the idea would take, especially in American culture.  I consider caring for the environment to be a commandment from God, but if leaders of churches were to actively encourage their congregations to conserve and give back, I don't know if it would have much effect.  Church members might agree with these teachings, try hard to be environmentally conscious for a couple weeks or a couple months, and then the movement would fizzle out and die.  I think many of us would just feel guilty about it without really doing anything.  It would take the focus off of other, perhaps more important, things.  So as nice as the idea sounds to me, I can't see it working very effectively.

Despite this, studying the value of God's creations has brought a great deal of fulfillment to me.  In the early days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, founder Joseph Smith said, "Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God. A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race."  While learning about how much earth and its creatures are really worth, I felt this kind of love in a way and with an intensity I never have before.  I think anybody who sincerely searches to have this compassion can feel it too.  I hope this knowledge permanently changes the way I live my life, and I hope it does for you.

Ecotheology: Religion and the environment

Ecology is a rarely mentioned topic in religious teaching, at least in my experience. I don't remember participating in a Sunday school lesson about why we should take care of the environment, and I don't remember our environmental responsibility being a subject of any talks in sacrament meeting (the LDS Sunday service) or general conference (a worldwide semiannual LDS gathering). Several church leaders in the past have spoken about the need to care for the earth, but it's far from being a major topic of Mormon discussion. I'll focus more in my next post about why I think that is.

This post will focus much more on the LDS perspective of environmentalism. I haven't given as much time to study this topic among world religions like I have with animal consciousness, so I'm sticking to what I'm familiar with right now. But I hope the principles I mention here will be widely applicable to many faiths and traditions.

Religious arguments of environmental ethics are often grounded in doctrine regarding the creation of the earth and its purpose for existing. The biblical creation story, common to several major world religions, makes it clear that mankind has dominion over the earth. Some theologians have interpreted that dominion to mean ownership and inherent human privilege, when others have seen it as a call to responsible stewardship. Book of Mormon scripture teaches that "the Lord hath created the earth that it should be inhabited; and he hath created his children that they should possess it" (1 Nephi 17:36).

LDS scriptures gives a unique perspective as to the spiritual identity of the earth and all things on it. I mentioned a scripture in my last post (Moses 3:5) which teaches that all animals and plants have spirits and were created spiritually before they were created physically. Later in the book of Moses, we read about a revelation given to Enoch that gives a remarkable level of personification to the earth itself. "Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face?" I don't know if I believe that the earth itself has a spirit and a consciousness; but if it does, we're giving it plenty of reasons to be pained and weary.

In a nutshell, believing that the earth is something worth caring for is a motivation to be an environmentalist. But even those who take a humanocentric view of the universe have reasons to care for the earth. One of the main reasons is sustainability. It's a simple fact that several of our major resources are, though abundant, finite. If we continue to be wasteful, ignorant, and greedy, we will run out at our own peril. It might not happen during our lifetime, but we're sad examples of compassion if we leave a legacy of waste to our children and grandchildren. In the Doctrine and Covenants (other LDS scripture), the Lord states: "For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves. Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment" (104:17-18). We have enough, if we use it wisely. If we don't, and if we don't care about the state we're leaving other unfortunate people in, there will be consequences, here and in the hereafter.

My opinion on this matter is very much similar to the opinion I have of animal rights and welfare. We don't have to be complete ascetics and abstain from all the luxuries of life and technology, and we don't all have to be environmental activists (I don't plan to be). I think we'll make much more progress if we each improve our own lifestyle and strive to conserve than if we seek to change things through protest and lobbying. Changing the way we do large-scale industry will definitely have big effects, but changing the way the American household uses energy will too. There's plenty of people fighting for environmental change in the public square, but my preferred approach is personal. Whether we're religious or not, each of us has many reasons to conserve the precious and finite resources we have on the only earth we have.

Further reading:

Righteous Dominion and Compassion for the Earth, by Elder Marcus Nash of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Scriptures and statements from church leaders about the environment
Mormon newsroom: Environmental stewarship and conservation

Ecotheology: Animal consciousness and vegetarianism

This will be another series, but probably only 3 posts long this time.  I'm kind of doing this to wrap up a process I just finished, which was writing a great questions essay for the honors program at BYU.  The "great question" I wrote about was:  "Are humans the only animals with a consciousness?"  It's been a long process and a long journey, and it's affected me more than I thought it would.  The essay requires students to approach the topic from three different academic disciplines; one of my three was theology.  I found a lot of interesting materials detailing the position of several major world religions on the status of animals, and what I found still surprises me.  If you're interested, the full text of my final draft of the essay can be found here (it's a couple dozen pages, so set aside some time).

In a nutshell, animals know and experience a lot more than most people realize.  Apes especially, but dolphins, elephants, and African grey parrots (among other species) have done remarkably well in tests of self awareness, intelligence, learning, memory, planning, and creativity.  Individuals of multiple species have consistently shown the ability to recognize their image in a mirror as themselves, showing that they have a level of self-concept that many people categorically deny animals.  Chimpanzees and other great apes display remarkable proficiency in American Sign Language; several lab subjects have attained a vocabulary of several hundred words.  Dolphins have found ways to solve problems that no one had shown them before, suggesting evidence of planning and creativity.  And several African grey parrots, in research situations, have developed a habit of answering questions deliberately wrong because they were bored of the testing procedure.  I won't cite evidence here; references are available in the text of my essay.

What does theology say about the status of animals?  Most people are familiar with the Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, which basically demolishes any spiritual barriers between us and the other creatures.  Countless stories exist in theological legend about animals conversing with or instructing humans, including the biblical story of Eve being deceived by a serpent.  A closer look into the Hebrew text of the Old Testament suggests that God gave spirits to the animals, and Mormon theology is quite explicit about that (see Doctrine & Covenants 77:2 and Moses 3:5).  Historically, Christian religions have been most disposed to deny the consciousness or spirit of animals, but theologians like Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, seek to overturn Christianity's disrespect and feeling of dominance towards the rest of God's creatures.  I could go on, but suffice it to say that if you're religious, you have a lot more reason to believe in animal consciousness than you thought (check out Lisa Kemmerer's book "Animals and World Religions" if you want to learn more).

So why should we care?  One thing I really enjoyed about Kemmerer's book is that it included an appendix detailing the current status of animal cruelty in the American meat industry today (the book was published in 2012).  Before reading this, I was familiar with several activists' accounts of how animals were treated in slaughterhouses and such, but I simply assumed that it was a thing of the past.  Not so.  I won't go into detail, but current practice isn't much different from what it historically has been.  There's enough evidence to pretty solidly debunk Descartes' idea that animals don't feel pain.  There's plenty of suffering still happening to billions of them.  And if you study theology deeply enough, it gives you a reason to care about it, no matter what religion you belong to.

Outside of this blog post, I don't plan to become an animal rights activist.  Frankly, I don't know how effective any efforts will be to get the meat industry to change the way they do things.  But we can change how much we support the industry; namely, by changing how much of their products we buy and consume.

This is Graham Hill, an environmental activist of sorts.  This short TED talk is aimed towards people who have thought about being vegetarian before, but didn't think they would be able to do it completely.  In Hill's words, "Imagine your last hamburger."  For me, I think going vegetarian would be doable but difficult.  I don't know if I could ever go vegan; I enjoy dairy too much.  The reason I enjoy Hill's approach is this:  when I've heard other people's arguments for vegetarianism in the past, it frequently seems to be couched in language that suggest we should accept vegetarianism completely or not at all.  Go big or go home.  Hill realizes that this sort of rhetoric is counterproductive; what about all the people who see and agree with the good reasons for it, but don't want to go 100% (like me)?  All-or-nothing vegetarians are wasting their time and effort on them.

So he offers an alternative:  be a weekday vegetarian.  Monday through Friday, no meat.  Saturday and Sunday, eat what you want.  After all, he says, "If all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarian".  He doesn't cite any of the reasons why most people go vegetarian (check this out if you want to see the best ones), this talk is primarily to offer people an option besides complete vegetarianism.  This is something I plan to try out when I'm back in college.  Feel free to join me if you'd like.

My OK Go fanboy post

So, a few months back my brother wrote a fan post on his blog for one of his favorite artists, Sara Bareilles.  Now, Sara Bareilles is talented and all, and I do respect her as an artist.  But I choose to write about musical groups that don't put my man card in danger (and I'm only writing that because my brother hates it when I talk about man cards).  So, OK Go.

Some of you may be aware that OK Go recently came out with a new music video.

Yeah.  Awesome.  I know.  I've shared it with a few people over the last few weeks, and about half the time, they're like, "Who's OK Go?"

WHAT THE HECK, PEOPLE.  And most of the other half says something like, "Wait...weren't they those people who danced on the treadmills and stuff?"

Yes.  Yes they were.  But PEOPLE.  They have done SO MUCH MORE cool things since then (which was 2006, by the way.  8 years ago).

Like this.

And this.

And freaking THIS.

PEOPLE.  They built a mile-and-a-half long instrument, and they're playing it with a car.

WITH A CAR.

Oh, and they do almost every single one of their music videos in one continuous camera shot, with the exception of the car video, and End Love, which was probably stop-motion photography.

They're coming to Salt Lake in two days, and I think it goes without saying that I can't wait to see them.

One thing that impresses me about the band is that several of these projects have brought together dozens of people to try and do something that's never been done before.  But the main reason I love OK Go so much is because they take creativity so far beyond the limits of what anybody thought a band could do.  I'm pretty sure at some point during the making of one or more of these music videos, somebody came up to them and said, "Um, isn't this pretty much impossible?"  "This is never, NEVER going to work."  "You've tried this, like, 40 times already, why don't you just give up?"  "Why are you buying 280 guitars and 55 pianos to make this music video?"

And they just do it anyway.  They never say it, but everything they do sends the message that creativity doesn't have limits.  There shouldn't be anybody who says, "You can't do this."  There shouldn't be anybody who says that something you created has broken the rules of creativity.  Because there are none.