How Religion Can Save the Environment

            As the participants at the 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Sustainability and the Humanities looked back at four weeks of presentations on the environmental crisis, one thing became remarkably clear: reason alone could not save us.

In the first week, we discovered how a fine scientist and finer writer, like Aldo Leopold, was unable to slow down the machinery of development. His 1948 book, A Sand County Almanac, provided one of the most finely wrought descriptions of the laws of ecology and yet America continued to develop shopping centers where redwing blackbirds held court. Too many had no ears to hear, nor eyes to see how the United States resembled a potato beetle, eating its livelihood to the point of starvation.

During the second week, Acoma poet Simon Ortiz spoke of the ways of indigenous people, of the ceremonies needed to heal the souls of tribal men sent off to fight America’s wars. He read his poems of displacement and dispossession and how the seasons and the rain, the planting of corn, squash, and beans, restored the Navajo, the Hopi, and the Acoma to a way of life that he called sustainable.

The third week brought us a surfing philosopher, a globe-trotter who saw reasons not to give up. A dark green religion, he told us, was spreading across the planet. He had seen it in South Africa and in suburban Florida. We could see signs of it in James Cameron’s Avatar and in the deep love modern people were expressing for Mother Earth. We were on the verge of another paradigm, he told us, poised to turn things around. A man used to standing on water, he wanted us to see how each of our individual concerns were part of the same substance as his dark green religion.

Having been introduced to each other as academics, we made the requisite skeptical sounds about religion’s role in saving the planet. We worried about definitions. Had he not confused religion with spirituality? Besides, wasn’t religion a political powder keg? Didn’t we need to keep the discussion on a more rational, less New Age-y, track? This was pluralist America, if he hadn’t noticed.

We were all feeling rather smug at having corrected the surfer, when we were treated to a brief introduction to contemplative pedagogy. The visiting instructor suggested we try a few classroom exercises to put our students in deeper touch with the Great Outdoors. She showed us a series of photographs of the San Francisco Mountains, the magnificent serrated peaks just to the North of Flagstaff. As she showed us each slide, we wrote down whatever feeling the photograph inspired. Next, she led us through a guided meditation, a standard practice that links the breather to her breath. Having been restored to the basic rhythms of our bodies, we were invited to go outside and look quietly at the world, which, at that moment, was showing its forceful monsoon splendor.

We may have rejected dark green religion in the abstract but we took to meditation like desert dwellers to the first rain. “I usually hate this sort of stuff,” said the philosophy professor, sitting to my left, “but I think I may actually use this in class.” “The first nature we need to appreciate is our own,” explained the instructor. If we’re out of touch with ourselves, with our breath and our rhythm, we won’t be able to participate in the world outside our skin.

For many of us, the contemplative practice was the high point of the summer institute. Becoming aware of how the air outside became the air inside, only to become the air outside again, broke down the boundary between self and environment. We were as near to nature as our next breath. And yet, somehow, with all that breathing in and out, with all that attention to body and a fierce afternoon rain, the problem seemed far more manageable. Our world was in trouble and we were breathing with her. Eventually our breath would stop and each of us would return to the earth.

            The final week brought an experienced policy wonk. An avowed atheist, he had developed a secular system that would allow various stakeholders to come to the policy table. Pragmatism, not ideology, will solve the environmental crisis, he insisted. There was neither room for metaphysicians nor true believers at the gates of his adaptive management system. Being skeptical academics, we challenged his assumptions about religion. Your system doesn’t welcome faith-based communities, we countered. There are lots of people attending lots of churches, temples, and mosques in this country and we need to work with them. You can’t ask them to leave their faith at the door. In the period of a week, we had gone from rejecting dark green religion to demanding that religion be part of the solution.

            A recent book published by the University of California Press, announces that environmental education has failed. Efforts to change consumption have not succeeded, say the authors, because schools are teaching to federal standards and environmental lessons are either too abstract or too bleak. They recommend using the school building as a laboratory: grow food in the playground, study energy consumption and how to decrease it. Along with growing food and studying how school buildings might become less wasteful of energy, classrooms might also become places where we contemplate the mystery of life.

            Looked at from any angle, the environmental crisis is beyond comprehension. We honestly can’t wrap our brains around the magnitude of so many people on the planet, so many species disappearing, and so little time to mourn the passing of old ways of life. But as with all things that appear insurmountable, a little breathing, a quiet prayer, and a profound respect for the Great Things of this world can go a long way. Reminding us of our first nature, our breath returns us miraculously to this glorious and wounded world, a place that somehow still sustains us.