Presentation by Larry L Rasmussen

The New York Times published a letter to the editor in response to a news article of Feb. 17 entitled “Glaciers Flow to Sea at a Faster Pace, Study Says.” The author was James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and before that administrator of the United Nations Development Program. Speth writes: “The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global average warming is already raising sea levels, strengthening hurricanes, disrupting ecosystems, threatening parks and protected area, causing droughts and heat waves, melting the Arctic and glaciers everywhere and killing thousands of people a year…Yet there are several more degrees coming in our grandchildren’s lifetimes…It is easy to feel like a character in a bad science fiction novel running down the street shouting, “Don’t you see it!” while life goes on, business as usual…Climate change is the biggest thing to happen here on earth in thousands of years, with incalculable environmental, social and economic costs. But there is no march on Washington; students are not in the streets; consumers are not rejecting their destructive lifestyles; Congress is not passing far-reaching legislation; the president is not on television explaining the threat to the country; Exxon is not quaking in its boots; and entire segments of evening news pass without mention of the climate emergency…Instead, 129 new coal-fired plants are being developed in the United States alone, and so on…There are many of us caught in this story. We must find another soon.”_[1]

What is “this story” we’re “caught in?” And how do we get to the other story we “must find…soon?”

Speth should be supplemented with the alarm of scientists whose context is the misery of the poor. Ricardo Navarro is the Salvadoran scientist who founded a large grass roots conservation effort in Central America and, until recently, chaired Friends of the Earth International. His documentation of environmental conditions south of the border comes to this conclusion: the three most dangerous things you can do in El Salvador are breath the air, drink the water, and eat the food, in that order. In nearby Mexico, a full 50% of the water—to pick one critical resource—is unsafe for daily use. Globally, and to stay with the example of water, half of humanity is lacking proper sanitation facilities even though we presently use fresh water at double the rate of aquifer replenishment. Navarro spells out the details of this and other resource use and then lists the debts and the toll. “There is an ecological debt from the people who consume to the people who do not consume, or consume less. If we talk geographically we will say an ecological debt from the countries of the north to the countries of the south. If we talk historically, we will say an ecological debt from white people to people of colour or indigenous people. We can also say an ecological debt from men to women. We can also say an ecological debt from urban areas to rural areas. An ecological debt also from our generation to future generations, and the same ecological debt we ought to acknowledge from human beings to the rest of creation, because we are not only destroying ourselves, but we are also destroying other species on the planet. Besides that, socially speaking, half of the world lives with less than $2 a day. We talk about terrorism. We think about September 11^th, 3000 people killed—that is terrorism of course. The same day there were in the world 15,000 people killed because of diseases related to pollution of air, pollution of water and pollution of food. It was not only September11, it was September 12, September 13, September 14, every day – and that happens day after day. If we dare to say that killing 3,000 in New York is terrorism, what is killing 15,000 people every day because of this system? Who is the terrorist here? It is the economic system. We have to think about that.”_[2]

So we have Speth urging “another story..soon” and Navarro saying “[it’s] the economic system. We have to think about that.”The story we’re captured by, now on a global scale, and the economic system we have to think about, is capitalism. There are very good reasons why we’re happily captured by it. No other economic system has approximated its capacity to generate wealth and lift the masses from their misery. Capitalism in fact solved one of the three old-age problems every economy addresses but few solve; namely, the problem of production. Capitalism generates “stuff” on a mass scale. It solves the problem of “enough” goods and services to meet human needs. Nothing has come close to capitalism as an engine of wealth-generation, now for billions of people.

Capitalism has not, however, solved the other two ancient problems of a viable economy: distribution and sustainability. You can put them together to say it has not solved the problem of injustice, if you include harm to peoples as well as the rest of nature under the rubric of “injustice.” Left to themselves, unfettered capitalist markets generate wealth at one pole and poverty at another. Present inequalities and inequities between rich and poor are obscene: the CEOS of major US corporations took home on average $10 million each in 2004 alone while workers’ wages stagnated or actually fell, along with their health care and pension benefits. The federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour is even not a livable wage for most families; i.e., working fulltime at that wage does not put one safely above the poverty line. On a global scale—and ours is a global economy of corporate capitalism—we are looking at what is called “The Champagne Glass Economy.” If you imagine the kind of champagne glass that has the broad, shallow top and long stem, the image works. The top 20% of the world population (the broad, shallow, upper portion of the glass) hold 83% of the world’s wealth. The next 20% (the v-shaped portion between the broad bowl and the long stem) holds 11% of the world’s wealth. And the bottom 60% of the world’s population (the long stem) holds 6% of the world’s wealth. Capitalism, left to its own logic of “buy cheap, sell dear” in a profit-driven, growth-driven economy, has never solved the problem of distributive justice. This has, in turn, led to interventions by governments so as to address the plight of the poor and forgotten (Scandinavian and lowland countries have done this extensively, as did FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs). Or the injustice of capitalism has led to economy-based reform of capitalism as a system (labor organizing, varieties of socialisms, efforts at sustainable local communities, etc.).

But solving the distribution problem does not automatically solve the problem of unsustainability. Addressing present human inequality and inequity doesn’t of itself assure that future generations won’t sunk under the ecological debt Navarro spoke of and find themselves with a degraded, depleted world where eating the food, drinking the water, and breathing the air are life-threatening activities.

Here is the crunch: modern industrial and post-industrial economies, whether capitalist or socialist, have yet to find a way to grow and yet be ecologically sustainable. The crunch is that Earth’s regeneration and renewal on its own non-negotiable terms and timelines collides with global capitalism and its short-haul dynamism. If you assume, as most do, that capitalist economics, which demand constant and rapid growth, grow about 3% per year, than the world economy will grow 16x in one century, 250x in two, and 4000 times in three. Planetary metabolic processes are soon overwhelmed by cumulative economic processes that affect, negatively, both biosphere and atmosphere. Exactly that is what accelerated climate change portends, and what Speth warns of, though climate change is only one consequence of a “taking” economy, rather than a sustaining, reciprocating one. All this happens while both history and science document that each and every human economy is always and only a dependent subset of Earth’s economy and that fragile ecosystems and biospheric and atmospheric limits are flouted by the high and rising levels of extraction, consumption and waste of what now can only be called global “turbo-capitalism,” whether that is pursued by the U.S., China, India, Europe, Russia, or Brazil. The global economy’s whole economic orientation is short-haul wealth and profit, while Earth’s economy depends upon, and demands, long-haul reciprocity.

Here, then, are the questions we must address. How do we ecologize capitalism at the same time we address its social injustice? How do we make capitalist markets work to help heal creation (peoples and “environment” together)? How do we do “green discipleship?”

Green Discipleship

What do I mean by “green discipleship?” “Green” has three meanings. It’s “green” discipleship because, at least in the U. S., that’s the color of money. What kind of discipleship takes seriously our economic stewardship? How do we address the obscene inequities and inequalities of the present economy?

It’s “green,” secondly, because that’s a prime color of healthy nature. What is environmentally-savvy discipleship, discipleship that yields sustainable communities, communities that are economically and environmentally sustainable at one and the same time?

It’s also “green” because we’re not very good at it. Our discipleship hasn’t solved either the social injustice or the eco-injustice problems. Yet it must help do so now, since these threaten to overwhelm us and the generations that follow. The planet is in jeopardy at human hands. We must strive for discipleship that is not so amateurish, so “green,” so causal about the crises Speth and Navarro say are hardly stirring us at all.

I am going to say a little more about “discipleship” in our time. This is an aside, but it’s the kind of aside appropriate for committed people of faith doing advocacy work. Thereafter I will finish with some Jewish and Christian guidelines for green discipleship.

I will put four questions to our discipleship. I grant you that they are largely rhetorical. The aim is to think about a discipleship viable for our moment and the challenges before us.

1. Is there a non-imperial or an anti-imperial discipleship for us today? Christian discipleship was not only forged in the context of empire, it was forged as a way of life alternative to the empire’s. What does discipleship as an alternative to empire and as an expression of evangelical obedience mean for Christians, especially Christians carrying U. S. passports at a time when this nation is “noisy with believers” at home and feared and loathed abroad? What kind of theological malpractice made it even remotely possible for U. S. Christians to render Jesus pro-rich, pro-American, and pro-war?

2. Is there a discipleship of the Spirit? Discipleship is always associated, rightly, with following Jesus. But is this a proper reading if what Jesus himself does he does “in the power of the Spirit,” or, alternatively, “full of the Holy Spirit;” if his own testimony about his own mission in Luke 4 begins, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor;” and if he says he must depart so that the Spirit might dwell among his disciples, guide them, and produce in them the fruits of the Spirit as the fruits of discipleship itself? Or if Jesus dares to say his followers will, in the power of the Spirit, do even greater things than he? And please note: Paul speaks of the first Jewish-Christian discipleship communities as those who “were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (I Corinth. 12:13) Are we sufficiently Trinitarian in our discipleship? Have we inadvertently been reductionist about following Jesus? Jesus is utterly God-centered and Spirit-inspired and Spirit-led, and not, as Joseph Sittler once remarked, Christ-centered at all. So should our discipleship be more Christocentric than Jesus’s discipleship? And, to shift attention to our real estate, what about our Christian neighbors? In no time at all, a blink of God’s eye, the modern Pentecostal movement has grown to gather in nearly one-quarter of the global Christian flock. How will we be disciples together if Spirit discipleship is foreign to many of us? These are times of tumultuous change, times that called out for a shared sense of the dynamism of the Holy Spirit as well as a shared sense that we belong to a common earth. That leads to my third question.

3. Is there a “green” discipleship for a planet in jeopardy at human hands? Addressing “Earth and its distress” (Bonhoeffer) is the moral assignment of our time. What has discipleship to do with it? What kind of discipleship honors the covenant explicitly deemed “everlasting,” the covenant between God and earth and every living creature of all flesh (Gen. 9)? And linking this to discipleship and the Spirit, have we totally forgotten the ecological perspective of ancient patristic theology? There the Holy Spirit is the liberating power that sets all creation free, the peoples and the land, sea, and sky, all together.

4. Is there a worldly discipleship savvy about the play of power and human responsibility when privilege continues to reign, as it does, instead of rightly ordered relationships of mutuality? What kind of power-savvy discipleship is wise as a snake while pure as lambs and doves? Discipleship lives from utterly free grace but its moral wisdom in a corrupt and crabby world does not come easily. We desperately need moral substance and moral weight in our politics, but that means a discipleship that is power-savvy at the very same time it calls us to act in accord with our better angels.

Guidelines

With this discipleship in view—non-imperial, Spirit-led, “green,” and power-savvy—we turn to some guidelines that have real tenure in biblical, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Guidelines only rarely specify exactly which bill to commend or defeat, but they do give us a clear bearing and orientation for our work. They provide a moral guidance system.

I have four guidelines for green discipleship; but no rank order is intended. All of them are introduced by St. Ambrose in the 4th c. together with two verses from Proverbs. Here is Ambrose: “The world has been created for all, while you rich are trying to keep it for yourselves. Not merely the possession of the earth, but the very sky, air and the sea are claimed for the use of the rich few…Not from your own do you bestow on the poor man, but you make return from what is his. For what has been given as common for the use of all, you appropriate for yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich.”_[3]And here is the voice of Sophia wisdom in Proverbs 30: 8-9: “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full, and deny you, and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.” And here are the guidelines.

1. Enough is best. Christianity, together with most every religious tradition, teaches that the truly abundant life is one of self-discipline and a restraint upon the multiplication of material desires. Indeed, a joyful existence is frustrated by unrestricted material indulgence and consumerism as a way of life. “Enough is best,” rather than “more is better,” is wise on all counts, material, moral, and spiritual. But what is enough? Real poverty is not enough. It debilitates body and kills spirit. It beats people down before they can stand tall. It brutalizes cell and soul alike. An economy that has the resources to meet basic human needs and the needs of Earth’s economy, and does not do so, fails the test of discipleship twice over. What incremental steps can we take toward a sustaining and sustainable economy, ours and Earth’s, an economy of “enough is best”?

2. Neighbor-love and the neighbor’s claim. In the mid-1950s, H. Richard Niebuhr and a couple friends wrote a little treatise on The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry. I cite a passage: “Who, finally, is my neighbor, the companion whom I have been commanded to love as myself?...He is the near one and the far one; the one removed from me by distances in time and space, in conviction and loyalties…The neighbor is in past and present and future, yet he is not simply mankind in its totality but rather in its articulation, the community of individuals in community. He is Augustine in the Roman Catholic Church and Socrates in Athens, and the Russian people, and the unborn generations who will bear the consequences of our failures, future persons for whom we are administering the entrusted wealth of nature and other greater common gifts. [The neighbor] is man and …angel and …animal and inorganic being, all that participates in being.”^[4]

In the economy of the “world house” (Martin Luther King’s image of our interdependent world), human householders are trustees of creation in a community that we have inherited and that is entrusted to us for present and future generations. For green discipleship, the neighbor is “all that participates in being.” The responsibilities we bear extend that far. How do we take account of both present and future generations is our decisions? How do we consider the children, all the children, in the manner Thomas Berry does in his dedication in The Great Work: our way into the future, where he lists not only our (human) children but the children of other creatures as well.

3. Universality and equality. “In that which is most basic…the value of each life, we are all equal.”_[5]This root moral conviction follows from the faith conviction that God’s love is unbounded. For our topics—economy, equity, environment—it means the following. No human group should be excluded from a reasonable share of the benefits of any human economy and nature’s, nor should any be exempted from shouldering a reasonable share of the burdens. One begins thinking about restructuring with the idea of an equal sharing benefits and burdens, and then goes on to say that economic inequalities may be justified if, but only if, they can be shown to serve the common good (instead of private interests only). This common good now is inclusive of the biosphere and atmosphere. Both are threatened by human activity. “Universality and equality” must thus pertain to human society, the biosphere and the atmosphere, as collectively matters of the common good of God’s creation as our own.

4. Checks and balances. As a species, humans are quite “bratty” and the world is quite “crabby.” We have been probably since Cain and certainly since Homer. Green discipleship argues that a wise economic order guards against any unchecked concentrations of power and minimizes opportunities for the selfish uses of power. Evil and injustice always flow from mal-distributions of power. So, while we cannot ipso facto rule out high concentrations of economic power—to build a public transportation network, to provide a needed dam and irrigation system, to keep postal and communications systems working, to address large-scale emergency needs, to provide public education for masses of people, etc.—such concentrations, whether in public or private hands, require built-in checks upon even the necessary amassing of economic and other power._[6]Green discipleship’s nod to democracy is precisely because genuine democracy systematically democratizes political, social, and economy power. Present threats to genuine democracy are those that unduly concentrate economic and political power and provide inadequate checks upon the abuses that follow from such concentration. (Both Washington, DC, and corporate America are practically afloat in corruption today because of these concentrations of power and their abuse.)

These, then, at least begin to provide an orientation for advocacy work as green discipleship. They offer a moral guidance system rooted in basic biblical faith claims: enough is best, neighbor-love and the neighbor’s claim, universality and equality, and power checks and balances.

(Dr. Rasmussen, an internationally known ethics scholar, has recently returned from a conference on poverty in Mexico. He lives in Sante Fe, NM where he has been involved in a campaign for a “living wage” for the city and for an increase in the state Minimum Wage.)

[1] James Gustave Speth, “Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times, 24 February, 2006: A22.

[2] Excerpted from “Environment and Humanity: Friends or Foes?”, a symposium at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 21 September 2004, with the transcript made available on the following website: www.stpauls.co.uk/image/1316055RCId4jSrqPkHAGj8Z4PLDM3i.pdf. I am grateful to Nelson Rivera, The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, for pointing me to this symposium.

[3] St. Ambrose of Milan, De Nabuthe Jezraelita 3, 11, as cited by Rosemary Radford Reuther in “Sisters of Earth: Religious woman and ecological spirituality,” The Witness (May, 2000): 14.

[4] H. Richard Niebuhr and other, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry: Reflections on the Aims of Theological Education (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1956), 38.

[5] J. Philip Wogaman, The Great Economic Debate: An Ethical Analysis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 53.

[6] This text about priniciples is take from Larry Rasmussen, “Gaining a Christian Perspective,” chp. 8 of Economic Anxiety & Christian Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1981).