Ecological science as a creation story.

• Author: Nelson, Robert H.
• Position: Report

Since at least the late 1980s, environmental writers have made growing use of the explicit Christian language of "the Creation." Two 1990s books by environmental authors, for example, are Caring for Creation (Oelschlaeger 1994) and Cavenant for a New Creation (Robb and Casebolt 1991). The magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the need for a greater "spiritual bond between ourselves and the natural world similar to God's covenant with creation" (Borelli 1988). Natural environments isolated historically from European contact are commonly described as having once been an "Eden" or a "paradise" on the earth--similar to the Creation before the fall (McCormick 1989; "Inside the World's Last Eden" 1992).

Such creationist language has also invaded mainstream environmental politics. During his tenure as vice president, Al Gore said that we must cease "heaping contempt on God's creation" (qtd. in Niebuhr 1993). In a 1995 speech remarkable for its religious candor, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said that "our covenant" requires that we "protect the whole of Creation." Invoking messages reminiscent of John Muir, Babbitt argued that wild areas are a source of our core "values" because they are "a manifestation of the presence of our Creator." It is necessary to protect every animal and plant species, Babbitt said, because "the earth is a sacred precinct, designed by and for the purposes of the Creator," and thus we can learn about God by encountering and experiencing his creation.

The American environmental movement has deep roots in and still depends heavily on the conviction that a person finds a mirror of God's thinking in the encounter with wild nature--or, in traditional Christian terms, that a person is in the presence of "the Creation." Absent this conviction, many of the American environmental movement's basic beliefs and important parts of its policy agenda would be difficult to explain and defend. (1) The use of creation language also reflects an increased role that the institutional churches of Christianity are now playing in the environmental movement. This involvement has worked to narrow the previously large linguistic gap between traditional Christian creationism and what might be called a secular "environmental creationism"--the use of creationist language without the explicit Christian context.

In 2005, the Interfaith Climate and Energy Campaign issued a statement titled "God's Mandate: Care for Creation," and Cassandra Carmichael is the director of the Eco-Justice Program at the National Council of Churches. In 2004, the council issued its first ecumenical theological statement on the environment, and in 2006 it distributed a report advocating "creation care" for the Chesapeake Bay (Lutz 2006). Carmichael declares that the council's program is "about justice for all of God's creation. Animals, plants and people are all connected and you have to make sure you are having right relationships with all of them." Invoking the classical Christian formulation, Carmichael explains that "some people compare it to how they can get to know an artist by studying his painting," and God, as one might say, painted the natural world at the beginning. By studying God's artwork in nature, she adds, "you come to know God both by God's written word and by walking in what God has created and being in relationship with it" (qtd. in Lutz 2006). Secular environmental creationists experience much the same sense of awe and inspiration in the presence of "the creation," but they typically describe it as a "spiritual" experience and drop the explicit references to a Christian God.

Environmental Creationism and Darwin

Many secular environmental creationists face a substantial tension, however, between their religious way of thinking about protecting "the Creation" and their simultaneous Darwinist understanding of the evolution--now considered to have been taking place for more than a billion years--of the plant and animal worlds. As modern science tells us, it was not God who created the present-day natural world, but the workings of Darwinist evolution, reaching a result that is not divinely inspired, but a random outcome of many billions of chance events. Even if God may have made the rules for evolution, the experience of Darwin's world of nature is less likely to inspire feelings of awe and reverence. Poets have long written about the beauty of the natural landscape, but, from an evolutionary perspective, as Thomas Dunlap comments, "Darwin made it difficult to find God's goodness in the smiling meadow" (2004, 38).

For many secular environmentalists, the simplest course is to ignore this disconcerting issue--to partake of strong feelings of religious inspiration in the direct presence of "God's creation" and then to go about their daily lives. Environmental creationism has not come under the same intense public scrutiny and criticism as Christian creationism. There have been fewer social and intellectual pressures for environmental creationists to work out their own precise thinking in this area. It may be best simply not to think about the matter, as sometimes in life it is necessary to avoid "paralysis by analysis."

Yet, for many environmentalists, blissful ignorance is not an option. They experience the sublime beauty of nature, and yet they believe in Darwinian evolution and in Darwin's way of studying and understanding the natural world. They are determined, therefore, to incorporate their own powerful religious experiences of the natural world into a Darwinist framework. This incorporation should not be a vague sense that Darwin and environmental religion can be compatible, but it should be a well-developed and--at least to their mind--defensible theory in rigorous scientific terms. In the modern age, science has had the greatest authority in understanding the natural world, and environmentalism should be able to draw on a legitimate scientific understanding of nature.

The field of "ecological science," or "ecology," is a response to these tensions. Its beginnings roughly coincided with the rise of Darwinist thinking in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, interest in ecological subjects increased gradually until the 1960s. Since then, with the rise of the environmental movement, ecology has become an important field of study in U.S. universities, attracting numerous students and large amounts of funding from public and private sources. The field of ecology has not been as successful scientifically, however, as it has been in terms of growing popular interest (Sagoff 2007). In a review of the history of the field of ecology in the United States, Eugene Cittadino observes that "ecology, then, is a highly derivative science, one that by its nature relies on language fraught with meaning beyond the science" and thus may lend itself to implicit religious and other expressions of values. Although ecologists have often made strong claims to a scientific status, Cittadino points out, and ecology may be a "science" in some classificatory sense, it certainly does not fall in the same category with the "hard" sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and molecular biology (2006, 73). Reviewing the development of U.S. ecological science, Cittadino observes:

Discussions of ecology and its history always emphasize the great diversity of its subject matter, the extreme differences in methods and approaches depending on the type of environment one is studying or the level of organization (from single-species populations to communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere itself), the lack of consensus on the meanings of terms, the proliferation of empirical generalizations of limited applicability, the paucity of broad general principles, and the prevalence of national and regional styles owing to both environmental and cultural differences. (73) Indeed, the outward scientific appearance of ecology masks a strong underlying religious content. The powerful religious element is not necessarily a problem in itself, but in the case of ecology, at least, the presentation of religion in the guise of a value-neutral science creates major tensions and even contradictions. Ecological science develops a new creation story that differs in some respects from the original biblical version but also exhibits basic continuities. The result is often both poor science and poor theology, as judged from a rigorously analytical viewpoint based in either area.

From Species to Landscapes

Darwin's theory of evolution deals with a competitive struggle among individual plant and animal species--or for any competitive group in nature, sometimes smaller than a species, that shares common genes. In considering any given species, it is possible to marvel at the ways it has adapted to its surrounding environment. The giraffe is capable of reaching high into African trees where other shorter animals tied to the ground cannot go. The internal workings of plants and animals--for animals, their digestive systems, their sensory organs, their bone structures, and so forth--also make up an astonishingly intricate network of interrelated parts. To study the human body is to marvel that such a large and diverse set of organs can come together to form such a complex and well-functioning whole.

Until the modern age, all these things were attributed to the omnipresence and the omnipotence of God in the world. After Darwin, God was often pushed out of the picture. (He might have started the ball rolling, but a billion or more years of evolution had occurred since he did so). Even without God, however, many species' internal physical workings can evoke awe and wonder. In this realm of the individual species, it may be possible for one person to revere the evolutionary record of history almost in the manner of another person reveres the biblical story. Secular and traditional religions are often surprisingly similar in...