Category Archives: Ecotheology

NOFA winter conference

Carol and I drove out to Worcester today for the winter conference of the Northeast Organic Farmers’ Association (NOFA). Carol was on the NOFA/Massachusetts board fifteen years ago, and wanted to go to some presentations on permaculture; I went along for the ride.

Sections in this post:

  • “Organic growing 101
  • Phytoremediation through urban gardens
  • Lunch conversations
  • “Husbandry was once a sacred art
  • Bees

“Organic Growing 101”

We started out with “Organic Growing 101,” presented by Frank Albani, who works two and a half acres at the Soule Homestead in Middleboro. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because he started with a 30′ by 50′ garden, and in addition to his two and a half acres he still works a 50′ by 100′ garden. Market growing on that size plot (about an eighth of an acre) would be adaptable to urban settings. Albani works the 50′ by 100′ plot by hand, having built up the soil to the point where he no longer needs to use a power tiller. He grows much of his lettuce on this smaller plot, but because the plot is in full sun he has to partially shade it (which implies that partial shading on an urban plot could be used to advantage).

Albani went into many specific techniquess of market growing. He makes extensive use of row cover material like Remay: row cover will keep marauding insects of crops like cukes and squash; it keeps deer at bay; it will keep crops warmer in cool weather. Albani advocated drip irrigation if the grower has access to filtered water but unfiltered water will clog the drippers; he pumps unfiltered water from a nearby stream using a Honda 5 hp pump (he advises, don’t skimp on pumps but get a good one), and says it takes a good eight hours a week to irrigate his land if there’s no rain. His seeding is done with an Earthway seeder, which he finds greatly improves efficiency with such tiny seeds as carrots. Most important, Albani said: “Organic growing is all about feeding the soil” and about “promoting soil health”; good food is simply a byproduct of doing sustainable agriculture.

Phytoremediation in an urban setting

The second workshop we attended was the one I was most interested in. A small non-profit called Worcester Roots Project did a presentation on using plants to remove toxic substances from soils, a process known as “phytoremediation.” They are mostly interested in lead (from lead-based paints) in soils around urban housing. One of the dominant pathways that lead gets into children is by playing outdoors and ingesting lead. Worcester Roots Project has experimented with a couple of soil remediation techniques that are low-tech, inexpensive, and that can be implemented by ordinary citizens.

First, and most obvious, is to grow a good groundcover over affected soils. But before planting the groundcover, they discovered that research shows that adding a one inch layer of compost reduces the bioavailability of soil lead (“bioavailability” refers to the ease with which ingested lead can enter the blood). A study in Baltimore showed that tilling the soil, covering with 6 to 8 inches of biosolids (e.g., compost), and seeding with a turfgrass groundcover led to a 57% reduction in soil lead after one year. Apparently, compost application reduces plant uptake of lead, as well as supporting healthy groundcover growth; additionally, a phophate soil ammendment reduces bioavilability by putting the lead into a different chemical form. Worcester Roots Project has also had success planting scented geranuims in soil with high lead levels; the geraniums take up about 2-% of the soil lead per year, storing the lead it their leaves and shoots. They dispose of the geraniums in a lined landfill.

Lunch conversations

In true NOFA style, lunch was a potluck affair, and with thee hundred people bringing potluck we had lots of good food to choose from. We wound up sitting at a table with Josh from D-Acres in Dorchester, New Hampshire, and Jonno, a biologist and permaculture teacher from Leverett, Mass. Once they learned that Carol had co-authored The Composting Toilet Systems Handbook, Josh, and Jonno immediately engaged her in technical conversations about waste water treatment. A young woman named Anne also sat at our table, but she and I didn’t get a chance to say much; I mostly asked a few questions and sat back and listened with interest.

Josh found out that Carol had written Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. He looked impressed, and said all his interns loved the book. It’s always fun to see that in certain (very small) circles, Carol is well-known.

“Husbandry was once a sacred art…”

The keynote speaker, Brian Donohue, started off his talk by quoting Henry Thoreau: “…husbandry was once a sacred art.” Donohue, the author of The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord is an organic-farmer-turned-professor who has become interested in the cultural roots of a land ethic. “Where do we look for inspiration” for a sustainable way of life?

“The story we tell ourselves today in the environmental movement,” said Donohue, “is that the best thing we can do with Nature is to leave it alone.” He said for New Englanders, that attitude is based on the story we tell ourselves about how New England was settled. “The story goes like this,” he said: first were the Native peoples living in harmony with the land; then the English settlers arrived, displaced the Natives, and deformed the landscape; then around a hundred years ago the farmer went away, moving out to the Midwest, leaving us with a reforested and “re-wilded” landscape. Therefore, the landscape we have today should be left alone as much as possible.

But in Donohue’s view, that story is not quite right. The story we tell ourselves now says that there are only two options: pristine wilderness, and Native harmony with the landscape. Donohue wants to add a third environmentally acceptable option: a pastoral landscape where humans interact sustainably with the land through husbandry (as opposed to agri-business).

So Donohue likes to tell a new story of how New England was settled. He starts with Native harmony with the landscape. But his research shows that when the English settlers arrived, they managed to live sustainably in the New England landscape by adapting the European tradition of mixed husbandry (i.e., farms that combine tilled soil, pasture lands, orchards, wetland meadows for hay). This sustainable lifestyle ended at the end of the 18th C., as farmers increasingly grew for the marketplace and a cash economy. That meant land wasn’t seen as something to husband, but just something to exploit for cash. Then in the early 20th C., most farming died out in New England, leaving a forested landscape — a landscape which is now being eaten up by suburban sprawl. Donohue suggest that we go back to the husbandry attitudes of the 17th and 18th C., and “resist letting the market decide how we relate to the land.”

Working with others at Harvard Forestry, Donohue has come up with a specific proposal for Massachusetts. He says we should set a goal that 50% of the state be protected as forested land. Of that land, 90% would be managed sustainably as woodlands, and the other 10% would be protected as wildlands. His current work is to include farmlands in that proposal.

In short, Donohue wants to change the economic model so that an engaged citizenry supports sustainable farming and farmers. This, he said, would return to making husbandry a “sacred art” once more — instead of just setting land aside untouched.

Bees

For the last workshop, I went to a presentation on bees and beekeeping. I’ve been thinking about urban beekeeping as a possibility. But the presentation was really about the kinds of plants bees prefer, and I sort of dozed off. The samples of honey were good, though.

This blog is dark green

On the reading list today is Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, by Patrick Curry. Curry divides environmental ethics into three schools: “light green” or “shallow” environmental ethics, which maintains an anthropocentric bias and includes “lifeboat ethics” and stewardship; “mid-green” environmental ethics, which still assigns a higher value to humans and includes animal rights and biocentrism; and “dark green” environmental ethics which does not privilege human beings above other beings and includes Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” the Gaia Theory, Deep Ecology, the Earth Manifesto, Left Biocentrism, etc.

Curry includes this interesting statement in his account of Left Biocentrism:

The Left Bio movement is also well place, by virtue of its dual ancestry [i.e., left political thought and ecological thought], to put ecology onto the progressive political agenda, where it is now glaringly absent. Extraordinary as it may seem, feminists, anti-racists, and socialists are almost as likely as those on the neo-liberal and anti-democratic right to ignore the claims of even mid-range ecological ethics (e.g., animals), let alone ecocentric ethics. This fact is sadly evident in the programmes of nearly all of today’s so-called green parties, where the green values are strictly shallow, that is, advocated insofar as they further human interests, and not when they exceed them, let alone conflict.

Of course, politics in the United States is even “shallower,” ecologically speaking, than in Curry’s native England. I cannot imagine any political figure in the United States advocating for non-human interests over human interests; and something like ecofeminism and ecojustice are at best obscure academic notions that have no place in the public discourse.

In the realm of liberal religious theology, the situation is probably worse: if you can find any ecological theology at all, it will almost certainly be a “light-green” Christian ecological theology emphasizing stewardship, and probably based on Genesis 1.24 and 2.15 (a human-centered garden metaphor). That’s a problem for people like me who are “dark green.” My own denomination, Unitarian Universalism, is probably mostly in the light-green end of the spectrum, albeit with a “theology” grounded more in a secular ethic than a religious ethic. Yet while liberal religionists are mostly light green, there are high-profile exceptions like Rosemary Radford Ruether to show us dark green folks other possibilities.

Eco-theology research

I’ve been re-reading John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (Praeger, 1969), looking at Mbiti’s section on “The Concept of Time as a Key to the Understanding and Interpretation of African Religion and Philosophy.” This was hot stuff when I first read it as an undergrad philosophy major back in 1983, as multiculturalism crept slowly into the philosophy curriculum.

I got interested in the African notions of time due to my growing interest in ecological theology, specifically eco-theological critiques of Christian notions of end-time; especially where such notions are used to justify exploitation of human beings and non-human beings. If Mbiti’s account is accurate, traditional African notions of time could provide an alternate view that might lead to more nuanced understandings of Christian notions of linear time. In particular, this also raises interesting questions regarding the persistence of African thought in North America, and North Americans’ cultural access to alternative understandings of time.

However, in the past few years Mbiti has been critiqued for bringing a colonialist/Christian viewpoint to his work. So now I’m looking for other, more recent, studies on traditional African religion; yet in my limited search of relevant literature I’m not finding another book that addresses the issue of time (and of course part of my problem is that I don’t have access to an academic library…). If any of my readers happen to know of such books, please do let me know.

Of course, all this may lead nowhere. But it sure is proving to be a fascinating path to follow. And I’ll let you know if I ever get anywhere with this….

Stuck indoors

A half hour before I was going to walk home for lunch, it started to pour. When lunchtime rolled around, I pulled on my trench coat, jammed my hat low over my eyes, and put up my umbrella. The wind came whipping around the corners of the buildings downtown and pulled at my umbrella; swirling around buildings it blew the rain at me now from the north, now from the west, now from the east. My trousers got soaked from the bottom of the trench coat to my shoes.

On the walk back, I put on full rain gear: hat, slicker, rain pants. It was raining and blowing even harder, and rain blew up my sleeves and into my face. I got back in the office and stripped off the rain gear. My shoes were soaked, so all afternoon I walked around the office in sock feet.

By sunset, the rain had stopped, but by then it was too late to take a walk. There are days when I just can’t get outside. I’ve had other jobs where it didn’t matter so much if I got soaking wet. When I worked for the carpenter, we had to be outside in all kinds of weather, and no one cared if we got wet. But ministers aren’t supposed to walk around the church in sock feet.

Working outside in bad weather can be uncomfortable and even draining, but it has advantages over being trapped inside — trapped by the clothes you wear and the conventions you have to follow. Not that I approve of “casual Friday,” where corporations allow their employees to come to work without a tie, or wearing sneakers. But for me as a minister, one barrier to living out ecological theology is this insistence in our society that we stay indoors; and this insistence is enforced in many subtle ways.

Tomorrow is supposed to be pleasant: temperatures unseasonably warm, windy but nice and sunny. My work will keep me stuck indoors most of the daylight hours. I love my job, but ecotheology leaves me vaguely troubled by the insistence that mine is an indoors job.

Lizards and Einstein

I’ve been reading Down the River, by novelist and environmental writer Edward Abbey. In the essay titled “Watching the Birds: The Windhover,” Abbey makes what I take to be a theological statement:

The naming of things is a useful mnemonic device, enabling us to distinguish and utilize and remember what otherwise might remain an undifferentiated sensory blur, but I don’t think names tell us much of character, essence, meaning.

Apply that to the old book of Genesis: God lets the first humans name things, not because God thinks humans are specially suited to naming things, but simply so humans can function in the world without things and events turning into a sensory blur. Puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it? Humans are not quite so remarkably unique as it seems at first. Not even Einstein:

Einstein thought that the most mysterious aspect of the universe (if it is, indeed, a uni-verse, not a pluri-verse) is what he called its “comprehensibility.” Being primarily a mathematician and only secondarily a violinist, Einstein saw the world as comprehensible because so many of its properties and so much of its behavior can be described through mathematical formulas. The atomic bomb and Hiroshima make a convincing argument for his point of view…

Take that, Einstein — you’re not quite the perfect scientist-hero that some say you are, and your (human) view of the world was limited….

The lizard sunning itself on a stone would no doubt tell us that time, space, sun, and earth exist to serve the lizard’s interests; the lizard, too, must see the world as perfectly comprehensible, reducible to a rational formula. Relative to the context, the lizard’s metaphysical system seems as complete as Einstein’s.

Neither science nor traditional religion offers a convincing explanation for the world as it truly is; both are ultimately too narrow. As is Edward Abbey when you come down to it– narrow, I mean — but at least he tells you so.

Walden

This week, I somehow committed myself to preaching a sermon on Henry Thoreau’s Walden. I think I’m going to connect Walden to ecotheology. Not that Walden is a work of theology (or of philosophy), but I think the book has implications for ecotheology.

Henry James wrote that Thoreau is worse than provincial, he is parochial — in other words, Thoreau is so focused on his “parish” that he isn’t even aware of the “province” or region in which he lives. James is right on the mark, although in the postmodern world being parochial may be a compliment rather than the indictment James meant it for.

Others have criticized Thoreau for being worse than parochial. Communitarians have accused Thoreau of being far too individualistic, to the point where Walden becomes a manifesto for rampant individualism. From a theological viewpoint, the communitarians might criticize Thoreau for encouraging individuals to think it is possible to do religion on your own without a religious community. You might call this “bootstrap religion” because you pull yourself up by your own religious bootstraps.

But I’m not sure it’s fair to accuse Thoreau either of excessive individualism or of parochialism. It’s hard to accuse him of excessive individualism when he devotes chapters of Walden to subjects like “Visitors” and “Former Inhabitants.” He may be shy and introverted, but he recognizes his debt to other people. And it’s hard to accuse Thoreau of being parochial when he quotes widely from religious texts from around the world, including such works as the Bhagavad Gita and the Confucian Analects. Rather than being parochial, he is expanding his conversations beyond the Protestant Chrstian tradition — which is farther afield than Henry James went.

Indeed, from a theological viewpoint Thoreau goes beyond individualism or traditional parochialism — because he expands his religious thinking beyond God and humanity to include all of the natural world. It’s a radical step he takes: he equates Nature with the transcendent. I’d say he equates God with Nature, and then goes further to imply that the divine is immanent in all beings, and even in inanimate objects such as rocks or bodies of water. So rather than taking a stance of radical individualism, Thoreau seems to extend subjectivity beyond humanity and God to all of Nature.

I don’t know how this train of thought is going to turn into a sermon, but it sure is fascinating.

An eco-theological celebration

The recent article published in the peer-reviewed journal Science reporting the sighting of a male Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, long thought to be extinct in the United States, is more than a feel-good story for eco-freaks. It’s also a religious story for some of us.

First of all, how often do we get good news about ecology? Mostly the news brings us a litany of ecological disasters. I’m a Universalist, so I know everything is going to turn out all right in the long run — but it’s nice to know that good things are happening right now, as a little encouragement for those of us who are trying to make the world better now, rather than waiting for some kind of afterlife.

There’s more theology than that involved. Those of us who are interested in ecological theology find a religious significance in bio-diversity. We ecological theologians hold that individual religion, individual salvation for individual human beings, is not enough. By extending religious principles to all species, and to eco-systems in general, we are saying that the category of evil also includes destruction of species and of eco-systems — that we can’t create the kingdom of heaven here on earth without rich bio-diversity. (For those of you who are theology geeks, yes, we stole most of this from the Social Gospelers.)

But the heck with theology — let’s just celebrate. Check out the news coverage on NewScientist.com, which includes a copy of the primary evidence involved — the five-second blurry video showing an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker flying — http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7319. Yes, it’s a blurry video, but I’m just enough of a birder to know that ain’t no Pileated Woodpecker flying along through the swamp.

It will take time for the scientific community to go over the data. In the mean time, the Nature Conservancy has received a multi-million dollar gift to protect more potential habitat of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Check out their report of their efforts to save this habitat at http://www.nature.org/ivorybill/habitat/saving.html — and click on the link in the upper right=hand corner of this Web page to make your own contribution towards saving the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker’s habitat. Heck, you were just going to spend that money at the mall, anyway. Give it to the crazy-looking woodpecker instead. What better way to celebrate?

Sense of place

As I continue to explore ecological theology, I get more and more interested in the notion of place. A sense of place is essential to understanding how we humsn fit into the rest of the ecosystem.

So this blog, called Where Project, caught my eye: www.whereproject.org Later note: I removed the link because this Web site is now defunct.

It’s written and photographed by a PhD candidate in English at Boston College, who’s writing a dissertation on “place blogging” — blogs that are all about one person’s relationship to one place.

Update August 2006: This blog is no longer current, although the author keeps promising to update it.

The April of religion

Back on October 13, 1885, Rev. William C. Gannett preached a sermon to the Illinois Fraternity of Liberal Religious Societies here in our little church in Geneva. It was later published as a tract in 1889, and republished by the American Unitarian Association in 1922 in the “Memorable Sermons” series. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“Are there not seasons of Spring in the moral world, and is not the present age one of them?” asked Dr. Channing toward the end of his life — and he died in 1842. Doubtless many persons living then were saying, “It is a season of the falling leaf, the old faiths are dropping from the tree; it is November in religion.” People say that today. I feel, instead, that Dr. Channing’s question is pertinent again: ‘”Are there not seasons of Spring in the moral and religious world, and is not the present age one of them?” There come seasons when thoughts swell like buds, old meanings press out and unfold like leaves; seasons when we either need new words for greatening thoughts, or else new meanings, new implications, new and larger contents, frankly recognized in the old words. And I think the present age, which some call November, is such an April in the world of faith; that old words are swelling with enlarged meaning, and that that is what’s the matter. In religion April’s here!

While I’m not as interested in the rest of Garrett’s sermon, I like his metaphor — and I do feel a new season of April coming to liberal religion in our day. I feel a quickening of new life as we expand our theology to include not just humankind but other living things as well. I feel old words swelling with new meaning as we recast Universalism for a new age in which people hunger for our message of hope. I feel a season of spring coming when our liberal religion will show itself as an example of how humanity can create humanity without narrow creeds and doctrines.

It’s an exciting time to be a part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation. We really do have the capacity to transform the world around us. It’s time to be hopeful.

Update 13 January 2006: I’d now add that the emergence of eco-theology gives reason to believe that this is another season of Spring in the moral world.