Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 5—November 14,1974
Reconciliation Between Man and Nature
“I LOOKED AT HUMAN
EXCREMENT pouring into the Hudson
River, and I smelled not waste but
death. I breathed deeply, coughed, and
no longer found humor in the joke:
‘When does the snow get dirty in New
BY REV. PAUL F PALMER, S. J.
“Old George” was a man of culture in the
root meaning of the word, but the only thing
polished about him was the top of his head. A
farmer, the only thing that he couldn’t cultivate
or grow was hair.
Well read, but only in the Bible and in the
Baltimore Catechism which he began to
memorize from the day he asked to be received
into the Church, George was a natural
philosopher. “Now you take this modern
farming,” he began. “These big tractors with
their ploughs dig too deep, they scar the earth.
In the old days the man with his horse and
plow, they caressed the earth.”
“Caress the earth,” what a lovely expression
coming from an old man whose back was bent
from laboring in the fields from the day he had
left an orphange to become a hired hand. But
the word “caress” reminded me of a talk given
by a learned colleague and fellow contributor
to these pages, Father Walter Burghardt. The
Latin word “colere” from which we derive such
English words as cultivate, culture, cult or
worship, is the word used by the Latin Bible to
describe Adam’s task of “cultivating” the earth.
As Father Burghardt expressed it, Adam’s
vocation was to “cultivate” his garden, to
“cherish” his woman, and to “worship” his
God, all variable translations of the single word
“colere.” Common to all three translations is
the idea of reverence. A man of reverence is a
man of culture, and “Old George” like Adam
before the Fall was all of that. I believe it was
Chesterton who said: “Satan is Satan because
he is irreverent.”
The world today is faced with an ecological
crisis, but I am beginning to wonder whether
the crisis is not basically theological. When
people use religion without being religious,
when people use the bodies of others without
really loving anybody, when people subdue
nature to their selfish use and in doing so abuse
it, are they not lacking in reverence?
The book of Genesis tells us that part of the
penalty visited upon man, as the result of
Adam’s rebellion against God, would be the
refusal of the earth to yield willingly and
graciously to the will of man. “Cursed is the
ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of
it all the days of your life ... In the sweat of
your face you shall eat bread until you return
to the ground” (Gen. 3:17,19).
This strange sharing of nature in the sin of
the First man, and its consequences for both
nature and man, is developed by the Apostle
Paul into a theology of redemption or
reconciliation that encompasses both man and
his world. “The Father has manifested His
mercy by reconciling the world to Himself in
NC
“INSTEAD OF BEING AT HOME’
with nature, we frequently are at a loss
in our efforts to relate ourselves to it.
We speak of the ‘hostile’ environment
and are terrified by many natural
events such as thunderstorms,
earthquakes and hurricanes.” In the
path of Hurricane Carmen, homes of
sugar plantation workers in Louisiana
show the effects of the storm. Roofing,
tin and boards (foreground) were tom
from one house.
NC
York City? At 10,000 feet.’”
Youngsters in the West Farms section
of the Bronx take a close look at the
Bronx River, oblivious to the litter and
junk polluting its banks. (NC Photo by
Chris Sheridan)
Christ,” “making peace through the blood of
His cross with all that is on earth or in the
heavens” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:18; Col. 1:20).
It is in the context of nature’s redemption
that Paul can say: “We know that the whole
creation has been groaning in travail together
until now” (Rom. 8:22), and speak of a
restoration in which God “will unite all things
in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth”
(Eph. 1:10).
The agony of nature is deeper today than it
was when Paul wrote. Our streams and rivers
and oceans are choking for want of oxygen;
large areas of our land have been strip-mined of
their adornment; our skies have been turned
into smog, obscuring or blotting out the sun;
while the very air we breathe is the bearer of
toxic polluents that suffocate rather than
susitate all life.
In the Apocalypse or the Revelation to John,
the Apostle writes: “Then I saw a new heaven
and a new earth; for the first heaven and first
earth had passed away, and the sea was no
more” (21:1). Many commentators see in this
text, based on the prophecy of Isaiah (65:17) a
renewal of all creation, freed from
imperfection, and transformed by the glory of
God (Rom. 8:19-21).
The man of culture, particularly if he is a
Christian, will not sit idly by and await the final
restoration of all things in Christ. He will join
with men of other cultures in keeping the
present earth a fitting dwelling place for man.
Having experienced reconciliation through
Christ, the Christian will be sensitive to the
voiced and unvoiced aspirations of the whole of
God’s creation to share in the “mystery of
godliness” just as it has shared in the “mystery
of iniquity.”
BY WILLIAM E. MAY
Genesis tells us that God, in making man,
alone of all living creatures, His own image,
gave him dominion over the created world: “Be
fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.
Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of
heaven and all living animals on the earth” (Gen
1:28). Because of sin, however, we have
become strangers not only to God, to our
brother men and to ourselves, but also to the
world in which we live. Instead of being “at
home” with nature, we frequently are at a loss
in our efforts to relate ourselves to it. We speak
of the “hostile” environment and are terrified
by many natural events such as thunderstorms,
earthquakes, hurricanes. Often we consider
other animals as our enemies in the struggle for
survival. Nature, red in tooth and claw, is our
common foe; either we vanquish it and bend it
to our will, or it will destroy us.
Reconciliation between man and nature
differs from man’s reconciliation with God, his
fellow men, and himself inasmuch as nature,
unlike God and other men, is not a personal
being. But the need for man to become
reconciled with the world of nature is only too
evident in the stinking cesspools that we have
made of our rivers and lakes, the poisons we
have put into the atmosphere, and the near
panic we experience because of the energy
crisis.
Some see the root cause of the mess we
experience in the very words from Genesis cited
above, for they think that these words gave
man a blank check, as it were, over nature,
making him its lord and master. Although this
is surely a terribly mistaken reading of
Scripture - for in the Bible man is not the Lord
of creation, for there is only one Lord, namely
the loving God who made man in his image -- it
is possibly this way of understanding man’s
place in nature that is at the heart of the
matter. For on this understanding nature is
simply something there for man to use at his
pleasure; the universe, of which he is the center,
is his plaything.
We differ from other animals and from the
rest of nature in that we really are the living
images or words of God.
Because we are, alone in creation, the living
BY REV. WALTER J. BURGHARDT, S. J.
(Part 1)
Recently the social philosopher and
psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was interviewed by
a New York newspaper. He had come to this
country in the early 1930s, an exile from
Hitler’s Germany, hopes high for life and work
in a vibrant America. Forty years later, he fears
for his adopted country. “The United States is
not yet entirely in hell. There is a very small
chance of avoiding it, but I am not an
optimist.”
Why this gloom? One reason is what Fromm
calls our “unrestrained industrialism.” After
World War II, America’s industrial machine
spewed an endless flow of motor cars and
pleasure boats, refrigerators and air
conditioners, barbecue pits and heated
swimming pools. Such incredible excess of
material things, Fromm claims, the machine
process, has minified man, made his own life
seem unimportant to him. “We have grown soft
from it at a sacrifice of, what shall I call it, the
soul.” And, on the whole, we “have accepted
the logic of machinery, which is to demonstrate
how machinery works. The ultimate purpose of
making a gun is to fire it.”
In consequence, “America has become the
world’s most destructive society.” Not only
have we bombed Vietnam back to the Bronze
Age. “Our society is also internally destructive.
In the last decade or so, a million people have
been killed in highway accidents. We produce
cars with built-in obsolescence. Knowing the
possible dangers, we continue to pollute the
environment. And we subsidize violence on the
screen - movies in which human life is depicted
as brutish and cheap” (cf. New York Times,
Dec. 15,1973, p. 33).
I have analyzed three ruptures that call for
reconciliation: rupture between man and God,
within man-himself, between man and man.
Now I take up a fourth facet of human
disunity, a rupture Dr. Fromm has in mind, the
rupture between man and nature, between man
and things. I shall probe two problems: (1)
BY RUSSELL SHAW
The proper relationship between man and
nature, in God’s plan, is sketched briefly but
clearly in the first chapter of the Book of
Genesis.
“Then God said: ‘Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness. Let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of
the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild
animals and all the creatures that crawl on the
words or images of God, we have a vocation, a
summons, a call. We are summoned to choose
life. But our choices are not to be blind,
irrational, unthinking responces. Rather they
are to be intelligent and free acts of
sefl-determination. We are called, in short, to
shape our own lives inwardly by choosing to do
what we come to know we ought to do if we
are to be truly men. By questioning our
experience we can come to know the meaning
of that experience, and we can test that
meaning we discover for its truth and act
responsibly in accord with our true
understanding of experience. The truth, we are
told, shall set us free.
What has all this to do with our
reconciliation with nature? Perhaps it has
everything to do with it. To be true to ourselves
and to the God who wills to share his life with
us, we must be true to reality. That is, we must
be open to the world in which we live, to the
natural world that we have not made but within
which we live. We must be ready to recognize
this world for what it is, the gift of a loving
God, and a sign of his presence to us. Too
frequently we believe that only persons like
ourselves are the subjects of rights. Although
we are, as persons, that is, as God’s images,
uniquely the subjects of inamissible and
transcendent rights that make us to be
infinitely precious, we are not the only bearers
of rights. Everything that issues from the
creative word of God is in a significant sense a
bearer of rights. Every being, for instance, has
the right to be recognized for what it is and for
the role that it has to play in the universe as a
whole. Because we, alone of all God’s creatures,
are capable of coming to understand what
things really are, we have the corresponding
obligation to find out what they are and to let
them be what they are and are meant to be,
both in themselves and in their relationship to
ourselves and to the rest of the created
universe.
What reconciliation between man and nature
involves at root, consequently, is a willingness
on our part to be open to the truth that the
created world of nature, simply by being, can
communicate to us, for this truth is one way
that the living Lord uses for telling us
something important about ourselves and about
1
what this rupture does to us, and (2) what this
rupture asks of us.
First, then, what is this rupture between man
and nature? By “nature” I mean all that is not
man or God. Till recently, you and I have
pretty much taken nature, things, for granted.
There they were - air and ocean, coal and
natural gas, aluminum and oil, steer and
salmon, wheat and milk and eggs, cars and
boats and planes, drugs and electric lights -
there they all were, in their natural state or the
fruit of American know-how, at our disposal
now and forever. Oh yes, much of it was
hostile, had to be subdued; some of it belonged
to others, had to be carried enslaved across
continents; but when the chips were down,
nothing could resist American ingenuity. What
we wanted we could have. One tradition even
boasted that such consistent success, such
material prosperity, was a sign of God’s
election: we were a chosen people. All enemies
would fall before our blessed might: not only
ensouled peoples but the soulless soil, the
bowels of the earth and the limits of outer
space.
Suddenly all that changed. No longer could
we take nature for granted. Each day a new
headline horrified us, terrified us: “Last Pocket
of Clear Air in United States Disappears;”
“World Oxygen Level Threatened by
Pesticides;” “Air Pollution Will Require
Breathing Helmets by 1985;” “World Losing
Water Pollution Battle despite Stepped-up
Control Efforts;” “Chemical Fertilizers Called
Threat to Water Resources;” “Millions Face
Threat of Starvation;” “World Food Supplies
Seen Running out by Year 2000;” “Experts
Say Human Race May Have Only 35 Years
Left” (Cf. Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of
Sin? p. 121).
In fear, we looked at nature with new eyes,
fresh awareness. I looked at human excrement
pouring into the Hudson River, and I smelled
not waste but death. I breathed deeply,
coughed, and no longer found humor in the
joke: “When does the snow get dirty in New
York City? At 10 thousand feet.” I read that
autos occupy more space in America than do
people, and I felt strangled. I saw a tree felled
in a few short moments, and I remembered that
ground’. . . God blessed them, saying: ‘Be
fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue
it.’”
The human race is meant to have
“dominion” over nature, to “subdue” it and
place it at the service of human purposes. Such
dominion, however, is not absolute. It is not
limited only by human ingenuity and prowess.
Rather, it is conditioned by a second concept -
the idea of stewardship.
Himself. Our reconciliation with nature can
begin with our adopting the attitude so
magnificently embodied in the life of St.
Francis, who with the poets could see a heaven
in a wildflower and a world in a grain of sand.
Our reconciliation with nature can begin
with our reconciliation with ourselves, in
humbly recognizing ourselves for what we are:
creatures unique in the world because of our
powers of mind and will, but with the rest of
creation one in being totally dependent on the
Lord of creation and dependent on all of
creation in living out our summons to become
truly what we really are: hearers of the word
that God speaks to us through His creation and,
in particular through those created images of
himself that he has personally become in our
Brother Jesus.
NC
“HUMAN BEINGS RULE AND
CONTROL nature as God’s
representatives. In exercising their
dominion over nature they are
accountable both to God and to one
another. When this principle of
stewardship is lost sight of, man’s
dominion is in danger of becoming
tyrannical and abusive - as in many
ways it has become today.” A bird is
silhouetted against the morning sky as
it makes its way through a combination
of mist and polluted air in an industrial
city of the midwest.
A
the tree had been centuries a-growing. I
watched the Arab-Israeli crisis unfold, and
realized that this winter our children and our
aged might be cold, might freeze. I saw a lady
look wistfully at chuck beef in a market, and
the ceaseless surge in living costs became more
than a statistic. I heard that, to power western
cities, Navajo land would be strip-minded, and I
thought of the horror that is Appalachia.
Appalachia ... Is it possible that Appalachia
is, in miniature, America in the year 2000?
“Every year Americans junk 7 million cars, 48
billion cans, 20 million tons of paper. Our
industries pour out 165 million tons of waste
and belch 172 million tons of fumes and smoke
into the sky. We provide 50 percent of the
world’s industrial pollution. An average of
3,000 acres of oxygen-producing earth a day
(1,000,000 a year) fall beneath concrete and
blacktop. The average American puts 1,500
pounds of pollutants into the atmosphere each
jyear. Furthermore, there is no end in sight”
(Richard A. McCormick, S.J., “Notes on Moral
Theology: April-September, 1970,” Theological
Studies 32 (1971) 97).
In all these facts and figures, what I find
frightening is that we are enlarging the enmity
that exists between man and his earth. It is as if
we began with the curse of God in Genesis,
“Cursed is the ground because of you” (Gn
3:17), experienced how reluctant nature often
is to serve us, vowed that with our know-how
and our power we rational creatures would
enslave the irrational, and then carried our vow
relentlessly to its logical conclusion. We have
conquered the earth; it is subject, or soon will
be, to our every will and whim. Only . .. the
slave has turned on his master; cold reason is no
longer in control; out of the nonhuman we have
fashioned a monster, and the monster threatens
to strangle us. The rupture that sin spawned,
hostility between man and his environment, is
reaching the point of no return. I can only hope
that you are as frightened as I am.
(The text for Father Walter J. Burghardt’s articles is
taken from his booklet entitled “Towards
Reconciliation’’ published by the United States
Catholic Conference, 1974. This publication may be
ordered by writing to U.S.C.C., 1312 Massachusetts
A ve., N. W., Washington, D. C. 20005).
Human beings rule and control nature as
God’s representatives. In exercising their
dominion over nature, they are accountable
both to God and to one another. When this
principle of stewardship is lost sight of, man’s
dominion is in danger of becoming tyrannical
and abusive - as in many ways it has become
today.
Disclosures of environmental abuse,
prophecies of doom concerning the depletion
of natural resources - these and other
reflections of the fact that all is not well in
contemporary man’s relationship with nature
have become the stock in trade of journalism.
Even so it is possible to wonder how much
impact they have had on the minds and hearts
of most Americans.
Our richness tends to insulate us. Only when
we are pinched ourselves do we awaken to
realities which dominate the lives of millions of
people the world over. In the winter of 1973
rising gasoline prices and long lines at the
pumps sensitized Americans to the fact that the
world’s supply of petroleum is not limitless.
When the lines disappeared, however, most
lapsed back into their customary complacency.
Not many Americans grasp the implications
of the fact that this country dominates the
world’s most precious resource: food. While
millions in sub-Sahara Africa and other parts
of the world face the threat of imminent
starvation, Americans struggle with a national
crisis of overweight. The possibility of a
paradoxical connection between the two things
occurs to very few.
The problem is not limited to Americans. By
drastically increasing the price of oil, the
oil-producing countries created a desparate
situation for the poor nations of the world,
forcing them to cut back on development plans
in order to pay the sky-rocketing bill for the oil
they need. The only operative principle seems
to be: Charge what the market will bear.
Do resources like food and oil “belong” to
particular nations and peoples in an exclusive
sense? Is this what it means to exercise
“dominion” over nature?
If dominion means cornering the market -
yes. If it means stewardship - accountability to
God and to other human beings - the answer is
no.
Stewardship and accountability have
implications not only for the present
inhabitants of the world, but also for the
unborn and for future generations. Here, too,
the current record leaves much to be desired.
The subduing of nature has now reached the
point at which, for the first time in history, the
extermination of the human race by all-out
nuclear war is a real possibility. Yet the
response of the superpowers is to haggle
suspiciously over limited arms control - not
disarmament - while developing new weapons.
At the same time other ambitious nations begin
to edge their way into the nuclear club,
impelled by the consideration that a first-class
power today needs nuclear weapons at its
disposal.
Something is wrong somewhere. In the
contemporary world human beings have
extended their dominion over nature to an
unprecedented degree. Yet they have done so
with little reference to their responsibility to
other members of the human race - present and
future - and with little visible sense of
accountability to God.
Dominion divorced from stewardship can be
a nightmare. Man’s fulfillment of the biblical
command to subdue nature to human purposes
stands in danger of becoming a catastrophic
mockery. If it does, the joke ultimately may be
on us.
Theology Article
Dominion or Stewardship?
Know Your
Faith
(All Articles On This Page Copyrighted 1974 by N.C. News Service)
Man’s Obligation to Nature