Where did we go wrong?

Originally published 26 December 2000

The morn­ing after.

We wake to the detri­tus of excess. Trash bins stuffed with wrap­ping paper, ripped from gifts that get big­ger and more expen­sive every year. Piles of mail-order cat­a­logs (in 1998, 64 cat­a­logs for every Amer­i­can, 12 per­cent of all the print­ing and writ­ing paper pro­duced in our coun­try). Gifts we don’t want or need. Toys that will soon join last year’s “must haves” in the garage or attic.

I don’t know about you, but for me Christ­mas has become a sym­bol of all that’s wrong with our stew­ard­ship of this plan­et: an insa­tiable orgy of resource deple­tion. Christ­mas is our nation­al hol­i­day of overindul­gence, a cel­e­bra­tion of our sup­posed God-giv­en right to strip the plan­et bare to sat­is­fy our greed. Big­ger, heav­ier, gas-guz­zling cars. The lat­est, most osten­ta­tious elec­tron­ic devices. Mini-man­sions on two — three, four — acres of land.

We live like there’s no tomor­row. In fact, we live like there’s no today. We are so busy con­sum­ing, and mak­ing the mon­ey that makes the con­sum­ing pos­si­ble, that we don’t have time to live, to love, to walk, to read, to play, or to care about mil­lions of broth­ers and sis­ters around the plan­et who have noth­ing but pover­ty and disease.

Mean­while, we resist any attempt to lim­it our con­sump­tion of the plan­et’s dwin­dling resources or to mod­i­fy our despo­li­a­tion of the envi­ron­ment (wit­ness the recent fail­ure of the devel­oped nations to agree on stan­dards for reduced emis­sions of green­house gas­es). Is there a patch of green? Pave it. A stream? Dam it. A remain­ing acre of old-growth for­est? Chop it.

How iron­ic that the birth­day of a man whose mes­sage was char­i­ty and restraint should become our nation­al fes­ti­val of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Air, water, tim­ber, oil: We offer them up on the altar of avarice. Bio­di­ver­si­ty be damned. Con­sump­tion is our nation­al reli­gion. So deck the halls with miles and miles of elec­tric lights. Roll out reams of ever glitzi­er paper to wrap our ever gaudi­er baubles. Keep those malls open 24 hours a day. It’s Christ­mas time, peace on Earth, more goods to men.

Oh dear, there he goes, rant­i­ng again. And he’s as guilty as the next person.

True, true. We’re all in this togeth­er. And the news isn’t all bad. We seem to have turned the cor­ner on ozone deple­tion, by will­ful, con­cert­ed action. Green busi­ness prac­tices have become spo­rad­i­cal­ly fash­ion­able. And a larg­er per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion is prob­a­bly con­cerned about envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion today than at any time in human his­to­ry. Even those folks in the sub­urbs with the two-ton SUVs recy­cle their glass and paper.

But, of course, token recy­cling won’t slow the jug­ger­naut of greed. If we are to keep the plan­et from going to hell in a hand-bas­ket, what is required is no less than a kind of reli­gious con­ver­sion, a world­wide com­mit­ment to treat­ing the Earth like the won­der­ful gift that it is.

And for­tu­nate­ly, there are folks out there who are seek­ing to forge an alliance of world reli­gions around the stan­dard of plan­e­tary con­ser­va­tion. The Unit­ed Nations Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­gramme has sup­port­ed efforts to bring reli­gions into part­ner­ship for envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion. And, tru­ly, the scrip­tures and tra­di­tions of all reli­gions offer ample instruc­tion for a car­ing, respon­si­ble atten­tion to plan­et Earth.

In this coun­try, a five-year sur­vey of the world’s reli­gions for their views of nature and their poten­tial con­tri­bu­tions to envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness has tak­en place at Har­vard’s Cen­ter for the Study of World Religions.

An inspi­ra­tion for many of these efforts has been cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an Thomas Berry, who in his many writ­ings has plead­ed for envi­ron­men­tal activism by reli­gious communities.

No force for change can be more pow­er­ful than the ral­ly­ing of reli­gious com­mit­ment on behalf of the plan­et’s threat­ened eco­log­i­cal sys­tems, of which humans are in inte­gral part. At the heart of the new reli­gion-based activism is the con­vic­tion that human spir­i­tu­al health is nour­ished by liv­ing in har­mo­ny with the environment.

If these admirable efforts to engage reli­gion on behalf of ecol­o­gy are to come to fruition, the impe­tus may have to come from the bot­tom up, rather than top down. Insti­tu­tion­al reli­gious lead­ers some­times seem more inter­est­ed in pre­serv­ing the pre­rog­a­tives of their own tra­di­tions than in fos­ter­ing a world view that sees all peo­ples and crea­tures as part of an organ­ic unity.

Still, I’m opti­mistic. Even on the day after Christ­mas, among the prodi­gious signs of excess, there remains a bit of the old mes­sage, lodged at the heart of every reli­gious tra­di­tion, as in these words of the Koran: “Eat and drink, but do not be waste­ful, for God does not like the prodigals.”