To what extent has the human community been in denial of our adverse effect on the planet?

Over the last several decades a range of scientists have documented such diverse problems as global warming, the burden of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, species extinction, loss of ecosystem services, soil erosion, and the pollution of air and water. With international reports such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment Report, the extent of the human impact on planetary systems has become alarmingly evident. Yet, why is it that humans have, until recently, been oblivious of the magnitude of pressures on the ecosystems of the planet? Are we in a state of paralysis that has blinded us to the problematic effects of unlimited industrialization and consumption? These questions are largely addressed to the industrialized world, but increasingly modes of excessive consumption and deleterious development have spread around the planet. Can we afford to postpone addressing these pressing environmental issues, as some suggest, until more people achieve the benefits of modernization?
Resistance to limitless economic globalization is now emerging in various parts of the world as serious consequences for biological and cultural diversity become more visible. Yet, resistance itself, while necessary, is not sufficient for supporting the essential flourishing of life. Humans require deeper wisdom and more engaged knowledge of who they are and what they can become. Now that awareness of planetary stress is growing, the challenge is to find effective visions and comprehensive values to create a sustainable future.
While policy solutions to these problems are appropriately aimed at short-term managerial or legislative strategies, there is a growing realization that long term, ethical and spiritual perspectives are also required to address issues of human motivation to make needed changes. Religions bring long term perspectives not only through their ancient historical scriptures and oral narratives but also in their contemplative, devotional, and ritual commitments to shaping abiding values in communal life. Authoritarian movements in the 20th century, however, remind us that values may entail individual and community expressions of the will to power and hegemony – and here religions are no exception.
Certainly humans have their misplaced pieties and doctrinaire fixations that derail the best of intentions resulting in rigid orthodoxies. Religions have also abetted conflict and intolerance in their misplaced emphases on exclusive claims to truth. Yet, it can be acknowledged that religions have contributed to social change. There are the striking examples in recent centuries of the resistance to, and abolition of, slavery and the 20th century civil rights movements. Historically, religious ethics have also oriented humans toward the broader horizons of the natural world and the larger cosmos as fields for personal cultivation. This is why the world’s religions have a role to play in redefining mutually enhancing human-Earth relations.
In this regard the religions are necessary but not sufficient; they need to be in dialogue with science and policy to address the changes needed. Science has provided pertinent information about the environmental crises, the social sciences are establishing the social, economic, and political basis for environmental policies, and the humanities are contributing deeper understandings of the role of the human, both historically and at present. The contributions of the humanities include such studies as environmental history, environmental philosophy and ethics, nature writing, the arts, and now religion and ecology.
It is significant to note that within religious traditions there are striking varieties of theoretical and practical responses to the environmental crisis. These positions range from care for creation, to tree-planting projects, to species preservation, and to a sense of deeper ontological transformation of the human. In a similar manner a variety of environmental ethics have been developed within the field of philosophy. Environmentalists themselves draw on various ethical positions for their work and some see the religious communities as allies in these efforts.
Modernity marks a gap between the historical context in which traditional religions arose and the demands of current environmental problems, yet, the potential of religions for spanning this contemporary divide is significant. In fact the distance itself may enable human communities to see how we have both formed and been formed by religious cosmologies. The religions and our diverse ways of knowing (sciences) have themselves arisen in relation to, and in dependence upon, values apparent in cosmologies that describe the deeper meanings of human-Earth relations. These cosmologies - the stories we tell one another about the origin and meaning of the world - are expressed in practices, ideas, and values of the religions and inscribed into persons and communities.
Our present effort is involved in understanding how these cosmologies function in societies while acknowledging the will to power that is entangled in them. For example, cosmological narratives have been used for hegemonic purposes, as in colonialist encounters, in which claims for exclusive truth were used to validate the systemic imposition of authoritarian power. Yet, an analysis of cosmology, as simply a master-narrative that willfully controls others, overlooks the complex orientations available in religious cosmologies to meaning, relationship, and numinous encounter. In particular, religious cosmologies situate humans in relation to the natural world around them as well as the larger universe. In the contemporary period religions have largely ceded cosmology to the western sciences regarding such emergent processes as the formation of matter, galaxies, the Earth’s solar system, life, and the ascent of the human.
What marks our transitional period as so challenging is that the religions are drawing on their traditional cosmologies regarding human-Earth interactions even as they realize that such teachings are insufficient for addressing the problems we face. Truly creative insights are required of all the traditions to transcend their historical limits, their political agendas, and their exclusivist intolerance.
Linkages are being made between the needs of the varied communities of life and the teachings of the world’s religions. Religious leaders and practitioners, theologians and scholars of religions are exploring scriptural and ethical understandings of relatedness to bioregions and the Earth itself. They are raising key questions such as: Isn’t the flourishing of life on Earth a religious issue? Is embodied life a significant religious concern? Are religions simply focused on salvation out of this world into a heavenly other-world paradise? Can religious and ethical perspectives provide orientations for valuing biotic and cultural life that are not simply subservient to economic development and consumption? How does the study of religion and ecology help us to understand our embodiment in the world? Do shared experiences of human embodiment across cultures provide capacities for the mapping of our place in the universe? No doubt these questions impinge upon the religions because the empirical evidence of environmental degradation is such a pervasive and stunning assault on individuals, communities, and ecosystems.