ETHICS IN RELATIONAL DIALOGUE: DEFINING AN ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE by Austin Leininger, © 2011, all rights reserved INTRODUCTION One could source the current global economic climate from any of several historic possibilities: The first transnational corporation at the close of the sixteenth century (East India Trading Company, founded 1600); the settling of Western Europeans in North America in the seventeenth century; the enlightenment in the late eighteenth century; industrialization in the mid nineteenth century; the first US oil derrick in 1859; the US transcontinental railroad, begun in 1877; the granting to corporations of personhood, together with all attendant rights and protections under the US Constitution in 1886 (Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad); or perhaps the international deregulation of corporations in the 20 th century “with the closure of the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations following the 1992 Earth Summit.” 1 Wherever we may source the current climate, the pervasive fact of globalization is undeniable in today’s world, and where this becomes tragic for our global community, and for our global ecosystem, is in the attending commoditization of life perpetrated by acts of corporate greed: Patenting of corn and rice genomes at the expense of biodiversity and regenerative subsistence; legal victories ensuring corporate rights to export water against a nation’s wishes, import and transport toxic chemicals against a nations wishes, and to market health risks that ensure profit at the expense even of infants’ lives against a nation’s wishes; as well as the rampant and accelerating exploitation both of non-renewable resources and of renewable resources to non- renewable proportions. From this modern reality, it has become painfully clear over the course of the past century that the human population—decidedly alienated from the rest of the eco- 1 Nick Robins, “Loot: in search of the East India Company, the world's first transnational corporation,” in Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2002), 79.
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ETHICS IN RELATIONAL DIALOGUE: DEFINING AN ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE by Austin Leininger, © 2011, all rights reserved
INTRODUCTION
One could source the current global economic climate from any of several historic
possibilities: The first transnational corporation at the close of the sixteenth century (East India
Trading Company, founded 1600); the settling of Western Europeans in North America in the
seventeenth century; the enlightenment in the late eighteenth century; industrialization in the mid
nineteenth century; the first US oil derrick in 1859; the US transcontinental railroad, begun in
1877; the granting to corporations of personhood, together with all attendant rights and
protections under the US Constitution in 1886 (Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific
Railroad); or perhaps the international deregulation of corporations in the 20th century “with the
closure of the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations following the 1992 Earth Summit.”1
Wherever we may source the current climate, the pervasive fact of globalization is undeniable in
today’s world, and where this becomes tragic for our global community, and for our global
ecosystem, is in the attending commoditization of life perpetrated by acts of corporate greed:
Patenting of corn and rice genomes at the expense of biodiversity and regenerative subsistence;
legal victories ensuring corporate rights to export water against a nation’s wishes, import and
transport toxic chemicals against a nations wishes, and to market health risks that ensure profit at
the expense even of infants’ lives against a nation’s wishes; as well as the rampant and
accelerating exploitation both of non-renewable resources and of renewable resources to non-
renewable proportions. From this modern reality, it has become painfully clear over the course
of the past century that the human population—decidedly alienated from the rest of the eco-
1 Nick Robins, “Loot: in search of the East India Company, the world's first transnational corporation,” in Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2002), 79.
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community of Earth—is on a terminal trajectory in our exploitation of the natural world.2
Changes in global structures indicated by global climate change, dead zones in our oceans, mass
extinctions, and decreased productive capacity of our soils offer clear evidence that humankind
has become a key developing factor in the overall survivability and well being of this entire
planet’s ecosystem.
Offering a “macrophase” view of the magnitude of our ecological crisis,3 Thomas Berry
writes about the “Great Work” of each era that brings about the next stages in human and global
development.4 Drawing on Berry’s macrophase view of the problem, I intend to follow the
development of ethical theory from Kant’s development of the categorical imperative during the
European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century through the relational trajectory introduced by
Habermas’ Discourse Ethics in redefining Kant’s categorical imperative in the twentieth century.
Further nuanced by Cynthia Mo- Lobeda’s eco-feminist relational theory, and with the aid of
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s discussion of relational theology tied in with Moe-Lobeda’s
discussion of relational ecological ethics, I intend to define an ecological imperative that ties a
continuing trajectory back into Berry’s work.5 Having himself suggested an ecological
imperative without thickly defining it, my hope is to offer a viable corrective to the
anthropocentric microphase ethics Berry complains against to arrive at a macrophase solution
2 I will use “creation” interchangeably with “the natural world” as there is a creative impulse inherent in the natural order, whether or not one believes in a divine sourcing of the universe, that bespeaks of a majestic drive toward thriving and ever more complicated expressions of life in the interrelated cycles of biodiversity of our planet. For me it is as much an expression of faith as it is an expression of that more purely scientific understanding of bio-diversification.
3 Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 101.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 In the scope of this inquiry, I build on the key arguments made by its three major contributors –Berry in The Great Work, Moe-Lobeda in Healing a Broken World, and Suchocki in The Fall to Violence. While my formulation of the ecological imperative relies on the integrity of these key arguments, their proof is the entire content of their Authors’ cited texts, which I cannot discuss fully in this brief work. While I will briefly introduce each, I encourage the reader to explore these fascinating works for their full justification.
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that gives moral counterweight in proportion to the macrophase power humankind now wields
against the natural world.
FOUNDATIONS AND TRAJECTORY
In The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, Thomas Berry opens with a description of
past Great Works that have included ancient Greek inquiry into the nature of the mind, ancient
Israel’s inquiry into the nature of the divine in relationship with creation, ancient and medieval
Rome in galvanizing European tribalism into stability under an ordered system of civil law,
ancient first peoples’ combination of spirituality and ecological harmony in the Americas, and
the religious and technological wonders of the Eastern world.6 Our current work he marks as
“moving modern industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a
more benign mode of presence.”7 Particular to this work is the new challenge to our moral
understanding of the world around us, and our place in it, through the field of Ethics. Berry
poignantly observes that humans have “become a macrophase power” in the world, “something
on the level of the glaciations or the forces that caused the great extinctions of the past.”8 In the
face of this enormous power, he names the reality that our current impact and ability to
fundamentally change elements of the Earth’s functioning that are irreparably harming the
6 Berry’s method draws on historic survey coupled with astrophysical theory regarding the beginning of the
universe. He combines earth science, history, theology, and ecology to provide the “macroview” of the human in relationship with not only the environ of Earth, but within the context of the Universe itself, which he convincingly argues (with the help of modern astrophysics) shares the same fundamental elements of which we ourselves are composed. From this underlying theory of the relationality of ALL matter of the universe, he argues for a comprehensive shift in our understanding of human/non-human relationships from an anthropocentrism that he sourced as a strong characteristic of the Western European Settlers of North America (which then became, through industrialization, the dominant paradigm of globalization), to a multi-centic or universe-centric understanding of relationality that demands a correlational duty to the non-human world. He provides the framework for my development of the ecological imperative.
7 Berry, 7.
8 Ibid., 101.
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structures fundamental to global ecological survival are pitifully underbalanced by our
“microphase sense of responsibility [and] ethical judgment.”9 Essentially, our current mode of
ethics will simply not offer us the necessary criteria by which to judge the enormity of our
current moral abuse of our planet. As such, he suggests an ecological imperative that I believe
holds a deeper significance for the development of the kind of macrophase ethics he suggests is
necessary to balance our macrophase power in the world.
Larry Rasmussen, responding to Berry’s work, seeks specifically to examine the
macrophase ethics Berry suggests needs to accompany our growing macrophase understanding of
the interrelated and interdependent world and universe around us. Rasmussen draws out the
Kantian and Descartesian influence of enlightenment morality in divorcing the human from the
rest of the natural world through Kant’s absolute devaluing of the physical realm in favor of the
purely rational a priori by which we must solely judge moral action, and Descartes similar appeal
to knowledge understood by the rational intellect in isolation from the natural world as the basis
for philosophy. Both center the “nature and resources of the autonomous, rational, individual
self, with reliable knowledge rooted in human subjectivity,”10 and both regard the non-human in
terms of “organic machines without consciousness and feeling” such that “the venerable traditions
of ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rights’ in the West oddly do not include the laws and rights of nature,
but the laws and rights of humans alone.”11 Drawing in John Locke’s Social Contract Theory,
Rasmussen extends the discussion to our fundamental understanding of rights, which he sources
from an expanded Lockean definition of Property Rights, in purely human terms – even including
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, despite its significance, yet ignores any sense
9 Berry, 101.
10 Larry Rasmussen, “Research Notes,” Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2001), 203.
11 Ibid.
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of obligation to the natural world around us. Rasmussen comments poignantly “I have no idea
what consolation it is to be segregated and alone in the community of life of which we are an
integral part. This is self-inflicted alienation. We are, it says to our soul and spirit, not truly at
home here, despite our shared DNA and evolutionary lineage.”12 Reiterating Berry, he comments
on microphase human responsibility and ethics, expanding on Berry’s definition to encompass the
entirety of our human epistemology including “all our formation of character and conscience…
carried on daily in family and community via market and media,” to which he, in agreement with
Berry, compares our incommensurably exaggerated macrophase global power, from which we
“visit the consequences upon neighbors we do not even recognize as neighbors.”13 His solution
ties back into the fundamental nature of our formation – essentially suggesting the necessity of
"Growing people up" for a different world.14 From his view, formation of a new worldview that
celebrates the interconnections between humankind and all of creation, “one that assumes Earth,
even cosmos, as the comprehensive community,”15 is the task before the human community. “It is
a task that understands human ethics to be derivative from Earth and the socio-ecological
imperative, not vice versa.”16 All three major players in his discussion of the formation of the
modern worldview, Kant, Descartes, and John Locke, specifically state that we have no duty to
the non-human world, and we’ve made little or no progress, from Rasmussen’s perspective, in
overcoming this major ethical shortfall. He offers a thin account of how we might get there,
concluding that even if we have made a start toward a macrophase ethics in reconstructing the
12 Rasmussen, 202.
13 Ibid., 203.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., (emphasis mine).
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“working moral notions (microphase notions) that have guided our sense of what is valued, how it
is valued, and the actions deemed appropriate in light of ascribed value,” still the “scope of moral
accountability… stops short of other members in the community of life.” 17 He concludes his
argument, disappointedly admitting “The disconnection of humans from the rest of their co-
siblings of creation remains unmended, as does the morality of domination and control.”18
While Rasmussen recognizes “macrophase power without macrophase ethics of the kind
that properly places us as a stanza in the continuing hymn of the universe” I believe there is more
hope than he engenders in his conclusion.19 Precisely in naming the sources of our foundations
we may hope to unmask them, address them, and amend them. Such, I assert, is the case in the
field of ethics since Kant’s time, as I hope to show in the progression that follows from Kant,
through Habermas to Moe-Lobeda.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant wrote Foundations of the Metaphysics
of Morals. Within that transformative enlightenment text, Kant laid down the foundations which
many subsequent ethicists have either built upon in support of his theories or have struggled to
overcome in seeking a rational morality that demands integration with the human community
outside of the rational a priori of the individual mind (whether cognizant of other as end or not).
Central to Kant’s theory is the concept of the categorical imperative, which in principle form states
“act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.”20 From this key concept, Kant elaborates two practical principles, “the universal
17 Rasmussen, 203-204.
18 Ibid., 205.
19 Ibid.
20 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd Ed, Trans. and Intro. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1997), 30.
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imperative of duty… Act as though the maxim of your action were by your will to become a
universal law of nature,”21 and “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in
that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”22 The only limit placed on this
imperative is that “the ends of any person, who is an end in himself, must as far as possible be also
my ends, if that conception of an end in itself is to have its full effect on me. This principle of
humanity is the supreme limiting condition on the freedom of action of each man.”23
In this one text, Kant successfully honed centuries of Hellenistic, biblical, and theological
dualism, refuting the usefulness of moral feeling and human emotion of any kind, any trace of
goodness or relevance in the physical world and the human body, and any but a tainting
influence of desire in fulfilling moral duty to another. Arriving at his rational a priori synthetical
practical proposition of the categorical imperative, all of his work in refuting the body aspect of
the dualistic nature of “man” is in favor of developing a truly dispassionate and calculating
human rational mind, for such is the only possible source of a truly moral action. By his
reasoning, the mind must be dissociated as much as is possible from all aspects of physicality
and the natural world, for these supply distraction and introduce self-fulfilling impulses that
degrade moral action in a diffuse chain of infinite hypothetical imperatives relating to desire.
Essentially, nature, body, physical reality becomes the privation of good, and the kingdom of the
mind – or Kingdom of Ends – where the purely rational mind posits universalizable maxims
from which it may honorably and morally act is offered as the antidote in forming a good will.
In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Jurgen Habermas offers a corrective
for Kant’s theories in his definition of Discourse Ethics. Habermas defines a dialogical
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 46.
23 Ibid., 47-48.
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approach, collapsing Kant’s two worlds theory, and introducing a relational aspect with the
suggestion that moral norms must necessarily occur in the context of communication rather than
conceived of as purely rational and individual. The reformulation of the categorical imperative
offered in the final section of the text, “Only those norms may claim to be valid that could meet
with the consent of all affected in their role as participants in a practical discourse,”24 reflects this
shift in thinking toward interrelation and mutual interconnection, which he sums up as “No one
can maintain his identity by himself.”25 The centrality of relationship for development of
individuality as well as forming a basis for morality offers an important shift from Kant’s theory
that reintroduces a certain humanness to the equation. As he suggests, again in the final section,
the changes alleviate much of Hegel’s critiques of Kant’s work, and particularly the dangers of
applying the theory universally (though perhaps ironic since Habermas is still a universalist).
The integrity of the human person and the relationality of the human community insist that
moralities must meet two fundamental criteria in that “they must emphasize the inviolability of
the individual by postulating equal respect for the dignity of each individual. But they must also
protect the web of intersubjective relations of mutual recognition by which these individuals
survive as members of a community.”26
Branching off of Kant’s categorical imperative, Habermas developed a new view of the
human in ethical dialogue that reinterpreted the categorical imperative in a relational trajectory,
but in the fact that Habermas still locates relationality in a human community, he fails to take
relationality to the extent necessary to satisfy the needs of an ecological imperative that takes
24 Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Trans. Christian Lenhardt and
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 197.
25 Ibid., 200.
26 Ibid.
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“the dignity of each individual” in that “web of intersubjective relations” to be a community of
ALL interrelated bio-systems of the planet.27 Toward this end, and continuing in the trajectory
Habermas began, feminist and liberation ethicists have stressed the importance of relational
understanding that takes into account the historic silencing of the voices of the oppressed.
Seeking their wisdom, inviting their healing and reintroduction into the equation of ethical theory
and practice, draws temporal factors into the relational theory of ethics that necessarily place our
ethical dilemmas in a multi-historical and interrelational context that seeks balance and equity
along with the other basic human goods pursued.
Nuancing this method of inquiry toward ecological concerns, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda
defines a strong imperative of action in Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God.28
Drawing together threads of feminist relationality, process theology, and ethics to posit an “Earth
Ethics,”29 Moe-Lobeda offers a critique of economic theory from the point of view of one who
has seen the devastation wrought by globalization in developing nations. Challenging four
pervasive economic myths, Moe-Lobeda argues that the dominant paradigm of globalization
disables democracy, robs individuals of their moral agency and convinces the same individuals
that freedom is market freedom and that there is no alternative.
27 Habermas, 200.
28 Moe-Lobeda draws on her work with tremendously impoverished communities in developing nations, observing first hand the effects of globalization on the well-being of the human and non-human populations in these broken communities. She combines anthropology, ethics, and theology, to explore the disabling of moral agency in industrialized nations, particularly the US, where our moral anthropology is connected inextricably to market ideologies developed and aimed at a false image of well-being based on GDP and economic progress. She then seeks ways in which she (and “I”) can recover agency, through subversive spirituality based on Martin Luther’s understanding of Christ’s own subversive practices/teachings that undermined systems of domination and oppression in Jewish culture, and society under Roman rule.
29 Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 102.
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Lisa Sowle Cahill, amidst a criticism of religious failure in which “Traditional religions
have been deplorably unable to offer ‘a meaningful challenge to the aggressive proselytizing of
market capitalism,’”30 credits Moe-Lobeda with offering a vital counter to the myths which
sustain this “religion of the Market” that Cahill (via David Loy from “Religion of the Market”)
observes has already become “the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts
more quickly than any previous belief system or value-system in human history.”31 The appeal of
this new religion, she observes, “lies in its promise of salvation from human unhappiness through
commodities, a promise that can never be fulfilled even for the few who enjoy the ability to
purchase almost unlimited quantities.”32
Moe-Lobeda’s solution is to seek “subversive moral agency in response to [this]
particular moral crisis of neo-liberal globalization.”33 Drawing on Martin Luther’s theological
responses to the economic abuses of his own time, she lifts up the classical notion of theosis as a
lifelong process of drawing ever nearer to the divine through each action that is in accord with
God’s will, the indwelling Christ as a source for subversive moral agency, and the connections
between Luther’s relational understanding of Christ’s work in restoring us to relationship with
God and feminist ethical theory “where the key concepts are mutuality, reciprocity,
interdependence, a passion for right relationship, and the just interconnectedness of all things.”34
Championing the cause against socio-ecological exploitation, Moe-Lobeda offers a candid
portrait of the complicit American market consumer:
30 Lisa Cahill, “Bioethics, Theology, and Social Change,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, 31:3 (W 2003), 374.
31 David Loy, “TheReligion of the Market,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1997) 65:275-290, cited in Cahill, 374.
32 Cahill, 374.
33 Ibid.
34 Cahill, 107.
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Not only is globalization taken for granted, but the practices of daily life mandated by it are taken for granted, are accepted as largely untranscendable. It seems not strange, then, that people of relative economic privilege in the United States—though they be compassionate and caring—agree to play soccer with balls made by child laborers; wear clothes made In sweatshops; eat strawberries grown on land that should grow beans and corn for its hungry children; buy stock in companies that dump toxic wastes in communities of color, devastate Philippine communities by deforesting their lands, and force subsistence farmers in India to buy seeds that will not reseed; and perpetuate an orgy of consumption that endangers Earth’s capacity to sustain life.35
The typical consumer, buying into the myths that sustain the market economy in all it’s
deplorable splendor, is fully engrossed in the projected image of market well-being offered
liberally and freely through advertising, misinformation, glorification of consumer gratification,
and the glamour of materialism. Out of this context Moe-Lobeda asserts the “deepest spiritual-
moral crisis of globalization is the disabling of our ability to know and to practice who we are
called and empowered by God to be: beings-in-community-of-life, crafting ways of life that
enable the Earth and its inhabitants to flourish.”36 From this weighty statement of her
understanding surrounding the global economic crisis, Moe-Lobeda recalls us from the false
wellbeing of the market ideology and calls us back into mutuality, defiance of domination, and
solidarity. “Mutuality,” she says, “suggests that life saving guidance toward economic
alternatives may come from Earth’s ecosystems. Defying domination implies dismantling the
structured (and theologically rationalized) relationship of exploitation between the human
species and the Earth.”37 And solidarity “may be the ‘place where people can speak the
unspeakable’ and be heard and heeded, where people can hear the unhearable and respond.”38
Essentially, we are relational beings that need to renew our connection to the world around us,
35 Moe-Lobeda, 68.
36 Ibid., 69.
37 Moe-Lobeda, 120.
38 Ibid., 123.
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seek actively to undermine and subvert the illusions of market well-being that hide the rampant
exploitation of the natural world around us, seek again toward mutuality and solidarity with all of
creation—human and non-human—and reexamine our crucial role as rational instruments in the
interrelational and interdependent web of life and life systems composing the biosphere of Earth.
Taking her own appropriation of relational theology one step beyond Moe-Lobeda’s
“Earth Ethics” in her fundamental understanding of the human relationship with creation,
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki adds a crucial restructuring of the classical doctrine of Original Sin to
the conversation through a shift from violence against God to violence against creation.39 While
not itself an ethical method, Suchocki’s constructive relational theology offers an incredible
wealth of meaning from which to draw into ethical discussion. Beginning with wellbeing, and
moving into globally interconnected relationships and concomitant responsibilities, Suchocki
builds a relational model sourced from creation itself, offering a rich field for ecological inquiry
that adds further depth and character to Moe-Lobeda’s relational underpinnings for developing
an ecological imperative.
“The well-being of the world and of God and the world together is established through
interdependence… [which] requires an inclusiveness of well-being. Inclusive well-being is
39 Suchocki starts from traditional Church teaching on Original Sin as developed and indoctrinated in
Augustine’s City of God, wherein humankind inherits Adam’s original sin of violating God’s command to abstain from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and from which the human person is said to be estranged from God, broken and tainted except for God’s interposition of grace by which (and only by which) we may be redeemed. Her premise for shifting from violating God’s command to violating God’s creation is based in constructive theological method combined with her own formation of Whitehead's Relational Theology. She convincingly argues her claim that in transgressing against one another and in treating God’s creation as purely a resource for human exploitation, we circumvent God’s purpose in creating and do violence against creation and thereby against God in our fundamental break away from created order to place ourselves in opposition to the created order of which we are an integral part. In denying and doing violence against the relational order of creation, we break our fundamental relationship with creation and thereby with God who is in relationship with all of God’s created order. The well-being of all is interrelated, and is evident in the collective ill-being engendered in global exploitation of the natural world, which cycles back into the ecosystems of ALL life being damaged/violated in exploitative resource extraction, pollution, and contamination of the bio-systems that support all life.
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therefore the norm against which sin is measured.”40 Starting from this working definition of
normative well-being, Suchocki defines a practical minimal well-being that includes basic needs
of sustenance, shelter, and the “opportunity for labor, meaning, and emotional nourishment,”
alongside the maximal particularity of well-being where “we are each one of us centers of an
existence that is many-centered.”41 By the maximal she then posits that our relationships with
non-human beings in both the realms of animals and plants teach us to recognize the centers of
well-being that extend beyond ourselves to include the other living inhabitants of our global
ecosystem which similarly live or die according to the conditions placed on their well-being by
their environments. “Interdependence implies reciprocal relations of well-being… we are
interwoven… But while immediate relationships are obvious, they are by no means exhaustive—
our relationality finally draws us into connection with the entire universe.”42 Extending this
globally interwoven well-being to the idea of responsibility, Suchocki elaborates on the special
role of human beings in our capacity for conscious reflection on the interdependent nature of the
world around us. “Knowing the world as interdependent involves the corollary of acting in terms
of this interdependence,” she asserts. “One’s actions and one’s knowledge are to be in
conformity with the reality that all things exist interdependently.”43
Having laid the foundation for her ecological challenge, Suchocki states the nature of our
global crisis, “for the sake of increasing profits, corporations persisted in operations whose side
effects included the production of contaminants that could not be safely contained. These toxic
40 Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (New York:
Continuum, 1999), 66.
41 Ibid., 67.
42 Ibid., 70-71.
43 Ibid., 88.
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substances were then disposed of in selected sites, where they seeped into the land and/or water,
negatively affecting the land, the water, and living beings.”44 Frankly assessing this situation,
she adds, “Pollution violates the well-being of earth and its inhabitants, creating disease and dis-
ease both consciously and subliminally.”45 Essentially the human community has divorced itself
from responsibility to respect and participate in the well-being of the non-human world. We
have perpetrated violence against non-human and human alike in our blindness, and we need to
seek forgiveness. It is this forgiveness that provides the crucial pivot to her theory.
Within her definition of forgiveness, Suchocki provides the key to breaking the chain of
violence – “forgiveness is willing the well-being of victim(s) and violator(s) in the context of the
fullest possible knowledge of the nature of the violation.”46 Commenting on Suchocki’s notion
of forgiveness, Barbara Patterson observes poignantly, “Restoration from violence in this
perspective is not about ‘paying back a debt’ to Jesus. It is not about viewing one's self as a
worm or about sacrifice or about becoming ego-less. Rather, it is about living as Jesus did fully
into our human, God-created capacities to transcend violence and those parts of our selves that
are caught in violence in order to love the other.”47 What this forgiveness amounts to in
ecological terms is a radical disclosure of abuses of the natural world, recognition of collective
human complicity, and collectively willing the well-being of the planet with the correlatively
derived duty to seek cooperative means of progress to replace current exploitative means.
Suchocki and Moe-Lobeda both draw on a Christian faith that is remarkably complicit in its
44 Suchocki., 105.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 144.
47 Barbara A. B. Patterson, Review of Fall to Violence in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), 712.
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history of systematic domination and exploitation of the natural world, yet each offers a
corrective. Moe-Lobeda seeks the subversive Christ – undermining the very cycles of
domination and privilege that for centuries were the purview of Christian religious power.
Suchocki, in her foundational shift in the doctrine of Original Sin, reappropriates Christianity in
the cause of ecological inter-human and intra-human relationality, drawing all the power of faith
to witness to the need for a forgiveness that reintegrates planetary well-being into our
transcendent and multi-centered reality.
THE ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE
Drawing all the threads together, Thomas Berry offers a scathing critique of human
institutions in their failure to live in equilibrium with the natural world around us, resulting in his
bold ethical claim:
[T]he ecological community is not subordinate to the human community. Nor is the ecological imperative derivative from human ethics. Rather, our human ethics are derivative from the ecological imperative. The basic ethical norm is the well-being of the comprehensive community and the attainment of human well-being within that community.48
Paired with Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s relational theological theory of sin as violence against
creation and Moe Lobeda’s “Earth Ethics,” these three together offer the seed for developing an
ecological imperative that I suggest might challenge the enormity of current global moral abuses
against creation.
Without the means to assess the magnitude of the situation, there is little hope of our
stemming the tide of destruction we’ve been riding for the past several centuries. Berry provides
just such a means in the macrophase view he offers in The Great Work. Completing the
foundation shared with Moe-Lobeda and Suchocki, Berry’s Great Work provides a map to the
48 Berry, 105.
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central concerns needing to be addressed by a widely defensible formation of an ecological
imperative that takes on the ethical component of our era’s Great Work in “moving modern
industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode
of presence.”49
Starting from the widest view, Berry asserts:
The human is neither an addendum nor an intrusion into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe… In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe. Such a statement could be made about any aspect of the universe because every being in the universe articulates some special equality of the universe in its entirety… Yet it is within our own being that we have our own unique experience of the universe and of the Earth in its full reality.50
(We just have to realize that ours isn’t the only experience that matters!) From this widest sense
of our interconnectedness with the entire universe, the ecological imperative will require the re-
centering of the moral criteria, of whatever one’s chosen method of ethical inquiry, away from
the anthropocentrism that has plagued the discipline since Plato walked the streets of ancient
Athens, toward an eco-centrism that seeks the restoration of equilibrium between humankind and
the rest of creation. As Herman Green notes in his response to Berry’s Great Work, “We need
laws that recognize the rights of the nonhuman components of the Earth and an ethics that
provides guidance to the human community in its interrelations with the natural world.”51 Locke
has for too long held the place of privilege in forming our foundational understanding of rights
from ownership. It is time for a shift to an understanding of rights that draws on the fundamental
dignity inherent in a subject’s being what it is in the incomprehensibly interconnected web of the
universal physical manifestation of matter. Berry notes the great work of indigenous first
49 Berry, 7.
50 Ibid., 32 (emphasis mine).
51 Herman Green, “Thomas Berry’s ‘Great Work’,” in The Ecozoic Reader, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 2000), 12
Leininger, page 17
peoples in their combination of spirituality and ecological harmony. Born out of respect for the
manifestation of the divine in whatever form was apprehended, native spirituality offers a
corrective to our understanding of rights by seeking the integral divine dignity of subject/object
in and of itself. The prayer of thanks given for the life of the buffalo, and the care with which
every portion of the animal was used without a trace of waste pays remarkable tribute to the
equilibrium sought out of this world view, and provides the shift suggested by Green from which
law might seek toward defining rights based on the integrity of life for its own sake, divorced
from any discussion of ownership that is born of the perceived right to domination. If Kant’s
categorical imperative is “act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time
will that it should become a universal law,”52 and Habermas offers the corrective, “Only those
norms may claim to be valid that could meet with the consent of all affected in their role as
participants in a practical discourse,”53 then in its first and widest form, the ecological imperative
is: act only in such a way that the dignity and integrity of both self and other as mutually
centered expressions of universal being in relational interdependence may be honored. While it
is entirely unrealistic to assume a position of non-consumption (even plants consume nutrients,
water, and sunlight), it is the fundamental dignity and integrity that is the foundation of the
ecological imperative in this form. As described in the indigenous use of Buffalo, it is possible
both to consume and simultaneously honor both the dignity and integrity of the Buffalo. By
offering thanks for the life that is taken, dignity is honored. By making use of every part of the
taken life, integrity is honored. As a counterexample, the factory farming of chickens—in which
life itself is commoditized and confined to cages stacked ten feet high in football-field-length
52 Kant, 30.
53 Habermas, 197.
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rows inside a vermin-infested factory building, where birds beaks are cauterized at birth to limit
damage between overcrowded cage-mates, and deceased carcasses are disposed of perfunctorily
without any thought of dignity, integrity, or use—is a painful and blatant abuse of the ecological
imperative.
This brings us to Berry’s major critique of Western European cultural elitism:
When in the seventeenth century the Europeans came here they might have established an intimacy with this continent and all its manifestations. They might have learned from the peoples here how to establish a viable relationship with the forests and with the forest inhabitants. They might have understood the rivers and mountains in their intimate qualities. They might have seen this continent as a land to be revered and dwelt on with a light and gracious presence. Instead it was to the colonists a land to be exploited.54
Charting the earliest extinctions following the abuses of European exploitation, Berry remembers
the Auk, which had fed thousands of sailors, and which, properly managed, could have been a
perpetually renewable resource, but which was gone by the mid nineteenth century. He
remembers the passenger pigeon, “the most numerous species of birds ever known… hunted to
extinction by 1915.”55 And he remembers the buffalo, numbering “some sixty million,” which
was nearly extinct within a few years of the civil war.56 Added to this may be the overfishing of
our seas, the strip-mining of our mountains, the clear-cutting of our primordial forests, and the
relentless drive to translate ecological material into market profit at a rate of consumption that
exceeds the Earth’s ability to sustain consumption of even renewable resources. From the reality
of exploitation, Kant’s second practical principle—“Act so that you treat humanity, whether in
your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only”57—offers an
54 Berry, 41.
55 Ibid., 42.
56 Ibid.
57 Kant, 46.
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excellent foundation, but which must be reoriented from its anthropocentric position. With
respect to the original form of the ecological imperative, this practical principle translates: Act so
that you treat the world around you, whether human or non-human, always as an end an never as
a means only. Again it is unrealistic to assume that humans, in competition for resources and
species survival, could assume a role of non-consumptive existence that never used non-human
life as a means to our own ends of survival (etc.). However, it is again the fundamental dignity of
interrelated life that builds on the rights of creation to insist that non-humans and humans alike
must be considered in their integrity—as ends in and of themselves as well as occasionally the
means to our survival and/or even our comfort. No one would fault the felling of a single tree to
provide for the fundamental need of shelter—however, the wanton destruction of entire forests of
old-growth redwoods by Pacific Lumber in Humboldt County for immense profits at the expense
of local livelihood, impoverishment of non-renewable natural resources, contamination of ground
water, pollution of Humboldt Bay and its contributory rivers, and the biocide of an entire
ecosystem imperils not only the trees and countless species of non-human inhabitants, but
threatens the well-being of the rivers, the bay, the human population, and damages our
relationship to the natural world. As an example of the kind of rampant extractive exploitation
that sees only means to selfish human profiteering ends, this is blameworthy and unethical,
particularly in terms of the practical principle defined from the ecological imperative.
Appealing to Neolithic images of the divine feminine or “Great Mother,” the ancient
“archetypal sense of the Cosmic Tree and the Tree of Life,” the “Death-Rebirth symbol,” and the
“archetypal Journey,” Berry next seeks the path back to the viable human—that state of
equilibrium with the natural world that will place humankind back into the web of
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interrelationality inherent throughout the known universe.58 Each symbol is known for its
powerful imagery of relationship—the divine feminine being the nurturing power of the universe
most readily seen in the nurturing of a child by its mother (human or otherwise), the recovering of
which, Berry contends, will balance and rival the power of creation and nurturance with the
patriarchal drive for dominion and conquest. The Journey, being a participatory symbol of our
connection to the larger story of the universe, locates us within the ever unfolding story of the
natural universe and puts us into relationship with every living (and inert) subject in the universe.
The Tree of Life, having its roots in the waters, its branches in the world, and its topmost leaves in
the heavens, joins all three ancient sacred sources of life in earth, air, and water. Where damage
done to any element of the ecosystem or to the tree itself would damage “life” itself, Berry hopes
this symbol will create a “deep instinctive repulsion to any such activity.”59 And the Death and
Rebirth symbol, Berry hopes, will provide relevant insight into the “cosmic process of continuing
transformation.”60 Applied back to the ecological imperative, the second applied principle
translates from Kant’s “Act as though the maxim of your action were by your will to become a
universal law of nature,”61 to become: Act in such a way as to promote the viability of the human
community in its interconnection to and interdependence upon the ecosystems of the Earth.
APPLICATIONS
Seen as steps toward the full realization of human integration into the ecological order,
and further identifying key areas where the ecological imperative might be applied, subsequent
58 Berry, 70.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Kant, 46.
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chapters in Berry’s work attend to the University, Ecological Geography, Politics, Corporations,
Economic Theory, and Petroleum – each offering a unique opportunity for reform,
reimagination, recovery of vision, and reordering around the ecological imperative and its
defined principles. “Universities have the contact with the younger generation needed to reorient
the human community toward a greater awareness that the human exists, survives, and becomes
whole only within the single great community of the planet Earth;”62 Ecological Geography
recognizes the natural limitations of local ecosystems, from which humans have artificially
separated themselves at the cost of enormous amounts of energy. “In this process we have so
violated the norms of limitation, so upset the chemical balance of the atmosphere, the soil, and
the oceans, so exploited the Earth in our use of fossil fuels, that we are devastating the fertility of
the planet…”63 Politics, Corporations, Economic Theory, and Petroleum are currently tied
inextricably to one another as the antithesis of sustainable and viable human existence. One
informs the other, but primarily each is furthered through working with transnational
corporations (on which are bestowed the rights of human beings), incredible monetary resources,
and the scrupulous drive for market dominance through greater and greater consumption. The
evils noted by Moe-Lobeda in her portrait of the American Consumer illustrate the complicity of
each of us in the systematic dismantling of the Earth’s capacity to sustain our own lives through
our participation in unjust corporate exploitation and the legalized systematic rape of creation. It
is within our hands to make a difference through our choices, through our democratic votes, and
through an unwavering dedication to dismantle the market ideology that masks terminal
destruction of the entire ecosystem of the planet as “progress.” In reformulating the Universities
62 Berry, 80.
63 Ibid., 93.
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away from the current model of preparing young people for corporate jobs that suck the life out
of the Earth, and seeking instead to prepare young people to think about the world around them
in creating sustainable options for a viable future, as well as in seeking to observe and respect the
limits imposed by geographically natural bio-systems, the ecological imperative is met in our
willingness to reassess our current practices, belief structures, and visioning of the future. A
maximal account of the ecological imperative in this sense affirms Berry’s treatment of the
university and ecological geography both in naming their abuse, and in proposing their
reformation. Particular to the hydra of Politics, Corporations, Economic Theory, and Petroleum,
Suchocki’s theory of original sin works with Moe-Lobeda’s eco-feminist theology to name the
violence that has been done in the name of progress and profit, and to unveil the systems of
oppression, exploitation, and injustice at work, and to begin the work of seeking toward the well-
being of victim and violator.
Toward this end, Berry (in the final section) answers this hydra of Politics, Corporations,
Economic Theory, and Petroleum with the fourfold wisdom of “indigenous peoples, the wisdom
of women, the wisdom of the classical traditions, and the wisdom of science,”64 through which
we are aided in our current Great Work of reinventing ourselves “at the species level, with
critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context…”65
Berry distinguishes the wisdom of Indigenous Peoples “by its intimacy with and participation in
the functioning of the natural world.”66 The wisdom of women is “to join the knowing of the
body to that of mind, to join soul to spirit, intuition to reasoning, feeling consciousness to
64 Berry, 176.
65 Ibid., 159.
66 Ibid., 177.
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intellectual analysis, intimacy to detachment, subjective presence to objective distance.”67
Included in this wisdom is the ancient Paleolithic and Neolithic Goddess figure, which represents
“a comprehensive cosmology of a creative and nurturing principle independent of any associated
male figure” that sustained a period of peace, domestication of plants and animals, and “intimate
human presence to the earth and to the entire natural world.”68 The wisdom of classical
traditions, according to Berry, is based on “revelatory experiences of a spiritual realm both
transcendent to and imminent in the visible world about us and in the capacity of humans to
participate in that world to achieve the fullness of their own mode of being.”69 Finally, the
wisdom of science—through empirical research methods—has ultimately revealed the
Universe’s story, drawing each of us into an intense cosmic relationality that incorporates all
matter of the universe into the common stuff of life. In wrapping up this final section of the text,
Berry notes that the ties, which bind the fourfold wisdom together, lie in their common
agreement on “the intimacy of humans with the natural world in a single community of
existence.”70 Adding a thick account of the means by which Suchocki and Moe-Lobeda’s
theories might find transcendence and forgiveness in the transformation of these institutions, the
final work of the ecological imperative is completed in the naming of institutional transgressions,
and in the seeking toward means by which a moral outcome might be possible.
CONCLUSION:
Lisa Cahill lifts up theology as offering a “distinctive contribution” in challenging
67 Berry, 180.
68 Ibid., 183-184.
69 Ibid., 185.
70 Ibid., 193.
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“exclusionary systems of access under the aegis of ‘love of neighbor,’ ‘self-sacrifice,’ or ‘the
preferential option for the poor.’”71 In this capacity, she recognizes the need for conversation
between theology and “other interpretations of human well- being and morality, discovered in
and through practical commitments to enhancing ‘the good life,’ inclusively understood as
providing basic needs and social participation for all,” concluding that “nontheological value
systems and their social consequences can be evaluated in light of this inclusive ideal.”72
Extending what she may have intended by “all,” to truly include ALL of the whole interrelated
universe, Thomas Berry lifts up the possibility of an ecological imperative, whereby both
theological and “nontheological value systems and their social consequences can be evaluated in
light of this [more truly] inclusive ideal.”73 Following the trajectory of Kant’s categorical
imperative as it undergoes modification through both Habermas’ relational theory of Discourse
Ethics, and more radically through Moe-Lobeda’s Eco-Feminist Ethics paired with Suchocki’s
relational theology of original sin, the ecological imperative is born out of the mutually
informing theories of Berry, Moe-Lobeda, and Suchocki. Arriving at its final form, the
imperative calls for us to: Act only in such a way that the dignity and integrity of both self and
other as mutually centered expressions of universal being in relational interdependence may be
honored, that the world and one’s environment, whether human or non-human, be treated always
as an end and never as a means only, and in such a way as to promote the viability of the human
community in its interconnection to and interdependence with the ecosystems of the Earth.
Having explored this imperative through both transformation of the University and Ecological
Geography, and through means of combating those primary systems of human and ecological
71 Cahill, 376.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
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exploitation that transgress the imperative, it is my hope to lift up this ecological imperative as a
means to supplement ethical theory at an interdisciplinary level across Religion, Science, and
Ecology, as a means by which the state of the world around us might not simply be seen as our
environment, but that in relationship, we might consider ourselves as part of the wider world of
interconnected, interrelated, interdependent life, seeking balance, equilibrium, and advancement
that is truly for the well-being of ALL as we continue to explore new avenues of growth and
progress that equates to profit in a globally sustainable system of recognized relationality.
Bibliography
Berry, Thomas. The Great Work. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999. Cahill, Lisa Sowle. “Bioethics, Theology, and Social Change.” The Journal of Religious
Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 3. Winter 2003. Green, Herman. “Thomas Berry’s ‘Great Work’.” The Ecozoic Reader, Vol. 1, No. 1.
Fall 2000. Accessed 11/25/11. Http://www.ecozoicstudies.org. Habermas, Jurgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Trans. Christian
Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd Ed, Trans. and Intro.
Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1997. Loy, David. “TheReligion of the Market.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Vol. 65. 1997. Cited in Lisa Sowle Cahill. “Bioethics, Theology, and Social Change.” The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 3. Winter 2003.
Moe-Lobeda, Cynthia D. Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2002. Patterson, Barbara A. B. Review of Fall to Violence. Journal of the American Academy
of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 3. Autumn, 1998. Rasmussen, Larry. “Research Notes.” Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 29, No. 1.
Spring 2001. Accessed 11/25/2011. Http://www.jstor.org/stable/40017884. Robins, Nick. “Loot: in search of the East India Company, the world's first transnational
corporation.” Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 14, No. 1. April 2002. Accessed 11/25/11. Http://www.m.eau.sagepub.com/content/14/1/79. DOI: 10.1177/095624780201400107.
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