Creation in Crisis

Front matter

CREATION IN CRISIS

SCIENCE, ETHICS, THEOLOGY

JOSHTROM ISAAC KUREETHADAM svi acon

Part I ARE WE TEARING DOWN OUR HOME? In the Beginning... 16

Earth—The “Goldilocks” Planet 21

Earth, the Womb of Life 25

Our Arrival at Home: The Peopling of the Planet 33

The Transformation of Our Common Home: From Agriculture to Industry and to the Era of Space Travel 42

Earth Is Our Only Home 46

The Gravity of the Contemporary Ecological Crisis: Warnings from the Scientific Community 52 The Alarming State of Our Common Home 56 The Danger of Crossing the Thresholds 61 Humanity Fouling Its Own Nest: The Anthropogenic Character of the Contemporary Ecological Crisis 65 The Dawning of the Anthropocene Era 71 The Moral and Religious Implications of Our “Ojikos-cide” 73 vi CONTENTS

Part II THE CRY OF THE EARTH The Greenhouse Effect as Rendering Earth a Home of Life 86

A Walk Through Earth’s Climate History 91

Anthropogenic Global Warming and Associated Climate Change 99

The Greenhouse Gases Driving Anthropogenic Climate Change 104

Projections of Future Climate Change and the Danger of Tipping Points 112

An Unprecedented Situation in the Geological History of Earth 116

Extreme Weather Events 121

Droughts and Desertification 127

Melting of Glaciers 132

Sea-Level Rise 139

Ocean Acidification and Threats to Marine Life 145 Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss 151

A Reckless Gamble with Our Planetary Home 155

Biodiversity and Its Importance 158

Earth on the Brink of a Massive Loss of Biodiversity 163

Current Spasm of Biodiversity Loss as Driven by Human Activities 168

Implications of the Loss of Biodiversity 176

The Death of Birth and the Rupture of the Web of Interdependence 181

A Unique Challenge and Opportunity 184

Pollution of the Air, Land, and Water 188 Waste and Depletion of Natural Resources 196

Contents vii

The Problem of Water Scarcity 203 Humanity’s Distorted Relationship with the Natural World 213

Part III THE CRY OF THE POOR

7. The Impacts of Ecological Crisis on Food, Health, and Shelter 221

The Current Food-Security Scenario 222 Health Impacts of the Contemporary Ecological Crisis 234 Ecological Crisis and the Specter of Forced Migration 242 Humanity Moving Toward the “Perfect Storm” 251

The Ecological Crisis in Terms of Injustice and Inequality 254

Ecological Divide 261

Historical Responsibility and Personal Responsibility 266

The Triple Pillars of Justice, Equity, and Solidarity 272

A Common Yet Differentiated Responsibility 282

Part IV THE CRY OF THE GODS

Our Incapacity to See the World as Creation 293 Our Disregard for the Sacredness of God’s Home 300 Creation as a Symbol and Sacrament of God 306 The Ecological Crisis and the Disrespect for the Telos of Creation 316 Rediscovering the Physical World as God’s Creation 327 viii CONTENTS

The Human Vocation for the Stewardship of Creation 329

Irresponsible Stewardship as Sin 338

Ecological Crisis Resulting from Our Hubris 345

Repercussions of Sin on Creation 351

Ecological Conversion in Response to Ecological Sin

Conclusion: Responding to a Creation in Crisis

Preface

My interest in ecological concerns dates back nearly a quarter of a century. After completing my postgraduate degree in philosophy, I taught cosmology for the first time in the early 1990s. While exploring the profound mysteries of the physical universe, our infinitely vast cosmic home, I also began to take note of how things were beginning to go radically amiss with our immediate planetary home, Earth. Ever since then I have tried to pass on to my students not only a sense of awe and wonder before the grandeur and majesty of the universe, but also a deep sense of concern for the increasingly precarious state of our common earthly home.

I offered my first seminar in ecology at the Salesian University in Rome in 2002, and since 2005 I have regularly taught a course in ecology for our postgraduate students while continuing to lecture on cosmology for the undergraduates. A realization that has grown within me ever since I began to take classes in ecology has been about the need to develop a broader and holistic understanding of the contemporary ecological crisis. In our present day the ecological crisis gets mostly reduced, unfortunately, to a mere “environmental” problem, or even a host of them. We do not realize that it is our “common home” itself that is in peril. In fact, our home planet is unique in the vast universe for its capacity to host advanced forms of life, at least as far as our current knowledge goes. The ecological crisis poses a real and unprecedented threat to the very capacity of Earth to be a “home” for humans and the rest of the biotic community.

In this context it is important to widen our understanding of the ecological crisis. All too often it is seen as a mere physical problem and a largely scientific concern. However, the crisis is also profoundly ethical in nature, given that its victims are disproportionately the poor communities who have contributed least to causing the problem in the first place. At a still deeper level the ecological predicament is a profoundly spiritual crisis. From a theological perspective the crisis poses a grave challenge to the integrity of God’s creation, as it interferes with the Creator’s loving plan to let Earth teem with life.

x PREFACE

From my acquaintance with the literature on ecological questions, I am aware that the physical aspects of the crisis are very well studied, thanks especially to the remarkable contribution from the scientific community in recent years. The moral dimension of the problem has also received increasing attention in the last couple of decades. There is much talk about eco-justice today, which is indeed a positive development. However, the spiritual and religious dimension of the problem appears to be neglected on the whole. The greatest lacuna, in my judgment, is that we are still to see the ecological crisis as a physical, moral, and spiritual problem, and in fact all these things at once. Our understanding of the crisis is still fragmented and rather sectorial. Only a holistic perception of the ecological crisis can awaken us to the true magnitude of the challenge facing our common planetary home.

It has been my desire for some time to write a book that provides a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary ecological crisis in response to the concerns expressed above. The present book is the humble result of a project that I began nearly five years ago. I managed to do most of the writing during a sabbatical period that I spent at Campion Hall at the University of Oxford from 2011 to 2012, and completed when I returned in the summer of 2013.1 am grateful to the master of Campion Hall, Brendan Callaghan, and to all the members of Campion Hall for their kind hospitality. I thank particularly Gerard J. Hughes, the former master, who welcomed me first to Campion Hall in 2004-5 as a research scholar during my doctoral studies, and also Nicholas King and Joe Munitiz. A special word of thanks to Gerard W. Hughes, a prolific writer himself, who read through the manuscript of the first few chapters and gave very encouraging initial feedback.

I thank the Faculty of Philosophy of the Salesian University in Rome for having granted me the sabbatical period to work on this book project. A special word of thanks to my colleagues in the faculty who have been a great source of support, particularly Mauro Mantovani, Scaria Thuruthiyil, and Luis Rosón Galache.

I am deeply indebted to Gill Ness Collins, who meticulously proofread the entire manuscript and offered valuable corrections. I am also grateful to Annabel Clarkson, who corrected the first few chapters of the book and showed keen interest throughout. I also thank Banzelao Julio Teixeira, who read through an earlier draft of the manuscript.

I thank Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books, for having accepted my proposal; James Keane, my editor; and the wonderful team at Orbis who skillfully guided me through the journey of getting the book ready for publication.

Preface xi

I would also like to thank all my friends, who have been a great source of support and encouragement over these years. They are too many to be mentioned individually here but are lovingly and gratefully remembered on this occasion.

A good number of the ideas of this book were developed and shared during classes, seminars, and workshops in the last few years in Italy, India, and the UK. I remember fondly in this regard all my former students and the participants of these courses. I remember especially the young people, who were usually the most attentive group to hear and discuss the situation of our common home that is increasingly imperilled by human activities. This book is dedicated to them, they who will have to bear most of the consequences of the mindless lifestyles of today’s generations, and to future generations, with a word of apology.

In the end, I thank God—the one who puts into us the desire to work for his greater glory (cf. Phil 2:13)—for his infinite love and providential care that I have continued to experience also while working on this project. This book is the humble expression of the zeal to protect and preserve our common earthly home, which is ultimately God’s own home where he pitched tent in the supreme event of the Incarnation. I pray that this book may in a small way contribute to inflaming “the zeal for your house” (Jn 2:17) in many hearts.

Introduction

The Crisis of Our Home

The contemporary ecological crisis is proving to be one of the most daunting challenges, and probably the most arduous one, that modern humans have faced since their evolution as Homo sapiens. The crisis is about our very home, the common home of the Planet Earth, where the survival and flourishing of the biotic community, including humanity, is increasingly under threat.

Right at the outset it needs to be clarified that the contemporary ecological crisis is not merely an environmental problem or even a host of environmental problems, as it is generally supposed. It is time to liberate the ecological discourse from the environmental straightjacket. For too long we have remained complacent, seeing more space allocated to environmental issues in newspaper columns, on television channels, on bookstore shelves, and increasingly even in school and university curricula. And for most people, environment has meant all this while merely something external and outside of themselves; as such, it has remained a peripheral and secondary concern.

Thus in the modern neoliberal economy—which is one of the major drivers of the mindless plundering of the planet through its paradigm of infinite growth, which necessitates ever increasing production of material goods and voracious consumption of them—ecological costs are considered as only “externalities.” Accordingly, one does not realize that the economic growth that inflicts irreparable damages to entire ecosystems amounts to tearing down the pillars of our common home, or that capital accumulation through the depletion of natural resources means depriving other members of the family, present and future, of their rightful share of the common resources. Most of the promoters of green economy continue to advocate that a bit of recycling, use of fluorescent light bulbs, and similar efforts are all it takes to be environmentally friendly, without having to alter radically the present course of economic development or undergo drastic personal and community lifestyle changes. In this vein the dream of sustainable development has remained mostly a fashionable catch phrase; so far, it

2 INTRODUCTION does not appear to have gone beyond hollow promises, as was evident in the last Rio+20 Summit.!

The ecological crisis has remained a merely environmental problem even at some of the higher echelons of thinking and critical debates. Most schools of philosophical thinking that arose in the wake of public awareness about the ecological crisis, beginning from the 1970s, have meekly surrendered to being labeled environmental philosophy and have more or less restricted their speculative domains to environmental ethics, often cogitating on nuanced issues like the intrinsic worth of nonhuman species, the rights of animals, and so on. Few of them have dared to grapple with foundational questions like the metaphysical grounds underpinning humanity’s distorted relationship with the natural world, as evident in the current ecological crisis. At a more practical level most of the Green movements that arose in recent decades in the Western hemisphere, spanning a wide spectrum from conservationists to animal liberation groups, have remained—with a few notable exceptions—on the peripheries of political and economic life, even after years of strident activism. In the meantime people have carried on with their routine lives, consuming material goods with increasingly rapacious appetites, enthralled by the glittering promises of the advertisement and lulled by the beliefs subtly driven home by the corporate industry and mainstream media that environmental concerns are, after all, only peripheral and marginal concerns.

The only notable exception in this regard has been the steady inflow of authoritative warnings from the scientific community—of which abundant use will be made in this bbok—building up into a crescendo during the last few decades. There has been no dearth of admonitions from the scientists urging the public to wake up from slumber because our common home is beginning to collapse around us. However, their warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The political leadership, on the whole, appears unable to look beyond the daily dips and rises of the stock markets and their own winning prospects in the next round of elections. They have sadly lacked the foresight and wisdom to understand the dire implications of the threats facing our planetary home and our common household.

The gravity of the situation of our common home is often lost sight of even in well-intentioned approaches like those of the churches and religious traditions. For example, in the 2004 Compendium of the

1 The Rio+20 Summit was the third of a series of Earth Summits organized by the United Nations to reflect on sustainable development. A summit is held once every ten years. The first Earth Summit took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the second in Johannesburg in 2002, and the third in Rio de Janeiro in 2012.

The Crisis of Our Home 3

Social Doctrine of the Church the question of the care of creation is taken up only in a late chapter, almost at the very end of the volume, and only after other weighty issues and challenges have been dealt with. The chapter is titled “Safeguarding the Environment.” In this document, as in many others, the constant reference is to the environment, while forgetting that it is our very common home that is in danger. Even the recent 2012 synod of bishops on new evangelization appears to have forgotten that the fundamental command of the Lord is to “go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (Mk 16:15, emphasis added). In the “Final Propositions of the Synod” the question of the stewardship of creation is mentioned only in the last of the propositions (no. 56), coming just before the conclusion to the document.

The lack of urgency in dealing with the contemporary ecological crisis is paradigmatic of the approach of mainstream society in general—political and economic institutions, on the one hand, and religions and churches, on the other. While they appear to have awakened at last to the groaning of the planet, they continue, at the same time, to see them as mere environmental problems. The result is a surprising ignorance coupled with a lack of concern on the part of the otherwise literate general public on such an important question as the alarming situation of our common home and the plight of millions of its least fortunate inhabitants. This ignorance is matched only by a frightening lethargy when it comes to action.

We have, indeed, a paradoxical situation today. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of environmental activism in recent years: environmental groups have sprouted in many parts of the world; environmental literature has grown a thousandfold, not to speak of environmental websites; and most universities have begun to offer courses in environmental concerns. Even oil companies and automobile groups are jostling to appear green. At the same time, reports from the scientific community indicate in no uncertain terms that the state of our home planet is deteriorating year after year, that many of the natural processes that sustain life on Earth are on the verge of collapse and that our common home is in danger.

Today we stand in need of nothing short of a paradigm shift in understanding and dealing with the crisis facing our home planet. Here, like in any crisis, we need to return to the roots, to the essentials, to the basic truths. In fact, if we were to follow the etymological route, the crisis has to do with the discourse (Jogos) centered around our common home (oikos). To see things in this perspective we will need to rediscover Earth as home more than as the mere environment that

4 INTRODUCTION surrounds us. Only when we see and love Earth as our home, our common home, our only home, and see ourselves as Earthlings, children of Earth, imago mundi—literally formed from the dust of the earth—will we begin to understand the gravity of the contemporary ecological crisis. As I shall be arguing in the opening chapter, Earth is not only our common home but our only home, the home that engendered us and sustains us. Earth is not merely an environment that we can swap for another one by migrating somewhere else when our home planet becomes degraded beyond redemption, as it is sometimes presented in popular science fiction and in the techno-savvy media. Only when we learn to see the earth as our only home will we be willing to act to save it. For in saving our common home, we will be saving ourselves.

The right approach here would be to return to the book of Genesis, whose first verses take us to the dawn of creation. The creation narrative, unfolding as a majestic cosmic drama that spans over six celestial days, is centered on the preparation of a home for all living beings, including humans. Within the vault of the heavens a formless Earth is lovingly fashioned by the Creator into a beautiful home: separating the dry land from the waters; adorning it with trees and vegetation, flowers and fruits; and hosting living things of every kind, including birds, fish, and animals. In fact, animals and human beings are created only on the very last day, only after a proper abode has been prepared for them—a home to dwell in. The sequence of events in the creation saga is not casual. It is only after a home has been prepared that life, including human life, can be hosted there. In the second chapter of Genesis—in the second creation narrative—human beings are called to be responsible stewards of this wonderful home teeming with life. Similar accounts of creation, in which the earth is hailed as a home and entrusted to human stewardship, can be found in the creation narratives of many religious and cultural groups both large and small.

In a very insightful way Pope Benedict XVI summed up this important truth in The Human Family: A Community of Peace, his message for the World Day of Peace in 2008: “For the human family, this home is the earth,” and it is “essential to sense that the earth is our common home” (nos. 7, 8, emphasis added).

It is fundamental to be in a home and to feel at home. These are the primary conditions that make all the rest possible. Life, human life, civilization, religion, philosophy, art, music, literature, science and technology, and a thousand other artifacts of human culture have been possible because there is the common home of the earth to dwell in, not vice versa. What is primary is being in this home; the rest, however important, are only secondary, because without the former the latter

The Crisis of Our Home 5 do not and cannot exist. Without our common home we cannot exist and flourish. Earth can exist without modern humans, as it has done for over 99.9 percent of its history, but we cannot exist without the earth. It is this common home that we are in the process of despoiling and destroying.

This book is about the crisis facing our common home (oikos), about how the capacity of the earth to be truly a home for all of humanity and for all living beings is increasingly placed in jeopardy. Breaking free of the environmental jargon in referring to the ecological crisis as the possible collapse of our common home adds a deeply existential dimension to the whole discussion. Seen in this way, we are not speaking of questions external and marginal to us. We are not talking about one of the many challenges that humanity has to face—and we know that there is no dearth of them. Instead, we are grappling with the destiny of our common home, indeed, humanity’s common destiny, along with that of the rest of the biotic community. In fact, in front of this unprecedented crisis all our other crises—economic, social, moral, and so on—pale in comparison. Primum vivere—first, life—as the wise ancient adage attributed to Seneca goes. Without our common home, we cannot live, much less live well. When we pollute and despoil our common home, we are endangering the quality of our own life and well-being and that of other living beings on Earth, as well as of future generations, our children and their children. We cannot remain indifferent but must become passionate about the crisis facing our home and household.

Against this background the first part of the book will explore how the earth came to be shaped as a home in the larger context of cosmic evolution, and how the building blocks of our home planet came to be marvelously formed in the galactic furnaces of the vast universe, in complex processes that lasted for billions of years. It is amazing that Earth appears to be the only home for life—at least in its advanced stages—in the whole universe. Life evolved gradually on our home planet through a marvelous process of evolution stretching over millions of years; human beings themselves appeared only very recently. However, in a very short time human activities have reached proportions to threaten the very capacity of Earth to be a home for the whole of humanity and for the rest of living beings. Authoritative warnings from the scientific community in recent years tell us that humanity is about to cross crucial tipping points with regard to some of the fundamental geo-chemical processes that sustain life on our home planet. This is our current situation, and such a global predicament is the starting point of this book.

6 INTRODUCTION

The main scope of this book is to offer a wider and integrated view of the crisis facing our common home by describing the ecological crisis—symbolically as well as in reality—as a triple cry of the earth, of the poor, and of “the gods.” These three cries are attempts to look at the ecological predicament from three different angles—physical, moral, and religious—with a view to gaining a more complete view of the crisis. These three cries are explored in detail in the remaining three sections of the book.

The cry of the earth is taken up in the second part of the book. In this section some of the main physical manifestations of the ecological crisis are analyzed. The phenomenon of global warming and associated climate change is the most evident and long-lasting manifestation of the ecological crisis today—with a wide range of impacts like droughts and floods, melting of glaciers and sea level rise, ocean acidification and coral bleaching, and a host of others. However, global warming and climate change do not exhaust the ecological crisis as the cry of the earth. We go on to examine how we are literally pulling out living rivets from the living organism of the earth, which shelters us within its biospheric womb, as evident in the phenomenon of species extinction and biodiversity loss. Further, we explore how we have polluted our common home: its atmosphere, its land, and its waters. Equally important is the fast depletion of natural resources of our common household. We shall see how, for example, in the case of fresh water, we are fast depleting the very source of life itself for humanity and for our fellow species. The cry of the earth includes the multiple groans of our home planet, the manifold ways in which our common home is imperiled. So in the physical understanding of the ecological crisis I try to offer a more complete understanding of the ecological predicament than that which is normally presented.

The ecological crisis is not merely a physical problem. It has a human face, as we see in the third section of the book. Herein we see how the crisis has huge implications in key areas of human welfare like food security, health, and shelter. We also look into how the ecological crisis has a disproportionate impact on groups that are already vulnerable—women, children, indigenous groups, minorities, and not least, future generations. As the impacts of the ecological crisis impinge on fundamental and basic human rights, questions of eco-justice are bound to emerge, brought into sharper relief by the fact that the victims are those who have contributed least to causing the crisis. The ecological crisis thus becomes a profound moral crisis.

In the fourth part of the book we go deeper in our understanding of the contemporary ecological crisis. The crisis, besides being a physical

The Crisis of Our Home 7 and moral question, is also a deeply religious and spiritual problem. For believers, the physical world is ultimately the creation—the very home that God intended as humanity’s household. It is also God’s common home as the “the spirit of the Lord has filled the world” (Wis 1:7) and the place God pitched his tent in the supreme event of the Incarnation (Jn 1:14). This common home where the whole of the human family along with the rest of the biotic community is called to dwell in God’s peace (shalom) is entrusted to human stewardship. Thus, despoiling the common home that is God’s own handiwork is sin. It is an affront to the Creator, while at the same time it ruptures the bonds of communion with one’s own fellow creatures. The ecological crisis also reveals how we have ignored the ultimate destiny of all creation to enter into God’s own Sabbath, as the whole universe will be recapitulated in Christ.

The present book is an attempt to frame our understanding of the contemporary ecological crisis by offering a broader and more holistic view of the problem. We do it by weaving together the different strands of the crisis of our common home—physical, moral, and religious—into a unified whole. The three cries, though taken up separately for the sake of exposition, merge into one deafening cry of agony. The complex nature and manifold layers of the contemporary ecological crisis expose the utter insufficiency of technological solutions like geo-engineering—piecemeal solutions that are themselves heirs of a reductive perception of the ecological crisis as merely an environmental problem that is in turn often reduced to the phenomenon of global warming alone. We need to widen our understanding of the ecological crisis as the crisis of our common home, if we are to respond to it effectively.

This book is basically concerned with understanding the ecological crisis. Understanding a malaise is the first step to facing the challenges thrown up by it. This insight is not new. It was admirably demonstrated by Gautama Buddha, the Enlightened One, in the sixth century BCE. Faced with the dilemma of universal suffering—Dhukha—Buddha went on to discover the “Four Noble Truths.” Significantly, the first of the noble truths had to do with the nature and reality of suffering. Before he went on to uncover the successive truths about the causes, cessation, and means toward the cessation of suffering, the Enlightened One sought to understand, in the first place, what suffering really is.

Today, faced with the contemporary ecological crisis, we need first of all to understand the crisis,. The fact that the ecological crisis is only getting worse even after decades of study, diagnosis, and

8 INTRODUCTION mitigation efforts means that we have not sufficiently understood the malaise in the first place. Hence the attempt here to understand the ecological crisis, to acknowledge its existence, and to comprehend its wide-ranging implications before proceeding to decipher its causes and propose concrete solutions.

The ecological crisis is about our common home in peril. So we begin with a basic question: are we tearing down our home?