An Ecological Theology of Liberation

Front matter

AN ECOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION

Ecology and Justice

An Orbis Series on Integral Ecology

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

Foreword Gustavo Gutiérrez

Introduction The Contemporary Global Context: Planetary Emergency XIX Ecological Emergencies XX Emergencies of Material Poverty and Economic Disparity xxii Politics, Legitimacy, and the Task of Theology xxiii Theology and the Need for an Ecological Theology of Liberation XXV The Structure of the Argument xxvii

Part II Interpreting the Word of God

Reading Genesis Theologically in a Politico-Ecological Key Creation, Vocation, Fall, City: Genesis 1-4 68 God, Gardener, and the Image of God: Genesis 2:4—25 72 Genesis 3: The Fall—Breaking of the Bonds of Communion 76 Cain and Abel 82 De-Creation, Re-Creation, Covenant, and the People of God 84 The People of God and the Vocation of Gardener 87 Joseph the Righteous, the Vocation of Gardener, and the Fate of the City 90 Joseph, Potiphar, and Potiphar s Wife 90 Joseph and His Brothers 92 Joseph s Land Reforms 94 Conclusion 101

Contents

4 The Jubilee of Liberation Exodus and the Political Ecology of Sin and Salvation 102 The People of God, Pharaoh, and YHWH 105 Manna, Covenant, and Law: Recovering Imago Dei 108 Promise and the Political Ecology of Sin and Salvation 110 The Political Ecology of Jerusalem 111 The Prophets and the Promise 114 Jesus and the Promise 118 The Political Ecology of God’s Reign 119 The Inauguration of Sabbath Peace 123 The Proclamation of Jubilee 124 Meekness, Obedience, and the New Adam: Jesus Christ the Gardener 127 New Adam, New Creation, New Jerusalem 131 The Contrasting Political Ecologies of Revelation and the Victory of God 133 Conclusion 137

Part HI Christian Praxis in a Globalizing World

5 Making and Sustaining the Planetary Emergency The Technocratic Paradigm within the 500-Year Project 142 Market Society and the Technocratic Paradigm 143 The Technocratic Paradigm and the Extractive Zone 146 Extracting Land and Labor from the “Hinterland” into the “City” 149 Slavery, Racism, and Technocratic Paradigm 154 Ecological Debt and Unequal Exchange 161 The Globalization Project: A False and Superficial (Political) Ecology 166 Legitimization or Obfuscation? 168 Sustainable Development and Hegemonic Power 170 Uncovering the False Ecology of the Globalization Project 175 Sustainable Development 175 Ecological Modernization 178 Material Inequality and Democracy 180 The Culture-Ideology of Consumerism: Holding Together the Unsustainable 183 Conclusion 186 ix x Contents

6 Bearing Witness to a Humane World The Globalization Project: Judgment in Light

of the Word of God 188 Ideology, Utopia, and the Praxis of the Gardener 192 The Way of the Gardener in the Space of the Globalization

Project 197 Sustaining an Ecological Spirituality of Liberation:

The Dispositions of the Gardener 200 Discipleship and the Practice of Sabbath 207 Dimensions of Sabbath Observance 208

Rest and Restraint 209 Mercy, Protest, and Solidarity 209

Discernment 210 Convocation 210 Celebration 211 Conclusion 212 Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the insights and generosity of many astute scholars and friends. I am grateful to Matthew Ashley for his wise direction of an earlier iteration of this argument, and for his friendship. I am likewise thankful to Jerry McKenny, Celia Deane-Drummond, and Omar Lizardo for their helpfully critical questions throughout that process. I am especially grateful to Gustavo Gutiérrez for his enthusiasm and encouragement throughout my work on this project, as well as for his work, which has greatly influenced my own.

Iam deeply appreciative of those who have taken time to read through parts of this book and offer constructive feedback. In this regard, I am especially grateful to Richard Lennan who, since we met during the first semester of my master’s program, has been steadfast in his generosity, unfailing in his encouragement, and productively critical of my written expression. I’m also grateful for the comments on the manuscript that I’ve received from Elizabeth Antus, Jim Buckley, David Carey, Christopher Carter, Lesley DiFrancisco, John Dougherty, John Fitzgerald, Steve Fowl, Brian Hamilton, Willis Jenkins, Kyle Lambelet, Kevin McCabe, Brandon Peterson, Trent Pomplun, Andrew Prevot, Nicole Reibe, Neto Valiente, and Matthew Whelan. I especially thank Roberto Goizueta, who took the time to read through the manuscript in its entirety.

I’m grateful to Jacqueline Hidalgo for inviting me to present part of Chapter 1 at the 2018 ACHTUS Colloquium and for the members of ACHTUS who took the time to read and comment on my work.

Additionally, countless persons have been generous with their time, allowing me to bounce my ideas off them and helping me refine my arguments over the course of several years. I am thankful for having so many great conversation partners, including Steve Battin, Fritz Bauerschmidt, Erin Lothes Biviano, William Brown, Brandon Bruning, Don Buggert, Peter Casarella, William Cavanaugh, Jessica Coblentz, Jeremy Cruz, Lorraine Cuddeback, Ilia Delio, Mary Doak, Heather DuBois, Denis Edwards, Rebekah Eklund, Julia Feder, Peter Fritz, Elizabeth Groppe, Mary Catherine Hilkert, Dan Horan, Natalia Imperatori-Lee, John Kiess, David Lantigua, Michael Lee, Tim Matovina, Ed McCormack, Claire Mathews McGinnis, Vince Miller, Kevin O’Brien, Pat Parachini. Margie Pfeil, Paul Scherz, Daniel Smith, Louis Vera, Tom Ward, Jeffrey Wickes, Tobias Winright, Raul Zegarra, and Christiana Zenner. I am xi xii Acknowledgments also grateful to the students I have taught throughout the years, for the ways in which their insights have sharpened my own.

I am thankful for the support of the GLOBES Program at the University of Notre Dame, Joanne Rodriguez and the Hispanic Theological Initiative, as well as Loyola University Maryland, all of whom have enabled and encouraged my research over the last decade, financially and otherwise.

I would not have been able to complete this project without the generous support of the Louisville Institute, from which I received a First Book Grant for Minority Scholars to help fund a year of research-leave while at Loyola University Maryland. I am grateful to Edward Aponte, Pam Collins, Keri Liechty, and Don Richter for their work in supporting Louisville’s mission. I am also grateful to my cohort at Louisville’s winter seminar—Randall Balmer, Candi Cann, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Leo Guardado, Nathan Jérémie-Brink, Melanie Jones, Andrew Krinks, A. G. Miller, and Courtney Bryant Prince—for the feedback that I received from them.

Iam incredibly appreciative of the tireless staff at Orbis Books. I especially thank James Keane and Robert Ellsberg for seeing the promise of this project in its early stages, and Jill Brennan O’Brien for her patience, thoughtful feedback, and sharp editorial eye.

Finally, I thank Erika, who entered into marriage with me a week before I began my master’s program. I am grateful for her friendship throughout my years of study, for her love of creation, her intelligence, and her sense of humor—thank you!

Abbreviations

Works by Gustavo Gutiérrez cited in this book

DoP Density of the Present: Selected Writings, Eng. trans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999.

GoL The God of Life. Eng. trans. by Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991.

LC Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995.

OJ On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Eng. trans. by Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987.

PPH The Power of the Poor in History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983.

TL A Theology of Liberation. Eng. trans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973.

TSMYF The Truth Shall Make You Free: Confrontations. Eng. trans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990.

WDFOOW We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journal of a People. Eng. trans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984.

xiii

Foreword

Gustavo Gutiérrez

The world today faces an ecological crisis. Especially the poor of the world face this crisis. It is a crisis that threatens the lives and livelihoods of so many and exerts even greater pressure on those already struggling with the crushing weight of injustice and exclusion. This poses a central question for an ecological theology of liberation: “How are salvation, liberation, and the care of creation related?” This question of the relationship of salvation, liberation, and the care of creation is one that the church, in solidarity with the world, must urgently wrestle with today. In his creative argument, Daniel Castillo gives us thought-provoking insights on how we can begin to answer this question, both in thought and action. There are three aspects of Castillo’s text that I would like to highlight.

First, I find that Castillo captures well the meaning of the very important concept of integral liberation within the theology of liberation. He is correct in emphasizing the important roles that both spiritual poverty and the difficult goal of communion play in understanding liberation in its deepest sense. The fullness of human freedom is always directed toward the loving service of one’s neighbor, even if that service requires, at times, confrontation. For Paul, Christians must be free, for “Jesus freed us” (Gal 5:1), but, he adds, they “serve each other out of love” (Gal 13). Castillo also makes important connections between the theology of liberation and the theology of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’. The book admirably shows how integral ecology can be thought of as a concept of liberation and rightly emphasizes the task of conversion to the earth and the poor as essential to the work of moving the world toward an integral ecology. It is certainly noteworthy that the concepts of “development” and “modernization,” concepts that liberation theology was suspicious of from its beginning, now appear in the form of “sustainable development” and “ecological modernization.” These terms, and the realities they represent, should be further examined.

Second, I value very much the interpretation of the scriptures in this book. The Bible always has been foundational to the life of the church—‘The study of Sacred Scripture must be like the soul of Sacred Theology” (Dei Verbum,

XV xvi Foreword

24). Here Castillo provides an insightful reading of salvation history that demonstrates throughout the closest of relationships between salvation, liberation, and the care of creation. In particular, the symbol of the “gardener” gives us an important image for thinking about the human’s relationship to God, neighbor, and earth, both in terms of the call to liberation and the call to communion. In a similar manner, Castillo’s work in connecting Jesus’s proclamation of God’s reign to the Jubilee is extremely helpful at a time in which we must consider the “ecological debt” that the global north owes the global south. If, as Paul Ricoeur states, “the symbol gives rise to thought,” then this text will help its readers think more fully about how they can incarnate the saving presence of God’s love in a world where the preferential options for the earth and the poor are inseparable from each other.

Finally, this book establishes significant links between the concerns of Latin American liberation theology and those of black liberation theology in the United States and elsewhere. The terrible realities of racism and cultural degradation have always been essential issues to confront when thinking about the preferential option. The connections that Castillo draws out between the technocratic paradigm, market society, ecological debt, and racism are important. These connections deserve to continue to be analyzed.

With trenchant insight, this book recovers the language of liberation for the task of theology today, demonstrating how the church’s response to God’s call demands an urgent conversion to the earth and to the poor. In our current context, we must incarnate an “environmentalism of the poor” that, at the same time, learns to understand nature as a gift given freely by God—a God who desires that all of creation partake in the fullness of life. This is vital to the task of Christian discipleship.

Introduction

In December 1991, while he was working as chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers authorized an internal memorandum for distribution at the bank.' The memo advocated for the “migration of dirty industries” to the world’s least developed countries. “The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable,” the memo asserted, “and we should face up to that.” It went on to single out sparsely populated countries in Africa as “underpolluted,” and lamented the difficulty in efficiently transferring environmental costs to the African continent. Such transfers would be “world welfare enhancing,” the memo asserted. Unsurprisingly, the Summers memorandum generated controversy and denunciations from observers who questioned the morality of externalizing toxic waste upon the people and lands of the world’s poorest countries. For his part, Summers claimed that the memo had been “sardonic” in nature and not intended as a policy option.? However, as James Swaney points out, the document’s recommendations are consistent with the economistic logic to which Summers subscribes.’ Sarcastic or not, the memo discloses an insidious global dynamic.

Numerous and varied critiques can be leveled against the views expressed in the Summers memo. I surface three. First, the memo’s recommendations exhibit dubious judgments with regard to the future. It attempts to justify the exportation of global waste to the least developed countries in the world on the assumption that trade in pollutants would financially benefit these countries. Presumably, the least developed countries would receive remuneration for housing the world’s “dirty industries” within their borders. However, as Edith Brown Weiss argues, long-term environmental degradation can “affect the robustness of our ecosystems ... and create a drag on future economic competitiveness.’ From this perspective, the policies of the memo risk turning

'See Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12-13.

*See James A. Swaney, “So What’s Wrong with Dumping on Africa?” Journal of Economic Issues 28, no. 2 (1994): 367.

‘Ibid.

‘Edith Brown Weiss, “Environmentally Sustainable Competitiveness: A Comment,” Yale Law Journal 102, no. 8 (1993): 2126. Along similar lines, Swaney observes that the memo makes the assumption that the wealth accumulated by least developed countries would render the “legacy xvii xviii Introduction the world’s least developed countries (or at least regions within these countries) into environmental “sacrifice zones,” regions whose health—both ecological and economic—is perpetually impaired.°

Second, if the arguments of the memo discount potential dangers in the future, they also discount the realities of the past. Specifically, the implicit recommendation that the “underpopulated” countries of Africa should receive a greater share of the world’s pollution ignores the historical context out of which many of Africa’s countries have come to be both “underdeveloped” and “underpopulated.” This history is complex and, undoubtedly, cannot be reduced to any single source. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that the relatively low populations and rates of economic growth in many modern African states likely have their roots in the colonial slave trade and the devastating effects that the mass-plunder of human beings had on African societies.° The slave trade radically destabilized much of the African continent in ways that have contributed to the formation of sparsely populated geographic regions throughout the continent in the twentieth century. Cast in this light, the recommendations of the Summers memo appear particularly odious. Carcinogens seem a poor form of reparation for the atrocities of colonial enslavement. The memo’s blindness to the racist history of the colonial system renders the memo itself an artifact of neocolonialism. The “impeccable” economic logic of the Summers memo is enclosed within the logic of racist colonial exploitation.

Third, as Rob Nixon observes, the Summers memo is blind to the ways in which the world is made up of diverse cultures that possess “environmental practices and concerns of their own.”’ The recommendations of the memo require the imposition of a singular utilitarian logic upon the world, a logic of today’s hazardous waste inconsequential.” See Swaney, “So What’s Wrong with Dumping on Africa?” 368. Arguments that make this assumption frequently point to the concept of the “environmental Kuznets curve” to claim that although economic growth creates initial environmental harm, that harm reverses as growth continues. The environmental Kuznets curve has proven to be a tenuous concept that is of dubious value when considering public policy options. On this, see Leigh Raymond, “Economic Growth and Environmental Policy? Reconsidering the Environmental Kuznets Curve,” Journal of Public Policy 24, no. 3 (2004): 327-48. Swaney also notes that the recommendations of the memo, if enacted, would de-incentivize the development of “cleaner” technologies.

ʻI borrow the term “sacrifice zone” from Steve Lerner’s book recounting the struggle for environmental justice among fenceline communities in the United States. Lerner notes that “the label ‘sacrifice zones’ comes from National Sacrifice Zones, an Orwellian term coined by government officials to designate areas previously contaminated as a result of the mining and processing of uranium into nuclear weapons.” See Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 2.

‘Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 128-130. See also Nathan Nunn, “Long-Term Effects of A frica’s Slave Trades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (February 2008): 139-76.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.

Introduction xix that reduces the value of each element of creation to its instrumental value. For the memo’s recommendations to appear reasonable, the logic that informs the memo must subjugate the complex and diverse value-systems of the world’s cultures to itself. In this manner, “world-welfare enhancing” would come to be strictly identified with the optimization of economic growth. Like the builders of Babel, who seek to organize the world through the use of their one language, the Summers memo is dismissive of moral arguments and rationalities that do not conform to its own economistic rationality.’

In reality, the world today is far from monolithic. There exists a multitude of moral frameworks and worldviews that resist absolutizing instrumental reason. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that the logic informing the Summers memo occupies pride of place among “the builders” that order the structures and processes of the ongoing neoliberal globalization project. As Pope Francis writes in the encyclical Laudato Si’, the world has witnessed the globalization of a “technocratic paradigm” that reduces creation to an object that can be freely manipulated in the service of profit. This paradigm, and the world that it organizes in increasingly pervasive ways, should be interrogated.

THE CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL CONTEXT: PLANETARY EMERGENCY

Beyond its jarring rhetoric and dubious logic, the Summers memorandum does serve to highlight a basic truth about historical reality: human agency transforms not only social landscapes but also ecological landscapes through the distribution of both economic and environmental costs and goods. In recent centuries, human agency has structured the world’s contemporary ecological and social contexts at the global level in significant ways.’ Indeed, the memo presumes this ability on the part of human beings. However, in order to get a better sense of the ways in which human agency has shaped these settings, it is necessary to expand our horizon beyond the memo and consider the development of the emergencies of ecological degradation and economic inequity that presently characterize the world’s historical reality.

‘The memo reads, “The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.” See Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, 13. On the reference to the project of the builders of Babel, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Theological Language: The Fullness of Silence,” in The Density of the Present: Selected Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), esp. 194-98.

*See J. R. McNeil, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth- Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

XX Introduction

Ecological Emergencies

The biosphere of earth is an inherently unstable realm. The geological eras by which humans measure the planet’s natural history have been constituted by radically different environments. Shifting continents, ice ages and thaws, the oxygenation of earth’s atmosphere, mass extinctions, outbursts of speciation, plagues—all have reshaped the face of the planet dramatically in various instances, at times, rendering earth virtually unrecognizable from one epoch to another.

Viewed against this long backdrop of radical fluctuation and difference, the most recent geological era, the Holocene (beginning roughly 11,700 years ago), appears remarkably stable. The stability characterizing the Holocene has supported the emergence of complex human societies and the possibility for forms of human flourishing that previously had been untenable. It is noteworthy, then, that atmospheric scientists Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen find that the Holocene has been eclipsed by a new geological era they term the Anthropocene.'° As the name suggests, this geological era is defined by the presence and activity of human beings on the earth. Within the Anthropocene, human beings have become the primary drivers of global ecological change.!!

According to Crutzen and Steffen, the seeds of the Anthropocene germinated during the Industrial Revolution with the advent of the coal furnace, the steam engine, and a corresponding rise in economic productivity. However, this era truly came to fruition during the decades following the close of the Second World War. It was these decades that bore witness to a “great acceleration” in the growth of human impacts on the earth.'? The great acceleration is observable across a multitude of categories and indicators, from the growth in the number of rivers dammed and the rise in fertilizer consumption to the amount of paper consumed and marine fish captured."

To reflect on one impact of the great acceleration more closely, consider the historical levels of carbon dioxide (CO, in the atmosphere. For the first eleven millennia of the Holocene, atmospheric CO, concentrations remained relatively stable at around 220 parts per million (ppm). During roughly the two centuries after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, CO, density rose quickly from the

Will Steffen, P. J. Crutzen, and J. R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (December 2007): 614-21.

"Of course, in view of the radical economic disparity that characterizes the world, humans have contributed to this era in radically divergent manners—this is a point considered more fully in Chapter 5.

"Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, “Anthropocene.” See also J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

'3See, for example, Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, “Anthropocene,” 617, fig. 2.

Introduction xxi pre-Industrial benchmark to 311 ppm by 1950. While this rise in atmospheric CO, levels is striking, it became even more pronounced in the decades following World War II. Over the last seventy years (roughly the time span of the great acceleration), CO, levels have skyrocketed to more than 406 ppm." This bears emphasizing. After more than 11,000 years of relative stability, CO, concentrations have risen over 85 percent in the last three centuries with that increase growing exponentially in the last seventy years.'°

As is well known, the sharp increase in atmospheric CO, concentrations threatens to upset the relative stability of the Holocene. According to Johan Rockstrém, for the earth’s biosphere to maintain conditions similar to those of the Holocene, human societies must respect nine “planetary boundaries” (including a boundary referring to CO, concentrations). Building off Rockstrém’s analysis, John Bellamy Foster argues that these boundaries function as “tipping points.” When they are surpassed, they can “lead to vast qualitative changes in the earth system that would threaten to destabilize the planet.” Thus, although public distress over the issue of climate change has focused attention on the planetary boundary associated with atmospheric carbon concentrations, each of the nine boundaries represents a potential global ecological crisis. For these reasons, many scientists worry that the Anthropocene portends an era of far greater instability within the biosphere than anything witnessed during the previous twelve millennia. This instability represents a grave threat not only to human life but to the myriad forms of life that have flourished in the Holocene. Already today, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.'® In the twenty-first century and beyond, the threats of climate change, increased drought, and ocean acidification (to name but three) figure to generate immense social and political upheaval, increasing the likelihood of war, mass social and geographical dislocation, and general human suffering on a global scale.'®

'4See NASA’s graph, “The Relentless Rise of Carbon Dioxide,” https://climate.nasa.gov.

'STo be clear, that is “over 30 percent” from the already elevated level in the year 1950.

‘Johan Rockstrém et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472. Rockstrém delineates the nine boundaries as “climate change,” “ocean acidification,” “stratospheric ozone depletion,” “nitrogen/phosphorous cycle,” “biodiversity loss,” “global freshwater use,” “change in land use,” “atmospheric aerosol loading,” and “chemical pollution.” Although Rockstrém has identified aerosol loading and chemical pollution as categories, he and his colleagues have not yet assigned these categories an empirical boundary. See also Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Age of Sustainable Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 181-217.

"This is a point made by the sociologist John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues. See John Bellamy Foster et al., The Ecological Rift: Capitalism 's War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 14

'8See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).

See Sachs, Age of Sustainable Development, 406-14; 459-74. On the link between climate change and war, see Solomon M. Hsiang et al., “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,” Science 341, no. 6151 (2013): 1190-1212.

xxii Introduction

Emergencies of Material Poverty and Economic Disparity

Within human societies, the period of the great acceleration also witnessed an acceleration of growth both in terms of economic wealth and disparity. Over the course of roughly the second half of the twentieth century, the gross world product (GWP) grew from approximately 9.2 trillion dollars to over 63 trillion dollars. However, despite this explosion in economic wealth, by the end to the twentieth century the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) estimated that the number of people living on less than $1 per day was over 1.2 billion. It is therefore unsurprising to find that the level of global economic disparity between the world’s richest and poorest members broadened dramatically during that same time span. As the UNRISD reported in 2000, “The incidence of poverty has increased . . . not because the world as a whole is getting poorer, but because the benefits of growth have been unevenly spread. There has been a striking increase in inequality.”' Indeed, it is remarkable to note that “the distance between the incomes of the richest and poorest country was about 3 to 1 in 1820, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1992.” The global wealth gap described by the UNRISD led the United Nations to question the validity of a global market society predicated on an ideology of growth. In its 2000 report, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) states, “Economic growth cannot be accelerated enough to overcome the handicap of too much income directed to the rich. Income does not trickle down; it only circulates among elite groups. ””

In recent years, however, there are signs that the acceleration in global inequality has slowed down, and is reversing altogether.” According to Jeffrey Sachs, this shift was to be expected. The reversal is due, at least in part, to the diffusion of technologies from economically wealthy countries to economically poorer ones. This diffusion allows for “catch-up” growth to occur rapidly in impoverished countries.” In the early twenty-first century, the combination of catch-up growth and the continued acceleration of GWP (which reached 108 trillion in 2015) has functioned to pull more than one billion people out of

See “World GDP over the last two millennia,” from “Our World in Data,” Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development and the Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science at Nuffield College, https://ourworldindata.org.

*1UNRISD, Visible Hands: Taking Responsibility for Social Development (Geneva: UNRISD, 2000), 11, www.unrisd.org.

UNDP, Human Rights and Human Development (New York: UNDP, 2000), 6.

?3UNDP, UNDP Poverty Report, 2000: Overcoming Human Poverty (New York: UNDP, 2000), 43.

See, for example, Christoph Lakner’s analysis of trends in global inequality. Christoph Lakner, “Global Inequality,” in After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, ed. Heather Boushey et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 259-79.

Sachs, Age of Sustainable Development, 80-81.

Introduction xxiii extreme poverty.” Moreover, there is hope that the trend toward convergence of economic wealth in rich and poor countries will continue in the twenty-first century.

Nonetheless, there are reasons both to continue to worry about the crisis of material poverty and to share the concerns expressed in the UNDP report. That more than one billion people remain in conditions of extreme poverty continues to demand urgent attention and action. Beyond this obvious point, economic disparity continues to present itself in pernicious and complicated ways within the contemporary global context. Most notably, the recent trend toward the overall reduction in global inequality has been accompanied by a countervailing trend in the increase in hyperwealth. A recent study by Oxfam finds that the world’s eight richest persons (all men) control roughly the same amount of the world’s economic wealth as the poorest half of the world.” Thus, while the gap between the average incomes in, for example, the United States and China may be shrinking, the gap between the wealth controlled by “the one percent” and the rest of the world continues to increase dramatically. Beyond the issue of hyperwealth, there is concern also as to whether rates of global economic growth can be sustained without exacerbating the ecological crisis to the point that it becomes an unmitigated disaster. If rates of growth cannot be sustained, then is it doubtful that levels of global economic disparity can continue to decrease. These are points to which I return in Chapter 5.

POLITICS, LEGITIMACY, AND THE TASK OF THEOLOGY

The foregoing observations regarding the Summers memorandum and the historical development of the ecological and economic emergencies suggest that these emergencies are rooted in politics. As Jedediah Purdy writes, “Both families of crisis .. . reflect the same predicament: if we want a self-sustaining world, both social and natural, we must build and preserve it.” Purdy continues, “The only way to build a shared living place deliberately is through politics. Collective, binding decisions are how people can give the world a shape that we intend.” For Purdy, the world’s socioeconomic and ecological formations, and the emergencies they harbor, demand political engagement and responsible praxis.