One more than one occasion I have been critical of the involvement of Orthodox Christians in the environmental movement.\u00a0 Most recently wrote an essay critically of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew\u2019s own opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which His All Holiness not only offered his support of international environmental regulations but also sought to justify theological his own involvement in the environmental movement.<\/p>\n

Publicly and privately, many Orthodox Christians criticized me for my disagreement and assume (wrongly) that I oppose our involvement with the environmental movement.\u00a0 While I see why they draw this conclusion, I would argue not that we withdraw but that that the Church involve herself more fully in the environmental movement.\u00a0 I would publicly encourage and support the involvement of those Orthodox Christians who they believe God is calling them to do.<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, I would also challenge my brothers and sisters in Christ to a more critical engagement of the environmental movement as a whole.\u00a0 This would include not simply a careful examination of the science of climate change but also of the political, cultural economic and yes, environmental, consequences of the various national and international public policy initiatives being advance.<\/p>\n

While all of these things are important, I think for the Church they are nevertheless secondary matters.\u00a0 What is primary for us is the anthropological vision that informs at least some of those in the environmental movement.\u00a0 Analogous to the Christolgical debates in the early Church, the contemporary environmental movement often assumes a vision of the human person that is not compatible with the Gospel.\u00a0 Anne Applebaum in a Washington Post (Anti-climate change, anti-human<\/a>) characterized the anthropological vision of the environmental moment as nihilistic.<\/p>\n

Though an \u201denthusiastically support renewable energy\u201d who believes \u201cstrongly in the imposition of a carbon tax\u201d and that \u201ca worldwide shift away from fossil fuels would have hugely positive geopolitical consequences, even leaving aside the environmental benefits\u201d Applebaum is \u201cdisturbed by the apocalyptic and the anti-human prejudices of the climate change movement .\u201d She quotes what she describes as the \u201cinfamous words of a National Park Service ecologist\u201d David M. Graber<\/a> who says that humanity is “a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.\u201d\u00a0 For Graber there are only two options.\u00a0 Either humanity decides \u201cto rejoin nature,\u201d or we live in \u201chope for the right virus to come along\u201d to wipe out, or at least diminish, the human race.\u00a0 Or, to take another example, there is the \u201cformer leader of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals once declared that \u2018humans have grown like a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

While voices such as these are relatively easy to dismiss, more worrisome are the mainline voices in the environmental movement who don\u2019t simply preach a false anthropology but who actively seek to engage others to act on anti-human sentiment.\u00a0 Applebaum asks us to consider<\/p>\n

the Optimum Population Trust<\/a>, a mainstream organization whose patrons include the naturalist David Attenborough, the scientist Jane Goodall and professors at Cambridge and Stanford\u2014and \u00a0that campaigns against, well, human beings. Calling for “fewer emitters, lower emissions,” the group offers members the chance to offset the pollution that they generate, merely by existing, through the purchase of family-planning devices in poor countries. Click on its PopOffsets<\/a> calculator to see what I mean: It reckons that every $7 spent on family planning generates one ton fewer carbon emissions. Since the average American generates 20.6 tons of carbon annually, it will cost $144.20 — $576.80 for a family of four — to buy enough condoms to prevent the births of, say, 0.4 Kenyans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Am I the only Orthodox Christian who recoils in horror at the suggestion that affluent, mostly white American and Western Europeans, assuage our environmental guilty by working to limit the number of births to people of color?\u00a0 I think Applebaum is more than restrained when she says that:<\/p>\n

The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: that human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide. And if we take that assumption seriously, a whole lot of other things look different, too. Weapons of mass destruction should perhaps be reconsidered, along with the flu virus: By reducing the population, they might also reduce emissions. Perhaps they should be encouraged?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As with the comments by Graber and the PETA spokesperson, it is easy to simply dismiss this as simply rhetorical excess or fanciful speculation on Applebaum\u2019s part.\u00a0 But is it really?<\/p>\n

Unlike despair which cripples us, nihilism empowers.\u00a0 It is a false dynamism to be sure and one that also cripples us spiritually, but unlike despair which tends to paralyze is, nihilism can\u2014and often does\u2014inspire us to a frenzy of destructive activity.\u00a0 Just as despair brings a false sense of quiet and acceptance that parodies that peace which surpasses all understanding and \u00a0which is the fruit of our trust and obedience to God\u2019s will, so too nihilism is a distortion of our creative powers.\u00a0 \u201cNihilism,\u201d writes Fr Seraphim (Rose) is \u201cmost profoundly, a spiritual disorder, and it can be overcome only by spiritual means; and there has been no attempt whatever in the contemporary world to apply such means.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would argue that at least part of the Christian witness within the environmental movement should take the form of a call to repentance.\u00a0 Not in the moralistic sense that it has come to have, but in the full, Christian anthropological sense, of coming to see self and other in the Divine Light.\u00a0 Such a call, I most add, is extraordinarily difficult.\u00a0 The challenge is that, unlike other sins, contemporary nihilism often cloaks itself in the language of the Gospel.\u00a0 Again to quote Fr Seraphim, contemporary nihilism is often described \u00a0in \u201ccontrary terms.\u201d\u00a0 What he means by this is that contemporary nihilists see \u201cwhat they do as a reign of \u2018love,\u2019\u00a0 \u2018peace,\u2019 and \u2018brotherhood. \u2019\u201d \u00a0\u00a0And they are able to do so<\/p>\n

because Satan is the ape of God and even in denial must acknowledge the source of that denial, and\u2013more to the present point\u2013because men have been so changed by the practice of the Nihilist \u201cvirtues,\u201d and by acceptance of the Nihilist transformation of the world, that they actually begin to live in the Revolutionary Kingdom and to see everything as Satan sees it, as the contrary of what it is in the eyes of God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me be clear, I am not saying that involvement in the environmental movement is Satanic.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t.\u00a0 It is, or at least should be, the fruit of our stewardship of creation which has been our vocation from the beginning (see Gn 1-2).\u00a0 At the same time we need to be mindful that our witness must overcome the strong nihilistic influence within the environmental movement itself.\u00a0 We cannot, as some have, given in to apocalyptic and anti-human rhetoric.\u00a0 Nor can we such let such language stand unchallenged.\u00a0 Applebaum does a fine job of this in the penultimate paragraph of her essay.<\/p>\n

For while it’s true that humans are often greedy, stupid and destructive, it’s also true that we got to where we are at least partly thanks to human creativity, ingenuity and talent. Electricity is a miracle, an invention that has brought light and life to millions. Modern communication and transportation systems are no less extraordinary, helping to create economic growth in places where poverty and misery were the norm for centuries.<\/p>\n

Yes, she says, \u00a0the advances of the last several centuries \u201cdepend on fossil fuels, but they don’t have to: A profound change in the nature of human energy consumption is possible\u2014thanks to the entrepreneurship that created the Internet, the compassion that lies behind the advances in modern medicine and the scientific reasoning that sent men into space. \u201c\u00a0 Unfortunately, the nihilism that has come to dominate our conversation rather than encouraging us to the compassionate, entrepreneurial exercise our creativity, ingenuity and talent, fosters in us a \u201chatred of humankind\u201d and \u201cteaches us nothing, except to give up.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is much for Christians, and indeed all people of good will, to admire in the contemporary environmental movement.\u00a0 Chief among these things is the renewed impetus it has given to all humanity to see ourselves not simply as consumers but as the stewards and artisans of creation.<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, there also are elements within this movement that are simply heretical.\u00a0 Chief among these is its unbalanced, negative view of humanity.\u00a0 For Christians to leave unchallenged this deficient view of the human is a betrayal of not only our own concern for creation but also the very men and women with whom we would make common cause.\u00a0 More seriously (if unwittingly) this betrayal\u00a0 open the doors to injustice committed against the poor and demonstrate our own lack of commitment to Christ and the Gospel.<\/p>\n

It must not be this way among us.<\/p>\n

In Christ,<\/p>\n

+Fr Gregory<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I would also challenge my brothers and sisters in Christ to a more critical engagement of the environmental movement as a whole. This would include not simply a careful examination of the science of climate change but also of the political, cultural economic and yes, environmental, consequences of the various national and international public policy initiatives being advance. But I would especially ask them to challenge the flawed, nihilisitic anthropological vision of the environmental moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[786,1134,256,1135,1136],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5113"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5123,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5113\/revisions\/5123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}