The environmentalist and theologian Thomas Berry, in his essay "World of Wonder," quotes Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin: "One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes ... See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence."
He then goes on, in this essay, to describe in detail the great natural wonders of the North American continent: the great rivers and plains, the extraordinary mountains, the vast and open deserts, the forests of the northeast and the northwest. All these wonders, he observes, have been severely degraded, in most cases irreversibly so, by Western civilization, essentially from the moment of its arrival on Columbus's ships. The loss, and the heedless avarice which has accompanied and driven it, is almost too much to bear. It is, finally, a fact that the mind cannot encompass. Consider, for example, that of the tallgrass prairie that once covered much of the midwest, only about 0.3% remains. The rest has been plowed under, often to grow feed crop for cattle, or corn that ADM will process into corn syrup. Spend a moment and try to feel the enormity of this mindless exploitation of this bountiful planet, endlessly complex and intricate variety tilled and hacked and plowed into dust, and replaced with unnatural expanses of monoculture. What was there is gone, and will never come again.
Why did this happen? Berry suggests that our culture has a fundamental lack of ability to see things as they are. The supposedly rational mind of the Western man views nature as a resource, a repository of wealth waiting to be extracted, and made of use to man. The immediate use value of tallgrass prairie is not apparent to the rational eye, but the soil beneath has obvious value. So, the one is removed to extract the value of the other. Anywhere you have a mining operation, you see this principle in horrifying action. Mountains in West Virginia have no obvious value, but the coal seams within them do. The mountain, then, must go. The boreal forest atop the Alberta tar sands? Valuable insofar as the wood can be sold. The life of the Gulf of Mexico? Of no use compared the the oil beneath the sea bed.
A recent letter to the editor about a proposed taconite mine in Wisconsin illustrates this point with frightening clarity. The mine should go forward, says the writer, because the taconite, in the ground, "isn't doing anyone any good." Apart from its value as a resource for industrial age humans, the taconite is worthless. This, I think, is a fatal blind spot in the Western view of the world. We are, finally, incapable of seeing the world as it is.
The Western religious tradition is also an abject failure in this respect. Berry notes that with its focus on personal salvation through a singular Savior, and its view of nature as corrupt, rather than as a manifestation of divinity, inherently sacred and inspirational, mainstream Christianity has little to say about the culture's inexorable destruction of the planet. The kingdom of God is elsewhere, not here, and because the world is devoid of divinity, Western religion can't be bothered to stir itself to its defense. In fact, anyone who finds divinity in God's actual creation is regarded as a heathen. To be truly Godly is to find not a speck of divinity in creation, the better to make money off its despoiling.
"Consider the lilies ... they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these," says Jesus, who was not afraid of invoking the miracle of the world around him. Unfortunately, modern Judeo-Christian religion has little use for the lilies, so busy is it with convincing its adherents that this world is the fallen one, and therefore of little concern. Like the Western scientific and technological tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition suffers terribly, fatally, from a lack of sight. Nature is fallen, and that is the end of it.
But, as Berry and de Chardin observe, sight is vital. We are blind to so much of this world. The great prairies were plowed under because settlers did not see them as whole or sacred or a manifestation of the divine or as a magnificent example of God's creation, possessed of the right to exist. In short, they didn't pause and experience them as of value in and of themselves. They were experienced and seen only in terms of their own needs, which is to say that they weren't seen at all.
Of course, it turns out that we need those prairies, and every other aspect of nature, far more than we need the black soil beneath. The prairie nourished the soil, just as the soil nourished the prairie. Mow one down, and you may possess the other in a sense, for a while, but soon it will tire of giving of its richness to people who not only do not give back, but who seem to feel that to take endlessly is their right. This is, to my mind, another fatal flaw in the Judeo-Christian approach to nature. God, in Genesis, says "fill the earth and subdue it ... have dominion ... over every living thing that moves on the earth." God may command it, but eventually the earth will balk at this relationship, and the earth has the last word.
The nature of our relationship to the natural world demanded by God is not one in which the natural world is truly seen. The nature of the relationship to the natural world demanded by science is not one in which the world is truly seen. God asks us to subdue the world, and in the world we see something to be subdued. Science asks us to pick apart the world, and in the world we see machinery to be broken down and brought under control. Industry asks us to draw every last resource from the world, and in the world we see fossil fuels, and biofuel, and minerals to be mined. What we see is not the world in its incomprehensible splendor, but merely our expectations of the world. We mistake our expectations for the world, and ultimately we suffer terribly for it, as does the planet. Paul Valery says "to see is to forget the nature of the thing one sees." Before we can see the world, truly, we must let go of the malignant ideas we have about it.
