Religion
pays homage to the Creator. Ecology respects the Creation. It's
hard to think of two more "natural" partners. Yet
beginning with dueling Bible verses in the first two chapters
of Genesis, things are not that simple. Faith and the
environment jibe only when we "tend the earth and keep
it," not when we seek to establish "dominion" over
it.
Consider the Easter Islanders. Some 16
centuries ago, Polynesian explorers arrived on Rapa Nui,
an island halfway between Chile and Tahiti. Having
sailed at least 1,400 miles—the closest landfall being Pitcairn—these
intrepid souls planted a thriving, artistic culture on this
island Eden.
Rapa Nui abounded in flora and fauna. Its
rich subtropical forest contained torimo trees (for firewood), hauhau trees (for making rope), and numberless stands of
the Easter Island palm. Growing
as high as 80 feet and as thick as 6 feet, this relative
of the Chilean wine palm was perfect for canoes, which allowed
the settlers to take advantage of the sea's abundant larder.
At the apex of the its vitality, the island hosted
10,000 residents. Yet when discovered anew by Dutch
merchants in 1722, Rapa Nui was a wasteland. Apart
from a handful of survivors, all that remained were hundreds
of gigantic stone heads, or moai. The largest, 32 feet high, weighed 50 tons.
Offering an irresistible magnet for extraterrestrial
speculation, the real story here is dramatic enough without
recourse to science fiction. The weight of recent scholarly
evidence fingers the moai (together
with climatic shifts and associated famine) as the major
culprits in Rapu Nui's demise. It now appears that,
in addition to providing wood for canoes, the island's palm
trees almost certainly to roll and to prop up, and perhaps
to scaffold, these monumental statues during their remarkable "walk" from
the mountains to the hundreds of abus (platforms or shrines) that ring the island. The hauhau trees
furnished rope to pull the monoliths along and to help erect
them. The torimo trees
were burned to clear the way. In the process of honoring
God and their ancestors, these devout Polynesians systematically
pillaged their environment, until not a tree remained on
the entire island.
Without its forests, Easter Island quickly became
inhospitable to numerous life forms, including our own. Without
wood for canoes, the fishing industry was destroyed. Civil
war followed, along with the advent of cannibalism. A
once flourishing people had sacrificed themselves on their
own altar.
A similar tension exists in Western religion
from the very beginning. In the Book of Genesis, competing
creation stories underscore the gulf between an environmentally
friendly faith and one that places the earth and its creatures
in jeopardy.
Biblical scholars recognize two ancient creation
myths woven together in chapters one and two of Genesis. In
the so-called E, or Elohist, narrative, God (literally, "the
gods," elohim) creates man and woman in the divine image and invests
them with lordship over their domain—specifically, with "dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping
thing that creeps upon the earth."
In the J, or Jahwist, narrative, the Lord God
(Jahweh) molds Adam from the red clay (adam). Although it gives Eve short shrift by plucking
her from Adam's rib cage, the Jahwist creation myth is markedly
more reverent toward our earthly home: "And the
Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden
to tend it and to keep it."
Depending on which set of divine instructions
we elect to follow, we become either lords or servants—either
masters of the universe or stewards of the Creation.
We know which choice the Easter Islanders made. Whatever
the specifics of their Polynesian faith (which likely involved
both ancestor worship and a monotheistic belief in Make Make,
the Creator God), they abandoned
all pretense to stewardship in order to honor their idols. Both
ecologically and spiritually, the consequences were tragic.
By exercising absolute dominion over their island, they despoiled
it completely.
We face the same choice today. As we enter
the 21st century, in possession of almost godlike technological
powers, each ecological decision we make pits the allure
of dominion against the responsibility of stewardship. Practicing
the latter, we don't suspend our powers—we direct them in
reverent ways. In spiritual terms, alternative technologies
for power, energy conservation, balanced multiple-use policies,
and the prudent protection of hitherto untrammeled public
lands represent responsible partnering between creature and
Creator. On a personal level as well, even as
dominion distances and estranges us from the earth beneath
our feet, stewardship nurtures both the ground on which we
walk and the ground of our being.
Though the E narrative may get my nod for acknowledging
the natural equality of woman and man, with
respect to the environment, I have
to follow the J. Tending and keeping the garden
not only is in our enlightened self-interest, but it also
nurtures the soul. Yet dominion remains tempting. It
enticed the Easter Islanders, until they had to stop production
of their ever-more massive idols, because there were no trees
left to transport them to the altar. It may tempt us
as well—perhaps to tap and extract all the earth's natural
resources, until a million Hummers come to a grinding halt
and rust in place.
If extraterrestrials ever do show up, such monuments
to our misplaced devotion would surely get their antennae
vibrating. Even as the moai have stood mute for centuries, in stony witness to
self-destructive human idolatry, why we would do this to
ourselves would constitute, to any higher life form, an equally
unfathomable mystery.
© Forrest
Church 2004
