How Does Your Gardner Go?

Ironically, evangelicals are getting a lot of attention, but they've been the latest comers to this topic. They were involved in the '90s in helping to save the Endangered Species Act. They called it the Noah's Ark of our day, and said that Congress was trying to sink it. They were very effective there. But that was just a small splinter wing of evangelicals who were environmentally oriented. It's only in the last year or two that we've seen that grow into a more mainstream evangelical movement dealing primarily with climate-change issues.

We had the What Would Jesus Drive? movement in 2002, and then this year we've seen evangelical leaders signing a document in February calling for action on climate change. Rich Cizik at the National Association of Evangelicals is just barnstorming the country trying to get evangelicals fired up about this.

My interest in this is long-standing. When I think about the whole suite of sustainability issues, typically we're talking about policies and technologies that need to change. But the challenge is more fundamental than that. It's a question of values that need to change. We need to reassess our relationship to the planet that supports us, and reassess the way we deal with each other, with human beings. Sustainability really is a values problem, and religions have a lot to do with helping us to shape our values, and could be very helpful in helping us to achieve a sustainable world.

An example of that is consumption. Consumption is the one issue on the sustainability agenda where we seem to be making very little progress. Yet it's an issue that religion has a long history of experience with, in terms of warning people of the dangers of excessive attachment to the corporeal world. When an environmentalist talks about consumption, he or she could make a strong case for the impact of our consumption habits on the natural world. A religious person could make the same case, but could take it further and say that consumption is bad for us as human beings, for the human spirit and for community -- that excessive consumption can be a corrosive influence in our lives.

Religions have long experience in making ethical and moral arguments, and have particular credibility, at least sometimes, when they make them. It's not that religions have a corner on the market in terms of ethics. But they can do it particularly well when they put their mind to it.

I hardly think the entire environmental situation in which we find ourselves can be laid at the feet of religious people. There may be, in some religious traditions, some blame to be laid. But one of the things religions have shown over time is a tremendous capacity to adapt to the times. We see this happening in Christianity right now, where there's a lot of reassessment, a lot of evaluation of the way religious traditions may have contributed to environmental degradation, a lot of reassessment of scriptural traditions. That's a very common process within religions.

This notion that humans have a special place is not confined to religious people; there are all sorts of people who are not religious who would agree.

At the same time, I would agree that the problem you're pointing to is a big one. Many times, religious people do become a part of the culture and become subject to the good and bad in that culture. That's why one of the messages I have to religious people is, "Return to your roots. Look at your own traditions, look at your own prophets, look at your own founding figures. Look at their original writings." You find tremendous power in those. You typically find calls for a return to justice. You find calls to a return to valuing spirit as much as we value the material world. Religious traditions have the capacity, and they regularly return to that capacity, to help build a better and more just world. It doesn't happen nearly as often as I would like it to, or many others would like it to, but it does happen, and there's tremendous power when it does happen.

I agree with you that religion could be much more involved in trying to change the structures of consumption. But I also would return to the individual-level effort. There's tremendous potential there for reducing consumption and making both our society and individuals better off in the process.

Much of the effort today to try to change consumption habits is about trying to get people to consume in a different way rather than to consume less -- things like fair trade and socially responsible investments -- trying to steer one's market power in a direction that helps create a better world. I'm all for that. But I think we also need less consumption in the industrial world. We just need to be buying fewer things. It would be better for us and I think it'd be better for the planet. I don't know of any institution in society that can make that argument more effectively than religion.

It's a tough question. I certainly understand where they're coming from. I would say that you're seeing the most active, most vocal people when you point to conservative Christians in this country. But there are all sorts. There are people on both sides of the political aisle who are religious, and who are motivated by their religion to pursue what they pursue. That's why, for example, the second largest provider of social services in the United States is religious groups -- the clinics, the schools, the hospitals, the orphanages. People doing very progressive work, motivated by their faith. The conservative side just gets more attention because they're particularly vocal.

I don't care if it's a Democrat or a Republican who is calling for greater attention to climate change. I don't care if it's a conservative or a progressive. It's all to the good, no matter who's doing it. That's how I would approach that question. On the record.