Abstract
The pandemic that we find ourselves in is an indication of how out of balance we are with our world. People wonder what has happened and why we weren’t prepared. We can say that we have created an illusion that we are not part of nature. We act as if we have conquered nature and can live in a fantasy world that food comes from supermarkets and water is in bottles. Nothing could be further from the truth. How will we reconnect to planetary health? As the ‘geologian’ Thomas Berry, said: ‘We can’t have healthy people on a sick planet.’ We need healthy ecosystems as the basis of healthy lives.
With the levels of uncertainty and panic rising we can hardly envision returning to a ‘new normal’ much less the endless consumption and indifference to inequities that has characterized life in the ‘developed world’. Will we connect the dots between COVID-19 and related epidemics to the eating or treatment of animals? More than half of contemporary diseases have been connected to our relations with animals. Will we connect to the climate emergencies as the central context of this pandemic moment?
Where are the portals for change? Where are the values that may guide us forward?
We are a people devoid of an ethics comprehensive and inclusive to encompass people and the planet. One declaration of an ethics of interdependence is the Earth Charter with an inspiring vision for integrating ecology, justice, and peace. The encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato si’, is another with its clarion call for an ‘integral ecology’.
We can also call on the world’s religions for guidance in ways that brings them out of simply human centered concerns towards mutually enhancing human-Earth relations. In collaboration with others, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology has endeavored to draw out these relationships for undertaking religious environmentalism and for the wisdom of spiritual ecology.
Indigenous traditions around the world have upheld for millennia and still embrace cosmovisions of relationality of humans with the more than human world. The mutuality of dwelling within a world of living beings continues to be honored by many Indigenous peoples. How could others have lost this worldview of flourishing with the larger Earth community? Can human re-enchantment with our world be restored in our modern world?
Western religions have had a strong sense of social justice for humans, but the pull now toward ecojustice is palpable, although still to be realized. Stewardship in Judaism and Christianity and Trusteeship in Islam means that the response to the beauty and complexity of life requires a sense of responsibility for its continuity. Planetary health requires these moral forces along with science, policy, law, and economics.
The religions of South Asia have traditionally had a strong sense of doing one’s duty (dharma) and expressing devotion (bhakti) to one’s guru or god. These religious practices are being extended beyond the human to include duty for the protection and care of nature as well as devotion to the sacred rivers. Trees too are valued as in the Chipko movement in the Himalayas where women embraced trees to prevent them from being cut down and Buddhist monks in Thailand and Cambodia are ordaining trees to deter unregulated deforestation.
In East Asia, in both Confucianism and Daoism, there is a desire to harmonize with nature, to sense its endless variety and fecundity, and to bring humans into the rhythms of its dynamic flow, the Dao. Traditional values undergird a contemporary aspiration to create ‘Ecological Civilization’ in China, but what relation does such thinking have to the ‘Belt and Road’ development schemes?
The pandemic is calling for a radical change in human values. Can we awaken to ancient and profound relationalities with all life? We are a planetary people who flourish beyond the walls of private gains or national ideologies. A pandemic knows no borders. We need to join the Earth community if we are to survive and thrive. Is this not what our children are calling us towards?
Surely we can answer this call and affirm the highest commitment of humans—to prepare the way for the flourishing of life for future generations of all species. We might consider a new golden rule for all religions to articulate in their distinctive ways: To nurture the Earth in ways it has nurtured us. Can we embrace radical hope and joyful thanksgiving even as we hear ‘the cry of the Earth, the cry of the poor’?