Abstract
When a so-called super-quarry was planned for the island of Harris, off the west coast of Scotland, community members successfully opposed it in a public inquiry with an argument based on the Ten Commandments and the belief that nature itself proclaims the glory of God. Like all the Outer Hebrides, Harris is dominated by a Presbyterian culture centred on strict observation of the Ten Commandments. Thus when the proposed quarry’s owner was unable to convince locals that they could consistently observe the Sabbath, the island’s unique religious and cultural identity provided the basis for successful theological opposition to the project.
Stories like this one, which stands at the centre of Michael Northcott’s Place, Ecology, and the Sacred, exemplify favourite values of many environmental ethicists: local, grassroots action that is simultaneously strategic and deeply theological. The challenge, though, is how to derive generalizable ethical norms from such stories. In one sense, Place, Ecology and the Sacred can be seen as an attempt to articulate such norms, based on Harris and other stories of local resistance to global capitalism. Northcott examines the disconnect between humans and their places, especially as it is perpetuated by capitalist corporations, and argues that only local resistance, especially based on a Judaeo-Christian understanding of place, is capable of overcoming this disconnect.
Northcott begins by introducing a biblical Judaeo-Christian place ethic: while the Old Testament articulates a community’s moral and theological life in a particular place, organized by ecological rhythms, social egalitarianism and conservation, the New Testament describes the potential presence of God in all places. The key inheritance from this strand of Christianity, according to Northcott, is the recognition that human social and moral life is inseparable from the places where it occurs.
The loss of this connection to place is primarily due to the arrogation of control of the land by the state and, later, by corporations. The latter are the primary target of Northcott’s denunciation. Because of their global scale (and consequent distance from local realities) and commitment to maximizing profit based on exchange value (rather than more inclusive use value), corporations are necessarily inimical to care for places. Thus the bulk of his text is devoted to expressing the capacity of ‘small-scale communities of place’ (p. 84) to reclaim governance of the land through practices of resistance, including the defeat of the Harris super-quarry, indigenous communities in Scotland enacting what Northcott describes as a biblical vision of land reform and a global movement of peasant farmers called La Vía Campesina. Northcott argues that the Judaeo-Christian conception of place can support the growing network of local churches and communities engaging in mindful place-based movements.
Whatever truth it may contain, Northcott’s indictment of corporations is overstated. Instead of asserting, as Northcott does, that corporations, for the reasons noted above, are incapable of being virtuous, why not ask whether and in what ways a virtue ethics approach may be fruitfully applied to corporations? What kinds of corporations, or corporate behaviours, might be considered virtuous and held up as exemplars for others? Comprehensive condemnations like Northcott’s are ultimately less helpful than more careful characterizations.
Just as corporations are not unambiguously vicious, neither is community an unambiguously virtuous ideal. Northcott describes community as a ‘boundaried concept’, constituted by ‘some people’ (p. 170), but seems untroubled by the exclusionary implications of this. Northcott’s position, emphasizing an explicitly Christian conception of place (and holding up religiously uniform communities like Harris as examples) seems particularly susceptible to this temptation. He notes this criticism, but never really responds to it. In this respect, his biblical place ethic might benefit from greater attention to the peoples expelled from the Promised Land by the Hebrew nomads.
As indicated above, Place, Ecology and the Sacred is an example of the recent pragmatist turn in some environmental ethics towards the actions and moral imaginations of particular communities, undeniably a salutary development. The above criticisms only serve to underscore the inherent difficulties of this pragmatist turn. Especially in its insistence that ecological problems cannot be separated from social and cultural dynamics, Place, Ecology and the Sacred offers valuable insights for religious environmentalism, and it merits consideration by anyone interested in community-based responses to environmental crises.