Environmentalism unites religious and secular voices to defend Earth’s sacredness

Environmentalism unites religious and secular voices to defend Earth’s sacredness

Commentary by Janet Marugg | FāVS News

He arrives as the world begins the crawl out of winter, and I’m leaning into sunlight like a philodendron. Just as my weeks go soggy with grays and browns, he brings the warm reds of desert lands topped by a wild blue sky. He is my winter author and friend, Edward Abbey. 

I start with “Desert Solitaire,” Abbey’s break-out book about his season spent rangering in Utah’s Arches National Park. He wanted to be a great American novelist, but it’s Abbey’s nonfiction that breaks my cabin fever. This year, I add “One Life at a Time, Please” and the essay titled “A Writer’s Credo” tickles my brain. 

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a nature writer, so smitten I was with Abbey’s way of taking me there. I even read Abbey’s environmental and nature writing friends, Doug Peacock, Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry and Wallace Stegner. Author friends stick better than most, and they are all delicious reading for cravers of wild things. “Freedom,” Abbey said, “begins in the mind.” 

One of the Humanist Ten Commitments is Environmentalism, aka The-Be-All-End-All. Environmental health is the hinge upon which everything hangs. All human endeavors, all religious practices and all the existence we can muster hinges on a healthy environment for human beings. 

Unhealthy human environments are harmful, often murderous, and therefore immoral. Period. Ensuring planetary health is the work of every sane, nonsuicidal, nonhomicidal, red-blooded moral human being. Edward Abbey was blunt about the sacred cow of unchecked anti-environmental capitalism: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” 

For Abbey — for many of us — caring for our earthly home is a deeply meaningful and, some say, spiritual practice. His words: “My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.” 

But perhaps best is the way Abbey quipped a question: “Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?” Caring for the environment as God’s creation is a serious tenet in every religion I know of — Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Jewish, etc. — and this makes environmentalism doubly, triply, infinitely righteous. 

For the secular humanist caring for the benefit of humans, environmentalism is moral common ground with the faithful. Organized religions and denominations, some with steeples near me, are urging members to act on environmental justice. I see resolutions and initiatives called “creation care,” and this does inspire! Christians caring for creation alongside Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, the unchurched and nonbelievers like me is the best in common ground I think we’re going to get. Ring the Unity Bell! 

Using religious freedom and personal morals to ensure the health of Earth is the assignment from which all other assignments hang. To theists and deists, today is for defending God’s creation. For all life-loving folks of all creeds, today is for defending our home against the destructive forces of unethical greed. That is the assignment, and it’s our religious freedom and constitutional right to complete it. Be brave. 

My journey as a secular humanist writer is about bravery. It’s a tightrope walk of words in a tender space. So, I bolster up with “A Writer’s Credo” and claim my moral duty to speak truth as best I can, to not “shore up the wrong, the false, the ugly, the evil.” According to Abbey, “the writer’s duty is to speak the truth, especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental.” I understand my writerly assignment: poke the sacred cows of society’s prevailing ideologies to save humanity from ruts that mire, deceive and destroy. 

The religious community’s recent environmental efforts, quiet as they are (I had to hunt for them), give me hope for humans and their beloved institutions. I had given up finding ethical common ground with the manifest destiny crowd. Green action is God action these days, and as Abbey put it, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” 

I don’t know anything about souls and Abbey is not for everybody, not even me full-time. Edward Abbey is opinionated, racist, acerbic, misogynistic, blasphemous, cantankerous and catterwaulic. And yet he is for everyone — especially people who love Earth, our home.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.