[uplifting instrumental music]
>> Fourth,
the resacralizing of nature, a Gaia ethic.
Chief Seattle said,
"What is a man without the beast?
"If all the beasts were gone,
"men would die from a
great loneliness of spirit.
"For whatever happens to the
beasts soon happens to the man.
"All things are connected."
How often do you hear that,
all things are connected?
Three weeks ago, my wife
and I went up to Yosemite
for the weekend.
And on the way in, we did a snowshoe hike,
a couple of pictures that were
up there earlier from that.
We use to do it all the time in Colorado
and can't do it that
often here in California,
but it was great.
Then we went down, stayed in the valley
and we always go to the visitors center
and watch the latest
videos or movies they have,
see what they have, then
we'd get out of there.
But here was a video, it was
called The Spirit of Yosemite
and it starts out with all
these beautiful pictures
of waterfalls and flowing
brooks and snow falling
and you know, the magnificent cliffs
of El Cap and Half Dome and
the narrator says something
about everyone who visits Yosemite Valley
senses something special.
They sense the presence of a
spirit, the spirit of Yosemite.
And then he goes on and
develops it and he talks about
the spirit of Yosemite, how
interconnected everything is.
And over and over there was
this notion of we're all one,
we're all connected.
And Barbie looked at me and
she just shook her head.
What do you expect?
And then of course they talk
about the Ahwahneechee Indians
and how they recognized
how everything was one.
And we thought, do you think
anybody could write a script
to be shown in a film in the
visitors center of Yosemite
that said, many, many people
who visit Yosemite Valley
see the grandeur of the creation
and they praise God Almighty.
Could you get away with that?
Of course not, you got to talk about how
the Ahwahneechee Indians
saw that everything was one
and this kind of thing.
And this notion that everything is,
how often do you hear that?
If you visit national parks, all the time.
If you read environmental literature,
you see it all the time.
We're all one, we're all connected.
This is a fundamental
idea of the Gaia ethic.
James Lovelock was the
one who came up with this,
a British naturalist,
philosopher, futurist,
published his book, Gaia: A
New Look at Life on Earth.
When did he publish that,
I don't have the date here.
I deleted all my footnotes from my notes.
Early '70s, somewhere there.
Now think the historical context.
Many of us can remember the '60s.
If you're old enough to
remember when you can't,
you lived them.
[audience laughing]
But I was at the Air
Force Academy in the '60s,
just skipped right over
and dropped in Boulder,
but the '60s as an event lasted
into the mid-70s I think.
And it was this time of major
paradigm shifts in thought.
This new way of thinking
was actually very old.
It was the incorporation
into Western counterculture
of Eastern religious thought.
Concepts in Eastern religions were applied
to things as diverse as
motorcycle maintenance
and quantum mechanics.
Remember Gary Zukav's book,
Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Or Fritjof Capra's book
about quantum mechanics,
The Dancing Wu Li Masters.
Converts from this Eastern philosophical
or religious point of
view, for the most part,
we're not converts to Eastern religion.
Rather, they found in Eastern
religion certain themes
which proved useful in challenging
the rooted paradigms of the '50s
of our parents, if you will.
Ecohistorian, self-described
ecohistorian Carolyn Merchant
writes this, in the
1960s, the Native American
became the symbol in the
ecological movement's search
for alternatives to Western
exploitative attitudes.
The Indian animistic belief system
and reverence for the earth as a mother
were contrasted with the
Judeo-Christian heritage
of domination over nature
and with capitalist practices
resulting in the tragedy of the commons.
I'll say more about this notion of tragedy
of the commons on Saturday.
Basically the idea is
if something is common,
people don't take care of it.
Every day I walk the short
distance from the parking lot
in front of Meijer's,
over there into my office and Meijer's,
virtually every day I'll stop
and pick up a candy wrapper,
a napkin, some piece of trash
passed by hundreds of people.
But it's common, no one has
the responsibility for doing it
until the people we pay
up get around to do it.
Or one thing that really bugs me,
you can edit this out
but this really bugs me,
I go in the bathroom, the
men's room, after lunch
and we got these machines,
I think we have them
in this building too, you know
you move your hand over it
and automatically you
get, so people are doing,
you take about two or three
sheets, wipe their hands
and toss them in the trash can.
The trashcan fills up
and begins to spill over
and nobody does anything about it.
They toss the paper towel and it falls out
and they walk out.
And so I'll go in there and
pick up all the paper towels,
put them in, pull my
foot up and stomp it down
and the students kind of look at me like
here's that weird prof,
I bet he recycles too.
[audience laughing]
But it's the tragedy of the commons.
I think, I don't wanna walk
into a messy men's room.
I don't want a visitor to
Talbot School of Theology
or Biola University to
come in and see trash.
But it's common, no
one has responsibility.
So Merchant says the tragedy the commons
comes out of the capitalist mentality,
that if everybody owns it, nobody owns it,
nobody cares for it.
In contrast to that,
she says it's the Eastern
or the Native American view
that is all sacred.
In the '80s, the same
stew was blended together
with feminist themes and Wiccan themes
and we called it the New Age.
That's still around,
nobody much talks about it
as the New Age, we don't use
those words so much anymore
but it surely is here with us.
But it was the work of Lovelock
that gained widespread attention
and made environmentalism
a vital part of the New
Age and gave the basis
for this resacralizing ethic
or deifying Mother Earth.
Lovelock's book Gaia: A
New Look at Life on Earth
described the Gaia hypothesis.
Oh, he's also written a later one,
this one is a year or two
old, The Revenge of Gaia:
Earth's Climate Crisis
& The Fate of Humanity.
She's gonna get her revenge.
Remember that old
commercial, it's not nice
to fool mother nature?
Some of you remember that.
That's what Lovelock says here.
The earth's living matter,
the air, the oceans
and the land surface form a complex system
which can be seen as a single organism
in which has the capacity
to keep our planet
a fit place for life.
This is the paradigm shift
Lovelock brought to it.
He brought a background
in systems engineering
and he saw, when he
looked at an ecosystem,
he didn't look at it with the
perspective of a naturalist.
He didn't see the ponderosa
pines and the aspens
and the willows and the
grasses and the beaver ponds.
What he saw were carbon
sinks and carbon sources.
Things like that.
He saw energy transfer,
cybernetic systems.
But he said this is not just ecosystems,
it's the entire earth.
The lithosphere, the
biosphere, the atmosphere
all together is one single
system which he called Gaia.
He says what hazards and near
disasters would have faced
the infant biosphere?
And how might Gaia's presence
have helped to surmount them?
It sounds now like Gaia
is a semi-conscious thing.
And he's talking about, in
the history of the world
when there was a high level of volcanism
and what that did and the
tectonic plate movements
and how ultimately we have a
biosphere like we have today
that's suitable for life,
he says ingenuity triumphed
and the danger was overcome
not in the human way but
in the flexible Gaian way
by adapting to change and
converting a murderous intruder
into a powerful friend.
So you see, Gaia is active and powerful
and all turning all things for good.
If Gaia exists, then she
now, by the end of the book,
Gaia has not it, it's she.
It's personified.
She is without doubt intelligent
in a limited sense at least.
You see where he's going with this?
He's gone from a purely mechanistic system
of energy transfer,
carbon sources and sinks
to a female entity.
It's a single organism and
is somewhat intelligent.
Now you wonder is this just metaphor?
Yeah?
>> Male student: I'm assuming
or I'm wondering is that,
is he getting this thing...
Is he relaying it to a she
because of the Greek goddess Gaia?
>> He chose the name Gaia
because of the Greek goddess, exactly.
Exactly.
And he moves in his book,
I think deliberately, from it to she
because he wants it to
have a certain personality.
He wants to personify
it as a female entity.
He doesn't quite deify it,
but his followers quickly did.
>> Male student: Is this very similar
to the whole Mother Earth?
>> Yeah, exactly, that's what it becomes.
It's what it becomes.
I'll spare you more quotes.
Well, maybe not.
Let me read you another
one here from Lovelock.
The concept of Mother Earth,
or as the Greeks called
her long ago, Gaia,
has been widely held throughout history
and has been the basis of a
belief which still coexists
with the great religions.
Ancient belief and modern
knowledge effused emotionally
in the awe with which
astronauts with their own eyes
and we, by indirect vision,
have seen the earth revealed
in all its shining beauty
against the deep darkness of space.
Some of us are old enough to remember
when Apollo 8 went to the moon.
And that first picture they sent back
that now is a classic poster from NASA,
the blue marble picture?
I actually had tears in my eyes
when I saw that on
television the first time.
Some of you old enough to remember that?
Were you awestruck at that?
And Frank Borman and James Lovell
and I can't remember
the third crewmen there
were just awestruck.
And that was one of, in
another book Lovelock says
seeing that was one of the motives
for developing his theory.
Yet this feeling, however strong,
does not prove that Mother Earth lives.
Like a religious belief, it
is scientifically untestable
and therefore incapable in its own context
of further rationalization.
So what he's going to ask
for is he's gonna give
a very powerful description of Gaia
and then say, but I haven't
proved there is a single thing
called Gaia, but you have to believe it
like a religious conversion.
That led to things like the
Lindisfarne Association.
And this is from their website,
Lindisfarne is an association
of individuals and groups
around the world devoted to
the study and realization
of a new planetary culture.
Seeking for the sacred in all forms
of human activity and culture,
members of the association
share the following goals:
the spiritual transformation
of individual consciousness.
We've all got to become
spiritual like Oprah, I guess,
or Deepak Chopra or something like that.
The realization of the inner harmony
of the great universal
religions are all the same,
just different roads to the same thing.
The resacralization, this is where I got
the name for this...
Well, not just me, others call
the resacralization ethic.
The resacralization of the relations
between nature and culture
through the development
of an appropriate technology
for a meta industrial culture
and the illumination of
the spiritual dimension
of the world order.
Okay, this is their website.
Now they disbanded in 2009
as an official organization,
but their fellows still meet once a year.
And if you wanna look for them on the web,
you'd be surprised at some of the people
that are members, that are
fellows of this organization.
Sort of the idea of searching
for a higher consciousness
so that we can recognize our unity
with Mother Earth, with Gaia.
And it gets weirder.
You find posters like this.
Maybe you don't go in
those kinds of stores.
[audience chuckling]
This is a website,
Gaia is named after the
Greek earth goddess.
And down at the bottom, Gaia is so great
that she can recover from
any disaster if given time.
She can, you see.
She is great.
She can't be endangered
by the unhealthy ways
that humans treat her, but
humans can be in danger
by the way she reacts.
So it's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
And then you find things like this.
Beautiful earth mother
is perfect for your altar
or your home.
Take a trip to Sedona, Arizona
and you can find this stuff.
The strange thing here, what
Lovelock did in the context
of the New Age movement and
the cultural transformations
of the '60s and '70s was provide
environmentalists and feminists
and Wiccans and American Buddhists
who are nothing like
real Buddhists and so on,
he provided them with this image,
and he's very coy whether or not
he really believes Gaia
is a real thing or not
or just a model.
He's very coy about that.
But he's provided them with this image
and especially by calling it she
is something that ecofeminists,
there really is a strand of
writing called ecofeminism
that they can latch on to Mother Earth,
goddess Mother Earth.
Now I think that the reason
that an awful lot of Christians
have a knee-jerk reaction against any kind
of environmental ethic is either
the extremes of the biocentric ethic,
that there ought to be a great
dieback of the human species,
or this kind of resacralization.
What? You're interested
in environmental ethics?
You mean Mother Earth?
You wanna worship the goddess?
Well of course not.
But there is that knee-jerk reaction.
Theologically, I don't have anything
that I need to say to you, do I,
about how anti-Christian this is.
Questions, comments about this so far?
Now you may think that
I've been cherry-picking,
looking for nice, easy, easy to criticize
approaches to environmental ethics.
I really haven't.
These are the four major approaches.
And an anthology like this
will have articles from all four.
It'll have the Gaian approach
where nature is sacred,
the biocentric approach
where all life is valuable,
or an ecocentric approach
like Ralston takes,
or a pure pragmatic approach,
there's no value in nature
except its value to us.
And those are really the
four that are out there.
All four are seriously flawed.
They leave us with these questions.
How many of you have heard of
this Gaia hypothesis before?
Is this a new idea?
You have heard of it or...
No?
Believe me, it's pretty common.
It may not be common here, but
go to Santa Cruz or Berkeley
or Boulder or Amherst or
Cambridge Mass and you'll find it.
>> Male student: What do they say
about the rest of the universe?
Does that ignore it and this is just--
>> Yeah, it's probably ignored.
Yeah, largely it's ignored.
I mean, we'll all stuff of star dust.
They'll say things like that.
But Gaia doesn't have much to do with
the exoplanet search
or anything like that.
Okay, remaining questions.
Do individual living organisms
or species or ecosystems
have moral rights?
I alluded to this at the beginning.
Now Taylor would say in
the biocentric ethic,
yes they do simply because they're alive.
But he failed to give
us a grounding for that.
The fourth point, if you
look back in your notes
of his four points of a biocentric ethic,
we should just accept
as a cardinal principle
that humans were no
different, no different value.
And if we have no different value
than anything else that's alive,
then everything else has the same value.
If we have moral value, then they do too.
If they have rights,
we have duties to them.
But how do we exercise those duties?
We have to eat.
We have to breathe.
It always amuses me to see people
that wanna be carbon neutral.
[chuckles]
One of our faculty members,
a chemist at Biola,
his degree is from MIT
and he has a friend,
classmate from MIT who is in San Francisco
and is striving for a
carbon-neutral lifestyle.
And it's incredibly difficult for this guy
to reduce his travel.
And he ultimately has to buy
all kinds of carbon offsets.
He has to pay for carbon offsets
because he can't live carbon neutral.
In fact if you die,
you're not carbon neutral.
I mean, you're still gonna decay.
You better decay anaerobically
or else you're gonna put greenhouse gas.
So what is our duty,
where do we draw the line?
None of these have yet given
us action-guiding principles.
The biocentric ethic says it's our duty
to treat every living thing
the same as we treat ourselves.
It's a deontological ethic.
But what exactly are those duties?
What does it mean to treat
every living thing the same?
The ecocentric ethic of Ralston
is more of a consequentialist ethic,
and perhaps it could also
be considered a virtue ethic
because we ought to value what's valuable,
a virtuous person values what is valuable.
But the problem that one of you mentioned
was how do we decide the degrees of value?
Just because someone else values
it, do I need to value it?
And two, do I need to value
it to the same degree?
And certainly, the resacralization ethic
doesn't help us at all here.
In fact, Lovelock says, contrary
to an awful lot of people
that also push a Gaia ethic,
Lovelock says there is no ethic.
He says Gaia is Gaia.
Gaia will do what she ought
to do to preserve herself.
Whatever we do doesn't matter.
Gaia will preserve herself.
But others try to draw
some kind of a moral
from the fact that we owe
a duty to this goddess.
And of course, the vast majority of people
are gonna have a great difficulty
with that kind of a view.
So I don't think we yet have
any question or any answers
to how we ground these
kinds of rights and duties.
And so far, we haven't been
able to ground rights and duties
either of, with respect
to future generations.
I would sure like my grandchildren
to be able to visit Yosemite
and see it the way I see it.
Last summer, my wife and I visited
the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
We hadn't been there since our honeymoon.
And as you may know, there's some concern
at the Grand Canyon, both
with noise pollution,
all the tourist helicopters flying over
and they've tried to
restrict the airspace some
so that you get quiet by the Grand Canyon.
But there's also a couple
of large power plants
several hundred miles away
that cause air pollution
if the winds are right.
And when we were there, we had a good day.
You could see from the North Rim
clear across to the South Rim.
But there are days where you can't see
from the north to the south or vice versa.
I would sure like my
grandkids to be able to see
the splendor of the Grand Canyon.
But do I have a duty to my
grandchildren or their children,
a duty that would entail trying to limit
the emissions of those power plants?
They don't exist, how
could they have rights?
How could they have a claim against me?
How could we give them their due?
None of these systems give
us solid answers to this.
In anticipation, here's
where I'm gonna go tomorrow.
God as creator is owner.
God owns the universe.
The earth is the Lord's
and the fullness thereof,
the psalmist said.
So as owner, what is valuable to him
ought to be valuable to me.
Then we can see in Genesis 1,
in the blessing to
humanity to have dominion,
subdue and rule, we can see there
God conferring on humanity a royal duty
to subdue and rule and have dominion.
And we'll unpack those words.
In Genesis 2, when God
put Adam in the garden,
he told him to guard it and to work it.
And those words are priestly words.
So there's a royal duty
and a priestly duty
conferred on humanity
with respect to creation.
But ultimately then we bring
in the concept of stewardship.
The steward works for the master.
The steward values what the master values
and the steward manages the estate
as the master would if he were present.
So I may not have a duty
to future generations
but I have a duty to God
with respect to future generations.
I may not have a duty to
an endangered species,
but I may have a duty to God
with respect to endangered species.
So both values and duties can
be grounded theocentrically
in a way that none of these
four common approaches can.
To me, that's exciting
because what I want to for myself,
I wanted to find some kind
of an environmental ethic
whereby I could say to
people you ought to recycle.
You know, you ought to take
care of the nature around you.
You ought to worry
about the natural world.
But naturalistically, I
couldn't come up with an ethic
that would do that.
Theistically I can with no
pictures of drowning polar bears
or belching smokestacks.
Okay, so that's what we're gonna go.
[uplifting instrumental music]
>> Presenter: Biola
University offers a variety
of biblically-centered degree programs
ranging from business to ministry
to the arts and sciences.
Visit biola.edu to find out how Biola
could make a difference in your life.
