I HAVE BEEN READING . . .

"Most of us will see the world in new ways after

reading this book. "
Belle Miller McMaster

Earth Community, Earth Ethics

Larry L. Rasmussen
Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996
366 pp. $30.

-he number of books exploring the theological and ethical dimen-

sions of the ecological crisis continue to burgeon. And for good reason.
More and more we are realizing that the future of life on the earth is
threatened. If you only have time to read one book on this matter,
choose Larry L. Rasmussen's Earth Community, Earth Ethics.

Here's why. First, the book is eminently readable and thought-pro-

Belle Miller McMaster is the Director of Advanced Studies,

Candler School of Theology of Emory University, Atlanta.
From 1987 to 1993 she served as Director of the Social Justice
and Peacemaking Ministry Unit, Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.).

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voking. You will find fresh perspectives all through it. Second,
Rasmussen has read widely in related fields and brings this wealth of
knowledge to bear on the issues in a way that a layperson can under-
stand. Third, Rasmussen speaks from the perspective of a committed
Christian and is at the same time in creative dialog with other faith tra-
ditions. Finally, this book is intentionally a book of hope, not a book that
leads to despair. At the same time, Rasmussen faces straight-on the seri-
ous consequences of life as we live it on the earth today.

To begin with, Rasmussen does not use the language of environ-

mental or ecological crisis, as I have done for shorthand above. He talks
about earth and its distress. The reason, he says, is because environment
means that which surrounds us and is separate from us, while he wants
us to recognize that we are part of the world:

We are an expression of it; it is an expression of us. We are made of it;

we eat, drink, and breathe it. And someday, when dying day comes, we
will each return the favor and begin our role as a long, slow meal for a
million little critters. Earth is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
This is not "environment" so much as the holy mystery of creation,
made for and by all earth's creatures together, (page xii)

Furthermore, Rasmussen speaks of humankind and otherkind

throughout to make clearer the interrelatedness of life on earth. Words,
symbols, myths, and ideas matter, Rasmussen both argues and demon-
strates in this book. His thesis is simple and, of course, not new:

Our most basic impulses and activities must now be measured by one
stringent criterion—their contribution to an earth ethic and their advo-
cacy of sustainable earth community. Fidelity to earth is the plea here,
(page xii)

The book is divided into three sections: earth scan, earth faith, and
earth action.

Earth Scan
The first part is an analysis of what is happening to the earth and
how we are responding as explicated by history, science, economics,
and policy studies. While such an analysis could be dull, in this book it
is not. "Earth's is a slow womb," says Rasmussen, building on Vikram
Seth's metaphor. "Life came late, with trauma," Rasmussen continues
(page 25). To illustrate, he borrows a device from Robert Overman.

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Imagine the saga of earth as a set of volumes. Skip the first two-
thirds of the universe and begin with earth itself. There are ten volumes
with 500 pages per volume. Each page of each book covers a million
years on earth. Life first appears in volume 8. Humankind appears on
page 499 of volume 10. The last two words on the very last page tell the
human story from the beginning of civilization—6,000 years ago—to
the present. Rasmussen builds on this image through the book, but here
he makes two points about its meaning. We humans, he says,

are part and parcel of nature as womb and lifegiver.... While humans
contributed very little to life, on land, in the water, in the air, we are
utterly dependent upon the rest for ongoing life, (page 27)

But even more startling than our embeddedness in earth as our only
home is the last syllable of the last word of the last volume, in which
"the process of slowly closing down major life-systems began at human
hands" (page 28). Rasmussen does not want to rush through this crisis
to explore what to do immediately, a natural instinct on our part.
Rather, he urges us to understand more fully the nature of nature and
our failure to deal with it rightly in our present way of life.

He notes four principles of life:

• contingency: everything in the natural order comes and then goes
• differentiation: nature has a bias for the novel and uses it for sur-
vival and development
• autopoiesis: nature's capacity to self-organize
• communion: the internal relatedness and interdependence of cre-
ation, with reciprocity and affiliation manifest everywhere.

Language shapes culture and us as well. Rasmussen wants us to change

our "apartheid" mind-set that wrongly sees nature as other and divides
the world into human and nonhuman. Even our rational and moral
powers, he argues, are not alien additives but nature's home-grown
powers. He also notes the false illusion of treating historical time as
human time, a view that characterizes virtually all of philosophy, sci-
ence, and theology prominent in the West since World War II. Nature
has become, in modernity, only an instrument with a variety of uses.
Rasmussen argues that we do not live on nature as on a stage that
serves as the grand prop for history. In fact, we do not live on earth, we
live as part of earth.

Most of modernity's thinking is Western. Rasmussen notes that,

while Europeans are not the only expansionist people, they were the

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first to master the ocean currents and winds and stitch the world
together. Two great swarmings of Europeans took place. The first was
the European population growth from 1750 to 1930, the highest in
recorded history. The second was the European emigration of 1820 to
1930, the largest recorded emigration. The significance of these facts is
twofold. First, the West simply took for granted this greatest aberration
in demographic history. Second, the West never noticed that creating
neo-Europes around the world was not only sociological imperialism
but also ecological imperialism as well. Since about 1450, in the face of
this invasion, most of the agricultural systems of the Third World have
experienced gradual genetic collapse. Even now, few are contemplating
what this collapse means for creation and its people.

We are now entering the world's fourth great revolution, Rasmussen

notes. The first three were the agricultural, the industrial, and the infor-
mational revolutions lasting from roughly 10,000 B.C.E. until the present.
They all reorganized society so as to produce more effectively. The
fourth great revolution has not yet come to pass—but must, for sur-
vival's sale. It is the ecological revolution; its purpose must be to reor-
ganize society to produce without destructiveness.

Rasmussen takes up the phrase "integrity of creation" from the

World Council of Churches to describe the goal for this next revolution.
The integrity of creation has six dimensions, he notes:
• The integrity of creation describes the integral functioning of end-
less natural transactions throughout the biosphere and even the
geosphere.
• It refers to nature's restless self-organizing dynamism.
• It refers to earth's treasure as a one-time endowment.
• It assumes the integral and causal relation of social and environ-
mental justice.
• It names a divine source and an intrinsic dignity and goodness of
creation.
• Its ethical meaning calls for respect for difference and the inde-
pendent goodness within all of creation.

Rasmussen locates the major violation of the integrity of creation in

a huge mismatch between the Big Economy (the present globalizing
human economy) and the Great Economy (the economy of nature),
(page 111)

The fundamental reality is that there can be no economic order that

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is not totally dependent upon earth's ecosystems and the biosphere and
the geosphere as a whole. The problem is that—surprisingly enough
when you think about it—economics simply does not take account of
the economics of nature; biological life is absent from economic's calcu-
lations even about such matters as rational choice theory and efficient
markets. There is an eerie "otherworldliness," a disregard of earth's
rhythms and requirements that is strangely docetic, says Rasmussen.
Drawing on phrases used by William E. Rees and Mathis Wackernagel,
Rasmussen concludes that this
"ecological empty economic theory" . . . deflects attention from the fact
that the present human economy is becoming "increasingly coincident
with the ecosphere" as economic expansion continues apace. . . .
"Globalization of the economy means globalization of the ecological cri-
sis." (page 125)

Sustainability: economically viable,

socially equitable, and
environmentally renewable.
Rasmussen has a helpful discussion of sustainability, the concept
central to his discussion. He rightly notes that the World Council of
Churches has been a leader in insisting from the early 1970s that dis-
cussions on development must focus on sustainability. The Council has
also insisted that power in society must be coupled with discussions of
sustainability because they are interrelated dimensions of a common
matrix. This approach is very different from that taken by the United
Nations, business, finance, and Northern nation-state governments that
talk about global economic growth qualified by environmental sensi-
tivity, or green globalism. The WCC, joined by the churches and other
nongovernmental organizations, talks about sustainability in terms of
local and regional communities that are economically viable, socially
equitable, and environmentally renewable. One of these approaches
begins with economies and their growth and the other with communi-
ties and their growth. Sustainability, as Rasmussen—with the NCC and
other NGOs—defines it,

is the capacity of social and natural systems to survive and thrive

together, indefinitely, (page 168)

Scientists have now concluded that "sustainability is inherently dynam-

ic and significantly unpredictable" (page 157). Thus we cannot make
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confident human prediction over the long term about the carrying
capacity of any particular ecosystem or nature as a whole and must rec-
ognize the likelihood of human error and the unexpected in nature.

These facts lead Rasmussen to some conclusions:

• Sustainability means thinking sideways and around corners, not just
up and down in hierarchies, or forward and back in our usual sense
of time and history.
• Sustainability thinking means latitude for both error and adaptability,
(page 168)

Then he draws out the moral norms of and for sustainability: participa-
tion, sufficiency, equity, accountability, material simplicity and spiritual
richness, responsibility, and subsidiarity ("problems should be resolved
at the closest level at which decisions can be taken and implemented
effectively" [page 172]).

Earth Faith
In the book's second section the author seeks to uncover "renew-
able moral-spiritual energy" that will help us find our bearings anew
in the face of the challenges of sustainability (page 177). His way of
doing this is to highlight symbols that aid the imagination's quest for
the highest levels of comprehensive knowledge and that foster moral
discernment. He believes, as do many other thinkers today, that peo-
ple see and live through symbols; rational scientific truths do not stir
our being and cause us to choose sacrifice. Believing in the creative
power of symbols, Rasmussen argues also for a less common aspect of
symbols, their capacity to carry a moral vision and substance. He
notes that hope pervades the chapters of this section—not hope in
progress, but the hope that has religious wellsprings. He quotes the
marvelous line from St. Augustine:

Hope has two lovely daughters, anger and courage. Anger, so that
what must not be, shall not be. Courage, so that what must be, shall be.
(page 179)
He explores two old ecumenical symbols that have crossed virtually all
religions and cultures: the tree of life and the gifts of darkness. For both
of these symbols his discussion draws on a rich variety of sources to
help us glimpse the life-giving connections with all of the earth. I select
only one of Rasmussen's examples for each symbol.

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About the tree of life, he quotes from Alice Walker's The Color Purple
[New York: Pocket Books, 1982]. Shug is explaining to Celie how she got rid
of God as "the old white man" and found the Spirit and new life in so
doing:
My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds.
Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like
a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part
of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm
would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house.
I knew just what it was. (Walker, page 178; Rasmussen, page 203)

Rasmussen argues for a less common

aspect of symbols, their capacity to
carry a moral vision and substance.
About the gifts of darkness, Rasmussen quotes Langston Hughes in
"Dream Variation":

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me— . . .
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me. (Rasmussen, pages 223-224)

Says Rasmussen,
New life always begins in darkness, in dark wombs or dark soil, even
dark tombs. New life is the gift of darkness, (page 226)

His point is that

because we get the symbols wrong, we get reality wrong. . . . Because
nature has been pictured as ever-regenerative, infinitely malleable, and
virtually inexhaustible, for example, and we a powerful species apart,
so much of that from and by which we live [the earth] has been
destroyed. Wrong pictures of reality can mean dreadful treatment of it.
(page 220)

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Next the author revisits Christian and Jewish traditions to ask

whether they can yet become genuine earth faiths. The tradition of stew-
ardship, most familiar to Protestants, he finds problematic for two rea-
sons. It masks a continuing homocentrism. It has also, say indigenous
people, been the ideology of the civilizers who spoke of subduing the
earth and included them. The positive side of the image of steward is that
he or she is the one entrusted with things precisely not his or her own:
Biblically, "the earth is the Lord's," and humans truly "own" nothing,
(page 236)

The symbol of partner attracts some as an alternative with other creatures

as co-siblings of creation in the drama of a shared life. The fact of human
power in so much of nature means that we are responsible in both sym-
bols to acknowledge our limits and take moral cognizance of otherkind.

Rasmussen notes that the tradition of sacramentalism, the traditions

of covenant and prophet, and the Hebrew accounts of creation and exo-
dus all have rich resources for an earth faith. The Bible's theology of life
yields four important terms for earth ethics: creation, justice, neighbor,
and mercy. Finally, Rasmussen turns to established Christian confes-
sional traditions to mine treasure for an earth faith. He focuses on the
Lutheran recasting of catholic themes, in particular the theology of the
cross. While this section covers some familiar territory, Rasmussen
recovers it with a freshness that clarifies anew the vivifying possibilities
of the ancient catholic themes in this context.

The final chapter in this section explores the resources of Dietrich

Bonhoeffer's life and writing for an earth faith. Rasmussen quotes, to
illustrate the resources of Bonhoeffer for our current earth crisis, from a
prison letter:
It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith.
. . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, prob-
lems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing
we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously,
not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with
Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is
how one becomes a human being and a Christian. (Bonhoeffer, letter of
July 21,1944, in Letters and Papers from Prison [New York: Macmillan, 1972],
pages 369-370; Rasmussen, page 316)

These familiar, powerful words of Bonhoeffer take on new meaning in

the context of earth's crisis.

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Earth Action
The final section of Earth Community, Earth Ethics is about what we
are to do in the face of the earth's distress. Rasmussen confesses the
modesty of the proposals he makes but argues that we must begin.
Believing that community rests at the heart of the problem, he describes
several communities that have an internal dynamism and have begun
to live in alternative ways:
• Kalundborg, Denmark, a small city, has developed an industrial
ecology that trades waste among industries in mutually beneficial
ways.
• Haymount in Virginia is a new community blending traditional
and high-tech features that will make the area more ecologically
viable after the town is finished than before it began.
• Common Bread, in South Minneapolis, part of the Community
Supported Agriculture and Subscription Farming movement, is
based on cooperation between a grower and a community of citi-
zens in a nearby city who purchase shares in a community farm.
• Natural Step, a movement in Sweden that includes local govern-
ments, corporations, and individuals, is working to achieve 100
percent recycling of metals.

They all begin at the right place,

with community participation and
ecological thinking.
None of these communities suffice as examples of sustainability,
Rasmussen acknowledges:

If we multiplied them ad infinitum, we would still have earth's distress,

(page 336)

But they all begin at the right place, with community participation and
ecological thinking, and illustrate subsidiarity. This ethical norm, which
he regards as central to sustainability, means massively deconstructing
much that is now globalized, especially food, shelter, livelihood, and
other needs that can be met on a community and regional basis.

Rasmussen emphasizes the enormity of the needed changes and the

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importance of imagination in envisioning alternative ways to live. He

concludes with a set of general principles that need to be institutional-
ized in our policies and our collective mind-set:
• Solutions grow from place.
• Ecological accounting informs design.
• Design should be done with nature.
• Everyone is a designer.
• Nature should be made visible, (page 342)

In the transition to sustainable community, he summarizes four key

points, congruent with those offered by David W. Orr:
• People are finite and fallible.
• A sustainable world can be put together only from the bottom up.
• The crucial knowledge is knowledge that coevolves from culture
and nature together in a given locale.
• Our design epistemologies must be compatible with the rest of
nature's. Learning to fit into nature's patterns is architectonic of all
else we would do. (page 343)

Larry Rasmussen has, in Earth Community, Earth Ethics, convincing-

ly reminded us and helped us understand more deeply the earth crisis
that we face. He has done this as well without numbing us with apoca-
lyptic doomsday warnings. The warnings are clearly there, but they are
coupled with a vision of hope for the future. Most of us will see the
world in new ways after reading this book. Perhaps most important of
all, we will see humans as part of a whole, not as separate from and bet-
ter than the earth:

This issue is sustaining power itself for a long and traumatic journey
toward . . . an order [based on "justice, peace, and the integrity of cre-
ation"]. The issue is the regular renewal of moral-spiritual and sociopsy-
chological energy in a long season of forced society-nature experimenta-
tion. The issue is bread for the journey, that is, faith, (page 351) W

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