By Matthew Mausner – Human civilization has always been a risky enterprise. Archaeologists have found the ruins of over 100 civilizations that have collapsed, some with hardly a trace, over the last 5,000 or more years. Most of these collapses have happened because people caused environmental degradation, damaging their local environment and ecosystem to the point where they could no longer support human life.
How Vulnerable is Civilization?
Today, for the first time, we have a truly global civilization—and for the first time, we are at risk of causing such vast environmental degradation, to Earth’s entire ecosphere, that all human life could become unsustainable.
What is environmental degradation?
It is any negative change or disturbance to the environment. This includes impacts like air and water pollution, wildlife extinction, deforestation, biodiversity loss, overfishing, ocean acidification, and desertification.
What is natural and not human-caused?
When volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes or other natural events destroy ecosystems or civilizations, we generally don’t perceive the destruction to be in the same category as human-generated disasters.
Holistic awareness of Risk
Faith traditions have always had a deep awareness of human and environmental vulnerability to “divine decisions” such as seasonal rains or droughts, that can save or destroy critical crops and drinking water supplies.
Self-destructive behavior
But it feels qualitatively different when we actually know such damage is a self-inflicted wound—when we actually do have enough knowledge, understanding, scientific evidence and data to recognize that our own actions and habits as a human collective are increasing our risk of local and global disasters.
It’s a moral view of the environment
In other words, what we may analytically describe as “environmental degradation” is really a moral judgment on ourselves and the disasters we ourselves are causing.
Collective human actions have indeed destroyed entire regions. The ancient city-state Sumer caused part of the farmland in Mesopotamia to become salt flats inhospitable to life. The Romans deforested much of the Mediterranean basin. The early people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) cut down trees until their forests were decimated, as Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse.
We do not know whether all these civilizations had awareness that they could change, or choose different resource use patterns, that would have been less destructive and nurtured their environment.
Some premodern civilizations have made consciously sustainable choices. Japan in the 1600s wisely stopped deforestation and reforested. Europe in medieval times worked out a system to avoid exhausting the soil by rotating periods of active crop planting with fallow periods of no planting. Native Americans in pre-colonial New England managed elaborate systems to maintain forests and wild game.
Is environmental degradation noticeable?
Most humans have a difficult time noticing environmental degradation, especially when it’s gradual. One measure of a society’s wisdom is its ability to monitor and respond to larger and longer-term trends in their environment. These matter especially where they affect subsistence, and all the more when human actions are shaping the dangerous arc of change.
Several factors make noticing and taking action more difficult when human activities cause gradual and devastating impact. In the “tragedy of the commons,” many different people use a “common” resource without coordinating their various uses. Each person has an incentive to use as much as possible for his or her own success or survival. The phrase comes from English history when everyone could graze their cattle on common land.
Other examples today are the overfishing of various fish and seafood species in the ocean, and excessive use of scarce resources such as water, whether from the Aral Sea or lakes in California. If each individual continues to use as much as possible, a common resource may be depleted beyond any ability to replenish or even maintain itself, and may collapse.
Entitlement and Environmental Degradation
This dynamic of competing uses—and sense of entitlement—helps explain much of the environmental degradation happening today. Whether through mining, fishing, industrial agriculture, or a hundred other ways humans are extracting or using the resources around us, many different people—from many nations—are doing similar activities in a largely uncoordinated way.
Since the major technologies of the industrial and tech revolution have spread to almost all societies on earth, the impacts are now global. When “tragedies of the commons” degraded English sheep pastures, decimated the Newfoundland cod population, drove the passenger pigeon to extinction, or shrank the Aral Sea, these catastrophes were still local degradation. Now we are faced with global impacts, and the dangers are increasing exponentially.
Pollution and Environmental Degradation
Foremost among unsustainable human activities is pollution: our factories, cars, planes, stoves, ships, and small consumer product industries are built on a process of waste, often extracting and burning fossil fuels, and emitting toxic gases and liquids. From the “tails” of coal mines to the oil spills and plastic garbage that find their way into our rivers and ocean, to the burned fuel emissions that fill our skies, any of these can cause visible devastation to the land, water and air on which we all depend. West Virginia mountains and rivers are toxic and devastated after 50 years of a coal mine.
Some of these impacts seem primarily local. We have seen how sea and coast life suffered in Alaska after the Exxon Valdez spill and in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon spill. Yet ocean pollution does not stay in one place or only in one layer of ocean water. How much of this pollution washes far from its source?
The Beginning of the Environmental Movement
From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the environmental movement was birthed and centered around bringing people’s attention to pollution. Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring raised the alarm about the pesticide DDT and how it devastated bird populations, which fed on contaminated fish in DDD contaminated bodies. Other horrific pollution events included the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland literally burning from chemical pollutants. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) often used in aerosol sprays were discovered to be making a hole in the protective ozone layer of our atmosphere (a different environmental impact than global warming).
The environmental movement was able to raise awareness of human impacts, and major policy changes resulted, including the 1970 establishment of the EPA, passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in 1972, and a global ban on CFC’s by the early 1980s which successfully stopped destruction of the ozone layer.
Humans consume things in nature in order to stay alive, and that consumption has massively increased over the past centuries. Most of us now personally use at least some electric power every day, and the web of our global distribution system requires more and more use of power worldwide. Powering our world from purely renewable sources like wind and solar energy would take a massive contraction and change in the way we choose to live. Weaning ourselves from fossil and nuclear fuels is proving extremely difficult.
However, for many eons people have been aware of animal populations rising and falling, of climates affecting the crops we gather and plant, and of soil use affecting crop yields. In short, we have become aware of the long-term consequences of our actions. But making real change is not easy, even when there’s a clear understanding of the actions that would degrade the environment and deplete resources.
Faith Wisdom and Environmental Sustainability
Wise cultures have noticed the patterns and tendencies that lead to environmental degradation, and proactively taken steps or practiced techniques to ensure continuity and sustainability of their people’s existence in their environment. Often this wisdom is embedded in faith traditions rather than encoded as scientific knowledge. And today, science is underscoring ancient faith wisdom.
The Bible, in the Book of Leviticus, famously sets aside every seventh year as a sabbatical year—to stop planting and plowing, and to let the land of Israel regenerate itself. (Eco Bible: Volume One: An Ecological Commentary on Genesis and Exodus relates to a range of similar themes.)
Christians in Europe, inspired by that concept, developed “fallow” farming practices that rotated fields, allowed some land to be “wild” and replenish itself and its nutrients, and notably prevented European agriculture from exhausting soils in the Middle Ages.
Modern Industrial Environmental Degradation
Can we bring such concepts into modern industrial practices? Obviously, agriculture needs to be guided by such techniques, as even with the massive industrial inputs, or even because of them, soils are at risk of degradation and exhaustion. See, for example, The Atlantic’s analysis of the “phosphorus problem” in regards to agriculture and fertilizer, and the possibility of phosphorus supplies being exhausted in the coming decades.
By their very natures, mining and fossil fuel use are not sustainable. We do not put as much carbon back into the Earth as we take out in the forms of oil, natural gas, and oil, and such resources take hundreds of millions of years to accumulate.
But the momentum of our economic growth ‘s natural resources overuse is so intense, we can hardly imagine even slowing down, let alone stopping, this impact on the environment. Air pollution is a tragedy of the commons times a thousand. The scars of strip mines will remain for millennia. Oil spills and pollution from carbon emissions have effects that have not yet been fully calculated. The “Anthropocene” or “Holocene” epoch—our own times in which humans are having massive impact—may have already degraded our environment beyond the point of no return. But here at the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, we believe that we must always have hope for the future. For example, click on this link for some air pollution solutions we can start implementing today.
The Power of Faith-based Environmental Action
Could faith-based ideas and movements inspire and mobilize where scientific-based protest and action have not succeeded? Could ancient concepts like the sabbatical year help inject an ethos of sustainability into industrial civilization, as it once revolutionized agriculture?
Our industrial and political leaders have failed us in many ways. Technologies are introduced at a dizzying rate, and are basically considered innocent until proven guilty—which sometimes means devastating the environment before we even become aware of the dangers from any given new technique, technology, chemical or type of pollution or impact that brings great environmental degradation.
Religions mostly got their initial footholds as a response to various forms of crisis, social, political, or even environmental. Connecting spirituality and sustainability could help to renew the relevance of religion in our times, drawing on ancient understandings of an interdependent web of life and a deeper unity of creation. We can celebrate and appreciate the environment, rather than exploit and destroy it.
The fact that we have made environmental degradation part of our language and consciousness suggests that we can, indeed, address this decline. The very definition of the phrase implies an awareness that human impacts can be detrimental and that we can make a moral judgment on ourselves and choose to change. Religious belief has tremendous potential to promote increased environmental action now.
Religions have often been perceived as following rather than leading environmentalism. However, the seeds of moral environmental leadership were always there, in the Biblical injunction to be stewards of the Earth, in the insistence on sabbatical years for agricultural protection, in the holistic view of the world, that today can incorporate deep scientific understanding. Time is of the essence. If we reassert the deep power of our moral and ethical frameworks in guiding our collective actions, it’s still possible to save the commons and stop the environmental degradation our current global civilization is causing, so that future generations everywhere can not only survive, but thrive.
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