Jake Meador titles Chapter 7 The Earth is Our Mother: On Christianity, Land, and Animals. He proceeds in two parts. First, he engages in a quick fly-over of a biblical text and some ecclesiastical writings to justify using the expression "Mother Earth." Second, he presents two concepts and an example to substantiate his conclusion that "Christian ecology is merely Christian neighborliness [hospitality?] applied to the land and to animals."
Meador's locus classicus for Mother Earth is the first half of Job's lament recorded at Job 1:21: "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither ..."
So who is the "mother" Job is thinking of when he says this? It can't be his biological mother because he won't return to her when he dies. The American theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards has the answer. Edwards suggests that the earth is "the common mother of mankind." The "mother," Job is referring to, Edwards says, is "the bowels of his mother earth, out of which every man is made." God is our Father, Edwards says, and the earth our mother.
I will leave it to others to evaluate the strength of this exegetical thread. For my part, the biblical doctrines of creation (Genesis 1.1-2.25), preservation (Genesis 9.1-7), and several of the specific laws mediated by Moses are sufficient to frame an understanding of humanity's duties toward the non-human aspects of the created order. One step removed, natural law teaches that we have many more duties than rights, and a duty to use the created order coram deo is among them. (I would commend readers to Jonathan Burnside, God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible 145-177 (OUP 2011)) for a more thorough consideration of the biblical record.) Of course, conceptualizing specific duties to the earth and animals is much more difficult.
Meador moves from the picture (or metaphor, if you prefer) of "Mother Earth" to application through two principles: a willingness to be obstructed and an ethic of kindly use. "If we are to recover an authentic relationship to the planet, then we must let reality chasten and refine our own ambition and desire." Meador identifies two obstructions Christians should be willing to endure: willingness to spend more on our food to undercut the abuses of factory farming, and to sacrifice economic opportunity for the sake of nature or neighbor.
If we're willing to set aside the idol of convenience and allow ourselves to be obstructed in small ways in order to lay hold of some greater good, we will quickly begin to see the possibilities for living a life more closely bound to the land, more attentive to its needs and its life.
The ethic of kindly use is more diffuse and seems to be summed up in the notion of reciprocity. Reciprocity here means "that we ought to allow the world to act on us as much as we act on it". In other words, the created order is a subject (of God's beneficence) as well as an object (of human dominion).
Meador's cites an application of the principles of voluntary obstruction and kindly use: a Bruderhof community in Australia. Grazing in the absence of predators had overtaxed the dry land rendering it virtually useless for any purpose. Concentrating cattle with moveable fences solved the problem and returned the land to fertility.
I find little with which to quibble in this chapter. Jumping from high-order principles to a single application, however, leaves out the hard intermediate steps of developing policies and rules. Such steps are especially fraught in an age of ever-expanding civil government and ever-more powerful corporate interests. To be sure, such was not the purpose of Meador's slim book but it leaves this reader dubious about the what can realistically be expected.
An aside: in this chapter the phrase "revolutionary story" replaces "Whiteness" as the epitome of all that's gone wrong in modernity. The world-wide spread of the objectification of persons, places, and things as well as industrial technology helps make sense of this subtle shift in naming our contemporary malady. Of course, it also raises the question of whether Whiteness was ever the best term for it.
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