Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that this is the reason that religious leaders have an important role.
“There are millions of people who don't listen to politicians and who are
skeptical of science, but who will listen to their clergy,” she notes. 22
Faith communities own between 7 and 8 percent of the habitable land
surface of the planet, run (or are involved in) half the world's schools,
and control more than 7 percent of international fi nancial investments. 23
They can be powerful political players in environmental protection and
remediation.
Due in large part to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and
the success of science in understanding the physics, chemistry, biology,
and geology of the world we live in, the earth has come to be viewed as
an impersonal machine, with only humans as meaningful creatures. Our
culture seems to have lost touch with the view held by indigenous peoples
that nature is alive and sacred and that we humans are an integral part
of it all. Anyone who considers it to be so is often treated with ridicule
or suspicion.
In the words of John Mohawk, Native American chief:
The natural world is our Bible. We don't have chapters and verses; we have trees
and fi sh and animals. . . . The Indian sense of natural law is that nature informs
us and it is our obligation to read nature as you would a topic, to feel nature as
you would a poem, to touch nature as you would yourself, to be part of that
and step into its cycles as much as you can. 24
Native Americans view environmental destruction as a sin.
The modern world's ethical framework appears to be slowly expand-
ing and will eventually include the total environment. This framework
affi rms the right of all resources, including plants, animals, and earth
materials, to continued existence and, at least in certain locations,
continued existence in a natural state.
Expanding on John Stuart Mill's view of progress, Arnold Toynbee
once noted that the measure of a civilization's growth is not its capacity
to build empires or raise living standards, but the law of progressive sim-
plifi cation: the capacity to spend more and more time and energy on the
nonmaterial side of life. 25 The world's religions have the capacity to chal-
lenge their institutions and adherents to make Toynbee's vision a reality.
The Ideal Environmental Life
Because of their powerful brains, humans have the ability to severely
affect the functioning of the environment, often to the detriment not
only of the organisms they share the planet with, but to themselves as
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