Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul: Aquinas, Whitehead, and the Metaphysics of Creation

Introduction

Introduction This is a work in ecological ethics. For many people, the need for such an ethic has become pressing in our time, yet demonstrating this need can be a surprisingly delicate business. To be sure, one can cite an endless list of existing and looming ecological problems. Let me provide a representative , but by no means exhaustive, list. If today is a typical one on our planet, human beings will destroy 160 square miles of tropical rainforest, create 72 square miles of desert, add 78 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, erode 71 million tons of topsoil, and increase our population by 233,000. In the course of a year the numbers will become mindnumbing : between 26 and 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere, a total population increase of 85 million, an area of tropical rainforest the size of Michigan lost. The current rate of human-induced extinctions is estimated to be 1,000 times the background rate. This tremendous loss of other life, this simplification of the rich diversity of creation , very likely places us in the midst of one of the great extinctions that have struck our planet only two or three times since life evolved here. The rapid increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” almost certainly means that the global temperature will rise over the coming decades with catastrophic effects for some of earth’s inhabitants , human and non-human alike. In addition, our use of nitrogen, especially in fertilizers, threatens to overwhelm the natural nitrogen cycle so vital to the proper growth of plants. Human modifications to the natural environment have not only changed the structure of ecosystems (for example , which plants or animals exist, or what portion of the land is “developed ”) but also, perhaps more fundamentally, the very processing and 1 2 Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul functioning of these systems. In the past fifty years, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous , and water cycling have changed more rapidly than at any other period in recorded human history. The facts and statistics are alarming—but the term “mind-numbing” may be more to the point. We hear the numbers and read the reports about the threat of some ecological problem or other, and we learn simply to filter them out and go on with our lives. After all, the issues seem too large and remote. Besides, we have more pressing problems—bills to pay, sick children, an exam to prepare for, a migraine headache, two reports due by tomorrow, and so on. Macro-scale ecological problems, and the vast majority of more regional problems, simply do not affect our lives as concretely and immediately as do our other concerns. But as we deal with those problems in our daily lives, we contribute to the macro-level problems described above. Our use of fossil fuels to power our increasingly large vehicles and houses, our longer commutes from far-flung suburbs, and our consumption of processed food grown or raised across the globe with tremendous amounts of fertilizers and pesticides all leave an ecological wake, a trail of effects, which is as complex as it is damaging. In this work, I presuppose that ideas have efficacy; they make a difference in how we live. One complex of ideas that many of us appear to hold as a background belief (that is, without explicitly articulating it) is that human beings are separate from the rest of creation. According to this view, we have a separate destiny (whether worldly or otherworldly) from the rest of nature, which exists to serve us in our pursuit of that destiny. This view of reality rests easily with a consumerist culture in which values such as ease and gratification become the defining metaphors of “the good life.” Once we see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, there is no need to attend to the connection between our consumption of resources and the effects of this consumption on the rest of the natural world. To be sure, it is more difficult to justify this resource use in light of the tremendous want of much of humanity. But this problem is usually answered by the argument that the living standard for all of humanity can be made richer through the further exploitation of nature. This claim reflects the “rising tide raises all boats” mentality, in which the rising tide is the flow of resources from the natural economy to the human economy...