For Earth’s Sake: Toward a Compassionate Ecology by Stephen Bede Scharper (review)

“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” What poet Seamus Heaney espoused in “Digging” (1966) is the heartfelt digging that Stephen Scharper is doing in For Earth’s Sake. This text is evocative, interdisciplinary, and grounded both in and of the Earth as he constructs an “anthropo-harmonic ethic” (181) of living and loving as human persons in an evolutionary world in crisis. This text is a mélange of newspaper columns interspersed with personal stories, investigative interviews, and analytic interdisciplinary explorations of the many dimensions of the intertwining plight of the planet and the poor. Scharper’s diversity of literary modalities is the matrix within which his “political theology of the environment” (61) develops, and it exemplifies how his use of “political” does not reflect a modern, emaciated vision of politics. Instead Scharper embraces the root polis within a planetary context that is struggling for justice, sustainability, and peace. His text cultivates a substantive understanding of the role of human persons as ordinary citizens of the Earth community and as beings with powerful responsibilities from a rich substrate of sources: Gaia theory, indigenous wisdom, ecofeminism, liberation theology, and personal experience. What also sets this text apart is Scharper’s development of a biotic and cosmological understanding of the interconnectivity of human and Earth ecologies within a distinctly “natural city” (147). Since the urban context is increasingly becoming the natural habitat for many human citizens, this perspective is vital for any movement toward a compassionate ecology.

This text is both a literary feast with the succulent language and evocative mythological imagery needed to rally uninspired imaginations, and an alarmingly realistic portrait of the immense devastation and injustice experienced today. Scharper’s skill at holding these two poles together makes this text accessible to those less familiar with eco-theology and social justice issues at the undergraduate level or in more popular arenas, and yet its attention to detail and hopeful pragmatism offers a wellspring of current data and ethical vision that can augment eco-theological efforts at a graduate level.

One problematical area of the text is structural and the cost of its giftedness; the diversity of materials from varying literary genres enables an expansive, aesthetic, and concrete grounding that some more theoretical eco-theological texts lack. Nevertheless, this choice can also cause a form of literary whiplash if one is unprepared. For example, as Scharper traces theology’s historical blindness to the reality of ecological destruction and the heavy burden this crisis places on the poor, his readers are also exposed to many ongoing factors contributing to this pathology: the insulation of North Americans from any contact with nature; the enshrining of malls as places of faith; the empowering of our media to be untruthful. This experiential reinforcement is astute; however, the back-and-forth transitions between evocative, yet lighter, newspaper articles and personal stories and the heavier, denser academic documents requires more commentarial buffering than is offered. Also the scarce attention to chronology contributes to a sense of unbalance and prohibits the chronicling of the evolution of Scharper’s eco-political thought. Other compilations that embrace a more purposeful chronological orientation, such as Linda Lear’s Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1998), reveal many hidden nuances in the author’s unfolding wisdom.

A second area of Scharper’s text needs clarification. After the fifteen years that have lapsed since the publication of “Ecofeminism: From Patriarchy to Mutuality,” from Redeeming the Time (1998), Scharper’s open-ended questions of ecofeminism require attention. One of his questions was whether “ecofeminists romanticise the mutuality and harmony of nature while not seriously engaging its violent aspects” (111). I am pleased to answer this more directly: no. The ecofeminist appraisals of the suffering offered by Marjorie Suchocki, Grace Janzen, Gloria Schaab, Laurel Kearns, Catherine Keller, Celia Deane-Drummond, and Elizabeth Johnson have, thankfully, paved the way for new research (including...