At Home in the Cosmos (review)

At Home in the Cosmos. By David Toolan. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001. 257 pp. $25.00.

This is a book that desperately needed to be written, and it should be read by everyone who has any concern for our future on this planet, and by anyone who entertains uncertainties or experiences conflicts about our responsibilities as Christians and human beings to nature and to our world. Despite many recent explorations of environmental issues from religious and Christian perspectives, there really has not been an accessible, balanced, integrated and critically informed theological-scientific exposition of our relationship to the natural world and the ethical demands it places on us as individuals and societies. Such an exposition needs to include a forthright acknowledgment of the economic and political realities with which we have to contend, as well as a realistic critical assessment of ourpresent rate of global consumption and the environmental impact of our way of living. It must also include a discussion of the scientific, philosophical, theological, and social resources available for forging more holistic perspectives and policies. David Toolan has successfully accomplished writing such a volume. His aim is "to 'rethink and refeel' our place within nature and our common destiny with nature as a whole--from a Christian perspective" (13).

Toolan begins by presenting the 1997 appeal of 24 eminent scientists to spiritual leaders that they use their influence and integrity to persuade their followers and listeners to protect and preserve the global ecosystem. He goes on to discuss whether the biblical worldview is to blame for the ecological insensitivity and irresponsibility that has characterized Western culture, as Lynn White has prominently charged. Toolan agrees with White that Christianity has been afflicted by dualism, which has led to either the exploitation or the deprecation of nature and the material world. He also considers White's thesis correct in locating the environmental crisis "in our basic beliefs about human nature and destiny." But Toolan finds White's indictment too broad, and compellingly demonstrates the existence of extensive resources in the biblical tradition that support and even demand environmental sensitivity and care. Toolan maintains that it is not the biblical mandate that has seduced us into ecologically insensitive and exploitative behavior, but rather the mechanistic, reductionistic, and materialistic developments of the Enlightenment, including Cartesian dualism. It is this, Toolan affirms, which "emptied nature of value, except as resource for human manipulation, and is thus intimately connected to economic materialism" (43).

To Toolan, it is the philosophy that developed from the burgeoning scientific thinking of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton) that is materialistic, mechanistic, and deterministic--the idea that all reality is reducible to meaningless matter in motion, or divided into two realms: meaningless matter in motion and the mind, which is conceived as completely separate from matter (Cartesian dualism). As Toolan points out, when nature is imaged this way, it has no moral status and no intrinsic value. Such a conception severed human beings from nature and set the stage for economic materialism, the commodification and exploitation of nature, undergirded by what we now recognize as unsupportable assumptions and attitudes toward the material world and nature itself. In developing his critique, Toolan is careful to clarify that he is not inveighing against classical physics, or the important laws on which it rests, but rather against considering such laws or regularities as the sum and substance of material reality. As contemporary physics, chemistry, and biology have wonderfully revealed, the material world is much richer, and much more dynamic and surprisingly complex than that.

Returning to biblical traditions, Toolan relies on recent scholarship to show that the ancient Hebrews saw their life and society in deep harmony with the land and with nature, not detached from it, as some earlier Scripture scholars had suggested. He is also careful to delineate the differences among various biblical traditions, for instance between the...