What is Ecotheology?
By Christopher L. Fici, PhD
The primary experience of ecotheology is the experience of empowerment which emerges from intimacy, regeneration, and devotion in the spaces and places where the Earth and the Divine meet. The Potawatomi elder and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 327). To ecotheologize is to ground the language and experience of faith in the soil which gives us life. No abstractions here. No dualities here. This is not where we will keep our pain and fear of the body and of each other. This is where we heal that pain.
The ecotheologian places the experience of the Divine within the dirt and messiness and pain and injustice of our lives and systems. Ecotheology is dirty theology. The Irish author Paraic O’Donnell expresses this exquisitely and clearly:
“To care for a garden, you have to know it deeply. You have to know it carnally. You have to touch it intimately, get under its skin. You have to go down on it, taste its undermurk, get as filthy as it wants, let it claw you, mark you, draw blood. You have to ache from it, stink of it, reel from it. Because that’s how you remind yourself, how you know. Because when you stagger inside, fouled and lacerated, you glimpse something of what you were, something original and uncorrupted. It’s everywhere on your skin, in the muck savour and the lush reek of chlorophyll. It’s in your blood, when you taste it from your torn wrists. You’re wasted, undone, as good as dead. But you know this much. You can just about sound out the words. They’re singing in you, sweet and ragged under everything. This is what I belong to. This is what I am for.” (“MS is meticulously destroying me. I am being unmade“)
Those who practice the vocation of ecotheology have three primary interconnected tasks. The religious studies scholars Whitney A. Bauman, Richard R. Bohannon II, and Kevin J. O’Brien, in their volume Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, describes these tasks as recover, reform, and replace. First, in the service of recovery, the ecotheologian must engage in a continuous critical ecologically-oriented tilling of their respective religious traditions, cultures, and communities. In doing so they amplify textual, ritual, pragmatic, and experiential elements which inspire and reinforce ecologically sound, wise, just, and compassionate relationship to planetary creation. Concurrently the ecotheologian must desire to reform those elements of their traditions, cultures, and communities which reinforce a denigrative, destructive relationship to Earthly creation. Reformation of a tradition does indeed include practices of replacement. Better said, reformation is the practice of repair, of regeneration, of healing the wounds which denigration of creation and of creatures have degenerated. Yet and still, replacement carries its own Earthy echoes: ecotheology grounds us back in place, in the sanctity of place, in the sanctity of giving one’s self, bone marrow, heart, and soul, to a place, to the land, in intimacy, devotion, and love.
“roots” Heiner Engbocks
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
Ecotheologians are committed to ecological and economic restorative/distributive justice for all vulnerable living beings. Ecotheologians reinforce, protect, and nourish models of symbiotic development which support and mimic the natural flourishing of the ecosystems and watersheds we are embedded in and embodied by. Ecotheologians cannot merely unpack the nature of our ecological derangement. They must respond to this derangement by constantly becoming co-creative reconstructors of Earth-honoring faith, justice, and community. The field of ecotheology emerges from the diversity of approaches which foreground planetary creation as being of exquisite concern for theological formation. Ecotheology is what emerges when Earth is foregrounded as a being of theological concern and religious devotion. Ecotheology is a constructive, co-creative theology which comes from the touch, embrace, and smudge of Earth upon our theological concern. Ecotheology “means precisely to resist any reductionist account of the earth and its geobiological bodies: and by the same token to smudge every metaphorical body-social, textual or theological-with its terrestrial ground. This would be the eartheological analogue to the Derridean “trace.” (“Talking Dirty,” 73)
Certainly I identify, quite fervently, as an ecotheologian. I believe the field must be established further as a systematic, constructive, and comparative theological undertaking in the formal spaces of the Academy with a capital A. While you may catch me kvetching about the wallflower status ecotheology still seems to have in many academic circles, it is very important here to make clear that the category of ecotheology, and the practice of ecotheology, cannot be a merely academic exercise.
“Worship” Andrea Kirkby
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
What is particularly radical and anticipatory about ecotheology, is the capacity for every person to be an ecotheologian. We hear a call in the work of the process philosopher and theologian Jay McDaniel that anticipators are always already prophetically imaginative ecotheologians:
“Ecotheologians thus put forward the kind of question that is rarely asked in consumer society but is nonetheless critical to our human future: what would economic theories, policies, and institutions look like if their primary aim was the promotion of human community in an ecologically responsible context, rather than ever-increasing production and consumption? Ecotheologians do not reject market economics, but they do resist the idea that communities ought to serve the market.” (“Ecotheology and World Religions,” 28)
Be an ecotheologian! McDaniel adds that he often meets people who do not think of themselves as formal ecotheologians “but who exemplify the spirit of what we are talking about. Their lives are their sermons; their attitudes are their teachings. They exemplify living theology. Thus when I say that ecotheologians are theologians, I have in mind this living theology.” (“Ecotheology and World Religions,” 30) Ecotheologians appreciate, revere, and express devotion through an understanding and experience of a Divine being/presence who is the source of creation, who as this source is profoundly beyond and different from creation, but who is also, simultaneously and inconceivably, deeply embedded and embodied within each and every element, each and every atom, each and every move of the quantum dance of Earthly creation. The living theology that is ecotheology is open, willing, and aching for the remembrance and return to the intimate embrace of our planetary neighbor in their animacy and in their animality. Ecotheology is geared to the unique languages of repentance and reform, of doing first works over, which is not a guilt-stricken ascetic exercise of devitalizing flogging, but instead the gentle but firm tending of our existential and Earthly wounds.
References
Catherine Keller, “Talking Dirty”, in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth
Jay McDaniel, “Ecotheology and World Religions,” in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth