CHAPTER 3- Gardner

CHAPTER 3____________

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL APPROACHES:

CHANGING VALUES, BELIEFS,

AND WORLDVIEWS

I. Chapter Prologue

II. Introduction

III. Do Values, Morals, Beliefs, and Religious Teachings and Practices Affect How Individuals and Cultures Treat Their Environment?

A.    Survey-Research in a Single Country (the United States)

B.    Historical and Intercultural Evidence

IV. Proenvironmental Religious/Moral Movements—Current Developments and Possible Future Trends

A.  Ecotheology

B.  Thomas Berry's Work

C.  The Deep Ecology Movement

D.  Ecofeminism

V. Common Threads in Religious/Morally Based Environmental Movethents

A.  Shared Ecological Worldview

B.  Shared Ecocentric Values

C.  Plan for the Rest of the Chapter

VI. Issue One: Are Environmental Values and Beliefs Changing?

A.    Strong Public Support for Environmental Protection

B.    Emerging Support for the Ecological Worldview

C.    A Direct Search for Ecocentric Public Values

D.    The Emergence of "Post-Materialist" Values

VII. Issue Two: Will Changes in Values and Beliefs Persist?

VIII. Issue Three: How Do Values and Beliefs Influence People's Actions?

A.    A Closer Look at How Values (and Beliefs about the Consequences of Environmental Problems) Influence Actions

B.    Factors That Can Limit the Effect of Value and Belief Changes

IX. Conclusion

34             PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

CHAPTER PROLOGUE

In 1854, Chief Seatlh, leader of the Suquamish tribe in the northwest United States, gave a speech in reply to President Franklin Pierce's offer to buy a large tract of Indian-occupied land and to provide a reservation for Seatlh's people.

While there is no written record of Seatlh's words, one person present, Dr. Henry Smith, took brief notes (Seed et al., 1988). Based on Smith's notes, Ted Perry, a film scriptwriter, attempted to recreate Seatlh's speech for a 1970 movie. Perry's re-created speech became somewhat of a classic and was fre­quently reprinted in books and articles on the environ­ment. Though Perry's words must be regarded as fiction and while they may over-romanticize Native

American religious beliefs, they do convey the rever­ence with which many Native American tribes re­garded (and still regard) their environments (Viola, 1992, quoted in Jones, Jr. and Sawhill, 1992). We quote some of Perry's words below:

How can you buy [the land,] . . . or [we] sell the sky. . . ? This idea is strange to us. . . . If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? . . .

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap

Reflections in a Lake

(Copyright 1994 Corel Corporation.)

which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the grasses in the meadows, the body heat of a pony, and man—all belong to the same family. . . .

The shining water that moves in the streams and the rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you. . Jthe] land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kind­ness you would give any brother. . . .

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath: the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you [the] . . . land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it sup­ports. . . .

[If we sell you the land,] . . . the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his briothers. 1 have [heard about] . . . a thousand rotting buffalo on . . . [a] prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. . . . [How can] the smoking iron horse . . . be more important than the buffalo that [red men] kill [only enough of] to stay alive? . . . What is man without beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. . . . [W]hatever happens to the beasts soon happens to the man. . . .

This we know—the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. . . . All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. . . . Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. What­ever he does to the web, he does to himself. (Quoted from Seed, .1. et al., Thinking like a mountain, pp. 68-73.

1988. New Society Publishers. Reprinted with permis­sion.)

INTRODUCTION

This beautiful and moving speech describes a pro-environmental religion that resembles the religions of some Native American tribes. These tribes and reli­gions predate the industrial revolution and the west­ward wave of European invaders/settlers across the American continent by centuries, maybe even millen­nia. It is therefore ironic that a number of contempo­rary scholars, theologians, and writers claim that unless modern Westerners adopt a religion like the one in the speech, we will fail to solve the environ­mental problems that threaten human survival (e.g., Naess, 1989; Devall, 1985; Sessions, 1985; and Ehrenfeld, 1978). In other words, these people argue that we must set aside our current religious teachings and practices in favor of the proenvironmental ones in the speech. Nothing short of radical change of this type will ensure that Westerners—both individually and collectively—behave in proenvironmental ways. In this chapter, we closely examine this argument and explore the impacts of religious and moral teachings and practices on the origins, and possible solutions, of global and regional environmental problems.

Though the Chief Seatlh "speech" is brief, it illus­trates the main components of most religions and religious systems. In the case of Seatlh's religion, all of these components act to encourage proenviron­mental individual and collective behavior. (The dif­ferent components overlap and intertwine, so it is somewhat artificial to discuss them separately.) First, a religion upholds certain basic values, that is, things, qualities, and principles it considers important and worthwhile. Thus, portions of the speech urge a rever­ence and respect for nonhuman forms of life and for natural processes. Some specific examples: ". [E]very part of the earth is sacred. . . . Every shining pine needle, . . . sandy shore, . . . humming insect . . . is holy. . . . The air is precious." The speech also portrays nonhuman forms of life as having as much importance and worth as human life: "Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it."

36           PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

Second, religions include basic beliefs and worldviews (collections of beliefs about the world and an overall perspective from which an individual and culture view it). Thus, the speech stresses the interre­latedness of all forms of life and the human de­pendence on nonhuman forms. For example: "The flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the grasses . . . , and man—all belong to the same fam­ily. . . ." And: "All things are connected. . . . What­ever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth." Further, the speech portrays the Earth as the creator of life and views humans as strongly connected with it. For example: ". . . [T]his beautiful earth is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of

Third, religions include a system of ethics or mor­als, that is, they specifically encourage specific indi­vidual behaviors and enjoin other behaviors. Some ethics and morals are implicit in basic values and beliefs. Other ethics/morals are mentioned explicitly. Thus the speech urges: ". [Y]ou must give [the rivers] the kindness you would give . . . [a] brother." And: "[Red men] kill [only enough buffalo] to stay alive. . . ."

Fourth, religions generally include ceremonies, rituals, and other practices that convey and reinforce their values, beliefs, and behavioral injunctions. Cer­emonies and rituals are not mentioned in the brief speech above, but they play a major role in Native American religions, the Western Judeo-Christian reli­gious tradition, and most others.

Fifth, religions have spiritual elements, that is, ele­ments involving deities or other supernatural forces. Spiritual elements arouse our feelings and emotions and they appeal to our intuitive sides. Thus, the speech asserts that the "the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. . ." and the speech refers to "ghostly reflections in the clear water of the lakes [that] tell . . . of events and memories in the life of my people." Note also how moving, beautiful, and inspir­ing the speech is overall. The speech is much more than a simple intellectual or rational description of the different forms of life in nature and how these forms interact.

Although a number of scholars, theologians, and writers argue that no resolution of environmental problems is possible without a major shift in religion and morals in the direction of the speech, there are a few who make a more radical claim. These scholars/ writers/theologians argue that not only do current Western religions lack a proenvironmental orienta­tion, but these religions are actually antienviron­mental; indeed these religious beliefs, values, and practices are a major and active cause of all contem­porary Western environmental problems. Probably the best-known of the writers who make this claim is historian Lynn White, Jr. In a provocative, often-quoted, though no longer widely accepted, article in Science magazine (1967), White argued that the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is a root cause of all Western environmental problems. White focused especially on the Genesis portion of the Bible. Con­sider the following Genesis quote:

And God said, Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, . . . and subdue [the earth]; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the earth, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:16-28, King James version).

Note how different this well-known biblical pas­sage is from the speech attributed to Chief Seatlh. The speech depicts humans not as a special species but as one strand in an overall "web of life." Humans are seen as dependent upon other forms of life and are urged to protect them. Humans are an integral part of nature, rather than being separate from, and superior to, the other forms of life. In contrast, the biblical passage depicts humans as a unique and exalted spe­cies, since only humans were created in God's image. The passage also exhorts humans to control and "sub­due" the other forms of life. Thus the passage makes a

major distinction between humans and the rest of nature, with humans in a primary and dominant role, and other forms of life in a secondary and subservient role. Finally, the last paragraph ("be fruitful, and mul­tiply") appears to encourage unlimited growth in hu­man numbers.

The biblical view, White claimed, permeates Western culture, creating a general disregard for non­human forms of life and natural processes, a feeling of human invulnerability, and a push toward limitless growth. "Especially in its Western form," White ar­gued, "Christianity is the most anthropocentric [i.e., human-centered] religion the world has seen. . . . [In the biblical story of creation,] God created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally God . . . created Adam and . . . Eve. . . . Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule; no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes [p. 1205]."

White's (1967) basic position was shared by sev­eral other scholars and writers, including historian Arnold Toynbee (1973), biologist Paul Ehrlich (1971), and regional planner Ian McHarg (1971). However, White's (1967) thesis is no longer very widely accepted. Some have criticized both White's interpretations of the Judeo-Christian religious tradi­tion and his analysis of Western culture and history. A number of scholars and theologians argue that—though Western values, beliefs, and morals are an­thropocentric and do legitimate the exploitation of nature for human ends (and are, therefore, root causes of environmental problems)—the Judeo-Christian re­ligious tradition is not the main source of these values, beliefs, and morals. Some of these scholars and theo­logians claim that the "multiply and subdue the earth" portions of Genesis are taken out of context and mis­interpreted (e.g., Shaiko, 1987). Some point out, fur­ther, that many other portions of the Old and New Testaments emphasize the concept of "stewardship," or care, of nature (e.g., Shaiko, 1987; Naess, 1989; Gelderloos, 1992; and Whitney, 1993). These schol­ars and theologians thus argue that the Judeo-Chris­tian tradition is more correctly seen as a major source of proenvironmental values and beliefs, rather than of antienvironmental values and beliefs. We discuss the work of these "ecotheologians" in more detail later in the chapter.

Other scholars/writers blame the human-centered­ness of Western culture and the belief in the legiti­macy of exploiting nature for human ends not on our Judeo-Christian heritage but on elements of ancient Greek philosophy that are, in part, bases of modern scientific thought (Callicott, 1983), or on the view of nature as mechanical and inert that emerged in West­ern countries at the beginning of the scientific revolu­tion in the 1600s (Shiva, 1989; Whitney, 1993), or on the development of capitalism in Western countries beginning in the late 1700s (Whitney, 1993).

Finally, yet other scholars/writers, including Ophuls (1977) and Brown (1981), argue that exces­sive levels of materialism and consumerism in West­ern countries are main causes of environmental problems, and these scholars/writers urge radical de­creases in these values. To quote Brown (1981):

None of the political philosophies today embraces the values essential to a sustainable society. Indeed, as scientist B. Murray noted in an address to theologians, "Capitalism and Marxism have one thing very much in common: they both presume man's fundamental needs are material." Murray believes that for this reason both fall short. Whether capitalist or socialist, materialism is neither sustainable nor satisfying over the long term [p. 3501

To quote Ophuls (1977):

.. Mhe sickness of the earth reflects the sickness in the soul of modern industrial man, whose whole life is given over to gain, to the disease of endless getting and spending that can never satisfy deeper aspirations and must eventually end in cultural, spiritual, and physical death [p. 2321

To summarize: Many scholars and writers argue that Western morals, beliefs, values, and/or religious teachings and practices play a major role in causing global and regio^-nal environmental problems, and that these morals, beliefs, and so forth must be shifted sharply in a proenvironmental direction if the prob­lems are to be solved.

38           PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

DO VALUES, MORALS, BELIEFS, AND

RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PRACTICES AFFECT HOW INDIVIDUALS AND CULTURES TREAT THEIR ENVIRONMENT?

As our discussion above indicates, the religions/val­ues/morals approach is popular with scholars and theologians as a framework for understanding and potentially solving major environmental problems. The approach also has considerable intuitive appeal. It is manifestly true that Western culture is anthropocen­tric and materialistic, regardless of the historical sources of these orientations, and it makes sense that such a culture would treat its environment roughly.

However, much of the evidence we will review in the rest of this chapter suggests that the religions/ morals/values framework has only limited power in explaining why major environmental problems occur, and also suggests that major changes in societal reli­gious beliefs, values, and morals are not likely to be effective by themselves in solving environmental problems. We remind the reader, however, of our emphasis in this book on multiple strategies for under­standing and solving environmental problems rather than the total reliance on any single strategy. That a good deal of the evidence to be reviewed below is negative does not detract from the importance of this solution strategy as one ingredient in a multidimen­sional strategy for understanding and solving environ­mental problems.

We begin, in the 'next section, by reviewing the results of survey-research studies that fail to show a consistent relationship between individual Ameri­cans' religious beliefs and practices and their levels of environmental concern. We move on, in the section after it, to review the results of cross-cultural studies that fail to find a relationship between the degree of proenvironmentalism in a culture's religion, values, and so on, and its success in averting major environ­mental problems. We will see in later sections of the chapter, however, that values, beliefs, and morals can influence individuals' actions toward the environ­ment, within limits.

Survey-Research in a Single Country (the U.S.)

One way to test the idea that Western religious beliefs and practices play a major negative role in environ­mental problems is to see if, within a single country, differences in people's religious affiliations and be­liefs are associated with differences in their concern or behavior regarding environmental problems. Some psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have done studies of this type in the United States. Unfor­tunately, these studies have reached contradictory conclusions. A few early survey-research (public opinion) studies by Eckberg and Blocker (1989), and also Hand and Van Liere (1984) and Shaiko (1987), concluded that Christians and Jews report less con­cern about the environment and environmental prob­lems than do non-Christians/non-Jews; further, those individuals who most strongly believe in the Bible and its literal truth report less concern about the envi­ronment and environmental problems than those whose biblical beliefs are weaker. These results lend support to White's (1967) argument. However, in a more recent study, Greeley (1993) found, in survey-research data collected in 1988, no relationship be­tween people's religion or their belief in the literal truth of the Bible and the level of concern they report about the environment. On the other hand, the authors of this book analyzed similar survey data collected in 1993 that appear to contradict Greeley's findings and support those of Eckberg and Blocker. Finally, Kempton, Boster, and Hartley (1995) provide evi­dence, though based on a small, nonrepresentative sample of Americans, that religious belief, defined generally, is positively correlated with expressions of environmental concern. In the next sections we ex­plore these inconsistent findings.

Eckberg and Blocker (1989) interviewed 300 resi­dents of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, metropolitan area via telephone. They asked each respondent several ques­tions about religious beliefs and affiliation. One ques­tion asked whether the respondent was Christian or Jewish, or a member of some other religion (or none

at all); (a large majority of the respondents were, as it turned out, Christian or Jewish). Another question asked the respondent to choose from the following three statements the one statement that most accu­rately described his/her beliefs about the truth of the Bible: "The Bible is the actual word of God and it should be taken literally. .. ," or "The Bible is the inspired word of God, but it was written by men and contains some human errors.," or "The Bible is an ancient book of history and legends [written by hu­mans].

Eckberg and Blocker also asked each respondent twelve questions about environmental problems. Eight addressed the respondent's level of concern about environmental problems in general: Four ques­tions dealt with whether this country should accept pollution for the good of the economy (e.g., "Pollu­tion control measures have created unfair burdens on industry"); four questions addressed whether we should protect the environment despite the economic costs of doing so (e.g., "We should maintain our ef­forts to control pollution, even'if this slows down the economy and increases unemployment"). Response alternatives for these questions ran from "strongly disagree" through "strongly agree." The remaining questions concerned environmental problems in the Tulsa area: Two questions concerned air and water pollution, and two concerned waste disposal. Re­sponse alternatives for these questions ran from "not very serious" through "very serious."

Eckberg and Blocker began their data analysis by calculating the correlations between respondents' an­swers to the religious questions and answers to the questions about environmental concern. The left-hand data column (headed Zero-order correlations) of Table 3-I displays the results. To explain how to interpret the column entries, consider a specific ex­ample: The table shows a small negative correlation (—.25) between respondents' degree of biblical literal­ism and theii level of environmental concern ex­pressed in answers about "accepting pollution for the good of the economy." In other words, respondents who expressed a high level of belief in biblical literal­ism were slightly less likely to express proenviron­mental sentiments (i.e., were more willing to accept pollution for the sake of the economy) than were respondents who expressed a low level of biblical literalism. Looking at the left-hand column entries overall, we see small, but in many cases statistically significant, negative correlations between being Judeo-Christian and level of environmental concern as measured via the four different types of concern questions, and also between strength of belief in the literal truth of the Bible and level of environmental concern: Judeo-Christian respondents tended to show less environmental concern than non-Judeo-Chris­tians, and those respondents with the strongest beliefs about the literal truth of the Bible tended to show the weakest levels environmental concern.

However, there is a major problem in interpreting the results in the left column of Table 3-1: A correla­tion between two variables (e.g., the inverse relation­ship between strength of belief in the literal truth of the Bible and level of environmental concern) does not necessarily mean that one variable (literal belief in the Bible) causes the other (lack of environmental concern). Instead, some third variable may be respon­sible for the correlation. For example, the people in the Eckberg and Blocker study who believed in the literal truth of the Bible may have been, on average, somewhat older than those who did not believe in the literal truth, and age may be the real cause of their lack of environmental concern. Alternatively, believers may have been less educated than nonbelievers, or believers may have belonged to more strict, fundamentalistic denominations; in turn, education level or denomination may have been the real cause of lack of environmental concern.

In anticipation of these problems of interpretation, Eckberg and Blocker (1989) asked each respondent several additional questions about his/her age, in­come, education, specific religious denomination, and other relevant variables. Eckberg and Blocker then calculated partial correlations (using what are known

40            PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

TABLE 3-1 Selected Results of the Eckberg and Blocker (1989) Study

CORRELATIONS BETWEEN RESPONDENTS' BELIEF/NONBELIEF IN THE LITERAL TRUTH OF THE BIBLE, AND THEIR JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY/NON-JUDEO CHRISTIANITY ON FOUR MEASURES OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN

 

	ZERO-ORDER CORRELATIONS	PARTIAL CORRELATIONS
Use of the environment for the economy (4 questions)
Judeo-Christian vs. non J-C	-.14'
Belief in literal truth of Bible	-.25-	-.17-
Protect the environment (4 questions)
Judeo-Christian vs. non J-C		-.14'
Belief in literal truth of Bible	-.16-	-.13'
Concern about Tulsa air and water (2 questions)
Judeo-Christian vs. non J-C	-.13'
Belief in literal truth of Bible	-.09	-.14'
Concern about Tulsa waste disposal (2 questions)
Judeo-Christian vs. non J-C	-.10
Belief in literal truth of Bible	-.10	-.18"

Source: Adapted from Eckberg, D., and Blocker, J., Varieties of religious involvement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 28, p. 514. Copyright 1989. Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Used with permission.

Legend: 'significant at the .05 level of significance; ^-significant at the .01 level of significance; ^-significant at the .001 level of significance; -This correlation is only minimal.

as regression analyses). The right-most data column of Table 3-1 displays the results of these analyses. The entries are the correlations between being Judeo-Christian and belief in the literal truth of the Bible and environmental concern, independent of the possible influences of age of respondent, income, level of edu­cation, gender, conservatism of religious denomina­tion, and the importance of religion in respondents' lives. Looking at the pattern of the partial correlations in the right column of the table, note that belief in the literal truth of the Bible was negatively correlated (to a modest but statistically significant extent) with all four of the measures of environmental concern; also being Judeo-Christian was negatively correlated with the "protect the environment" questions on environ­mental concern. These results, then, do lend support to Lynn White's (1967) hypothesis that Judeo-Christian biblical teachings are responsible for envi­ronmental degradation in Western nations: Within Eckberg and Blocker' s sample of 300 Americans

from Oklahoma, those individuals who most strongly believed in the Bible and its literal truth reported less concern about the environment and environmental problems than those whose biblical beliefs were weaker; also, Christians and Jews showed less con­cern (at least by one measure) than non-Christians/ non-Jews.

We should point out, however, that even though Eckberg and Blocker (1989) used regression analyses to control for the effects of age, gender, and so on, there may have been yet other variables (e.g., respon­dents' ethnicity or race) that Eckberg and Blocker failed to control via the questions they asked and the statistical analyses they performed. Therefore, their results cannot prove that belief in the literal truth of the Bible and being Judeo-Christian actually cause low concern about the environment. (All correlational research is limited in this way; a correlation between two variables—even a partial correlation derived from regression analyses—never proves that one vafi-

able has a true causal effect on the other.) Indeed, as we discuss below, Greeley (1993) argues that Eckberg and Blocker failed to control for the effects of certain key variables.

Andrew Greeley (1993), a social scientist and a Ro­man Catholic priest, took Eckberg and Blocker's (1989) research plan and data analysis a statistical step further; his results suggest that Eckberg and Blocker drew the wrong conclusion. Greeley exam­ined the relationship between religious beliefs and environmental concern in a representative sample of Americans who took part in a large (well over a thousand respondents) public opinion survey in 1988—the annual General Social Survey (GSS) con­ducted by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago. This survey, which covered a broad range of topics, contained several different questions about the respondents' religious beliefs (including one question on biblical "literalism" identical to the one used by Eckberg and Blocker, 1989), and also a single ques­tion about respondents' levels of environmental con­cern. That question was: "[Are we as a nation now] . . . spending too much money, too little, or about the right amount . . . on improving and protecting the environment.. . ? [p. 22]" As the left-hand data col­umn of Table 3-2 shows, Greeley found small but statistically significant correlations between religious

affiliation and literal belief in the Bible, and environ­mental concern: Respondents who were Christian and respondents who believed in the Bible's literal truth were less concerned about improving and protecting the environment than were respondents who were non-Christian and respondents who did not believe in the literal truth of the Bible; (note that Greeley used the category "Christians," rather than "Christians and Jews;" however, the number of Jews in the U.S. popu­lation is relatively small, and inclusion of them in the same category should not have greatly affected the results). Greeley's "raw," or zero-order, correlations were, thus, similar to those obtained by Eckberg and Blocker (1989) in Oklahoma.

However, Greeley argued that the biblical literal­ists in his study were more likely to be political con­servatives than political liberals, and that it was political conservatism, not literalism, that accounted for the lower levels of environmental concern found for literalists. Put another way, Greeley argued that there are some biblical literalists who are politically liberal, rather than conservative—Vice-President Albert Gore, for example—and these literalists are as concerned about the environment (and about other liberal causes) as are nonliteralist liberals. Greeley further postulated that Christians and biblical literal­ists were also more likely to be morally rigid and have harsher religious mental imagery (e.g., a mental con-

TABLE 3-2 Results from the Greeley (1993) Study

CORRELATIONS BETWEEN RESPONDENTS' BELIEF/NONBELIEF IN THE LITERAL TRUTH OF THE BIBLE, AND THEIR CHRISTIANITY/NON-CHRISTIANITY ON ONE MEASURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN

PARTIAL
CORRELATIONS

ZERO-ORDER                   (STANDARDIZED

CORRELATIONS                BETA WEIGHTS)t

Not enough money spent on the environment

Christian vs. non-Christian                                                                                    —.10'                                                              —.02

Belief in literal truth of Bible                                                                                 —.11^*                                        —.04

Source: Adapted from Greeley, A., Religion and attitudes toward the environment. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 32, pp. 19-28. Copyright 1993. Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Used with permission.

Legend: tThese are standardized beta weights from a regression analysis, and can be interpreted as partial correlations. significant at the .05 level or better

42  PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

ception of God as a father, master, judge, and king, versus as a mother, spouse, lover, or friend) than were non-Christians and non-literalists. Therefore, Greeley used regression analyses to statistically control for the effects of political liberalism/conservatism, moral ri­gidity, and religious imagery, and also the effects of such sociodemographic variables as age and level of education. The right-most column of Table 3-2 shows the results of his analysis. Note that the standardized beta weights, which can be interpreted as partial cor­relations, relating Christian/non-Christian and bibli­cal literalism/non literalism to environmental concern were not statistically significant. These results there­fore contradict those of Eckberg and Blocker (1989).

Though Greeley's (1993) conclusions were the op­posite of Eckberg and Blocker's, we believe that Greeley's results are not definitive for two reasons: First, Greeley used a single and ambiguous measure of environmental concern. A respondent's judgment about whether the government is spending the right amount of money on improving and protecting the environment actually measures both the respondent's environmental concern as well as his or her assess­ment of the adequacy of government spending. (In contrast, Eckberg and Blocker, 1989, used twelve dif­ferent questions in an effort to tap their respondents' levels of environmental concern). Second, Greeley may have gone too far in his attempts to statistically control for his respondents' religious imagery and moral rigidity. More specifically, his questions on these dimensions may actually have included aspects of biblical literalism. For example, one question on moral rigidity asked how important was it to the re­spondent ". .. to follow [his/her] . . . conscience even if it means going against what the churches or syna­gogues say and do. .. ." If this question duplicates or overlaps the biblical literalism question, then using it to statistically control for moral rigidity could spuri­ously mask a real correlation between biblical literal­ism and environmental concern.

A Look at More Recent GSS Data. As we point out
above, Greeley's analysis suffers from its use of a
single, ambiguous measure of environmental concern.

His analysis would be more convincing if measures of religious belief were related to more trustworthy mea­sures of environmental concern. Fortunately, the 1993 General Social Survey contains both a series of items on religion and a series on environmentalism. We now describe and analyze results from the 1993 sur­vey, which involved approximately 1,600 randomly selected Americans.

Among the environmental items in the survey, in addition to the one Greeley used, were a series of items that we have grouped into three scales of proenvironmental action and willingness to support environmental protection financially. One scale, mea­suring consumer behavior, is made up of three items such as "How often do you make a special effort to buy fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides or chemicals?" The political behavior scale consists of three items such as "In the last five years, have you taken part in a protest or demonstration about an environmental issue?" The third scale measures will­ingness to make financial sacrifices for the environ­ment, and includes three items such as "How willing would you be to pay much higher prices in order to protect the environment?"

Table 3-3 presents regression coefficients that rep­resent the strength and direction of the relationship between measures of Christianity and religious belief and behavior and the four measures of environmental­ism. The first two columns, which report results on the indicator of environmental concern that Greeley used, show that the 1993 data replicate Greeley's findings. The two indicators of religion that Greeley reported (see Table 3-2) have a weak but significant relationship to the government-spending measure of environmentalism, but the relationship disappears when age, education, income, gender, and political liberalism-conservatism are taken into account (bold­face/italicized entries)) For other indicators of envi­ronmentalism, however, measures of Judeo-Christian religious belief do sometimes make a difference, and usually, the effect is negative, as White's (1967) the­sis predicts. The significant relationships between re­ligion and the political behavior and financial support scales are almost uniformly in the direction predicted by White's thesis.

TABLE 3-3 Analysis of 1993 GSS Data

REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS REPRESENTING ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN INDICATORS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR

 

	SPENDING ON ENV'T. A		POLITICAL BEHAVIOR A		FINANCIAL SACRIFICE A		CONSUMER BEHAVIOR A
Christian	-.17***	-.05	-.50***	-.30**	-.45***	-.24*	-.36***	-.33**
Belief in God	-.03**	-.01	-.17***	-.07**	-.14-	-.05	-.04	-.01
RELIGIOSITY
Frequency of prayer	.03*	.01	.04	.02	.05	-.02	-.09***	.09***
Strength of affiliation	-.04	-.02	.02	.04	.17**	.20"	.17-	.17***
FUNDAMENTALISM
Biblical literalism	-AO*"	-.05	-.30-	-.16*	-.29-	-.12	-.04	-.02
Fundamentalist	-.07***	-.05*	-.20*-	-.09*	-.27-	-.14"	-.12**	-.09*
SACREDNESS OF NATURE
Nature sacred in itself	.30-	.21**	.58-	.41***	.61***	.41***	.40-*	.26"
Nature sacred; made by God	-.08*	-.04	-.33-	-.16*	-.07	.16	-.02	.03
Nature import. not sacred	-.14***	-.12**	-.09	-.15'	-.39-	-.48***	-.28***	.23"

Columns A present regression coefficients uncontrolled for other variables.

Columns B present them controlled for age, education, income, gender, and political liberalism. *p <.05; "p <.01; "p <.001

The consumer behavior scale presents a different pictuie, however. Although Christians are less likely than non-Christians to change their behavior specifi­cally to protect the environment, among Americans of all faiths, those who are stronger in their religious practices (frequency of praying and self-reported strength of affiliation) are more likely to engage in such behavior.

This finding seems self-contradictory and needs further explanation. The data in the table suggest at least one possibility. Adherence to religion is some­times understood in terms of two separate dimensions, religiosity (typically measured by frequency of pray­ing and self-reported strength of affiliation) and fun­damentalism (typically measured by items like the belief that scripture was literally written by God and other indices of strict religious ideology-this survey used a measure that rated each respondent's religious denomination as fundamentalist, moderate, or lib­eral). This distinction makes a bit more sense of the data. The effects of two measures of fundamentalism on proenvironmental behavior are uniformly nega­tive, as White would have predicted, although the effect may be weaker for consumer behavior than for the other indicators. The two measures of religiosity have positive effects on environmentalism-opposite to White's thesis-but these effects are restricted al­most entirely to consumer behavior. This pattern sug­gests that although strict adherence to Judeo-Christian religious ideology (fundamentalism) has antienviron­mental implications, particularly for political behav­ior, something different applies for religiosity and for personal behavior. One interpretation is that both reli­gious attendance and proenvironmental individual be­havior are part of a broader pattern of altruism and good citizenship among Americans who identify with

44             PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

organized religion. This hypothesis, however, is not strongly supported by the data, and so deserves fur­ther testing.

The data clearly suggest, however, that the rela­tionship between religion and environmentalism is more complex than White's thesis implies. It seems to depend not only on beliefs in broad religious ideology but on other factors associated with religious adher­ence—and it may be that religious influences affect different kinds of proenvironmental behaviors in dif­ferent ways. We should emphasize, however, so as not to lose sight of the main point, that all the relation­ships represented in Table 3-3 are rather weak, sug­gesting that religious belief by itself has a limited influence on behavior among present-day Americans. Furthermore, as we noted above, a significant correla­tion between two variables (or a significant regression coefficient) never proves causality. Similarly, if bibli­cal literalists tend to be more antienvironmental than nonliteralists, this does not demonstrate that biblical scripture (or, for that matter, the teaching of certain religious denominations) is correctly characterized as being antienvironmental.

One other finding about religion and environmen­talism from the 1993 General Social Survey is worth further mention. Respondents were asked to choose the one of the following statements that most closely represented their personal beliefs:

— Nature is spiritual or sacred in itself.

— Nature is sacred because it is created by God. — Nature is important, but not spiritual or sacred.

The lower part of Table 3-3 presents the relationships between these beliefs and the indicators of environ­mentalism—the three lines under the heading Sacred­ness of nature. The first line under the heading gives the regression coefficients when the respondents who chose "Nature is sacred in itself' are compared to subjects who chose the other two alternatives; the entries indicate that respondents who chose "Nature is sacred in itself' were much more likely to report proenvironmental concern and action than those who chose the other alternatives, even when age, educa­tion, income, gender, and political liberalism were controlled for.

The third line shows that respondents who chose "Nature is important but not sacred" were signifi­cantly less likely to report proenvironmental concern and action than those who chose the other alterna­tives, even when age, and so on, were controlled for.

Finally, the second line shows that respondents who chose "Nature is sacred because it is created by God" were neither more or less likely to report proen­vironmental concern/action than the other two groups combined.

These results suggest a surprising conclusion: Indi­viduals whose belief in the sacredness of nature is based on religious teachings are apparently less pro-environmentalist than people who do not tie that belief to God. Thus, it seems that a belief in the sacredness of nature has a significant influence on behavior—both personal and political—but less so when that belief is derived from the teachings of organized religion. It is almost as if people who be­lieve nature is sacred because it is God's creation feel that God will take care of nature, and that they need not. We believe that these findings need to be ex­plored further to see which are reliable and to under­stand their meaning.

The above findings contradict the results of a study that we discuss in the next section, though that study involved a small and nonrandom sample of Ameri­cans, unlike the GSS 1993 survey on which our analy­ses above are based.

Kempton, Boster, and Hartley (1995). We lastly and very briefly describe a study performed by an­thropologists Willett Kempton, James Boster, and Jennifer Hartley (1995). Their goal was to try to un­derstand in depth the values and beliefs that underlie people's concern, or lack of concern, about environ­mental problems. Kempton et al. queried 142 respon­dents in four U.S. states and in five categories: members of Earth First! (a radical proenvironmental group), members of the Sierra Club (a more main­stream environmental group), the general public, managers of dry-cleaning businesses, and laid-off sawmill workers. Kempton et al. assumed that the environmental group members and some members of the general public would have proenvironmental sen-

timents, while dry-cleaning managers and laid-off sawmill workers would have antienvironmental sen­timents. A key feature of the study was that the researchers asked respondents directly and in an open-ended way "why they thought protecting the environment was important [to the extent the respon­dent felt environmental protection was important]."

Kempton et al. found that a majority of people in all five groups expressed high levels of environmental concern (measured in various ways) and that many of them volunteered that this concern was based on reli­gious and/or spiritual values. When asked, approxi­mately 75 percent of all respondents (in all of the five groups) agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: "Because God created the natural world, it is wrong to abuse it." Further, those respondents who agreed most strongly with the statement were significantly more likely to have reported that "they belonged to an orga­nized religion." Kempton et al. did not report which religions their respondents belonged to, but to the extent that the religious respondents were predomi­nantly Christian, these results would seem to contra­dict those of the 1993 GSS that we presented in Table 3-3. Kempton et al.'s sample was very small, how­ever, and their respondents were hardly representative of the U.S. population in general (this was the re­searchers' intention; the goal of their study was to identify in a general way the values and beliefs that underlie environmental concern). Further, Kempton's analysis did not statistically control for the effects of such potentially confounding variables as respon­dents' age, gender, income, and so on. Thus, their results must be viewed as interesting but not defini­tive.

We should mention one other result, a surprising one, that Kempton et al. report. Almost half of the respondents who indicated that they did not belong to an organized religion and did not even believe in a "spiritual force in the universe" agreed with the state­ment "Because God created the natural world, it is wrong to abuse it." It's as if these respondents had strong spiritual feelings that nature is sacred, but had no other way to express these feelings.

A further relevant result: Kempton et al. found that a number of their respondents reported a strong spiri­ tual experience when they were in natural outdoor environments: Some, respondents who identified themselves as religious, stressed that they felt the presence of God in such environments. Some others, respondents who were not religious in a formal sense, stressed that they felt a spiritual awareness or con­sciousness when in such environments.

Overall, though Kempton et al.'s samples were small and nonrepresentative, and though they used simple statistical summaries rather than regression analyses, their data do suggest an important spiritual dimension to people's concerns about the environ­ment: Rather than being a source of antienviron­mental feelings and attitudes, organized religions and religious sentiments in general may be potentially major sources of proenvironmental concern. As we discuss later in the chapter under the heading "Eco­theology," many organized religions in the United States are now in a state of flux. Religious leaders are becoming more environmentally conscious and are looking for ways in which religious institutions can encourage proenvironmental concern and action on the part of their congregants. We end our discussion of Kempton et al.'s work by mentioning a significant and relevant example they cite: U.S. Vice-President Albert Gore ". . justifies his personal environmental values based on his own Southern Baptist faith (1992: 242-248) [quoted from Kempton et al., in press, Chapter 5, p. 39])."

To summarize our discussion in this section of the chapter: There are only a few studies of the relation­ships in this country between Judeo-Christian affilia­tion, and also belief in the literal truth of the Bible, and people's level of environmental concern, and the results of these studies, while interesting, are incon­sistent.

Historical and Intercultural Evidence

The survey and interview studies that we discussed above found rather weak and inconsistent relation­ships between religious beliefs and environmental concern and behavior. However, keep in mind that all of the subjects in the studies were Americans and a large majority came from Judeo-Christian religious

46         PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

traditions. As a result, none of the studies really ad­dressed the larger and more important issue of whether Western religious/moral beliefs and values are largely responsible for the environmental deterio­ration found in Western countries, and whether alter­native, more proenvironmental values and beliefs would successfully prevent or lessen environmental damage. This major issue is addressed in research, which we now review, that examines the environmen­tal records of different cultures throughout the world and at different times of history—cultures that vary in the degree to which their religious teachings, morals, values, and so on were pro- or antienvironmental.

To begin with, several scholars have argued that the environmental records of many non-Western cul­tures are just as bad as those of Western cultures. Thomas Derr (1975, quoted in Dwivedi and Tiwari, 1987), for example, argues that the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, North Africans, and Aztecs seriously dam­aged their environments, in some cases to a degree sufficient to destroy their civilizations.

More powerful evidence against the idea that pro-environmental values and beliefs can avert envi­ronmental degradation is the serious environmental damage that has occurred in certain cultures through­out the world that have notably proenvironmental reli­gious teachings. Thus, Cobb (1972, cited in Hargrove, 1986) and Derr (1975, op. cit.) both claim that some Native American tribes had a blemished environmen­tal record, despite their proenvironmental religious and moral codes. They also point out that proenviron­mental Eastern religions, including Hinduism in In­dia, and Taoism and Buddhism in China, did not prevent enormous environmental damage from occur­ring in these countries. To take a closer look at this claim, we devote the next few pages to an in-depth examination of these three Eastern religions and their associated environmental records.

India and Hinduism. 0. Dwivedi and B. Tiwari (1987) argue that India's environmental record is ex­tremely poor, despite the fact that Hinduism, the dominant religion in India, is the oldest and the most proenvironmental religion in the world. Hinduism, which predates the birth of Christ by several thousand

years, holds that humans, other animals, plants, and even "lifeless" environmental features like stones and mountains are all part of an underlying unity because all are suffused with the same spiritual energy. Hu­mans are thus viewed as an integral part of nature, rather than as being an exalted species destined to control and exploit nonhuman forms of life.

Further, Hinduism (which has elements of mono­theism and polytheism), is animistic in that specific gods are thought to be manifested or incarnated in animals and other natural forms (a belief probably derived from prehistoric peoples who worshiped the forms and forces of nature that they could not under­stand, but which they were at the mercy of). Consider, for example, the following passage from the Kalika Purana (1927, quoted in Shiva, 1989):

Rivers and mountains have a dual nature. A river is but a form of water, yet it has a distinct body. Mountains appear a motionless mass, yet their true form is not such. We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell. that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish (Shiva, p. 39).

Perhaps the best-known animistic feature of Hin­duism is cow worship. Cows are thought to be mani­festations of a goddess and are therefore sanctified, protected, and allowed to roam at will. The key role of cow worship in Hinduism is made clear in the follow­ing words of Mahatma Gandhi:

The central fact of Hinduism is cow protection, cow protection is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution. It takes the human beyond his species. The cow to me means the entire subhuman world. Man, through the cows, is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. . . . (PJrotection of the cow means pro­tection of the whole ... creation of God. . . . (Clow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world. And Hinduism will live as long as there are Hindu to protect the cows (quoted in Dwivedi and Tiwari p. 45).

In addition, plants, for example pipal and banyan trees, just like animals, are thought to be the dwelling places of gods and are sacred. Many households wor­ship a pipal branch in a ceremony in the spring. The

scriptures, further, contain injunctions and penalties for the cutting of trees and for various acts of polluting the environment.

However, despite the obvious proenvironment­alism of Hindu scripture and practice, the environ­mental record of India is, as mentioned above, a miserable one. Dwivedi and Tiwari note the

. . enormous loss of natural resources . . . brought on by the cutting of trees. . . , and by the killing of animals and birds [p. 53]." In addition, heavy pump­ing of water for irrigation of crops in parts of India has lowered water tables by as much as ninety feet in ten years. In some places the pumping has caused salt water to invade aquifers and contaminate drinking supplies (Postel, 1990). In addition, overirrigation, overgrazing, and deforestation have seriously dam­aged large tracts of land in India; approximately 35 percent of potentially productive land has been de­graded due to the resulting water erosion, wind ero­sion, and salinization (Postel, 1989). In turn, it appears that deforestation and desertification have worsened droughts and floods (ibid.). And so on.

What explains the above discrepancies between the proenvironmental religious precepts of Hinduism and India's poor environmental record? Several fac­tors appear to be responsible.² One, as Dwivedi and Tiwari (1987) point out, is the invasion and occupa­tion of India by Muslim and Western (British) cul­tures over a period of 700 years and the consequent weakening of Hinduism (p. 90). However, as Hindu­ism dominates in India today, cultural invasion cannot fully explain the country's current poor environmen­tal record (p. 91).

A second factor is the philosophy of development that has been adopted in India (and many other devel­oping nations) in response to Western ideas—the de­mands of international markets, and pressure from international lenders whose development loans must be repaid in hard currency. For example, forests are cleared to replace indigenous trees with commercially valuable species that bring in cash for loggers and to repay international debt. Among the results have been a loss of firewood and fodder from the noncom­mercial trees; hardship for peasants—especially women—who had provided for their families, espe­ cially in hard times, by gathering twigs, fodder, and fruit from the forests; and massive downstream floods due to erosion of soils held in place by the indigenous vegetation (Shiva, 1989). Because of these impacts on women, the poor, and the environment, Vandana Shiva (1989) refers to India's policy as one of "mal­development."

A third factor is the unrelenting pressures of popu­lation growth, industrial development, and urbaniza­tion. The exponential growth of human numbers and the consequent growth in the need to feed, clothe, and shelter them simply overwhelms religious precepts. To provide one example, India's population, which has doubled since 1950, has "outstripped the sustain­able production levels of . . . [India's] fuelwood and fodder resources; . . . demand for these resources in the early 1980s exceeded supply by 70% and 23%, respectively [Postel, 1989]." As Dwivedi and Tiwari (1987) put it: "Members of the public, by themselves, will seldom venture into this battle to save the envi­ronment if their total attention is always placed on the battle for survival [p. 101]."

China and Taoism and Buddhism. In prerevo­lutionary China, the pressures of population and industrial and urban growth also overwhelmed proen­vironmental religious precepts and contributed to a long record of environmental degradation. As we will see, however, additional factors help account for China's environmental record, factors that also oper­ate in India and other countries that have proenviron­mental religious beliefs.

Before the Communist revolution in 1949, there were three dominant Chinese religious, philosophical, and/or moral traditions: Taoism, Buddhism, and Con­fucianism. (Elements of these traditions are still present in China today, though they are less visible [Kamachi, 1994].) Both Taoism and Buddhism con­tain many proenvironmental elements. Let's examine the elements in Taoism first. Quoting philosopher Po­Keung Ip (1983, pp. 338-339):

(Basically, the concept of "Tao" is] . . . a totally de­personalized concept of nature. . (Tao] is . . . intan­gible, ... simple, all-pervasive, eternal, (and] life sustaining. . . . [The word] "Te" [refers to] . . . the pc,-

48              PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

tency, the power, of Tao that nourishes [and] sustains beings.. . . Since RI is internalized in all beings in the universe, Ian are thereby linked and related].

All beings in the universe, furthermore, are of equal importance. Thus in Taoism, humans are neither su­perior to nor separate from the nonhuman parts of nature.

Going further, the Taoist doctrine of "Wu Wei" enjoins humans to act in accordance with, rather than against, the laws and processes of nature. Although it is appropriate for people to act to change nature by, for example, building dams and canals, these changes must be designed in accord with the way the hydraulic forces of nature operate, and nature—not people—is always the final arbiter of the success or failure of the project (Goodman, 1980). Finally, the Taoist concept of reversion emphasizes the cyclical, nonlinear char­acteristics of many natural processes, as when a living thing dies, decays, and new life forms from its re­mains (Po-Keung Ip, 1983; Goodman, 1980). Thus, natural processes are closed processes; garbage or other things that are thrown away by humans never leave natural systems.

The above Taoist principles are very much in line with the basic principles of modern ecology, as Goodman (1980) points out. Indeed, when one first reads the Taoist principles, they seem almost like summary statements taken from a contemporary ecol­ogy textbook!

Very briefly, Buddhism, like Taoism, stresses the equality of different forms of life and emphasizes the intrinsic value and importance of nonhuman life forms. "Buddhists are taught to love all living beings and not to restrict their love only to human[s]. . . . The Buddha's advice is that it is not right . . . to take .. . the life of any living being since every living being has a right to exist [independent of its utility or value to humans] (Dhammananda, 1982)."

Although Taoism and Buddhism contain many proenvironmental elements, the environmental record of prerevolutionary China was not a good one, as we noted above. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan (1970) docu­ments deforestation on a "vast scale" in northern China and "acute problems of soil erosion on the loess-covered plateaus [p. 248]."

What then explains the discrepancy between the proenvironmental teachings of the traditional Chinese religions of Taoism and Buddhism and the poor envi­ronmental record of prerevolutionary China? Yi-Fu Tuan identifies population growth as a major factor (as was the case with India). As the population in China grew, forests were cut down to provide more land for agriculture, and also wood for construction, and charcoal to heat homes. When faced with the choice between denuding forests in violation of reli­gious teachings, on the one hand, and allowing people to go hungry or to freeze to death, on the other, there is no doubt as to which choice wins. Urbanization and the growth of industries (e.g., metal industries) that consumed wood as fuel also contributed to environ­mental degradation during certain time periods.

However, the causes of the discrepancy were con­siderably more complicated than the above paragraph would suggest, and population and urban and indus­trial growth were not the only factors operating. Pos­sibly as important were the many political, economic, and social factors that—besides religious and moral teachings—determine the behavior of virtually any culture or country, both developing countries as well as advanced industrial states. As Yi-Fu Tuan points out, ". . . China, with her . . . temple compounds, was also a vast bureaucracy, a civilization, and an empire [p. 247]. . . . In the play of forces that govern the world, esthetic and religious ideals rarely have a ma­jor role [p. 244]." The egoistic and imperialistic be­havior of kings, generals, and other leaders with political, military, and/or economic power can contra­dict and overwhelm the religious and ethical teach­ings of a culture. Similarly, groups that have political, military, and economic power are often in a position to override the religious and moral beliefs of other groups that lack such power. National governments sometimes do this by extracting resources from poor or less powerful regions to enrich the rulers and the imperial center, thereby disrupting what may have been sustainable local relations between people and their environment.

An example of this "override" phenomenon is the large-scale deforestation that is now taking place in the Amazon River basin of Brazil. The efforts of indigenous tribes to protect their sacred ancestral

homelands, and also the efforts of nonindigenous rub­ber tappers to prevent deforestation, have been swept aside, sometimes violently, by cattle ranchers and others who—spurred on by such government policies as providing access roads deep into the forest, grant­ing ownership to anyone who clears a piece of forest, and providing tax incentives for farming—have ruthlessly pursued their own economic agendas by clearing land and creating large cattle ranches. Inter­national lending institutions long supported these policies by funding large-scale development projects that cleared forest land and made Brazil more depen­dent on cash crops, such as timber and beef from Amazonia, to repay international loans (Stern, Young, and Druckman, 1992).

National governments may also disrupt sustainable local relations between people and their environment in the name of development, as we have seen in the case of India. In postrevolutionary China, the govern­ment—in addition to suppressing the traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—has sacri­ficed the environment to development, for example, by pursuing a policy of heavy industrialization that relies on burning highly polluting soft coal, without emission controls (Smil, 1988).

Many of the political, social, and economic forces and processes that we outlined in the last few para­graphs above play a significant role in any country, and most certainly help explain the poor environmen­tal record of India. Some of these forces and processes also operate in advanced industrial nations like the United States today, nations in which population growth is much slower than in developing nations. The strong influence of nonreligious forces and pro­cesses in any country is a major reason that religious/ moral/and so on efforts by themselves are insufficient to solve major environmental problems.

PROENVIRONMENTAL RELIGIOUS/MORAL MOVEMENTS—CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AND POSSIBLE FUTURE TRENDS

The experiences of India and China warn us of the
limits of religious and moral controls alone as a way
to solve environmental problems. Nevertheless, we

believe that a stronger moral consciousness of the environment will help, and that religious and moral changes will play a role—most likely an important one—in any successful, permanent solution to global environmental problems. With this in mind, we brief­ly review in this section four current movements in the United States and other advanced industrial soci­eties that are trying to raise this sort of moral/religious consciousness. We then, in later sections, examine these four movements in terms of their common threads and their prospects for success. The religious/ moral movements are: contemporary Christian and Jewish ecotheology, which emphasizes proenviron­mental aspects of traditional scripture; Catholic theo­logian Thomas Berry's proenvironmental religion, which includes elements of Eastern religions and of modern scientific ecology; the deep ecology move­ment, led by Arne Naess, Bill Devall, and George Sessions, a movement that provides a new worldview and that urges major changes in Western lifestyles and values; and ecofeminism, which claims that there is an intrinsic moral and practical linkage between solving environmental problems in Western cultures and end­ing gender-role stereotyping and discrimination against women. Note that these four religious/moral movements overlap with each other to some extent and that they are not mutually exclusive (i.e., people could embrace more than one of the movements at the same time). Note also that the four differ in the degree to which they are complete religions: Both eco­theology and Berry's work involve full-blown reli­gions, whereas deep ecology and ecofeminism are each moral/ethical/values movements that have some religious elements.

Ecotheology

As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, many modern theologians argue that the "multiply and subdue the earth" quote from the Bible (Genesis), above, is mis­interpreted, taken out of context, and viewed simplis­tically. There is little in traditional Judeo-Christian scripture, these theologians argue, that endorses envi­ronmental exploitation, and much that supports a stewardship philosophy, one that stresses our respon­sibility to respect and care for the Earth, its ecological

50                   PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

systems, and nonhuman forms of life (Gelderloos, 1992; Whitney, 1993).

There is now considerable change occurring in many Western religions, even religions traditionally viewed as very conservative (Gelderloos, 1994). In­deed, a proenvironmental "Statement by Religious Leaders. . ." stressing the concept of stewardship was endorsed in 1991 and again in 1992 by a large panel of prominent Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, and Protestant religious leaders representing a total of 330,000 different congregations in the United States (Anderson et al., 1991; Moehlmann, 1992). Further, a National Religious Partnership for the Environment has been formed by organizations of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and evangelical Christian denomi­nations. These movements tend to confirm Kempton et al.'s (1995) conclusion that, contrary to White's (1967) thinking, religions in this country may be a major source of, rather than an obstacle to, proen­vironmental sentiments and actions.

Many ecotheologists base their arguments for the stewardship concept on a close examination of the wordings of original biblical and other scriptures, as distinct from the teachings and writings of more re­cent religious leaders and movements (Gelderloos, 1992; Whitney, 1993). Thus, Gelderloos (1992) dis­tinguish es between Christianity and its Judaic roots on the one hand, and Christendom on the other. The former refers to actual Judeo-Christian Holy Scrip­ture, the latter to commentaries, teachings, sermons, encyclicals, and practices of members of religious organizations over the past two millennia. Gelderloos argues that the concept of stewardship appears clearly in the Jewish Torah and Old Testament, and even in some New Testament scripture, but that Christendom has greatly deviated from these scriptures in recent centuries. Gelderloos attributes this deviation to sev­eral causes, including the influences of the prominent Christian theologian Saint Augustine several cen­turies after the death of Christ, the Protestant Refor­mation in the sixteenth century, the mechanistic worldview that emerged in the Western Enlighten­ment during the eighteenth century, and the industrial revolution.

Gelderloos (1992) and others base their claim that the stewardship ethic is clearly present in the Jewish Torah and the Old Testament (centuries before the deviation described above) on several lines of reason­ing. For one thing, these scriptures repeatedly empha­size that God is the creator of ". . . the heavens, . . . the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them [Neh 9:6, quoted on p. 13], and that [God] .. . gave life to everything"; things created by God, in turn, are sacred and must be protected. In addition, the Book of Genesis (the book containing the "multiply and subdue" passages) also describes the role of humankind as the "tillers" and "keepers" of God's creations, with the relevant Hebrew words clearly implying that humankind is to care for and keep these creations forever. Similarly, Barr (cited by Whitney, 1993) argues that the Hebrew word appearing in Gen­esis and translated as "to have dominion" is more correctly translated as implying responsible leader­ship, and the word translated as "to subdue" specifi­cally refers to the physical act of plowing soil, and not to the domination and exploitation of animals.

Gelderloos (1992), further, points out that support for the stewardship concept is found in Jewish rab­binical writings (which are separate from the Old Testament and therefore not shared with Christians) as well as the Old Testament itself. Gelderloos cites the writing of Ehrenfeld and Bentley (1985) on the (Old Testament) Jewish law of bal tashhit (meaning "do not destroy"), and also specific rabbinical injunc­tions against ". . . overgrazing of the countryside, the unjustified killing of animals or feeding them harmful foods, the hunting of animals for sport, species extinc­tion and destruction of cultivated plant varieties, pol­lution of air or water, overconsumption of anything, and the waste of mineral and other resources [quoted in Gelderloos 1992, p. 16]."

In summary, Gelderloos and other ecotheologians argue that Christians and Jews should now return to the stewardship "paradigm" that is clearly present in the original Judeo-Christian religious tradition. (Note that Gelderloos uses the word paradigm to encompass worldviews, ethics, and values, and we will adopt this usage for the remainder of the chapter.) To quote

Gelderloos: "Today we are looking for new para­digms to lead us out of the most severe planetary crisis we have faced since the end of glaciation.. .. [Al new look at one of the oldest paradigms in history, the Judeo-Christian [religious tradition reveals a clear paradigm] ... of stewardship or earthkeeping [p. 7]." Given that Judaism and Christianity have been the main Western religions for centuries, and given that radical changes in peoples' religious beliefs are not likely in the time we have left to avert environmental problems that threaten human survival, the ecotheolo­gy movement, by emphasizing the proenvironmental teachings of the dominant religious tradition, is a promising approach for moving Western values and beliefs in a proenvironmental direction.

We end this discussion of ecotheology with a mov­ing quote from Psalm 104 from the Old Testament that has some of the flavor of the passages ascribed to Chief Seatlh in the Chapter Prologue (as quoted in Gelderloos [1992], pp. 29-30):

[God] ... makes springs pour water into the ravines: They give water to all the beasts of the field:

the wild donkeys quench their thirst.

The birds of the air nest by the waters;

they sing among the branches.

[God] . . . waters the mountains .. .

the earth is satisfied by the fruit of [God's] . . . work. . . .

The trees of the Lord are well watered,

the cedars of Lebanon that [God] . . . planted. There the birds make their nests;

the stork has its home in the pine trees.

The high mountains belong to the wild goats;

the crags are a refuge of the coneys [small mammals]. The moon marks off the seasons. . . .

How many are your works, 0 Lord! In wisdom you made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number, living things both large and small... .

May the glory of the Lord endure forever. . . .

The work of ecotheologians, which we discussed in this section, overlaps with the work of Thomas Berry, which we describe in the section that follows.

Thomas Berry's Work

Thomas Berry, a Catholic monk and an "historian of cultures," believes that the survival of Western civili­zation hinges on its ability to create and gain adher­ence to a radical new religion. The new religion must include, Berry emphasizes, an environmentally sound worldview and cosmology (story of the creation of the universe and the role of humans in it).³ While this religion does not yet exist in final form, it will, Berry (1988) proposes, include the following elements: The new religion will be Earth- rather than human-cen­tered. It will give us a sense of the Earth's sacredness, and we will respect, revere, and feel gratitude toward our home planet. We will fully understand the interre­latedness and interdependency of all living things. Berry emphasizes that these elements are found in the religious beliefs of some Native American and other traditional cultures. Berry (1988) writes:

[The] story [will present] the organic unity and creative power of the planet Earth as they are expressed in the symbol of the Great Mother; the evolutionary process through which even living form achieves its identity and its proper role in the universal drama as it is ex­pressed in the symbol of the Great Journey: the related­ness of things in an omnicentered universe as expressed by the mandala: . . . and finally, the symbols of a com­plex organism with roots, trunk, branches, and leaves, which indicate the coherence and functional efficacy of the entire organism, as expressed by the Cosmic Tree and the Tree of Life. [p.34.] (This quote and ones below are from The Dream of the Earth. Copyright 1988 by Thomas Berry. Reprinted with permission of Sierra Club Books.)

Berry's new religion, however, would augment the spiritual beliefs of native peoples with cutting-edge, scientific knowledge about the ecology of the planet and the functioning of the entire universe. This would make religious beliefs and, thereby, resulting human actions, consonant with the actual processes and lim­its of the natural world, so that human actions will be eternally sustainable. (Note that many ecotheolo­gians, e.g., Gelderloos, 1992, also see a need for in­puts from scientific ecology.)

52           PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

Berry suggests an additional reason for giving modern science a major role in creating a new reli­gion: He argues that scientists in physics, astronomy, biology, meteorology, and other disciplines are now coming to a radically new understanding of the Earth as a living organism, as well as an understanding of the "oneness" of all things in the universe, and even of an intelligence that is manifest in the universe's de­sign. Thus, contemporary scientists, Berry argues, are arriving at the same kind of worldview and cosmol­ogy (or creation story) that native religions, as well as Eastern religions such as Taoism and Hinduism, have held to for thousands of years. This worldview and cosmology is, therefore, one that people can now accept both emotionally and intellectually. Berry (1988) writes:

[O]ur sustained [scientific] inquiry into the inner functioning of the planet [has] _I. . . brought us [to an] . . . awareness that the entire planet . . . (may be] a single organic reality. . . . [D]esignation of the earth as "Gala" [referring to the "Gaia hypothesis" a scientific theory that views the Earth and all its biological and physical processes as a single integrated organism] is no longer unacceptable in serious [scientific] dis­cussion. . . . Here the ancient mythic insight and our modern scientific perceptions discover their mutual confirmation. . . .

(Furthermore], science is [now] providing some of our most powerful poetic references and metaphoric expressions. . . . We are more intimate with every par­ticle of the universe and with the vast design of the whole. . . . We experience an identity with the entire cosmic order within our own beings. This sense of an emergent universe identical with ourselves gives new meaning to the Chinese sense of forming one body with all things [as in Taoism]. . . . That some form of intelli­gent reflection on itself was implicit in the universe from the beginning is now granted by many scientists.

The inclusion of new developments in science in the creation of a new environmentally sound religion is ironic. Earlier science and technology, shaped so strongly by the human-centered worldview and values of Western culture, may be seen as responsible for the industrial and postindustrial revolutions that have led to the serious environmental problems the world now faces, including the alteration of global climate and the erosion of the Earth's protective ozone layer (White, 1967; Berry, 1988, p. xii).

One major point of Berry's argument needs further clarification: Berry is talking not just about creating environmentally sound rules or codes to guide human action, based on modern scientific ecology, but also about creating a full new religion, one that has, as do all religions, significant subjective, spiritual, in­tuitive, and emotional components. Berry sees the subjective and spiritual components of religion as necessary for two reasons. First, from a practical point of view, he argues that the spiritual components of a religion are much more effective in changing and regulating human actions than are mere rules or codes of conduct. Thus, for example, he writes:

Without a fascination with the grandeur of the North American continent, the energy needed for its preserva­tion will never be developed. Something more than the utilitarian aspect of fresh water must be evoked if we are ever to have water with the purity required for our survival. There must be a mystique of the rain if we are ever to restore the purity of the rainfall [p. 33J.

Secondly, the spiritual, emotional components of a religion are, Berry argues, necessary to satisfy basic spiritual and emotional needs that all humans have, but that have been given short shrift in Western cul­ture. Berry believes that many Westerners are emo­tionally starved and unfulfilled in our supremely secular and materialistic society—a belief he shares with several other writers (e.g., Theodore Roszak, 1973). Berry writes:

. . . (O]ur secular society remains without satisfactory meaning or the social discipline needed for a life lead­ing to emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual fulfillment. Because of this lack of satisfaction, many persons are returning to a religious fundamentalism. But that, too, can be seen as inadequate to supply the values for sustaining our needed social discipline [p. 124J.

The kind of new religion that Berry envisions would fulfill our spiritual and emotional needs, while at the same time it would guide us into environmentally sound, permanently sustainable behavior.

The Deep Ecology Movement

Although it has spiritual and religious elements and some overlap with the work of Thomas Berry, the deep ecology movement mainly involves an over­riding philosophy and worldview, and a prescribed lifestyle. The concept of deep ecology and its philo­sophical foundations derive from the work of Nor­wegian philosopher Arne Naess (e.g., Naess and Rothenberg, 1989). The concept has been further ar­ticulated by sociologist/ecologist Bill Devall, philoso­pher George Sessions, and others (e.g., Devall and Sessions, 1985).

Deep ecologists emphasize the major differences that exist between their basic philosophy, values, and worldview (i.e. their paradigm) and the philosophy, values, and worldview currently dominant in Western countries. Table 3-4 summarizes these differences.

The dominant Western paradigm (left column) is hu­man-centered and materialistic, and derives, deep ecologists argue, from the basic Judeo-Christian worldview criticized by White (1967), from tradi­tional scientific orthodoxies, and also from capitalism (Devall and Sessions, p. 45). This paradigm, deep ecologists claim, is responsible for current global eco­logical crises, is factually and scientifically incorrect, and is spiritually impoverishing.

The deep-ecological paradigm (right column), in contrast, is nature-centered and stresses the intrinsic value of nonhuman forms of life, rather than their value defined only by their usefulness to humans. Deep ecologists identify several sources of their be­liefs and values, including: the new research findings in physics, astronomy, and so forth (discussed above in connection with Berry's work); modern scientific ecology; Eastern religions, such as Taoism; Native

TABLE 3-4 The Deep Ecology Paradigm Versus the Dominant Western Paradigm

DOMINANT WESTERN PARADIGM                                      DEEP ECOLOGY PARADIGM

Dominance over nature                                       Harmony with nature

Natural environment as resource for human use

Material/economic growth for a growing human

population

Belief in ample resource reserves

High technological progress and solutions

Consumerism

NationaVcentralized community

All nature has intrinsic worth; biospecies equality

Elegantly simple material needs (material goals serving the larger goal

of self-realization)

Earth "supplies" limited

Appropriate technology; nondominating science

Making do with enough/ recycling

Minority tradition/ bioregionalism

Source: Adapted from Devall, B., and Sessions, G., Deep ecology: Living as if nature mattered, p. 16. Copyright 1985. Gibbs Smith, Publisher. Used with permis­sion.

54         PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

American religions; contemporary feminism (dis­cussed in the next section, Ecofeminism); certain as­pects of Christianity (especially the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi); and the writings of ecologist Aldo Leopold, authors Theodore Roszak and David Ehren­feld, and others.

Deep ecologists generally advocate: A decrease in the Earth's human population; less human interfer­ence with the nonhuman natural environment; a lifestyle of "voluntary simplicity" (that is, one that minimizes resource consumption and environmental pollution and that avoids superfluous material pos­sessions); and frequent communion with nature, for example, by hiking in natural environments—a com­munion that reconnects people with the Earth, pro­vides spiritual fulfillment, and is the only way, deep ecologists believe, to truly understand and appreciate the deep ecology worldview (Devall and Sessions, 1985; Devall, 1988).

The literature of the deep ecology movement draws clear distinctions not only between the domi­nant Western paradigm and the deep-ecological para­digm (as in Table 3-2), but also between "shallow" and "deep" levels of ecological consciousness. The literature claims that a great many of the people who are truly concerned about environmental problems and are motivated to solve them (this includes a ma­jority of Americans, according to public opinion poll results) still do not realize the degree to which their worldviews and values are frozen at a not sufficiently radical level. In Table 3-5, adapted from Miller (1990) and Devall and Sessions (1985), we outline three dif­ferent levels of environmental consciousness, going from shallow to deep.

Deep ecologists urge all Westerners to progress by reading the deep ecology literature and communing with nature to the third, or deepest, level of ecological consciousness and follow the tenets of their move-

TABLE 3-5 Levels of Environmental Consciousness

Level One—Shallow ecology: Concern about pollution and resource depletion: Acute and visible cases of environmental degradation are a cause of serious concern and action. Different environmental problems are seen as largely unrelated, and are to be corrected on a case-by-case basis. Natural resources should not be squandered, but should be consumed efficiently. Nature exists for humans and human use, but it is in our own self-interest that nature be managed wisely.

Level Two—intermediate-depth" ecology: The spaceship-earth analogy: Nature exists for human use, but humans are polluting and despoiling it badly. We must more fully understand the high degree of human dependence on nature, the finite ability of nature to absorb pollution and yield resources, the interrelatedness of all life forms, and the complexity of global ecosystems. With advanced scientific knowledge and management (for example, sophisticated computer models of ecosystems), and with the proper laws, regulations, and other existing societal institutions, we should be able to manage the planet wisely so that humans will continue to prosper materially into the foreseeable future.

Level Three—Deep ecology: Bioequality: Morally speaking, humans are not more important than nonhuman life forms and are not fundamentally different from or separate from them; all forms of life have a basic right to exist. Humans and human science and technology will never be able to fully understand and manage global ecosys­tems; to assume so is merely human arrogance. Nature can't be bent to the ways of humans. Pursuit of material comforts is intrinsically unrewarding; a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity is rewarding. We must replace our Western worldview with that of Eastern and native religions, and develop a spiritual/religious bond with the Earth and all its creatures, including fellow humans of all cultures and countries.

ment. Nothing short of this, they argue, can save our species and planet.

Ecofeminism

Because there are several different versions of ecofeminism and a diversity of ecofeminist beliefs (Cuomo, 1992), it is difficult to briefly characterize the ecofeminism movement. However, most eco­feminists are concerned both about solving global and regional environmental problems and about eliminat­ing sexism, that is, eliminating discrimination against women and gender-based stereotyping of social roles. Ecofeminists argue forcefully that there is an underly­ing linkage between major environmental problems and sexism, and that both problems can only be solved together. Both problems, they argue, reflect the West­ern male paradigm, one that stresses dichotomy, hier­archy, discrimination, domination, and exploitation (Shiva, 1989; Salleh, 1992; Cuomo, 1992). Thus, the Western view of nature, historically developed by men, sees nonhuman forms of life as separate from and inferior to human life, and Westerners have ex­ploited and subjugated nonhuman life for centuries; similarly, the Western view sees women as inferior to men, and Western men have subjugated and exploited women for centuries. (Some ecofeminists argue that the linkage in the Western male paradigm between women and nature derives from the paradigm's view of nature as feminine; in other words, women are identified with and symbolic of nature [see Ortner, 19741.) Further, ecofeminists argue, both the subjuga­tion of nature and the subjugation of women are strongly linked together in male-centered Western re­ligions and religious institutions, in Western science, and in everyday Western life.

Concerning Western religions, we have already reviewed the claims of White (1967) that the Judeo-Christian tradition is human-centered and demeaning to nonhuman forms of life. Though many scholars and theologians have questioned these claims (as we dis­cussed above), it is difficult to deny that Western religions are patriarchal and male-centered. Judaic and Christian scripture both portray God as male, and emphasizes the male progenitors of the human species more than the female progenitors. In Christianity, the child of God, Christ, is a male, and he has greater importance than Mary, the mother of Christ (or than any other female figure). In most organized Jewish and Christian religious institutions and traditions, fur­thermore, women have until recently played a less important role than men, both in participating in ser­vices and rituals, and in serving as priests, ministers, or rabbis. Western science is, similarly, male-cen­tered, ecofeminists argue (Shiva, 1989). Francis Ba­con and the other (male) founders imbued science with the distinctly male hierarchical and patriarchal worldview and values, a worldview and values that justify the exploitation of nature and that at least implicitly justify sexism and the exploitation of women. Finally, it is apparent that just as deep ecol­ogy is not yet widely accepted in Western nations, there is residual sexism in most Western nations (this is not to deny the considerable progress made in the last two to three decades).

Going further, some ecofeminists argue that the differences between the male paradigm (one that stresses dichotomy, hierarchy, discrimination, domi­nation, and exploitation, as we discussed above) and the female paradigm (which we discuss in more detail below) are mainly culturally rather than genetically determined and can be traced back to the gender-based division of labor found in a nomadic hunting and gathering society, the main form of human living arrangement for the first 30,000 years of our species' 40,000 or so years of life on this planet (Maria Mies, 1986, [cited by Shiva] and Shiva, 1989). Men gener­ally hunted animals, whereas women, besides bearing and nurturing new human life, gathered foods such as berries, nuts, and tubers. Shiva argues that the role of hunter intrinsically involves the use of tools that de­stroy life rather than produce life, a basically exploit­ative, dominant stance toward nonhuman nature, and a life-or-death power over other living things—in other words, the basic male paradigm that still appears to dominate today.

In contrast, Shiva argues, the female role as food gatherers led women in Stone Age cultures to a differ­ent, female, paradigm, one that stresses: the inter­connectedness and interrelatedness of all life forms;

56      PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

the sanctity of all forms of life; the diversity and complexity of life forms and natural processes (which cannot be understood by examining small, individual parts); and nature as productive, creative, and bounti­ful (Shiva, 1989). Shiva (1989) also argues that, in Stone Age hunter/gatherer cultures, women's gather­ing activities actually generated as much as 80 percent of the food consumed. Furthermore, women who live today in developing countries, Shiva points out, still have a disproportionately large role in food produc­tion, both as gatherers and in small-scale farming activities.

Some ecofeminists and others further claim that although the male paradigm has predominated in Western society for tens of thousands of years, there was a brief period (650013.c. to 3500 B.c.) during which certain cultures in Europe followed feminine principles (Gimbutas, 1974; Berry, 1988). These cul­tures were, according to at least some archaeologists, egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful. However, ac­cording to these accounts, the cultures were swept aside by an invasion of Aryan peoples, the male-centered forebears of contemporary Western cultures (Berry, 1988, pp. 139-140). These archaeologists ar­gue that a key element in the replacement of feminine-oriented cultures by masculine-oriented cultures was the replacement of the Earth Mother, worshiped by the feminine cultures, with the Heavenly Father con­ception found today in Judeo-Christianity. The mas­culine-oriented cultures, by these accounts, were apparently responsible for 5,000 uninterrupted years of warfare, brutality, and environmental destruction. As political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1974, [quoted in Shiva, 1989]) wrote, "Inasmuch as the male principle has been the ruling mental and physical force [in Western civilization and has produced such negative consequences], a free society would be the 'definite negation' of this principle—it would be a female society."

The ecofeminist solution to global environmental problems and to sexism, then, is for Western society to readopt the feminine worldview and religious/ moral codes that some ecofeminists claim existed in European cultures between 6500 and 3500 B.c. Again, ecofeminists stress that since environmental problems and sexism have the same underlying cause—the male paradigm—they can only be solved together and through a fundamental and radical change from the male to the female paradigm. Note, finally, that the female paradigm Shiva describes is highly similar to the basic worldview and perspective of modern ecol­ogy (as we discuss in greater detail later in the chap­ter). In fact, the contemporary ecological theory that views the Earth as a single, living, and self-regulating organism is called by its proponents the "Gaia Hy­pothesis," Gaia being the name of the (female) Earth goddess in ancient Greek mythology.

COMMON THREADS IN RELIGIOUS/MORALLY BASED ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS

Each of the four proenvironmental movements or po­sitions we just discussed—ecotheology, the teachings of Thomas Berry, deep ecology, and ecofeminism­has an explicitly religious/moral/ethical base, and each claims to be a departure from a dominant West­ern paradigm its proponents hold responsible for envi­ronmental degradation. What do these environmental movements have in common, aside from what they oppose? We con tend that the four movements share two key components: 1) A worldview (or system of beliefs) consonant with contemporary scientific ecol­ogy, and 2) an ecocentric value orientation. These key components overlap and are tightly intertwined. We now discuss the components one at a time.

Shared Ecological Worldview

All four religious movements share to varying de­grees the basic worldview or belief system that many ecologists and environmental scientists have been ad­vocating for the last few decades. A look at any recent text on human ecology, environmental sciences, or environmental studies reveals a set of interrelated be­liefs about: the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, the workings of global and regional ecosystems, the disruptive impact that human activity is now having on those systems, the potential for catastrophic consequences, and the changes in human activity needed to avert those consequences. The eco­logical worldview advocates harmony with nature,

emphasizes the finiteness of natural resources, the limited resilience of ecological processes, and the necessity of controlling human population and mate­rial growth.

Table 3-6 contains a more detailed statement of the major beliefs that comprise the worldview of scien­tific ecology, as we understand it, based mainly on a close examination of the best-selling undergraduate text in environmental studies/science, G. T. Miller's Living in the Environment, 1994. Again, we maintain that all four movements—ecotheology, Berry's reli­gion, deep ecology, and ecofeminism—share many of the beliefs in this table. Items in the table aren't neces­sarily listed in order of importance, nor is the list intended as exhaustive. A look back at the discussion earlier in the chapter will verify that the four move­ments embrace some or many aspects of the ecologi­cal worldview. For example, compare Table 3-6 with the right-hand column of Table 3-4 on the deep ecol­ogy movement.

TABLE 3-6 The Worldview of Modern Scientific Ecology

1.     There are complex, multiple interactions and linkages between the different forms of plant and animal life on the planet. The forms of life are highly interconnected and interdependent.

2.     Because of these complex interconnections and interdependencies it is difficult to change one thing in a natural or environmental system (e.g., to increase or decrease the population of a species) without creating other changes, often ones that are remote and unanticipated. This principle is sometimes summarized by the saying "You can't do just one thing."

3a   Human survival is highly dependent on services provided by nonhuman forms of life and by global and regional ecological processes.

3b   There are limits to the resiliency of the ecological processes upon which human life and activity depend (for example, the oxygen cycle, and global climatic processes).

4.    The Earth's supply of natural resources upon which human activity (especially technologically advanced human activity) depend are finite and exhaustible.

5.    The global impacts of human activity (affected by the size of the human population, the nature of the technologies humans use, and the intensity with which they use them) have recently begun to disrupt key ecological processes, disrupt the "balance of nature," deplete natural resources, and cause the extinction of plant and animal species at unprecedented rates.

6a    Growth in human population and industrial activity, and hence in resource use and pollution generation, cannot continue indefinitely.

6b    Exponential human population growth must be slowed and stopped, along with the growth of human industrial activity. Permanently sustainable levels of population, resource use, and pollution generation must be reached.

7.     Natural/environmental systems and processes are closed or circular ones (e.g., the waste materials and dead bodies of a species become the food and sustenance for others), not linear ones. There is no "away" to which human garbage or pollution can truly be thrown.

8.     Global and regional environmental systems are highly complex, and humans may never be able to fully comprehend them. Human efforts to "manage" nature—even aided with such technology as computer models—could well lead to catastrophic failure.

9.     "Upstream" solutions to environmental problems (for example, limiting the material introduced into the solid-waste stream to begin with) are generally more beneficial than "downstream" solutions (for example, trying to clean up a pollutant after it has been widely distributed). A summary of this principle is "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care." [We further discuss this and related principles in Chapter 10.]

10.   The ecological integrity and diversity of the Earth's life-support systems must be maintained.

11.   There is some evidence that the Earth, its biota, its atmosphere, and so on can be conceived of as a single, complex, integrated organism (i.e., the "Gaia hypothesis").

58            PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

Consider how different the ecological worldview, described in Table 3-6, is from the Western world-view (compare items in Table 3-6 with items in the left-hand column of Table 3-4 titled "Dominant West­ern Paradigm"). The Western worldview holds that there is an essentially unlimited supply of natural resources and that science and technology have essen­tially unlimited powers. Similarly, it assumes that continual material growth and growth in human num­bers are both possible and desirable. The Western and the ecological worldviews are, thus, in many ways polar opposites.

To repeat and summarize, we contend that all four of the cutting-edge environmental movements de­scribed earlier in the chapter share a rejection of the Western worldview and embrace, to varying degrees, the contrasting ecological worldview in Table 3-6.

Before we leave the topic, however, we should briefly qualify our discussion of the ecological world-view. All worldviews, including this one, are sets of beliefs that provide cultures and individuals with gen­eral perspectives or vantage points. Woridviews are not God-given truths. Thus, it can be argued that no worldview is valid in an absolute sense, including this one. On the other hand, the ecological worldview is a conceptual framework accepted by most ecologists and environmental scientists. The framework is im­plicitly if not explicitly endorsed by national and international scientific panels that have voiced warn­ings about global and regional environmental prob­lems. For example, a group of over 1,000 scientists, including dozens who received Nobel prizes, signed a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (1992) that basi­cally accepts the framework of Table 3-6. This degree of scientific agreement at least suggests that the West­ern worldview is flawed and that the ecological worldview must be given serious consideration.

Shared Ecocentric Values

All four proenvironmental movements share not only
a highly similar set of beliefs, or a worldview, but also
a single major value and ethical orientation. We can

best describe this orientation in relation to Carolyn Merchant's (1992) analysis of the values and ethical bases that underlie human views on the environment. Merchant argues that controversies about human-en­vironment relations center on three different values/ ethics. One, which she calls the egocentric ethic, judges acts against the standard that the pursuit of self-interest is to be placed above other values. People who uphold this ethic tend to oppose environmental policies that would lead individuals to take actions against their desires. A second ethic, that Merchant calls homocentric, holds the good of the human spe­cies above other values. People who uphold this ethic support environmental policies that constrain indi­vidual choice if the effect is to promote a greater good for a greater number or to advance humanistic ideals such as equality or justice. They oppose environmen­tal policies that promote the well-being of nonhuman species if the policies cause human beings as a species to make sacrifices or if they create injustice. The third ethic, termed ecocentric, judges acts according to their effects on the biosphere. People who uphold this ethic favor environmental policies benefitting ecosys­tems even if human beings must sacrifice.

Of course, few people hold any of these values/ ethical positions in the extreme. Even the most ego­centric agree that there are limits to selfishness set by the good of society, and even the most ecocentric would not place unlimited burdens on human beings to achieve small benefits for other species. Neverthe­less, it is useful to distinguish these three ethical posi­tions because doing so makes clear the moral basis of the positions of environmental movement groups and their opponents.

The four radical proenvironmental movements we discuss in this chapter all share an ecocentric value/ ethical orientation. Their proponents consider envi­ronmental quality to have intrinsic value and believe on ethical grounds that people should protect the envi­ronment even at some cost to themselves and their societies. Their positions can be contrasted with those of environmentalist organizations that do not chal­lenge the human-centered basis of ordinary ethics. These environmental groups may organize people to reduce pesticide residues in food on the grounds that

they are carcinogenic, to oppose nuclear power be­cause of the risk of accidents that can cause human illnesses and fatalities, and to control toxic waste disposal because of the threats air and water pollution pose to human health or to aesthetic or recreational values. These arguments are all homocentric, in Merchant's terms, and in that way contrast sharply with the positions of the ecotheologians, Thomas Berry, the deep ecologists, and the ecofeminists, as well as with the teachings of Native American reli­gions and Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist scripture. Homocentric and ecocentric environmentalists often take the same positions on policy issues, but on differ­ent value and ethical bases.

Plan for the Rest of the Chapter

We devote the remainder of this chapter to exploring
the potential for these radical religious/ethically based
proenvironmental movements to succeed. In Mer-

FIGURE 3-1 Religious/Ethical/Moral Traditions/Movements That Share an Ecocentric Value Orientation

chant's terms, the goal of the movements is to put human-environmental relations on a more ecocentric ethical basis. In addition, the movements aim to dis­seminate and make dominant the contemporary eco­logical worldview, as we discussed earlier. These changes are major and represent dramatic shifts in Western values and beliefs. To judge whether or not these environmental movements—and the religious/ moral/ethical strategy—are likely to succeed, we must consider three important and related issues. First, we need to examine more closely the values and worldview that now underlie public support for envi­ronmental protection and the potential that exists for making that support more ecocentric and more based on the ecological worldview. In the next section of the chapter, we carefully review relevant public opinion data on these issues. We'll see evidence that people's basic values and beliefs in Western and other nations have already begun to shift in the direction that radical ecologists want them to shift. Second, we need to consider whether or not the value and belief shifts are likely to persist and become permanent. Third, we need to assess the probable effects of value and belief shifts on people's actual behavior, such as their taking energy-saving actions in their homes and cars, pur­chasing proenvironmental goods and services, partici­pating in recycling programs, choosing to limit the size of their families, supporting proenvironmental government policies, voting for proenvironmental po­litical candidates, and so on (there are analogous changes in the actions of government policy makers). Major shifts in values, morals, and beliefs must trans­late into such changes in people's behavior if the shifts are to have a significant positive impact on global and regional environmental problems.

ISSUE ONE: ARE ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES AND BELIEFS CHANGING?

Explicit in the arguments of ecotheologians, deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and other radical environ­mentalists are the claims that Westerners are now primarily homocentric or egocentric in their value orientations and primarily adherent to the Western worldview. But what do we really know about the

60      PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

values and beliefs of the general public in Western countries? Are the ecologists' claims about the non­ecocentricity of people's values and about their worldviews backed by empirical data? As it turns out, there are extensive public-opinion data concerning environmental values and beliefs, and we devote this section of the chapter to a review of these data. The data, indeed, confirm that an ecocentric orientation, is not now common among the Western general public. However, the data do show surprisingly strong, wide­spread, and increasing environmental concern in Western and in many developing countries as well. There is also some evidence that this concern is linked to deep, underlying values and beliefs, suggesting the initial emergence of a more ecocentric orientation and of the contemporary ecological worldview, and possi­bly of an equally fundamental shift in general societal values. These trends may reflect in part the influence that liberal and radical environmental movements have already had on the values and beliefs of the public and of policy makers.

Strong Public Support for
Environmental Protection

Opinion polls show that public proenvironmental sen­timents in the United States are very strong—stron­ger, indeed, than they have ever been (Mitchell, 1990; Dunlap, 1991). Recall from Chapter 1 that public concern about environmental problems and support for proenvironmental measures first increased in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then decreased during the mid- and late 1970s, though it was still consider­able (Dunlap, 1991). In the 1980s, public environ­mental concern and support once again increased, leading up to the very high levels of environmental concern and support in recent polls. Evidence of the strength of public proenvironmental sentiments in the United States is shown in Table 3-7. The table, adapted from Dunlap (1991), displays people's re­sponses to questions asked in four different public opinion polls taken in 1990. Each poll involved a different random sample of several hundred Ameri­cans; the data should be accurate within plus or minus

four percentage points. Note that despite differences in question wordings from poll to poll, all the surveys show strong proenvironmental public sentiment. Fig­ure 3-2 shows graphically the increase in public envi­ronmental concern in this country through the 1980s. It displays results from CBS/New York Times sur­veys that repeated a single question—the last question presented in Table 3-7—at seven different times be­tween 1981 and 1990. The wording of the question is as follows: "Protecting the environment is so impor­tant that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made at all costs." The increase in proenvi­ronmental sentiment during this period, reflected in agreement with this strongly proenvironmental state­ment, is especially impressive given that President Reagan, in office between 1981 and 1989, pro­pounded the view that government environmental regulations were excessive. Despite the president's antienvironmental stance, the general public's sup­port for environmental protection measures increased steadily. This increase continued into the early 1990s.

The evidence of strong and growing support for environmental protection among the U.S. public is matched by evidence from other countries that indi­cates widespread environmental concern worldwide. Dunlap, Gallup, and Gallup (1993) reported results of a huge survey-research project involving approxi­mately 1,000 respondents in each of twenty-two coun­tries. The countries ranged widely in level of wealth and economic development and in geographic loca­tion. In twenty of the countries, a majority of the respondents gave environmental protection first prior­ity when asked to rank the importance of environmen­tal protection relative to economic growth. In sixteen of the countries, a majority even indicated a willing­ness to pay higher prices for goods and services if necessary to achieve environmental protection. In ad­dition, "[p]eople in the poorer, developing countries . . . clearly recognize[d] the impact of population growth on their environment and . . . [did] not place all of the blame for global environmental problems on richer nations. Likewise, residents of wealthy nations . . . [did] not attribute the world's environmental

TABLE 3-7 Public Opinion Poll Results: Proenvironmental Sentiment in the U.S. General Public, 1990. (Figures shown indicate the percentage of people polled who held the corresponding view.)

National Opinion Research Center Poll:

The U.S. is spending on improving and protecting the environment:

a.  too little                                          71%

b.  too much                                                        4%

Cambridge Poll:

[Should we] sacrifice environmental quality or sacrifice economic growth?:

a.  sacrifice econ. growth                   64%

b.  sacrifice environ. qual.                  15%

Cambridge Poll:

Amount of environmental protection by government:

a.  too little                                          62%

b.  too much                                        16%

NYTimes/CBS Poll:

Environmental improvements must be made regardless of the cost:

a.   agree                                                              74%

b.   disagree                                         21%

Source: Dunlap, R. Trends in public opinion toward environmental issues: 1965-90. Society and Natural Resources, Volume 4. Copyright 1991. Taylor & Francis, Inc., Washington, D.C. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

problems primarily to overpopulation [in poorer countries] [p. 2]."

Of course, people's responses to public opinion poll questions and their true values and beliefs are not necessarily the same. Further, people's values and beliefs do not necessarily consistently affect their ac­tual behavior, a fact that behavioral and social scien­tists have long emphasized (and which we discuss in detail in Chapter 4). Although for these reasons it is possible to infer too much from public opinion data, there are still several reasons to be impressed by the extent of public expressions of environmental con- cern. First, it is striking and unusual that proenviron­mental public sentiments in the United States have remained quite strong over the last twenty-five years and are now stronger than ever before. This pattern of long and relatively consistent public support is very different from the pattern found for a variety of other social issues, which typically occupy the public's at­tention for only a few years or even months.

Second, environmental concern is widespread and cuts across traditional sociodemographic lines. Al­though environmental support is positively related to respondents' youth and their levels of education and income, and although differences between men and women are sometimes reported, the effects of these variables on strength of support are very modest (Arcury and Christianson, 1990; Hines, Hungerford, and Tomera, 1987; Jones and Dunlap, 1992). In other words, environmental concern is found among all so­cial strata, races, education levels, and so on. More­over, at the international level (as we noted above), high levels of environmental concern are found not only in wealthy countries but also in developing coun­tries and countries of the former Socialist bloc (Dunlap, Gallup, and Gallup, 1993). The claim that is

March
1989
(Alaskan oil spill)

FIGURE 3-2 Public Views of Environmental Protection "Regardless of Cost" 1981-1989

From national telephone surveys conducted by the New York Times/CBS News, and the New York Times.

Source: From Mitchell, R. Public opinion and the green lobby. In Vig, N., and Kraft, M. (Eds.), Environmental Policy in the 1990s. Copyright 1990. Washington, D.C.: CO Press. Reproduced with permission.

sometimes made—that environmental concern is a luxury of the rich and well educated—seems to be untrue both within the U.S. population and at the international level.

Third, research data suggest that proenvironmental public sentiments are strong enough to affect such actual behaviors as voting for proenvironmental po­litical candidates and purchasing proenvironmental goods and services, as we discuss in detail later in the chapter. In sum, environmental concern appears to be widespread, relevant to action, and gaining in strength.

Emerging Support for the Ecological Worldview

In addition to the high levels of public support for environmental protection, there is now evidence sug­gesting the emergence and increasing acceptance of the contemporary ecological worldview (Table 3-6). Only a few relevant studies have been done in this country, most of them by sociologist Riley Dunlap. In the mid-1970s, Dunlap (1978), his colleagues, and others (Dunlap and Van Liere, 1978, 1984; Lovrich et al., 1987; Arcury and Christianson, 1990; Dunlap et al., 1992) proposed the concept of a "new environ­mental paradigm" (NEP), a paradigm, they argued, emerging in Western countries. Note that Dunlap et al.'s NEP while mainly a worldview, is also to a lesser extent a value orientation.

Table 3-8 shows the main tenets of Dunlap and Van Liere's (1978) NEP as represented by the twelve items in their survey instrument. Dunlap and Van Liere chose the statements in the table based mainly on a review of literature published in the mid-1970s by ecologists, environmental scientists, and others concerned about environmental problems. Dunlap and colleagues asked their research subjects to rate, on i questionnaire form, the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with each of the twelve state­ments. Note that some of the twelve statements are worded so that a respondent's disagreement with the statement signifies belief in the NEP; this wording is used to detect if a respondent did not really read the statements and only agreed or disagreed with them uniformly.

The first ten items in the table assess respondents' beliefs about the relationship between humanity and nature—how it is and how it ought to be. These items duplicate several aspects of the ecological worldview that we discussed earlier (Table 3-6). The final two items of the NEP scale focus on the value of nonhu­man versus human life. Although Dunlap et al. did their initial research before Merchant (1992) pub­lished her three-part classification of ethics/values, disagreement with these final two items is quite con­sistent with Merchant's ecocentric value orientation. Dunlap and colleagues' NEP scale is like the pro-

TABLE 3-8 Dunlap and Colleagues' New Environmental Paradigm Scale (Subjects Rated Their Level of Agreement with Each Statement)

WORLDVIEW

We are approaching the limit of the number of people the Earth can support.

The balance of nature is very delicate and easily upset.

Mankind was created to rule over the rest of nature.

When humans interfere with nature it often produces disastrous consequences.

To maintain a healthy economy we will have to develop a "steady-state" economy in which industrial growth is controlled.

Humans must live in harmony with nature in order to survive.

The Earth is like a spaceship with only limited room and resources.

Humans need not adapt to the natural environment, because they can remake it to suit their needs.

There are limits to growth beyond which our industrialized society cannot expand.

Mankind ig severely abusing the environment.

VALUES

Humans have the right to modify the natural environment to suit their needs. Plants and animals exist primarily to be used by humans.

Source: Adapted from Dunlap, R., and Van Liere, K. The "New Environmental Paradigm." Journal of Environmental Education, Volume 9, p. 13. Copyright 1978. Heldref Publications. Used with permission.

grams of the proenvironmental movements we dis­cussed earlier in the chapter, in that it embraces both the ecological worldview and ecocentric values.

In several research studies, Dunlap and his col­leagues found high levels of public agreement with items of the NEP. Thus, Dunlap and Van Liere (1978) found that an average of 74.5 percent of 806 randomly selected residents of the state of Washington "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the twelve NEP items (items scored in a proenvironmental direction to com­pensate for differences in item wordings). Further, Dunlap and Van Liere found that approximately 25 percent of the respondents adhered "coherently" to the twelve .NEP items. That is, 25 percent of the respondents responded to the scale in a highly consis­tent proenvironmental way. They "strongly agreed" with most, if not all, of the proenvironmental state­ments, suggesting a coherent ecological worldview (and an ecocentric value orientation), and not merely a tendency to support environmental protection mea­sures on a piecemeal, case-by-case basis.

In subsequent research, Lovrich, Taurutani, and Pierce (1987) found significant numbers of "coher­ ent" new-environmental-paradigm supporters in Ja­pan as well as the United States. Further, research data suggest that public acceptance of the new envi­ronmental paradigm has been increasing. In 1990, Dunlap and his colleagues (Dunlap et al., 1992) pre­sented eight of the original NEP items to a representa­tive sample of residents of the state of Washington and compared the results with those from the similar sample, noted above, surveyed in 1976. Overall, the 1976 respondents endorsed each of the eight items at an average level of 71 percent—a high level of accep­tance. By 1990, acceptance had increased somewhat further, to an average of 78 percent endorsement. This evidence suggests that it is not only support for envi­ronmental policies that has been increasing but also support for the ecological worldview (and also eco­centric values).

A Direct Search for Ecocentric Public Values

In related and more recent research, Paul Stern and
colleagues surveyed a representative sample of resi-

64  PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

dents of Fairfax County, Virginia, a large suburban area of Washington, D.C., in a direct attempt to detect the emergence in the public of a ecocentric value orientation (Stern, Dietz, Guagnano, and Kalof, 1994; Stern and Dietz, 1994). Their data failed to confirm a coherent ecocentric orientation distinct from a homo­centric one (in their terms, a "social-altruistic" one). However, the Stern et al. data revealed surprisingly strong public support for several of the individual value items that comprise the ecocentric ethical posi­tion.

In their research, Stern et al. first compiled a list of specific values—including both homocentric and eco­centric values—from the work of Schwartz (1992). The list is sum marized in Table 3-9. Note in the left­most column of Table 3-9 the cluster or group of values that Schwartz calls self-transcendent values. In Merchant's (1992) terms, these values include some that appear to be ecocentric (unity with nature, pro­tecting the environment, and a world of beauty) and others that appear homocentric (a world at peace, equality, social justice, and helpfulness). Egocentric values are to be found in the two other value clusters that Schwartz calls self-enhancement and openness to change.

Stern et al. added two environmental value items to Schwartz's self-transcendent values to see if length­ening the list would make it easier to statistically identify in their respondents' value systems a coher­ent ecocentric value cluster separate from a homo­centric cluster. Stern et al. presented each respondent with the list of value items and asked him/her to rate the importance of each item on a scale, along with other items about environmental beliefs and actions. Stern et al. found that most of their respondents strongly endorsed many of the homocentric value items and many respondents strongly endorsed sev­eral of the individual ecocentric value items. How­ever, so far, Stern et al. have failed to find convincing evidence that a separate coherent ecocentric set of values is emerging in their representative U.S. popu­lation. As Table 3-9 indicates, homocentric and ecocentric values, though they are distinct in the lit­erature of the environmental movement, could not be disentangled in this cross-section of citizens. That is, individuals who endorsed the ecocentric items tended

TABLE 3-9 Four Classes of Values

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE             SELF-ENHANCEMENT             OPENNESS TO CHANGE                TRADITIONAL•

 

Unity with nature Protecting the environment Preventing pollutionb Respecting the Earthb A world at peace Equality Social justice Being helpful A world of beauty

Authority Social power Wealth Influence

An exciting life A varied life Curiosity Enjoying life

Honoring parents and elders Honesty Obedience Self-discipline Family security Cleanliness Politeness Social order

Source: Stern, Dietz, Guagnano, and Kalof, 1994. The values are listed in order of the strength of relationship between individual items in a cluster and a scale that represents the entire cluster as a single factor.

aSchwartz's (1992) term is "conservation," in the sense of wanting to conserve existing institutions. Stern et al. (1994) used the term tradition, because in the literature on environmentalism, the term conservation has a very different meaning. Traditional­ists are not necessarily conservationists.

bThese items were added to those originally used by Schwartz (1992).

also to endorse the other items in the self-transcen­dence cluster, all of which are homocentric. (It is possible, though Stern et al. have not yet examined the possibility, that a separate ecocentric value orienta­tion is emerging in certain subgroups, such as envi­ronmental activists or youth.)

The Stern et al. data thus show that the ideological struggle concerning proenvironmental values is not nearly over. At this point, the homocentric and eco­centric ethics seem to be combined in many people's minds, rather than competing. Stern et al. believe the progress of radical ecologists' efforts to change the ethical basis of environmental concern can be gauged by monitoring changes in the structure of human val­ues in particular populations. If, for instance, the in­creasing environmentalism of younger cohorts of the population reflects a value shift toward ecocentric values, that may be an early indicator of a change in the typical value structure in the society. If radical ecologists can succeed in socializing youth in a new value structure, the result might be significant for the future of mass environmental concern and possibly for action.

The Emergence of "Post-Materialist" Values

The political scientist Ronald Inglehart, in his book Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (1990), argues that a profound shift of basic values has been occurring in Western countries over the past two de­cades, a shift that is broader and more general than one toward ecocentrism. This shift, Inglehart sug­gests, may play a role in increasing public environ­mental concern and support for proenvironmental policies. Based on an extensive analysis of data from public opinion surveys in as many as twenty-five different countries between 1970 and 1988, Inglehart concludes that the public has become less interested in the pursuit of money and material objects ("Material­ist" values) and more interested in pursuing non-monetary goals ("Post-Materialist" values), such as esthetically pleasing surroundings (including envi­ronmental protection), self-expression (for example, more say in how things are decided in workplaces), and self-esteem. Inglehart argues that although this

trend had its origin in the decades of economic pros­perity after World War II, the trend toward post-materialism has not weakened during major economic recessions in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

One significant facet of Inglehart's (1990) work concerns the values of young people. He writes: "Ev­eryone has heard that youth . . . [in the late 1980s turned] conservative, and that they . . . [were] mainly interested in preparing for lucrative careers so that they ... [could] become Yuppies and devote their lives to conspicuous consumption." Inglehart's data, however, do not support this perception. Although more students went into business careers in the 1980s than before, Inglehart sees that trend as a rational response to job availability. His general conclusion is this: ". [T]he overwhelming bulk of the evidence indi cates that the basic values of . . . youth [in the late 1980s were] not more materialistic than those of their counterparts a decade or two earlier. Nor ... [were] they politically conservative in any basic sense [p. 12]."

Inglehart's data indicate that materialists in West­ern countries outnumbered postmaterialists by ap­proximately four to one in the early 1970s, but by 1988 the ratio was about four to three. He predicted that because materialists are older than postmateri­alists, by 2000 they will be about equal in numbers. Inglehart concluded that even by 1990, the post-materialists represented a large group of potential votes for proenvironmental political parties. He noted that in eleven European countries, an average of 47 percent of the adult population expressed a willing­ness to vote for "ecologist" political parties, such as the West German "Greens."

Despite this finding on people's willingness to vote for ecologist political parties, the impacts of post-materialist values on public concern about the envi­ronment remain uncertain. The results of several research studies that attempted specifically to identify these impacts are so far equivocal. Inglehart presented some additional evidence to support a link between environmentalism and postmaterialist values (Ingle-hart, 1992), but other preliminary studies have failed to support this relationship (Dunlap et al., 1993; Brechin and Kempton, 1994).

66  PART 11 BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

Looking broadly, then, at the above research on postmaterialist values and the research on the new environmental paradigm and on ecocentric values, we conclude that increased public support for environ­mentalism is due at least in part to increasing accep­tance of new beliefs about human-environmental relations, such as Dunlap's NEP. However, we cannot tell with certainty whether environmentalism also re­flects a shift in basic human values, such as increasing postmaterialism or ecocentric (biocentric-altruistic) values, because not enough studies have been done. Postmaterialism is increasing, but its connection to environmentalism has not yet been demonstrated, and data on Schwartz's value clusters have not been col­lected for a long enough time to tell whether a value shift is occurring.

ISSUE TWO: WILL CHANGES IN VALUES AND BELIEFS PERSIST?

If, as Inglehart and Dunlap claim, the developed coun­tries (at least) are experiencing a shift toward post-materialist values and an initial emergence of a new ecological paradigm for understanding human-envi­ronmental relationships (and assuming that postmate­rialist values do have a significant positive impact on people's environmental concern), will these value and belief changes be permanent? The permanence of shifts in basic values or in basic orientations towards the natural environment depends, of course, on what is causing the, shifts.

One theory implicit in some of the work of both Inglehart and Dunlap, is rooted in the satisfaction of human needs. The argument has its roots in the work of the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1954), who postulated that human beings have a hierarchy of needs beginning with so-called basic needs, such as the needs for food, air, and protection from danger, and moving up through "higher" needs, such as re­spect from others, social position, self-esteem, and self-expression. According to the theory, higher needs are not expressed unless the basic needs are supplied to an adequate level. Since postmaterialist values and concern with the environment both represent higher needs, they can be expected to be significant in people's consciousness only as lower, material needs are satisfied. It follows from this line of reasoning that as people's basic material needs are met, they begin to express postmaterialist values. This is why postmate­rialism first appeared as a major social phenomenon during the period of Western prosperity after World War II. If this analysis is correct, postmaterialist val­ues are likely to continue to be expressed as long as individuals expect to have their material needs ad­equately met. Thus, barring economic collapse in the West, postmaterialism can be expected to last a long time. Moreover, economic development in other countries can be expected to lead to increasing post-materialism there as well, and thus to increased con­cern about environmental quality.

This theory is plausible but hard to test without letting several decades pass. We should note, though, that the widespread environmental concern now being expressed in developing countries suggests that mate­rial satisfaction is not always necessary for environ­mental problems to be taken seriously.

A second theory is that the value shift toward envi­rournentalismtasⁱbeen influenced by scientific infor­mation demonstrating the interconnectedness of all life and by graphic representations, including photo­graphs from space, of the finiteness of the planet Earth. Dunlap's new ecological paradigm is in large part a set of beliefs that have been supported by de­cades of ecological science, and it may be that science has played an important part in changing people's understanding of the world, which in turn has led to a change in values (again, it is hard to disentwine ecocentric values and a scientific-ecology world-view). If this theory is correct—and it is also very difficult to test—the new ways of thinking are likely to become more prevalent as older people with older beliefs are replaced in the population with new gen­erations raised with the new scientific understanding. Under this theory, the change is also likely to be very long-lasting.

A third theory is that value changes occur not in whole populations but in cohorts, groups of people of similar age who share common formative experi­ences. Under this theory, postmaterialism is histori­cally rooted in the experience of a generation that saw privation (the Great Depression of the 1930s) re­placed by prosperity. The children of the Depression

3 RELIGIOUS AND MORAL APPROACHES: CHANGING VALUES. BELIEFS. AND WORLDVIEWS 67

were materialist because of their experience, and the children of the postwar period were postmaterialist because of their experience. Similarly, the children of Earth Day adopted the beliefs (and values) of the new ecological paradigm, while their forebears, who were not raised with the environmental movement, did not. Under this theory, the future of ecocentric values and ecological thinking is much more uncertain. As events bring new issues to the forefront of public concern, people may shift their priorities between values—materialist versus postmaterialist, ecocentric versus homocentric or egocentric, and so forth. In fact, much of the debate over environmental policy can be seen as an effort to bring one set of values or another to the fore. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agen­cy accepted the language of risk analysis in its policy thinking during the 1980s, it signaled a subtle change of values. Environmental protection seemed to put ecocentric values first, whereas risk management im­plies that the environment needs to suffer some insult, and the question is how to balance it against other risks, particularly risks to economic growth. The re­sults of such political and ideological debates express a society's values at a particular time, and it may be that individuals raised in a period of such debate have their values shaped for a lifetime by the winning paradigm. If this is how environmental values and thinking changes, the proenvironmental develop­ments of the late 1960s and the 1970s may be revers­ible.

Not enough is known to tell which of these theories is most accurate, but one thing is common to all of them. It is that values, and basic ways of thinking about human-environment relations, are hard to change in adults. Shifts in the dominant values or ways of thinking in a society are therefore slow, gen­erational prpcesses, so that whatever effects they have on behavior will be long-lasting.

ISSUE THREE: HOW DO VALUES AND BELIEFS INFLUENCE PEOPLE'S ACTIONS?

In prior sections, we described four Western, radical proenvironmental religious/ethical movements, re­viewed survey data on people's values and beliefs toward the environment and changes over time in

these values and beliefs, and discussed the likelihood of such changes becoming permanent. However, we have not yet discussed the effects of people's values and beliefs on their actions. As we noted earlier, if proenvironmental shifts in people's values and world-view don't translate to changes in their behavior (e.g., taking energy conservation actions, voting for proen­vironmental political candidates, and so on), then shifts in values and beliefs will have relatively little impact. We now, therefore, take an in-depth look at the links between people's values and beliefs and their willingness to support environmental protection poli­cies or to take proenvironmental actions. Our focus will be primarily on the impacts of values.

To understand the value and ethical basis of envi­ronmental concern and action, we need first to step back and consider the full range of human values (i.e., not just environmentally relevant ones). An ongoing international research project, organized by the social psychologist Shalom Schwartz at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is examining just this question (Schwartz, 1992), (see Table 3-9). The project is searching for universals in the structure of human values by asking respondents in many different coun­tries to rate the importance to them of a list of fifty-six different values, including almost all those in Table 3­9. It has found that although the importance of par­ticular values varies from one national population to another, the relationships between the values are quite constant. For example, people who value wealth highly tend also to value power and influence highly, regardless of the country they live in. People who value variety in their lives tend also to value excite­ment and enjoyment. People who value honesty also tend to value obedience, cleanliness, and family secu­rity. And people who value social justice also tend to value equality, beauty, and protecting the environ­ment. Schwartz found that in every country studied, the fifty-six values fell into almost exactly the same clusters. Table 3-9 lists the clusters and some of the values in each.

As we noted earlier, several of the self-transcen­dent values in the left-most column of Table 3-9 are clearly relevant to protection of the environment: These are the ecocentric values (e.g., protecting the environment, a world of beauty); the other self-

68    PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

transcendent values are homocentric (e.g., world at peace, social justice). Egocentric values appear in two other value clusters, self-enhancement and openness to change. (The relationship between Inglehart's post-materialist values that we discussed earlier in the chapter and the broad value clusters identified by Schwartz has not yet been systematically investi­gated. It seems on the surface, however, that Inglehart is claiming a shift away from traditional and self-enhancement values to self-transcendent values and openness to change, which seem to be postmaterial­ist.)

In recent research, which we partially described earlier in the chapter, Stern and colleagues have be­gun to look for direct evidence of links between value clusters and individuals' willingness to take political action for environmental protection (Stern, Dietz, and Kalof, 1993; Stern, Dietz, Guagnano, and Kalof, 1994; Stern and Dietz, 1994). Recall that Stern et al. compiled an enhanced list of values from the Schwartz (1992) work and presented the list, along with other questions about environmental beliefs and actions, to their sample of Fairfax County, Virginia, residents. As we already noted, Stern et al. failed to find convincing evidence that a separate ecocentric set of values is emerging in the population of their study. The results indicated that homocentric (social-altruistic) and ecocentric (biospheric) values could not be disentangled in their sample of citizens. How­ever, while the Stern et al. results failed to show a distinction between ecocentric and homocentric sets of values, the results did clearly suggest an influence of values on behavior. The cluster of self-transcendent values (Stern et al. termed it "biospheric-altruistic") was strongly predictive of people's self-reported will­ingness to take politically significant actions such as boycotting the, products of a company that pollutes, signing a petition for tougher environmental laws, and refusing to invest in or work for a polluting company. The self-enhancement value cluster, which consists of egocentric values, also predicted willingness to take action, but in a negative direction—people with strong self-enhancement values were less supportive of proenvironmental actions. The other two value clusters were unrelated to action. Thus, the values or ethics that writers like Merchant link to environmen­ tal concern on theoretical grounds in fact predict sup­port for environmental protection; other human val­ues, though also universal, are generally unrelated to environmentalism.

A Closer Look at How Values (and Beliefs about the Consequences of Environmental Problems) Influence Actions

Stern et al. take the position that people's values are likely to be especially strong determinants of their proenvironmental actions because people often need to react to environmental conditions or problems on the basis of very limited knowledge or experience. People are continually faced with environmental is­sues appearing in the media that are newly discovered or reinterpreted by scientists, and they must find ways to determine whether to take these issues seriously enough to do something about them. Stern et al. rea­son that values provide a basis for those choices. People consider what they know about an environ­mental condition or problem and ask themselves whether that condition or problem is likely to have harmful consequences for anything they value. If it is, and if they can do something to prevent the harm, they are inclined to take action. In fact, they may feel a sense of moral obligation to take action. (We discuss the role of moral obligation in more detail in Chapters 4 and 6.)

In the Stern et al. formulation, then, the keys to people's response to any environmental problem are people's values as well as their specific beliefs about the consequences of environmental problems to the things they value (note that a person's beliefs about harmful consequences are just one part of his/her set of environmentally relevant beliefs or worldview.) As we already described, Stern et al. found that respon­dents' values were significantly correlated with their actual political behaviors. Stern et al. further found that respondents' beliefs about the adverse effects of environmental conditions also affected their willing­ness to act. Effects on nonhuman species and the biosphere made the most difference, but effects on oneself also mattered, and in one of the studies (Stern et al., 1993), effects on people in general also moti­vated action. These beliefs, however, were in turn

affected by values. A striking finding was that people with strong biospheric-altruistic values were more likely than others to believe environmental changes had adverse effects on all kinds of valued objects: nonhuman species, other human beings, and oneself.

Stern et al. interpreted their results as indicating that values_c_an__affect proenvironmental action both directly and indirectly, through beliefs about conse­quences. Values may affect these beliefs by simply motivating people to pay attention to information about how environmental conditions affect things they value, or they may shape the beliefs directly by leading people to believe what they want to believe. For instance, individuals who hold strong traditional or self-enhancement values, which environmentalists often claim will need to be sacrificed to preserve the environment, may deny that human activities are harmful to nature because such a denial allows them to believe they need not give up what they value; similarly, individuals who value the biosphere for its own sake may believe with minimal evidence any claim that a human activity is threatening a natural system. The Stern et al. data so far do not make clear whether one or the other, or both, mechanisms are operating to influence environmental beliefs. The data do show, however, that basic values are relevant both to individuals' beliefs about the consequences of en­vironmental problems and to their actions.

What do these studies of environmental values and action have to say about the prospects for social change through movements like deep ecology and ecofeminism? The studies demonstrate that basic val­ues can have far-reaching implications for individu­als' willingness to support proenvironmental actions. This means that the ideological debates about homo­centric versus ecocentric ethics, "deep" versus "shal­low" ecology, and the like, which center on whether nonhuman aspects of the environment should be val­ued in their own right, are potentially important.

Factors That Can Limit the Effect of Value and Belief Changes

As we have just discussed, changes in people's values
can have significant effects on their willingness to
support proenvironmental policies and to take proen-

vironmental actions. However, when environmentally related public morals, values, and beliefs change, the effect on the environment may be sharply limited by several factors. Assume, for example, that as of to­morrow morning, all citizens of the United States considered it their moral duty to conserve energy and reduce pollution by reducing gasoline consumption. When morning came, a great many of them still would be living in suburban areas with separated single-family houses, and still would be dependent on auto­mobile transportation. These structural conditions would greatly limit what individuals could do for the environment by acting on their new values and be­liefs. Markets would further constrain their options. Anyone who wanted to trade in the family automobile for one that could drive 70 miles on a gallon of gas would not be able to do so because, though such cars can be built, they are not now on the market. These sorts of structural and market factors are difficult to reverse. Moreover, they change very slowly, and the unorganized actions of individuals can do very little to change them.

There are other barriers to action that may be easier to remove. Many people, for instance, do not know which of their daily actions are most responsible for energy use or toxic waste production. Without this information, they are unlikely to act effectively on their values and beliefs, but with it, they might change.

CONCLUSION

We have argued in this chapter that Western culture is strongly human-centered, considers nonhuman forms of life as having importance only in direct proportion to their usefulness to humans, and embraces a non-ecological set of beliefs about the environment. These basic Western values and beliefs have several pos­sible origins, though the Judeo-Christian religious tra­dition is probably not primarily responsible. Regardless of their source, however, these values and beliefs cannot be helping Western countries solve major environmental problems that ultimately threaten human survival.

While it seems quite plausible that changes in Western values and worldview—changes that have

70      PART II BEHAVIORAL SOLUTION STRATEGIES

already begun—are necessary to lessen or avert envi­ronmental problems, a look at cultures that have strongly proenvironmental religions and belief sys­tems suggests that even radical changes are not likely to do the job by themselves. The influences of reli­gious and moral beliefs and institutions are often se­verely limited by the influences of political and economic forces and also the force of population growth. Furthermore, basic values and beliefs usually change slowly—in entire populations, it may take a generation (or more) for major changes to be achieved. In addition, value and belief change does not lead in any straightforward way to behavior change and environmental improvement: Structural conditions and other barriers often keep values and beliefs from being enacted as behavior, and when this occurs, it will require changes in the structure of society and in people's funds of knowledge for changed values and beliefs to be carried into action. In the following chapters, we discuss ways of eliminat­ing barriers to action by changing attitudes, providing information, changing incentive structures, and creat­ing new institutions.

But even though proenvironmental shifts in moral/ religious/value/belief systems can bring about little change in behavior and environmental improvement by themselves, this sort of change can still be a critical part of the solution to the problems of the commons. We will see in subsequent chapters, and especially

Chapter 7, that the four main solution approaches (of which the religious/moral approach is one) can rein­force each other, creating more effect in combination than the sum of their individual influences. Further, removing the barriers that often block proenviron­mental individual action, as discussed in this and subsequent chapters, often requires action by govern­ments, which, in turn, may require an aroused and concerned public that actively promotes the necessary changes in government policy. Public concern and political action, in turn, may require that the public embrace proenvironmental values and an ecological worldview. Thus, change in values and worldviews may be an important stimulus for public concern, arousal, and political action; similar changes on the part of government policy makers may be critical as well.

Finally, we have reviewed in this chapter four new and "radical" religious/moral/ethical movements that all share an ecocentric value orientation and a world-view consonant with contemporary ecology. These movements—ecotheology, Thomas Berry's religion, deep ecology, and ecofeminism—share major ele­ments with Asian religions, and the religions of some Native American tribes. If these new movements, or parts of them, are widely adopted in Western cultures, they may have a positive influence in averting global and regional environmental problems, as well as in helping to satisfy our spiritual needs.

NOTES

1. Note that our analysis differs from Greeley's in three ways: First, the items on "moral rigidity" were not in the GSS 1993 survey, and hence we could not use them in our regression analyses. Second, the "religious imagery" ques­tions were in the 1993 survey, but they did not significantly correlate with our four environmentalism indicators, and we therefore omitted them from the analysis. Third, the regression analysis results shown in B columns of Table 3­3 controlled for age, education, income, gender, and politi­cal liberalism; Greeley failed to control for income and gender in his regression analyses; however, we found that the inclusion or exclusion of these two variables made very

little difference in results.

2.     In addition to the factors described below, some argue that Hinduism's otherworldly orientation and emphasis may lead to the neglect of real-world problems.

3.     Berry and others want to retain many elements of our basic Judeo-Christian heritage, such as the Ten Command­ments, that proscribe murder, and so on.

4.     This claim must be qualified. In Bacon's day, more than now, nature was a source of danger and threat, poorly understood, and much feared. Disease was rampant and nature was a prime killer of people. It is not surprising that humans wanted to understand and master nature.

PENDAHULUAN

Pidato yang indah dan bergerak ini menjelaskan agama pro - lingkungan yang menyerupai agama dari beberapa suku asli Amerika . Ini suku dan agama mendahului revolusi industri dan gelombang ke arah barat dari Eropa penjajah / pemukim di seluruh benua Amerika oleh berabad-abad , bahkan mungkin ribuan tahun . Oleh karena itu ironis bahwa sejumlah ulama kontemporer , teolog , dan penulis mengklaim bahwa kecuali barat modern mengadopsi agama seperti yang ada di pidato , kita akan gagal untuk memecahkan masalah lingkungan yang mengancam kelangsungan hidup manusia ( misalnya , Naess , 1989; Devall , 1985; Sessions , 1985 , dan Ehrenfeld , 1978) . Dengan kata lain, orang-orang ini berpendapat bahwa kita harus menyisihkan ajaran agama kami saat ini dan praktek yang mendukung yang proenvironmental dalam pidato . Tidak pendek dari perubahan radikal jenis ini akan memastikan bahwa orang Barat - baik secara individu maupun kolektif - berperilaku dalam cara proenvironmental . Dalam bab ini , kita meneliti argumen ini dan mengeksplorasi dampak dari ajaran agama dan moral dan praktek tentang asal-usul , dan solusi yang mungkin , masalah lingkungan global dan regional .

Meskipun Kepala Seatlh " pidato " singkat , itu mengilustrasikan komponen utama dari sebagian besar agama dan sistem keagamaan . Dalam hal agama Seatlh itu , semua komponen ini bertindak untuk mendorong individu proenviron - mental dan perilaku kolektif . ( Komponen dif -beda tumpang tindih dan jalin , sehingga agak buatan untuk membahas mereka secara terpisah . ) Pertama , agama menjunjung tinggi nilai-nilai dasar tertentu , yaitu , hal-hal , kualitas , dan prinsip-prinsip yang dianggap penting dan berharga . Dengan demikian , bagian-bagian dari pidato mendesak penghormatan dan penghargaan terhadap bentuk-bentuk non-manusia hidup dan untuk proses alami . Beberapa contoh spesifik : . " [ E ] sangat bagian dari bumi adalah suci .... Setiap jarum bersinar pinus , ... pantai berpasir , ... bersenandung serangga ... kudus .... Udara sangat berharga . " Pidato juga menggambarkan bentuk-bentuk non-manusia hidup sebagai memiliki banyak kepentingan dan layak sebagai kehidupan manusia : " Manusia tidak menenun jaring kehidupan , ia hanyalah seutas benang di dalamnya . "

Kedua , agama mencakup keyakinan dasar dan pandangan dunia ( koleksi keyakinan tentang dunia dan perspektif keseluruhan dari mana seorang individu dan budaya melihatnya) . Dengan demikian , pidato menekankan keterkaitan semua bentuk kehidupan dan ketergantungan manusia pada bentuk bukan manusia . Sebagai contoh: " Bunganya saudari kita , rusa , kuda , elang besar , ini adalah saudara-saudara kita di puncak berbatu , rumput ... , dan manusia semua milik keluarga yang sama .... ". Dan : " Semua hal yang terhubung .... Apapun yang menimpa bumi menimpa anak-anak bumi . " Selanjutnya , pidato menggambarkan bumi sebagai pencipta hidup dan pandangan manusia sebagai sangat berhubungan dengan itu . Sebagai contoh: " ... [ T ] bumi yang cantik adalah ibu dari orang kulit merah Kami adalah bagian dari bumi dan itu adalah bagian dari .

Ketiga , agama termasuk sistem etika atau moral , yaitu , mereka secara khusus mendorong perilaku individu tertentu dan melarang perilaku lainnya . Beberapa etika dan moral yang tersirat dalam nilai-nilai dasar dan keyakinan . Lainnya etika / moral yang disebutkan secara eksplisit . Dengan demikian pidato mendesak : " [ Y ] ou harus memberikan [ sungai ] kebaikan Anda akan memberikan ... [ a] saudara . . " Dan : " [ laki-laki Red ] membunuh [ hanya cukup kerbau ] untuk tetap hidup .... "

Keempat , agama umumnya termasuk upacara , ritual , dan praktek-praktek lain yang menyampaikan dan memperkuat nilai-nilai mereka , kepercayaan , dan perilaku perintah . Upacara dan ritual yang tidak disebutkan dalam pidato singkat di atas , tetapi mereka memainkan peran utama dalam agama-agama asli Amerika , tradisi keagamaan Barat Yahudi-Kristen , dan kebanyakan orang lain .

Kelima , agama memiliki elemen spiritual , yaitu , unsur-unsur yang melibatkan dewa atau kekuatan gaib . Elemen spiritual menggugah perasaan dan emosi kita dan mereka menarik bagi sisi intuitif kita . Dengan demikian , pidato menegaskan bahwa " udara berbagi semangat dengan semua kehidupan mendukung ... " dan pidato mengacu pada " refleksi hantu di air jernih danau [ yang ] mengatakan ... peristiwa dan kenangan dalam kehidupan umat-Ku . " Perhatikan juga bagaimana bergerak , indah, dan inspirasi pidato secara keseluruhan . Pidato jauh lebih dari deskripsi intelektual atau rasional sederhana dari berbagai bentuk kehidupan di alam dan bagaimana bentuk-bentuk ini berinteraksi .

Meskipun sejumlah ulama , teolog , dan penulis berpendapat bahwa tidak ada penyelesaian masalah lingkungan yang mungkin tanpa perubahan besar dalam agama dan moral ke arah pidato , ada beberapa yang mengajukan klaim yang lebih radikal . Ini ulama / penulis / teolog berpendapat bahwa tidak hanya agama-agama Barat saat ini tidak memiliki orientasi proenvironmental , tetapi agama-agama ini sebenarnya antienvironmental ; memang ini keyakinan agama , nilai-nilai , dan praktik merupakan penyebab utama dan aktif dari semua masalah lingkungan kontemporer Barat . Mungkin yang paling terkenal dari para penulis yang membuat klaim ini adalah sejarawan Lynn Putih, Jr Dalam provokatif , yang sering dikutip , meski tak lagi diterima secara luas , artikel di majalah Science ( 1967 ) , White berpendapat bahwa tradisi keagamaan Yahudi-Kristen adalah akar penyebab semua masalah lingkungan Barat. Putih difokuskan terutama pada bagian Genesis dari Alkitab . Pertimbangkan hal berikut Kejadian quote :

Dan Tuhan berkata , Baiklah Kita menjadikan manusia menurut gambar dan rupa kita , dan membiarkan mereka memiliki kekuasaan atas ikan di laut , dan selama unggas di udara , dan atas ternak dan atas bumi , dan atas setiap merayap melata di muka bumi .

Maka Allah menciptakan manusia menurut gambar-Nya , menurut gambar Allah diciptakan-Nya dia ; laki-laki dan perempuan diciptakan-Nya mereka .

Dan Tuhan memberkati mereka , dan Allah berkata kepada mereka , Jadilah berbuah , dan berkembang biak , . . . dan menundukkan [ bumi ] ; dan memiliki kekuasaan atas ikan di laut , dan selama unggas dari bumi , dan atas segala sesuatu yang hidup yang merayap di bumi . ( Kejadian 1:16-28 , Raja James versi ) .

Perhatikan betapa berbedanya bagian Alkitab ini yang terkenal adalah dari pidato dikaitkan dengan Kepala Seatlh . Pidato menggambarkan manusia bukan sebagai spesies khusus tetapi sebagai salah satu rangkaian dalam keseluruhan " jaring kehidupan . " Manusia dilihat sebagai tergantung pada bentuk-bentuk lain dari kehidupan dan didesak untuk melindungi mereka . Manusia merupakan bagian integral dari alam , bukannya terpisah dari , dan unggul , bentuk-bentuk kehidupan lainnya. Sebaliknya , bagian Alkitab menggambarkan manusia sebagai spesies unik dan mulia , karena hanya manusia diciptakan menurut gambar Allah . Bagian ini juga mendesak manusia untuk mengendalikan dan " sub - karena " bentuk-bentuk kehidupan lainnya . Dengan demikian bagian ini membuat perbedaan utama antara manusia dan seluruh alam , dengan manusia dalam peran utama dan dominan , dan bentuk-bentuk kehidupan dalam peran sekunder dan tunduk . Akhirnya , paragraf terakhir ( " berbuah , dan berkembang biak " ) muncul untuk mendorong pertumbuhan tak terbatas dalam jumlah manusia .

Pandangan Alkitab , White mengklaim , menembus budaya Barat , menciptakan mengabaikan umum untuk bentuk-bentuk kehidupan non-manusia dan proses alam , perasaan kekebalan manusia , dan dorongan terhadap pertumbuhan terbatas . " Terutama dalam bentuk Baratnya , " Putih berpendapat , "Kekristenan adalah yang paling antroposentris [yaitu , berpusat pada manusia ] agama dunia telah melihat .... [ Dalam kisah Alkitab tentang penciptaan , ] Allah menciptakan terang dan gelap , surgawi tubuh , bumi dan semua tanaman nya , hewan , burung , dan ikan . Akhirnya Allah ... menciptakan Adam dan Hawa ... .... Pria bernama semua binatang , sehingga membentuk dominasinya atas mereka . Allah merencanakan semua ini eksplisit untuk kepentingan manusia dan aturan , tidak ada item dalam penciptaan fisik memiliki tujuan apapun simpan untuk melayani keperluan manusia [ p 1205 . ] " .

( 1967 ) posisi dasar White dibagi oleh beberapa ulama lain dan penulis , sejarawan Arnold Toynbee termasuk ( 1973 ) , ahli biologi Paul Ehrlich ( 1971 ) , dan perencana regional Ian McHarg ( 1971 ) . Namun, ( 1967) tesis Putih tidak lagi sangat diterima secara luas . Beberapa telah mengkritik kedua interpretasi White dari agama tradisi - tion Yudeo-Kristen dan analisis tentang budaya Barat dan sejarah . Sejumlah ulama dan teolog berpendapat bahwa walaupun - nilai Barat , keyakinan , dan moral adalah - thropocentric dan melakukan sah eksploitasi alam untuk tujuan manusia ( dan , oleh karena itu , akar penyebab masalah lingkungan ) - tradisi keagamaan Yahudi-Kristen bukanlah sumber utama dari nilai-nilai , keyakinan , dan moral . Beberapa ulama dan teolog menyatakan bahwa " berkembang biak dan menundukkan bumi " bagian dari Genesis yang diambil di luar konteks dan disalahtafsirkan ( misalnya , Shaiko , 1987) . Beberapa titik keluar , lebih lanjut, bahwa banyak bagian lain dari Perjanjian Lama dan Baru menekankan konsep " pelayanan ", atau perawatan , alam ( misalnya , Shaiko , 1987; Naess , 1989; Gelderloos , 1992; dan Whitney , 1993) . Ini ulama dan teolog demikian berpendapat bahwa tradisi Yahudi- Kristen lebih tepat dilihat sebagai sumber utama nilai-nilai dan keyakinan proenvironmental , bukan nilai-nilai dan keyakinan antienvironmental . Kami membahas karya ini " ecotheologians " secara lebih rinci nanti dalam bab ini .

Lain ulama / penulis menyalahkan berpusat pada manusia - ness budaya Barat dan kepercayaan pada legitimasi mengeksploitasi alam untuk manusia berakhir bukan pada warisan Yudeo - Kristen kita tetapi pada unsur-unsur filsafat Yunani kuno yang , sebagian, basis ilmiah modern berpikir ( Callicott , 1983) , atau pada pandangan alam sebagai mekanik dan lembam yang muncul di negara-negara Barat pada awal revolusi ilmiah tahun 1600-an ( Shiva , 1989; Whitney , 1993) , atau perkembangan kapitalisme di Barat negara dimulai pada akhir 1700-an ( Whitney , 1993) .

Akhirnya , namun ulama lain / penulis , termasuk Ophuls ( 1977 ) dan Brown ( 1981 ) , berpendapat bahwa tingkat yang berlebihan materialisme dan konsumerisme di negara-negara Barat adalah penyebab utama dari masalah lingkungan , dan ini ulama / penulis mendesak radikal de - lipatan dalam nilai-nilai ini . Mengutip Brown ( 1981) :

Tak satu pun dari filsafat politik saat ini mencakup nilai-nilai penting untuk masyarakat yang berkelanjutan . Memang , sebagai ilmuwan B. Murray dicatat dalam sebuah alamat ke teolog , " Kapitalisme dan Marxisme memiliki satu hal yang sangat banyak kesamaan : keduanya menganggap kebutuhan pokok manusia yang material. " Murray yakin bahwa untuk alasan ini keduanya jatuh pendek . Apakah kapitalis atau sosialis , materialisme bukanlah berkelanjutan atau memuaskan dalam jangka panjang [ p . 3501

Mengutip Ophuls ( 1977) :

Mhe .. penyakit bumi mencerminkan penyakit dalam jiwa manusia industri modern , yang seluruh hidupnya diserahkan untuk mendapatkan , untuk penyakit yang tak ada habisnya mendapatkan dan pengeluaran yang tidak pernah dapat memenuhi aspirasi yang lebih dalam dan akhirnya harus berakhir dengan budaya , spiritual , dan kematian jasmani [ p . 2321

Untuk meringkas : Banyak sarjana dan penulis berpendapat bahwa moral Barat , keyakinan, nilai , dan / atau ajaran dan praktik keagamaan memainkan peran utama dalam menyebabkan masalah lingkungan global dan regio - nal , dan bahwa moral ini , keyakinan , dan sebagainya harus bergeser tajam ke arah proenvironmental jika masalah-masalah yang harus dipecahkan .

Conclution

Kami berpendapat dalam bab ini bahwa budaya Barat sangat berpusat pada manusia , menganggap bentuk non hidup manusia sebagai memiliki kepentingan hanya dalam proporsi langsung kegunaannya bagi manusia , dan mencakup satu set non - ekologi keyakinan tentang lingkungan. Nilai-nilai dasar dan keyakinan Barat memiliki beberapa asal-usul mungkin, meskipun tradisi keagamaan Yahudi-Kristen mungkin tidak terutama bertanggung jawab . Terlepas dari sumber mereka, bagaimanapun , nilai-nilai dan keyakinan tidak dapat membantu negara-negara Barat memecahkan masalah lingkungan utama yang pada akhirnya mengancam kelangsungan hidup manusia .

Meskipun tampaknya cukup masuk akal bahwa perubahan dalam nilai-nilai Barat dan pandangan - perubahan yang sudah mulai - diperlukan untuk mengurangi atau mencegah masalah lingkungan, melihat budaya yang memiliki agama sangat proenvironmental dan sistem kepercayaan menunjukkan bahwa bahkan perubahan radikal tidak mungkin untuk melakukan pekerjaan sendiri . Pengaruh keyakinan dan lembaga agama dan moral seringkali sangat dibatasi oleh pengaruh kekuatan politik dan ekonomi serta kekuatan pertumbuhan penduduk . Selain itu , nilai-nilai dasar dan keyakinan biasanya berubah perlahan -in seluruh populasi , mungkin diperlukan waktu satu generasi ( atau lebih ) untuk perubahan utama yang harus dicapai . Selain itu, nilai dan keyakinan perubahan tidak memimpin dengan cara mudah untuk perubahan perilaku dan perbaikan lingkungan : kondisi struktural dan hambatan lain sering menjaga nilai-nilai dan keyakinan dari yang berlaku sebagai perilaku , dan ketika hal ini terjadi , itu akan memerlukan perubahan dalam struktur masyarakat dan dana masyarakat pengetahuan untuk mengubah nilai-nilai dan keyakinan yang akan dilakukan ke dalam tindakan . Dalam bab-bab berikut, kita membahas cara-cara menghilangkan hambatan untuk bertindak dengan mengubah sikap , memberikan informasi , mengubah struktur insentif , dan menciptakan lembaga-lembaga baru .

Tapi meskipun pergeseran proenvironmental dalam sistem moral yang / agama / nilai / berkeyakinan dapat membawa sedikit perubahan dalam perilaku dan perbaikan lingkungan sendiri , semacam perubahan ini masih bisa menjadi bagian penting dari solusi untuk masalah-masalah bersama. Kita akan melihat dalam bab-bab berikutnya , dan terutama Bab 7 , bahwa empat pendekatan solusi utama ( dari mana pendekatan agama / moral adalah salah satu ) bisa mengendalikan - memaksa satu sama lain , menciptakan efek yang lebih dalam kombinasi daripada jumlah pengaruh masing-masing . Selanjutnya , menghilangkan hambatan yang sering menghalangi aksi individu proenviron - mental, seperti yang dibahas dalam hal ini dan bab-bab berikutnya , sering memerlukan tindakan oleh pemerintah-pemerintah , yang , pada gilirannya , mungkin memerlukan publik terangsang dan khawatir bahwa secara aktif mempromosikan perubahan yang diperlukan dalam pemerintahan kebijakan . Perhatian publik dan aksi politik , pada gilirannya , mungkin mengharuskan masyarakat merangkul nilai-nilai proenvironmental dan pandangan dunia ekologis . Dengan demikian , perubahan nilai-nilai dan pandangan dunia mungkin merupakan stimulus penting bagi perhatian publik , gairah , dan aksi politik ; perubahan serupa pada bagian dari pembuat kebijakan pemerintah mungkin penting juga.

Akhirnya , kami telah ditinjau dalam bab empat " radikal " agama gerakan / moral yang / etika baru dan bahwa semua bagian orientasi nilai ecocentric dan pandangan dunia konsonan dengan ekologi kontemporer . Ini gerakan - ecotheology , agama Thomas Berry , ekologi yang mendalam , dan ecofeminism - saham utama elemen dengan agama-agama Asia , dan agama-agama dari beberapa suku asli Amerika . Jika gerakan-gerakan baru , atau bagian dari mereka , secara luas diadopsi dalam budaya Barat , mereka mungkin memiliki pengaruh positif dalam mencegah masalah-masalah lingkungan global dan regional , serta membantu untuk memenuhi kebutuhan rohani kita .