The creator and the steward of creation
Like many ecologists, Lynn White in her book The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, blames the Bible and in her case also religion for being the mentor and the godmother of the unbridled domination and exploitation of the planet Earth. For us the students of NVC, however, this accusation is unfounded and unacceptable because in the biblical myth of creation violence appeared only afterwards as a problem, it was not desired nor was it created by God.
The overall justification of violence towards everything and everyone comes from the Babylonian myth of creation, which came before the biblical myth, and is the root of what theologian Walter Wink calls the “civil” religion that ever since the beginning and still holds true today has the most number of faithful. As we have seen before in the Babylonian myth, creation was an act of violence. In the Babylonian myth, violence is not a problem but just an intrinsic facet of creation, of nature and of Man himself.
The verb to dominate comes from the Hebrew word “Radah”, a word related to royalty and means to reign, it is therefore a term that carries the weight of the office of a king. What does the Bible tell us about how a king ought to govern? Let us see how this very word is used in the context of the coronation of King Solomon who for Israel is the symbol of wisdom:
May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (…) For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight. Psalm 72:8, 12-14
And what kind of ruler does God not want?
Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. Ezekiel 34:2-4
In light of the biblical myth of Creation the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), and its counterparts, God does not give us any rights, or ownership over creation, but rather the responsibility to take care for it in a way consistent with His will.
First, we need to understand that Man, and only he alone, was made responsible for Creation because out of all the creatures only he was created in the image and likeness of God the Creator. Second, dominion as synonym to unbridled exploitation can only come from the reading of the biblical myth of creation in view or through the eyes of the Babylonian myth which has shaped and formatted mankind and prevailed throughout the history of humanity. To this day when we ask around if humans are naturally violent or naturally non-violent, most will say that violence is part of the human nature.
Therefore, originally that is, interpreting the Bible in light of the Bible itself, using other texts from the same, the word “dominion” does not mean totalitarian despotism, or exercising absolute power in a cruel or oppressive way, but is the proper stewardship under God’s direction because God is the sole owner and landlord, the Lord of Creation of everything contained therein including us:
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. Psalm 24:1
For God did not hand over creation to Man and became disinterested in it; on the contrary, Man should never forget that of creation he is only the steward:
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? (…) Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice? Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust. Isaiah 40:12, 14-15
Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew? Job 38:28
He gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry. Psalm 147:9
To subjugate the earth, therefore, does not mean to dominate and exploit it, but to learn to understand all its processes, the laws of nature and all its creatures, for the benefit of humanity and the glory of God. This mandate is still in force and valid today for all the descendants of Adam and Eve, but is even more important for the Christians because we have the knowledge of the Lord not only in his work as the Creator of the world, but also as its Redeemer. The redemption that we have obtained from Christ is extended to the planet as the planet needs to be saved as well.
In this same spirit of life, in harmony with nature, the Church has a patron saint of animals and ecology to propose to the ecologists of our time, Saint Francis of Assisi. For him there were no hostile or dangerous animals, no enemies, hence he called the wolf brother wolf; not only did he relate with the beasts of the earth, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea as members of his family, but he also extended this relationship to the elements calling water his sister and the sun his brother.
The “New Testament” of the Babylonian myth
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally higher animals, directly follows. (The last paragraph from the book Origin of Species by Charles Darwin)
In other words, the battle for survival, with the elimination of the weak and the crippled, leads to the survival of the fittest, so that this war of nature must eventually lead to superior animals, superior races and finally to superior civilizations.
By the use and abuse of the violent words and concepts, the last paragraph in Darwin’s book appears to be the emblem of violence of the Babylonian myth of creation. Therefore already in modern times we see in Darwin, and in his most fanatical followers, a “New Testament” of the Babylonian myth, this religion that dominates the planet. And just as Christianity soon became felt in the world, so the effects of applying this philosophy in the 19th and 20th century are now being felt in the 21st century.
Among others, one of the more harmful results of this philosophy has been the careless exploitation of our natural resources – animal, mineral and human, all in the name of socioeconomic evolution. Large amount of mineral and plant resources, especially wood, have been misused and badly wasted; the nature’s balance of regeneration has been broken so that many animal and plant species became extinct. British environmentalist Norman Myers tried to put a number to the rate of extinction to over 130 species per day.
The spell is turned against the sorcerer – The effect of disorderly, selfish and arbitrary exploitation of our planet has resulted in unprecedented contamination of the ecosystems:
The soil is been depleted of essential elements for our health because of monocultivation; it is also contaminated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers that have altered its chemical composition and poisoned the groundwater from where our drinking water comes from;
The oceans are contaminated with plastic such as the microfibers that come out of our washing machines since plastics have replaced natural fabrics, like wool, cotton, linen and silk which together with heavy metals like mercury, are being absorbed by the fish that we consume;
The air is contaminated with carbon dioxide which leads to harmful level of greenhouse effect, resulting in global warming as seen by the increase of global temperature that melts glaciers and polar caps, raises the sea level, alters the course of winds, and modifies the pace of the seasons causing hurricanes, floods and droughts of unprecedented intensity.
The social environment is also plagued by the fact that today 1% of the humanity possesses more wealth (54%) than the remaining 99% (46%). The gap between the rich and the poor keeps getting wider. Some die of hunger, others die of abundance; if there was sharing, neither one nor the other would die. This situation is due to the ideology of Mr. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, who believed that if all were selfish, that is if all sought their own self interest, an invisible hand would take care of the common interest; such invisible hand acting like Santa Claus has never been verified and in the meantime the situation goes from bad to worse.
We have nothing against the fundamentals of the science behind the evolution of species; in fact, since Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Humani Generis in 1950, the Catholic Church accepts the postulated fundamentals of the theory of evolution of species, that is, it is more than obvious that life comes from a common stock, which has been diversifying into various species over the course of millions of years to this day. What we cannot accept is the violent interpretation that this same Darwin and his disciples prescribe to the theory written above in his last paragraph of his famous book.
As a basis for the biblical myth of creation and NVC, we believe that violence is not part of nature, the engine of evolution, never was and never has been, contrary to what Darwin and his followers thought; violence was introduced by man, by the way he has been relating to nature, especially in the past two centuries.
The butterfly effect and the domino effect
A butterfly moves its wings in Hong Kong and causes a storm in New York. However small may be whatever we do, it affects the global ecology of our planet. Before when the human population on the planet was meager in comparison, the world appeared too big, too powerful and timeless to be affected by the action of Man. Today, however, apart from a catastrophic and mind-boggling population increase, we know that the action of Man on the planet is cumulative; that is, errors and crimes against the planet accumulate because as it is said, God always forgives, Man sometimes but nature neither forgives nor forgets.
Although the concept of the butterfly effect has been known since 1890, it only gained popular acceptance in 1961 due to the weather forecast model used by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He noted that small changes, which should have been statistically insignificant, led to scenarios that were exponentially different.
The analogy of the butterfly started in 1972 when Lorenz gave a talk titled, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?” And given the changes that we human beings have already introduced into the complex ecosystem, known as the planet Earth, it is accurate to say that we have already done the work of billions of butterflies.
One area of major importance is biodiversity. In addition to the fact that biodiversity protects humans against the effects of agricultural catastrophes such as the Irish potato famine, the loss of a species results in significant alterations in natural habitats that can seriously injure us in short, medium or long term.
Taking these same butterflies as an example, if they disappear and become extinct not only children would suffer for not having seen their beauty, but many plants that are intimately linked to the butterflies (and vice versa) would also be doomed to disappear, as one cannot survive without the other.
When we think of the natural interdependency of living beings with each other and of the ecosystems among themselves, it is frightening to think what can come crumbling down by the extinction of a single species. The bees are endangered and are the main pollinators in our planet; the squirrels are also endangered and they plant more trees than humans when they forget the nuts they hide in the ground to survive through the winters.
The domino effect is a reality in ecology; the climate change can lead to the extinction of animals and plants dependent of them and provoke a chain reaction of unpredictable consequences given the interdependency of living beings with each other and all of them dependent on the climate conditions of their natural habitat.
While writing these lines we have received the sad news of the death of the last white male rhinoceros. Prior to its death some of its sperms were frozen in the hope of continuing the species, but of the last two existing females one is sterile. This makes the prognosis of salvation of the white rhinoceros very bleak. It is known that this species was mercilessly hunted down because some cultures like the Chinese believe that its horns have aphrodisiac properties.
Genesis of violence in the biblical myth of creation
According to the religion of violence of the domination system which has as its sacred scripture in the Babylonian myth, violence is the principal commandment, the matrix upon which all relationships emanate – the relationship of man with his own kind, the relationship of man with himself, with God to whom sacrifices of violence are offered to appease His anger or to win His favor, and with nature who is not a prodigious mother to us, but rather a stepmother.
Nature gave animals everything, even clothed them, to us it gave us nothing, we were born naked, and if we want to eat we need to labour. Contrary to the Neanderthal, who adapted to nature, the Homo Sapiens sought to dominate Nature with his mind and adapt it to his needs. Understanding himself, in relationship to other animals, as the “Ugly Duckling” of Creation, the relationship of Man with Nature seems to be a relationship of vengeance.
‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ Genesis 3:17-19
Violence was natural for the Babylonian myth, but not so for the biblical myth. What God created was good and there was a time when Man was as God had created him just like the original Nature, that is, the Garden of Eden. Man and Nature lived in symbiosis and in harmony, the same harmony that used to reign between God and Man who strolled at dusk in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8). With the fall, this harmony between God and Man and Man and Nature was disrupted.
The “win win” philosophy of NVC as the solution to the ecological problem
Christ came to bring salvation not only to Man but also to the environment in which Man lives; this Earth can return to be the paradise that it once was. For this we have to give up the exacerbated Darwinism that relates violently with nature; as we have already exposed the fallacy of the myth of the redemptive violence, now we must condemn the myth of domination and survival of the strongest over the weakest and less capable, declaring it as a false ideology, which has tried to explain the relationships of animals over millions of years of evolution.
There is no violence among animals, there is only the fulfillment of their needs. Animals do not kill because they feel hatred for one another, but to meet their needs within the food chain. It is known that a cat will play with mice and birds and not eat or harm them if one feeds it by other means.
The final goal of NVC is that everyone will find their needs harmoniously met. It is possible to return to the world that we had before the industrial era, to find a form of harmony, progress that is sustainable and friendly to the environment. In NVC the needs of others are also our needs, there is no antagonism between us and others even when they say No we hear a yes.
In NVC there is only “win win” because we are convinced that everyone can win; as there is no human life outside this planet that we know of, what is good for the planet is good for Man and vice versa, what is bad for the planet at long range is also bad for Man in the long run. The consequences of past ills have already begun to be felt. Let us stop being enemies of the environment because it is in it that we live.
If Mother Earth sustains life, our life, then she is also alive, she is a living organism. Let us relate to her using the four components of Nonviolent Communication and objectively observe the situation she finds herself, let us ask the Indian shamans of North America, to help us scrutinize her feelings and needs and finally to discern what she is asking of us to keep her alive and in turn, keep us alive.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
