Religion & Ecology 1970

The First Environmental Sermon of Reverend Peter Gwillim Kreitler

PGK Note:  (My First Environmental Talk Sermon that I can find in my archives. Typed on a manual typewriter and presented to the entire student body.  In retrospect they probably had little clue as to what in earth I was talking about.  -- Please excuse the language of the day which used man to refer to humankind)

November 6, 1970
The Barstow School

Peter G. Kreitler

This afternoon we are asked to set aside our daily lifestyles and to address ourselves to the rather nebulous subject of religion and ecology.

I am sure that there are the intellectuals sitting here who are both pessimistic and skeptical about an attempt at relating religion and ecology.  Perhaps basing this assumption on the justified criticism of the church that says ‘the church and religion has little if any relation to any social issues.’ The intellectual can go one step further if so disposed and disavow the whole Judeo-Christian religion and its relation to the environment by reciting from Genesis 1.

“God blessed them, say to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and conquers it.  Be masters of the fish of the sea, birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth.  God said, see, I give you all the seed bearing plants tart are upon the whole earth and all the trees with seed bearing fruit; this shall be your food.’

If we so desire, we can read this as man’s license to rape the earth. It is evident that man has and continues to rape nature at an ever accelerating pace, and man so easily finds scapegoats that take the blame off his shoulders.  Man’s callous exploitation of the environment is plain old rape, and if we want we can blame religion for granting the license to man.

Or – we can open our eyes and look further to see if religion has anything more to say about the interrelationship of living organisms with their environment.

In Genesis 2:  “And the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it, to dress it and care for it.’

Man is called to be responsible for the creation of the world.  He was to be the dominant creature possessing the ability to control the other beings of creation, but man’s status on earth was undeniably tempered by the command to cultivate and care for the land.

I am not a Biblical literalist, but to exonerate the church, and its scriptures from blame, sets the stage whereby we can see if religion does offer anything constructive to man in his search for a better environment.

Many people describe all this furor over ecology or man’s relation to his environment as simply another fad that will pass with the death of men like Paul Erlich or Ralph Nader.  Crisis of every description have preceded the ecology crisis – we have had the war, radical, urban, drug, generation, law and order crisis, and so on.  We must in all honesty ask ourselves, do we really give a damn about this crisis or are we going to jump on another bandwagon next year.

It is pointless discussing ecology if we see it as anything less than the most vital, most all inclusive issue or crisis that has ever befallen man.  This means that a mere academic dialogue by intellectuals is insufficient.  We are dealing with life and death questions this must involve each of us with our total being. 

Frenchman Monsieur Rousseau stated that man is born free, but that everywhere he is in chains.  Today man is not free at birth, and the chains that bind man draw tighter daily.  Man’s only freedom is the freedom to choose those chains which he will be bound by – man is born into a system that will automatically require that his waste be fed to the whole earth.  We have no other alternative and our human potential has been negated by the total dominance of man by man.

In essence, what I am saying is that many of us continue to rape nature unconsciously because our systems – schools, churches, families, business, government have denied man the use of his brain.  We have no choice, because we no longer have the ability to be reflective conscious beings. We are in fact, regurgitating pollutants that barely bring our actions to the cognitive, tangible level. 

To use the vernacular – we consume and dispose without using our heads.

(To toss a cigarette butt on the land is simply a manifestation of our total inability to reflect on our continued belief in man’s dominance of nature and what this means – we do not use our heads)

Once again, the point in time is rapidly approaching when the unthinking species will be forced to devise schemes for survival.  Survival of the fittest was the cry of a bygone epoch, but will again be the cry of the millions when the water in our reservoirs will only be enough for some of us.  And who is the us going to be?  Certainly not the blacks, the poor, misfits; no the fittest will be the important, the rich, and white.  No one is going to be talking about social justice during the stampede for life itself, and the entire crisis we mentioned above will be pale by comparison. 

The sad part of all this is that the intellectual right answers for cleaning up the environment, reducing the present danger level, and stemming the tide are based on the wrong standards.  We must have the right answers but we have to start by asking the right questions.  The questions such as where can I find happiness, where do I get the best job, or which company is doing the most about pollution are the wrong questions to be asking.

This is where religion can be of some help because religion can help us ask the right questions.

We all know that the institutions we have created are destroying the livability of the whole world because the worth of a human being has been denied for the sake of progress of a better life.  Stopping the mercury flow into the Great Lakes is not the answer, fining people $185 for dropping a cigarette butt as they are doing in Singapore is not the answer – the answer comes when we begin to value human life, and this is going to demand some changes.

Our entire system, our entire consciousness, most of all our secular values must change.

Whatever you call it, however you label it – call it communal, call it sharing, call it Christian, call it selflessness, call it anti-profit motive –

It all centers down on the right question:  The why of our existence!

Do we view our existence as one of dominance and destruction, or do we value human life.  We must start by valuing our own lives, then our neighbors, then our brothers and sisters in the world.  Man is part of a diminishing world and my brother in Africa will get the garbage of my existence on his land unless I become aware of my calling as a human being.

It is difficult to decide how we want to live or what our values will be because of the systems we are born into.  We must work to rearrange the hierarchy of priorities.  The difficulty in doing this is evident by the gravity of the situation, bout our God is a God of hope who sticks by man as he blunders along his way.

If we can bring to the conscious level that which we are doing to our land we are in essence admitting that our priorities do not lay with money, power and rightness, but with people and their worth.  (If writing today all references to people would also include the animal and plant realms as well.)

If we can dress and keep our land with responsibility we will automatically share our love and concern to the global village we call our world.  I am banking on your ability and my ability to seek out the right questions, ask them, and then live them.

PGK note:  Offered 38 years ago at the age of 27, I read this and shed a soft tear for the words sound strangely relevant for today.  The language is a bit archaic, but my understanding of scripture has changed little – we are called to be gardeners of this fragile earth, our island home. I spoke of systemic change in 1970; the urgency of the message is now more acute than ever for the entire earth family.