Years ago, I lived for a brief time in Steubenville, Ohio, a city steeped in history and tradition. At the time, it was also notoriously polluted by effluence from nearby steel mills, paper factories, and coal mines. While there during the winter, I saw lots of snow, but none of it white, and the smoggy odors from industry were noxious and debilitating.
It was so bad, in fact, that the local Franciscan friars implored God to do something about the pollution … and many mills, factories, and mines closed shortly thereafter, tossing hundreds of workers unwittingly into the ranks of the unemployed. What followed was disastrous poverty, high levels of illiteracy, alcoholism and drug abuse, and social backwardness. A lesson for the astute: be careful what you pray for!
Since that time, the nearby Ohio River has recovered somewhat, if only inadvertently and perhaps only momentarily. As it turns out, Steubenville sits on top of two huge shale formations so now there’s work to re-purpose old wells for hydrofracking. Out of the frying pan into the fire, as the old saying goes. Poor Steubenville.
Rivers have a knack for washing away our sins, if given a half-decent reprieve. It’s an unequivocal signal about the inherent resiliency of nature to recuperate from partial disaster. The flexibility’s built into the genetic fiber of living systems. Under limited stress, they can often bounce back if the trauma is not implacable. Remove the sin, and some semblance of paradise returns!
A similar bounce-back occurs when we eradicate artificial dams. Throughout the past decade, government officials and conservationists have removed over 500 dams in the United States, the majority in New York and New England. Most were constructed around the turn of the 20th century to power factories and, at once, to provide a convenient dumping ground for a deadly palette of wastes and pollutants.
The Penobscot River, the longest river in Maine, is a prime example of a bad idea, long-standing but eventually corrected. The story began in 1830 when the first of five dams was built to support a burgeoning sawmill industry that polluted the river and disrupted its fish runs. In 1972, the Clean Water Act began to regulate river discharges; and, since the 1980s, environmental groups and the Penobscot tribe have focused on blocking new dam construction and removing existing structures. Now the alewife, shad, and Atlantic salmon are returning to reclaim their old territories! Perhaps not yet en bloc, but in sufficient quantities to suggest that recovery is possible now that the dams are passé.
Again my point: natural systems may rebound if our ecological stressors – whether biological, chemical, or physical – are diminished or removed in timely fashion to allow the recovery of wildlife species and their habitats.
Still, it astonishes me that we humans cannot resist fouling the very resources that sustain us. Knowing that the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels contributes significantly to climate change, we continue to “drill, baby, drill.” Knowing that the rainforests of the world harbor irreplaceable medicinals, we continue to “chop, baby, chop.” Knowing that artisanal gold mining is the biggest source of mercury released into the environment, we continue to “mine, baby, mine.” Knowing that marine plastics pollution is a toxic time bomb, we continue to “mold, baby, mold.” Greed and doublespeak are the two dark faces of this Janus-like justification of our willful imposition on the natural world.
It astonishes still more that orthodox religious congregations (Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Buddhist, and Hindu among them) have accomplished so little to steward Creation. With rare exceptions, they seem to have abandoned Heaven on Earth for their vacuous attentions on an afterlife.
“By their deeds ye shall know them,” says the Gospel of St. Matthew. Present tense, not future. And, given the unequivocal proclamation of the Psalmist that “The Earth is the Lord’s and all it holds,” it is a supremely evil act to drill, chop, mine, and mold so unashamedly the blessings of the Creator while striving to stockpile spiritual points for Paradise.
With their heads in the sands of faith, the ministers of these creeds, these modern-day Pharisees, rant against abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, and immigration without a glance at clean air, water, and soil. Such faith without the works of stewardship is a dead faith and stands condemned by the severity of extinction, climate change, pollutants, and all other ills of our society gone mad. Collectively, these ministers represent a modern-day Nero, fiddling with such a narrow scope of belief while Rome burns around them.
The natural world has endured our self-serving attentions for millennia, but now it discloses frays and tears in its natural systems that may threaten our way of life in the decades ahead. Nature may rebound grandly if we act responsibly. But the turnaround will require those orthodox congregations, indeed all stakeholders in our environmental issues, to worry less about the afterlife and more about meaningful action in the here-and-now.
Halting human-caused extinction, climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction seems a prime commandment, perhaps preamble to the Decalogue itself. A rebounding of the natural world may be our greatest raison d’tre for the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
H. Bruce Rinker, Ph.D.
