Environmental Ethics: Some Challenges for Christians Holmes Rolston III

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• San Clemente Island
• US Fish Wildlife Service
• Shot thousands of goats
• To save endangered plants
• Plants count more than animals?
• God saved the species?
• In their wild environment?

• Genesis
• Divine imperatives
• Let there be
• Light, dry land,
• Vegetation
• Living things according to their kind
• Swarms of living creatures
• Biodiversity?
• The earth produces itself
• Spontaneously
• Very Good

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• Keep them alive with you... Genesis 619b
• Not just the valuable
• Not just the clean
• Preservation of the species, more than
• Medical,
• Agricultural
• Industrial
• For human use

• Fertility is sacred
• Dryness in a plant is essential to its being
  able to flower. Ann Haymond Zwinger said, in The
  Mysterious Lands Dryness promotes the formation
  of flower buds flowering is, after all, not an
  aesthetic contribution, but a survival mechanism.

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• Ecosystems
• Land ethic
• Covenanted promise
• Leopold Land ethic
• All people dwell in promised lands
• Integrity
• Ecosystem health not to degrade resource
• For self or whole, present and future

• United States
• 96 developed
• Farmed, grazed, timbered, designated
• 2
• Wilderness
• 2
• Semi-wild status
• Wise use people
• No more wilderness
• Want repealed Endangered Species Act
• Environmentalists
• More wilderness
• Want to strengthen, Endangered Species Act

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• Management of natural resources
• Yellowstone National Park
• 1988 million acres burned
• New ethic let it burn
• Reset succession
• Release nutrients
• Recycle materials
• Renew biotic community

• Teton wilderness
• 15,000 acres of trees blown down
• No to salvage, but let it rot
• Let it burn! Let it rot! Let it suffer!
• Christian Ethic?
• Death birth
• Creative process
• Regeneration

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• Aldo Leopold
• Land ethic - preserve
• Integrity
• Stability
• Beauty
• Promised land
• must preserve it
• Apply ethics to it
• Land is the Lords

• Earth
• Loved as a neighbor
• Duty of ethic
• Crisis
• Population growth
• Consumption
• Change use
• Resource use
• Can address the issues
• Earth ethics

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Exodus 2310-12

• For six years you shall sow your land and gather
  in its yield
• but the seventh year you shall let it rest and
  lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may
  eat and what they leave the wild animals may
  eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard,
  and with your olive orchard.
• Six days you shall do your work, but on the
  seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and
  your donkey may have relief, and your home born
  slave and the resident alien may be refreshed.

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Leviticus 2510-13

• And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you
  shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all
  its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you
  you shall return, every one of you, to your
  property and every one of you to your family.
• That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you
  you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or
  harvest the unpruned vines.
• For it is a jubilee it shall be holy to you
  you shall eat only what the field itself
  produces.
• In this year of jubilee you shall return, every
  one of you, to your property.

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• Earth ethics
• Christian ethics
• Relate to others
• Justice
• Fairness
• Love
• Forgiveness
• Rights
• Peace
• Relate to God
• Respect
• Trust
• Love

• Relate to others God
• Earth
• Earths resources
• Where we live

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Environmental Ethics Some Challenges for
Christians Holmes Rolston III

• Nature Grace
• For God so loved the world, that He sent His
  only Son John 316
• Believers conduct
• Combines Nature Grace
• Providing ground
• Brilliance
• Endurance
• Truth
• Animated
• Spirited inventiveness

• Genesis
• Autonomy
• Self-creation
• Gift
• Cruciform Psalm 23
• Passion Play
• Perish in tragedy
• Love of life flows into meaning
• Holy Ground
• Promised Land
• Earth

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Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama

• At 29 escapes his
• Pleasant prison
• Seeks teacher
• Teacher to teacher
• Unsatisfied
• Six years

• Questions
• Death?
• Suffering?
• Age?
• God?
• Soul?
• Afterlife?

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Buddhism Practical

• Noble silence
• Concentrate on
• Minimizing suffering
• Inner peace
• Doctrines not dogma
• Experienced as truth
• Three marks of reality
• Constant chance
• No permanent identity
• Existence of suffering

• Change (anichcha)
• Impermanence
• Nothing remains the same
• Sameness is illusion
• Expect change
• Zen (Chan) meditation
• Satori - unity with universe
• Zazen sitting meditation
• Koan public discussion
• Manual labor

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Buddhism The way to inner Peace

• Right work
• Job does no harm
• Right effort
• Moderation
• Striving to improve
• Right meditation
• Discipline of meditation
• Right contemplation
• Inner peace

• Right understanding
• Impermanence of life
• Right intention
• Pure motives
• Right speech
• Honesty
• Kindness
• Right action
• Do no hurt

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Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama

• At 29 escapes his
• Pleasant prison
• Seeks teacher
• Teacher to teacher
• Unsatisfied
• Six years

• Questions
• Death?
• Suffering?
• Age?
• God?
• Soul?
• Afterlife?

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Vietnamese Buddhist
• Thich reverend
• Nhat Hanh one action
• Founder of Van Hanh University
• 75 books
• Committed to peace
• End of political oppression
• 1967 nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Martin
  Luther King, Jr.

• Ecology based on oneness with nature
• Respect
• Humility
• Mindfulness
• Love
• Compassion

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Body
• Not limited to skin boundary
• More immense
• Heart stops
• Life stops
• Many things outside our body too
• Ozone layer
• Sun

• Sun is our second heart
• Consume sun
• People
• Animals
• Plants
• Minerals
• No phenomenon not our concern
• Pebble
• Movement of the galaxy, even light years away

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• I believe a blade of grass is no less than a
  journey-work of stars. -Walt Whitman
• Not philosophy, but from depths of soul
• All phenomena are interdependent
• Speck of dust
• Flower
• Hunan

• Line drawn between one and many, one and not one
• Unity can not exist without diversity
• Unity diversity interpenetrate each other
  freely
• Unity is diversity
• Diversity is unity

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Principle of interbeing
• Forest lungs outside of our bodies
• Deforesting
• Destroying air
• River, etc

• We are imprisoned in small selves
• Begin being our true selves
• Be the forest
• Be the trees
• Be the rivers
• Be the ozone
• If forest die
• We lose our peace
• Inter-are with the trees

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Autos factories
• We with the trees
• Whose smart?
• Orchid
• Snail
• Respect
• Nobleness of nature
• Oak tree is all is needs to be

• In former lives
• Rocks
• Clouds
• Trees
• Life is impermanent
• All children of the earth
• Takes us back again
• Continually arising
• Nurtured
• Returned
• Life for a time
• Then compose

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Killed many
• Extinct
• Now we are harmed
• Sleepwalkers not aware
• Doing
• Heading
• Mindful steps important
• Birds
• Joy
• Beauty
• Purity

• Love us
• We destroy
• Destroy ourselves
• Miss unconditional love
• We need unconditional love
• Change the way we think to know this love

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Diamond Sutra
• Highest cause
• Whole being
• Help every living being cross the sea of
  suffering
• Obsticles
• Self
• Person
• Living being
• Life span
• Life is one
• Self does not exist

• Notion of person non person
• Is mankind more important?
• Humans have no advantage
• Humans have no self
• Not happy with self
• So not happy with environment

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Living being
• Made of non-living
• So protect
• Stones
• Soil
• Oceans
• Atoms Electrons
• Consciousness?

• Life span
• Life a a certain time, before not
• Life is made of death.
• Death is made of life.
• Cells die cells live
• Life death,
• 2 aspects of same thing
• Die peacefully
• Non-fear
• Non-anger
• Non-despair
• We will not burn out

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Ten Penetrations
• All worlds penetrate a single pore, a single pore
  penetrates all worlds.
• All living beings penetrate one body, one body
  penetrates all living beings.

• Infinite time penetrates one second, one second
  penetrates infinite time.
• All Buddhist teaching penetrates one teaching,
  one teaching penetrates all Buddhist teaching.
• Innumerable spheres enter one sphere, one sphere
  enters innumerable spheres.

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Buddhism The Sun My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

• All sense organs penetrate one organ, one organ
  penetrates all sense organs.
• All sense organs penetrate non-sense organs,
  non-sense organs penetrate all sense organs.
• One penetration penetrates all penetrations, all
  penetrations penetrate one penetration.

• Every sound penetrates one sound, one sound
  penetrates every sound.
• All times penetrate one time, one time penetrates
  all times.
• Space contains time, time contains space.