Billions & Billions (20 page)

“Global warming is a grave concern likely to pose a serious threat to the very foundation of human life,” said Japan, announcing that it would stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2000. Sweden announced that it will phase out the nuclear half of its energy supply by 2010 while decreasing the
CO
₂
emissions of its industries by 30 percent—to be done by improving energy efficiency and by phasing in renewable energy sources; it expects to save money in the process. John Selwyn Gummer, Britain’s Secretary of the Environment, declared in 1996, “We are accepting as a world community that there are to be world rules.” But there is considerable resistance. The OPEC countries are opposed to reducing CO
₂
emissions, because it would take a bite out of their oil revenues. Russia and many developing countries oppose it because it would be a major impediment to industrialization. The United States is the only major industrial nation taking no significant measures to counter greenhouse warming. While other nations act, it appoints committees and urges the affected industries to adopt voluntary compliance, against their short-term interest. Acting effectively on this matter, of course, will be more difficult than implementing the Montreal Protocol on CFCs and its amendments. The affected industries are much more powerful, the cost of change is much greater, and there is nothing yet as dramatic for global warming as the hole over Antarctica is in ozone depletion. Citizens will have to educate industries and governments.

CO
₂
molecules, being brainless, are unable to understand the profound idea of national sovereignty. They’re just blown by the wind. If they’re produced in one place, they can wind up in any other place. The planet is a unit. Whatever the ideological and cultural differences, the nations of the world must work together; otherwise there will be no solution to greenhouse warming and the other global environmental problems. We are all in this greenhouse together.

Finally, in April 1993, President Bill Clinton committed the United States to do what the Bush Administration had refused to do: join about 150 other nations in signing the protocols of the Earth Summit meeting held the previous year in Rio de
Janeiro. Specifically, the United States pledged that by the year 2000 it would reduce its levels of emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels (1990 levels are bad enough, but at least it’s a step in the right direction). Fulfilling this promise will not be easy. The United States also committed to steps to protect biological diversity in a range of ecosystems on the planet.

We cannot safely continue mindless growth in technology, and wholesale negligence about the consequences of that technology. It is well within our power to guide technology, to direct it to the benefit of everyone on Earth. Perhaps there is a kind of silver lining to these global environmental problems, because they are forcing us, willy-nilly, no matter how reluctant we may be, into a new kind of thinking—in which in some matters the well-being of the human species takes precedence over national and corporate interests. We are a resourceful species when push comes to shove. We know what to do. Out of the environmental crises of our time should come, unless we are much more foolish than I think we are, a binding up of the nations and the generations, and even the end of our long childhood.

I
ntelligence and tool-making were our strengths from the beginning. We used these talents to compensate for the paucity of the natural gifts—speed, flight, venom, burrowing, and the rest—freely distributed to other animals, so it seemed, and cruelly denied to us. From the time of the domestication of fire and the elaboration of stone tools, it was obvious that our skills could be used for evil as well as for good. But it was not until very recently that it dawned on us that even the benign use of our intelligence and our tools might—because we are not smart enough to foresee all consequences—put us at risk.

Now we are everywhere on Earth. We have bases in Antarctica. We visit the ocean bottoms. Twelve of us have even walked on the Moon. There are now nearly 6 billion of us, and our numbers grow by the equivalent of the population of China every decade. We have subdued the other animals and the plants (although we have been less successful with the microbes). We have domesticated many organisms and made them do our bidding. We have become, by some standards, the dominant species on Earth.

And at almost every step, we have emphasized the local over the global, the short-term over the long. We have destroyed the forests, eroded the topsoil, changed the composition of the atmosphere, depleted the protective ozone layer, tampered with the climate, poisoned the air and the waters, and made the poorest people suffer most from the deteriorating environment. We have become predators on the biosphere—full of arrogant entitlement, always taking and never giving back. And so, we are now a danger to ourselves and the other beings with whom we share the planet.

The wholesale attack on the global environment is not the fault only of profit-hungry industrialists or visionless and corrupt politicians. There is plenty of blame to share.

The tribe of scientists has played a central role. Many of us didn’t even bother to think about the long-term consequences of our inventions. We have been too ready to put devastating powers into the hands of the highest bidder and the officials of whichever nation we happen to be living in. In too many cases, we have lacked a moral compass. Philosophy and science from their very beginnings have been eager, in the words of René Descartes, “to make us masters and possessors of Nature,” to use science, as Francis Bacon said, to bend all of Nature into “the service of Man.” Bacon talked about “Man” exercising a “right
over Nature.” “Nature,” wrote Aristotle, “has made all animals for the sake of man.” “Without man,” asserted Immanuel Kant, “the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain.” Not so long ago we were hearing about “conquering” Nature and the “conquest” of space—as if Nature and the Cosmos were enemies to be vanquished.

The religious tribe also has played a central role. Western sects held that just as we must submit to God, so the rest of Nature must submit to us. In modern times especially, we seem more dedicated to the second half of this proposition than the first. In the real and palpable world, as revealed by what we do and not what we say, many humans seemingly aspire to be lords of Creation—with an occasional token bow, as required by social convention, to whatever gods may lately be fashionable. Descartes and Bacon were profoundly influenced by religion. The notion of “us against Nature” is a legacy of our religious traditions. In the Book of Genesis, God gives humans “dominion … over every living thing,” and the “fear” and “dread” of us is to be upon “every beast.” Man is urged to “subdue” Nature, and “subdue” is translated from a Hebrew word with strong military connotations. There is much else in the Bible—and in the medieval Christian tradition out of which modern science emerged—along similar lines. Islam, by contrast, is disinclined to declare Nature an enemy.

Of course, both science and religion are complex and multi-layered structures, embracing many different, even contradictory, opinions. It is scientists who discovered and called the world’s attention to the environmental crises, and there are scientists who, at considerable cost to themselves, refused to work on inventions that might harm their fellows. And it is religion that first articulated the imperative to revere living things.

True, there is nothing in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition that approaches the cherishing of Nature in the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain
tradition or among Native Americans. Indeed, both Western religion and Western science have gone out of their way to assert that Nature is just the setting and not the story, that viewing Nature as sacred is sacrilege.

Nevertheless, there is a clear religious counterpoint: The natural world is a creation of God, put here for purposes separate from the glorification of “Man” and deserving, therefore, of respect and care in its own right, and not just because of its utility for us. A poignant metaphor of “stewardship” has emerged, especially recently—the idea that humans are the caretakers of the Earth, put here for the purpose and accountable, now and into the indefinite future, to the Landlord.

Of course, life on Earth got along pretty well for 4 billion years without “stewards.” Trilobites and dinosaurs, who were each around for more than a hundred million years, might be amused at a species here only a thousandth as long deciding to appoint itself the guardian of life on Earth. That species is itself the danger. Human stewards are needed, these religions recognize, to protect the Earth from humans.

The methods and ethos of science and religion are profoundly different. Religion frequently asks us to believe without question, even (or especially) in the absence of hard evidence. Indeed, this is the central meaning of faith. Science asks us to take nothing on faith, to be wary of our penchant for self-deception, to reject anecdotal evidence. Science considers deep skepticism a prime virtue. Religion often sees it as a barrier to enlightenment. So, for centuries, there has been a conflict between the two fields—the discoveries of science challenging religious dogmas, and religion attempting to ignore or suppress the disquieting findings.

But times have changed. Many religions are now comfortable with an Earth that goes around the Sun, with an Earth that’s 4.5
billion years old, with evolution, and with the other discoveries of modern science. Pope John Paul II has said, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.… Such bridging ministries must be nurtured and encouraged.”

Nowhere is this more clear than in the current environmental crisis. No matter whose responsibility the crisis mainly is, there’s no way out of it without understanding the dangers and their mechanisms, and without a deep devotion to the long-term well-being of our species and our planet—that is, pretty closely, without the central involvement of both science and religion.

—

It has been my good fortune to participate in an extraordinary sequence of gatherings throughout the world: The leaders of the planet’s religions have met with scientists and legislators from many nations to try to deal with the rapidly worsening world environmental crisis.

Representatives of nearly 100 nations were present at the “Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders” conferences at Oxford in April 1988 and in Moscow in January 1990. Standing under an immense photograph of the Earth from space, I found myself looking out over a diversely costumed representation of the wondrous variety of our species: Mother Teresa and the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief rabbis of Romania and the United Kingdom, the Grand Mufti of Syria, the Metropolitan of Moscow, an elder of the Onondaga Nation, the high priest of the Sacred Forest of Togo, the Dalai Lama, Jain priests resplendent in their white robes, turbaned Sikhs, Hindu swamis, Buddhist
abbots, Shinto priests, evangelical Protestants, the Primate of the Armenian Church, a “Living Buddha” from China, the bishops of Stockholm and Harare, metropolitans of the Orthodox Churches, the Chief of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy—and, joining them, the Secretary-General of the United Nations; the Prime Minister of Norway; the founder of a Kenyan women’s movement to replant the forests; the President of the World Watch Institute; the directors of the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, its Population Fund, and UNESCO; the Soviet Minister of the Environment; and parliamentarians from dozens of nations, including U.S. Senators and Representatives and a Vice-President-to-be. These meetings were mainly organized by one person, a former U.N. official, Akio Matsumura.

I remember the 1,300 delegates assembled in St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin to hear an address by Mikhail Gorbachev. The session was opened by a venerable Vedic monk, representing one of the oldest religious traditions on Earth, inviting the multitude to chant the sacred syllable “Om.” As nearly as I could tell, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze went along with the “Om,” but Mikhail Gorbachev restrained himself. (An immense milky-white statue of Lenin, hand outstretched, loomed nearby.)

That same day, ten Jewish delegates, finding themselves in the Kremlin at sundown on a Friday, performed the first Jewish religious service ever held there. I remember the Grand Mufti of Syria stressing, to the surprise and delight of many, the importance in Islam of “birth control for the global welfare, without exploiting it at the expense of one nationality over another.” Several speakers quoted the Native American saying, “We have not inherited the Earth from our ancestors, but have borrowed it from our children.”

The interconnectedness of all human beings was a theme constantly stressed. We heard a secular parable, which asked us to imagine our species as a village of 100 families. Then, 65 families in our village are illiterate, and 90 do not speak English, 70 have no drinking water at home, 80 have no members who have ever flown in an airplane. Seven families own 60 percent of the land and consume 80 percent of all the available energy. They have all the luxuries. Sixty families are crowded onto 10 percent of the land. Only one family has any member with a university education. And the air and the water, the climate and the blistering sunlight, are all getting worse. What is our common responsibility?

At the Moscow conference, an appeal signed by a number of distinguished scientists was presented to world religious leaders. Their response was overwhelmingly positive. The meeting ended with a plan of action that included these sentences: