Closing Comments of Mary Evelyn Tucker,

Bucknell University, Forum on Religion and Ecology
At the Earth Dialogues Forum
Closing Plenary Session
February 23, 2002
Lyon, France
        
 
We are poised at a historical moment when we are witnessing the European community coming into economic integration along with political unification. Who would have imagined this was possible even half a century ago? Just as who could have predicted the end of the Cold War thanks to the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev? Similarly, who would have dreamed that the human community would begin to reimagine its destiny amidst signs of limits to unrestrained growth so as to redirect the course of human history toward a sustainable future? Who could imagine that the Earth Charter, a “Declaration of Interdependence,” would now embody the ethical aspirations of the Earth community? And who could envision that the world’s religions would be called in their first great Parliament in 1893 in Chicago to a new sense of mutual understanding and dialogue, and in the second Parliament in 1993 to assist in the creation of a Global Ethics?
        

If the European Union can model political and economic integration, if the great powers can withdraw from the Cold War, if the United Nations and the international community can point the way toward sustainable development, surely the religious communities can also become significant partners in identifying a compelling ethical vision for sustainable life on the planet.  This is their challenge and ours. For they are called now to help us move from an exclusive preoccupation with Divine-human relations and even solely human-human relations to renewed human-earth relations. From a concern for a human ethics regarding homicide, suicide and genocide we are turning to a global ethics addressing biocide and geocide. This requires the voices of the spiritual traditions along with secular humanism.

This extension of ethics outward represents a major transformation for the world’s religions from their theological and anthropological phase to their ecological and cosmological phase. And the Earth Charter embodies this great transformation in an extraordinarily comprehensive manner. For the human person is becoming decentered and recentered amidst the great concentric circles of life – from the individual and social circles to the circles of other species and ecosystems with which we share the web of life. And like the ripples in a pond, these circles move outward from the Earth to the universe itself. As the Earth Charter suggests in the Preamble, “Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe. Earth our home is alive with a unique community of life.”
The religions have already known we are contained in the center of vast mysteries – we dwell amidst intimate immensities as the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, suggested. Historically the religions have shown us how to orient our lives set between hearth and cosmos. It is then the task of the religions to recover and recreate a language - both ecological and ethical – which reroots us in the earth as our home.
        

For clearly the religions can not stand by as silent witnesses to the sixth great extinction period which we inhabit or we too will join the endangered species list. Rather the human heart is waiting to participate in dialogue with the Earth. The human soul is poised to recover the language of the sacred that brings us back into contact with the great rhythms of the natural world. The religious traditions can help to unlock this language of dialogue with the Earth and for the Earth.
        

For buried deep within the symbol systems and ritual practices of the world’s religions is a language of connection to the spiritual dimensions of nature itself. Life, death, rebirth, and renewal lie at the heart of both matter and spirit – at the core of both symbolic and biological realities. Religions, along with the great cultural traditions of art, music, dance, painting, poetry can lift up for us the voices of the Earth so that our dialogue will not be a monologue but a true conversation. With the help of our religious and cultural traditions a new kind of listening to the Earth is at hand, a new mode of hearing is now possible.
The call of the Earth is emerging; the cry of the species is sounding. The deep structural languages of the elements – air, water, soil, and fire – are becoming present to us. The call of the Earth is to see the Earth as the source of life not as a resource for our use alone. The cry of the species is for humans to join the great community of life forms not stand apart from it.  The language of the elements reveals our inherent solidarity: air in our breath, soil in our bones, water in our blood, and fire in our hearts.
This call, these cries, this language reminds us that all religions have seen our body as part of the Earth body – that Earth is mother who has born us, nurtured us, and cared for us.

And thus, as the world’s religions suggest, our response to the Earth is one of continued gratitude for the gift of life. The religions remind us that at their heart is wonder and awe in the face of this mystery of existence, restraint and respect while partaking of its gifts, and a feeling of responsibility to future generations for its continuity.

As the religious voices emerge in concert with the voices of Earth Community we will see once again that the common good is our common ground, that we are a late arrival amidst the vast evolution of the universe, but that our songs celebrating the extraordinary fecundity of life processes will point the way to renew the face of the earth. Let the chorus begin.