Roundtable 6: Religious and Spiritual Leaders

Moderator:    Mary Evelyn Tucker, Forum on Religion and Ecology and Bucknell University

Rapporteurs:    Rick Clugston and Peter Blaze Corcoran, Center for Respect of Life and Environment

1. Ethical challenges in the broader society
   
   The fundamental task of the roundtable was to contribute to an ethical framework and identify those basic policy commitments necessary to ensure a viable future for the community of life on Earth.  A major reason for this gathering was the recognition that dominant development paradigms and their associated economic and social structures are not bringing us down the path to a humane and sustainable future.  Ten years after the Rio Earth Summit the news is not good.  Trends show accelerating increases in population and poverty, species loss, and environmental deterioration. 
   
   Clearly our worldviews and ethics matter. And the ethics of intolerant righteousness and of greed and short term gain cannot lead us to sustainable development, despite enduring beliefs in the one right religion or the invisible hand.
   
   We humans have constructed a worldview -- a belief system -- that has turned animals and nature into "objects" which have no intrinsic worth or moral claim on us and which human societies can exploit for even trivial human ends.  Our globalizing economic, legal and political systems embody this "mechanistic" premise in their principles and practices.  If we could create societies -- from the global to the local -- which recognize, as Thomas Berry states, that "existence is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects" and that organized its policies and practices toward principles such as those in the Earth Charter, then we would have the basic foundations of a sustainable society.  If we cannot make this shift in human consciousness, then our efforts will always be marginal -- rearguard actions in the face of the fundamentally inhumane juggernaut of economic globalization.
   
   

2. The Ethical Challenges within Religions Themselves
   
   Roundtable participants agreed that institutionalized religions have many internal challenges to face, e.g.,

·           Religions have been late in focusing on critical issues.

·            Religions have their 'dark side.

·            Fundamentalism and misdirected zealotry complicate the world scene.

·           Religious ideals are not always realized in practice.

·            Religions in the past have tended to be:

                  - Isolated from critical issues,

                  - Exclusivist in their relations to one another,

                  - Estranged from other institutions.

It is clear that our religious institutions have barely begun to articulate the core values for a sustainable future.  In their fundamentalist-fanatical forms, religions throughout history have justified terrorism, in jihads and crusades against people who hold different beliefs and against the Earth itself.  In their more liberal forms, churches had often become another form of business as usual-neither affirming the spiritual depths of the wider life community nor offering a sounder economic vision.

Session II: Role of Ethical Norms in Promoting Sustainable Development

A.  Contribution of Religions and Spiritual Groups:

Religions and spiritual groups have many strengths.  These were identified by roundtable participants:

·      Religions offer moral authority and ethical principles.

·      Religions have institutional strength and can take a leadership role.

·      Religions offer a viable alternative to materialism and consumption.

·      Religions offer stories of meaning and give coherence and direction.

·      Inter-religious understanding is going strongly in the modern world.

Mary Evelyn Tucker, speaking of the role of religious and ethical traditions, in her report to the final plenary session said,

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.”…

For clearly the religions cannot 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. …

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.

... each religious tradition, at its roots, does affirm a deeper ethical vision of respect and care.  Each faith tradition offers many practical examples of communities living together with respect and care for diverse peoples, faiths, other animals and nature.

B.  The Earth Charter

The Earth Charter was unanimously supported by roundtable participants.  Steven Rockefeller, the Chair of the Earth Charter Drafting Committee, expresses succinctly our moral challenge:

At this juncture in human evolution, extending our sense of respect and care to embrace the whole human family in all its diversity, the greater community life, and future generations has become an ecological and social necessity.  In the vision of the Earth Charter, caring for people and caring for Earth are two interrelated aspects of one great task.  Only such an expansion of our moral consciousness will transform industrial-technological civilization and lead toward a genuinely sustainable way of life and peace on Earth. 

Over the past decade, tens of thousands of people representing hundreds of organizations have worked in a participatory and transparent process to articulate the basic values and principles of sustainable development.  The Earth Charter presents a consensus vision of an integrated agenda for the pursuit of peace, social and economic justice and the protection of cultural and biological diversity.  If affirms that each of these important goals can only be achieved if all are achieved.  Justice, peace and ecological integrity are inextricably intertwined.

Most important, diversity is lifted up as a central value.  Protecting the diversity of life forms, cultures and languages, as well as rights and opportunities for each individual, is fundamental.  When we lose these different expressions of life, we lose sources of essential knowledge, wisdom and technologies.  We also lose the richness of our souls, for at some deep level our ecological and ethical selves require the enhancement of diversity against both the violence of exploitation and the efficiency of monoculture. 

Despite the fact that many societies are filled with coercive violence and restrictions of basic freedoms, a global ethical consensus is emerging on human rights in general, with particular emphasis on the needs and rights of women and indigenous peoples.  Also, this emerging ethical consensus increasingly recognizes that nonhuman animals, and nature have intrinsic worth and deserve more legal standing.

Humans must also accept a world of material limits.  A correlate of extending rights to others is recognizing the limits of human technological and intellectual capacities.  The needed ethical framework demands that we humans accept a set of restraints on our exploitation of the natural world, based on respect for the integrity of the life community, as well as healthy skepticism about human ability to control and manage extraordinarily complex natural systems benignly.  Human humility is essential. 

As the world's religions move into the ecological age, their circles of compassion, respect and care widen to embrace the whole of the Earth community.  Part of our task is to shift our focus from having more to being more and doing more. 

In the survey of the world's religions' relations to ecology (undertaken in the project at Harvard University, the Forum on Religion and Ecology), five shared principles emerged.  Each is deeply embedded in the Earth Charter.  They are:

·       Reverence for the Earth and the Cosmos

·       Respect for myriad species

·       Restraint in the use of natural resources

·       Redistribution of wealth and resources

·       Responsibility for future generations and for the community of life.

Certain key areas of collaboration among religion and other guiding institutions of business, media, education and civil society engaged in several speeches and discussion.

·       Water, as a unique Earth resource, is sacred and must not be commodified.  It should be clean and available to all.

·       Education for sustainable development on all levels should include the history of the world's religions, historical and contemporary inter-religious dialogue and cooperation, and the creative engagement of the world's religions with peace, justice, and sustainability in the modern world.

·       Human economic systems must be reformed to support biological and cultural diversity, social justice, and spiritual development.  All of this must be undertaken with a deep concern for 'the next seven generations.'

·       The world's media need to be more aware and supportive of these ethical concerns and of initiatives to address them.  One significant practical suggestion was made involving the creation of a world television channel devoted to issues of planetary concern.

Session IV:  Strategies for Advancing the Ethics Agenda

In response to the Secretary General's call 'to put in place a new ethic of global conservation and stewardship,' the roundtable recommends that his report to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) include specific language on the value of the Earth Charter as a comprehensive contribution of civil society in defining sustainability and as a blueprint for broad movement toward sustainable development that includes an ethical framework. 

The Roundtable recommends that the WSSD organizers conduct a consultation on values and spiritual issues and their implications for sustainable development in Johannesburg.  This should be convened by the Forum on Religion and Ecology, the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, the Earth Dialogues, the World Faiths Development Dialogue and other partners to further advance the Roundtable's agenda.

These partners should participate in the Global Engagement Network (GEN) of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions.  The GEN project builds on the growing body of foundational ethical statements of norms of human behavior that are accepted globally across religious/spiritual traditions and cultural communities; these statements provide a basis for assessing alternative strategies for achieving a sustainable, peaceful, and just world.  As the process unfolds, religious communities will be brought into creative engagement with organizations representing the range of other guiding institutions to craft and implement a join action plan to be presented to the world at the 2004/2005 Parliament of Religions. 

The Earth Dialogues Religious and Spiritual Leaders should also participate in the Forum on Religion and Ecology's efforts to clarify common values that most of the world's religions have in relation to the natural world.  They might be summarized as: reverence, respect, restraint, redistribution, and responsibility.  Just as religious value needed to be identified, so too, do the values embedded in disciplines such as science, education, economics, and public policy also need to be more carefully understood.  Environmental changes will be motivated by these disciplines in very specific ways: namely, scientific analysis will be critical to understanding nature's economy, economic incentives will be central to equitable distribution of resources, educational awareness will be indispensable to creating modes of sustainable life, public policy recommendations will be invaluable in shaping national and international priorities.  Cosmological and ethical values will be crucial for the transformations required for life in the next century and beyond.  All of these are needed.  In this way, the various values, incentives, and forms of knowledge that motivate human activity can be more effectively channeled toward long term sustainable life on the planet.