Ecological Science as a Creation Story

Since at least the late 1980s, environmental writers have made growing use of the explicit Christian language of “the Creation.” Two 1990s books by environmental authors, for example, are Caring for Creation (Oelschlaeger 1994)and Covenant for a New Creation ( Robb and Casebolt 1991). The magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the need for a greater “spiritual bond between ourselves and the natural world similar to God’s covenant with creation” (Borelli 1988). Natural environments isolated historically from European contact are commonly described as having once been an “Eden” or a “paradise” on the earth—similar to the Creation before the fall (McCormick 1989; “Inside the World’s Last Eden” 1992). Such creationist language has also invaded mainstream environmental politics. During his tenure as vice president, Al Gore said that we must cease “heaping contempt on God’s creation” (qtd. in Niebuhr 1993). In a 1995 speech remarkable for its religious candor, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said that “our covenant” requires that we “protect the whole of Creation.” Invoking messages reminiscent of John Muir, Babbitt argued that wild areas are a source of our core “values” because they are “a manifestation of the presence of our Creator.” It is necessary to protect every animal and plant species, Babbitt said, because “the earth is a sacred precinct, designed by and for the purposes of the Creator,” and thus we can learn about God by encountering and experiencing his creation. The American environmental movement has deep roots in and still depends heavily on the conviction that a person finds a mirror of God’s thinking in the encounter with wild nature—or, in traditional Christian terms, that a person is in the presence of “the Creation.” Absent this conviction, many of the American environmental movement’s basic beliefs and important parts of its policy agenda would be difficult to explain and defend.1 The use of creation language also reflects an increased role that the institutional churches of Christianity are now playing in the environmental movement. This involvement has worked to narrow the previously large linguistic gap between traditional Christian creationism and what might be called a secular “environmental creationism”—the use of creationist language without the explicit Christian context...read more