From Earth to Heaven ... by Analogy!

Since I rededicated this blog as "This Sacramental Earth," I've been struggling to come up with a reason why we Catholics in particular, and all Christians in general, ought to think of the natural world as a sacrament: a visible sign of God's invisible grace.

If Mother Nature, through evolution, engendered our material being in the form of species Homo sapiens, then I suppose we can adopt two possible attitudes. One is to think of our material being, and of the material world at large from which it derives, as purely disposable. We can think highly of just the immortal soul which comes to us from God at the time we are individually conceived and returns to God when we die. The rest of our "reality" can be gladly discarded, in this view.

The other possible attitude is to think of our material reality as imbued with God's grace. If we think of it that way, then it would be a desecration, pure and simple, to turn physical Nature into a trash heap as we keep plundering Nature unsustainably in support of our ravenous economic aspirations. If material reality is itself a sacrament, then we ought to be environmentalists instead.

But why should we not visualize our natural, physical being as, ultimately, some sort of waste matter to be tossed onto a figurative slag heap and forgotten after we have gone to our graves?

The reason is simply this: our Nicene Creed says, " ... we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."

The word "resurrection" implies ongoing, or restored, corporeality — not just a disembodied soul floating eternally in the beatific presence of God in Heaven after we die. So the life we know today as bodily creatures here on Earth can fruitfully be envisioned as analogous to the promised "life of the world to come."

One specific analogy is the evolutionary succession of species here on Earth. Humankind in particular is the product of a long chain of precursor hominid species, all of which are now extinct. They in effect still exist today, though — in "resurrected" form, as us!

Another analogy with the resurrection our creed promises us after death is the return of temperate climes that arrived after the end of the last Ice Age, during which frigid time the prospects looked dim indeed for our early ancestors' continued survival.

The return of the Earth's fecundity each spring, following the death of green things that accompanies each winter, is yet another natural analogy of the personal resurrection our Christian religious belief promises us.

If we but accept the notion that such Earth-Heaven analogies furnish us with a true "optic" through which to view the credal promise of resurrection life in the Kingdom of God, then the natural world as we know it today automatically becomes a sacramental world. It makes no more sense to plunder and despoil Nature than to neglect the upkeep on our own house or burn it to the ground.

Saving the Anacostia

The cover of The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, wp, for today, October 2, 2011 ...

... bears a lovely photo by Linda Davidson that highlights a series of articles inside. The lead article is Neely Tucker's "Anacostia River: From then till now". The Anacostia River ...

(The top of this map points northwest.)

... runs through my home town, Washington, D.C.:

It's fed by branches and creeks in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, in Maryland, and the Anacostia in turn feeds the Potomac River, on its way to the Chesapeake Bay.

Ms. Tucker reminds us that when white Europeans first saw the Anacostia in the early 1600s, it was still fully 40 feet deep, and in 1608 the famous Capt. John Smith could marvel at its clarity. The Nacotchtank Indians had long considered the Anacostia their river of life:

“The river was seen as a vein of Mother Earth; it was salty, like blood, and it tasted like blood,” says Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Indian (the closest descendants the Nacotchtanks have left) and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “It was part of the living system.”

Back then, the native peoples "moved on the river and its dozen or so tributaries — clear and abundant with shad, pike, bass and oysters — on small canoes."

Since the coming of white men and women, what's happened to the river ...

Blue, gooey substance collecting on silt
at low tide.

Trash and debris along the river
near where the Washington Nationals play.

More trash and debris.

... has been a study in how to despoil our living Earth, step by step by deplorable step. That's one upshot of Ms. Tucker's article.

The early white settlers included wealthy planters who wanted to grow tobacco near the Anacostia, using black slave labor. They cleared the aboriginal forests and drained the wetlands. Since they didn't replenish the soil with manure, it kept declining in fertility ... so they just cleared more land and started over. The result was that much of the cleared soil wound up in the river.

After the American Revolution, the European market for tobacco declined, and the planters switched to wheat. That made things worse, since they now had to plow up land that was formerly cultivated with hoes. At the outset of the nineteenth century, after Maryland ceded territory to build the new Nation's Capital:

Within a generation, the Anacostia was so clogged with silt and debris that deep-water boats could no longer make it to Bladensburg. In 1873, Washington began using underground sewers to dump raw waste into the river.

Then came the depredations of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, in the early twentieth century ...

... began a campaign to create usable land around the Anacostia. Tributaries were strangled with heavy culverts. Great swaths of bog and marsh were converted into dry land with landfill.

The Anacostia riverbed is now so overlain with centuries of agricultural runoff, sewage buildup, and other debris that Ms. Tucker is forced to write, "Today, you can walk across almost any part of the 8.5-mile Anacostia, as most of it is five feet deep or less, choked by silt and pollution."

Now, though, we paradoxically find that the only way we can restore the Anacostia to its former health and glory is to apply governmental and institutional tools that only a European-derived democracy can muster.

We also need environmental advocacy groups — especially local ones like the Anacostia Watershed Society — to continue to put pressure on various components of federal, state, and local governments, including the U.S. military, to do the right thing. Again, that's something Ms. Tucker's article is telling us.

It's as though a culture that has long revolved around contention and conquest, rather than cooperation, came to these shores and contended with the native tribes, wiping many of them out. Meanwhile, they conquered the supposed chaos of nature. Result: a continuing cascade of environmental catastrophes. Now that same culture resorts to a litany of adversarial episodes — court cases, congressional hearings, political campaigns, etc. — as the only way to bring itself to heel.

How ironic. Yet there's a positive lesson here. The worst features of a culture can turn into its best characteristics.

There's no way America can ever go back to a lost, uncivilized past where humans live in complete harmony with nature, Indian-style.

So, to get back in harmony and balance, we have to find our own way. It has to be a process that does not undo the marvels of civilization. It has to respect the spirit of this photo from the wp article:

It's the Anacostia in one of its remaining clean, green settings ... crossed by a bridge for golf carts!

Welcome to This Sacramental Earth!

With this post I'm rededicating this blog (yet again) to what it's new title, "This Sacramental Earth!", implies. As a Catholic, I believe in sacramentality, and as a budding environmentalist, I believe that the earth itself is a sacrament.

A sacrament is a visible sign of invisible grace, and grace includes every freely made gift of God. God was under no compulsion to make the universe. He made the natural world because it was pleasing to him. We humans evolved in and are part of God's divinely ordained natural order.

Why do we Catholics, as Christians, have such a hard time seeing God in the creation he has made? Is it because we, as humans, have set up a historical pattern of deprecating nature, then plundering it for our own supposed enrichment?

I believe that's so. Now we have to find ways to break our disastrous exploitation which, if left unchecked, will paradoxically turn the planet into a wasteland and leave us impoverished.

I for one can no longer turn a blind eye to the harm we are doing to the earth. It was sort of a "last straw" for me when I read in yesterday's Washington Post an article by Juliet Eilperin, "Whitebark pine tree faces extinction threat, agency says."

The story bespeaks yet another in a long-running series of man-made insults to Mother Nature. The whitebark pine, "a tree found atop mountains across the American West," is facing extinction because:

An invasive disease, white pine blister rust, along with insects such as mountain pine beetle, has infiltrated the historically colder altitudes where whitebark pines thrive. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Amy Nicholas said these factors, along with fire patterns and global warming more broadly, are undermining the tree’s viability.

As a result:

The Canadian government has already declared whitebark pine to be endangered throughout its entire range; a recent study found that 80 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem are dead or dying ... The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the whitebark pine could disappear within two to three generations — from 120 to 180 years from now.

As I interpret that, the whitebark pine is adapted to regions that once were colder than they are now. They were accordingly not prey to pine blister rust and the mountain pine beetle. But humans have changed the climate, making it warmer. Now the whitebark pine is nearly gone.

To lose the species would be a sacrilege. Eilperin writes:

The tree is a critical part of the West’s high-elevation habitats: It helps to slow the annual melt of snowpack and provides food for animals such as grizzly bears and Clark’s nutcracker, a bird that can cache thousands of pine seeds in different places and remember later where it put them.

We could save the whitebark pine, but to do so would mean putting it on the endangered species list ... where I think it belongs. However:

This month, the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee voted to eliminate any funds for listing species under the Endangered Species Act as part of the 2012 budget.

So the current brouhaha over the debt ceiling and the budget may kill the whitebark pine.

That's why I'm rededicating this blog. We Catholics are widely known to believe in causes of social justice. Now I'm hoping we can take up the cause of environmental justice as well!