Print PageRecognition of the long-standing history of environmental stewardship in faith and belief systems is vital to achieving wide-spread response to ecological issues, particularly as these are global. However, a divide has developed between faith and science, and their institutions. It now is necessary for this divide to be bridged to allow science and faith to work in concert on biospheric integrity.
Results/Conclusions
In Western culture, environmental stewardship stems both from ancient philosophers who believed people should live in harmony with a highly ordered earth, and the stewardship tradition based in shared biblical texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Of these world religions, it is perhaps Christianity that has been present during Western industrialization and its positive and negative contributions to societal and ecological integrity. It is more certain that Christianity has received the greatest judgement by the scientific community through the eyes of medieval historian Lynn White, Jr. in his 1967 paper in Science, and there is little doubt that his judgement widened the divide between faith and science. Investigation of the stewardship tradition, the shared biblical texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the texts of the Christian scriptures prove to be important in bridging this divide. Clarence Glacken, for example, in his Traces on the Rhodian Shore, (also 1967) described “Christianity and the ideas that lay behind it” to be “a religion and a philosophy of creation.” And, based upon his assessment of the stewardship tradition, wrote that “it is no accident that ecological theory... has behind it the long preoccupation in Western civilization with interpreting the nature of earthly environments, trying to see them as wholes, as manifestations of order.” Investigation of biblical texts long used as the base for the stewardship tradition, uncovers profound ecological teachings on stewardship, including conservation (“con-service” and “con-servancy”), maintaining the lineages of organisms (“fruitfulness”), providing earth and its living things time for restoration (“sabbath for the land”), and safeguarding the earth and its life (“earth-keeping”). In recent years the stewardship tradition in Christianity, and also in Judaism and Islam, has re-surfaced to become the basis for a renewed stewardship of the earth and its life in these faith traditions. This is not only to be welcomed by ecologists, but also to be encouraged by them through mutual commitment to right living in accord with ecological processes and principles.
