Will We Choose Life?, by David W. Orr

David W. Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, wrote this “Foreword” to Grounded in Love: Ecology, Faith, and Action, by Nancy Roth, to be published by KenArnoldBooks. It will be available from Amazon.com by the end of May. Professor Orr’s words echo those of the book’s author in summoning us to a deeper understanding of the spiritual roots of the environmental crisis.

The writer of Deuteronomy says: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live,…” (Deut. 30:19) No generation before our own could feel the full, global, and permanent weight of those words, but we can. The science could not be clearer. The members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) say that we have a very narrow window to stop and then reverse the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere before we risk the demise of civilization. Nicholas Stern, in the most authoritative report ever on the economics of climate change (2007), similarly warns of thresholds beyond which effective action becomes increasingly unlikely and finally impossible. The thousand scientists who wrote The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report (2005), also warn of surprises and points of no return dead ahead related to the breakdown of entire ecosystems and the loss of species. We are the generation that will chose between life and death, but now on a planetary scale and for all that will be born or could have been born.

All true spirituality beckons us to fullness of life and hope, but that is not the drift of the present conversation about sustainability. Mostly, it has been about how to devise a smarter economics and better technology. Certainly we need a smarter economics, which is to say one that includes all the costs of what we do. And certainly we need better technology to harvest current sunlight and eliminate pollution. These, however, are necessary, not sufficient changes, and they are grounded in the faith that we might become smart enough to make end-runs around natural constraints imposed by entropy and ecology, as well as the limits imposed by our own ignorance. In no important way does this discourse challenge the deeper sources of our plight which have to do with human desires and intentions now warped by a century of sybaritic commercialism and militarism. The point is that we will have to want to do better for deeper and more profound reasons than those of self-interest alone. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had good reason to know, once observed that there was no such thing as “cheap grace.” The same applies, I believe, to the effort to make the human presence on Earth sustainable. In contrast to a great deal of the happy talk of our time, I think it wise to assume that the transition ahead will be a demanding and perilous journey that will ask a great deal of us and those who will follow. We face nothing less than a struggle for life over death now on the scale of the whole Earth, and we will have to reach deeper to go higher.

There can be no technical solution to what is at root a spiritual problem, but there is an interesting convergence between our self-interest in survival and ethics. The journey to sustainability requires us to do what the wisest have always said that we ought to do, but now the same argument holds for more mundane reasons of self-interest as well. We will have to thirst for righteousness and justice if we wish merely to live. America represents the future that much of the world still aspires to, but our manner of living cannot be sustained either physically or spiritually. So, there is serious and necessary talk of global bargains that would level our carbon emissions to perhaps two tons per person per year. By contrast the average in the United States is twenty tons of CO₂ per person each year. But by the remorseless working out of big numbers, that level cannot be sustained. Nor should we wish that it could, for that number conceals the cold reality of wars and injustices required by a culture of mass consumption powered by ancient sunlight. Are we up to the challenge? Will we choose life? That is THE question of our age and there is no other remotely as important.