Contribution

Earth-Honoring Faith and the Anthropocene

Larry Rasmussen

Golden Spikes

T

HE International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) is the official
arbiter of geological time. To map Earth’s ages the ICS plants“golden spikes.” Geological eras, periods, and epochs begin and end
with golden spikes. One of them, marking the boundary between the
Cretaceous and the Paleogene, is hammered into a hillside in El Kef,
Tunisia.
In 2016 the ICS will make a momentous decision. Is, or is not, a new
golden spike warranted? If it is, that spike would end the Holocene
Epoch of the Quaternary Period and mark the onset of what has alreadybeen christened “the Anthropocene.”1
The notion that Earth has discontinuous ages is quite recent. Classicaltexts from ancient civilizations both East and West, as well as the sacredscriptures of the oldest religions, omit dinosaurs, mastodons, and evenninety-five percent of human history (hunter-gatherer), to say nothing ofEarth’s long tenure well before any life appeared, even single-celledcreatures. The memory encased in written records is typically of one
epoch only, the civilizations of the late Holocene (the past 11,700
years).
Thus it was against the grain of religion, science and philosophy that
Jean-Leopold-Nicholas-Frederic (Georges) Cuvier (1769–1832) argued
from his small Paris fossil collection that worlds previous to ours
existed. “Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events,” hewrote in the early 1800s, “Living organisms without number have been
the victims of these catastrophes.”2 Nature had changed course, withdevastating effect. Cuvier exposed what no one expected—a history ofan Earth given to periodic seizures.
If the ICS plants a golden spike in 2016, the Holocene (Greek for“wholly recent”) will officially be history. Given geologists’ patient
sense of time, this decision is anything but casual. It means they,
together with climatologists, oceanographers, and other Earth scientists,
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have already accumulated sufficient evidence to consider a decisive
judgment about a new epoch.
Many scientists are not waiting. Nobel laureate climatologist Paul
Crutzen interrupted a geologists’ meeting in 2000 that kept referring to
the late Holocene as our habitat. “Let’s stop [this],” he said. “We are nolonger in the Holocene; we are in the Anthropocene.” “The Anthropocene” (from anthropos, Greek for “human”) quickly became the coffee
break buzz. After Crutzen’s essay “Geology of Mankind” was publishedin Nature magazine, it became the popular topic of numerous scientificjournals and popular magazines as well. (National Geographic’s “Enter
the Anthropocene—the Age of Man” appeared in 2011. The Economist
made the Anthropocene its cover story the same year.)
The International Geosphere—Biosphere Programme had rendered its
verdict well before. “The planet is now dominated by human activities,”
they said in a 2004 volume that announces the Anthropocene. “Evidence
from several millennia shows that the magnitude and rates of humandriven changes to the global environment are in many cases
unprecedented. There is no previous analogue for the current operationof the Earth system.”3“[N]o previous analogue” means, in this case, that for the first timeever human time has merged with geologic time with sufficient impact
to initiate a world unlike any previous one. The “thread of operations [ofprevious nature] has been broken.” Nature has “changed course.”(Cuvier)4
Meanwhile the ICS itself took official action and established an
Anthropocene Working Group to ponder the arrival of the possible new
epoch.
That human impacts on the natural world are now orders ofmagnitude beyond what they were prior to the Industrial Revolution is
nowhere doubted. The sole question is whether these geologic-scale
events are a dramatic development of the continuing Holocene or the
onset of a new epoch. Should the ICS hammer in a new golden spike ornot?
For the moment this is the salient point: While Earth has seen wildly
varied ages before, and will again before it becomes the cinder of anaging star, Homo sapiens sapiens civilizations have inhabited one age
only. Our tenure is strictly Holocene. All written human history and all
human civilizations to date, starting with neo-lithic settlements, haveenjoyed the Holocene’s emblem; namely, a warm period of sufficient
climate stability to allow, even foster, the triumph of life amid nature’s
predilection for trying anything once, including ice ages and marshy

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polar regions.5
Presently, however, the relative climate stability of the Holocene isapparently giving way to the climate volatility of the (prospective)
Anthropocene. The specific cause was never intended and is quite
startling; namely, humankind has taken to regulating solar radiation andre-engineering planetary surface processes by burning dirty fuels on a
massive scale. Since 1950 especially but steadily from 1750 onward, we
have been resetting the planet’s thermostat and altering the chemistry
and dynamics of the atmosphere, oceans and landmasses. The result is adramatic carbon spike that issues in climate volatility, identified as“accelerated and extreme climate change.” Present CO2 levels in theatmosphere exceed those of the last 800,000 years.6 Because of ocean
carbon capture, the souring of the seas is proceeding at the fastest rate in
the last 8 million years and on a scale not seen in 300 million years.7
Of utmost import for philosophy and ethics is that accelerated andextreme climate change, mass extinction, and ocean acidification thistime around is anthropogenic geophysical change that goes where
human agency and responsibility have never before gone—“cumulatively across generational time, aggregately through ecological systems, andnonintentionally over evolutionary futures.”8 This is a seismic shift in
human impact and responsibility for which we have no ethic on thebooks or in existing moral theory. Cumulative human consequences
exceed the time dimensions and space dimensions of present accountability. Were there a “golden spike” to mark the end of one era of human
responsibility and the beginning of qualitatively different one, that spikewould be hammered in here and now.

The Human Footprint
If this new circumstance were the case for thought experiments only, it
might not be dangerous. But this reality is embedded in the daily habits
and standing structures of the economy, the political order, law, transportation, and jurisprudence. How we cook our breakfast and obtain thefood for it, how we travel to and from work, what clothes we wear andwhat their global supply line is, and where our money goes for what
purposes, all belong to a new order of planetary consequence. The
bottom line, however, is that we have in fact arrived at the stand-off laidout by Naomi Klein: “[O]ur economic system and our planetary system
are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many
forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to
avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our

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economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.
Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws ofnature.”9
If it’s “not the laws of nature,” then it’s “the economic model.” Thatposes the daunting task of transforming global corporate capitalism andits extractive economy.
But before we turn to how we might alter our entrenched model, or
consider an alternative economic cosmos, we should summarize late
Holocene or early Anthropocene reality. Until the impact of the humanin recent decades and centuries sinks in, all discussion of deeptransformation risks false analysis and false solutions. Three factors areprominent.
Humanity is now the single most decisive force of nature itself. The
anthropos [“human”] of the late Holocene or early Anthropocene has
modified the flows of most rivers and changed the catchment areas of
the world. This anthropos has reengineered more rocks, soil, and landscapes in the last century than volcanoes, earthquakes, and glaciers. This
anthropos is now the main agent in the planet’s nitrogen cycle. This
anthropos now sends innocent species to eternal death at a quickening
pace. This anthropos is altering the carbon content and dynamic in theacidification of the oceans and the regulation of solar radiation. This
anthropos may in fact be initiating a geological epoch whose tattoo ismass uncertainty.
In short, the human footprint is everywhere. All the systems of thenatural world are either currently embedded as part of human systems or
profoundly affected by those systems. This includes places humans do
not live—the high atmosphere, the ocean depths, the top-most polar
regions.
Our role itself has shifted as natural boundaries are routinely
breached. A resident of the planet, us, has become its manager,10 a single
species has become its autocrat. Even nature’s preservation requires
careful human intervention. Simply “hands off” or benign neglect is nolonger possible when “hands on” is the case everywhere, from the Arctic
and Antarctic to the equatorial belt.
How far-reaching is the human imprint? Elizabeth Kolbert concludes
that homo sapiens are a co-evolutionary force. “We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open
and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed
this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”11
Nature has changed course in the manner of geological age transitions. On September 21, 2014, 350,000–400,000 people took to theearth-honoring faith and the anthropocene

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streets of New York City for The Peoples’ Climate March, a marchmobilized to send an urgent message to the United Nations’ Climate
Summit of September 23–24. Indigenous peoples from across the globe
participated, backed by a declaration delivered to the UN from the
Indigenous Peoples’ Council. In a statement of just over two pages thewords “sacred,” “sacredness,” and “sanctity” appear 25 times, not leastin the title itself: “Beyond Climate Change to Survival on Sacred
Mother Earth.” Were “the sacred” and “sanctity” itself the subject, it
might have been even more prominent. But “the sacred” is not the
subject per se—getting beyond climate change to survival is. Much of
the text is thus descriptive of changes to “Sacred Mother Earth” that
follow from “modern living and all that it encompasses.” “Modern
living and all that it encompasses” means the reach of the Industrial
Revolution and several centuries of conquest, colonization and“progress.” “The Air is not the same anymore,” the statement reads.
“The Water is not the same anymore. The Earth is not the same
anymore. The Clouds are not the same anymore. The Rain is not thesame anymore. The Trees, the Plants, the Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects
and all the others are not the same anymore. All that is Sacred in Life isvanishing because of our actions.”12 “There is no more time for discussion on preventing ‘Climate Change. That opportunity has passed.
‘Climate Change’ is here.”13“Not the same anymore” is the new normal. A non-analogous Earthmoment has arrived.14
The tattoo of the Anthropocene, if it is our new epoch, appears to be
climate volatility and eco-social uncertainty on a global scale. Since therelative climate stability of the late Holocene made possible the rise andspread of agriculture, then settled human civilizations, from ca. 11,000
BCE to the present, the challenge for the Anthropocene becomes that ofthose transitions required when the “normal” is global eco-social
uncertainty. How, amidst climate volatility, do we move from industrialtechnological civilization fueled by fossil energy to ecological-technological civilization fueled by low-impact renewable power?
More pointedly, at least for this journal, what does this non-analogous
time mean for cosmology and ethics? What would an Earth-honoringand Earth-healing faith be if no natural terrain goes untouched by bothhuman goodness and human molestation and everything turns on ouractions and choices? What understanding of ourselves and the world,
and what manner of living would take responsibility not only for present
and future generations of humankind but for the community of life as awhole, including its generative elements of earth, air, fire, and water?

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The Turn to A Culture of Life
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, founder of Buddhist Global Relief, offers a framework. We need not only new technologies for reducing carbon emissions
and capturing carbon already in the atmosphere, he writes. We also needa new model and paradigm he labels “a culture of life.” It would replace“the pernicious culture of death” we presently purvey. The culture of life
includes a different economic model (see Klein above) but it is evenmore. It is an understanding of the world and an alternative set ofworking values. Both are conducive to a “more integral relationship ofpeople with each other, with nature, and with the cosmos.” People,
nature, and the cosmos are, in Buddhist and most religious traditions, all“subjects of experience.” This world of subjectivity contrasts sharply
with “the objectifying processes of corporate capitalism.” In thecosmology of corporate capitalism, these very same elements—people,
nature, the cosmos itself—are valued as objects for market society andno more.
The essential difference of Bodhi’s world from the commodified andmarketized world of global consumerism could not be starker. For him
the cosmos itself is “endowed with a profound subjective dimension,even an inherent intelligence by which it can transform stardust intoplanets that bring forth a profusion of life forms and transform moist
clay into conscious beings with feelings and thoughts and ideals andhopes and the innate capacity to reflect the cosmos back upon itself.”15
The cosmos is alive and sacred, rather than simply useful.
The Roman Catholic Passionist priest, Thomas Berry, highlights
Bodhi’s point this way: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not acollection of objects.”16 The Journey of the Universe project, inspired by
Berry and led by Mary Evelyn Tucker of Yale University and Brian
Swimme of the California Institute of Integral Studies, is a formidable
effort to give voice and vision to these living sacred cosmologies,
whether Bohdi’s, Berry’s, or that of the Indigenous People’s Council.17 It
does so through film, interviews with scientists and others, a Journeytext and curriculum, and multiple networks of actors from varied cultures, religions, and sectors of society.
My own trial attempt, in Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a
New Key,18 is that of a social ethicist working from religious and secular
traditions. This attempt, too, aligns with Bodhi’s, Berry’s, theIndigenous People’s Council, and the Journey of the Universe project. It,
too, rests in reverence and respect for the natural world, together withawareness of its finitude, resilience and power. My attempt also joins

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theirs in its “solidarity between peoples everywhere based on empathy,
respect, and a shared humanity” and in its efforts to “endorse an ethic ofsimplicity, contentment, and restraint to replace the voracious malady of
consumerism.”19
To give this cosmology and ethic flesh I proceed along two paths forthe remainder of this essay. The first describes the hard transitions
needed to move from industrial-technological civilization to ecologicaltechnological civilization. The second is a thought experiment abouthuman responsibility and the sacred at our moment in history. If, with
Bohdi, Berry, the Indigenous People’s Council, and Journey, weconceived planetary creation as alive and sacred, what might we draw
upon to fashion human responsibility for the Anthropocene?

Transitions
Basic reforms and modulations are needed. They include the following:
A perspectival transition in which we understand ourselves as a
species among species no longer inhabiting the same planet humans has
known for a very long while. Altered perception for this changed reality
involves a “reenchantment” of the world that counters what Max Webercalled the “disenchantment” by which nature was rendered little morethan a repository of resources for human use.20 Reenchantment restoresto human consciousness nature as a community of subjects, the wombof all the life we will ever know, the bearer of mystery and spirit, andthe ethos of the cosmos.
An economic transition in which economics and ecology merge to
become “eco-nomics.” Eco-nomics embeds all economic activity within
the ecological limits of nature’s changing economy and pursues thethree-part agenda of production, relatively equitable distribution, andecological regenerativity. Growth as a good is not precluded, provided it
is ecologically sustainable and regenerative for the long term, reduces
rather than increases the instability that large wealth and income gaps
generate, and bolsters rather than undermines the capacity of local andregional communities and cultures to nurture and draw wisely upon theircultural and biological diversity.
An energy transition that parallels economic policy. Most present
attention to energy is about energy resources and use. Do we haveenough to do what we want to do, namely, continue to grow theeconomy to meet human needs? Are we energy-independent and, if not,how will we secure that? How will energy be distributed fairly? These
discussions all go on without first asking what sources and uses are108earth-honoring faith and the anthropocene

mandated by the planet’s climate-energy system in the Anthropocene,
the way in which the planet regulates the incoming solar heat that keeps
Earth from being little more than a barren, frozen rock. Energy policy
discussions assume that human energy use is primary and we’ll address
the downstream effects. (These effects now include the consequences ofclimate change.) But human primacy and priority is exactly backwards.
Human energy use is derivative of the planet’s. The first law of energy,
then, is preservation of the planet’s climate-energy system as conducive
to life. This is the energy parallel to Berry’s maxim that the first law of
the human economy is preserving nature’s economy.21
A demographic transition in which human population levels off orslowly declines and—equally vital—the negative per person impact on
the rest of nature gives way to mutual enhancement with other life.
Presently we are far too many, and many of us are far too rich, for theplanet to bear, on our terms.
A polity transition in which the basic conception of democratic
capitalism shifts, if indeed democratic capitalism is retained as viable.
The shift is from short-term horizons (the two or four or six year
election cycle and the quarterly and annual business report) to horizons
that include the well-being of future generations of human andotherkind. The shift is also from a society that fosters virtuallyunrestricted liberty to acquire and enjoy wealth, in which the right toproperty and its uses is more basic than the role of government as anequalizing force, to a society that fosters the common good through theprocess of democratizing social, political, and economic power in such a
way that the true primary goods of the commons—earth, air, fire, water—are cared-for requisites of a shared good, a good for both present andfuture generations. The notion is that of “sustainable community” basedon the principle of an ancient norm, “subsidiarity.” Subsidiarity asks
how economy, environment, and governance are wrapped around local
communities and bioregions. As a principle, subsidiarity is always insearch of the most appropriate “whole” to address challenges, problems,and uncertainty. But it begins in decentralized fashion with local
communities and their assets. If they can address basic needs and meetbasic challenges with those assets, no further course need be pursued. Ifthey cannot, or, rather, when and where they cannot, then the effort ismade to draw upon or create a more encompassing “whole.” In acontracting world, that whole will often require international
cooperation. But subsidiarity’s principle is always the same: begin withthe local and solve problems at the so-called “lowest” appropriate levelwith the resources available there. “Consult the genius of the place”22 asearth-honoring faith and the anthropocene

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step one.
In contrast to “sustainable development” as global corporate capitalism “greened,” sustainable community based in subsidiarity is the effort
to preserve or create the following all together or in part: greater
economic self-sufficiency locally and regionally, with a view to thebioregions themselves as basic to human organization; agriculture
appropriate to a region and in the hands of local owners and workers
using local knowledge and crop varieties, with the ability to save theirown seeds and treat their own plants and soils with their own products;
the preservation of local and regional traditions, language, and cultures
and a resistance to global homogenization of culture and values; arevival of religious life and a sense of the sacred, in place of a way oflife that leaches the sacred from the everyday and reduces life to theutilitarian; the repair of the moral fiber of society on some terms otherthan sovereign consumerism; resistance to the full-scalecommodification of things, including knowledge; the internalization of
costs to the local, regional, and global environment in the price ofgoods; and the protection of ecosystems and the cultivation of Earth as“a sacred trust held in common,” to use the language of the Earth
Charter.23
All this is global democratic community, not nativist localism. It is
not asking whether to “globalize,” but how. And the Earth Charter’sanswer—democratic community democratically arrived at—is global
community by virtue of its planetary consciousness and its impressive
networking of citizens around the world as made possible by electronic
globalization. Adherents of sustainable community have this, rather than“development” in mind, because they are not trying to wrap the global
environment around the integrating global economy of corporations.
They are asking, “What makes for healthy community on successive
levels—local, regional, sometimes national, and global—and how do weachieve a healthy economy and environment together, aware that Earth’s
requirements are fundamental?” They are attentive to questions that
global capitalism, even as sustainable development, rarely asks: What
are the essential bonds of human community and culture, as well as thebonds with the more-than-human world? What is the meaning of suchprimal bonds for a healthy, concrete way of life? What are cultural
wealth and biological wealth and what wisdom do we need to sustain
them in the places people live with the rest of life’s community? Whatkind of decision-making internalizes the prospective needs of future
generations?
A policy transition in which policies are as integrated as nature itself.

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Climate change, poverty, energy, food, water, and biodiversity loss areinterlaced in the planetary economy. None is siloed in reality, so none
can be siloed for analysis and solution, either. Integrated policies need tomirror the systemic character of nature’s own integral functioning, justas human technologies must cohere with the technologies of the natural
world. Because the dual impoverishments of human poverty and theEarth as the new poor are increasingly interwoven, social well-being andecological health must be addressed together.
And a cosmological, religious and moral transition in which, because
planetary health is primary and human well-being is derivative (Th.
Berry), and because the common human good depends upon the healthof the generative goods of the commons—earth, air, fire, water—theecosphere as a whole is the relational matrix of our lives and our
responsibility. Planet-keeping thereby becomes the common calling of
all philosophies and religions in the same moment that the moral
framework of ethics is struck in a new key. Religious and philosophicalethics now stretches beyond a fixation on the human species so as toinclude the biophysical and the geo-planetary. Social justice takes wings
as creation justice.24

Sacred Strangers and Deep Traditions
Effecting the hard transitions requires leadership. It also requires anability to think and act from somewhere beyond industrial civilization’s
conventional wisdom and drag of normalcy. That leads to our thought
experiment: what might we draw upon if we place ourselves in planetary
creation as sacred?
We’ll look first to leadership, then to what leaders might call upon for
their cosmology and ethic.
Decades ago, Howard Becker undertook a study of leaders at
inflection points in history, those moments when, like our present
Holocene or emerging Anthropocene, the future closes in aroundsomething quite different not only from the past but from the present as
well. While Becker’s study was provoked by secularization rather thanthe challenge of 7 to 9 billion souls on a hot, crowded, and destabilized
planet, his findings are suggestive.
The most effective leaders, he discovered, were not the keepers of theconventional wisdom and the reigning paradigm. These leaders were so
captured by their own success that they failed to exit the mind-set andinstitutions that created wicked problems from that very success. So
they were not prepared for the storm that blew in from paradise.

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111(Working furiously to get the same economy back on track that brings
on climate change is an example of the trap we set with “we-knowwhat-we’re-doing-and-there-is-no-alternative.”)
Instead, the most effective leaders were, to use Becker’s phrase,“sacred strangers in secular society.” Sacred strangers drew on traditions
that anchored them in a place beyond the presently popular. At the sametime these leaders undertook a revision and expansion of those very
traditions. They were outliers and dissenters, yet they were not cynics
about either social change or the reform of their cherished faithtraditions. A compassionate retreat from the reigning culture and its
gods was possible and another way was attainable. Sacred strangers
knew what the prophets knew—things can fall apart, and do from timeto-time, and new creation can arise.
This sacred stranger profile contrasted with two others. Some leaders
abandoned ties to older traditions as they embraced the new. For them,
the new displaced the old. They wanted modernity’s freedom, nothing
more and nothing else. The march of progress that had issued in modern
prosperity and the pleasures of privilege was all that was needed ordesired.
The other contrasting cohort was a population whose leaders held fast
to the old and, for them, the sacred. They engaged in long and bitter
battles against encroaching secularization, only to find themselves withwaning influence and deepened alienation. While they felt they had
never left home, home had left them.
Distinct from both cohorts, sacred strangers sought new possibilities
while drawing upon the values, meanings, and insights of older sacredorders. They drank deeply from the wells of their faith and sub-cultures
while, at the same time, they recast inherited understandings. According
to Becker these sacred strangers were better grounded and more creative
than either those religious persons who clung to a past they felt they
were losing or those liberal humanists who assumed that modernity’s
well-worn paradigm still had a lock on the future.25
Taking cues from Becker, might communities of sacred strangers aid
the common quest for a durable way of life when our paths are not yet
trodden and the perils are not yet known? Might communities of thelong obedience of discipleship offer a sturdier place to stand, anchoredto the good work of ancestors who, in their own time, broke old molds
in favor of new resilience? Might planet-keeping in the hands of sacredstrangers bring renewable moral-spiritual energy to the journey fromindustrial to ecological civilization in the Anthropocene?
Only if their faith is genuinely Earth-honoring and Earth-healing.

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Such faith takes us to the resources available to sacred strangers in the
Anthropocene. Let’s call them “deep traditions,” since they span timeand cultures for as long as human records have existed. Mysticism,prophetic-liberative practices, asceticism, sacramentalism, and thecultivation of wisdom are pan-human and pan-religious. They havesometimes been Earth-honoring but often not. The present work ofsacred strangers is to develop their Earth-healing talent so as to counterthe Earth-destructive forces that presently put the planet in jeopardy athuman hands: consumerism, utilitarianism, alienation, oppression, andfolly. A broad-brushed sketch looks like this.
Traditions of asceticism are traditions of saying “yes” and saying“no” in a disciplined way of life that emphasizes spiritual richness andmaterial simplicity. Ascetic traditions that love the Earth fiercely in a
simple way of life offer an alternative to global consumerism. The worldof consuming passions is countered with the disciplining of desire and arichness of spirit.
Traditions of sacramental imagination regard all material reality (creation) as sacred. It carries a value humans fully share but do not create.
The planet might then be viewed as a “sacramental commons.” Thiscounters the habits of modern living that treat all nature as marketedcommodities for exclusive human use. Such an unrelentingly utilitarian
ethic is a modern version of an ancient ethic—master/slave—with us as
master and the rest of nature as slave. By way of contrast, forsacramental ethics, the community of all life is viewed as a planetarycommons in which the parental elements of earth, air, fire, and water
have standing. Their requirements for their own regeneration andrenewal become part of “eco-nomics” while their own needs become
part of our expanded moral universe.
Mystical experience is a third pan-religious and pan-human experience and tradition. An oceanic feeling prevails in which the human self
belongs to “the All.” The attention of Earth-honoring faith to mysticism,however, is to the kind of renewable moral energy that accompanies thisexperience: How does immersion into a transcendent mystical reality
lead to tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”)? If the world is acommunion of subjects, as mystics claim, what follows for the way
nature is treated? The brief answer is that alienation of the human selffrom the rest of nature is overcome in the experience of all things
communing in God, or in “the All,” or in whatever mysticism names as
the embracing cosmic reality.
The heart of prophetic-liberative traditions is justice-centered faith.
Its key is shared power and an unquenchable thirst for life. With justiceearth-honoring faith and the anthropocene

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for creation viewed as the center of faith and morality, Earth-honoring
faith focuses on shared, largely decentralized, power as the means tooppose the oppression that follows from race, class, gender, or culturalprivilege. A restructured ethic of power counters the structured
oppression of nature, including its human communities.
Wisdom traditions are those universal traditions in which creation is
the teacher. Measured human responsibility follows upon creation’s
disclosures of its changing ways. Wisdom takes the form of varied genre—didactic sayings and stories, puzzling parables and probing questions,
poetry and meditation, ritual practices of all kinds, treatises on the
mysteries of life and death. In some religious traditions, wisdom is
identified as a feminine companion and partner of divinity. Accessible
moral instruction is always part of wisdom, as is an awareness of humanfolly. An awareness of moral tragedy may be present as well, together
with the grace of new beginnings.
The sweep of the deep traditions brings to the Earth crisis rooted
practices and moral substance for a different cosmology and way of life.
What they all share is profound interconnectedness and reverence, what
Buddhists call “interbeing” (Thich Nhat Hanh). They also share lively“mixing.” Innumerable practices of diverse indigenous peoples, forexample, reject the sharp dualism of nature and culture as they passalong the wisdom of a sacred universe and the mystery of belonging to
it. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew cannot instruct in the ways of
Orthodox Christian discipleship without braiding asceticism, mysticism,and sacramentalism together. Mohandas Gandhi, drawing from Indianvillage culture, placed a popular Hindu asceticism in the service ofliberative ends. Dorothy Day took her uncompromisingly prophetic
stance against war-making and poverty-making into the field, but
nurtured it with the sacramental piety of daily mass at the Catholic
Worker. Thich Nhat Hanh’s engaged Buddhist discipleship joins his
ascetic regime and mystical meditation to wisdom and liberative
example. From the New York City Mayor’s Office, and working withyouth, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin views “the Earth [as] a Mosque” andmarshals Muslim discipleship to embody Islam as a “Green Deen” (pathor way of life). In the state of Connecticut, USA, Adamah Farm trains
college youth in organic farming and a ranging Jewish spirituality.
Hazon, the largest Jewish environmental organization in the UnitedStates, is also the largest single network of Community Supported
Agriculture farms (55).
Orchestrating these deep traditions as appropriate to the adaptive
challenges of a given time and place is the work of “sacred strangers.”

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Those just mentioned are only a few among thousands.

Coda“Song” is a motif of Earth-honoring faith and a way to image its form as
religious ethics in a new key. The Song is Earth-honoring and Earthhealing faith, but its expression is never a single melody line. Its musicis via innumerable songs, the songs of the world’s faiths and cultures, inevery locale as appropriate to place.
The shared song of Earth-honoring faith expresses a fundamental“consent to being.” “Consent to being” is a trust that plants our lives inthat arena apart from which we would not be, and cannot be: planetarynature together with the rest of the cosmos. It also plants our lives in soil
native to most all religions and cultures, the soil of birth and rebirth,
death and renewal, the Phoenix shaking off its ashes. “Consent to being”
is a basic trust in the triumph of life, its continuation and renewal, evenin non-analogous epochs—such as the Anthropocene.26
Notes
Information from Gayathri Vaidyanathan, “SCIENCE: When did man dominatechanges on Earth? A rock-hard question for scientists,” published in ClimateWire, pp. 2–
3 of the printout of the March 12, 2015, online version, available at www.eenews.net/
cw/2015/03/12.
2
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost World,” Part Two, The New Yorker, December 23 &30, 2013: 50.
3
W. L Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System (Berlin and New York:
Springer, 2004), v.
4
To view this in graph form, see pages 56–57 of Larry Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring
Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford University Press, 2013). The graphs areused with permission from W. L. Steffen, et al., Global Change and the Earth System(Berlin and New York: Springer, 2004), Figure 3.66 and Figure 3.67.
5“The Holocene,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, www.ucmp.
berkeley.edu.
6
Nicholas Kristoff, ‘Neglected Topic’ Winner: Climate Change, The New York Times
Sunday Review, January 19, 2014: 11, reporting data from William Nordhaus’s book,
The Climate Casino.
7
From Vaidyanathan, “SCIENCE: When did man dominate changes on Earth?”,ClimateWire, p. 2 of printout available at www.eenews.net/cw/2015/03/12.
8
Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability Social Justice, and Religious
Creativity (Georgetown University Press, 2013), 1.
9
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 21.
10
Robert Arthur Stayton, Power Shift: From Fossil Energy to Dynamic Permanent
Power (Santa Cruz: Sandstone Publishing, 2015), 6.
11
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry1

earth-honoring faith and the anthropocene

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Holt and Company, 2014), 268–69.
12
From p. 1 of “Beyond Climate Change to Survival on Sacred Mother Earth,” madeavailable December 9, 2014, by the American Indian Institute Traditional Circle ofIndian Elders and Youth, Bozeman, Montana. The declaration was signed by 51
members of the Indigenous Peoples’ Council, representing at least that many different
nations.
13
Ibid.
14
See the citation above from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme,
cited from W. L. Steffen, et al., Global Change and the Earth System, v.
15
All the citations in this paragraph are from Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Moving from a
Culture of Death to a Culture of Life: Preparing for the People’s Climate March,” Vol. 6,
No. 3, Fall 2014 issue of “Helping Hands,” the newsletter of Buddhist Global Relief, andobtained online at www.buddhistglobalrelief.org. The citations are from p. 4 of theprinted out version. The material in italics is italicized in the original.
16
Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (Sierra
Club Books, 2006), 17.
17
See the following as an introduction to, and text for, this work: Brian Thomas
Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (Yale University Press,2011).
18
See Larry Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key(Oxford University Press, 2013).
19
These are the words of Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Moving from a Culture of
Death to a Culture of Life: Preparing for the People’s Climate March,” Vol. 6,
No. 3, Fall 2014 issue of “Helping Hands,” p. 4 of the printed out version fromwww.buddhistglobalrelief.org.
20
See the use of these terms in Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation
Lectures (Hackett Classics, 2004). The original, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” was publishedin Tubingen (1922) in Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 524–55.
21
Thomas Berry, “Conditions for Entering the Ecozoic Era,” Ecozoic Reader 2, No. 2,(Winter 2002): 10.
22
From the title of the book by Wes Jackson, Consulting the Genius of the Place(Counterpoint Press, 2010).
23
The Earth Charter is available at www.earthcharter.org.
24
These transitions draw largely upon, but amend, those in Rasmussen, EarthHonoring Faith, 77–79.
25
A fascinating syndicated column in The New York Times makes the same case as
Becker, albeit without reference to Becker’s work. See Ross Douthat,“The Case for Old
Ideas,” The New York Times Sunday Review, March 8, 2015:11.
26
The sacred stranger and deep traditions themes are distilled from Rasmussen, EarthHonoring Faith, Part II, pp. 239–368.

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earth-honoring faith and the anthropocene

Author Biography
Larry L. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union
Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a past president of the Society of
Christian Ethics, a past editor of The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, anddirector of the Ghost Ranch decade project on Earth-honoring Faith: A Song of Songs.
He is the recipient of the Joseph Sittler Award for Outstanding Leadership in
Theological Education and the Burnice Fjellman Award for Distinguished Christian
Ministries in Higher Education. He has published widely, including Earth-honoring
Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (2013 and Gold and Grand Prize winner of the2014 Nautilus Book Awards); Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996) and winner of the1997 Grawemeyer Award.