The RMS Office of the Bishop in partnership with leaders across the synod has created a community discussion guide to engage challenging topics as people of faith. Each week we will share a personal reflection on that week's featured social statement.
The Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice social statement explains the ELCA’s teachings on ecology and the environment, grounded in a biblical vision of God's intention for the healing and wholeness of creation. This statement provides a Christian understanding of the human role to serve in creation, and a hope rooted in God’s faithfulness to the creation from which humans emerge and depend upon for sustaining life. It provides a framework for understanding the human role in creation, the problem of sin and the current environmental crisis.Caring for Creation expresses a call to pursue justice for creation through active participation, solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability, and states the commitments of the ELCA for pursuing wholeness for creation — commitments expressed through individual and community action, worship, learning, moral deliberation and advocacy. [credit: elca.org]
Job 38:25-27
Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and make the ground put forth grass?
Environmental Justice
Larry Rasmussen, Santa Fe, NM
This ELCA Social Statement was adapted in 1993. It holds up rather well, especially Section IV, The Call to Justice, with its four norms of participation, solidarity, sufficiency, and sustainability. The world and planet have changed dramatically since 1993, however. Climate system change and the coronavirus pandemic upend the world everywhere. Study of Caring for Creation should ask what these planetary events mean for our lives now and for the lives of future generations of both human and other-than-human life.
The single biggest change in my years of engagement with “ecoissues” is the shift from recycle, re-use, renew to environmental justice. The former used the language of stewardship in which we are the stewards and nature the stewarded. Any deep critique of our institutions, especially our kind of economy, went missing. The focus instead was on personal habits and how changing them would conserve resources, reduce pollution and waste, etc.
Environmental justice, by contrast, connects caring for creation to most everything else. More on that in a moment. First to note is the shift in the leadership of environmentalism. As one way put it, it is no longer elderly white Quakers driving Priuses. As measured by polling, the two groups of Americans who care most about healthy environments are African-Americans and Latinx Americans; and the face of environmentalism now is predominately that of younger women of color.
Centering on environmental justice, as the Pope does in Laudato Si’ with the norm of “integral ecology” and a deep connection of the “cry of the Earth” and “the cry of the poor,” the question put to every community is, What precisely is it you want to sustain?
What “normals” do you want to make normative or exemplary? What kind of health system, economy, governance do you want and wish to strive for? What kind of race relations, policing, education, and experience of the natural world do you want for yourselves and future generations? What faith, spirituality and morality inform your aspirations and commitments?
Environmental justice has moved such questions as these front and center. It makes Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice far more comprehensive, and more probing, than most of us assumed when first we considered it in 1993.
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