God, nature and Nannie Rawley's philosophy

by Annette Mendola and John Nolt

We have been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer,” a marvelous, complicated book about the web of life, culture of southern Appalachia, changing gender roles, interconnectedness of communities, moths, coyotes and the American chestnut. It is great. Read it.
We especially like the ecotheology—the sense it makes of relations of humans, nature and the divine. One of the heroes of the novel, Nannie Rawley, champions the notion that the world is filled with glory, wonder and joy, but not for humans alone. Nannie, a 75-year-old, freethinking, organic-apple farmer, and her neighbor, retired voc-ag teacher Garnett Walker, have a running disagreement about nearly everything, most especially nature and the divine. Garnett’s somewhat traditional view puts humankind above and thus apart from the rest of creation. “If the Holy Bible is to be believed, we must view God’s creatures as gifts to His favored children and use them for our own purposes,” he lectures. But his beliefs put him at odds with the world around him, from weeds to insects to his neighbors and his own son. Everything around him must be managed, be it with Sevin dust and Malathion or with reprimands and scorn. His sense of superiority provides him neither solace nor delight.
Nannie, by contrast, has a modest understanding of who and what we are in relation to life as a whole. We are not the crowns of creation, not the favored children of God. To think we are, she believes, is the root of much destructive foolishness, and paradoxically, a sense of despair. She articulates her thoughts in a letter she writes to the openly hostile Garnett and deposits on his porch, along with a homemade blackberry pie. Nothing, she insists, is as simple as it appears from our finite perspective:
Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that’s the moral of the story … it’s an aggravation and a marvel. The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on.
Failure to understand that, together with aggressive use of our power over creation “for our own purposes” inevitably leads to unintended consequences. Nannie catalogues some of these with a theological twist: “To our dominion over the earth, Mr. Walker, we owe our thanks for the chestnut blight. Our thanks for kudzu, honeysuckle and the Japanese beetle also.”
She is not sentimental about nature; she pulls weeds from around her trees and kills the flea beetles on her eggplant. But there is humility in her methods. She is mindful of what she does and takes care not to disturb the balance of the ecosystem. She understands nature’s cruel side, having borne a child with Down’s syndrome who survived only to fifteen, but the miracle of the world before her is a comfort to Nannie. The notion that all of God’s creatures are sacred does not weaken her appreciation for life. It only deepens it.
Garnett’s belief that God created the world because He loves us and wants us to be happy actually seems at odds with the idea that God wants us to consume all we can, without regard for the delicate intricacy of His world. What kind of father would want to sire children who are indifferent to his work, to his provision for them? As Nannie says:
You’re a religious man, Mr. Walker. Seems to me you’d think twice about spraying Roundup all over God’s hard work.

Obligation and ownership

By Annette Mendola

I teach a class in business ethics at UT, and one section concerns ethical obligations toward the environment. It has been interesting to watch the recent transformation of students’ attitudes about this topic. Just a few years ago the idea that the environment is not a special interest, but a common concern was not well received by students. Now there is nearly universal agreement that we have obligations to the environment, even if there is still debate about what those obligations are and how much action they demand.
Philosopher Lisa Newton suggests we have become accustomed to several kinds of freedom that contribute to environmental damage. In class readings, we learn these include the freedom to buy whatever consumer goods we want (or can afford), to use as much gas as we want (or can afford) and to have as many children as we want (or can afford). She tries to get us to see that we do not always have a moral right to something simply because we have money to pay for it, that the financial price of goods do not reflect their ecological price.
She also discusses the freedom to own property. To buy land and use it as we see fit is a fundamental American value, noble and romantic. It appeals to our sense that one gets what one deserves, that we should work hard and make our labor and our land into something and be rewarded with prosperity. Those who do not will suffer for their idleness. It appeals to our reverence of individuality: do what you want with your house, in my house I will do whatever I want.
But such attitudes are not without problems. For one thing, the borders we draw to separate your land from mine are ecologically meaningless. Seeds, pesticides, kudzu and the like drift from your land to mine without respecting property lines. More importantly, the land persists long after individuals and their goals have died.
Some of my students have heard the equally romantic but conceptually fuzzy idea that we do not truly own land. We do not inherit land from our parents, but borrow it from our children, they declare, then wait expectantly for me to agree. Alas, they can not explain what they really mean. Should I leave my land undeveloped in case my kids want to do something with it? Fine, but by the same logic my kids can not develop it either.
A more promising understanding of land ownership holds that land is “ours” like children are ours. We have rights to develop and responsibilities to steward and care for both, but neither kids nor land are mere things. Both persist long after we and our rights and responsibilities are gone. Our prerogative as parents, for example, is to decide what kind of education our child should have. Whether the school she goes to is Christian, public, Montessori or our home is for us to decide. Good parents make such decisions based partly on what they value (reverence for God, multiculturalism, civic responsibility, creativity, academic rigor) and partly on what the child needs (individual attention, kinetic learning, lots of structure, lots of freedom). Similarly, decisions about land should reflect our own values and the needs of the land itself.
Both children and land are ends to themselves; they have their own interests, their own health and integrity. We can speak meaningfully about what is good for them apart from what is good for us. Yet to think of either kids or land as separate from us is wrong. My child and I are connected; if she is harmed, I am harmed, and to help her is to help me. So too is it with our land.
The metaphor is not perfect. Children need parents, for example, but land without a human owner does just fine. But today leaving land alone requires owning it first, which is the strategy of the Nature Conservancy and similar groups. Once land is owned, it is vulnerable, as children are vulnerable. Like children, it requires respect, protection, and care.