This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home

On Monday I talked about how Silko says that, if we are to end our destructive (and ultimately self-destructive) assaults upon the earth, we must come into spiritual alignment with it.  I’m aware that appealing to Native American religions is sure to draw jeers from certain sectors of the political right, especially the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

“Conservatives” (the reason for my quotation marks will become clear in a moment) have been assaulting environmentalists for a while—from Ronald Reagan’s rollbacks of Jimmy Carter’s energy-saving measures (including symbolically removing solar panels from the roof of the White House) to Limbaugh’s attacks on “treehuggers” to Dick Cheney’s refusal to include conservation in his comprehensive energy plan to Sarah Palin’s chants of “drill, baby, drill” to the dismissal of those who deny global warming of scientific findings (and science itself).

Therefore it was with some satisfaction that I read the following passage from T.S. Eliot’s 1939 work Defense of Christianity, (a tip to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish for alerting me to it).  It reminds us that true conservatives—which Eliot certainly was—believe we must learn to move within the limits of the world that we have   Here’s the quote:

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.  I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of soil erosion—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale. . . ,  for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. . . .

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live on this planet.

There are ways in which Eliot is harkening back, in an unrealistic way, to an idealized rural life.  (And when Eliot harkens back, he goes all the way back to 17^th century monarchical England.)  Nevertheless, there are ways in which, on this issue, he and Silko would see eye-to-eye.

Eliot was an Anglican, as am I (an Episcopalian, to be exact), and during Sunday service we have a prayer we sometimes say that I’m particularly fond of.  It occurs during the “Prayers of the People”:

Reader: At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.
Congregation: By your will they were created and have their being.

Whether or not you are religious, you probably can appreciate why we must treat “this fragile earth” with respect and reverence, as though it were suffused with a divine spirit.   Literature and religion don’t necessarily help us a lot with policy prescriptions, but they can help us ground ourselves in life-affirming values upon which good policy is built.  Unless we stop seeing the earth as something to use up and throw away–snatch and run–, oil spills and other disasters will continue to plague us.  Real conservatives would understand.