The "dream" of conservation ethics

At .17 square miles and with a population of 800, the Vatican is the smallest independent state in the world by both metrics. Yet that has not kept environmentalists from getting excited about it: the Pope just went Green. Workers have started to replace cement tiles on the Paul VI auditorium with 2,700 solar panels, a gift to Pope Benedict XVI by German company Solar World. Although the solar installation will only power a small part of the Vatican, it demonstrates a policy commitment that will have powerful implications for reconciling science—particularly conservation—and religion.

The late Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent Harvard archaeologist, argued that the areas of fact and morality were “nonoverlapping magisteria,” completely separate in the human experience. His contemporary, E.G. Wilson, took the opposite stance: the code of ethics continually expands and develops only through knowledge and scientific observation. However, a third view, Alasdair MacIntyre’s “virtue ethics,” has the most potential to turn environmental issues, based on good science, into forms that Americans will care about. MacIntyre posited that science is a socially-constructed activity; as members of society, scientists cannot interpret data without influence from their social experience. As Duke professor Kyle Van Houtan summarizes in his 2006 paper (which I read in my conservation biology class last week), “Conservation as Virtue,” this alone suggests that scientific issues like conservation ethics NEED a cultural vehicle to be brought into the limelight.

As it turns out, Van Houtan uses Chappelle’s “A Stone of Hope” to draw parallels between the Civil Rights movement and conservation ethics: “Segregation and disenfranchisement were overthrown dialectically—in the particular language, logic, and practices of a particular tradition. In this case, the dialectic was biblical, taking the form of a prophetic story, a pessimism in human institutions (this includes churches), corporate prayer, and—most notably—nonviolence.” Ultimately, as Chappelle argues, the Civil Rights movement was a religious cause with political implications; Van Houtan maintains that, while research can identify the scope of ecological problems, it cannot in itself form ethics that are socially sustainable. While media like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth have warned the masses of ecological crises, they have been unable to instill conservation morality. Academia has certainly failed to do so. As a result, the Pope’s actions are critically important to conservation.

American churches, including Catholic churches, have largely prioritized so-called “family values” over environmental issues, perhaps due to discord between religion and science. However, in March, the Pope made pollution of the environment one of seven new “social sins,” recognizing that environmental damage makes “the lives of poor people on Earth especially unbearable.” He recently told Catholic leaders that “God entrusted man with the responsibility of creation.” Roman Catholicism is by far the most dominant Christian sect in America, representing roughly a quarter of the country’s total population (there are 1.1 billion in the world). This is a significant new network for disseminating conservation ethics, and once those are in place, widespread interest can lead the population to conservation science. I believe that the Catholic churches in America have a long way to go in convincing their congregations that what they have been doing for centuries, degrading the environment, is a sin. It is an especially large obstacle given how dependent our lifestyles are on resource consumption—for example, where does one draw the line between safe and sin? However, there is no reason not to have a cautioned optimism about the future of conservation, as Martin Luther King did about racial justice. With the support of such a prominent world religious leader—not just a cultural vehicle, but a cultural juggernaut—sustainability can be a new “dream.”