— Mission Integration Principles of Environmental Justice, Eco-Justice, & Eco-Justice Spirituality
“Work with us, people.” So say the myriad living beings co-creating, nurturing, and sustaining the global οἶκος we call home. The Greek word oikos means household/family/homestead/home, and serves as a root for all terms preceded by “eco.” Who are the “We” we’re becoming? And how do “We” co-inhabit a common home? As human-merely-beings, how are we expanding our notion of “We” for the good of the home planet?
Many are familiar with the term “environmental justice,” the equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits. The term and its accompanying discourse deconstruct eco-degradation wrought by indiscriminate pillaging of the planet. Environmental justice is meant for people on the margins, especially BIPOC, economically depressed, excluded populations, in order to promote access to environmental goods such as clean water, air, land, and habitat. Protecting human rights for access to a healthy common home is at the root of environmental justice.
But what about justice for creation as it is, justice for “other-than-human” facets of creation? “Eco-justice” pays attention to the rights of all our relations, our eco-kin, not only applying a cost-benefit analysis in environmental policy for human health, for example. Eco-justice advocates consider the rights of all creation’s denizens, including the water, air, soil, arbor elders and creature-kin, the staggering variety of complex and micro-organisms whose very existence is threatened by human causes, especially our tendency toward excess and waste in the techno-industrial-military paradigm. All our relations depend on our expansion of the notion of “We.”
Post-humanist philosophy has been offering us new ways of knowing that wrest us from the stranglehold of rampant anthropocentrism. Eroding the knowledge boundaries that have traditionally separated humans as above-and-beyond the rest of creation has been post-humanism’s bailiwick for over two decades. What have we learned?
Epistemology, language, culture, political philosophy, ethics, a sense of “justice,” and yes, environmental policy based on all these are fraught with anthropocentric concerns. Our human obsession with humanity itself continues to decimate our common home, and we are only slowly emerging with an evolutionary awareness that we are not alone, above, or separate from creation. We are not to “have dominion over” and “subdue” the Earth, as sacred patriarchal texts have been interpreted — mistakenly — for centuries. Our hermeneutics of self obsession is slowly giving way to an eco-phenomenological model in which knowledge is perspectival, an inter-relational entanglement. Interpretation and knowledge itself need not be conceived as univocal, on the one hand, or delusional, on the other. It can and should be communally constructed, evaluated, and deconstructed over and over. This is an inherently inclusive and dialogical interpretive matrix in which our deepest sense of self reveals a rootedness in all creation. Our knowledge of who “We” are in respect to human consciousness, as it turns out, is embedded in our connection with a wider community, a mycelial network of energy, matter, and intentionality. This is where “eco-justice spirituality” makes its entry, marking the connection between spirituality (which had for centuries been linked with religious and theological discourse) and the natural world. Traditional patriarchal religious discourse has foundered on principles associated with eco-justice precisely because of humanity’s anthropocentric obsession. A predominantly male-image deity, presiding over an ordered, hierarchical creation, grants exclusive rights of dominion to humanity over the rest of creation. What has ensued is a history of violence against creation, global degradation, and rank injustice not only for humans on the margins, but for other-than-human kin, especially. Those humans who do speak for creation as a whole have developed a sense of the wider “We” that is not only inclusive of more-than-human kin, but endemic to the good of the whole. “We” are all one. This is an epistemological platform on which theists, ethical humanists, agnostics and atheists may perhaps align.
If “spiritual but not religious” global survey indicators are correct in assessing the burgeoning demographics of those whose spirituality is directly tied to principles of the wider “We,” there is hope for humanity. And with respect to environmental health, environmental justice, and eco-justice, there is hope for the planet. We as humans are becoming dramatically aware in the midst of this Sixth Great Extinction of our own inter-dependence with creation as a whole, and we are becoming more focused on our plight and our possibilities as a planetary community. How do we integrate this evolutionary awareness into our mission statements, board rooms, home rooms, chat rooms and sacred spaces, wherever those may be?
Languaging around “home” — our oikos — is only the beginning. “Environmental justice,” “eco-justice,” and “eco-justice spirituality” are just a few terms to integrate into a mission statement that espouses the wider “We” and its concomitant eco-values, as well as bearing responsibility for the good of the whole. The call is clear: “Work with us, people.”
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