Aplicaci´on Kino

A related aspect of Critical Human Ecology is the use of boundary judgements or boundary critique, after Midgley, 2000. This involves clearly defining the scope of the research in terms of what is in, what is out, and why. Some definitional and scope issues have already been addressed in the Chapters 1 and 2. I discuss others below.

3.4.1 Forum on Religion and Ecology

A substantial aspect of the methodology, particularly in relation to boundary judgements and orienting principles is consistent with that used by the Forum on Religion and Ecology (FORE). FORE is a venture of The Harvard University Centre for the Environment, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Bucknell University, and the Centre for Respect of Life and Environment of the Humane Society of the United States. The FORE website describes the project as “the largest international multireligious project of its kind. With its conferences, publications, and website it is engaged in exploring religious worldviews, texts, and ethics in order to broaden understanding of the complex nature of current environmental concerns.” It states that “The Forum recognizes that religions need to be in dialogue with other disciplines (e.g., science, ethics, economics, education, public policy, gender) in seeking comprehensive solutions to both global and local environmental problems.”

FORE’s work is broadly within the scope of what Taylor, 2004 p992, terms the field of “religion and ecology”. He describes this field as:

“…focusing first on identifying the obstacles that the world’s mainstream religions may pose to environmental sustainability, and secondly the resources such religions may have available for promoting environmentally beneficent behaviours. A third, normative agenda often accompanied these two more descriptive ones, to promulgate the religious beliefs and practices that produce environmentally responsible behaviours, reappraising and reconfiguring the traditions as needed so they can provide the needed conceptual, spiritual, and practical resources for environmentally beneficent behaviour” Taylor, 2004 p992.

FORE has published numerous texts in its series, Religions of the World and Ecology. Of these, the key text used in this thesis is ‘Christianity and Ecology: seeking the well-being of Earth and humans’ (Hessel & Ruether, 2000b). That publication includes a section on the methodology of the project (Tucker & Grim, 2000) in which some orienting principles and boundary judgements are raised.

These include:

• accepting the existence of “the environmental crisis” and that it is a real and imminent threat to ecological integrity in which rapid growth in the human population, levels and inequities of consumption, and use of technology are contributing factors;

• accepting the need to “rethink worldviews and ethics” in light of the crisis and its nature – that scientific and political solutions to the crisis have proven inadequate to address the underlying causes of the problem;

• agreeing that in this context, religion offers both “problems and promise” in addressing the crisis. Religion has both progressive / prophetic and conservative / constraining aspects to it and there are diverse views within religion;

• accepting that religion has been late to address the ecological crisis (and so by inference may be behind other aspects of society in this regard);

• agreeing that the transformative and transpersonal aspects of religion can provide powerful motivation for personal and societal change in a way that is beyond or at least different to that of science and secular politics - in particular, in moving “from rhetoric in print to realism in action”. This potential is beginning to be realised now that most religions have adopted environmentalism to varying extents; and

• supporting the statement that religions are not unique in having a policy/praxis disjuncture. This disjuncture “should not automatically invalidate the(ir) complex worldviews and rich cosmologies”.

I have adopted the methodology of FORE but situate it within the broader context of Critical Human Ecology as discussed above. I draw on some of FORE’s methodological boundaries that help to circumscribe their efforts with “healthy scepticism, cautious optimism, and modest ambitions”, (Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxi). In discussing methodological concerns, Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxi-xxii, note that the field of research into religion and ecology is an emerging one in which “there are, inevitably, challenging methodological issues”, in particular, “time, place, space and positionality”.

“With regard to time, it is necessary to recognise the vast historical complexity of each religious tradition” (in this case Western Christianity as it manifests in Australia), which cannot be easily condensed…”, (Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxi-xxii).

Place is an issue in this thesis as I am dealing with modern Western Christianity in Australia, which the literature suggests is distinct from its manifestations in, for example, the United States.

“With regard to space, we recognise the varied frameworks of institutions and traditions in which these religions unfold”, (Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxi-xxii). Whilst I am dealing with mainstream Christianity in Australia, there are significant variations between the traditions and institutions of the Catholic, Anglican and Uniting Churches. In theological terms, there are significant differences between the Catholic faith and that of the Protestant tradition that includes the Anglican and Uniting Churches. There is also considerable institutional and traditional variation between the Protestant churches. For example, the Uniting Church of Australia is a relatively recent merger of three older denominations but operates with some arguably modern notions such as consensus decision-making and State-based management. In contrast, the Anglican Church of Australia has an organisational structure little different from that of the Catholic Church. Of additional and arguably greater significance in the context of ecotheology and related policies and praxis, is the extent of variation within each of the subject denominations.

“Finally, with respect to positionality, we acknowledge our (my) own historical situatedness… with distinctive contemporary concerns”, (Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxi-xxii). This is particularly relevant in that way that FORE approaches ecological thought and action within religion. The central issue is that all major religious traditions pre-date modern ecological knowledge, though not necessarily ecological or related forms of knowledge in general. At the time when most of these traditions arose, there was no global ecological crisis, there were no weapons of mass destruction, no artificial fertilisers or biocides, no transgenic species, no ozone depletion or anthropogenic greenhouse effect. Thus, when researching any major religion and its relationship with ecology, we have to acknowledge that it originated, and

for most of its history has been interpreted in a world very different from the one we inhabit and claim to understand today.

Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxi, note that their approach could be criticised, as has mine, for being an instrumentalist and potentially exploitative use of religion to address ecological concerns. This is expressed in the context of a call by environmental ethics philosopher J. Baird Callicott, 1994, for scholars and others to “mine the conceptual resources” of religious traditions to create a more inclusive global ecological ethic (for further commentary on this issue see Taylor, 2004 p992). In essence, Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxii, argue that FORE does not seek to draw on such resources with a one-directional notion of taking and using. Instead, they see the process of investigating religions’ relationship with ecology as being at least a two-way exchange in which the knowledge systems of religion and ecology interact, as do the researchers and the religions they study.

Similar to the approach of Tucker & Grim, 2000 p.xxii, I do not simply “mine” information from the subject denominations for the purposes of my research. I also provide information to the Churches and my research participants as to the outcomes of my research, and this extends to improving dialogue between and within the denominations. One manifestation of this is my establishment of an Internet forum to which I invite participants in my research, and others, for the purposes of their sharing information that is intended to aid the ‘greening’ of the Churches, particularly in relation to achieving practical outcomes. This was in part motivated by several research participants asking to be kept informed of my findings and being very pleased when I forwarded information about what their peers were achieving in other areas and denominations. This extended to include information about what their peers were and were not achieving and my analysis of the reasons for this.

I also reject the instrumentalist claim because it presumes that my attempts to address the global ecological crisis through my research into the ‘greening’ of religion are based on a purely self-serving agenda. Such a stance would also have us believe that environmentalism is inherently instrumentalist because proponents of it are only trying to look after their own personal, familial, communal, corporate, or national interests. I reject that view because it is not based on critical thinking. It is a self-serving ruse and is generally proffered by those who have a vested interest in opposing environmentalism and/or who are fundamentally cornucopian in perspective (religious or otherwise). My research is based on a justice-oriented agenda in which my own interests in combating the ecological crisis are concomitant with what I believe to be in the global interest.

In adopting FORE’s methodology, there are some key elements that I develop further as explained in the following section and in the following two chapters.

3.4.2 Australia and mainstream Christianity

I have also made several boundary judgements that confine the scope of this thesis in relation to its focus on Australia, on mainstream religion, and therefore on the three largest Christian denominations. I discuss the boundary judgements associated with those choices in Chapters 4 and 5 due to the volume of associated text.

To summarise the associated boundary judgements, I chose to focus on Australia because as a long-term resident, I have an interest in its human ecology, including the religio-spiritual dimensions. Australia is also largely absent from the literature dealing with the ‘greening’ of religion, so I perceived a need to fill some of that gap. Linked to this is widespread confusion in academic and popular domains as to whether Australia has enough of a religious life to warrant any scholarly attention, especially within the field of the ‘greening’ of the Church.

Recent research by Bouma, 2006, has helped to clarify this issue, confirming that Christianity remains the dominant religion by affiliation, by membership and attendance. However, whilst conventional expressions of Christianity, such as weekly church attendance at one of several of the older denominations, have declined and continue to do so, religion in Australia is by no means dead or even dying. Bouma, 2006, and others such as Tacey, 2000, 2003, make the case that Australia is witnessing a spiritual and to some extent a religious renewal, which manifests almost entirely outside the mainstream Churches. This phenomenon was evident at least as far back as the early 1980s (see for example Millikan, 1981). Despite the predicted demise of most suburban churches within twenty years, particularly of the ‘rationalist’ Protestant traditions, Catholicism remains a very large and relatively strong denomination, though it too faces generational demographic challenges (Bouma, 2006).

Thus having chosen to focus on Australia and on the ‘greening’ of its mainstream religion, the thesis focuses on Christianity in the form of the three largest denominations as of the 2006 national census (ABS, 2007): the Catholic, Anglican and Uniting Churches37. Whilst the fortunes of the conventional mainstream Churches look relatively dim in the medium-term, they remain large organisations with considerable ecological and cultural influences. Even as the mainstream Churches decline, they remain a valuable case study into the nature of the ‘greening’ of religion in Australia. They provide a meaningful lens through which to explore the increasingly promoted view that religion is or could be an important or indeed vital vehicle via which the necessarily radical personal and societal changes can be made and sustained in order to address the ecological crisis.

37

Research for this thesis commenced in 2004 when the latest national census data was from 2001. The release of the 2006 census data in mid-2007 did not change the relative ranking of the three largest denominations.