“Our Daily Bread: A Theology and Practice of Sustainable Living”
A Report from the Duke Divinity Convocation and Pastors’ School
“Hope to belong to your place, to know it and to care for it.”
This line, from an upcoming book of new poems by Wendell Berry, distilled the essence of a two-and-half day conference on sustainable living, held Oct. 8-10 at Duke Divinity School. Read by Berry during the closing session of the school’s 2007 Convocation and Pastors’ School, the line summarized much that had come before, when Berry and others called for a renewed focus on local context and local economies.
Convocation & Pastors’ School AudioComplete recordings of these and other lectures from the Convocation and Pastors’ School can be downloaded for free — along with other lectures, music, news segments and other materials from Duke University — via the Duke iTunes U site. If you already have iTunes on your computer, the link will take you directly to the Convocation and Pastors’ School page in iTunes. If you don’t have iTunes, then you will have to first download the free iTunes software. Once iTunes is installed, you can view and download all the Divinty School content. You may also purchase CDs of the convocation lectures and sermons from Duke University Conference Services. |
In a time of widespread environmental degradation, rapidly depleting energy supplies, commodified and unhealthy food, and a host of other seemingly intractable problems, a new appreciation and concern for all things local may be our best and only hope for survival, Berry and others said.
“We are clearly at the point in life and the economy where we have to think of restraint,” said Berry. “Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.”
Whether it’s mountaintop-removal coal mining in east Kentucky or U.S. foreign policy blunders or large-scale industrial farming techniques, the notion that “anything goes” has long prevailed in modern art, science, and politics, Berry said. Across the nation and around the globe, so-called “experts” are busy trying to apply “everywhere” what they learned “somewhere.” But the critical issue is really context and place, Berry said.
“Whatever doesn’t fit a place is wrong,” Barry said. “It doesn’t matter it if is true or false. If it doesn’t belong, it is wrong.” Without a standard of “place” as a measure of real prosperity, Berry said, we will never know what to make of development, technology, research, education, modernization, religion, and the environment, or ecosphere.
“We have gone from ‘anything goes’ to a strenuous warning, ‘Attend to context, or else,’” Berry said.
A noted novelist, essayist, poet, and farmer, Berry was the featured speaker for the annual convocation, which this year addressed the theme, “Our Daily Bread: A Theology and Practice of Sustainable Living.” In addition to Berry, the event also featured lectures by Wes Jackson, founder and president of The Land Institute, a Kansas non-profit research and educational organization, and Norman Wirzba, professor and chair of philosophy at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky., and a frequent writer on agrarian issues and environmental ethics.
In the conference’s opening lecture, Wirzba offered a theological analysis of food, which he contends is about much more than just fuel for our bodies. A fundamental expression of our identity, food and eating situate people in a cultural context, define them as embodied creatures who can never stray too far from the garden and demonstrate what they love and care about, he says.
Yet today, most people in the U.S. and throughout western culture are virtually estranged from their food, with profound consequences for their physical, communal and spiritual health, Wirzba warned.
“We don’t know where it comes from or what it took to produce it, said Wirzba. “Food has been reduced to a product we pick off the shelf.”
As a result, people no longer know what it means when they pray the words, “give us this day our daily bread.” Yet, eating, he says, implicates us in numerous stories, in customs, folkways and neighborhoods.
“Whenever we eat or drink, we bind our stories with those of countless others,” he said. “Stories of chickens and cucumbers, grandparents and God. Stories of where we come from and where we are now and where we are going.”
But many stories we now tell about our food are false, said Wirzba. Hidden behind the “fun and convenient” story of a chicken nugget, for example, is a dark and troubling story of industrial food production, immense factory farms where chickens are raised in overcrowded pens, pecking one another and battling for space.
If people are confused about their food, they are ultimately confused about much more, Wirzba said. Environmental degradation, public health, personal health and many other issues could be addressed by paying more attention to what we eat and drink, he said.
Our current ways of eating and the long process by which food arrives at our tables is inappropriate, unjust and violent, evidencing little or no gratitude for Creation, said Wirzba.
“Jesus understood himself as the bread of life,” Wirzba said. “But if we view bread as just one more product on the shelf, then we misunderstand Jesus’ message.”
Later, Jackson presented an equally sobering assessment of agricultural production and overall energy use. A biologist and former professor of biology, Jackson said that all life forms, from the first single-cell organisms that emerged 3.5 billion years ago to humans, have foraged for energy-rich carbon, the central organizing atom of all life. Simple bacteria in a Petri dish with sugar grow until the sugar has been consumed or the walls of the dish have been reached. Fruit flies seek out and feast upon rotting fruit.
“The same thing is true of mice and men and whales in the sea,” Jackson said. They all seek and consume carbon.
Over the past 2,000 years, however, humans have tapped into increasingly vast pools of carbon, consuming them at ever faster rates. The first breakthrough came in the mountains of Iran with the breaking of soil and planting of crops, then with the harvesting of trees, then the mining of coal around 1760, and in 1859 with oil and natural gas.
This 3.5 billion-year imperative to seek out pools of energy-rich carbon is now playing out at a mind-boggling rate, said Jackson. Indeed, a 22-year-old person today has lived through the consumption of 54 percent of all the oil ever burned in the history of the planet.
As he spoke, Jackson displayed two charts on a large screen behind him. One displayed three scenarios for peak oil and available oil reserves. Under all the projections, oil reserves are expected to decline dramatically, and even under the most optimistic projection, will last only to 2100.
But as that graph line plummets over the coming decades, another line — population growth — is expected to increase dramatically.
“There is the story,” Jackson said, pointing to the diverging graph lines. “How is this any different from bacteria in a Petri dish? This is what makes this moment in history the most important in history, including our walk out of Africa.”
Jackson was skeptical of technological solutions to the energy crisis. Substituting ethanol for oil-based fuels offers little hope. Even if the nation’s entire rice, wheat, corn and soybean crop was diverted from the food supply and turned into fuel, it would provide only 14 percent of the fuel needs for the nation’s vehicle fleet, he said.
“The idea that we can re-efficiency our way out of this is insane,” he said.
Instead, Jackson called for a profound re-conceptualization of the way humans think about themselves and the planet. Drawing on the work of Jay Stan Rowe, a Canadian ecologist, Jackson said that, instead of seeing the world, or the environment, as something separate and apart from us, we need to view it as a “supra-organism,” of which we are but one small part.
The earth, said Jackson, is an “eco-sphere,” with an embedded “eco-system” in which we belong.
“We belong to the world,” he said. “The eco-sphere is beyond people. It is before us in time, large in inclusiveness, creativity and diversity.”
Later, in an on-stage conversation with Jackson, Berry echoed Jackson’s remarks saying the word “environment” had done tremendous damage, separating us from a sense of place and belonging and making the world something outside and apart from us.
“It makes the ‘environment’ a quarry from which we carve out what we need,” he said.
In a separate onstage conversation with divinity Dean L. Gregory Jones, Berry said he has thought much about hope in recent years and made it the subject of many of the poems he has been writing. But, as he noted in one of the poems he read, “It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you get old.”
“One of the hardest things humans have to deal with is their stupidity,” said Berry. “Despite calling ourselves homo sapiens, we’re really pretty dumb.”
Asked by Jones what role churches can play in working toward a more sustainable world, Berry said they need to understand our present culture as one of “divorce,” not just regarding marriage but throughout our culture. We live in a time when many things that ought to be together, such as utility and beauty, have been torn apart, said Berry.
The divorce between spirituality and economy has been particularly damaging for the church, Berry said.
“You go to church and learn how to get into heaven and then go out into the world and practice the economy,” he said. “But this economy is not justifiable in spiritual terms, or even in economic terms.”
