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Reflections on the Earth Charter Process
Mary Evelyn Tucker
Bucknell University
Department of Religion
Lewisburg, PA 17837
(copyright M. E. Tucker 2002)
Some years ago in Hawaii I attended an International World History Conference that was organized around the theme of "Oceans in World History." At the opening dinner of the conference Nainoa Thompson, a young Hawaiian sail master with the Polynesian Voyaging Society, told the story of the Hokulea voyages that recreated the earlier Pacific journeys from Hawaii south to Tahiti. These voyages took place in the centuries of great oceanic migrations in the Pacific from approximately 700 to 1400. "Hokulea" is the name given to the canoe built for these voyages and is translated as "Star of Gladness" for a star that passes over Hawaii.
Here we were 200 academics sitting in a windowless banquet room with the usual generic hotel décor - high ceilings, heavy curtains, glitzy chandeliers, and predictable carpets. The speaker had been appropriately introduced and bedecked with a lei, the slides were in place, and his soft voice proceeded to narrate. Almost like an ancient Hawaiian chant his story began to unfold from this unassuming slight man before us. He began with disclaimers and modest apologies and then proceeded to electrify the audience with his verbal and visual images of the journey.
"We wanted to recreate the original sea voyages of our ancestors from Hawaii back to the South Pacific islands," he began. "They had been stopped for hundreds of years due to a mysterious taboo. We wanted to reconstruct the original outrigger canoes and to bring along only traditional foods.
"First we needed a navigator. We searched among our own Hawaiian people but no one emerged as knowledgeable enough to guide us across these vast ocean distances. We sent word down to the South Pacific that some of us Hawaiians wanted to relearn the traditional navigation techniques. One of the last 'ancient mariners' of the South Pacific replied. Named Mao Pilaug, he came up to Hawaii from the Melanesian island of Satawal.
"Mao began to help us with the building of the canoe and with outfitting it. But most importantly he began to share with us his knowledge of how to sail it. Gradually we learned how to see the sun and to place its rising and its setting in relation to sea movements and sky constellations. Slowly we began to read the flotsam and plankton on the surface of the sea. Little by little we began to notice the patterns of birds' flight. We started to feel the movements of the waves and the direction of the currents. Eventually we could follow the map of the stars on the low horizon for direction. We felt the voyage being born.
"We set out onto the high seas with two canoes and a crew of nine people. It was far from perfect, but we learned as we sailed -- about human nature and conflict and cooperation, about Mother Nature and vulnerability and humility. We read the position of the sun and the stars, and discerned the movements of the currents and the waves. Without compass or modern technology we proceeded across the paths of our ancestors. We were both exhilarated and exhausted.
"Our challenges came quickly and sometimes unexpectedly. The most difficult was navigating on a cloudy or stormy night. With no moon or stars, it was impossible for us to continue to sail. It was especially at these difficult points that we had to call on the ancient mariner.
"On those dark, cloud-filled nights in the midst of this vast Pacific ocean Mao would go and lie in the hull of the canoe. As was the custom with children in Melanesia he had spent much of this early childhood in a canoe - sometimes simply rocked in a canoe tied to the shore like a cradle, sometimes accompanying a family member on a fishing expedition. From both instincts absorbed as a child and knowledge taught by his elders, he could feel the direction of the waves and discern the movement of the currents. He would navigate our direction based on these ancient indigenous ways of knowing that had been learned and transmitted across the centuries. We were deeply moved in witnessing this."
The narrator, Nainoa Thompson, told us how he had to adjust much of his scientific training and bracket his "modern" skepticism to learn these ancient navigation techniques. But he acknowledged he had still not reached into the instinctual indigenous knowledge of reading the waves from the depths of the hull.
He shifted focus, then, from the narration of the recovery of ancient sea-faring knowledge to its contemporary import. He told us how the voyagers were eager to share their experiences with the children in the Hawaiian schools. In later voyages the classrooms were linked up to the Hokulea canoes by solar technology. The Hawaiian children could relay their questions on geography and astronomy to the crew who then answered them. The children were connected to a contemporary voyage that held the past in its wake and the future in its wave-shattering foam.
Just as the Hawaiian children were encouraged and inspired by sharing in this ancestral journey so, too, were several thousand natives who gathered to welcome the Hokulea canoes when they sailed into the bay in Tahiti. The Tahitians greeted the voyagers with their ancient melodic chants of welcome and the Hawaiians replied with their own traditional chants acknowledging their hosts. Across the gap of many centuries these ancient journeys were renewed and the peoples of the Pacific revitalized. Ethnic pride and historical identity were renewed.
The Earth Charter
The story of the Hokulea journey can be seen as a metaphor for our own need to recover and uncover a path across vast tracks of unchartered waters toward a sustainable future. We are like the ancient mariner in a cloudy night trying to navigate our way into a new historical moment when humans will contribute to the flourishing of the Earth community not its destruction. We need the Earth Charter as a compass to guide the actions of humans. The Preamble acts as a constellation of key stars illuminating the voyage.
The Earth Charter represents an effort of people from many parts of the world to articulate the aspirations of humanity yearning for a more peaceful, secure, and sustainable future. It is both a process for discerning an ethical path and a document for holding up key principles. There is a profound sense emerging around the globe that we are at a critical moment of transition and transformation. Many perceive our present economic mode of unlimited growth and unrestrained development as no longer viable. The increasing social gap between the rich and the poor is seen as no longer acceptable. The mindless ravaging of resources and the conscious abuse of human rights is recognized as no longer tolerable. How to realign our priorities and values within the human community for the enhancement of the larger Earth community remains our fundamental challenge.
The Earth Charter calls clearly and passionately for shifts in worldviews and action that will create the basis for a viable future. The choice is emerging in rather stark terms between a future for humans filled with conflict over limited resources or a future where more equitable distribution of resources and more democratic modes of participation will be made possible. This is a future governed not simply by seeing nature as something to be used for our own benefit but something, which sustains the larger community of species and ecosystems. In other words, this will require a shift in an instrumentalist view of regarding nature simply as a resource to be exploited rather than seeing nature as the source of all life. The shift is what Thomas Berry speaks of when he observes the natural world is not simply a collection of objects but a communion of subjects.
The Earth Charter, then, reflects the hopes of many for new directions into the 21st century. It is a soft law document that needs to be backed up by a hard law document of implementation and enforcement that is the intent of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Covenant on Environment and Development. It is like a compass, a guiding instrument across the unchartered waters ahead. It is a new kind of compass in several respects.
1) It calls upon the wisdom of the past from the contributions of world history, culture and religions.
2) It relies upon the best knowledge of the present, affirming the contributions of humanistic science and sustainable technologies.
3) It points toward the hopes of the future by drawing on an understanding of ourselves as part of a vast evolutionary process whose continuation will be guided in part by our own decisions.
This compass, then, points us toward a new expression of a common future respecting difference and diversity while affirming our shared destiny as part of the human family. Like the unwritten codes that govern families, the Earth Charter affirms individual rights and freedoms along with individual responsibilities toward the global family and its future. It tries to strike a balance between a variety of conflicting tensions. In doing so it hopes to find new harmonious chords among the creative tensions of the rights and responsibilities of humans and nature.
This involves a series of elaborate relationships between individuals and groups, men and women, older generation and younger generation, political leaders and citizens, business leaders and consumers. It recognizes that while governments and individuals need to play a critical role, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other leading groups in civil society have an important voice also. To bring these voices together we need to discover the common ground that sustains us as humans. We need to explore not only the relations of humans to one another but also the relations of humans to the natural world around us.
These common grounds and creative tensions are clearly articulated in the Preamble that sets the context for rethinking the foundations of a genuine and sustainable future. The Preamble captures the worldview changes that ground the principles that follow. If the Earth Charter as a whole is like a compass guiding us into the future, the Preamble points toward the key constellations by which we can navigate across the vast ocean in the dark night of this new millennium at the end of the Cenozoic Era.
Just as the constellations have guided sailors in their ocean voyages for centuries, so too these Preamble paragraphs form a constellation of brightly burning stars. They move from a sense of common destiny to cosmology, from crisis to choice, and from community to confidence.
Common Destiny: One Human Family, One Earth Community
The first paragraph of the Preamble sets forth the key idea that the Earth community and the human family have a common destiny. Indeed, without this profound sense of a common future, the human community may be on a self-destructive path. As Daniel Maguire suggests: "If current trends continue, we will not." In other words, we cannot pollute the sources of our very existence- namely air, water, and soil and hope to have a healthy or sustainable future. It is like fouling our nest without realizing the consequences. This is why the Earth Charter might be seen as the first major Declaration of Interdependence instead of independence. As Thomas Berry has noted, "The human community and the Earth community will go into the future as a single, celebratory event or not at all."
The power of individualism, the lure of independence, and the respect for diversity have emerged in a compelling way since the 18th century Enlightenment era in the west. As a result, the notion of a common destiny or common good has been more difficult to foreground against the demands of individual rights. Yet now more than ever before these ideas of common good and common destiny need to be carefully articulated and clearly evoked so as to be embraced by a large number of people around the world. Indeed, our survival as a species depends on this. Otherwise factionalism and intense individualism will lead to increasing fragmentation of groups and deterioration of societies. On the contrary, solidarity with a larger common destiny points us toward survival as a planet and as a species. Individual rights can be respected along with responsibilities to a larger whole- namely the Earth community of which we are a part.
Cosmology: Earth, Our Home
The second paragraph opens with two sentences describing the cosmological grounding of this common destiny for the Earth community: "Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe. Earth, our home is alive with a unique community of life." For the first time in a document of this kind there is an acknowledgement that evolution is the comprehensive context in which we need to rethink our role and purpose as humans. Thanks to science and the universe story, we now know that the universe is some 13 billion years old, that the Earth is some 4.6 billion years old, and that humans are only about 150,000 years old. To realize this enormous time perspective changes our sense of how we fit into the vast evolution of life and how we have come very late to this process. Yet in this short period of time we have managed to do almost irreparable damage to species and to ecosystems. The time line of evolution has been compared to a monthly calendar where life has evolved on the planet over 4.6 billion years and where we as humans have appeared only at the very end of the 30th day of the month. A similar scale has been used with a clock where evolution is diagramed into 12 hours and humans appear a few seconds before midnight. The new walk through cosmological time at the planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York has all of human history represented by a single human hair.
This evolutionary cosmology gives us a comprehensive perspective to reevaluate what we are doing to the planet and how we are going to manage to restrain our destructive habits, harness our creative energies, and reconfigure human-Earth relations in a more constructive manner. A new balance is needed lest we destroy ourselves and many other life forms in the process. While we may be the first generation to imagine our own termination as we live in the midst of a sixth extinction period, so also we may collectively begin to imagine and create a viable and sustainable future.
To help make this happen it is critical that we recognize the importance of the sentence, "Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life." This sentence was first proposed by a scientist, an astrophysicist, who suggested that the idea of "Earth itself is alive" would be important to include in the opening of the Earth Charter. There are many possible interpretations of this phrase and indeed a fruitful ambiguity may be helpful in this regard. The scientist was clearly using the term "alive" in a metaphorical manner to suggest something of the vitality of the life forces that surround and constitute the Earth. For indigenous people this was one of the most empowering phrases to be included in the text. Several said that they felt this phrase marked the first time that their worldview was included in such a document.
The cosmological context of a vast, evolving universe helps to situate and to ground the notion that at this juncture we have inherited a sacred trust- namely the preservation of the Earth for future generations. This is what Thomas Berry has described as the Great Work of our time. Each person has an important role to play for we are now, in a special sense, co-participants of the evolutionary process. The survival of many species and the integrity of various ecosystems are in our hands.
Crisis: The Global Situation
The third paragraph of the Preamble highlights the critical nature of the global environmental crisis that we are facing noting, however, "These trends are perilous- but not inevitable." The nature, size, and scale of this crisis are outlined here. Without a sufficient sense of the dimensions of the crisis we will not be able to develop the will to take the necessary steps toward change. There is an urgency that needs to be sounded regarding the magnitude of what we are facing. As the paragraph suggests, the foundations of global security are being threatened by the interlinking problems of endemic poverty and environmental degradation, as well as population growth and unrestrained consumption. These are problems, which, if left unchecked, will undermine the life support systems of the planet. While these are global problems, they are problems that threaten to further divide developed and developing nations. Hence we need principles and strategies for genuine sustainable development such as the Earth Charter contains.
While the magnitude and interconnected nature of these problems need to be clearly understood, solutions are not going to be simple or forthcoming without significant changes by individuals, institutions, societies, and governments. How to help make these changes possible without causing exhaustion of human energies and initiatives will be a considerable challenge. How to encourage institutions to become more sensitive to sustainable paradigms without causing them to become rigid or fossilized will require skilled and persistent effort. How to assist the changes without causing the rapid collapse of current economic, social, and political systems will be a formidable task. All of this is part of what Maurice Strong has referred to as "reinventing industrial civilization".
In this moment of crisis and transformation we need to avoid paralysis of action or indifference of attitude. A lack of hope and a sense of disempowerment afflict many in the younger generation. Effective leadership and a comprehensive vision toward the future is sorely lacking in the older generation. We need, then, to find the means to empower individuals and communities to assist in this historical moment of transformation. This historical moment is what Thomas Berry calls the transition from the end of the Cenozoic era of the last 65 million years of evolution to what he calls the Ecozoic era that is emerging in our times. Along with the depletion of natural resources there is the potential depletion of human energy that is needed to make this transition possible. This is, in part, the role of the Earth Charter, namely, to serve as a compass that will inspire and guide human action at this moment of crisis.
Choice: The Challenges Ahead
The centerpiece of the Preamble is the phrase "the choice is ours." There is no more clearly framed challenge than this. It is a matter of human will power, vision, and creative energy to chart our way into the future. This choice is a stark one toward care and concern for the planet and its myriad forms or life or toward indifference and destruction. Both consciously and unconsciously we are already taking steps toward realigning our priorities and commitments. As the Earth Charter indicates, the choice that we are making will involve a change of attitudes, (worldviews) values (moral and spiritual commitments), and ways of living (consumption and production habits).
It is here that the world religions may be especially helpful as they are the repositories of key attitudes and values, which have shaped individuals and cultures over many centuries. For this reason my husband, John Grim, and I organized a series of ten conferences from 1996-1998 at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions on "Religions of the World and Ecology." These conferences explored views of nature in the various traditions so as to discern viable beliefs, practices and values that would contribute to resolving our current environmental crisis. The papers from these conferences are being published by the Center for the Study of World Religions and distributed by Harvard University Press in 10 volumes.
At the invitation of the United Nations Environment Programme, a press conference was held in October 1998 at the UN to report out on findings of the Harvard series and to announce the formation of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. The American Museum of Natural History in New York provided the venue for a culminating conference of over a thousand people. Spokespersons for the religious traditions dialogued with scientists, ethicists, educators, and public policy makers highlighting the multidisciplinary character of current environmental issues.
Since this series the Forum on Religion and Ecology has held continuing conferences on World Religions and Animals, Religion and Nature Writers, and World Religions and Science. The Forum has organized workshops for high school teachers for implementing world religions and ecology materials into secondary education. In addition, the Forum has helped to launch an international journal, "Worldviews: Environment, Culture and Religion." The Forum has participated in the Parliament of World Religions in Capetown in 1999, the Millennium Religious Leaders Peace Summit at the UN in 2000, the Tehran Seminar on "Environment and Religion," in 2001, and the "Religion, Science and the Environment" Symposium on the Adriatic Sea sponsored by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 2002. Together with the United Nations Environment Programme the Forum published "Earth and Faith" a booklet for use in congregations and discussion groups. More than 37,000 copies have been distributed. For more on the Forum work see website http://environment.harvard.edu/religion
The kind of choices we will have to make regarding attitudes and values toward the environment have also been evident in the large questions being raised regarding what constitutes genuine sustainable development. A viable future for the planet rests on more considered understanding of the interlocking dynamics of environmental protection and economic development. Over the last several decades the United Nations has made this a major priority. Indeed, since the United Nations Conference on the Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972, the United Nations has repeatedly identified the environment as a critical global challenge. This international political body has highlighted sustainable development as a central goal of the Earth community. The 1987 Bruntland Commission report, Our Common Future, outlined key strategies toward that end. Since the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992, the United Nations has held various other major international conferences to analyze our global situation and devise strategies for ensuring a sustainable future. These include conferences on social development, habitat, women, population, and food. These UN conferences have been supplemented by the work of literally thousands of nongovernmental and environmental organizations around the world toward formulating more sustainable and just policies and programs for civil society.
Sustainable development has been critiqued by some environmental, labor, and human rights organizations as often leading toward rampant globalization of capital and the homogenization of cultures. The unintended consequences of globalization in the loss of habitat, species, and cultures make it clear that new forms of equitable distribution of wealth and resources need to be implemented. Indeed, the growing inequities of North and South that are exacerbated by environmental deterioration, species loss, and climate change remain a leading challenge to he global community.
This is why the Earth Charter is so essential.
Community: Universal Responsibility
The fifth paragraph of the Preamble sets out the sense of challenge, the scope of community, and the scale of commitment. The challenge ahead is how to help shape a global civilization built on democratic principles and law. The task is, in particular, to create modes of balancing tensions and reconciling opposites. This is one of the most difficult things to do for humans, especially because we tend to see things as polar opposites that are irreconcilable.
The challenge, then, is how to find principles and modes of conciliation and integration for a larger sense of community. This will at times involve skillful compromise that will help shape this new era. How to see opposites as interrelated: for example, human rights need to be balanced with human responsibilities, individual liberties need to be connected to a sense of a larger common good, short term gains (especially economic profits) need to be seen in the context of long term goals (environmental protection, health benefits, renewable resource use). Here is where concern for future generations is central to uncovering the motivational dimensions of change as well as functional models and principles that may be useful in deciding complex issues such as equitable distribution of resources. Just as the Iroquois Confederacy spoke of the necessity of making decisions that would take into account their effect on seven generations into the future, so does the Earth Charter suggest that a broadened understanding of intergenerational ethics need to be made second nature.
The Preamble describes the expanded sense of community that distinguishes the Earth Charter. We are in an era that suggests that peace among humans is only possible with peace with the planet. Further effort is clearly going to be needed to improve relations among humans already strained by ethnic and racial tensions, as well as social, economic, and religious differences. This is a formidable challenge to community building in itself. There are numerous examples around the world of the seemingly endless conflicts, especially over religion and ethnicity.
However, humans are now realizing that their common future and global and ecological security as a human community rests on reconciliation with the planet itself. This overrides, although does not diminish, the basic differences between and among humans. For as the Brazilian liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff and many others have noted, the liberation of humans can only take place in conjunction with a new understanding of human-Earth relations. There will be no long lasting basis for just and sustainable societies without understanding the critical role of the earth to sustain life and community.
As the conservationist Aldo Leopold suggests, the expansion of ethics outward from within the human sphere toward the natural world signifies the moral growth that is needed to sustain life on the planet. Just as women, children, and minority groups have gradually been included in ethical concerns, so, too, other species and ecosystems need to be included in the discussion of ethics. The growth of environmental ethics and the emerging involvement of religious communities in this expansion of ethics is a cause for hope. There is a lively debate occurring in various circles sponsored by this expansion of ethics to embrace the larger community of life.
Tensions can be seen between those advocating an anthropocentric ethics and those calling for a more biocentric ethics, or between those supporting social ecology and those favoring deep ecology. These reflect the healthy debate concerning what is it that humans will contribute toward a more just and sustainable future. Those who view these debates as irresolvable do not see how much they are part of the same creative tensions that will result in more holistic and inclusive human-Earth relations. Like the yin and yang in Chinese thought, these opposites may be seen as complementary and mutually engaged in one another.
Confidence: Together in Hope
The Preamble ultimately brings us to a deep sense of shared commitment with confidence in the future. The need for a comprehensive and inclusive vision is affirmed in the final paragraph. At the same time, a sense of a common commitment is evoked. Commitment here reflects a will that is indispensable for making the changes happen. To have a larger confidence born out of hope requires that we have a historical perspective that acknowledges significant political and social changes have taken place in the last half century that give us a perspective on the beginning of this new century and millennium. Less than fifteen years ago we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Nearly 30 years ago the Vietnam War ended and the veterans came home. Forty years ago segregation was declared unconstitutional and integration was initiated. Fifty years ago Europe lay in fragments at the end of the second World War and now is united politically with the European Union and economically with the Euro. These are all signs of hope that can reflect to us the possibility of change for the human community with effort, will, vision, and trust.
The principles that follow in the Earth Charter can only become functional and operational if we have confidence in the deep processes of life itself that have brought forth this remarkable beauty and diversity of nature and human beings. This life force that has sustained the unfolding of the universe and our planet Earth may enkindle in us courage and commitment that will be needed for the Great Work ahead. As the Charter says, "The Forces of nature make existence a demanding and uncertain adventure, but Earth has provided the conditions essential to life's evolution."
As Thomas Berry suggests at the end of his essay on "The New Story" in his book The Dream of the Earth what is needed along with courage and commitment is an unassailable sense of confidence in the vast evolutionary process and cosmological powers that have brought forth and sustained life until the present. He writes:
"If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought humans into being and guided them safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to this guidance we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture."
With this confidence and commitment we may indeed have a new beginning. As the Earth Charter suggests in the end, "We will succeed because we must succeed."
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