What is it about?
Scientific understandings of nature are broadly coherent with Jewish and Christian understandings of land. Both emphasize the importance of living in communities involving patterns of mutual well-being that provide the resilience needed for the community to survive over time. Both show that present patterns of increasing human population and inequitable economic development are not sustainable.
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Why is it important?
The longer we postpone a transition to sustainable ways of living that foster mutual well-being, the more difficult the shift will become. To have any chance of success, we must begin to make that transition during the next generation or two. Now may be our last chance to get our future right.
Perspectives
As an Earth Scientist, I am acutely aware of the dangers to human society posed by increasing population and consumption, and of the need for good science to shape our vision of a sustainable future. Gretchen van Utt is a Presbyterian pastor who is sensitive to the need for justice in our use of resources essential to life. We both sense the need to combine moral and scientific wisdom as we search for a path to sustainability, and we find that combination in biblical and ecological understandings of community.
Professor Emeritus George W Fisher
Johns Hopkins University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Science, Religious Naturalism, and Biblical Theology: Ground for the Emergence of Sustainable Living, Zygon®, December 2007, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2007.00881.x.
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