Climate Emergency & Covid-19 - a Crisis of the Spirit
My college, Trinity at the University of Toronto, is currently initiating a Centre for Sustainability, a multi-disciplinary teaching and research facility examining the inter-relationships that the many facets of sustainability involves. The Alumni Society recently sponsored an online seminar to present some of the issues we face.
Taking the lead was Dr. Stephen Scharper, director of the institute’s sustainability initiative and well known across the campus for his teaching and involvement in several colleges and departments. He called us into a diagnostic moment in which we have agency – a spiritual space, he says.
It is time to question our role as a human species. What is our purpose and what is the response we are called to make? What on earth are we doing? First, epidemiology and ecology are both systems that focus on the common good and we need to learn more about both and how they work together.
Second, we are no longer nomads separated by distance and lack of knowledge of one another. We live in an earth community – which makes us responsible for social, cultural, political, economic and gender health with a responsibility to work against oppression and seek justice for all. The poor are affected most.
Third, we lead lives wherever we live with joy, love and hope. The response of our spiritual practices must relate to the natural world as our partner and we need to build new relationships with the economy, the culture and the biosphere. Thomas Berry is always a primary source in encouraging us to “Befriend the earth” as a subject to be embraced and valued rather than an object to be exploited.
What is required is balance. Oikos, the Greek word used for family, property and house – the household becomes a common prefix “eco” for both economics and ecology. There needs to be a balance between them. Scharper defines the economy as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the earth”.
We are in a position comparable to that of some Old Testament prophets who protested their summons from God by saying, “We didn’t ask to be here”. We are the ones to be here now.
Joy Fitzgibbon, Associate Director of the Margaret MacMillan Trinity One Program followed. She echoed the recent reports on the pandemic and agreed that the record of Canada is not great. Decisions have been made that are both helpful and unhelpful and we need to understand more of both. Public health tries to deal with trauma and our current situation reminds us of the trauma of the earth itself in need of healing. Fear, denial and attempts to control are common to both. Public health does not show as much evidence of global policy as environmental protection does – though the latter is more aspirational than effective. Fragmentation is less effective than collaboration and poor patterns of working together have a history.
Nevertheless she has hope and sees many opportunities to respond in a crisis – to learn, to embrace needs, to alter person life practices, to not waste time, to refashion society and to re-order better relationships between the human and non-human in our environment - and to admit many of the wrong things about the way we live. It’s possible to look at political and social structures and to listen to suffering through the voices of the marginalized, especially the poorest of the poor. She cites Henri Nouwen who describes being led out of the desert by someone who has been there.
There are good examples for learning. Among them are the Sustainable Development Goals, Access to Care, the Global Drug Facility and The Johns Hopkins site where one can monitor the progress of countries world side and track their progress in dealing with Covid-19. In our own country we can learn from places that have done well – the Maritime provinces – and the indigenous communities which in some places has done well with the pandemic by saying the have a “deep respect for the virus”. They also have much to teach us in their deep respect for the earth.
Sarah Levy, a graduate of the college and a past president of its Environment Society focuses on her post-doctoral research of animals. The pandemic has reminded us we are among them and subject to all the links in the chain with no vacuums among the levels. Pandemics are zootic and jump from animals to humans. We have not absorbed this reality.
While we may not have shopped at live animal markets for food, we are now living with finger pointing and racial epithets about their counties of origin. But we don’t acknowledge our own culpability in supporting factory farming, industrialized meat production and the use of immigrant farm workers, who are often housed and have been made to work in places that encourage the spread of disease. Sick animals get excluded from the food system only when there are serious outbreaks reaching our attention – like Mad Cow disease – and Canadian mink farms have recently come under scrutiny as dangerous.
These are not just symptoms but recognition of the spiritual dimension of “The Other”. What will our new normal look like, she asks. An opportunity is to listen to the animals, who have no voice. We have to be theirs. We love them and indulge them as pets. But there also needs to be recognition of how they serve us – less for physical labour now than they have done throughout history – but still for food. Their suffering during brief and incarcerated lives harms them – and by extension ourselves, as fellow creatures. We could return to smaller scale farms and develop more plant based diets – helping both the animals and the environment.
Much food for thought.