The first reading today, Emerson's "Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home", written in 1824, is a poem that expresses a desire for retreat from the complexities and superficialities of society to a more authentic and fulfilling "home," which represents an inner life of peace, inspiration, and spiritual connection. The poem reflects Emerson's emphasis on the power of nature, and the pursuit of truth over conformity. He longs for a simpler existence, away from the "proud" and "weary" world, suggesting a deep weariness with social expectations and a yearning for authentic experience. In this sense it is a very contemporary poem, that continues to speak to the plagues of modern Western life.

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In the same year as Charles Darwin sailed for Australia on the HMS Beagle and 150 years before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his seminal essay, Nature.

Emerson had a knack for scandalizing the Unitarian and Congregationalist authorities of 19th century New England. He lived in Concord, Massachusetts, not far from Walden Pond which his friend and mentee, Henry David Thoreau, made famous.

Emerson advocated a religious outlook that gave primacy to first-hand experience. He became a pariah among many of the establishment preachers of Harvard Divinity School, his alma mater. After one speech in Divinity Hall he was effectively banished for 30 years!

Emerson broke with Trinitarian and Unitarian belief, and argued that access to the Divine need not be mediated by religious authorities, but that each of us can find a living revelation of Divinity in nature. Before movements in eco-theology would take up the relationship of humanity and nature, Emerson’s essay, Nature, challenged a conventional, Calvinist theology of nature that justified a utilitarian dominion over the natural world (i.e. the planet was there to serve us). Rather, for Emerson, not only is nature sacred, it is nature that is ministering to us. 

Readers of Emerson today, however, would hardly find his ideas scandalous or even all that radical. In many respects, his writings prefigure some of the most significant trends in religion today, including the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” understanding, the decrease in religious affiliation, and a return to nature as a locus for the spiritual life. If anything, Emerson would likely be critiqued for not being radical enough. 

And maybe his critics had a point. For the theology of nature put forward by Emerson and like thinkers was not sufficiently strong to withstand its use/misuse as divine justification for America’s bloody westward expansion. It’s a complicated history. On the one hand, Emersonian philosophy paved the way for the birth of “America’s greatest idea” – the national parks system – and instilled the values of preservation, conservation, and recreation into American civic life. On the other hand, building the parks system necessitated the dispossession and forcible removal of native peoples from their lands. His theology challenged dogmatism and brought the Spirit back into colonial American religion, but this could not stop American frontiersmen from using God’s presence in nature as a divine mandate for exploiting the land and its native peoples.

Given the legacy of Emerson, we are left to wonder whether his theology of nature was too sentimental, lacking in a theory of justice. The challenge today, therefore, for any theology of nature that will meaningfully respond to the climate crisis without being coopted for destructive purposes is to be sufficiently interdisciplinary; able to accommodate and weave together the common insight of all theologies interested in the pursuit of justice and peace. This insight is that the root of our disordered relationships resides in the human heart and mind. Wendell Berry wrote in Think Little, “The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, … that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology.” For this reason, a theology of nature for our time needs to embody, in a spirit of solidarity, the insight of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ that there is an inseparable bond“ between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.”

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There is whakataukī (a proverb) that I suggest we learn for Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori language week): "Ka ora te whenua, ka ora tetangata." Which translates as: ‘When the land is well, the people are well.’ And which means that there is a reciprocal dependency between humans and planet Earth. When we care for the land, rivers, the sea, the creatures and critters, they will care for us (or following Emerson, minister to us).

So one can imagine our tupuna (ancestors) in Aotearoa centuries before, using this whakataukī to teach the young about sustainable hunting, fishing, farming, and forestry practices. But I can also imagine this whakataukī used as part of spiritual education. For wellness and well-being are not just about our physical needs and care. Our spirits, our hearts, are sustained by practices of respect, honouring, and thankfulness, not just respecting, honouring, and thanking our whānau, friends, and communities, but respecting, honouring, and thanking all that is of planet Earth.

This week the actor and director, Robert Redford died. He used his charisma, good looks, and good acting skills, to not only acquire fame and fortune in the Hollywood world, but to use his skills and notoriety to make a difference –whether it be telling stories that looked deeply into life and its nuances, coaching and encouraging emerging actors and directors, or championing progressive causes. In one tribute I read I was struck by his phrase, quoting Derrick Jensen, that we need to ‘think like a planet.’ Which I took to mean thinking globally, how actions in one place have consequences in others, how we are connected – not just to others of the human race, but connected to the land, sea, air, and creatures - whose wellbeing we have learnt, and are continuing to learn, impacts upon our own. Prioritizing our human wellbeing, or the wellbeing of our own clan, community, or country, has adversely impacted on the wellness of earth, sea, sky, and all who live here.

Our second reading today, Proverbs 8:22-31, is a well-known passage in Jewish Wisdom poetry. Here the Spirit of Wisdom is personified – we could call her Sophia (in Greek, Sophia means ‘wisdom’). She is not only present at the beginning of creation, present before the earth and heavens, she is a master craftswoman in the formation of the universe, intimately connected with God, and continually expressing joy and delight in all that she was seeing and co-creating.

To deconstruct this passage, I would firstly extract the later Christian idea about the ‘Wisdom of God’ being the pre-existent Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:24),albeit with a gender change. And similarly extract the conjecture that this text points to the plurality of God that came to be called the Trinity.

Instead I would start with the emotions that the writer expresses, standing where we do on planet Earth, and staring into the wonder and beauty above, around, and below. Emotions of joy and delight. And then weaving these emotions into his/her poem. The writer asserts that the wonder and beauty reflects an amazing creativity, and our response – the response that wisdom (small or capital ‘W’) teaches us – is to emulate and propagate joy and delight.

For the writer the planet doesn’t need to be fixed, it needs to be appreciated. For the writer the planet is not a vacant section on which we can build whatever we like or however we like, it is an environment rich in creativity and creative potential that we need to learn to appreciate, work with, enjoy, and respect.

The phrase ‘Think Like a Planet’ invites me to take off my human-focused spectacles for a while, and put on the glasses that can see as planet Earth sees.

‘Think Like a Planet’ is about thinking holistically, long-term, with an interconnected perspective. What we do in this place affects not just what we can see, but what we can’t (people, plants, ecology in other places, or in future generations). So ‘think like a planet’ invites us to move beyond human-centric views to consider the entire Earth system's physical and ecological processes on grand spatial and deep time scales.

Two thinkers, if you want to read more about this, are firstly Aldo Leopold (who died in 1948). He was a visionary conservationist and philosopher. Probably his greatest quote is: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic (or ecological) community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’

There’s a story told of Leopold in the early 1900s when he was assigned to hunt and kill bears, wolves, and mountain lions in New Mexico. Local ranchers hated these predators because of livestock losses, but Leopold came to respect the animals. One day after fatally shooting a wolf, Leopold reached the animal and was transfixed by a “fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” That experience changed him and put him on the path toward an ecocentric outlook. He developed an ecological ethic that replaced the earlier wilderness ethic that stressed the need for human dominance. His rethinking the importance of predators in the balance of nature has resulted in the return of bears and mountain lions to New Mexico wilderness areas.

The other thinker, who has built on Leopold’s work in this time of climate crisis, is J. Baird Callicott. He is concerned that we assert and care for the planet by affirming its intrinsic value. Philosophers have long provided reasons why human beings should be valued intrinsically (and thus not discarded when broken or useless). Leopold, according to Callicott, provides reasons why non-human species, biotic communities, and ecosystems should be valued intrinsically (and thus not severely compromised or destroyed). He writes, “It is inconceivable tome that an ethical relationship to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value (instrumental value), I mean value in the philosophical sense (intrinsic value).”

At first, the Western religious tradition was vilified in environmental ethics as the root cause of the environmental crisis. Callicott has explored the possibility of a Judeo-Christian "citizenship" environmental ethic as a more radical alternative to the familiar Judeo-Christian "stewardship" ethic. Such “citizenship” entails going beyond individual actions like recycling to encompass a deeper sense of shared responsibility and active participation in environmental policy, and a recognition of interdependence with other people and nature on both local and global scales. This ethical shift involves prioritizing planetary habitability, understanding our role as part of the Earth system, and fostering a mind and heart transformation to align our actions with Earth's realities, as seen in the context of climate change and ecological restoration. 

I close with another quote from Aldo Leopold, one that aligns with the whakataukī‘ Ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata’: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” 

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