What Do We Really Want?
Reading H. Parker Blount’s essay in the latest Sunstone, “The God of Nature Suffers,” dug up a question that has haunted me for years. Namely, what is it I really want from life?
In his essay, Blount takes apart our Western, capitalist culture and argues that the Mormon Church, though possessing a doctrinal foundation for environmental activism, is probably one of the least environmentally conscious Christian churches. He then makes an eloquent plea for Mormons to take their doctrine more seriously and make sustainability a matter of spiritual import.
I have thought along these lines many times before. I mean, I’ve taken a college class in environmental literature, I’ve seen the documentary films Affluenza and The Corporation, and I can see that our Western, corporate-based, dominion-over-the-earth approach to life is incredibly destructive. But then I think, “But wait, what would I have to give up in order to live sustainably?”
I look around me and I see that I am embedded in this destructive culture. I like a lot of things about it. I like being able to spend inordinate amounts of time studying literature (made possible by hundreds of years of industrialization). I like iTunes. I like my Mac. I like it when my wife comes home with a sexy new jacket. I like to take my kids to theme parks. I like to eat oranges and strawberries out of season. I’m seriously considering moving to Las Vegas, for Pete’s sake!
Being in this situation, I appreciate Daniel Quinn’s suggestion in his book Beyond Civilization that instead of thinking about what we could do without, we think about getting more of what we really want.
What we really want? What is that?
I tend to think that we don’t really know. I also think the problem is compounded by the way corporate culture has infiltrated Mormon culture and dictated a set of false needs and expectations that seem to fuse with our doctrine.
My belief was clinched by an anonymous informal survey I conducted in my priesthood quorum a few months ago to find out how they spent their time and what their general view of life was. It turned out that most of my fellows
1. spend less than 2 hours a day in contact with their family,
2. work on job-related activities an average of 10 hours a day,
3. get less than the recommended amount of sleep each night,
4. rarely engage in an activity they think is worthwhile, and
5. are frequently discouraged.
When we talked about the findings most of my compadres actually seemed proud of them. The first thing out of anyone’s mouth was, “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread all the days of thy life” (which, as I have been informed, has been trademarked by Proctor and Gamble).
Whatever happened to “Men are that they might have joy?”
I get the feeling that most of us would need no less than a revolution in our lives to understand what we really value and muster the will to pursue it. Myself included.
April 8th, 2006 at 10:21 am
Whatever happened to “Men are that they might have joy?”
It got submerged by men trying to find happiness.
April 8th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Why else would we have the beehive for an icon?
April 9th, 2006 at 5:41 am
I have so many questions and so few answers. Can the entire population of the world live as Americans live? Is our lifestyle a blessing from God? Is wealth God’s blessings, and therefore we should do whatever is necessary to have and maintain our wealth? Is capitalism really God’s economic plan, as some members of the LDS Church seem to think, or is it just another form of fundamentalist religion? Are my questions simply economic and political, or are they at the heart spiritual and as important as questions about body piercing?
April 9th, 2006 at 11:14 am
I really liked Blount’s piece - particularly the description of finding spiritual communion in nature. It gives me much to think about.
I think a big reason our church is not particulary interested in ecotheology is our millenialist nature - why worry when everything will be taken care of shortly with the second coming? Of course, each generation has had that attitude - we’re still waiting.
We could certainly make a dramatic shift in a very short time, as the LDS church is organized in a manner that would be conducive to a rapid re-orienting.
Some things the institution could do:
- Invest in renewable energy for buildings (solar power, wind power, daylighting, Trombe walls for passive solar heating, downdraft cooltowers for natural ventilation cooling, energy-efficient lighting, and advanced building controls) - this not only provides long-term cost savings (stewardship over tithes and offerings) and environmental awareness (stewardship over the earth), it would demonstrate a commitment to the members, AND it would give us some unique architecture for future buildings. (That’d be nice)
- Creating eco-callings. A ward recycling coordinator, or perhaps eco-service project coordinators.
- Churchwide recycling programs for the organization
- Renewed emphasis on self sufficiency (connect with our history by planting gardens, keeping bees for pollination, etc.)
Finally, how about a secondary missionary program focused on service? We’ve raised the bar, limited the proselytizing missions to the most dedicated, but perhaps we could find young people or retired couples interested in 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, or 2 year service missions? It would be an ability to leverage the vast talent from our older, retired members, and a way for us to truly develop into a service-oriented, global culture.
These service missions could include both environmental as well as broader service-oriented activities.
In the mean time creating an awareness of not simply the need but also the doctrinal basis, such as Parker does with this artcle, is a good start. We need to do better.
I could do better.
April 9th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Parker Wrote: I have so many questions and so few answers.
Stephen speculates:
It seems to me that all those questions have definite answers:
No. No. Yes. Yes - way more important.
I’m actually very curious, Parker. What do you do toward living a sustainable life?
April 9th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Stephen - are your No. No. Yes. Yes answers related to Parker’s questions in a one-to-one? If so, your yes answers seem to be related to:
Is wealth God’s blessings, and therefore we should do whatever is necessary to have and maintain our wealth?
Is capitalism really God’s economic plan, as some members of the LDS Church seem to think, or is it just another form of fundamentalist religion? (If yes, which one?)
I’m also interested to hear the response to the sustainable life question.
April 9th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Sorry ’bout that. Here’s the understandable version:
Can the entire population of the world live as Americans live?
No
Is our lifestyle a blessing from God? Is wealth God’s blessings, and therefore we should do whatever is necessary to have and maintain our wealth?
No
Is capitalism really God’s economic plan, as some members of the LDS Church seem to think, or is it just another form of fundamentalist religion?
No to the first part; Yes to the second part.
Are my questions simply economic and political, or are they at the heart spiritual and as important as questions about body piercing?
Yes, all of the above; More important
April 11th, 2006 at 5:27 am
Our efforts at sustainability are but a drop in a vast sea. We compost our kitchen waste. We recycle everything our recycling center will take. We try to buy locally and organic. We purchase recycled paper products including paper for the printer. We are making a concerted effort to simplify our lives, by having fewer possessions and more time for solitude. We are selective about when we drive the car. We think we are doing the environment a favor, lessening the size of our footprint, with every meeting we don’t attend.
April 13th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
I’ve been thinking of suggesting that our local Public Affairs Council call an “eco-director.” In our stake we have an interfaith director, community relations director, and a media relations director. While environmental issues can be entertwined with any of the other facets of PA, a person in each stake dedicated to environmental issues could have a huge impact, IMO.
Like Parker, I try to minimize my footprint on the planet. We have a family ‘no food waste’ policy, we vermicompost, tend an organic garden that’s bigger than our living space, and just got bicycles for the whole family so we can stop using the car so much. Can’t wait to start biking to church (in our ward most ppl not only drive SUVs, but they have Lexus SUVs or something equally ostentatious).
April 13th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
Stephen,
Thanks for raising these questions! We recently moved to the Four Corners area and for the first time have space to experiment with developing a more sustainable lifestyle. We plan to try windmills (we get great winds in the spring) and eventually one solar option or another. I’m looking into planting native and drought-resistant vegetation in the yard. And the garden potential–yowza! I am anticipating devoting significant portions of our lot to butterfly and bee gardens so that our yard may extend whatever natural insect and animal corridors exist in this area. I keep my outdoor lights off at night not only to reduce energy use and expenditures but also to allow the local wildlife, which is abundant here, the darkness it needs to maintain natural rhythms.
Moving to the desert is exactly what I wanted out of life–that is, moving to where the light is less congested, the air more nourishing, the night-time more wild, and to where I can have free and un-gasoline-enabled access to wildlands. I just walk a quarter of a mile, pass through the prairie-dog town, and there I am on the edge of a spectacular canyon. Middle-aged as I am I feel now like I felt when I was 10-17 and had free access to the rural Virginia woodlands.
Living in Utah Valley I developed a deep loneliness for other species and interactions with them. That loneliness is now being dispelled. Coyotes, turkeys, cliff swallows, canyon wrens, eagles, deer, so on and so forth–I see their tracks, hear their calls, catch sight of them. I have a million-dollar view for well under $100,000. I think there is virtue in the long view, expecially when it looks out on wildlands and weather as far away as 30-50 miles. Puts things into perspective. I don’t know about others think a view is for, but for me it stimulates thinking, especially about the future.
As a writer, I think it very important that I write about what I love (about anything I love, but especially about nature and sustainability) in such a way as to make it possible for others to love it, too. As Richard Louv points out in his book Last Child in the Woods, our society is perhaps getting fed up with what he calls ecophobia, “the fear of ecological deterioration” (Sobel as quoted by Louv). Louv mark’s Sobel’s warning that ringing relentless alarms over environmental abuses in our classrooms, media, and so forth may produce in society a form of dissociation where its ceases to associate nature with anything but guilt and fear. Kinda like what my generation endured with all the rhetoric over nuclear annihilation.
Writing about nature in such a way as to open up the narrative–to inform, delight, and restore wonder to the world–may accomplish much where alarm-ringing fails.
Another reason we moved to the 4 Corners area–to get our children out of the city and turn them loose in nature (with instruction and supervision, of course). CHildren disconnected from nature will see little or no reason to attempt to develop a more sustainable anything in the future.
April 15th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Well, you may or may not be happy to hear that instead of moving to Las Vegas, the Carters are moving to a little town in Wyoming. Certainly closer to nature. But then I wonder. Is it really? I’ve been living in Alaska for the past 5 years, and I’ve noticed that in many ways, the people who live up here insulate themselves from nature even more than they do in the lower 48. We stay in our buildings most of the time, and if we do go outside, we take these ear-splitting snowmachines to propell us through it as quickly as possible. (I have a theory that snowmachines are actually our way of making public flatulance appropriate, laudatory even.
Even the Alaska Natives I’m associated with take many pains to secrete themselves away from the outdoors. They don’t go out for fun. They go out to work.
So Patricia’s comments on her current location fill me with romantic longing, but at the same time, I wonder if the reason it remains so difficult for the modern person to connect with nature is because we do have inclinations toward the urban, toward collectivity.
What do you think, Parker and Patricia, can we find a way to be connected with the earth in our apartment buildings? Or is it only for the rural dweller?
April 18th, 2006 at 5:36 am
That is an interesting question Stephen. Since we are quite literally connected to land—in a larger sense—earth, we are always connected no matter where we live. As someone has said, if you want to know how deeply you are connected to the land, go without eating for a few days. But the degree of consciousness of that connection is the question isn’t it? Just as you can be conscious of your connection to God without attending a church (or unconscious while attending) I suspect you don’t have to live on the land to be connected. Although it does seem to me that as the consciousness of the connection, along with the spiritual dimensions of being a member of creation increases, so does the desire to be closer to wilderness, land, nature, or whatever term we might use.
I will be interested, Stephen, in hearing your further thoughts on this as you contemplate it as the winds whistle in Wyoming. I know you will be reading Wendell Berry on the advantages of the small land based community.
April 19th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Stephen asks: can we find a way to be connected with the earth in our apartment buildings? Or is it only for the rural dweller?
I think absolutely, yes, we can connect with the natural environment in buildings and cities. Louv (Last Child in the Woods) has a lot to say about this very subject. I really do heartily recommend that book. We simply [hah!] have to shift several cultural bases, including prevailing architectural and educational philosophies as well as linguistic and narrative stances. Here’s a quote from Last Child:
(On imagining cities that can sustain wildlife): “To most people, that would seem a stretch. Just listen to our language: We talk about ‘empty land’ at the urban fringe (far from empty, it teems with non-human life), and ‘improving land (grading and filling and topping it with Jiffy Lubes). Most urban theory ignores non-human species. So do even the most progressive architecture schools, even as those graders keep scraping hills. Yet … a zoopolist movement, though poorly documented, is emerging in many U.S. cities, often for practical reasons. For example, conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, water-dependent environments. This has led some cities in arid regions to encourage native plant species, which need less maintenance and contribute to wildlife habitat. Central to this notion is the psychological need for biophilia–the life-enhancing sense of rootedness in nature.”
The idea is to put cities back into the context of wilderness, a context that really we cannot escape, we can only lose consciousness of it. Another quote on landscape urbanism:
“Landscape urbanism is a call to turn urban design inside out, starting with open spaces and natural systems, to structure urban form instead of buildings and infractructure … The idea of landscape urbanism reorders the values and priorities of the void over built form and celebrates indeterminacy and change over the static certainty of architecture. It recalls nature’s restorative cycles and tries to put them to work in the city.”
You might be interested to know that the new Conference Center in SLC gets a mention in Louv’s book for being “capped with a greenroof.” And I’ve noticed that the new humanities building at BYU–can’t think how it’s designated right now–has something of a greenroof. Of course, the HBLL has that grassy quad capping its addition. Meanwhile, several European cities are ahead of the U.S. in experimenting with landscape urbanism.
What’s necessary is to shift the narrative, or open up the narrative, urban landscaping and sustainable design, and biophilia. Which is why I raised my point earlier about how people who love nature might do better to write and speak in such a way as to make it possible for others to love. This is far better than posturing about how the only way this world can survive is if humans are wiped off the face of the earth, etc. Of course to do this one has to love people as well as plants, animals, and vibrant, star-studded skies.
April 19th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Oops! In that last paragraph, I meant, “write and speak ins uch a way as to make it possible for other to love what you love.”
April 22nd, 2006 at 11:57 pm
I’ve been doing some reading in Native Alaskan spirituality recently, and came across something interesting. It turns out that the main creation story, which is told in numerous ways across the arctic, is much different than the Adam and Eve story.
In an old Yupik legend a boy and a girl wake up in an empty village with no memories. Together they explore the village and try to make sense out of the tools they find. They start to devlop a working knowledge of their landscape and survival methods from experiementation. As they come to know the world better, they start to understand that they are one of the last creatures to be created, therefore, they are the youngest and in need of the wisdom of the other, older creatures. So they start to watch the rabbits and the ravens for both survival and spiritual wisdom.
This is a striking departure from the story of Adam and Eve where the humans are given “dominon” over the animals. It also differs from the teaching of Joseph Smith that animals are inhabited by intelligences of lesser complexity than those of humans. (Though I also seem to remember Smith hypothesizing that there are non-humanoid creatures with more complex intelligences than ours, but that may just be an old Dune book bubbling up.)
I wonder if this basic world view of dominion and spiritual complexity is at the root of Mormonism’s difficulty in engaging with environmental activism?
April 24th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Has anyone read the new book on Mormonism and the environment (Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment) produced by the BYU Religious Studies Center? I’d love to hear reactions.
I was humbled at this weekend’s Sunstone West symposium when an attendee pointed out how surprised he was that there was no session on environmentalism and Mormonism given that the symposium was held on Earth Day! Let’s make up for that. How about some of you who’ve been writing on this thread getting together and proposing a panel or two (or giving a paper in your own session) on this topic? Parker’s article has generated a couple of nice letters to the editor we’ll publish in the issue that’s about two weeks away from press. It’s time we stepped up this conversation.
Dan
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:17 pm
wake up america you are not the centre of the world or any Gods promised land/ over another