What if the Earth Could Speak?

What if the Earth could speak? What would it say? Would it laugh with joy or cry out in pain? This is a hard concept for us to grasp. Increasingly people are beginning to realize that thinking of the Earth as the third rock from the sun is a product of old ways of thinking and also a major problem. It is more helpful to think of Earth as an interdependent set of communities that move through cycles of life in fragile ecosystems.

Humans represent one system of life but not the only one. All living things that breathe, share the same molecules of oxygen and carbon. The water that makes up most of the human body is the same water in which fish swim. Earth includes rocks but it is primarily a place of life. That’s why we call it Creation. When the Earth speaks, it is the communities of the Earth that are speaking. As the ancient wisdom of Job puts it:

“ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you. (Job 12: 7-8)

Over the last 50 years, we have been struggling to find language to describe the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. Rachel Carson cautioned us about chemicals and silence in her book The Silent Spring. Aldo Leopold encouraged us to recognize ourselves as one part of the biotic community in his Sand County Almanac. Increasingly people are using the language of ecojustice to call for a different relationship between ourselves and the rest of Creation.

Ecojustice calls for a right relationship among all the communities of Earth. It takes as its starting point that humans do not stand apart from Creation but are one integral part of a complex system of living relationships. Ecojustice generates standards of sustainability, sufficiency, participation and solidarity that need to be met for justice to be achieved.

How do these standards apply? In Alberta, an area the size of Florida is being mined for heavy oil saturating ancient layers of sand. This is four times larger than Vancouver Island. Much of the oil is mined using steam and processed with water. The oil mining operations are licensed to divert 349 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River, twice the amount used by the city of Calgary. The oil companies are required to rehabilitate the mined land to the state of its previous biological productivity but since none of this has yet happened on a large scale, the standard of sustainability has not yet been achieved.

The standard of sufficiency seems the most difficult test to meet. It seems obvious that Canadians are extremely wasteful of both fossil fuels and water. The only country more wasteful is the United States, which is the destination of most of this mined oil. Surely only a radical change in consumption patterns could justify an extraction process that produces five times as many greenhouse gases as conventional light crude.

These are only two of the four standards and so far we are not meeting them. The oil industry is the economic engine of western Canada and nobody wishes for rain during a parade. However, the claims of Creation for ecojustice are serious ones. When Earth catches a fever, everyone gets sick.