How sustainable are we?

Part of being human is our capacity to transform the natural world around us. Although we rightly rejoice in our scientific knowledge, we are increasingly aware of the damage that we are causing as our technological powers have gone beyond harnessing forces and resources locally, to controlling and redirecting on a massive scale. If all the peoples of the world consumed resources at the rate of the current richest nations, key systems of the planet could not sustain the burden—for example, the climate, fresh water and soil. No longer can we rely simply on our ability to rescue ourselves technologically from problems of our own creation. Our past greenhouse gas emissions have set in train climatic consequences that we cannot stop; the best we can do is to put in place countermeasures to reduce emissions by 60–80% by the year 2050, to keep the increase in global temperature within tolerable bounds. The UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Report and the Stern Review indicate the large scale of the measures needed to achieve this (Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 2000; Stern, 2006).> No longer can we rely simply on our ability to rescue ourselves technologically from problems of our own creationOne of the most urgent needs facing global civilization is to find models by which to use our powers sustainably and, in turn, the values that should underlie them. I would argue that, among the many religious and cultural understandings of the human condition, the ancient texts of the biblical book of Genesis offer an important clue. Its two parallel accounts of creation describe humans, contrastingly, both as apart from the rest of nature, endowed with a task to “subdue the earth and fill it” ( Genesis 1: 27–28), and yet also as a part of nature, set …