Ecology (from the Greek oi`ko~, ‘house’, ‘housekeeping’) was introduced into biology as a term in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel to describe ‘the science of the relationships of the organism to the outward world surrounding it’. He was picking up an idea put forward by Charles Darwin, who had maintained in his theory of evolution (published in 1859) that in the long run changes in the environment act as factors in selection.[1] The interplay between plant and animal species and their specific environments had been known from time immemorial. The first listings are to be found in Aristotle’s Historia Animalium and in Theophrastus’s Historia Plantarum. But systematic research on the subject began only in the Enlightenment era.
Ever since Haeckel, a distinction has been made between autecology (the environmental field of individual organisms) and synecology (the environmental field of plant or animal communities). Successes in biological environmental research led to the expansion of the term to include human ecology, the biosphere and the global environment as a whole, so that today the term ‘ecology’ also takes in the changes in the conditions for life on earth brought about by human beings, and in general use means preeminently the human ecosystem.
In biology, the science of individual organisms and species was expanded to include the network of relationships in ecosystems. In the framework of the spread of human civilization and population, ecology led to the systematic research into environmental destructions on the regional and the global levels (for example through the World Watch Institute in Washington and other observation systems), and to applied ecology in environmental protection, environmental ethics and environmental politics.
Human ecology also has a root of its own in the development of psychosomatic medicine. In human beings themselves it is impossible to make a strict distinction between subject and object, spirit and nature. For himself, the human being is never entirely an object. Even as the carrier of an illness, as a human being he remains a subject. Psychosomatic medicine began by ‘breaking the spell of scientific objectivity’ through ‘the introduction of the subject’—the sick person—into the pathology, and it developed holistic modes of observing the human person in his or her Gestaltkreis (Viktor von Weizsäcker)—Gestaltkreis being defined as ‘the unity of perception and motion’.[2] The discovery of the body-soul totality of the human being and the reintegration of bodily and sensory experiences of the self into the life of the person and the community became approaches through which to heal the disturbed relationship of human beings to their own nature. The ‘psychology of the environment’ (Hellpach), ‘psychological ecology’ (Lewin) and ‘Gestalt psychology’ investigate human modes of behaviour in specific human-environmental fields, in particular living areas and living spaces.[3] A complete human ecology will link this ecological psychology with the human changes to the ecosystem of the earth as the inner and the outer sides of the same processes.
In the human ecosystem a distinction is made between the primary and the secondary environment. The biosphere is designated as primary, the technosphere as secondary. Rapid urbanization leads to the replacement of the biosphere by the technosphere in the outer perspective, and in the inner perspective to a suppression of human bodiliness and sensoriness. The wealth of secondary experiences available through the media replaces the primary experiences of life.
Human ecology, psychosomatic medicine and ecological psychology have called in question the anthropocentrism of modern anthropology. According to Pico della Mirandola’s theses of 1486, animals are determined by nature, but human beings are created free.[4] Consequently, human beings have been set ‘at the centre of the world’. According to Johann Gottfried Herder (1770), ‘every animal has the sphere to which it belongs from birth’, but the human being has ‘a world of affairs and determinations’.[5] Toward every animal nature was a ‘loving mother’ but toward human beings ‘the severest of step-mothers’. Hence the human being must compensate his natural deficiencies through the conscious creation of his own world, a world in which he himself is the centre. The theory that the human being is uniquely ‘open to the world’,[6] is scientifically untenable: animals and human beings are adaptable in varying degrees but a dependence on the environment is pre-given. Implicit in this modern anthropocentrism was not least an androcentrism equating the woman with nature and the body and subjecting her to a male culture.[7] Androcentrism founders on the simple requirements of humanity and modern anthropocentrism on the simple fact that although the human being is dependent on nature, nature is not dependent on human beings.
The spread of scientific and technological civilization as we have known it up to now leads to the annihilation of more and more plant and animal species. Carbon dioxide and methane gases produce the ‘greenhouse effect’ which is going to change the climate of the earth momentously in the next few decades. The ground is being poisoned by chemical fertilizers and diverse pesticides. The rain forests are being cut down, the pastures are being overgrazed, the deserts are growing. In the last sixty years, the population of the world has increased fourfold and in the year 2050 will total between eight and ten billion people. The required means of living (food, water, and so on), as well as the production of waste, will increase in proportion. The urbanization of humanity has grown from 29 percent in 1950 to over 50 percent today.[8] The human ecosystem has lost its equilibrium and is on the way to the destruction of the earth and hence to its own destruction. The slowly spreading crisis is given the name ‘environmental pollution’, and people are seeking technological solutions for it. But in my view it is in actual fact a crisis of the whole total project of modern civilization. Human destruction of nature is based on a disturbed human relationship to nature. Unless there is a fresh orientation of this society’s fundamental values, we shall not succeed in finding a new practice in our dealings with nature; unless human beings arrive at a new way of understanding themselves, and at an alternative economic system—then an ecological collapse of the earth can easily be extrapolated from the facts and trends of the present crises. In earlier times, ecological catastrophes could be attributed to natural causes—for example, the annihilation of the dinosaurs. In those cases nature was able to restore the diversity of living things or develop it further. But the present ecological crisis is manmade, and whether, and how, life on earth can be restored after the ‘ecological death’ is uncertain; what is at all events certain is that the human race will not survive it.[9]
The living relationship of a human society to its natural environment is determined by the techniques by means of which human beings acquire from nature their means of living, and give back to it their waste products. This metabolism with nature is as natural as breathing in and breathing out. It is based on reciprocity. But since the beginning of modern times it has been determined more and more one-sidedly only by human beings, without consideration for nature. Nature counts on the one hand as the provider of the means for living and the reservoir of raw materials, and on the other hand as a rubbish dump. As a consequence of increased consumption in the countries of the First World, and of over-population in the Third, the non-regenerative sources of energy are dwindling and the natural foundations of human life are being used up.
In human technologies the natural sciences are involved. Technology is applied science. At some point all scientific discoveries come to be applied technologically, even if they are harmful, for as Francis Bacon proclaimed ‘knowledge is power’. The sciences provide humanity with the knowledge of how to dispose over nature. That is the concern behind scientific investigation. The sciences are what Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker called machtförmig—they are a form of violence not only in their application but already epistemologically: nature is constrained to provide an answer to human questions.
Technologies and sciences are always developed from particular human interests and concerns. They don’t exist value-free. Interests precede them, guide them, and press their results into service. These human interests, for their part, are regulated by the society’s fundamental values and convictions. These values and convictions are whatever the members of a particular society consider to be a matter of course, because in their system they are self-evident. If, in an ecosystem which links a human society with its natural environment, nature begins to die, the logical outcome is a crisis in the whole system, which cannot be confined to any one of its parts: crises in technologies, in the sciences, in attitudes to life and in the society’s fundamental values.
What interests and values dominate modern civilization? It is manifestly the will to rule which drives modern people to seize power over nature—the nature of the earth and their own physical nature. The increase in human power and the securing of power is the driving force behind progress, which is always only measured quantitatively, economically, financially and in military terms, and the costs of which are pushed off on to nature. The modern civilization originating in Europe is a civilization of expansion, both towards other countries and towards nature. Lost is the wisdom of self-restraint and the preservation of an equilibrium between culture and nature, which was observed earlier in ‘premodern’ or non-European societies (nowadays called ‘underdeveloped’). Today it is lost also among people who desire a Western standard of living. The expansion and spread of this culture of domination is accelerating, and in proportion to this acceleration ecological catastrophes in all countries are increasing.
This gives rise to the decisive questions of the present time. Is the industrial society unavoidably the ‘end of nature’, or must nature be protected against the industrial society? Is the biosphere the indispensible foundation of the human technosphere, or can the technosphere be expanded in such a way that the biosphere as we have known it hitherto becomes dispensable? Ought we to protect nature from us human beings for its own sake, or must we rebuild the earth into an artificial world like a spaceship, in which human beings who are then adapted to it by means of genetic manipulation can live?
The modern culture of expansion and the resulting ecological crisis have emerged from Christianity in its Western form. Is Christianity a factor in the ecological crisis? There are four points to be discussed in this connection:
1. The biblical requirement that the human being should rule over the earth (the dominum terrae) is often made responsible for human beings’ seizure of power over nature, and for the boundlessness of their will to power: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion’ (Gen. 1.28). True, this text is 2,500 years old, and the modern expansion culture came into being only four hundred years ago; but torn out of its context, this human destiny to rule has acted as a legitimation down to the present day.
2. The dominum terrae rests on the idea of the human being—and the human being alone—as being made in the image of God (Gen. 1.26). Whereas all other creatures display traces of God (vestigia Dei), human beings have been created to be God’s image, representative and governor on earth (imago Dei). It is from this notion that Christian cultural history has moulded the concept of the human person. The human being is not just part of nature. He is also ‘person’, called forth by God and responsible to God. This lends him his human dignity, the dignity which distinguishes him from all other living things. This gives him an inalienable quality as determining subject. As the subject of perception and will, the human being is God’s image on earth, and superior to all other created beings, which he can make the objects of that perception and will. Although according to the biblical traditions, this special human determination has validity only within the community of creation (so that it is only as a part of nature that the human being is ‘person’), in Western cultural history this destiny has nevertheless legitimated the subjugation of nature and the instrumentalization of bodiliness.[10]
3. In spite of the whole primary theocentric thrust of the biblical traditions, the concepts of the imago Dei and the dominium terrae still reveal a secondary anthropocentrism. The creation of other beings on earth points towards the creation of the human being, according to Genesis 1, and according to Genesis 2–3 human beings are at the centre of the Garden of Eden, and are also the centre of the curse which falls on all flesh because of their guilt. Israel’s experience of God is primarily the experience of God in the happenings of human history. At the centre of Christianity is faith in the becoming-human of God. In European cultural history Christian anthropocentrism slowly pushed out the cosmocentrism of the ancient world and prepared the way for the anthropocentric project of modern civilization.[11]
4. What had the greatest influence of all, however, was Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheism. Through it, God and the world were divided. God was set over against the world as its transcendent creator and Lord, and the world was robbed of all the divine mysteries other religions revered in the nature of the earth. When monotheism robbed nature of its magic, it prepared the way for the world’s secularization and its degradation into being the object of human beings.[12]‘Mother nature’ became ‘unclaimed property’ which belonged to whoever first took possession of it.
In the history of European culture, the divine was seen for preference in the realm of what was spiritual over against what was material, in what was spiritual rather than what was bodily, in the historical rather than the natural, and not least in the male rather than the female. It follows from this that Christianity, viewed as a part of cultural history, is a factor in the ecological crisis into which the Western expansion culture is bringing the earth. What follows from this recognition is the need for Christianity, its spirituality and its theology, to be reformed, if we are to find Christian ways out of this crisis.
On the way to an ecologically responsible theology, what will be put in the forefront are the cosmological aspects of the doctrine of God and of anthropology.
Modern monotheism has stressed God’s transcendence. Panentheistic philosophy[13] tried with dialectical definitions to find the mediation between transcendentalism on the one hand and pantheism on the other. Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy tried to grasp the transcendent immanence of God in the interplay between God’s primordial nature and his consequent nature.[14] According to patristic and modern Trinitarian theology, creation is a Trinitarian process in which the Father creates the world through the Son in the Spirit.[15] Everything that is, is therefore from God the Father, through the Son, and in God the Spirit. Through his Spirit, God is present in each of the beings he has created and in their community of creation. Everything living lives from ‘the source of life’, the divine Spirit. The existence-sustaining and life-giving Spirit is poured out on the whole creation and forms the creation community.
Old Testament Wisdom literature already taught that the Spirit of God is to be perceived and revered in all things: ‘The Spirit fills the world’ (Wis. 1.7). ‘Lord thou art the lover of life and thy immortal Spirit is in all things’ (12.1). Medieval Christian mysticism also maintained this pneumatological view of creation, as we can see from the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen.[16] If the creative, life-giving divine Spirit is in all things, then the Spirit is also the soul of the world and extends over all material things, just as the soul extends throughout the whole body.[17] For the efficacy of God’s Spirit in the world, perichoresis is an appropriate concept. This is a term in trinitarian theology for mutual indwelling and reciprocal interpenetration which brings out the unique unity of the triune God. The community of God with his creation corresponds to the inner community of the Father, the Son and the Spirit: God’s Spirit is in creation, and ‘creation lives and moves in him’ (Acts 17.28). To this the community of created beings with one another also corresponds: they exist with one another, for one another, and in one another. Only the Spirit of God which sustains all things subsists from itself; created things do not exist from themselves but from one another and for one another. Unilateral rule is not the principle of life; it is mutuality in relationships. Everywhere life is communication in communion. ‘The fellowship God’, as the Holy Spirit was also called, creates the coming-to-community of created beings, as well as the differentiation between their own particular kinds. The words of creation differentiate and specify things, the creator Spirit binds them together, just as in human speech different words can be spoken in the same breath.
The immanence of the transcendent divine Spirit means that it is possible and necessary to perceive God in all things. According to the tradition of natural theology, this is an indirect, mediated knowing of God.[18] It leads to fellowship with God by way of the fellowship of creation. It does not save, but it makes us wise. For a time, natural theology was considered to be a rival to revealed theology, and in the 1930s Karl Barth therefore fought against it. But natural theology is neither a rival to revealed theology nor its preliminary stage; it is its necessary consequence. The ‘cognition’ of God in all things can only be a ‘re-cognition’ of the God who has first of all disclosed himself in his revelation. But on the basis of his revelation there must then come to be a recognition of God in all created things; otherwise God will not be perceived as God.
Earlier, in ‘natural theology’, people looked for a second way of access to God. Today people seek a new access to nature. If we understand nature as God’s creation, all things have a transcendent inner side, and our experiences of them can become experiences of God, if we ask not only how they appear to us but also how they are in the eyes of God. They then acquire for us their divine dignity so that we respect and treat them as ‘fellow creations’. ‘Nothing created is so far from God as not to have Him in itself.’[19] Some people have talked about a ‘sacramental presence’ of God in the world and have declared the world to be the sacrament of God’s presence. Others have talked about ‘the world as parable’ of God, so as to discover the ‘traces of God’ in things.[20] It is also helpful to decipher all realities as real symbols of their primal foundation and its future. In a transferred sense created things ‘proclaim’ to other created things their common creator.[21] According to the psalms, ‘the heavens praise thy wonders, O Lord’ (Ps. 89:5), all the natural elements and all living things ‘praise the Lord’ (Ps. 148), ‘the heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork’ (Ps. 19:1, Job 26). ‘To seek God in all things’ is the one side of Christian cosmos spirituality, ‘God awaits us in things’ is the other side.[22] But this means that on the foundation of belief in God, God can be experienced in things with all the human senses. It is not only the direct human experience of the self which has the depths of self-transcendence; every objective and every social experience can become the experience of God. Over against the faith which ‘comes from hearing’, all the senses will then be sensitized to perceive the presence of God in all things, the senses of touch, feeling and taste as well. Christian mysticism, as its poems and songs show, was already always on the search for an ecological ‘aesthetics of nature’ of this kind.[23]
Today the rediscovery of the cosmic dimensions of Christology is urgently required.[24] In a post-industrial society, ideas belonging to the pre-industrial world are returning in a different way. In the ancient world the theme of cosmic Christology was the conflict between ‘Christ and the powers’. It was the world of feared and revered gods and demons. Into this world the cosmic Christ brought the freedom of faith. Today the conflict with which we have to do is Christ and the cosmic catastrophe. It is the world of ecological crises: Christ and the rubbish dumps. The theology of modern times reduced the relevance of Christ to the salvation of human beings and the salvation of human souls, and by doing so it delivered up everything else to a region outside the bounds of salvation. Cosmic Christology counted as a myth not open to existential interpretation. But if Jesus is the Christ of God, we must also think of him as the all-reconciling reality, as Paul did (1 Cor. 8.6) and, following him, the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians. Faith in the cosmic Christ discovers the reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth (Col. 1.20), and accepts everything created as beings for which Christ died, and which he leads toward resurrection. The war of human beings against nature must be replaced by the reconciliation of human beings with nature, and of nature with human beings.
What follows from this is the cosmic orientation of the church of Christ. The church’s restriction to the human world and the salvation of souls was a perilous abbreviation. The church has to represent the whole cosmos, so it must bring before God the ‘groanings of creation’ (Rom. 8.19ff.) as well as hope for the coming of God to everything created. The non-human creations are members of the church just as are the angels, so the church must bring human beings into community with both the non-human creation and with the angels. Consequently believers will draw reverence for all created being into their worship of God: ‘I am the light which is over all,/ I am the universe, the universe has come from me/ and the universe returns to me again. / Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up a stone and you will find me.’[25]
Not least, the consequence of this is a non-anthropocentric anthropology. Behind the anthropocentrism of the modern world is a cosmology that has gone wrong, and a theology that has been surrendered.[26] As a result the human technosphere is supposed to replace the natural biosphere, and the human being is to become the God and lord of his world. The reversal in anthropology will once again see human beings and their world as embedded in the wider cosmic cohesions of the conditions for life on earth and in the evolution of all the living, and will stress that human existence is dependent on nature. We are indebted to modern feminist theology for dissipating the androcentrism inherent in most modern philosophical and theological anthropologies. Philosophical and theological process thinking offers a metaphysics and epistemology which are no longer subject-orientated. Finally, new cultural reform movements are leading to the rediscovery of the body and the senses in a world of subject-less information and secondary experiences acquired by way of the media. Many meditation and therapeutic centres are developing a new spirituality of nature and the body, and of the senses that mediate between the two.
Ecological ethics is only in its beginnings, but at least four different approaches can be detected.
Albert Schweitzer coined this term in 1919, in affirmation of Tolstoy’s ideas and in critical dissociation from Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. In ‘reverence for life’, he found a term which, reaching beyond the relationships between human beings, was well-suited to describe the appropriate attitude of human beings to all the living. ‘Through the ethics of reverence for life we arrive at a spiritual relationship to the universe.[27] He believed that this ethics was an extended ethics of love and a philosophical insight into the ethics of Jesus, and that this was therefore the true ethics of peace. For him the foundation is the mystical experience of ‘the great will for life’ manifested in all living things. There is no ‘less valuable’ life, let alone valueless life. Experience teaches that ‘I am the life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.’ Schweitzer interprets this experience that there is life only at the expense of other life as ‘the riddling self-dichotomy’ of ‘the great will to live’.[28] Human ‘reverence for life’ manifests the will ‘which through us will do away with the self-dichotomy of the will to life’.[29] The love that is prepared for co-living and co-suffering heals the contradictions of life. Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life in all living things is intended to overcome modern egocentricism, but it nevertheless maintains at the same time the fundamental ideas of modern anthropocentrism: only the human being knows reverence for life. ‘Nature knows no reverence for life.’ Through his love, the human being is to ‘do away with’ the self-dichotomy of the will for life in the conflict of living things among each other. The human being is destined to be the redeemer of nature: ‘Wherever you are, there should be redemption, as far as this is within your capacity, redemption from the misery which the self-divided will for life has brought into the world.’[30] These ideas belong to the emotional elevation of humanity, a feature of the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century. They break down in the face of the need of human beings themselves for redemption, since human beings are much more the cause of the problem than they could be factors in its solution.
In Germany, a detailed outline of environmental ethics was first provided by Alfons Auer.[31] It is an ecological ethics resting on a consciously anthropocentric basis. Auer considers the path from the ancient world’s cosmocentrism to modern anthropocentrism irreversible and an inevitable consequence of Christianity. Nevertheless, his ‘choice in favour of anthropocentrism’ is directed against anthropocentrism in its modern boundless and unbridled form. His theological theocentrism justifies anthropocentrism but at the same time brings into play the limitations and constraints designed for the preservation of God’s creation. The human being is rooted in nature and is a member of nature. But in the human being, and only in him, ‘nature comes to itself and only in him is its meaning fulfilled’.[32] Consequently, the human being rightly knows himself to be ‘the centre of nature’ and its ‘lord’. Only the human being has self-esteem and is ‘his own purpose (Selbstzweck)’. That is why he has been given a claim to ‘sole representation in the cosmos’. ‘The whole of non-human nature must be integrated into the human orbit of meaning’,[33] for the teleological world order points all things towards the human being, which they have to serve in order to arrive at the meaning of their existence. Auer rejects all postmodern attempts to find new cosmocentrism. Christianity seems for him so fused with the modern world that any criticism of that world has to be taken as a criticism of Christianity. Even nuclear energy was created by God, with the intention that human beings would discover it and apply it responsibly for the furtherance of their existence.[34]
Auer’s apologetics neglect what he himself calls the ‘rooting of the human being in nature’. His cosmic anthropocentrism breaks down because of the simple fact that nature was there before human beings, is there apart from human beings, and will still be there after them. The term ‘environment’, like the phrase ‘our natural foundations of life’, is anthropocentrically determined. It conduces to a destruction of the environments of all other living things and to a withdrawal from nature of its own value.
We find a countering outline in Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich’s physiocentric ethic of a shared world.[35] The human being is not the measure of all things; nature is. The misleading expression ‘environment’—the world surrounding us—should therefore be replaced by the relativizing expression ‘the shared world’, for human beings are ‘related’ to the natural world they share, ‘animals and plants, earth, water, air and fire’, as a part of natural history. If human beings seek ‘peace with nature’, they must respect nature for its own sake, not for its usefulness to them themselves. That does not mean that nature should be conceded the same rights as human beings, for human beings are dependent on what they draw from nature, as is also the case with the food chain. But it does mean that we should recognize nature’s own values and rights and then protect them in such a way that the civil state under law becomes a community under law with nature. Meyer-Abich seeks a physiocentric image of human beings which allows them to arrive at true humanity not just in the human community but already in the natural community with animals and plants. Experience of the self is found first not in social experience but in the experience of nature, through the ‘local’ senses of touch, taste and temperature, as we can see in every child. He therefore demands a new development of the senses which will further the perception of the natural surrounding world and also of a technology compatible with nature. For human beings to limit their use of energy is part of the minimization of violence towards nature. In the community under law between human beings and nature which we have to strive for, animals, plants, earth air and water have to be protected from the aggressive action of human beings. Every serious intervention in nature and its ecosystem must be justified. Nature is not ‘unclaimed property’. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves. Yet Meyer-Abich himself breaks through his own physiocentrism with the anthropocentric thesis that in the human being ‘nature comes to speak and hence comes to itself’: ‘It depends on us whether nature takes the chance for freedom which it has in the human being, or misses it.’[36] What Meyer-Abich maintains is not a naive concept of nature but a normative one, as the term is used colloquially in the words ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, in analogy to ‘human’ and ‘inhuman’.
Finally, there are approaches to a theocentric creation ethics. Every theology starts from the assumption that neither the human being nor nature is the centre of the world; the centre is God, and the world is his creation. This decentralizes the relationship between human beings and nature. In recognizing their creator, human beings understand themselves and all other natural beings as being ‘fellow creatures’ in a community of creation.[37] This comes out best in the covenant with Noah: ‘Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature’ (Gen. 9.9-10). Fundamental human rights derive from the covenant ‘with us’—the rights of coming generations derive from the covenant ‘with us and our descendants after us’—the fundamental rights of nature derive from the covenant ‘with us and our descendants after us and with every living creature’. Before God, the creator and preserver of life, the present generation, the generations to come, and every living creature—different though these all are—are partners in the same divine covenant. They therefore enjoy the same dignity and have in each case their own rights. Other living things are not human property, and human beings are not just part of nature. All living things are God’s partners in the covenant, and in this covenant with God they must make a covenant with each other for the reciprocal furtherance of life and the shared guarantee of survival. In a creation covenant like this, it is a matter of balancing out the different concerns in life in common responsibility before God. God’s covenant with all living things constitutes the creation community, in which both the fundamental rights of creation and human rights must be formulated. Every human community is a community with nature too. Consequently, the nature involved has a claim to the protection of its own rights in the framework of this human community. This federalist idea about the relationship between human beings and nature says that anyone who destroys other living things without a reason is destroying the covenant with God; anyone who pushes off the costs of life on to coming generations is breaking the covenant with God. The covenant with Noah, which is intended to guarantee life on earth, requires codification of the contract with the society and the generation contract and also the codification of humanity’s contract with nature.
Human rights are always formulated and agreed upon in the face of threatening dangers. The individual human rights drawn up in 1948 were a response to the question about the liberation of human beings from state oppression. The social and economic human rights of 1966 pioneered ways for freeing human beings from hunger and misery. Correspondingly, today the nations must recognize and respect the rights of nature so that nature may be protected from human oppression. Where nature is delivered over to human violence, human laws must protect it.[38] The ‘World Charter for Nature’—proclaimed by the Central Assembly of the United Nations on October 29, 1982—was a first step in this direction: ‘Every form of life is unique, warranting respect, regardless of its worth to man.’[39]Here for the first time a theological framework—creature-fellow creature-creator—is used in a secular German statute. The expression “fellow-creature” indicates the creation community of human beings and animals, the word ‘responsibility’ appeals to the human being’s special position in this community. The last sentence makes the author of any attack on an animal accountable. The next step logically is to apply this Animal Protection Act to other sectors of the natural world too, and to agree that:
1. Nature, whether animate or inanimate, has a right to existence, that is to say, to preservation and development.
2. Nature has a right to the protection of its ecosystems, species and populations in their interrelatedness.
3. Animate nature has a right to the preservation and development of its genetic inheritance.
4. Living things have a right to a species-appropriate life, including reproduction, in the appropriate ecosystem.
5. Interventions in nature must be justified. They are only permissible if the conditions for the intervention have been established in a democratically legitimated proceeding and with regard to the rights of nature, if the concern behind the intervention is weightier than the concern for an undiminished preservation of the rights of nature, and if the intervention is not excessive. After any damage, nature must be restored once more whenever possible.
6. Rare ecosystems, especially if they are especially rich in species, must be put under absolute protection. The extermination of species is forbidden.[40]
It is only if the declared and generally accepted human rights are no longer based solely on the dignity of human beings but on the dignity of all created beings that they will lose their anthropocentric character, which is conducive to the destruction of nature. It is only then that they can be related to nature’s own rights and provide a framework under law for the community of the living shared by human civilization and the nature of this earth.
The community of creation is always a community under law. The biblical and Christian traditions stress the special position of human beings in creation and their special responsibility. But there was always the more comprehensive horizon of the community under law linking together human beings, other living things and the earth, and that is the rootedness of all things in the rights of the creator to his creation.
4. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man (1486). ↵
5. Johann Gottfried Herder, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1770 (Berlin: Voss, 1959), 18. ↵
9. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random, 1989). ↵
12. Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, 295. ↵
The Holy Spirit is life-giving life,
Mover of the universe and the root of all created.
He purifies the universe from all impurity,
He cancels the guilt and anoints the wounds.
Thus he is radiant life, worthy of praise,
waking and reawakening the universe. ↵
17. Thomas Aquinas, STh I q 8a 2 ad 3 ↵
18. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, 189–208 ↵
19. Thomas Aquinas, STh I q 8. ↵
21. Oswald Bayer, Schöpfung als Anrede (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990). ↵
23. Gernot Böhme, Für eine Naturästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1989). ↵
25. The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77. ↵
According to the old anthropocentric idea, only human beings are persons or determining subjects; everything else is a thing or an object. But are animals ‘things’ for the human people who possess them and can make use of them? The German Animal Protection Act of August 18, 1986, has struck out a new path here: ‘The purpose of this law is to protect the life and well-being of the animal as a fellow creature, out of human responsibility for it. No one may inflict pain, suffering or damage on an animal without sufficient cause.’[41]Albert Lorz, Tierschützgesetz: Kommentar (Munich: Beck, 1987); Gotthard M. Teutsch, Mensch und Tier, Lexikon der Tierschützethik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). ↵