LAUSR

“Why is Nature not a Mother, but a Stepmother who refuses to feed us?” Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century Russian philosopher, asked after a particularly horrible famine. “Why is it natural to ask why something exists, yet unnatural to ask why the living die?” he continued. Reflecting on the meaning of life itself, he further wondered, “Is this all for the participation of all in material comfort, or in the work of understanding the blind force which brings hunger, disease, and death?” “This is why we must transform Nature into a life-giving force,” he triumphantly concluded. Nikolai Fedorov was a rather strange fellow. He has been called the father of transhumanism and the Socrates of Moscow; he was even an inspiration for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who famously went on to pioneer modern rocketry and astronautics. But he is not often credited as a forerunner in deeply grounded Christian ecotheology. Two questions often rouse the Russian imagination conjointly when it comes to the problems in the world: (1) What must be done? (2) Who is to blame? Fedorov, like many Russians of his time, was acutely aware of these questions and, like many people today, answered: we are to blame. Christian ecotheologies often come to this conclusion—and even more often return to the paradigmatic relationship between humanity and nature and how this relationship is seriously breached. Typically, the logic is this: Christianity at some point betrayed the biblical mandate of stewardship in favor of dominion. Dominionism is the cause of empire, industry, exploitation, as well as the total and complete rupture of humanity from nature. It is the source of our alienation from nature and the cause of our imagining ourselves as lords of the world over and against nature, something to be subdued—or, to the word, dominated. There are, against this, better models for ecological living. Christians, as mandated in the Book of Genesis, ought to be stewards of the environment and live in harmony with nature. This, of course, is something I agree with fully. But the line does not stop there. What is to be done? We are to become stewards of the environment and live in more-perfect harmony with nature. Christian ecotheologies—from Lynn White Jr. to Leonardo Boff all the way to Pope Francis— very frequently conclude there is something even more basic at its root. The source of our problem may be an ideology of dominionism, but the fruits of this ideology are something else: the globalization of technology, or more ominously as Pope Francis put it in Laudato Si, “the globalization of the technocratic paradigm.”