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Economics, Ecology, and the Roots of Western Faith: Perspectives from the Garden
By Robert R. Gottfried

Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. 165 pp. $47.50, $18.95 (pb).

The Greening of Protestant Thought
By Robert Booth Fowler

Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 242 pp. $34.95, $14.95 (pb).

Here are two additions to a burgeoning literature on Christianity and the
environmental crisis. Gottfried is an economist teaching at the University
of the South; his niche in this debate is an extended development of the
metaphor;,) of the garden, which, he judges, provides a critical crossover
between the Hebrew worldview and a sustainable economics. "Ultimately,
we are gardeners." Fowler, a political scientist at the University of
Madison Wisconsin, provides a historical analysis of "green Protestants"
in the United States since the first Earth Day. Both books are interesting
theological ventures by persons who are not professional theologians.
Perhaps, this also accounts for their readability.

Gottfried wants to recover our Judeo-Christian roots. "If we dig back far enough, to the beginning of the Common Era (the time of Christ), we find a civilization whose writing left us a rich legacy of thought and spirituality replete with economic, political, and ecological implications .... Simi-

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larly, a study of ecology reveals many principles that fit well with the Hebrew perspective and that offer economics the potential for a far more adequate understanding of the interrelationships between ecological vitality and human well being."

Essentially, the problem is that classical economics views humans as individual; self-maximizers and encourages what Gottfried calls "grasping" (almost like the Buddhist tanha). By so doing, economics overlooks the importance of human relationships socially and human relations to the land. Nature is nothing but resource and sink. Gottfried recommends the controlling metaphor of "the garden," which can mix human ingenuity with natural processes "to create systems where plants, animals, and humans may interact and flourish." We can "view gardens as managed natural systems." Humans can and ought to be gardeners, not graspers.

Following an introductory chapter, successive chapters examine an ecological nderstanding of nature, the Hebrew and early Christian concept of nature, nature and the economy, how spiritual malaise wreaks environmental destruction, and how humans can best manage their land for themselves and all of creation. There are many insights here; as an economist, Gottfried is quite knowledgeable about ecosystem science.

The gardener metaphor becomes overworked. "Landscapes where humans are present represent gardens created by a few or many gardeners Just as gardeners must choose how much land to clear for a garden, and where to ,place flowers and forests, so must society choose how to configure pits landscape." But this earth-garden is also a commons, and people should join in community to husband their commons. "Whereas isolated individuals inhabit the neoclassical [economic] world, people inhabit the Garden."

All this seems pleasantly pastoral, but a nagging question is whether the garden is too simple a metaphor for an industrial, technological, capitalist economy. ,I The metaphor comes out of an agrarian age; the Genesis myth is the founding story of an agricultural society whose identity and survival depended upon its tillable land. Gottfried argues that this remains true of every society: That sounds right, at first. We humans must eat. Yet, in the United States, the average bite of food eaten has traveled 1,200 miles. A century ago, most of the population were farmers; now a few percent of the labor force can feed the nation. Agriculture is only one sector of a vast world economy.

Will "garden economics" (the title of the closing chapter) serve as the founding story for the next millennium? The metaphor is rather rural, but life now is largely urban. (As an aside, wilderness is not much of a garden but an important conservation issue.) Gottfried offers as an overall conclusion: "Grasping for control brings about the destruction of the cosmos whereas letting go and trusting the Creator and the created order brings shalom." This seems vaguely reasonable as long as it is kept reasonably vague. Adam and Eve ought to have relaxed and trusted in the seedtime and harvest. What ruined the garden was "grasping for power," symbolized by

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Adam and Eve's overweening pride and misfortune, and maybe that is still the problem with transnational corporations.

But precisely what could this agrarian trusting in the fertility of the fields mean for industrial economists today, who must maintain control of their operations or go bankrupt? How is a business CEO to let go and trust the Creator to bring shalom? The answer lies in something like management without grasping, and the figure of speech that catches that is proposed to be gardening. "Ecosystems resemble solar powered, multiproduct factories." And factories should resemble ecosystems.

Well, yes and no. There are analogies: inputs, resources, outputs, processes, and products. There is so-called free market environmentalism. But there are many disanalogies: capital, labor, ownership, fair distribution of wages, markets, retirement plans, corporate buyouts, taxes, subsidies, NAFTA treaties, and on and on. Somehow, brought to such repeated focus, the weaknesses of the garden metaphor for the modern age begin to show through. To take a parallel book, which couples an economist with a theologian, there is considerably more analytical power in Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr.'s For the Common Good (1989). Nevertheless, Gottfried's book is a provocative introduction.

Fowler begins with contemporary green Protestantism, a summary history of recent decades, enlarged as the debate over the Bible as cause and cure of the ecological crisis, and the Christian environmental record. Subsequent chapters consider various green theologies within the diversity of Protestantism, such as stewardship, ecotheology, process thought, and ecofeminism. The final chapters look at practical Protestantism: goals, strategies, policies, institutional statements, and practices. Although the book features Protestantism, it also considers the views of many nonProtestants, including Roman Catholics and Jews, philosophers and secular humanists, with whom the views of green Protestants may be shared, compared, of contrasted. One repeated discovery is that Protestants make considerable appeal to environmental science; they in effect often take biological science as an authority, whereas in other controversies (such as debates over science and values or about evolutionary theory), Protestants have traditionally been more circumspect about science.

Fowler sums it up: "My argument has been that at all levels of Protestantism there is now a considerable consensus on the necessity of action by Christian people to address the environment. At the same time, we have seen that this consensus has its limits, especially among some fundamentalist Protestants, and that disagreements frequently occur over how to conceptualize and act on a Christian ecological agenda. As it faces the environment, Protestantism has proven once again that it deserves its reputation as a study in both unity and diversity."

This well-done study is full of detail and can serve as a general introduction to environmental thought. It is readable by laypersons. There is attention to the challenges of postmodernism (an issue that entirely escapes Gottfried). In many respects, Fowler's analysis is more thorough and more nuanced than that of Max Oelschlaeger's Caring for Creation

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(1994). Oelschlaeger presses all his evidence to fit his main claim: The environmental crisis cannot be solved without the help of the churches. Fowler can hear the diversity in Protestantism, and he is more frank about the voices) that do not fit such a picture. Another comparable study is James Nash's Loving Nature (1991); Nash too is arguing a thesis, accentuating the evidence that supports his case and arguing away the counterevidence. Fowler accepts messy evidence when he finds it.

HOLMES ROLSTON III
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO