What Do We Owe Nature?

Fri, Sep 22

“We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”  

– Andy Goldsworthy

From Earth First! to Extinction Rebellion, committed young activists have put their lives at stake to protect and defend the natural world. Ecoterrorism is even discussed today in the pages of the New York Times and the London Review of Books, and makes the subject of a critically lauded indie thriller. If democratic politics, the market, and activism have all failed us, some argue, we must turn to direct action.

The appeal of sacrificial violence is not new. Daniel McGowan and the members of the Earth Liberation Front, the subject of today's film, If a Tree Falls, were inspired by the daring and sacrifice of previous activists' deeds, from tree sits and protests to sabotage. Beyond radical environmentalism, activists can look to the less-discussed not-so-nonviolent aspects of the Civil Rights movement, the bloody fights for working conditions and labor rights in the early decades of the 20th century, and to a long line of martyrs and ascetics, including St. Francis, willing to sacrifice their lives for a higher cause.

The Earth "cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her," writes Pope Francis in Laudato Si'. So what do we do? What do we owe nature, after more than two hundred years of bloody plunder? Is there any possible way for us today to make right the sins of our mothers and fathers?