Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities PDF
Preview Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities
Place, Ecology and the Sacred i ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Public Religion and the Urban Environment, Richard Bohannon Religions and Environments, Richard Bohannon Religion in Environmental and Climate Change, edited by Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann ii Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities Michael S. Northcott LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY iii Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Michael S. Northcott, 2015 Michael S. Northcott has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-9964-5 PB: 978-1-4411-3406-6 ePDF: 978-1-4411-1537-9 ePub: 978-1-4411-1457-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Losing and finding sacred place 15 2 Lament for a silent summer 47 3 Artificial persons and the political economy of place 65 4 Place, religion and resistance to corporate power 87 5 Wilderness, religion, and ecological restoration in the Scottish Highlands 103 6 Food sovereignty from Joshua to La Via Campesina 121 7 The moral geography of sustainable communities 137 8 Re-placing ethics in the city and the countryside 163 Notes 189 Index 223 v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The essays in this book reflect some years of learning to grow food in Durisdeer, a small village in Southwest Scotland. Durisdeer means ‘gate of the forest’ and is set in the Lowther Hills of Dumfrieshire. As I have dwelled and dug here on weekends and holidays, its buildings, hills, inhabitants and soils have revealed a gathering of forces aesthetic, ecological, historical and spiritual, which mark the village as what George McLeod, founder of the Iona Community, called a ‘thin’ place. An account of these forces in the phenomenology of place is woven into the Introduction as a frame for the book. The essays that follow also reflect teaching and research at New College on the Mound in Edinburgh, situated close by Edinburgh Castle, which stands as forbidding sentinel above the rocky crags that overshadow Princes Street Gardens. I am grateful to successive cohorts of students on my course Ecology, Ethics and Religion, which I have also taught at Dartmouth College and Duke University, who have stimulated my thinking. I am grateful to the publishers of previously published material incorporated into the book, and to book publishers and journal editors for permission to reproduce my work here in revised form. I am very grateful to my friends Jolyon Mitchell and George Reiss who read earlier drafts of the whole book and made very helpful suggestions on improving it. A version of Chapter 3 was previously published as ‘Artificial persons against nature: environmental governmentality, economic corporations, and ecological ethics’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1249 (2011), 104–117; a version of Chapter 4 was previously published as ‘Sabbaths, shamans and superquarries in Scotland: environment and religion in a contested landscape’ in Fred Gale and Michael M’Gonagle (eds), Nature, Production, Power: Towards an Ecological Political Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000), 17–34; a version of Chapter 5 was previously published as ‘Wilderness, religion, and ecological restoration in the Scottish Highlands’, Ecotheology 10 (2005), 382–399. Chapter 2 originated as a presentation at the conference ‘Green as a Leaf’ sponsored by the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of Nottingham University and Southwell Minster, and held in the Minster in April 2010; Chapter 6 was given as a paper at the CAFOD seminar on ‘Climate, Consumption and the Common Good’ held at Kings College London in May 2014, and I am grateful to participants for comments on the paper; parts of Chapter 8 were presented at the symposium ‘Landscapes of Hope: Towards the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’ at vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Edinburgh, 27 February 2014. Finally I am very grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research project ‘Caring for the Future Through Ancestral Time: Engaging the Cultural and Spiritual Presence of the Past to Promote a Sustainable Future’ (AH/K005456/1), which enabled me to bring this book to completion. Introduction There is a growing disconnect in contemporary life between people and the land, or what moderns call ‘nature’ or the nonhuman ‘environment’. This disconnect originates with rapid urbanisation, which began after 1800 with the industrial revolution, and the Enclosures, in England.1 Globally the majority of human beings now live in cities or suburban areas. This population shift also marks the withdrawal of most of the human population from participation in agriculture. In the UK and North America fewer than 2 per cent of the population are now involved in formal agriculture. The resultant disconnect between people and the earth has effects both on human beings and on other creatures. It might be expected that, with the withdrawal of human beings from rural occupations and from rural dwelling, the number of species would increase. Those formed in the Romantic aesthetic of nonhuman wilderness as sublime, and intrinsically valuable apart from its use to humans, assume that human beings inevitably reduce biodiversity through their food growing, fuel gathering and other consumption and production activities.2 But on the contrary the withdrawal of most human beings from rural pursuits and engagement in farming has been accompanied by a decline in the abundance of species, and in the quality of rural habitats. Key to this decline is the use of fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and heavy machinery, and the growing numbers of domesticated animals, sponsored by industrial agriculture. These practices displace human labour on the land, but at the same time they erode living soils and uncultivated areas, and hence the base of the food webs on which insects, birds and small mammals rely. Traditional mixed farms and smallholdings by contrast sustain a much larger range of species, and they produce more human food per hectare than modern industrial farming methods. What they do not produce is quantities of grains and oils sufficient to supply the industrial-scale facilities, including cattle, chicken and pig sheds and feed lots, in which the majority of the 5 billion globally domesticated animals and birds are cruelly incarcerated, and the industrial food factories that manufacture packaged and ‘refined’ foods beloved of supermarkets and food scientists, and increasingly associated with a range of human dietary disorders and diseases. The great disconnect between people and the land is promoted not only by industrial agriculture and rural depopulation but by planners and development companies, who devote a growing proportion of urban and 1
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