I recently read James Hoggan's Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (2009) and am about to begin Stephen H. Schneider's Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate (2009). These, and all this talk about the big "Global Warming Hoax" which I wrote about on here has got me thinking about our home: Midgard. In the Heathen scheme of the cosmos, this is the human enclosure, and Asgard is the home of the gods. I will speak of the Outlands momentarily.Everyone knows that Paganism is earth-centered religion. All original religion (ethnic religion) used to be earth-centered. And no surprise: the people lived very close to nature. Heathenism even has an entire tribe of gods associated with nature: the Vanir, as contrasted with the gods of the sky, the Æsir. The Vanir are distinctly gods of earth and fertility. However, the whole "nature-worship" thing is considered an evil by Abrahamic monotheistic thought. People should, they tell us, be looking to a god outside the world, not gods who are part of it.
Revealed religion, Book religion, that is, Abrahamic monotheism, turned that whole association with nature on its head.
The extreme-conservative Christian-dominated GOP is, not surprisingly, still largely hostile to nature and the environment, as recent statistics demonstrate. A Pew Research Poll from May 2008 illustrates the problem: 84% of Democrats say the earth is warming. The percentage of Republicans is 49%. Asked whether humans are responsible for that warming, 58% of Democrats said yes, a mere 27% of Republicans.
It gets worse when you follow the dollars. Looking at "oil-and-gas industry contributions to U.S. politicians" we see these stood at 60/40 between Republicans and Democrats in 1990; by the time of the Bush Administration they were at 80/20. The picture from the coal industry is similarly bleak: 90/10 between Republicans and Democrats by the middle Bush years (Hoggan 2005:152-153. 169). It is no secret to anyone that the Bush Administration was hostile not only to science in general, but to the environment in particular. We all remember, I think, the ridiculous specter of an EPA that insisted it did not have a mandate to protect the environment.
In fact, statistics show, the same Republican senators who oppose gay marriage and stem cell research also oppose environmental legislation.[1] In May 2000 the Family Research Council actually lumped "population control, economic redistribution and the environment" and called environmentalism a "socialist-leaning movement" and noted with some degree of paranoia that the 30th Annual Earth Day "happens to coincide with communist dictator Nikolai Lenin's birthday."[2]
It gets crazier, believe it or not. In 2000 the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, a new coalition of conservative religious leaders that offered a "Judeo-Christian" alternative on the environment.
The Council held a press conference in Washington, D.C., April 17 to release a document called the "Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship." Endorsers include James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, TV preacher D. James Kennedy, the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, Christian Reconstructionist author George Grant and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Conservative Catholics included the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life and the Acton Institute's Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest who spearheaded the Cornwall Declaration.
The religious leaders charge that liberal environmentalists "elevate concern for nature above concern for people." They deny that global warming is occurring, argue that there is no overpopulation crisis and insist there is no evidence for rampant disappearance of species.[3]
It is no surprise then that in the 2007 National Environmental Scorecard released...by the League of Conservation Voters, John McCain, Republican presidential candidate in 2008, received
a score of ZERO. McCain was the only member of Congress to skip every single crucial environmental vote scored by the organization, posting a score lower than Members of Congress who were out for much of the year due to serious illnesses--and even lower than some who died during the term. By contrast, the average Member of Congress scored a 53 in 2007. McCain posts a lifetime score of only 24.[4]
And Sarah Palin is clearly no friend of science; in her anti-intellectual worldview there is room for neither evolution nor human-caused global warming.[5]
But we polytheists realize that live in a world filled with the divine. The gods, the spirits, are all around us, a part of this world we live in, not apart from it, not outside. I don't know about you, but I take comfort from this cosmological scheme. From a Heathen perspective, what is outside of the community is not to be trusted. What comes from outside is a stranger. Those are the Outlands (Utgarðr). Why put your gods in the Outlands? The gods should be part of the community. This so-called Judeo-Christian alternative elucidated above seems to be from the Outlands. The lack of concern shown for the human enclosure (Midgard) is obscene.
But in polytheistic religions, the gods are part of the community.
This is particular true for Heathens, who see the gods as not just deities but founders, originators, even ancestors in some sense. You want to talk about having personal relationships with gods? Not to be too flippant about it, but "we got yer personal relationships right here."
I think it's fair to say that from a certain perspective, the ancients understood nature better than we do. Oh sure, we have science, we understand the science of it quite well. Any high school graduate knows more about environmental science than the wisest of the ancients. But scientists don't generally live among the trees, among the wild that they study. Much of what we read is ivory tower intellectualism, as separated from nature as the god of monotheism is from the world. An academic might understand nature on one level but be completely unable to survive when thrown into it.
I am not denigrating science. Far from it. It is not that science has no role, but that it has its own role. There are some things science cannot explain, things science is not designed to explain, just as there are things religion cannot explain. They each have their own realm, necessary but different, like men and women.
The immediacy of nature is lost to most moderns. I say this every fall, but think of what the fall must have meant to our ancestors? They didn't just pile up wood to have some nice cozy, romantic fires over the winter, but to survive. To stay alive. They didn't go hunting to add some spice to their diet, or because it was a sport. They hunted to survive. I might look at a deer and admire its beauty, its sleek lines. They'd be looking as well at a piece of food with four legs. I don't see it first and foremost as food. I don't have to. I have a grocery store down the street.
That's not to say they objectified the animals they killed. Nature was part of their grand narrative, a narrative inseparable from their own. They understood the role of the deer in nature. They thanked it for giving its life to feed them. That early humans, pre-monotheistic humans, gave a lot of thought to what they were doing when they hunted, the careful rearrangement of bones on the altar, shows that they understood things on a level lost to most of us. Life taken for life to continue, and a return of that life force to the gods who provided that life in the first place.
They say, based on the literary evidence, that ancients did not admire the beauty of nature in the same way we do. I suppose we will never know for sure what the common folks thought about it. After all, unlike the wealthy city-dwellers who wrote most of what survived, they didn't leave us any written testimony. But it seems reasonable when you're trying to eke a subsistence-level existence out of nature that you wouldn't have time to sit around admiring it.
I say this because I've read some of the letters and diaries written by early Minnesota settlers, folks, as it happens, who were mostly from Sweden and Norway. I remember then talking about the swamps and the mosquitoes and the other hardships the land put in their path, but beautiful as the country is, they didn't have as many words for that aspect of the scenery. Mostly they dwelt with its harshness. This might or might not provide evidence for the scholarly position.
But at the same time, you won't find the modern home-owner or contractor apologizing to a tree before he cuts it down. There aren't many laws (outside of the California Redwoods) regarding cutting down trees (that I'm aware of), unless it's some neighborhood/community standards thing.
Nobody is worried about religious associations in nature any longer. Nobody but modern Pagans. And what Heathen does not know that the oak is sacred to the Thunderer? Or that Yggdrasill is an ash? Or that it was an elm and an ash that gave birth to the human race?
For most, trees, if they are loved at all, are loved for their beauty, or for the shade they provide. Their religious associations are mostly lost. How many sacred groves do you see on your local city map? But once there were Groves of Thor. Bad things happened to those who violated such places. Look to the example of Þórir and Karli, who ransack a Finnish grove dedicated to Jómali (Óláfs saga helgi). Their greed in violating this sacred grove results in their eventual downfall (DuBois 1999:7).
It would stand to reason then that where environmental issues are concerned, whatever ones feelings about Anthropogenic Global Warming, that a certain heightened level of concern about the environment, will be visible among Heathens. Heathens will not objectify nature. They will not set themselves apart from it but will in some sense try to accommodate themselves to nature.
It makes sense, doesn't it, given the tale of Aksr and Embla? As I noted above, in Heathen mythology, the first people were made from trees, which scientifically speaking, has a great deal more to say for it than the idea that we were made out of lumps of dirt, or just conjured up out of thin air. As Carl Sagan noted in his series Cosmos,
We’re virtually identical to trees. We both use nucleic acids as the hereditary material; we both use proteins as enzymes to control the chemistry of the cell and most significantly, we both use the identical code book to translate nucleic acid information into protein information. Any tree could read my genetic code.
I don't know about you, but when the oil and coal industries start paying lobbyists, journalists, and various non-climate specialist scientists to tell me that C02 emissions are good for me, or worse, that DDT should be a "food group" and that its liberal application over the face of Midgard can save the human race...well, I'm just a bit suspicious of their motives.
I'm more inclined to believe the scientists who actually study climate for a living - and who aren't being paid by big oil and big coal to toot the company line (remember those tobacco company studies promoting the completely healthy effects of smoking?). I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that big oil and coal are not thinking about our best interests as humans, or the religious associations of nature and of the things in nature. They don't care that my tree is sacred to Thor.
But I do.
I have long argued that whether you accept Anthropogenic Global Warming as a fact (I do), we should still be showing some concern for our environment. This for religious as well as common-sense reasons. You don't have to think of the planet itself as a goddess (Gaia) to see it as part of the divine. Everything around us is part of the divine. It is part of the human enclosure (Midgard). Would we treat our own homes like we treat the world around us?
And everything, literally everything we see in nature is part of something bigger, that "circle of life" thing you hear so much about. Every object in nature has some purpose that does not include humans. Pluck it out, and everything changes. Some creatures adapt, some do not. Usually, humans adapt. But at some point, even humans might fail to adapt. Blind faith that "god" will take care of everything, that "he" will see to it that everything is okay, is worse than absurd. It's reckless.
Yes, species go extinct all the time. And many without any involvement from humans. They've had their chance and blown it. They couldn't keep up with the changes. This used to happen all the time before there were any humans to affect the balance. But that doesn't mean we should willy-nilly help them along. If we get too careless with nature, rather than managing nature, we might find nature managing us. Not a pretty picture.
I want to go back to polytheism. I don't want to go back to the 9th century to do it.
Notes:
[1] http://www.grist.org/article/scherer-christian/
[2] http://www.au.org/media/church-and-state/archives/2000/05/pampe.html
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/releases/pr2008-02-21.asp
[5] On the issue of Anthropogenic Global Warming, http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/sarah-palin-record-environment.php. On the issue of evolution, http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/11/19/going-rogue-is-sarah-palin-a-creationist/
[6] For health risks associated with DDT, see "Public Health Statement for DDT, DDE, and DDD" by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs35.html#bookmark09
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