CGR Vol. 38 No 3 (Fall 2020)

*****

These six essays help foreground the importance of understanding Purdy’s environmental politics and the meaning of commonwealth through love and wounds. Purdy’s environmental politics is a version of democratic socialism that takes seriously the possibility of love and the ineluctable fact of wounds in the modern world we have made. His criticism of “global hypercapitalism” that was the means for making this world is based on how all of life has been conscripted “in a world-historical gamble concerning the effects of indefinite growth, innovation, and competition.”[19] The scale of response must match the scale of effect; we need a global internationalism that elevates security and solidarity with those who feel the unequal distribution of harms and risks most acutely. What that means for most of us is recognizing we are the stakes and not the gamblers. The GND as infrastructure change articulates this recognition. It is an example of a politics that can address climate change because it is “a politics that takes the notion of the human being and their place in the world as part of its stakes.”[20]

Who are we as humans and what is our place in the world? For Purdy, “We are creatures who care, whose nature is to grow infinitely attached to finite things. What we truly believe is worth our time, the natural things and the cultural forms in which we find the richness of this life, gives us an imperative to take responsibility for them.”[21] These lines capture Purdy’s religious sensibility and love of nature and how they are tied together politically. Care for basic values and the work of sustaining human goods is measured in one’s life, in one lifetime. Jedediah Purdy in nature—his assiduous smile among the roots of sequoias whose conflagration besets his friend Isaac Villegas’s beleaguered dreams—ties together sincere meaning, material conditions, relentless labor, and determined politics.

JosephR.Wiebeis Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Alberta, Augustana Faculty, in Camrose, Alberta.

Introduction

In A Theory of Justice, political philosopher John Rawls explained that he wasn’t taking up the issue of environmental ethics because that would require something outside the scope of his project. It would require “a theory of the natural order and our place in it.” In a word, “metaphysics.”[1] Rawls seemed to be both acknowledging the secularity of justice as fairness and nodding toward a possible space for the sacred in the natural world, just not one that he was interested in dealing with. At least that is how Laurence Tribe saw it in “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees,” which can be read as an attempt to make a start on that metaphysics and ended with this:

Saint Francis of Assisi could embrace Brother Fire and Sister Water, but Western societies in the last third of this century may be unable to entertain seriously the notion that a mountain or a seashore has intrinsic needs and can make moral claims upon our designs.

Still, we can try.[2]

This was the 1970s, the era of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act in the US, when environmental legislation was embraced and pushed by a bi-partisan coalition led by the Nixon administration,[3] when a former Sierra Club director, William O. Douglas, could famously argue for nature’s standing from his seat on the Supreme Court, and when a law professor as distinguished as Tribe could hope that modern science was on the verge of recognizing “something sacred in the natural.”

Nicolas Howe looks back on this period with a tone of wistfulness in LandscapesoftheSecular.He mourns the loss of a time when “legal thinkers participated in the high-minded discussions of religious ideology” and regrets the way, in the last few decades, “environmentalists sought to sweep their ‘spiritual values’ under the rug.” [4] “Even Purdy, who argues for a return to ethical speculation, leaves religion out of his account.”[5] Even Purdy, because Purdy also recognizes the centrality of this period, and of Tribe’s essay, as a major turning point in the history of environmental law, the point when “environmental ethics and law stood briefly back to back and strode rapidly in opposite directions.”[6] The lawyers became cost-benefit analysis technocrats while the philosophers (and theologians) spun elaborate “New Stories” of cosmological unity that “proved dramatically unhelpful in solving practical problems.”[7] Purdy, as much as Howe, understands environmental law’s turn to an exclusive reliance on one particular method and theory of ethics, utilitarian cost-benefit analysis, as a loss.

Howe is both right and wrong here. He is right that at least in “Our Place in the World,” the essay he is citing, Purdy doesn’t assume as Tribe did that metaphysics had to be religiously or spiritually inflected.[8] And he is definitely right that Purdy thinks we will do well to leave religion out of it.

But it isn’t just that Purdy passively neglects religion. He actively rejects it, at least in its monotheist versions, as a foundational problem. He banishes it from the field of environmental ethics. This creates some confusion for me, because I admire his work and read him as a kindred spirit. Either there is something I have failed to understand about his work or something he has failed to understand about theology. While the chances are good that it is the former, in what follows I try to make the case for the latter.

Naturalism and Monotheism

The basic argument of AfterNature, as well as many of Purdy’s essays over the last decade, can be summarized in three parts. First, we have entered the age of the Anthropocene, in which there is no longer any aspect of nature that has not been changed by human action and when, therefore, we are forced to recognize the collapse of the old nature/culture divide and that “discussions about ‘nature’ have always been less a description of the natural world than means for humans to talk to and about other humans.”[9] Second, this means we will need to give up on “naturalism,” the idea that there is a singular logic of nature that could provide moral guidance about how we should live with each other or with it.[10] Third, in the absence of such naturalism, answers to those questions must now be political, and, in histories like the one Purdy tells, we can see that they always have been so. “The Long Environmental Justice Movement,” the closing chapter of This Land Is Our Land, shows what this politics might look like when it is thoroughly democratic.

The critique of naturalism is in part simply the logical conclusion of the Anthropocene condition. “If human action is part of what creates the world, how can the character of the world guide human action?”[11] But Purdy doesn’t say the Anthropocene creates this condition. He says it ought to force the recognition that talk about nature has alwaysbeen tangled up with human projects and imagination. Anecdotal evidence is simply the variety of human practices for which nature has been employed as authority. At one extreme, the Athenians cite nature as authority for their conquest of Melos and social Darwinians cite evolution to justify unbridled capitalism. At the other, Peter Kropotkin and contemporary environmentalists claim that mutuality and cooperation are the deep truths of nature that should guide any social philosophy. So with hierarchy and egalitarianism; heteronormativity and queerness; slavery and freedom.

If we leave it at this, it sounds like Howe is right. Religion is left out. To claim, as I did, that religion is banished in Purdy is to add that for Purdy naturalism is a product of religion or, at least, of monotheism. Here is how he put it in a 2013 lecture:

The idea of nature as a whole having a point of view or a meaning or a purpose that speaks in any direct way, certainly in any complete way, to the question of how we ought to live with respect to one another or even what we ought to do with nature is an idea that is only available if you are a monotheist. It’s only available if you are committed to the thought that the world is the product of a mind and a mind that in some form, in some way, we can understand as speaking the questions we have.[12]

Note what Purdy is notsaying. He is not content simply to point to the flexible and contrary uses of nature and allow that alone to generate skepticism about naturalism. Nor is he making the now commonplace argument that Christianity has a harmful understanding of nature. He is not saying that, for example, the Genesis 1 command to “subdue and have dominion” or Christianity’s frequent tendency to embrace a hierarchical dualism of spirit and matter, means that Christianity’s view of nature is intrinsically bad for environmentalists. As a historian, he is aware that any religion is a rich and complex thing and can contain, and has contained, multiple understandings of nature.

Purdy’s question is prior to the question, What is the view of Christianity or religion toward the natural world?

The question I want to address concerns a distinction between all religious views of the natural world and an alternative. The alternative is the idea that the very thought there is such a thing as a logic of nature, a purpose to nature, an order of nature that can teach us something about how we ought to live together and how we ought to treat the natural world is mistaken and misleading.

In the Utah lecture he quickly adds, “I’m willing to be talked out of that. . . . I look forward to being challenged on that point.” So, is he right?

I lack the capacity to evaluate the entirety of the 2500-year story Purdy elaborates of, on one hand, a tradition of monotheist naturalism stretching from Plato to Emerson to the Sierra Club and, on the other, a counter-tradition of atheist anti-naturalism stretching from Epicurus through Hobbes and on to John Stuart Mill.[13] But I do think the story is more complicated and far more interesting than Purdy is aware. First, Purdy could easily expand his anti-naturalist counter-tradition to include, at its beginning, the Hebrew Bible and, at its end, Karl Barth. Second, he could expand his naturalist tradition to include a great many atheist physicalists. Both points would make his story much more interesting (not to mention accurate), but would require that he give up his convictions about monotheism and be clearer about what kind of physicalist he is. The point is not to mount a defense of monotheism but to add some biodiversity to Purdy’s historiography—and to invite him to join in a far more interesting 21st-century conversation about theology than the one he is currently in.

The Accidental Barthian

It is certainly true that eco-theology’s overriding agenda since Lynn White has been to elaborate a version of naturalism. Most of that work has been dedicated to the appropriation of ecology as foundational to a communal, cooperative environmental ethics.[14] In this work ecology names a complex but discernible system of harmonious relationships among inextricably interdependent creatures. Environmental degradation happens when humans fail to recognize that they too are just another part of that system. When humans choose anthropocentrism over biocentrism, they choose (unnatural) individualism and competition over (natural) community and cooperation.   Essential to this argument is that “the ecological ethic that corresponds with this model is understood to be consistent in important ways with Christianity’s ethic of love and care for the neighbor—particularly the neighbor who is suffering, oppressed, and in need, as our ‘natural’ neighbors appear to be.”[15] A conventional, if very general, conception of Christian ethics, in other words, is shown to be part of the order of nature.

So, while Purdy’s modern examples are largely 17th-century English natural theologians, the last fifty years of eco-theology emphatically reinforce his claim. Yet there remain good reasons to be hesitant. Just as the richness and complexity of a religious tradition means it will have competing naturalisms, so it will also have competing accounts of whether there ought to be any at all. Purdy is well aware of the former but less so of the latter. Instead of saying that Christianity or monotheism is committed to naturalism, it is historically more accurate to say that it is embedded in a millennia-long argument about the status of naturalism.

Christine Hayes traces this back to the confrontation between competing Hebrew and Greek conceptions of divine law.[16] Ancient Greco- Roman accounts of divine law identified it with natural law. The divine law was rooted in the order of the cosmos and, as such, was very much what Purdy is calling an “order of nature.”[17] But in the Old Testament, divine law was revealed law. Its authority came from the will of the legislator, not the order of creation, and in the cases when the gap between the divine law and the order of creation is collapsed, it is only because something about the order of creation has been revealed not by human reason but by divine revelation.[18] It is worth pointing out that Jerusalem, and hence both the Israelite monarchy and Temple cult, are conspicuously absent from Genesis 1 and 2. That is, these origin myths make no attempt to do what Purdy’s natural theologians do, namely tie the monarchy or the religion into the nature of things.

Hayes’s point is not to assert and maintain a Hebraic/Hellenist dualism on these grounds. For her, this dualism is only the beginning. She thinks it is still with us, present in both Judaism and Christianity (often caricatured as Catholic Thomists versus Protestant Barthians), and in modern legal theory.[19] But the real burden of her book is a history of how this dualism was variously reinforced and challenged, undermined and reframed, already in competing strands of the OT and Second Temple literature and later in both Paul and the Talmud. As such, it doesn’t just challenge Purdy’s account of the relationship between monotheism and naturalism. Her careful tracing of the twists and turns of her dualism also models a way of writing a grand narrative that stands in instructive contrast to the rigidity of Purdy’s storytelling.

Karl Barth was arguably the greatest of 20th-century theologians and arguably most famous, or infamous, for the viciousness of his attack on natural theology.[20]  That attack first took the form of a pamphlet written in response to his old friend, Emil Brunner, just a few months after he drafted the Barmen Declaration (1934). Article 1 of Barmen said, “We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.”[21] Here those rejected sources are Hitler and National Socialism. In the reply to Brunner, the rejected source was nature. For Barth they amounted to the same thing and came together in a “German nature- and history myth” of blood and soil. The same identification remains when Barth rejects Brunner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “orders of creation” (work, family, gender, state, nation, tribe) because they grant these orders knowability and autonomy outside the revelation in Christ and therefore produce not an ethic of radical discipleship but “North German patriarchalism”[22] instead.

We see a striking convergence between Barth and Purdy both in their contempt for naturalism and in their reasons for it, primarily its use to undergird political formations but also in the way it produces fear.[23] While I admire Barth, my intention is not to defend his position on natural theology[24] but to raise the possibility of a thoroughly monotheist anti-naturalism.

The Accidental New Atheist

I came to Purdy late, discovering him not in his first and most famous book, ForCommonThings, but in the pages of N+1, where in 2014 he published an extraordinary essay called “The Accidental Neoliberal.” That piece, as I read it, was a confession for an entire generation’s, my generation’s, failure of political imagination as well as a record of his penance.[25] Later, I came to know him as an interpreter of the November 2016 US elections. Purdy seemed to me then and now the surest guide to understanding the significance of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.[26] Coming across those essays over the course of 2016 enabled me to clear my head by elaborating arguments that I knew to be true but was having trouble articulating: that the rise of Trump didn’t teach us something about an excess of democracy but about its lack, and that hopefulness about the possibility of a socialist future for the US can come because of, not in spite of, a darkly pessimistic understanding of its present. So I think of Purdy first and foremost not as a scholar and historian of environmental law but as a theorist of democracy. I could call him prophetic, but in those days I treated him as more like a pastor. Those essays functioned for me as sorely needed sermonic exhortations to keep the faith, to resist the temptation, common in November 2016, to believe that Trump meant liberalism, not democracy, was the best the resistance could hope for.

I came to AfterNaturewhile preparing for an upper-level seminar in eco-theology in the Spring semester of 2017, and found in it a model of how to treat competing environmentalisms with generosity and a warning about how any position was prone to use nature in order to skirt the necessity of the democratic negotiation of claims about nature and to displace our responsibility for our convictions onto nature. This latter claim still seems to me to be the beating heart of Purdy’s work. But, perhaps because I was reading it in the wake of November 2016, I missed how that claim is one piece of a wider argument that is as much anti-naturalist as it is pro-democracy.

Let me back up a couple of steps. Purdy appears to have four distinct, if interrelated, problems with naturalism. The first is the Anthropocene argument. Because we have entered an age when every corner of nature has been transformed by human activity, it doesn’t make much sense to turn to nature as an independent guide to human activity. Purdy calls this the Anthropocene Condition. The second is what I will call the postmodernist argument, as advanced in William Cronon’s UncommonGround.[27] There has never been, not even before the Anthropocene, a natural nature, only “cultural constructions that reflect human judgments, human values, human choices.”[28] Sometimes Purdy calls this the Anthropocene Insight. The third is the anti-reductionist argument, which doesn’t require the collapse of the nature/culture distinction in the same way as the other two. Instead, the problem is that naturalism reduces the astonishing variety and complexity of nature to a singular over-arching principle. It manufactures unity out of diversity. Fourth is the democratic argument:

Each form of American environmental imagination has called on the natural world to underwrite, to “naturalize,” one version of politics while excluding others from the debate…. Each version has evaded politics, tried to shut down imagination and mobilization, by claiming that certain collective questions must be decided by nature, not by human judgment.[29]

I mostly agree with these arguments. My affection for Purdy and my abiding debt to AfterNatureand Ths Land Is Our Land is precisely because of my agreement. What confuses me is that we seem to agree for opposing reasons. While Purdy associates these arguments with a challenge to naturalism and with a philosophical tradition of monotheism, I associate them with a challenge to positivism, a philosophical tradition that claims the only truths are scientific truths and is therefore committed to caging not just theology but the humanities in general on one side of a fact/value dichotomy made possible by a fundamental misconstrual of mind and world.[30] Importantly, it is acutely vulnerable to the latter three of these criticisms. It cannot accept that there are no natural natures, is inclined toward reductionism, and wishes to evade politics in exactly the way Purdy decries.

Take, for example, “Consilience.” E.O. Wilson’s dream of ending the fragmentation of the disciplines in a unified theory of knowledge grounded in evolutionary biology is naturalism on steroids. Sam Harris’s TheMoralLandscapepresents a logic of nature that is similarly totalitarian in scope and ambition. Purdy thinks that “The idea that nature is morally instructive in any straightforward way is nearly impossible to maintain unless one starts by assuming that the world was created by a benign and omnipotent God with unified moral purpose.” But Harris subtitles his book “How Science Can DetermineHuman Values” (my italics) and finds utilitarianism to be written into the logic of nature. Steven Pinker, too, ends his Enlightenment Nowwith an attempt to naturalize utilitarianism.[31]

This desire for naturalization is not confined to these sorts of vulgar physicalists. Even Romand Coles, who could never be confused with Harris or Pinker, has found himself tempted to naturalize democracy. Early in his latest book, Coles voices a worry shared by many of us that in face of the enormous powers wielded in defense of inequality, domination, and exclusion, we have to ask “does this mean that radical and receptive democracy is merely an illusion,” an ideological smokescreen concealing our entanglement in systems of power in which freedom is no longer a possibility? Are we “not trapped in ways that are nearly ontological?” In order to respond in the negative, Coles turns to neuroscience, announcing that “these challenges need not lead us to despair. Instead, I venture here that recent work on mirror neurons helps illuminate the character of our capacities for a politics of resonant receptivity in ways that suggest indispensable possibilities for ethical and strategic modes for organizing a powerful radical democratic movement.” [32]

My point is not to criticize Coles’s turn to neuroscience, nor to pile up more counter-examples to Purdy’s dualism. Instead, it is to suggest that perhaps Purdy is right that there is some kind of ur-source for naturalism, even if he is wrong that it is monotheism. Purdy suggests one possibility: the temptation to think that certain questions must be decided by something other than human judgment. That temptation, often born of despair and fear, can overcome anyone, not just monotheists, and it can be filled by science just as easily as God. Despite his curious inability to recognize that, Purdy remains among the best guides we have for courage in facing such fear and hope in resisting such despair.

PeterDulais Professor of Religion and Culture at Eastern Mennonite UniversityinHarrisonburg,Virginia.

In Jedediah Purdy’s rendering in This Land IsOur Land, world-making and world-breaking intersect with a politics that is material in how it structures human lives in a built environment. For Purdy, this built environment is both infrastructural and technospheric. He defines the technosphere as “the material habitat that humans have created for themselves in the form of roads, cities, rural housing, the active soil in cropland, and so forth.”[1] For Purdy, “only politics can deliberately change the architecture of shared life, change the rules and the built world that humans live in and live by.”[2] The architecture of our current political world tears down mountaintops and poisons streams, just as it connects us to each other via technologies that spread globally on an invisible network which consumes massive amounts of energy and depends on extractions from the earth as damaging as the mineshafts that serve a dying coal economy.

I

I want to suggest that, although Purdy does not use this term, what he offers us can be understood as a “political ecology”: a linking of politics and ecology that hinges on the political-ecological implications of how humans inhabit the land in a deeply material sense, an inhabiting deeply involved in an imagined homeland. Purdy’s political ecology accounts for the ways many bodies, different kinds of bodies—water and rock and flesh and bone—are reciprocally embedded in ecological relationships. These relationships both construct a politics and are constituted by a politics; the ecological is the political and vice versa. I take Purdy’s political vocabulary to be broad: that is, he does not restrict “politics” to civic and governmental institutions and procedures but applies it to the quality of the relationships between people who are necessarily joined in certain ways by shared dwelling places.

Purdy’s book tracks between two registers: between landscapes and dreams, the material and the ideal, physical bodies and political bodies. He announces this intersection at the outset: “No story or picture of the world matters much if it floats too far from what people do with one another’s bodies and with soil and weapons and other tools; but also and by the same token, no material change in power will go forward without ideas and images that give it shape and a horizon to aim for.”[3] For Purdy, the idea or image of a commonwealth functions as just such a horizon. Another way of putting this is to say that practices and pictures, images, plays and dramas, shape our moral, political, and ecological imaginations.

Imagination plays an important role in any kind of intentional moral or political transformation: one can only move toward an unrealized aim or state of affairs if one can envision it in some way, even if only partially and incompletely. Images (photographs, dreams, visions, metaphors) and narratives (stories, dramas, myths) shape such visions. Purdy understands his recurring dreams of landscapes as expressing “a way to get above a terrain without leaving it, to merge many small horizons into one image. These dreams sketch a geography of thinking, a way of seeing a place whole without being overcome by it.”[4]

As my own work focuses on “moral aesthetics” in a theological key, this point about the interaction between practices (“what people do with one another’s bodies and with soil and weapons and other tools”) and images/ ideas/horizons particularly interests me. As Purdy shows, these bodies— animal, vegetal, mineral—interact, and by those interactions they may flourish or sicken and die. And the ways human actors in these ecologies specifically devise images and structures to represent and govern this shared life are frameworks that significantly constitute whether those interactions lead to flourishing or malady. Indeed, the ways we pictureand dramatizethe ecological relations in which we are embedded are politically as well as ethically and aesthetically significant. Purdy writes, “Democratic politics can survive not as a morality play, but only as a project.”[5] Certainly, naïve moralism, which often deploys its logic in the form of good-versus-evil dramas, will not serve a democratic politics capacious enough to account for the complex encounters and interrelations that characterize “the architecture of shared life.”[6] The change to “the rules and the built world” that is needed in this landscape of bodies and identities requires attention to the terms of coexistence rather than simplistic contrasts between conflicting interests.[7] If we set aside morality plays for what I call “moral aesthetics,” however, then this might open up resonances between Purdy’s structure (“what people do with one another’s bodies and with soil and weapons and other tools” and images/ideas like a commonwealth) and the one I will propose between how we regard wounded bodies/ecologies and an image of the resurrection. That is, it might open up the resonances between the links Purdy and I respectively make between practices (“what people do”) and the imaginative horizons that orient them (whether the idea of a commonwealth or an eschatology).

II

In Christian theology, eschatology is an important site of transformed imagination that can perform a “merging” function (to pick up on Purdy’s account of his dreams as “a way to get above a terrain without leaving it, to merge many small horizons into one image”[8]). It can perform this function to the extent it gathers up all created temporal things into an integral image beyond time. One of the more obvious paths to connect eschatology to ecological imagination is Revelation’s restored creation, the “new heaven and new earth” (Rev. 21:1). This is an attractive vision, and I don’t intend to displace its significance in the panoply of eschatological images (I note that what this newness indicates is open to interpretation). At the same time, I think it needs to take its place among other images, to hold the risks of escapism at bay. The aim of our moral and eschatological imagination cannot be, as Purdy writes at one point, to offer an “escape from history and social life into a greenwood idyll” but to see “in a landscape the nonhuman body of the species, in which the history of economic and political life is written as vividly as in laws.”[9] Our landscapes are not whole, they are polluted and stripped. They are wounded by this history of human habitation. One way of seeing this history written on a landscape is to attend to the wounds inscribed on it by the ways it has been inhabited. In this line, then, I want to consider the Christological body: a wounded body and one which, if we consider in its cosmological dimensions, merges human and nonhuman creatureliness and refuses to efface the history of injury even in resurrected, eschatological form.[10]

Recently, a number of theologians have taken up a line of Christological inquiry that can be loosely gathered under the term “deep incarnation.”[11] While the term is new, the roots of this line of thinking may be traced back to early Christian writers. Deep incarnation names the idea that in entering the created world, the Word (through which the world is spoken into its created form) then becomes flesh, takes on created form. As John 1 affirms, Christ’s incarnation is not just an assumption of humanity but of materiality in the broadest possible sense. Elizabeth Johnson puts it this way: “While sarx[flesh] in a strict biological sense may point to soft animal tissue of muscle and fat interlaced with blood vessels and nerves, that flesh itself evolved from and exists in continuing interrelationship with other nonmuscular, nonbloody living beings and the physical world itself. In a deeply real sense, the meaning of flesh/sarx encompasses all matter.”[12] The incarnate flesh of Christ was “a complex unit of minerals and fluids, an item in the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen cycles, a moment in the biological evolution of this planet. The atoms comprising his body were once part of other creatures.”[13] As a result, “The sarxof John 1:14 thus reaches beyond the person of Jesus and beyond all other human beings to encompass the whole biological world of living creatures and the cosmic dust of which they are composed. In this perspective, the flesh that the Word/Wisdom of God became is part of the vast body of the cosmos.”[14]

This incarnational point is important for the eschatological one, for the body incarnate is the body resurrected, so what is assumed in the incarnation is raised as well. If all of creaturely existence is touched by the incarnation, bound up in this web of interdependent materiality, then the “merging” of many bodies into a single, imagined horizon can be encapsulated in this movement from creation to incarnation to resurrection.

Christ’s resurrected body retains the marks of the wounds suffered in his earthly life. The theological symbolics of these wounds merge life and death, injury and healing. Christ dies with his feet and hands punctured by the nails holding his body to the wooden cross, but also with his side pierced by a spear. The wound in his side from which the blood and water rushes has been read as a vaginal image[15]—both menstrual and natal, fatal but not final, for this punctured body rises with its wounds. The wounds on Christ’s resurrected body are visible and penetrable to doubting fingers. They are a rent in a body open to sight and touch, a mark as well as an aperture into a new form of life.

In a deep incarnational perspective, we may already see Christ’s wounded body in continuity and solidarity with all of the wounded bodies of the world. But what of these many bodies? What place is there for their wounds in an eschatological imaginary? One way of assigning a coalescing significance to Christ’s wounds would be to see them as representative of all wounded bodies, such that no wounds but his would be preserved in the eschaton. But I want to suggest that Christ’s wounds do not replace other wounds.

I want to use a suggestive passage from Augustine’s CityofGodto extend the claim from Christ’s wounded resurrected body to all such bodies, human and nonhuman alike. In the final book of CityofGod, a long reflection on the resurrection, Augustine writes that although in the resurrection all deformity will be removed,

[W]e feel such extraordinary affection for the blessed martyrs that in the kingdom of God we want to see on their bodies the scars of the wounds which they suffered for Christ’s name; and see them perhaps we shall. For in those wounds there will be no deformity, but only dignity, and the beauty of their valour will shine out, a beauty in the body and yet not of the body.[16]

This passage invites a range of possible reflections about the nature of deformity, dignity, and beauty, but my focus here is that Augustine extends the signifying function of wounds from Christ to the martyrs.[17] In so doing, he (inadvertently, perhaps) opens up a radical line of theological possibility. If in some sense all material bodies suffer in Christ—as I think one can claim if one traces the line of continuity between the Word that speaks in acts of creative formation, the Word become flesh that suffers and dies and rises again—then all wounds and injuries to these bodies share in the significance involved in retaining them in the resurrection.

For eschatology not to be an escape, a way of fleeing or denying the injuries of this world to an untouched idyll, it must not efface earthly wounds. An eschatological image of wounded resurrected material bodies of all kinds prohibits a dream of eternal flight from the ecological damage wreaked on the earth in time. Eschatological images may force a reckoning with the theological significance of the injuries we inflict on our own bodies and on other bodies now: just as Christ’s resurrected body bears the memory of the violence done to his body, so too the histories of human violence on bodies of rock and soil and water and all the creatures whose lives depend on those bodies.

This is a theological path toward “new kinds of solidarity, new ways to feel that your good life is part of my good life, and an injury to you is an injury to me.”[18] It is a path that takes seriously the kinds of images and ideas that shape imaginative horizons without floating too far from questions about what “people do with one another’s bodies and with soil and weapons and other tools.”[19] Such imaginative horizons must value the integral ecosystems on which our earthly lives depend in order to inflect moral ecologies that conduce to flourishing.

All too often we understand harm and responsibility in dyadic terms: victim and wrongdoer. Even relative to environmental harms, difficulties accrue to attributing responsibility for “corporate wrongs” in both senses (harms done by corporations and harms done by a group of people). Corporate harms trouble conventional ethical and legal structures for attributing responsibility that tend to function more easily when they apply individually (and thus dyadically) than corporately (and thus ecologically). There are cases in which corporations have been held responsible for environmental damage (BP in the case  of  the  Deepwater  Horizon  oil spill is a major recent example). But such examples are too few, given the scale of ecological damage at issue, and these examples depend on clear, attributable violations of established safety procedures or environmental regulations (which, such as they are, are being gutted under the current Trump administration).  How does  one attribute  responsibility, even  for discrete actors and actions, in the vast interlocking systems of production and consumption wreaking ecological and climatic harm in myriad ways and on multiple scales (from local to global), which do not in themselves contravene any existing regulation or international legal convention? This is part of the difficulty Purdy points to in facing planetary problems without any kind of global international structure to do so—hence the proposal to think in terms of commonwealths (plural).

III

Purdy’s proposal to think plurally on this point is a good one, but between his descriptions of material harms that ripple out along interlocking threads of ecological relationships and the aspirational ideal of political commonwealths capable of building new forms of solidarity there is a missing or underdeveloped piece: one that I identify in terms of political formation. It would have been helpful if Purdy had spelled out more concretely how we should go about creating such commonwealths and actively forming political movements that accomplish the solidarities to which we should aspire. He offers effective descriptions of damaged landscapes and the people and other creatures who inhabit them, and a vision of a commonwealth that is rather a hazy horizon. What are the practical mechanisms and processes of political organizing?

This is a question I ask without having an easy or developed answer myself. In a sense, I am proposing that the eschatological horizon I have evoked relates to a Christian moral-aesthetic ecology in a similar way that Purdy’s commonwealth relates to his political ecology. In both cases, a central question is how the vision is or might be formatively linked to the kinds of people and practices it shapes. The (eschatological) horizon I have been evoking is a different order, so too the kinds of formation it effects, and the elaboration of how it functions formatively exceeds the scope of this essay.[20] But certainly one aspect of forming ecological movements that act out of a sense of solidarity that is present in Purdy’s book, and that interests me with regard to an eco-theological horizon, involves habits of ecological perceptiveness: being able to perceive the kinds of harms that attend ecosystems at various scales requires practices that habituate us to see and attend to the ways in which “your good life is part of my good life, and an injury to you is an injury to me.”[21] To see how our flourishing and our suffering are bound up in such ecosystems, and in which the “your” and “my” addresses not just other humans but the whole range of material bodies involved, requires us to practice such forms of attention.

Purdy himself offers a range of such examples in his illustrative descriptions, but expanding perceptiveness requires a broad diet. To name only two: Dorceta Taylor’s ToxicCommunitiesreveals in excruciating detail how environmental damage is inscribed into racially discriminatory zoning laws,[22] while Rob Nixon’s SlowViolencedescribes the ecologically damaging legacy of weapons deployed in the Iraq war (among other examples).[23] To think about goods and harms in moral-political ecological terms requires seeing the ecologies at play and ourselves as embedded participants in them. Such perceptiveness is both material and imaginative: we need to perceive the material ecological relations on which we depend and within which we act, and to picture them and to imagine how we might desire to see them. Do we desire to see ourselves in flourishing webs of interdependent ecosystemic and ecological relations? That in and of itself may take some habituation. At this point, at least in North America and Europe, a vision of these goods is not sufficiently material or sufficiently inculcated in our habits of perceptiveness. But, further, if we do want to be able to see and imagine ourselves in flourishing ecosystems, we must also be able to perceive the ways we are implicated in suffering webs of ecosystemic relations, in which the political, moral, and biological ecologies are disrupted and faltering. There is no perceiving the mutually imbricated “good life” without perceiving the mutually imbricated injuries to which such mutual interdependence makes us vulnerable.

Similarly, there is no vision of resurrection without a vision of the wounded (crucified) body, but significantly, these mergein the image of the wounded resurrected body. Resurrection is not just a passage from mutilation and death to spotless glory. It speaks to a longing for healing, wholeness, and restoration. And at the same time, the wounded resurrected body reveals that the “good life” Christ promises will not allow us to forget, pass by, or flee from the violence and suffering of the world. Such an image incites us to work for healing and wholeness in the present, to attend to suffering and harm, and not to dream of an afterlife unmarked by what we do or fail to do in this life.

For Augustine, the desire to see the martyrs’ wounds responds to a beauty he attributes to their willingness to suffer loss for love of Christ. While there are environmental martyrs who require our attention if one is going to evoke sacrificial injury in the struggle for justice, Purdy rightly discards “sainthood” as a general standard for civic life.[24] My point here, though, is not about martyrdom as such but about the possibility of imaging wounded bodies in their mutual imbrication. Not only martyrological wounding in the strict sense but all wounding may be understood as continuous with Christ’s wounding and thus takes its place in an eschatological vision of resurrected wounded bodies. An eschatological imagination shaped by the enduring marks of earthly injuries forbids fantasies of rapture, flight to idylls untouched by what we do here and now, even as it also pictures the healing of those injuries.

IV

Purdy’s primary image for  fostering corporate habits  of perceptiveness and action is the commonwealth. Mine is a body made up of many bodies, human bodies and nonhuman bodies. In theological terms, one might call it a totusChristusimage. One may long and hope for healing without denying the wounds and injuries we inflict and suffer. Such a horizon, I suggest, is a small imaginative step towards a Christian moral aesthetics that may shape political and environmental solidarity in the face of destruction.

SarahStewart-Kroekeris the Jacques de Senarclens Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Introduction

In ThePrince, Nicolo Machiavelli advises a would-be prince that “above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.” Although written in the context of the Italian Renaissance, this advice clearly illustrates one of the key tensions between Indigenous peoples and settlers today. The latter took the patrimony of the former and, with a few notable exceptions, have not given any of it back. This situation is problematic because, as scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have pointed out, without concrete actions—like returning the land—discussions of a new relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples become a move to innocence on the part of the former.[1] It is this outcome that unfortunately mars Jedediah Purdy’s proposed commonwealth which, while providing a seemingly sustainable alternative to our current system, is premised not on settlers returning the land to Indigenous peoples but on Indigenous peoples and settlers learning to live in harmony on what is stolen land. In doing so it downplays the cruelty of colonization and provides clemency to the settler population, all in the name of protecting the environment. The end result is that validity of Purdy’s commonwealth is called into question.

Why  Can’t  We  Be  Friends?

ThisLandIsOurLandis a very American book.[2] It was written in the context of the Donald Trump presidency and deals with the rise in reactionary rhetoric aimed at challenging liberals, socialists, the left, political correctness, and environmentalism. It calls for a paradigm shift away from classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and partisanship. As Purdy notes, “we have made a world that overmasters us” (146). In place of the old world, he calls for “a world-renewing ecological commonwealth . . . that prizes the work of sustaining and renewing the human world” (148). He also calls for a return to civil discourse as well as the belief that hope and understanding can lead us out of the current situation (149). In this context the book makes perfect sense.

As someone who has spent his entire life in Canada, visiting the United States from time to time for personal and professional reasons, I find that watching what is happening there is much like watching my neighbors from my kitchen window. I can see what is going on, but I don’t always have the entire story behind it. However, it is not hard to see that public discourse in the US has become incredibly partisan, especially under the presidency of Trump. Prior to the novel coronavirus, how I viewed the plight of my southern neighbor fell somewhere on a spectrum between concerning and entertaining. How I miss those days! Now I often find myself wondering about the decline of civilizations. It appears that the US saw the outbreaks in China, Italy, and Spain and said, “Hold my beer.” Now my biggest concern is making sure its seemingly uncontrolled approach to a pandemic doesn’t take root in Canada. The attempted coup on January 6, 2021 did not make me feel any more confident about the future of the American republic. On its face it appears that a shift away from the individualism of classical liberalism, the sacrosanct perception of capitalism found in neoliberalism, and the rampant partisanship that renders every state policy and societal goal as either left or right would help prevent this outcome from occurring. In this context too, the book makes complete sense.

Nevertheless, ThisLandIsOurLandis not just a treatise directed an American audience. Liberalism, neoliberalism, and partisanship are not limited to the US, just as climate change does not stop at the border wall. Purdy’s commonwealth is a proposed solution to a system that dominates the very world it is destroying. As an Indigenous scholar, I would argue that it appears to do so without taking into account Indigenous perspectives on what needs to be done, and as such it is important that we address the khud[3] in the room.

Cruelty

In 1492, one hundred percent of the land now comprising the United States was owned by various Indigenous states. I am not the first to make such a statement. It is important that we make note of two words in it: “owned” and “states”. It is a myth that Indigenous peoples had no concept of land ownership, and to suggest otherwise is either to downplay the seizure of this land or to exemplify New Age idealism.[4] After all, it sounds better to say the land was taken from a group that merely occupied and used it, rather than to admit that it was seized from a group that owned the land and therefore might want it back. It is the difference between the tragedy of the commons and plain theft. Purdy seems aware of the fiction of an unowned land when he states that “the dominant American claim has always been that the place belonged only incidentally to the peoples who had been here for thousands of years” (xv). However, he does not wrestle with the handmaiden of this fantasy: that Indigenous states owned the land. This omission makes sense, since part of downplaying what happened to Indigenous peoples is the erasure of Indigenous statehood and sovereignty from the conversation altogether. It does not sound as bad when one states that the land was taken from people who, in addition to merely living on and using it, had not bothered organizing in any sort of political manner. Yet it happened, and today we are left to deal with the consequences.

Any way it is described, the US left Indigenous peoples with precious little of their homelands to hold onto. Today, roughly two percent is held in trust by the federal government for the survivors.[5] And although the Bureau of Indian Affairs claims a government-to-government relationship with the various tribal governments that exist,[6] and there is a rhetoric of tribes being domestic sovereign nations, the fact that this land is held in trust belies the reality that the relationship is not one of equal parties.

This current state of affairs is not unique to the US. In the settler state I live in, Canada, the federal government holds less than one percent of all lands for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis,[7] and there is little pretense that any of these Indigenous groups is sovereign. Yet in one aspect the US has proved quite exceptional: unlike most other settler states founded by the British Empire, the US currently seems more preoccupied with deciding if it should make itself great again than with paying lip service to reconciliation with Indigenous groups. Much to my disappointment, Purdy’s book seems to be just one more voice in this preoccupation.

Two percent is a stark number. Yet, because Indigenous peoples lost more than just their homeland to the US, it hides more than just “a world historical land grab.”[8] A failure to recognize this simple fact only further perpetuates  colonialism.  The  land  provided  material  resources to Indigenous peoples, and as a result along with taking the land went Indigenous economies, ways of life, and infrastructure that had existed in many instances for thousands of years. In the case of disease, both introduced (intentionally or not)[9] and endemic, the loss of land represented the loss of medicinal plants, animals, and minerals. Since many Indigenous knowledge systems were predicated on land-based learning, the loss of land disrupted Indigenous educational systems as well. The European style of education that the US was offering[10] was designed to take away Indigenous children both literally through forced removals and figuratively through assimilation. Indigenous peoples could resist, but more often than not this resistance was met, and continues to be met, with violence from American soldiers, law enforcement, and citizens. Violence was, and is, sometimes directed at Indigenous peoples for no other reason than being Indigenous. In this context, the Standing Rock protests in 2016-2017 over the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline were nothing new. One has to simply read through the comments online associated with the news of the McGirt case[11] to see how many settlers opposed the idea of giving anything back to Indigenous peoples regardless of how it was gained. Indeed, it is still too soon to completely understand what the repercussions of the US Supreme Court’s ruling that the reservations of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” still exist are, although people are already declaring the death of the state of Oklahoma, if not the United States.

Clemency

Perhaps it is this history that makes settlers feel uneasy about their relationship to the world and, to paraphrase Purdy, results in their search for a homeland.[12] Deep down they know what happened and are uncomfortable about it. The house is haunted because it was built on an Indian burial ground that their settler ancestors dug and used as the foundation. But what is to be done? How should North America deal with the sins of the past? And is it looking to show itself mercy and absolution?

One option is denial: simply deny that the colonization of North America was genocide or that it even happened. This outcome can be accomplished by effacing Indigenous histories and geographies until Indigenous peoples either are semi-mythic symbols of the past or of nature, or disappear altogether.[13] Commonly called “colonial erasure” in Indigenous studies, it highlights why so many educated non-Indigenous individuals are ignorant of Indigenous matters. As scholars such as historian Patrick Wolfe have noted, while the settler colonial relationship does not automatically equate to genocide per se, it does always include some sort of elimination.[14] In this instance it is knowledge that cannot be denied, although, as sociologist Andrew Woolford points out, the supposed line between non-physical forms of elimination and physical forms of elimination is not as clear as people often think it is.[15]

Denial can take many forms. Full repudiation is undoubtedly employed by some. It runs the risk, however, of being rendered ineffective if the contradicting information is so great that it shatters the suspension of disbelief, fights against popular discourse, or becomes the desired forbidden. History still recalls the 4th-century Greek arsonist Herostratus,[16] despite official attempts to render him anonymous. Full denial also suggests a binary between acceptance and denial that rarely exists. As numerous scholars have revealed, there is a far more effective intermediate zone in which one selectively remembers aspects of what happened and in doing so controls the larger narrative by deciding what is forgotten.[17] Nothing is denied per se; it is simply not talked about, and eventually the conversation moves on. Purdy acknowledges this form of denialism when he states that “denialism can stand for something broader: a refusal to see the things that tie us inconveniently together.”[18]

Two relatively recent high-profile examples of this purposeful nonacceptance of a connection are seen in two former British settler countries, Australia and Canada. In both, an apology was made in 2008 for the seizure of Indigenous children that was highly problematic. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology and a subsequent report avoided directly labeling the seizure of children deemed “not Indigenous enough” as genocide but instead focused on a bright new future of reconciliation.[19] Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper avoided using words associated with colonialism when describing residential schools, and then later at a G20 conference claimed Canada had no history of colonialism.[20]

Whether or not he is aware of it, Purdy commits this intermediary form of denial when he deflects from dealing with the settler state and calls for decolonization by discussing inequality and how it intersects with race and racism. This deflection is best seen in Chapter Two: “Reckonings,” in which he examines the relationships between the environment, race, and class. In particular, he shows how one’s class affects the level of control one has over the environment (39) and yet how one’s relationship to the environment— Purdy notes the disposal of waste—shapes one’s class and race (42). In this sense, his commonwealth is a call for people from all classes and races to put aside the differences that divide them (45) and unify for the common good.

While in theory this call to action is good, it is maligned in the text by Purdy’s apparent focus on whiteness and the plight of economically disadvantaged Whites in general (45-46). As he notes, in some instances White  Americans  are  behind  other  groups  in  certain  metrics  (46). Furthermore, when one realizes that being White is all too often thought to be the norm and White Americans are not considered to have a race,[21] this focus on whiteness could be an example of “channel-switching”[22]—changing the focus to avoid talking about race and racism. And while it helps lead into Purdy’s third chapter about how Americans are losing their homeland, it also represents a double shift, first away from an examination of colonialism and then from a discussion of race and racism. How Purdy expects to build his commonwealth without first dealing with the current situation is perplexing. Regardless of how disadvantaged some White Americans may have become, one simply has to compare how protesters coded as White are treated in the US with protesters not coded as White, or protesting for causes coded as not White, to see that White privilege is alive and well. Whereas Black Lives Matter protesters were met the summer of 2020 with tear gas to allow for a president’s photo-op, when supporters of that president tried to stage a coup in the winter, certain Capitol police officers aided and abetted them, even while some of these supporters were killing these officers’ colleagues. A failure to deal with this hypocrisy, and in doing so snuff out White supremacy and settler colonialism in the US, would result in a new commonwealth that has more in common with the Commonwealth of Virginia during the Civil

War than with Purdy’s new ideal.

Commonwealth

On page xiv of ThisLandIsOurLand, Purdy states that “the American commonwealth has been blocked again and again by division and exploitation.” It could be said that by speaking of Indigenous peoples and settlers I too am creating a binary and contributing to the forces preventing Purdy’s commonwealth from coming into existence. In a certain sense, this allegation is correct. However, I would argue that I am trying to prevent the perpetuation of a relationship that has existed in the US since contact. Indigenous peoples have too often been asked to give up something in the name of the common good. That Purdy’s commonwealth is more abstract than a hydroelectric dam does not make it categorically different. The same can be said about the environmental movement. The racism of many of its spiritual founders (e.g., James Madison, John Muir, and Gilbert Pinchot) may no longer be front and center, but to suggest—as Purdy seems to do in his fifth chapter—that this element has disappeared or become incidental in the movement is idealism at its best. Numerous scholars have pointed out how racist the contemporary environmental movement can be, especially with regard to paternalism, Eurocentrism, and perpetuation of the view that White people know better than other groups and need to save the world.[23]

It is therefore imperative that any changes to the movement, such as Purdy proposes, first address not only its colonial and racist past but also its colonial and racist present. In recent years it has been commonly said in Canada that truth must come before reconciliation. The same applies to Purdy’s commonwealth. While it may be true that we have created a world that could very well spell our doom, it is equally important that any new worlds we bring into being are not tainted by the old. Asking Indigenous peoples to share their stolen patrimony based on the rationale that it will be better for everyone is a fine example of a colonial mindset, as in the assertion that a pipeline will be good because it will create jobs for everyone and the profits can be used to build a better world.

Conclusion

A common question is, What needs to be done to rectify the colonial situation? Just as common is the Indigenous response: The land needs to be returned. For the most part, this solution has not been tried, and in the rare instances where it has been tried, far too many people have been concerned about what Indigenous peoples will do with the land and what this means for the future of the settler state. The McGirt case highlights this reality. In ThisLandIsOurLandJedediah Purdy provides a challenging solution to the current environmental emergency we are facing. He points out how since we built this world, we can rebuild it to our benefit: All it will take is to recognize what we have in common and work together. However, Indigenous peoples see this recognition as demanding that they share the land with settlers, whether they like it or not. Until Purdy deals with this snake in his proposed Garden of Eden, colonialism appears to be part of his best-case scenario.

DanielSims,a member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation, is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, B.C.