Our Endangered Garden^6
The following chapters focus on challenges within the contemporary global age. These chapters put theological humanism on trial to see where thought Challenges to Natural Life
leads us. The present inquiry is about basic and natural goods. In terms of classic humanist images, the following pages explore the garden, those given features of life which must be rightly cultivated in order to flourish. The garden, this fragile blue-green orb called planet earth, is now gravely endan-
gered. The place of life, the good of locality, is threatened. What is needed, we argue, is clarity about the moral standing of all forms of life, as well as the specific responsibility of human communities.Of course, human beings have always intervened to alter their environ-
ments for the sake of survival. Nevertheless, in the present age the expansion of human power has increased the impact of human action on life. Nuclear energy, farming and fishing techniques, tall-stack factories, and automobiles threaten future life on this planet, most obviously through global warming,
but also in the loss of species and the destruction of lands and forests. Those threats are deeply interwoven with economic forces that generate wealth but also leave a trail of poverty and misery in their wake. As the Christian ethicist William French has noted:
No previous generation has faced the array of ecological concerns that now command attention: habitat destruction, global warming, aquifer overuse, deforestation and erosion, species endangerment and extinction, air and water pollution, acid precipitation, and nuclear waste. Some biologists warn that the9781405155267_4_006.indd 979781405155267_4_006.indd 97© Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism2008 David E. Klemm and William Schweiker^. ISBN: 978-1-405^ -15526-7David E. Klemm and William Schweiker 5/2/2008 7:23:43 PM5/2/2008 7:23:43 PM