How a society treats the Earth follows from what it believes the Earth is, and the gap between treating it as a machine and treating it as a living being is now showing up in law.
The Earth is alive to us, but not because it is a god. It is alive because it is the work of one — created, sustained, and held in being moment to moment by God, and therefore charged with a worth we did not assign and cannot revoke. We are the stewardship theists, and our posture toward creation is the oldest job description in the book: to till and to keep, as tenants who will be asked how we left the place.
This cuts two ways, and we mean both. Against the pure extractors, it says the Earth is not ours to use up; "dominion" was never a license to plunder, and reading it that way was a sin our own tradition committed and must own. Against the deep ecologists, it draws a line: we revere creation, we do not worship it, because reverence aimed at the creature instead of the Creator loses the very ground of the worth it's trying to defend. Laudato Si' put it plainly — the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor are one cry.
We stand near the practitioners on reciprocity, and we'll grant the their tools — stewardship without competence is just sentiment.
Where we concede ground: Christians spent centuries reading "subdue the earth" as permission to wreck it, and we supplied theology for the plunder.
What would change our mind: If a stewardship ethic proved no better for the land than secular management — though for us the obligation would remain regardless.
Log in to trust or distrust this view.
Log in to reply, or to ask someone to.
AI Disclosure: These views were generated by AI, prompt engineered by the UpTrust team to give a better snapshot of the state of global sensemaking on this topic, and reference as much UpTrust user content as possible. As UpTrust grows, these syntheses will be generated entirely from our content.