NCC Eco-Justice Fellowship Retreat Experiences Partnership Ethics

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Thirteen, Number Five
October 2004

There are few words or metaphors that can fully describe the synergistic mix of participants in the first retreat of new National Council of Churches Faith and Eco-justice Fellowship. A diverse assembly of persons, numbering 18 in all, representing many differing faith traditions as well as religious, political and scholastic vocations, gathered for three days in late July with a common purpose: to envision ways to care for the more-than-human world. Members of the United Methodist, Episcopal, Unitarian Universalist, Presbyterian, Mennonite, Evangelical Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ and Evangelical Free Churches, among others, met to discuss how to bring more fully into practice the care of God's creation.

Assisted by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and held in its "environmentally sustainable" education center at Port Isobel, a short distance from Tangier Island, the fellowship retreat was a dynamic synthesis of faith and science. Well presented descriptions of the pollution threats to the Chesapeake intersected passionate calls for the protection of the magnificent and serene environment around us. Fellowship members got muddy, studied local species such as blue crab, spoke about spiritual connections with creation, articulated strategies for environmental initiatives and political action, voiced concerns to one another, and learned about local tensions and displays of uncommon cooperation among differing constituencies, each with a stake in the region's future.

Participants attended workshops, worshipped together, fished, and explored their temporary island home. They listened to one another, to local residents and to members of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and imagined better ways to care for creation. These cooperative efforts among participants and differing human constituencies are illustrative of a "partnership ethics," a concept credited to eco-feminist philosopher and environmental historian Carolyn Merchant.

An accurate description of the participants in the Fellowship would not be complete without including the land, water, vegetation and the myriad non-human species which comprise the area of Chesapeake Bay. There was a palpable sense of the region's own participation in shaping the retreat experience, a sense that extended well beyond the fact the participants lived for a few days outside the range of e-mails and cell phones. It seems to do justice to non-human nature to note the participation of the Chesapeake itself.

The metaphor of "stewardship" does not fully describe the experience shared by the Fellows who seemed to live in nature, not apart from it. Elaborating partnership ethics engages those who consider what justice toward non-human nature itself might mean. Partnership ethics gains in significance by moving beyond understandings of environmental justice that involve relations among human persons in environmental contexts to apprehension of non-human nature as "autonomous actors, either as individual entities or comprising a "matrix of actors."

The National Council of Churches Faith and Eco-justice Fellowship may well deepen a sense of what eco-justice means. At the very least, the richness of insights emerging from the on-going work of the Fellowship promises to inform the faithful ecological practices of many faith traditions for many years to come.