Theological Foundations for a Christian Land Ethic

The overlapping ecological, economic, and social crises created by our contemporary industrialized food system have increased moral attention to the human relationship to the rest of nature. However, despite overt attempts to incorporate evolutionary biology and ecology into moral and theological discourse, some of the central insights of these sciences—such as the symbiotic patterns of interspecies relationships and processes of regeneration by which ecosystems evolved and are sustained—are rarely accorded substantive moral weight, or worse, are explicitly theorized as problems to be overcome. This dissertation describes the normative significance of natural processes of renewal. It argues that (a) God’s providential wisdom is evident in natural patterns and processes of regeneration and this means that (b) the moral life consists in part of pious affection for the land and its members through consenting participation in their symbiotic, complex goods.

These commitments together comprise a Christian land ethic, an interdisciplinary synthesis of theological, ethical, and practical reflections on the way we inhabit the land. It primarily draws on James Gustafson, Thomist theories of the natural law, contemporary Aristotelian philosophy of biology, Wendell Berry, and the land ethics tradition to outline the moral obligations that arise from the integrated goods of the land and its individual members. It then describes how the principles and practices of agroecology and regenerative agriculture are the natural extension of this normative framework.