Sustainability in Australian Agriculture (original) (raw)
Related papers
Owning and Farming Land in Australia: Towards a Pastoral theology for Australian Farmers
Synopsis The church in rural communities that seeks to be supportive of the farming enterprise may feel overwhelmed by the size of the ethical and pastoral issues that arise. Land-owning is a gift of God and brings responsibility to nature, to the community and to a God who is present in but also watching over the land. This then points to the issue (so currently controversial in my district) of water and irrigation, and affects our treatment of animals and plants. A second area is the area of work. Farmers have a distinctive work ethic which needs to be moderated by the biblical perspective on work and Sabbath and mitigated by the other responsibilities of life. Appendix 2 shows how teachings on Sabbath and slavery illuminate relationships with rural workers. Finally, farming today benefits from the insights of the Bible into debt, wealth and ambition. In the high stakes of agriculture, some get buried and some get rich, for which ancient Israel had its solutions. As a form of Christian discipleship, farming has a ministry to the earth and to the community. This essay has sought to clarify some issues and lay out the way for farming to be spiritually sustainable (if I may use a vogue word in a different way).
Our Agricultural Krísis: Sketches of a Missional Response
Ecclesial Futures, 2020
In Australia, and indeed across the world, we are experiencing the effects of a broken food system, such that we face the possibility of a serious agricultural crisis. Current hopes for a resolution to this impending crisis are generally pinned to technology, despite the various problems associated with the use of agricultural technologies over recent decades. Such a situation demands a Christian missional response-an agriculturally-conscious missiology. This paper argues that farming and food production constitutes an aspect of Christian mission. The NT notion of krísis (judgment) is an as opportunity for repentance, applied to suggest that our agricultural crisis is a missional opportunity for the Church since it has spiritual, practical, and traditional resources necessary for a new agricultural paradigm. In light of these resources, the paper makes some provisional suggestions, directed at "consumers, " related to three missiological categories: relationship, contextualization, and participation. Each contributes to a way of thinking that Ellen Davis has called "agrarianism."
The Image of God and Our Vocation of the Soil
Journal for Culture and Religious Theory , 2024
The Anthropocene represents the sum of anthropogenic impact upon the planet, from climate change and ocean acidification to the threat of mass extinctions – including the pollinators of our food, land use changes for agriculture, and the disruption of key natural cycles of phosphorus and nitrogen due to the misapplication of fertilizers. Agriculture plays a key role in the Anthropocene, at both the production and consumption end. Raj Patel and Jason Moore see cheap food as one of the key elements in the rise of capitalism. This rise in turn produced the Great Acceleration of the global economy in the 1950s, which marks the beginning of the Anthropocene. Ellen Davis identifies the present crisis as the result of humans being fully habituated to industrial culture. The solution according to Davis is to become fully human. This full humanity is achieved by recognizing the agrarian nature of the bible, and that God’s work as cultivator and caretaker provides the model for our behavior. This paper explores a theology of the Imago Dei and our vocation of the soil by examining the agricultural themes in the two creation accounts. This theology is then applied to the human vocation in the Anthropocene in two ways. Firstly, from the Priestly creation account, the earth is sacred space, a temple in macrocosm as Jon Levenson identifies it. In it, Elohim the creator God makes provision for human and more than human alike. Humans seek their food in agricultural activity. The seventh day of creation is declared as holy, providing an aetiological account of the Sabbath and the rest that the land is to enjoy from human agricultural activity. To bear the divine image to the rest of creation involves self-limiting our impacts upon it. In the Garden story, the human pair represent royal humanity exercising wise rule in the land. The Garden represents the Tabernacle, again identifying working the soil as a holy vocation. Davis concludes that the human pair were to work for the soil, serving its needs. The parallels with the Tabernacle indicate that this royal/cultic role allows creation to be what it was intended to be, i.e., praising its creator in a manner specific to its nature. The identification of the image of God in humans as associated with tending the soil to provide for our own needs but without sacrificing it or the needs of other creatures implies the Hebrew Bible sees humans as fundamentally agrarian. We are to be connected to the soil. While not advocating a return to a fully agrarian society, much less the “blood and soil” ideologies of right-wing extremism, a connection to soil literally grounds humanity, acknowledging our own finitude in the context of the finite resources of the soil. I suggest that all humans should at some time and in some manner become involved in the activity of growing food. In tending plant and soil, we learn our utter reliance on divine provision through natural process and bring our busy existence back to the timescales of these process. Such practices are designed to encourage a slower, more reflective mode of thinking about our responsibilities to all of creation.
Engaging the writings of Bernard Lonergan, Charles Massy, and Pope Francis, this article offers a systematic exposition of the relationship between the Eucharist and regenerative agriculture. First, it surveys the overlapping cultural malaises identified by Massy, Francis, and Lonergan at the root of modern industrial agriculture. Second, in response to this form of decline, it shows how the regenerative agricultural practices called for by Massy instantiate the integral ecology called for by Pope Francis; at the same time, it substantiates Massy's calls through the emergently probable worldview of Lonergan. Third, in a way that Massy does not show, such a worldview can elevate these agricultural concerns to a supernatural, redemptive plane. Not only does an emergently probable worldview show that right agricultural practices restore creation's capacity to praise, so too does it show that Christian praise-as made especially apparent in the Eucharist-depends upon just agricultural practices.
Replenishing resources in perpetuity, sustainability is to agriculture what the Hippocratic Oath is to medicine. Converts to agricultural sustainability recover the notion of inherent value in food plants and animals, beings morally sublimated in industrial systems where monetary value dominates the landscape. Cultural historian Thomas Berry proposed Earth Literacy to name the need to revitalize people’s sense of place in the living world and the wider universe. Involving qualitative research in three religious-agricultural locations, this comparative religious ethics volume supports the assertion that local, religiously affiliated, sustainable agriculture projects can provide significant locations for strengthening Earth Literacy, embodying nature-affirming epistemology and religious-ethical values through agricultural praxis. The author’s case studies feature both education and agriculture to support flourishing for farmers, consumers, local communities, food animals and plants, and landscapes. In Chicago, Taqwa Eco-food Cooperative (2001-2009) provided food education and sourced local, sustainable meat permissible for Muslims. Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center (1972-present) featured a Buddhist environment for farming organically north of San Francisco, California. In northwest New Jersey, Genesis Farm’s Community Supported Garden (1988-present) offered weekly produce to local members. Despite unique interpretive lenses with distinct texts and traditions, plus diversity within each religious and agricultural location, leaders in all three sites showed remarkably common ethical threads. Project leaders showed compassionate care for people, living systems, and other-than-human beings eaten as food, while balancing past heritage, present stewardship, and future legacy. This volume navigates transdisciplinary methodological intersections in ethics, history, and sociology of religion, brightened by the sunlight of feminist insight, and supported by the ground of ecological reflection. The methods combine feminist social research, comparative religious ethics, religion and ecology, and holistic ecofeminism to provide frameworks for evaluating and comparing three case study sites, each with its own terminology, history, and religious meanings. This project brings together Marti Kheel’s nature ethics for individual beings, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s committed love, and Thomas Berry’s Earth Literacy to unearth the relevance of sustainable agriculture for generating direct, caring relationships within specific communities of plants, animals, people, and real soil underfoot, feeding a solidarity ethic relevant for the larger study of religion.
Catholic sustainability and subsidiarity in the 21st century
Catholic ecological sustainability and subsidiarity in the 21 st century! The parish community is the spiritual home for Catholics and it should reflect not just theological principles of the faith but should equally reflect the parish community's principles that illustrate the responsibility all Catholics hold towards the stewardship of God's natural resources and manifestations of His creation which are reflected in the parish church's actual structure. The Sacraments of the Church provide the focal point for all of the spiritual activities, with Eucharist providing the primary nourishment and restoration for the faithful community. However, the Catholic call to responsible stewardship of natural resources should also be part of the life cycle of the prayer and faith community which we call the Church, especially in the local parish community. The Sacred Liturgy celebrates the mystery God's presence throughout salvation history, the physical community of the parish community reflects how we as faithful participants in the continued unfolding of salvation history should indicate how as Catholics we safeguard and celebrate the gifts the Father as Creator has given us. The parish community of faith has the obligation to preserve and protect the Father's Creation and utilize the world's resources effectively, responding to the mandate of God the Creator in Genesis 1:28-30 who commands us: " Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. " Then God said, " I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food. " And it was so. God gives mankind the gift of the fruits of His creation and then delegates us to be the stewards of what He has created. That ecological obligation has implications not just for the
The Church as a Community of Gardeners
Leaven, 2014
God gave us these growing things as signs and symbols of his redeeming love for the whole of creation.-Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening E very church should cultivate a garden. I realize this bold claim is found nowhere in scripture, and for many churches strapped for time, funds, and staff, my imperative seems a bit superfluous, to say the least. With limited resources, shouldn't we just focus on the things that matter, like evangelism and children's education? While we must indeed attend to the needs of God's created people, I argue that as Christians it is our duty to care for all of creation-people as well as the land. Land is the Biblical metonym for all of creation and includes all non-human beings: moderns refer to this realm as nature. Ellen Davis writes, "[W]hat Leopold calls 'the land community,' the biblical writers call 'heaven and earth.'" 1 That is to say heaven and earth is a Biblical idiom denoting all creation. When attentive to the fact that "land" or "heaven and earth" play part in the covenant, one will discover that the Old Testament people of God have always been called to care for the fate of non-human realities. And according to the great narrative of scripture, God is restoring all creation; Christians represent those who follow God in that restoration. Therefore, the Christian mission includes more than baptizing people into Christ, which is the reductive way in which many modern Christians understand the Church's purpose. Its mission also includes addressing other issues such as poverty, peace, art, healing, and even ecology. 2 My thesis is that church gardens create awareness for Christians to the needs of creation and the costliness of human impact upon what is popularly called the "environment"-what Christian doctrine calls "creation." More specifically, church gardens offer two important gifts to the church: education and benevolence. But before considering how a garden can help churches with these important aspects of church mission, let me explain my own congregation's use of a community garden. Menuah Gardens: An Experiment Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood.-Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World This spring marks the fifth season of our church's community garden: Menuah Gardens. Menuah is a transliterated Hebrew term meaning "delight" or "tranquility." It is a word associated with Sabbath. Menuah
Particularly Present: Agrarianism, Ecofeminism, & Holy Presence in a Post-Pandemic World
American Baptist Theologians Commission, 2023
Agrarians and Ecofeminists believe that our treatment of the land mirrors our treatment of one another. Our treatment of the land has been one of flattening, reducing, and commodifying, in the interests of power, domination, and control. Our treatment of other human beings, women in particular, has been one of flattening, reducing, and commodifying, in the interests of power, domination, and control. The COVID-19 global pandemic reflected a similar logic of control: human beings were commodified (and objectified) as carriers, vectors, or contaminants. Our agency, dignity, and particularity were ignored through statewide social distancing, quarantine, and self-isolation measures. Drawing from the insights of Agrarians and Ecofeminists, and attending closely to our post-pandemic moment, for pastors ‘Holy Presence’ means particularization. As industrialism, patriarchy, and pandemic exploit creation through commodification, ‘Holy Presence’ as particularization, can heal exploited congregations through anti-commodifying attention and care. In this paper, I survey the modern discourses of Agrarianism and Eco-Feminism, attending to the problems they address and the solutions they proffer. Then, I outline the commodifying power of the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing the results with those identified by the aforementioned discourses. Finally, I conclude with a formulation of ‘Holy Presence’ as particularization, informed by Agrarianism and Eco-Feminism and situated in our post-pandemic cultural moment. Ultimately, my contention is that American Baptist pastors can bring healing to their commodified and exploited congregations by reformulating (and embodying) ‘Holy Presence’ as particularization.