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As Al Gore, Jane Goodall, and others have highlighted over the last decade, auditing our shared values and ways of being-in-the-world is just as important as driving more fuel efficient cars and recycling office paper. Scholars, writers, and environmentalists have discussed these metaphysical aspects of the modern environmental crisis for more than 30 years in a subfield known as “Religion and Ecology.” The inter-religious discussions and academic analyses began in 1967 with a short essay entitled “The Spiritual Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” by Lynn White Jr., which asserted that Western Christianity was to blame for our systemic environmental problems.
However, more than thirty years before the publication of Lynn White Jr.’s essay, John Steinbeck published a fictional book that examines those same themes, interrogating predominant but underlying metaphysical and religious assumptions about the divide between human and non-human life. To a God Unknown is a subtly iconoclastic work, merging pagan, Christian, and Hindu imagery with philosophical, mythological, and ecological tropes, all infused into the story of one man and his family’s experience homesteading in a California valley. This novel recognizes and argues that contemplation of the natural world and acts of stewardship have spiritual value, pushing the reader to re-imagine his/her way of being in the world. It encourages its readers to respond with a new set of values—and a new set of ethics—to address the environmental crisis through collaboration, seeking not just an egocentric utilitarianism, but a spiritual awakening that transcends the materiality of human existence. Steinbeck was far ahead of his time, implicitly asking questions that now seem hauntingly relevant.
The themes of the text are largely a product of the book’s development. Over a period of five years, Steinbeck wrote and revised this, his second novel, with the help of two then-unknown friends: biologist Ed Ricketts and mythologist Joseph Campbell. The collaboration of writing the novel mimics the acts of collaboration necessary to address our environmental crisis today, an argument I will attempt with the help of author N. Scott Momoday and philosopher Emanuel Levinas.
Forty years after publication, that essay by Lynn White Jr. is still the most oft-cited article, by a wide margin, in the history of the journal Nature, illustrating the primacy scholars give to understanding how our religious traditions and values shape our relationship with the natural world. Now, seventy-four years after it first appeared in bookstores, Steinbeck’s novel has a fleshed-out context and may be more relevant today than ever before.
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