The Lost Gospel Of The Earth
A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit,
and Politics
A passionate call for spiritual integrity and essential democracy.
Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden is a man of ambitious goals. From his
early 1960s role in framing the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students
for a Democratic Society, to his work opposing the Viet Nam War, from his Campaign
for Economic Democracy to his election to the California Senate, Hayden has devoted
his energies to political organizing, with social justice and participatory democracy
at the core of his concerns. Now chairman of the Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee
of the California Senate and a university instructor in ecotheology, Hayden has embarked
upon his most challenging quest yet – the renewal in Western culture of an ecological
ethic based on a spiritual connection to the Earth and a sense of kinship with all
life.
The Lost Gospel of the Earth is a most impressive work. It clearly is not a book
he could have written in the early 1960s when, in the spirit of the time, he and
his fellow drafters of the Port Huron Statement called for “the industrialization
of the world” with nuclear power as the linchpin. To his credit, Hayden has learned
a great deal since then, much of it from direct experience of nature. His stories
of meeting a grizzly bear in Alaska and experiencing the energies at Ayers Rock in
Australia bespeak a firsthand knowledge of nature that goes well beyond the current
politics of environmental policy. One thing that hasn’t changed about Hayden is his
ability to craft a detailed case for change built on widely shared beliefs interpreted
in a new way. In The Lost Gospel, he delves deep in search of a Biblical basis for
a kinship model for humanity’s relationship with the environment, culling passages
from Genesis, Job, and Psalms to elaborate a Judeo-Christian green ethos to counter
what he calls the “lords of the universe” view that asserts scriptural support for
human domination of nature. Exploring how other peoples relate to the environment,
Hayden concludes that some religious traditions remain silent as the environment
is pillaged in the service of material aims.
Thinking globally, but also thinking and acting locally, Hayden explores his home
turf (Los Angeles and his native Michigan) and his Irish heritage, seeking deeper
understanding. He recommends that each of us “rediscover the creation story of our
immediate place” and that together we revise the creation story of America, “which
began some 10,000 years ago when our ancestors first learned how to live in this
land.” In the chapter “The Lost Gospel of Our Native History,” he applies the term
“native” with refreshing inclusiveness, using it to refer not only to Native Americans
but also to the Irish, Mexicans, Africans, Asians, and white Europeans, all of whom
have ancestral traditions of kinship with the Earth. Hayden avoids the common pitfall
of viewing Christianity, with its focus on ascension, as having nothing at all in
common with Earth-based native religions. His eco-spirituality creatively blends
the two. If there is a flaw in The Lost Gospel, it may be that Hayden’s vision is
so broad and far-reaching that the action steps he proposes seem small and incremental
in comparison. He laments that the environmental movement has not yet produced the
equivalent of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” or brought
forth a leader like Cesar Chavez, blessed with both moral authority and a gift for
political organizing. Hayden has done his best to fill the gap, and his book will
inspire others to do their part.
Daniel Redwood, a Virginia Beach, Virginia, chiropractor, is the author of A Time
to Heal and Contemporary Chiropractic...
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