*3.1. Challenging Practical Wisdom*

The dominant forms of practical wisdom neglect much of the world, often justifying social, economic, and ethnic stratifications and human abuses of land and seas for the sake of monetary or techno-industrial progress. Ecologists have long recognized the need to question dominant world views and theologies, seeking to replace individualistic views with communal ones; accents on progress with accents on well-being; anthropocentric views with ecocentric or cosmocentric ones; technological solutions with holistic ecological ones; focus on economic expansion with focus on sustaining and regenerating the ecology; political competition with communal collaboration; and hierarchies of power with deep listening to all beings of creation. I will focus here on the issues and insights posed by some of the most influential ecologists of the past 80 years, recognizing that equally important challenges and alternatives are offered by indigenous peoples, to whom I turn in the next section.

Aldo Leopold was an early pioneer in the modern ecological movement, especially with the posthumous publication of his seminal *A Sand County Almanac* (1949). He was far beyond his time in his understanding of the urgen<sup>t</sup> need for compassion and justice for the whole natural world, including human beings, who were both a beneficiary and a danger to the rest of the natural world. Leopold's land ethic was a guide for human understanding and responsibility, though seriously marred by a lack of racial sensitivity and racist comments. He saw a contrast between conservation and Abrahamic concepts of land, which he identified with commodification. In his foreword, he argued, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect" (Leopold [1949] 2013, pp. 16– 17). *Herein lies a major challenge to practical wisdom—to reject worldviews of commodification and to understand the land as community*. An additional challenge has to be addressed to Leopold himself, namely *the challenge to question hierarchies of value, including those that value some peoples over others*.

Rachel Carson carried a different, but complementary, message. She was a marine biologist, ecologist, and science writer, who had a gift for communication in scientifically accurate, poetic prose, thus catching the attention of a broad public. In her earliest book, *Under the Sea Wind*, she told stories of sea animals—birds, fish, turtles, and other creatures— as they lived their daily lives (Carson [1941] 2007). This is a series of narratives that invite readers into the actual worlds of these creatures and their waters. Carson challenges the practical wisdom of viewing the world from human perspectives by narrating an ecology of life among animals related to the sea and one another. In sum, *she challenges dominant forms of practical wisdom by decentering human experience*. Carson ([1962] 2002) offers another challenge in her most famous book, *Silent Spring*, in which she explains the effects of chemicals and pesticides on humans and other living beings, focusing particularly on DDT and its uses in agriculture. Here *her challenge is twofold, revealing the permeability of humans to chemicals, to poisons and contaminants outside themselves, and revealing the enormous damage*

*that can be done to people, plants, and land by chemical pesticides*. This particular work won widespread attention and eventually led to the elimination of DDT and other pesticides from U.S. agricultural use, but sadly not from exports.

Others continued the accents of Leopold and Carson. One of the people who explicitly raised issues of worldviews and practices was the educator Chet Bowers. He sought to connect ecojustice with educational practices in childhood, youth, and higher education (Bowers 1995, 1997, 2001, 2016). From 1974 to 2016, Bowers addressed *worldview challenges, explicitly worldviews grounded in individualism, progress, economic–political power, and human dominance over the earth*. He argued for a "deep cultural" movement, critiquing education for reproducing the very cultures that are destroying the earth by perpetuating the cultural myths that magnify ecological crises. Bowers decried simple answers, even the practice of blaming capitalism; he made a case that *all* assumptions need to be questioned (Edmundson 2017). As a fierce advocate for changes in worldview, he drew especially on indigenous traditions and values to discern and encourage cultural alternatives.

Many other advocates for ecological justice and flourishing have offered ecological alternatives and reshaped worldviews, drawing upon Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, indigenous traditions, and others (Grim and Tucker 2014; Tucker 2003; Vaughan-Lee 2016) and upon particular theological traditions such as African American (Baker-Fletcher 1998); Lutheran and ecumenical (Rasmussen 2015; Chicka 2019; Santmire 2020); and process–relational (Cobb 2020; Cobb and Castuera 2015; Birch and Cobb 1981). In all these and more, people have questioned and proposed alternatives for the development of practical wisdom, echoing the challenges named above.

Some ecological authors of the past 40 years have also highlighted the close relationship between environmental destruction and the ideological or physical crushing of women and the poor. Women have frequently raised issues of the mutually reinforcing oppression of the earth, women, and marginalized peoples (Johnson and Wilkinson 2020; Shiva 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Ruether 1995, 1996, 2006; Gebara 1999, 2003; Halkes 1989). Some compilations have brought together voices of women across the world (Ruether 2006) and activist women in diverse cultures and roles (Johnson and Wilkinson 2020). In addition to analyzing gender, gender identities, and environmental perspectives, these women often identify with and speak strongly on behalf of the poor, as do liberation theologians across the world (Boff [1997] 2000). The cries of the earth and the cries of the poor are intertwined. *The challenge is to explore ecological crises from the perspective of multiple religious and cultural traditions and multiple oppressions*.

I have portrayed some of the early work associated with the ecological justice movement to reveal the wide range of concerns and ideas from the 1940s to the present. What is still lacking is the hard work of listening deeply to one another and the earth itself, and the close questioning and reshaping of practical wisdom. What is also lacking is attention by practical theologians to issues of ecological justice and the climate crisis in particular. Pamela McCarroll has diagnosed the situation well, identifying the anthropocentrism of methods and goals in practical theology and in Western theologies more generally, together with the spreading of eco-anxiety that can stimulate defensiveness and thwart action (McCarroll 2020). HyeRan Kim-Cragg's critique is similar, with an emphasis also on the destructive forces of colonialism (Kim-Cragg 2018), as highlighted above by Gilio-Whitaker and others. While practical theologians have made a case for the field's engagemen<sup>t</sup> with public theology (Graham 2013; Forrester 2004) and social witness (Ayres 2019b), direct engagemen<sup>t</sup> with ecological injustice and crises is limited to fewer works (such as (Ayres 2013, 2019a, 2019b; McCarroll 2020; Kim-Cragg 2018)), even in the face of climate catastrophe. *The challenge now is to study both human and nonhuman practices—practices of trees and rivers and antelope—and to assess and reshape practical wisdom accordingly, so that daily life, community activism, and political action will be transformed*.
