From 8a8c8e4b7e0e36229623bcb3652a0dfd0e1c1015 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jeremy Kidwell <bots@jeremykidwell.info>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2025 09:01:14 +0100
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+<html>
+  <head>
+    <title>"Contemplative Ecology Question Time"</title>
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+
+.xxlargetext[Contemplative Ecology Question Time]  
+
+.mediumtext[002025 June 04]
+
+.largetext[Jeremy Kidwell]  
+.mediumtext[University of Birmingham]  
+.mediumtext[*School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion*]
+
+.footnote[Email: [j.kidwell@bham.ac.uk](mailto:j.kidwell@bham.ac.uk)]
+
+---
+
+### Vignette 1 – Spiritual beings and Sex, or “Why we should talk about whether angels are male”
+
+Question: Are angels male?
+
+---
+
+class: middle
+
+Quick answer: No.
+
+---
+
+class: middle
+
+Follow-up question: How do you know this?
+
+---
+
+class: middle
+
+Quick answer: I do not. 
+
+---
+
+Based on Jesus’ statement in Matthew 22:30 (Mark 12:25) we might surmise that angels are asexual or sexless. However, this is problematic for humans, unless you’re happy with perpetual virginity (or at least non-marriage) into the eschaton. Also, people will raise questions about the completely weird statement in Genesis 6:1–4 about nephilim. None of us have any idea what they are talking about, but generally we can say that biblical prooftexting is not our best strategy here.
+
+---
+
+Thankfully, Christian reflection across the ages has some level of consensus about this: 
+
+- Augustine of Hippo (354–430) – Commentary on Genesis 1:3, City of God angelology in XI–XII: spiritual beings who were created before the corporeal world, reinforcing their non-physical essence.
+
+- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 50, Article 1 on “Whether an angel is altogether incorporeal?” “Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty... Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature”
+
+---
+
+So is this not a question even worth asking?: No, it is definitely worth asking about whether angels are male even when there is an obvious answer.
+
+---
+
+And why is this the case....? Because people often freak out when we say the same thing about the other two non-incarnate members of the Trinity not being male, but as the tradition shows us, the logic is more or less the same.
+
+For more clear-headed thinking on the issue, see Nicholas Adams (2024), 'God's pronouns', *Scottish Journal of Theology*. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0036930624000322
+
+---
+
+It's also the case that we bring this English-language bias to our thinking about the natural world.
+
+God's creation is not heterosexual or straight-forwardly gendered in binary male / female ways. And these divergences from norms are intrinsically caught up in the survival and adaptation of species. For example...
+
+- most flowing plants, most marine invertebrates (barnacles, snails, starfish, fan worms, and sea anemones) and many fish are simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites. Many mammals can often be intersex (such as black-tailed deer, pigs and kangaroos).
+
+---
+
+- sex-role reversal: Male seahorses and pipefish provide a great deal of parental investment in terms of time spent rearing the young in their pouches or glued to their undersides... Wattled jacanas from the Chagres River in Panama are large, squat black birds with white wing tips, a red face, and a long, yellow probing bill used to feed among shallow freshwater plants like hyacinths. The raucous, beefy females spend their days jousting with one another at the borders of their territories. Within these territories, harems of smaller males tend the eggs and chicks.
+
+---
+
+- some animals practice monogamy, have two-gender families, and even have divorce (annual divorce rates as low as 2.4 percent in the barnacle goose), but this is uncommon for mammals who are mostly polygamous and nonmonagomous (and let's remember this is not unthinking and happens within often quite complex cultural and social systems e.g. with primates).
+
+---
+
+- other animals have multi-gender families, with "within-sex polymorphisms" such as the plainfin midshipman (Porichthys notatus), "this fish is but one of hundreds of known species where males come in two or more genders" or the bluegill sunfish which has a three male morph one female gender family unit.
+
+---
+
+- it is often the case that for animals, "mating isn’t the same as breeding... matings serve as much to manage relationships as to transfer sperm" so it isn't surprising that we find "same-sex sexuality among vertebrates" (see Bonobos)
+
+For more, I recommend reading Joan Roughgarden, *Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People* (University of California Press, 2013)
+
+---
+
+class: middle
+
+### Vignette 2 – on the Judeo-Christian marriage to Agriculture
+
+Big question: is it a problem for our attempts to be ecological Christians that the Judeo-Christian traditions emerged exclusively in an agricultural age?
+
+Let's lay things out carefully here.
+
+---
+
+class: middle
+
+Point 1. Agrarianist ecology offers an account of good v. bad farming, even going so far as to suggest that agriculture should be considered to be an intrinsic component of a ecological society. Defended somewhat by urban ecology emphasis on crafting modes of co-existence between humans and non-humans.
+
+---
+
+class: middle
+
+Point 2. But there are increasingly sharp questions about whether there is any version of, from an ecological perspective, “good farming”
+
+“The history of Earth-abuse through agriculture has been horrendous. Essentially, all of nature’s ecosystems are perennial polycultures. Agriculture reversed that. Consequently, soil erosion became a problem. The wilderness has to become a standard against which we judge our agricultural and cultural practices." 
+
+– Wes Jackson, co-founder, The Land Institute (https://landinstitute.org/about-us/)
+
+---
+
+Point 3. There are good reasons to ask questions around the popular “Green Revolution” food security ethical narratives. Things look good at first:
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cropland-per-person-over-the-long-term?time=1500..latest&tab=chart" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+But then you zoom out:
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-cropland?time=-10000..latest" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+But then you zoom out:
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-land-use-since-10000bc?time=1200..latest" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+The effects of land-use conversion for grazing and agriculture are unavoidably anti-ecological:
+- intensive inputs (redirection of water supplies, and over-consumption of water, fertilizer)
+- intensive modification (tilling and soil disturbance)
+- monocrop farming
+
+This is all in the name of providing food to the worlds humans exclusively after 3000BC. 
+
+Let's bear in mind that we have clear indications from archaeological research that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) with complex societies, rituals of creator worship,  culture and behaviours have been walking this earth and eating their fill for 300,000 years (see Jebel Irhoud, Morocco site). See also recent evidence for human Rainforest Habitation ~150,000 years ago.
+
+---
+
+Also note, farming is much more of a challenge than urbanisation (but yes diet in light of intensive population growth):
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-over-the-long-term?time=1880..latest" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+Note here the shift towards intensive agriculture:
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/extent-of-intensive-agriculture?time=earliest" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+<section>
+  <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/extent-of-pastoralism?time=-8000" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 500px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>
+</section>
+
+---
+
+Point 4: Some anthropologists and geographers have adopted an "Old Anthropocene" concept which shifts the locus of concern backwards into earlier Holocene and pre-modern environmentally destructive cultures particularly that land use changes for agriculture seems precede species extinction and global warming. 
+
+This is helpful from a biblical archaeology and interpretation perspective, as it enables us to overcome "noble savage" bias we might bring to the biblical text. As Michael Northcott notes, this seems to be a reasonably faithful representation of Old Testament perspectives on the destruction of nature.
+
+See: William F. Ruddiman, "The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago" in Climatic Change Vol. 61, pp. 261–293, (2003) and "Late Holocene climate: Natural or anthropogenic?" in Reviews of Geophysics Vol. 54, Issue 1 (2016), pp. 93-118.
+
+---
+
+Point 5: If we take on board these concerns about the irrevocable impacts of holocene agriculture and horticulture, we should be sensitive to arguments for forms of food growing that can nest within healthy ecosystems, e.g. perennial polyculture, ecological intensification, and agroforestry. (see Land Institute research here).
+
+Also note: there is growing evidence that refutes "neolithic revolution" arguments for a "dawn of agriculture" 12-8k years ago, suggesting instead that Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer-fisher-forager societies also engaged in intentional plant propagation and ecological niche construction, creating anthropogenic landscapes characterized by selective harvesting, transplanting, and fire management, particularly in ecotonal zones. Selective harvesting and re-sowing suggests a continuum rather than a dichotomy between foraging and farming and a non-linear, multi-regional model of agricultural origins.
+
+---
+
+Point 6: This all undermines the "inevitability" of agriculture as part of human flourishing and presses us to consider low-intensity models for food growing that can coexist with ecological restoration and reforestation.
+
+But why haven’t we been able to facilitate these shifts yet? Agricultural scientists and ethnobotanists note that the practices of low intensity food growing doesn’t just demand technical changes – it rests on a need to shift to “Perennial Cultures”
+
+
+---
+
+Point 7: Scholars like Timothy Morton carry this concern about culture into a critique of agricultural-age religion, which is nonetheless quite different from Lynn White's:
+
+“So I have a lot of sympathy for the “What are we going to do?” sort of question. And this is precisely why I refuse to give it a straight answer. What this type of question is asking, and the way the question is asking it, has to do with needing to control all aspects of the current ecological crisis. And we can’t. That would require being able to reverse time and return at least to 10,000 BCE, before humans set the agricultural logistics in motion that
+eventually gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, carbon emissions, and therefore to global warming and mass extinction… Foreseeing and planning are strangely overrated, as neurology is now telling us, and as phenomenology has been telling us. It has to do with how we overrate the idea of free will. Our agricultural-based religions tell us that we have a soul that is somewhere inside yet beyond our body, and that this soul guides the body around, like a charioteer steering the horses (this is how the Greek philosopher Plato puts it in Phaedrus). But this idea has its origin in the very dynamic we have identified as the problem. We’ve been thinking that we are on top of things, outside of things or beyond things, able to look down and decide exactly what to do, in all sorts of ways for about 12,000 years.” 
+
+(Morton, Being Ecological, p. xxiv-xxv)
+
+---
+
+"...And if agriculture is in part responsible for global warming and mass extinction (which it is), wouldn’t it be better not to use a monotheist reference frame or mono-theist language? Wouldn’t it be better to stop with the sermonizing, the shaming, and the guilt that are part and parcel of the theistic approach to life that arose in the agricultural age?
+
+“Usually the ecological way of being religious takes the form of some kind of misanthropy, which is still anthropocentrism: humans are evil because they have caused ecological destruction. This idea is hardwired into accounts of what Judeo-Christian religions call the Fall, but also other agricultural-age religious accounts of the move toward agricultural society, such as Hinduism.” (Morton, Being Ecological, p. 146)
+
+---
+
+So here's the big question for us: Are there any signs that the Judeo-Christian tradition has been formed outside the lifeways of Agriculture?
+
+---
+
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