Humans and nonhumans: on cooperation
This is the opinion of Br. Denys Janiga, OSB, a monk of St. John’s Abbey and a Benedictine Fellow at SJUFaith
The notion of dominion in Christianity originates from the Book of Genesis 1:28 where God grants humanity “dominion” over the earth, including its creatures.
In some instances, this has been used to justify the exploitation of nature since dominion has been interpreted as ownership and control.
In other words, God created the earth exclusively for humans who have been bestowed the right to do what they want with it.
This, of course, is just bad theology. While some might anticipate that this is where I immediately introduce the notion of Benedictine stewardship as a counter-narrative to this notion of dominion-as-control, I will not.
Stewardship is a necessary part of caring for God’s creation, but it is not sufficient unto itself.
For stewardship to be liberated from the domination of nature it must first be posited that humans and nonhumans share a common heritage and differences exist by matters of degree and not kind.
Take, for instance, the diversity of the microbial genome in the human gut (i.e. microbiome).
Microbiologists have been positing that this diversity is significantly greater than the human genome.
Moreover, the brain and gut comprise a complex system that is bi-directional and has linkages to emotion, cognition, memory and maybe even consciousness itself.
These fundamental dimensions of human experience are dependent on the labor of nonhuman microbes. The boundary between the human and nonhuman, therefore, is quite permeable and, in some instances, contains a built-in predilection for cooperation.
A significant development took place in Ecuador in 2008 that deserves attention, and I would like to connect to the notions of dominion and stewardship.
Ecuador was the first country to introduce legislation recognizing the rights of nature. Chapter seven of its constitution, states that “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.”
The constitution assigns obligations to government, corporations and the public to consider the rights of nature.
This is a shift from an anthropocentric constitution — whereby humans are at the center — to a more ecocentric one — where nonhuman nature is afforded rights in a similar way as humans.
Humans, in other words, are obligated to recognize and respect the rights of nature.
An article in 2024, from the Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Law Review, contends that changes to Ecuador’s constitution have been brought about largely by the work of indigenous communities, “who have embraced the agency, power and rights of nature within their worldview for hundreds of years.”
Nature is not seen as a mere object to be controlled and mastered but is seen as a subject with intrinsic worth.
Stewardship will look different when humans and nonhumans are placed on a more ontologically cooperative footing.
Does the first account of creation in Genesis not lend itself to this kind of interpretation?
Rather than see humans as the crowning achievement of God’s creation, it might be more humbling to see this account depicting humans as nested and embedded in a multitude of interdependent relationships.
Such a theological a priori like this would give the valuable notion of Benedictine stewardship a very different accent. Care for creation would be flatter and less vertical.