Willis Jenkins

Ecological Management, Cultural Reform, and Religious Creativity

Complex environmental problems frustrate practical reasoning and scientific research, and thereby challenge relations between ethics and ecology. Sustainability crises, in which human powers affect ecological systems in ways that jeopardize basic social values, become practical problems only as cultures create capacities to take responsibility for them. They become real problems, that is, only as cultural reform processes generate ways to confront and learn from social crises. Issues such as climate change therefore require professionals who can make challenges to environmental science and moral culture into sites for adaptive learning and social change, thereby making inchoate threats into intelligible civic problems. How to make crises into problems shapes an ongoing debate over competing strategies of practical reason. Should ethics critique the cultural worldviews and metaphysical assumptions at root of environmental crises, or should it develop practical responses to specific problems from broadly available cultural values? The question seems to force a dilemma: choosing the cosmological route lets one critique the depth of problems, but at the cost of distance from the moral imagination and political values of most citizens, while choosing the pragmatic route lets one deploy cultural values to support specific policy solutions, but at the cost of being constrained by the modest reforms those values permit. Work in religious ethics, and its companion field of religion and ecology, tends to pursue a cosmological strategy, examining background worldviews and ontological assumptions in order to challenge the cultural ideas that underlie sustainability problems. This approach allows ethicists to critique deep cultural roots, but at the cost of distance from the way particular moral communities can respond to environmental problems and of abstraction from the specific problems faced by ecological science. Because our scholarship has often been abstract from science-based interpretation of problems and from the cultural reform processes by which communities generate responses to them, I have elsewhere argued that religious ethics should adopt methods from the problem-based approaches proposed by pragmatists. Problem-based methods allow religious ethicists to better critique and cultivate the ways communities invent moral change in response to practical challenges.1 Here I argue the other side; that problem-based approaches can benefit from considering the role of religious communities in generating cultural reform. Pragmatic approaches depend on cultural reform when they use adaptive ecological management as an instrument to deal with complex problems. Adaptive management is primarily a tool for doing ecological research in conditions of uncertainty, but as I will show, can be extended as a civic process of ethical

Islamic Law and Environmental Ethics: How Jurisprudence ( usul al-fiqh ) Mobilizes Practical Reform

Where some religious environmentalisms deploy traditional concepts according to the practical needs of cosmology, usul al-fiqh (jurisprudence) envisions an alternative practical strategy for Islamic environmental ethics. Jurisprudence governs religious adaptations according to guiding principles designed to conform practical reason to the ongoing discovery of divine will. This article shows how those principles can function as mechanisms for normative change, and reviews their diagnostic capacity for evaluating various uses of Islamic resources.

Global Ethics, Christian Theology, and the Challenge of Sustainability

This paper considers how theology confronts sustainability as a global problem, and what that confrontation can contribute to the challenge of global ethics. After reviewing major models of religious engagement with global ethics, I argue for an analogical conception in which Christian social practices generate moral patterns with the capacity to meet the integrative challenge of global ethics. Theological reflection on those practices then helps sustain the discourse of sustainability as an effective working concept.