Today is Earth Day. This is a strange thing to say for those of us utterly dependent every minute of our lives on the cooperative systems and generative cycles of this, our only home in the cosmos. But we forget. In our relatively new-found powers of industry we relate with the Earth as a collection of resources to be extracted and refashioned toward financial profit. We’ve become too good at this. And it is not going well. At least not for the systems and cycles on which the flourishing of life depends. And so, thankfully, we have an Earth Day to call us back to our senses.
There is much to lament. And much to do – from backyard composting to buying less to legislative advocacy.
Along with all this, I wonder how attuning to beauty might get at the root of what ails us. Dostoyevsky famously wrote that “Beauty will save the world,” which seems a bit out of reach. But maybe he was on to something.
The philosopher David Bentley Hart speaks of beauty as “an absolute end in itself.” “Beauty is gloriously useless; it has no purpose but itself.”* The useless act of beholding beauty puts us in a relationship counter to that of extraction and calculated optimization. When we encounter the beautiful in, for example, the way a bird is carried on the wind, or the way sunlight filters through a tree canopy, or the way water flows over a rock, we cease being consumers and become beholders. We participate in something of absolute value, which Hart believes is, by definition, a participation in the Divine life.
That’s a pretty different mindset than thinking: “Now how can I package and sell that?”
If you do nothing else to mark Earth Day, look for something beautiful and allow that to be a good in itself. And then stay with that mindset – relating with that thing, and other people, and the earth, as ends in themselves, as something to be enjoyed and honored for its own sake. And then, wonderfully, these others frequently do offer themselves as gifts which are of great use and necessity. Which produces gratitude and indebtedness in us for the utter generosity and abundance that is offered, which in turn puts us in service to this generative cycle. One might call it “sustainability.” But that’s a byproduct. What sets that in motion, or re-sets the whole system, is the beholding of the beautiful.
Joel
* Quotes from David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, p. 277