The Ecocentric Exodus
Literary traditions hold potent lessons for leading us through the climate and ecological crisis
In this guest blog, Dr Matt Pritchard – Director at Baringa and Cambridge University Policy Fellow - explores what the enduring influence of religious stories of struggle and promised lands might mean for navigating the deepening climate and ecological crisis
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The red sun rose over the Upper Galilee to the sound of scraping shovels and trundling wheelbarrows. Blurry-eyed archaeologists, coated in sweat and sand, scurried through the trenches and across the wooden planks like an army of ants. Bucket by bucket, they stirred the ancient city of Hazor from its three-thousand-year slumber.
The passing millennia do little to dim the echoes of the ancient epics. Some of those I joined on that excavation yearned to find a burnt stratum that might corroborate the biblical record of its conquest following the arrival of the Hebrews in the Promised Land (Joshua 11: 10-11). And their journey to get there – a gripping escape from slavery in Egypt and turbulent trek across the Sinai desert - has been enlisted many times to galvanise more recent transitions. Not only did this saga resonate, for obvious reasons, with modern Jews enduring countless persecutions and migrations, but it was used by the Founding Fathers of America to contextualise their passage to a new country free from the oppression they left behind; it inspired South American Liberation Theology; and it was a staple in the speeches of Martin Luther King, who saturated his themes of bondage and liberation with related texts and imagery.
The versatility and potency of this narrative leads me to wonder whether it may once again offer a mythic frame: for an increasingly constricted civilisation driving extinction, pollution and climate breakdown, and the arduous flight, barely yet begun, towards a safer, healthier world.
The rich ecological imagery helps: the ten environmental plagues, the inundation of Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea, the many deprivations of the desert. But I refer to a deeper metaphor, to us learning the hard way what our ancestors understood intuitively: we are part of the natural world, and our freedom depends upon our living harmoniously within it. Like slaves singing of their forebears, we seek a homecoming, but understand that it will look very different.
Let us assume that a general direction can be set, something akin to David Korten’s proposition that “Our common future depends on our successful transition to an Ecological Civilization that works in balanced and harmonious relationship with Earth’s living systems to provide every person with a means of living consistent with their need for health and happiness.”[1] Those who spearhead the expedition in that direction confront enormous challenges in mobilising others.
The practicalities of the transition are daunting. Our entire civilisation is built on fossil fuels; alongside their terrible costs, they have improved the quality of life of billions; our economic philosophies are fundamentally extractive; competing interests are numerous and powerful; the tragedy of the commons is playing out at levels from individuals to states; some are preparing to exploit the mayhem; there are vicious cycles; there are tipping points. We find ourselves in a predicament where both economic growth and economic de-growth seem to entail dire instability.
If we can do it at all, it will take a long time. Fossil fuels are so embedded - not just in our energy systems but in the production of fundamental materials like steel, concrete, plastics and fertilisers - that it is difficult to see how a full transition is achievable within a few decades, however much the climate trajectory demands it.[2] And that is only fossil fuels: cleaning up the pollution and regenerating the biosphere will also take a long time.
Like Moses, we face having to hold in place simultaneously a thrilling vision and the seeming impossibility of its realisation. In deteriorating circumstances, that vision may seem utterly fantastical, and our predicament entirely hopeless. Compare how he was required to lead not just in a harsh desert environment but with opposition from both within and without his group of ragged followers. There was the battle with other tribes such as the Amaleks, but he also faced internal rebellions such as the incident where, on descending Mount Sinai with the stone tablets, he discovered the Israelites worshipping the idol of a golden calf, and had to persuade God not to destroy them. Beset by physical hardship and mutinies, he needed to keep the community together in order to get to a Promised Land whose existence they knew only from centuries-old tales. The leaders of our great contemporary transition may similarly need to hold fast to an unlikely vision while the world seems to be hurtling in the opposite direction, and when those sharing their aims dissent and falter.
Eventually, on the summit of Mount Nebo, Moses looked out on the Promised Land. But he would never get there. Having come so far - having led his often ungrateful and recalcitrant people for decades through numerous travails - God ended Moses’s life. It was a moment echoed directly by an exhausted and feverish Martin Luther King when, the day before his assassination, he told a congregation in Memphis: “I’ve been to the mountaintop…And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.”[3]
What can twenty-first century leaders expect to see for their efforts? Any passage to a regenerative civilisation, if it happens at all, is likely to take a very long time. Those who take others on this journey must accept that they may never directly experience it. They may see it in odd locations or actions, but they may glimpse only from afar, in their imaginations, what amounts to a world restored.
If we need to prepare leaders for a long and painful rebirth with limited personal payoffs, either for themselves or their followers, the journey itself must be supremely meaningful. Here it is worth recalling that only two of the adults who departed Egypt would survive to see the Promised Land. It was a journey the multitudes took for their children. Roman Krznaric suggests, “a legacy is not something that we leave but something we grow throughout our lives. It is not just a bequest written into a will, but a daily practice.”[4]
The notion of intergenerational solidarity can be amplified into a transcendent goal, an orientation towards the unborn whereby, as an Apache saying has it: “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”[5] Contemplating how we want to be remembered runs counter to the death denial common in Western cultures, and invigorates what Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, believed to be the most important question we can ask, namely: “Are we being good ancestors?”[6]
It is now a quarter of a century since I packed my dad’s old mountaineering rucksack, boarded a flight for Tel Aviv and caught a bus north to join the excavations at Hazor. Any archaeologists far in the future, interested in our own time, might be searching for our troubled stratum, and in order to get here they will need to descend through more recent deposits. We must hope that they discover us only after digging through the lush organic layer of an ecologically harmonious age made possible by our own epic adventure.
Reflecting on our most enduring cultural narratives – religious, mythic, secular – can help to propel the types of leadership we need to navigate an uncertain and chaotic future, especially around compelling communications and growing resilient communities. The energy transition promises inexhaustible sources of power. So do our literary traditions.
[1] www.davidkorten.org/living-earth-econ-for-eco-civ/, retrieved 17 March 2023.
[2] See e.g. Vaclav Smil. 2022. How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to our Past, Present and Future. Viking.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgVrlx68v-0, retrieved 17 March 2023
[4] See e.g. Roman Krznaric. 2020. The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. London: WH Allen. p.69 (emphasis in the original)
[5] Ibid, p.69
[6] Jonas Salk. 1992. ‘Are We Being Good Ancestors?’ World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 1(2), pp.16-18
