All Creation Groans

From TREES, FORESTRY, AND THE RESPONSIVENESS OF CREATION by Walsh, Karsh, and Ansell How can trees have agency in the way in which we have been speaking of it here? To begin to answer this question requires that we be clear about what we mean by the exercise of agency. Does agency require that the agent be able to exercise some sort of will? This would appear to be the case. But if we confine our understanding of "will" to rational decision-making, it becomes ridiculous to speak of creatures that lack higher intellectual capabilities as exercising such will. This has been perhaps the greatest stumbling block to perceiving agency in plant life. The problem is that this is a false stumbling block. Human agency and will cannot be understood primarily in terms of rational decision-making. We are multidimensional creatures and our intellectual capabilities are but one factor in the exercise of our wills: an intellectualistic conception of will cannot adjudicate the claims of our volition, let alone those of nonhuman creation. To say, as the Bible does, that trees praise, sing, clap, and rejoice is to say that trees, as trees, in their whole physical, chemical, spatial, biotic functioning can fully respond to their Creator when that functioning is uninhibited and free. To say that trees groan is to say that trees experience and respond to conditions of human abuse or neglect that inhibits and closes down their responsiveness. In this way, metaphors of praising and groaning enable us to "hear" what the trees have to "say." Technorati Tags: Christianity, Ecology, Ecotheology