Is “Waste Not Want Not” an Adequate Ethic for By-catch?: Five Biblical Ethical Models for Addressing Incidental Fisheries Catch and Ecosystem Disturbance

The “Protestant ethic” with its emphasis on hard work, efficiency, and frugality has influenced the values of North American fishing communities. Many commercial fishers concur with its principle of “waste not, want not,” and believe that discarding marketable fish is wrong. In industrialized fisheries, this ethic by itself is inadequate, due to the use of mechanized harvest technologies that can capture fish at great depths and sweep over large areas of ocean. Under a general ethic of Christian stewardship of creation, five Biblically based ethical models can offer guidance: “do not destroy” which prohibits wanton disturbance of productive nature; neighborliness which prohibits damage to another families’ livelihood, divine ownership of and joy in creation, which assigns value to non-economic species; stewardship, which requires both active resource protection, and careful resource use; and the Hebrew land ethic, which requires a sabbatical or rest for harvested ecosystems, disallows complete efficiency of harvest, and requires that some of the harvest be left for both God’s creatures and for the poor or disadvantaged members of the human community. Although Christian ethical concepts cannot replace intelligent ocean policy, they can serve as foci for problem solving, and inspiration to better care of the marine environment

“The Mass on the World” on a Winter Afternoon: Contemporary Wilderness Religious Experience and Ultimacy

Contemporary studies of wilderness spirituality are based primarily in quantitative social science, and disagree over the relative influence of shared stories and religious traditions. In a study of visitors to California’s national parks and trails, Kerry Mitchell found that backpackers reported heightened perceptions, fueled by such dichotomies as the encounter with the spectacular rather than the mundane, and with divine organization rather than human organization in wilderness. I argue wilderness experience informed only by natural scenery falls short in encountering ultimacy. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “The Mass on the World” offers a unified rather than a fragmented vision of divine relationship to the natural and the human. Multiple readings can inform the wilderness sojourner, including a basic, open reading as a prayer shared with all nature; an environmental reading considering suffering and the act of Eucharistic offering; and a constructive reading to address dichotomies and fuse humanity and nature into an integrated cosmic futur

FROM IRON AGE MYTH TO IDEALIZED NATIONAL LANDSCAPE: HUMAN -NATURE RELATIONSHIPS AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM IN FRITZ LANG'S DIE NIBELUNGEN

Abstract From the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang's Weimar lm production (released in 1924-1925) of Die Nibelungen presents an ascendant humanist Siegfried, who dominates over nature in his dragon slaying. Lang removes the strong family relationships typical of earlier versions, and portrays Siegfried as a son of the German landscape rather than of an aristocratic, human lineage. Unlike The Saga of the Volsungs, which casts the dwarf Andvari as a shape-shifting sh, and thereby indistinguishable from productive, living nature, both Richard Wagner and Lang create dwarves who live in subterranean or inorganic habitats, and use environmental ideals to convey anti-Semitic images, including negative contrasts between Jewish stereotypes and healthy or organic nature. Lang's Siegfried is a technocrat, who, rather than receiving a magic sword from mystic sources, begins the lm by fashioning his own. Admired by Adolf Hitler, Die Nibelungen idealizes the material and the organic in a way that allows the modern "hero" to romanticize himself and, without the aid of deities, to become superhuman