Essays on the Land, Ecotheology, and Traditions in Africa
More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the physically circumscribed yet digitally connected rhythms of our days invite us to live glocally, a manner of thinking globally and acting locally. As I check positivity rates in my community, I hear the reverberations of desperate headlines ringing the Delta variant’s rapid spread through com- munities in India. News of the Biden Administration’s blocking of the Keystone Pipeline permit came as I sat with my hands in a stream near my home and tracked the progress of a friend in NC who was traveling with others to protest Line 3, another pipeline threatening waters not unlike the ones at my fingertips. To live glocally is to keep a sharp eye on the particular ecosystem in which you live while also casting a wide vision for the many threads that link your life to forces, decisions, and people beyond your bounds.
Essays on the Land, Ecotheology, and Traditions in Africa. Edited by Ntreh, Aidoo, and Aryeh. Resource Publications, 2019. 270 pages. $32
In the 2019 collection Essays on the Land, Ecotheology, and Traditions in Africa, edited by Benjamin Abotchie Ntreh, Mark S. Aidoo, and Daniel Nii Aboagye Aryeh, we are invited into a conversation among sixteen scholars pulling at the knots of interreligious dialogue, creation care, theological education, and Christian engagement at the institutional and individual levels in environmental crises.
Their research is hyper- local, addressing particular concerns—including the water and soil degredation caused by galamsey (small- scale mining operations), traditional grazing practices and their intersection with modern life, and the use and disposal of plastics—for particular cities, regions, and ethnic groups in Ghana and Burkina Faso. If you, like me, read the collection at both a geographic distance from its authors and conceptually removed from its issues, might I suggest reading glocally, as one of its contributors Dr. Yah Attah Edu-Bekoe advises. To do so is to rightly acknowledge that the menaces to environmental and human health in their parts of Africa are only shades different than those in your own, and it is also to listen for the theological, exegetical, or rhetorical tools you might need in your own context.
In Parts I and II, the editors have gathered contributors with a range of theological positions and exegetical responses to scripture, and the range is one of the strengths of the collection. It is a book that could be shared among communities with divergent beliefs but shared passions for environmental care. Essays on the Land does, however, speak with one voice that stewardship of the earth is both a divine prerogative and a primary command over human life. Blasu writes, “humanity’s dominion authority demands humility and moral accountability…because it is derived; only God wields actual dominion over creation.” Failure to safeguard waterways, soil, wildlife and air quality are named as sin and Christianity’s particular sins of omission and commission are named. Oduro suggests, “The sad state of the environment in Ghana is a testimony of Christian complicity in the degradation.” Osei-Owusu’s study demonstrates that despite stated commitments to link ecotheology to praxis, “the local church and the institutional church seem ill equipped to link their theological self-understanding with some of their congregants’ nascent pro-environmental orientations.” Aidoo identifies both a need for a methodology for producing an African theocology curriculum in order to “prepare [local theology] students to play an active role in African religious, cultural, social, and public life.”
Part III foregrounds issues that have murmured beneath the arguments of the preceding essays. Licensed and unlicensed small- scale mining in Ghana, gold mining in Burkina Faso, and local reactions to the grazing practices of Fulani herdsmen are offered as case studies that Christians have both an obligation and a particular wisdom to address. The call on the church is unequivocal in these studies. As Dr. Ini Dorcas Dah argues, “It is thus time for the church to stand up and biblically address the devastation… Otherwise, the Christian community will also bear responsibility for contribution to the destruction of creation by keeping quiet, for silence is tantamount to approval.”
Part IV provides ethnographic portraits of two ethnic groups in Ghana, the Akan and the Krobo peoples. The authors draw direct lines between the distinctive religious beliefs of these groups and their ethics of land stewardship. While other contributors have suggested ways that Christian theology might be overlaid or seeded out of such indigenous beliefs, in this section the portraits are offered alongside, seemingly as primed for the kind of ecotheological analysis as has been offered in other essays of Christian scriptures, practices, and thinking.
There are environmental crises in my context (coal ash disposal that protects groundwater and human health, forest management that prepares for the effects of climate change while supporting ecological integrity and local economies) that demand nuanced and careful analyses by theologians and biblical scholars like the ones provided in these pages of mining operations in Ghana. Indigenous ethics about shared lands need to be present in collected volumes with Christian scholars in the United States like you find among the essays here. Though I am a stranger in the lands here considered, my reading was filled with echoes of familiar issues and positions, failures and hopes. I leave the book gratefully burdened by all that ought to be done in response, both in the global places I only read about and those in which I act every day.
