I-Thou relationship with Earth

Martin Buber’s notion of I-Thou relationship between humans should be expanded to include our relationship to the Earth as I-Thou.

The person-hood laws enacted in countries like Ecuador, New Zealand, and India, recognizing Earth as a person should guide us to accelerate our thinking in that direction. In New Zealand, the Te Urewera National Park was granted personhood in 2004. That land is now a legal entity with “all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person.”

In 2017, a high court in the northern state of Uttarakhand in India, declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their tributaries such as streams, meadows, jungles, wetlands, springs, and waterfalls as “legal and living entities having the status of a living person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities.”

Two centuries earlier, John Muir, a Scottish American environmental philosopher, promoted a sense of kinship he felt with all forms of life describing them as “peoples” such as of “precious plant peoples” and even “insect peoples.” His nature mysticism is so evident in the excitement he expressed when he encountered a white orchid:

“I never saw a plant so full of life; so perfectly spiritual, it seemed pure enough for the throne of its Creator. I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy.”

We don’t come to or on Earth, but we come out of the Earth. Look at the story of creation of the first human in the book of Genesis. While the story is not intended literally, the message contained therein is profound. God created the first human from the clay of the Earth. The human body is infused with the breath of God in such an intimate fashion that every life form on Earth is infused with the intimacy of its Creator.

We are dust and unto dust we shall return. Your body is an outgrowth of this Earth. Your body is a part of this planet. Remember that all the elements of the Earth such as hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen are also elements in a human. We have iron in our blood and calcium in our bones. Just as seventy percent of the Earth is water, our bodies are also seventy percent water. Moreover, the steel in our refrigerator door, the aluminum in our “tin” cans, the copper in our pennies, and the lithium in our smart phones — all come from the Earth.

Harvard geologist Andrew Knoll wonders, “given all this, it is remarkable how incurious most of us are about this great sphere that sustains us and occasionally, during earthquakes and hurricanes, places us in harm’s way.”

American essayist John Burroughs points to the need for humility in these words:

“Nature exists for man no more than she does for monkeys and is as regardless of his life or pleasure or success as she is of fleas…While man is at the top in his own estimation…Nature values him only as manure — squanders him as recklessly as autumn leaves.”

(From Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a Heavenly Life)