Marty Walter's "Mathematics for the Environment"

One of my plans for next year is to design a"general education" mathematics course that will teach some basic concepts related to sustainability at the same time.

In a big university like Penn State, thousands of students each year take math courses to satisfy their "GQ" (general education - quantification) requirement.  Many of them will take precalculus courses, which provide foundational skills for calculus and advanced mathematics but are not always tailored to students for whom this is the last math course they will ever take.

Can we do better for these students? I think we can.

Education, Ecology and Death

In his book How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind, Richard Hughes records a the comments of a faculty colleague at Pepperdine University.  "It's obvious to me", said the colleague, "that you have one objective in all of your classes." Puzzled, Hughes asked, "What's that?". He records:

[My colleague] looked me straight in the eye and said, half facetiously but also, I thought, half seriously, "You want to convince your students that they're going to die."

 In a chapter which seems to me a profound response to a partly facetious comment, Hughes develops this thought in several ways.

• An educated person has learned to "embrace the ambiguity of the human situation", including the facts of his or her own finitude and frailty.  And Hughes is emphatic that this is particularly a task for Christian or faith-based education.
• "By asking our students to take finitude seriously, we free them for a healthy skepticism... to question the wisdom of all human authorities, including the wisdom that they may learn from us."
• In the same way "we prepare students to take seriously the finitude of others and to reach out with compassionate sensitivity" to those in need.
• And finally, "by focusing attention on ultimate questions, not religious answers, we preserve our students' integrity and freedom to make religious discoveries for themselves."

 Hughes goes on to talk about how hard it is for 18-year-old college students to genuinely contemplate finitude and mortality.  They are young, and their whole life experience has been one of steady growth in power and freedom.  They know it can't last for ever, but how easy is that to take seriously when experience to date is 100% in the opposite direction?

The message of ecological economics is that "Western" society as a whole is in the position of the death-denying 18-year-old student.  Our experience to date - as far back as we can remember - has been one of steady growth in power and freedom, but that growth has in fact been fueled by the steady depletion of resources that we have simply no idea how to replace. A huge change looms: whether it is sober middle age, or slow decline, or sudden death, I don't think anyone can say - but society's teenage exuberance is close to over. And how easy is that to take seriously when experience to date is 100% in the opposite direction?

My question is: what would an education look like which prepared students to live with the finitude and frailty of our society, of our historical project, in the same way that Hughes tried to mold an education around the finitude and frailty of the individual student?

The fate of the earth

'Why worry about "saving the planet"?' asked my friend.  'Isn't it going to be destroyed anyhow when Jesus returns? Surely we should focus our attention on spiritual things - things that will last?  In the mean time, the planet and its resources have been given to us humans to enjoy.'

My friend wouldn't see himself as greedy or rapacious, and it won't help if I start calling him those names - especially since the charge could easily rebound on me. He has absorbed from our tradition a contrast between the spiritual/eternal/morally significant and the material/transient/morally indifferent, and he just wants me not to misdirect my effort towards things that won't last.   What can I say in response?  Here are a couple of thoughts.

First of all, the argument that he's making - that our relationship with this planet is a temporary, morally indifferent one and that we're therefore free to enjoy what's on offer - exactly parallels those that surfaced in the early Corinthian church about the human body and its appetites.  See especially 1 Cor 6:12-20, where Paul counters the argument "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food; God will destroy them both" by affirming that the body is not mere indifferent matter but "the temple of the Holy Spirit".  It is gnosticism, not Christian faith, to believe that the spiritual world renders the material one somehow irrelevant.

But second, must we in fact believe that the material world is to be annihilated when Christ returns? (Once again compare 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, where Paul is at pains to emphasize the continuity as well as the discontinuity between our present state and the 'resurrection body'.)  The usual proof-text for 'annihilation' is 2 Peter 3:10, where the King James Version reads "the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."  "Burned up" here translates the Greek katakaisetai, which appears in the text from which the King James translators worked. However, earlier manuscripts (Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, and P72) have since been discovered which show that the original text most probably read heuresthisetai ("will be found"), and this reading appears in all modern editions of the Greek New Testament and underlies for instance the NIV translation "will be laid bare".  The Greek word heuriske here is the ordinary one for "finding" something, and to say that something "will be found" does not sound like saying that it will be annihilated; indeed, in Rev 18:21 the phrase "will NOT be found" is used to express the result of an annihilating judgment.

So what does it mean that the earth "will be found"? In an interesting article titled Worldview and Textual Criticism in 2 Peter 3:10, Al Wolters argues in detail that heuriske in this form refers to "the eschatological result of a purification process", as in the common image of refined metal emerging from the smelter's crucible.  I think I would tell me friend that according to Peter the judging fire will burn up the "elements" (stoicheia), the spiritual (!) powers which hold the earth in bondage, but that the earth itself will be purified or "found".  Would it be going too far to suggest that as part of this process of "laying bare" the earth, the way that we humans have used the planet as a giant mine and dumping ground will also be "laid bare": that the dioxins in the Passaic River, the violated mountaintops of West Virginia, the Third World heavy-metal scrapyards of discarded computers, will "rise up in judgment against this generation"?  I wonder.

Beyond our hope

Teatime, in England, the week before Christmas, years ago.  The hostess, graciously entertaining a family that included a young child, a boy, perhaps four years old.  As is perhaps inevitable, the conversation comes round to Father Christmas (Santa to my American friends).

"Will Father Christmas be coming to your house next week?"

The boy looks nervous, uncertain. "Maybe."

"Will he bring you presents?"

"I don't know."  His lip is trembling.

"Have you been good?"

The boy bursts into tears.  Embarrassed, his mother sweeps him into her arms and the little incident is over.

But it has stayed with me. Kids know the deal: if you are good, you get the stuff; if you aren't, you get the lump of coal.  But can you be sure that you've been good enough?  Is anyone good enough?  Maybe that over-sensitive four-year-old was wrestling with that ultimate question.

The difference between Jesus and Santa is this: Before sending his Son, God did not say to humanity "Have you been good?"  The angel did not say to Mary, "Have you been good?". The shepherds did not hear the celestial message, "Peace on earth and good will to those who are good."  If Jesus was like Santa, his gifts would not have been bestowed.  Because, no, there is not enough good in any of us to deserve his coming.

But we are not asked whether we deserve it.  We are empowered to welcome it.  As the Prologue to John's Gospel (itself a profound meditation on Christmas) says, "Of his fulness we have all received, grace upon grace".

That is good news beyond our hope.

Inside Job

I just took the time to watch Charles Ferguson's searing documentary about the 2008 financial meltdown, Inside Job.

The film is not a rant.  It does well at explaining the repackaging of risk into derivative securities, the unregulated "insurance" market of credit-default swaps, and how in the edn even small changes in the underlying assets could bring down the whole over-leveraged facade.

But as one lobbyist after another professes incomprehension that anyone could question the wisdom of Wall Street's obscene bonus culture (millions of dollars if you win! and if you lose, someone else goes bankrupt), one cannot but think of Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Academe is not exempt. See the chair of Harvard's economics department reduced to  bumbling incoherence as he tries to explain how there is no conflict of interest when faculty members are paid six-figure sums to write objective-looking reports that just happen to promote the interests of their paymasters.  No, they don't have to disclose the payments, or even the fact that they had been paid.

I suppose the follow-up is to read Confidence Men and learn how the foxes are still in charge of the henhouse.  Sigh.

Seriously, watch this movie.  Key line at the end: "Real engineers build bridges. Financial engineers build dreams. And if those dreams turn out to be nightmares, someone else pays."

Fill the Earth

In Genesis 1:28, God commands the first humans to "fill the earth".  What does this mean?

If I ask someone "please fill this glass" with water, and he takes it and brings it back empty, then it's clear he did not do what I requested.  But if he holds the glass under the faucet endlessly, while the water spills over and runs on the floor, then my request has been disobeyed in a different way.

In other words, the commandment to "fill" something implies a limit - "now it is full". It is not a mandate to keep filling for ever.

In the context of Genesis, is the instruction "fill the earth" a limitation on the earlier instruction to "go forth and multiply", rather than a reaffirmation of it?

Economics

One of my students came to my office today to talk about a math problem.  He's a finance major and as he was leaving he spotted a copy of Samuelson's economics textbook nestling among the geometry and differential equations.

"Are you interested in economics?", he asked. I had time only for a quick answer.

"Yes.  But I'm especially interested in the limitations of contemporary economic thinking and the ways that they might lead us astray as we think about the future."

"What do you mean?"

"Two key assumptions in particular: that humans are individual utility maximizers, and that the economy is a self-contained and self-perpetuating growing system.  The first assumption makes it difficult to talk about community, and the second makes it difficult to talk about limits.  But perhaps those two are exactly the things we need to be talking about now."

I went on to quote Herman Daly: "The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ecosystem".  And not a small subsidiary any more.  Take a look at the article A safe operating space for humanity in Nature, maybe the world's premier scientific journal, a couple of years back. The diagram at the beginning of the article symbolizes their assessment of humanity's impact on the Earth in a number of different categories.

To learn more about Daly's and related thought, visit the web site of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.