On the reading list today is Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, by Patrick Curry. Curry divides environmental ethics into three schools: “light green” or “shallow” environmental ethics, which maintains an anthropocentric bias and includes “lifeboat ethics” and stewardship; “mid-green” environmental ethics, which still assigns a higher value to humans and includes animal rights and biocentrism; and “dark green” environmental ethics which does not privilege human beings above other beings and includes Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” the Gaia Theory, Deep Ecology, the Earth Manifesto, Left Biocentrism, etc.

Curry includes this interesting statement in his account of Left Biocentrism:

The Left Bio movement is also well place, by virtue of its dual ancestry [i.e., left political thought and ecological thought], to put ecology onto the progressive political agenda, where it is now glaringly absent. Extraordinary as it may seem, feminists, anti-racists, and socialists are almost as likely as those on the neo-liberal and anti-democratic right to ignore the claims of even mid-range ecological ethics (e.g., animals), let alone ecocentric ethics. This fact is sadly evident in the programmes of nearly all of today’s so-called green parties, where the green values are strictly shallow, that is, advocated insofar as they further human interests, and not when they exceed them, let alone conflict.

Of course, politics in the United States is even “shallower,” ecologically speaking, than in Curry’s native England. I cannot imagine any political figure in the United States advocating for non-human interests over human interests; and something like ecofeminism and ecojustice are at best obscure academic notions that have no place in the public discourse.

In the realm of liberal religious theology, the situation is probably worse: if you can find any ecological theology at all, it will almost certainly be a “light-green” Christian ecological theology emphasizing stewardship, and probably based on Genesis 1.24 and 2.15 (a human-centered garden metaphor). That’s a problem for people like me who are “dark green.” My own denomination, Unitarian Universalism, is probably mostly in the light-green end of the spectrum, albeit with a “theology” grounded more in a secular ethic than a religious ethic. Yet while liberal religionists are mostly light green, there are high-profile exceptions like Rosemary Radford Ruether to show us dark green folks other possibilities.