The Planet You Inherit: Letters to my Grandchildren When Uncertainty's a Sure Thing

We face uncharted territory, Larry Rasmussen warns in his recent book, The Planet You Inherit: Letters to my Grandchildren When Uncertainty 's a Sure Thing.  We -- homo sapiens, that is -- stand at the edge of the abyss called the Age of the Anthropocene, the age of human domination of the entirety of nature.  Addressed to his two grandchildren, Eduardo and Martin, the letters in this incredibly engaging book were written with deep regret to have been part of the crowd which has unfairly placed them before such immense difficulty.  As their grandfather, Larry hopes to provide the boys (and us, with our progeny, of course), a map of "the world for a different way of life" in "a new age of discovery and a dangerous pilgrimage." The phrase captures both the sense of adventure and an awareness of peril which pervade the book.

Peril: Rasmussen calls for us to face with all seriousness the crisis of Earth. We are "running Genesis backward", he writes; "We are the Apocalypse."   In preparing us for the journey ahead, he provides a trenchant assessment of our strengths and weaknesses.  Yes, we are "endlessly resilient, creative and adaptive."  But the deployment of our powers has been misled by the grand myths of our civilization: belief in human centrality, separation from nature, and the power to control what we create "so as to render history as progress." These beliefs have brought us to the point where the threat of an entire collapse looms on the horizon.  Yes, we now enjoy our lives in powerful, rich, and thriving communities, but we are deeply conflicted by our tribalism and the need to include the other-than- human creation within our circle of concern. The trick will be to redeploy our strengths for the creation of a new kind of community and a set of transformed behaviors. 

The key here is to lay hold of the capacity for love which resides in creation itself. Love of all creation is in fact the grand theme of Rasmussen's book.  The pandemic has sharpened his "sense of what is most dear," especially love "as belonging to and with others, being with them, and for them."  Prophetic love, he holds, has "legs" that drive us into an inclusive justice which embraces all that is, human but  also other than human, "the whole planet." For all our "all too human" failures, when grounded in the reality of love, we can still hope for the transformation of our condition. This is the basis for Rasmussen’s ethic of responsibility. In, with, and under, and behind all that is, the love of the "hovering Living Presence" is the nearly unavoidable source of human transformation.  Love gets the last word of the book, a line from a poem by Denise Levertov:  "we have only begun to love the earth.  We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.  How could we tire of hope? --so much is in the bud."

With this new primer of Christian theology in hand, Rasmussen sets out a set of "cairns" to mark his grandsons' path into the Anthropocene. He has been collecting stones of wisdom, as it were, hefting them into the backpack of a long career in teaching social ethics and eco-theology, a route from his childhood in rural Southwestern Minnesota, into student days in the era of Civil Rights struggle in America, the harsh reality of cold-war Germany, and years as Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Union Theological Seminary in New York.  The stones have names attached:  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Victor Frankl, Martin Luther King, Jr.  Reinhold Niebuhr, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Toni Robinson, all of them familiar to those who have followed Larry along his way. Additions significant for this reader are the weighty rocks of Albert Einstein and the biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer.  The former's thought is fundamental for Rasmussen's understanding of that "Living Presence ''. The latter's work provides new insights into the life of the mothering Earth from the culture of Indigenous communities.

In summary, Rasmussen names the cairns: a philosophical cosmology that holds Earth to be sacred, and for us, accordingly, a sacred trust;  an understanding of community which is derived from a "primordial communion" that fosters "healthy bioregions where responsibility entails mutual flourishing"'; a practice of moral formation and transformation of persons and  their institutions; rituals that are "containers for the peak moments that touch every life and every community" including the "grief of losses we have inflicted on the planet;" an inner life that includes "reverence for Earth" which is characterized by radical honesty and the humility to recognize that whatever one does, it will not suffice to complete the Great Work of the next several generations.

A final word of caution.  As engaging as this book is, not every grandparent will appreciate its content. Its critique of white tribalism will seem to align Rasmussen with the "woke" critique of racism, and perhaps prompt a reader to dismiss his sensitive discussion of how we can emerge from our home place without blaming our ancestors.  Its critique of science, technology, and technology might seem to abandon the main means of finding solutions to the environmental crisis; again, Rasmussen is less interested in blame for unintended consequences, than engendering responsibility for things that are clearly in need of transformation. Finally, his understanding of God may appear to forsake the God of our tradition for a version of pantheism or even atheism; it is, in reality, a panentheism – meaning that all things are contained in God, a theology extended enough to meet the requirements of our contemporary understanding of both the heavens and the earth, and not without a basis in the Christian scriptures and tradition.  Rasmussen is more faithful to the God of a mysticism that asks, "why is there anything at all?", and "why has the cosmos developed as it has", so fully relational, than in the God who controls all and has given homo sapiens dominion over all things earthly.  Our grandchildren, and great grandchildren et cetera, will arguably be better served by such an understanding to ground their Great Work. And Christ's church will be so, as well.