By Monica Perez Nevarez
We usually speak about the ecological crisis in the languages of science, technology, economics or politics. We measure temperatures and carbon concentrations. We debate renewable energy, electric vehicles, conservation, regulation and economic growth. But after decades of environmental work, I have come to believe that they describe the symptoms better than they describe the illness.
Something Is Deeply Broken
Pope Francis said repeatedly in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’ that “everything is connected.” Environmental degradation cannot be separated from poverty, economics, culture, human relationships or the values by which societies organize themselves. His idea of “integral ecology” asks us to stop imagining humanity standing outside nature, or “managing it from above,” and instead understand ourselves as participants within an interconnected living world.
If everything is connected, perhaps what we are experiencing are not separate crises at all, but different expressions of the same disturbance in our essential relationships. Our relationships with one another have frayed into division, distrust and inequality. Our relationship with work and livelihood is increasingly mediated by an economy in which security always seems just beyond reach. Our relationship with nature has become a relationship with “resources” arriving so efficiently that we forget where they came from, or do not arrive at all, leaving us destitute. Our relationship with our own moral and spiritual values weakens as suffering and destruction become part of the daily background, large enough to distress us, but so enormous as to make us feel helpless and any relevant action beyond our control. And our relationship with personal agency erodes as responsibility is passed upward to governments, corporations, markets, institutions, or to anyone else other than ourselves.
From Relationship to Maturity
In that sense, the ecological crisis is a crisis of relationship, and more importantly, a crisis of collective maturity. Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, an anthology drawing on Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, Indigenous traditions, psychology, science and ecological thought, begins from a point resembling an abandonment wound: the loss of felt relationship, in this case, with the living world. We have converted relationships into resources. Forests became timber. Rivers became water supplies. Soil became real estate. Animals became units of production. The language changed because the relationships changed. And once a relationship becomes principally extractive, the behavior it produces can scale up, from the home to work, from business to finance, from economies to governments, from personal agency to silent acquiescence.
Yet that path is one of many available. Different traditions describe our living in the world differently, and there is a striking convergence in how most religions ask us to behave. A Christian may describe Creation as sacred. A Buddhist may speak of interdependence and compassion. An Indigenous tradition may speak of kinship, reciprocity or responsibility to future generations. A scientist may describe interacting ecosystems, evolutionary relationships and planetary boundaries. They all point to the possibility of different futures. And their ethics are remarkably similar: humility, restraint, gratitude, reciprocity, care, and responsibility. Those qualities become especially important when we apply them to our own footprints, accounting honestly for what our way of life actually leaves behind.
Muddling Toward Simplicity
In a recent episode of The Great Simplification called Frankly 160, Nate Hagens imagines the speech an honest world leader might give if there were no political consequences for saying what the public would rather not hear. His argument is uncomfortable because it challenges two reassuring stories. One says there is no serious ecological problem. The other says there is a problem, but that we can replace dirty technologies with clean ones and continue essentially as before. Neither storyline is true.
Hagens goes on to argue that modern civilization was built upon an extraordinary inheritance of concentrated fossil energy, which he calls “ancient sunlight.” It gave human beings capacities that previous civilizations could scarcely have imagined: mass transportation, mechanized agriculture, industrial manufacturing, modern medicine, global trade and extraordinary material comfort. It freed billions of human beings from forms of labor and scarcity that had shaped life for most of human history.
But every increase in power enlarges the field of consequence. The same energy that expanded human possibility also expanded our ability to extract, transform, transport and consume. It allowed us to take from the Earth faster, farther and on a scale no previous civilization could imagine. Prosperity grew, but so did concentrations of wealth and power, material throughput and cumulative ecological damage. The problem, therefore, is not simply that we discovered a dangerous fuel. It is that an enormous power entered a civilization that had not yet developed the collective maturity, or the ethics, to manage that enormous power.
Climate disruption is one result. Deforestation, biodiversity loss, acidifying oceans and coral reef die-offs, depleted aquifers, altered nutrient cycles, soil degradation, pollution, plastics and ever-increasing material extraction reveal the larger pattern. Again and again we encounter the same physical truth: we are taking from living systems faster than those systems can replenish themselves. We live on a finite planet, inside systems with hard limits, and yet we act recklessly as if the resources were limitless.
Unfortunately, limits force questions that people are not prepared to hear, and neither politics nor technology can answer. How much can we take without killing the source? How much do we actually use? How much is enough? What must remain untouched? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we learn to manage life without exhausting the systems that make life possible? (See Ed Conway’s book Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future for context.)
Science can tell us the consequences of our choices. It cannot, by itself, decide what we owe to a child who will be born fifty years from now, to a community whose water we have contaminated, to another species whose habitat we have destroyed, or to people who receive little of the benefit yet carry much of the cost.
Those are questions of relationship, ethics, responsibility and justice. Spirituality asks what being conscious of our actions obligates us to do. And once we accept that responsibility, another question follows almost inevitably:
What does restitution look like?
The Twelve Steps from recovery traditions offer an unexpected answer. They were deeply influenced by Christian teachings and the Sermon on the Mount. But if you set addiction aside for a moment and look only at the framework for recovery itself, you'll see its brilliance. First comes the realization that something has become unmanageable. Then we admit it. We relinquish the fantasy of complete control and undertake an honest inventory of our own behavior. We acknowledge the harm caused. We become willing to change and identify those who have been injured. We ask them how we can best make amends, and earnestly make amends. We continue examining ourselves so that the old behavior does not return. And eventually we carry what we have learned into ordinary life as a different way of living in the world.
Steps as Spiritual Practice
So let’s try an experiment; let’s apply these precepts to ecology. We begin by admitting what is already visible: parts of our relationship with the living Earth have become unmanageable. We relinquish the fantasy that human “wants” can somehow overrule physics, biology or ecological limits. We take an honest inventory of all we use and how we get it. And we do this without making blame the center of the exercise. The purpose of an inventory is clarity. We cannot repair what we cannot see. But we rarely actually look at what we do. We need this practice to keep us focused.
Then comes the step environmentalism rarely names: making amends. Not just stopping damage; paying the cost of restoration. As in: Restore the wetland. Rebuild the soil. Clean the river. Protect what remains of the forest, and plant it back. Return life to degraded land. Restore habitat. Reduce the burden placed upon communities that have carried the costs of somebody else's prosperity. Design businesses that replenish rather than merely extract. Use less where using more causes harm. Leave enough for others. Leave enough for future generations. Leave enough for life to continue.
That is a discipline. It changes ecology from an emergency project into a way of living. We do not take an inventory once and declare ourselves finished. We keep paying attention. We adjust. We repair. We iterate. We learn. Ecological responsibility becomes a daily practice. If one person does it, it's virtue. If the community does it, it's resilience. If we all do it, it's a new world.
Reaching Maturity
This is where Laudato Si’, spiritual ecology, modern systems science and the wisdom of recovery begin to converge. Each, in its own language, asks us to see reality without illusion, recognize our place inside something larger than ourselves, accept responsibility for our part in what has happened, change our ways, make amends, repair what we can, and change the behavior that caused the damage. Done collectively, that is maturity.
Humanity has achieved astonishing technological maturity. Our tools have become almost unimaginably powerful. Yet the maturity with which we use them has not developed at the same speed. That must change. A mature person knows something a child cannot be expected to understand: being able to do something does not necessarily mean we should do it. Freedom without restraint is not maturity. Power without responsibility is not maturity. Taking everything that is available simply because nobody can stop us is not maturity.
Maturity means learning that limits are not deprivation. It means anticipating consequences and avoiding bad ones. It means foregoing an immediate advantage when something of greater and longer-lasting value is at stake. It means accepting responsibility when our actions cause harm. It means understanding that what we do affects relationships and lives beyond our own lives. Above all, it means understanding that our well-being is inseparable from relationships larger than ourselves, and that our example influences the actions of others. Nowhere is that more obvious than in our relationship with nature.
Humanity and nature are not two separate things. Take away clean air and we survive only minutes. Take away shelter under extreme conditions and survival may be measured in hours. Take away water and it becomes days. Take away food and it becomes weeks. We breathe nature. We drink it. We eat it. We build from it. We warm ourselves with it. We are made from it, and eventually we return to it. Our dependence is not metaphorical. It is biological fact.
The Illusion of Connection
And yet modern life has become extraordinarily effective at hiding that dependence.
Look at your TV or your cellphone. We have never appeared more connected. Products arrive from the other side of the world overnight. Information crosses oceans in milliseconds. The extraordinary achievements of the convenience economy have been to connect us effortlessly to nearly everything we want while erecting enormous systems between us and the sources of what we need and want. That is a manufactured illusion of closeness. We are connected to the product but disconnected from its origin. Connected to the service but disconnected from the labor. Connected to our consumption but disconnected from its extraction. Connected to convenience but disconnected from the consequences.
Our modern economy has many benefits, but it has passed the costs of those benefits onto the public and made the damage almost invisible. When the forest is far away, the mine is far away, the factory is far away, the exploited worker is far away, the landfill is far away, or the community bearing the pollution is far away, we consume without ever experiencing the chain of relationships that consumption requires. Distance has become part of our politico-economic model.
And Hagens' description of the economic Superorganism helps explain why the separation that distance creates is so difficult to overcome. Billions of ordinary human decisions accumulate into a system with its own reinforcing logic on a daily basis. We extract in order to produce. We produce in order to grow. We grow to maintain employment, investment, debt and economic stability. Growth demands additional energy and materials, which enables still more production and consumption. What began as one single human behavior becomes structure, and then it begins silently shaping human behavior.
No single person designed the whole system. No single person controls it. Yet nearly all of us depend upon it. And this is why, as Hagens says, “... our predicament cannot be solved merely by urging individuals to become virtuous consumers.” Personal responsibility matters, but so do the conditions within which choices are made. Systems matter. Technology matters. Public policy matters. Economics matters. Culture matters too. But without accounting for the consequences, there is no context to our actions. And without context, there is no reason to act as if other things mattered.
What Is Life For?
Beneath culture lies a question none of the above-mentioned disciplines can answer: “What is human life for?” That is a spiritual and philosophical question. If the purpose of life is accumulation, limits will always feel like an enemy. If prosperity means continually possessing more, an economy must continually produce more. If success is measured primarily through consumption, restraint will feel like failure.
But if a good life can also be measured in health, security, relationship, usefulness, beauty, belonging, time, meaning and contribution, the possibilities expand exponentially. "Enough" no longer has to mean deprivation. A limit can become the boundary within which something precious is protected rather than the wall against which human desire endlessly crashes.
This is why spirituality has such a legitimate place in ecology, and vice versa. Science can tell us what is happening. Systems thinking can help us understand why it keeps happening. Technology can give us better tools to manage it. Economics can help allocate resources. Governments can establish rules and boundaries. But none of them, by themselves, can tell us why we should restrain ourselves. Why another species matters. Why future generations have claims upon us. Why gratitude changes the way we consume. Why power creates obligations. Why having “just enough” is richer than endlessly wanting more. Or why repairing harm is part of becoming whole.
For that we need the vocabulary of love: humility, compassion, restraint, gratitude, reciprocity, responsibility and making amends. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Indigenous traditions, humanism and philosophy do not arrive there through identical paths. But they have variations of the same ingredients: life is interdependent, our actions reach beyond ourselves, and what sustains life deserves our care. We share the same atmosphere, the same oceans, the same astonishing web of life and the same small planet. Whatever our differences, we can all agree on values.
Ecological Conversion
And as I have been writing this essay, something remarkable happened in the Vatican. The International Theological Commission published Caring for Our Common Home — A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God, with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV. More than a decade after Laudato Si’, the document takes the argument further. It proposes speaking of environmental wrongdoing as “a sin against Creation and against the Creator” and argues that the ecological crisis requires more than scientific and technological solutions. It calls for changes in production, consumption, transportation and energy use, and for something deeper: a change in cultural values and an “ecological conversion” in the way human beings live.
After coming at the question from such varied points of view, we arrive back at relationship. Perhaps that is where the ecological crisis has been trying to take us all along. What kind of people must we become to live well within a healthy world?
Hagens’ idea of collective maturity begins when a civilization becomes capable of doing what a mature person eventually learns to do after causing harm: stop defending itself long enough to see clearly. Stop blaming long enough to listen. Stop hiding behind numbers long enough to understand what the numbers mean. Tell the truth. Accept limits. Take responsibility. Make amends. Repair what can be repaired. Protect an ecological floor beneath which we refuse to descend. Learn from what cannot be restored, and what that loss actually means. And change. Change the way we think and act.
Spoiler Alert: amends are only the beginning of maturity. If we continually repair the same damage while preserving the behavior that causes it, restitution becomes another form of harm. The deeper transformation is learning not to create the same wound again. That requires something our culture does not speak about very often: self-restraint. Not as punishment, but as intelligence; as the starting point of collective consciousness. The discipline to take without exhausting. To use without destroying. To prosper without impoverishing everything around us. To keep our demands within the carrying capacity of the places that sustain us. To receive the bounty of the living world with gratitude rather than entitlement, and finally to understand that reciprocity applies to civilizations too.
Perhaps that is what spiritual maturity looks like at the scale of a civilization. Not returning to the past. Not rejecting science or technology. Not romanticizing hardship. Not imagining that human beings will suddenly become perfect. Just becoming mature enough to understand that our well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of the living systems that sustain us, and disciplined enough to organize our lives accordingly.
Epilogue
Ecology and spiritual practice have always been intertwined in my mind. From the moment when I was five years old and a newborn foal came up to me in the open paddock just to smell me, I reveled in discovering everything nature has had the grace and bounty to place before me. All I needed to do was pay attention. Both ecology and spirituality ask us to understand relationship, and to be responsible. Both ask us to live with humility inside something larger than ourselves. Both ask us to consider what our presence leaves behind. And both, at their deepest level, ask essentially the same question: How do we love?
My answer is simple. Not sentimentally, but practically. How do we love a river? A forest? A child not yet born? A species we may never see? A neighbor whose suffering is hidden inside the price of something we buy? How do we love a living world upon which every breath, every meal, every economy and every future depends? To me, love at that scale looks remarkably like shared values: a welcome responsibility, a sacred restraint, and a joyful reciprocity.
Because to me, ecology is spiritual practice. And my spiritual practice is ecology.
