Dawning of the age of the eco-missionary

When Ireland's eco-missionary, Father Sean McDonagh, walks into one of the many "green" campaign offices where he is welcome, he relishes the passion and commitment he meets there, but wishes it made some connection with the Christian God. There on the wall-posters are quotes from Chief Seattle or the Indian poet Tagore, but of Jesus or the Bible there's no sign.

He finds this "very significant and sad" - but is hardly surprised. He has spent two decades trying to get the Church to focus on the ecological crisis, and Christians to look to their religion as a fount of green ethics.

In 1990, the year of Father McDonagh's second book, The Greening of the Church, Pope John Paul II did acknowledge the crisis as a moral problem. In a strongly-worded message, he pointed to "indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology" as a prime cause of global warming. He assailed the "uncontrolled destruction of animal and plant life" and "the increasing devastation of the world of nature". Even non-believers, said John Paul, shared "the profound sense that the Earth is suffering".

As an ecological-cum-spiritual polemic, it was a match for Prince Charles's recent broadside in the UK. But, however deeply-felt, it made no lasting impact on Church teaching, certainly at local level. As Father McDonagh says in his new book, Greening the Christian Millennium, everyone knows where the Church stands on sex, but few, even among Catholics, know that the papal magisterium has ever addressed the ethics of environmental degradation.

Father McDonagh, who co-ordinates the Columban Missionaries' Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Programme, worked with Greenpeace Ireland and is now chair of VOICE, the Irish environmental organisation. But his is a rare religious voice in a country of parish priests who so often draw on a rural culture with an uninformed, exploitative view of nature.

In the world of green activism, too, he can find himself an odd man out. As Wendell Berry, the great American essayist, has put it, "the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world and the uselessness of Christianity in any effort to correct that destruction are now established cliches of the conservation movement".

Even the Pope's 1990 message reiterated that "Adam and Eve were to have exercised their dominion over the Earth with wisdom and love" - so repeating the traditional Christian idea, of a God-given human "dominion" over nature, that so many green idealists find abhorrent.

Both Wendell and Father McDonagh have gone back to the Bible for texts to nourish respect for nature. Wendell finds it "a book best read and understood outdoors and the further outdoors the better," and Father McDonagh, in his new book, finds biblical backing for green attitudes on everything from cancelling Third World debts to undoing global warming.

His most significant chapter, however, and the one especially relevant to Ireland just now, deals with ethics and genetic engineering. Like many in the Irish green community, Father Sean McDonagh has ended up deeply sceptical of the Government's bona fides in its consultation exercise, beginning with a discussion paper heavily weighted to the biotech industry's point of view.

Most of the usual questions about genetic engineering deal with concerns about human health and environment. But Father McDonagh also explores a wider ethical issue: should we, as one species among millions, be engaging in experiments that interfere with the genetic integrity of other organisms? Do sheep or salmon, pigs or turkeys, have intrinsic rights now abused by a human-centred science and technology?

A good many greens now call themselves Deep Ecologists. Any reasonable liberal can be the shallow sort, seeing the human race as having a lofty duty of "stewardship" over the rest of nature. One problem with that, in Father McDonagh's view, is that it casts God as an absentee landlord who has put human beings in charge. This managerial ethos also runs through biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Deep ecologists insist that all living things have intrinsic value, and that we should reduce the diversity of ecosystems only to satisfy the "vital needs" of our species. They urge social and ecological policies that observe "non-interference with continuing evolution".

Father McDonagh can't go all the way with Deep Ecology. He won't for example, surrender the "unique place for human beings in the community of the living" (unique, some might say, in its destructiveness, proliferation and resistance to routine mortality). But he does see the insistence on the rights of other creatures and the integrity of the ecosystem as a whole as the basic context for discussing the ethics of biotechnology.

It is hard to imagine the kind of Government-sponsored consultative debate that could have handled discussion at this level. Indeed, as Father McDonagh points out, the consultation paper produced by the Department of the Environment used the word "ethical" only twice in 76 pages. On the other hand, its use of the terms "traditional" and "modern" biotechnology seemed designed to propose a continuity and evolution of scientific technique and to blur the dramatic difference of GM intervention.

Father McDonagh shares the disgusted apprehension that most of us feel at the idea of corporate profit from "invented" plants or animals. He believes, of course, that life is "sacred and a gift from God". Those of us without religion will have to trust our deep ecological instincts, the keys to which, I trust, still lie safely concealed within the human genome.

Greening the Christian Millennium is available from Dominican Publications, for £9