Video: The Other Side of the Gateway: Space Rocks as a Pantheist Limit-Case

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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: The Other Side of the Gateway, Space Rocks as a Pantheist Limit-Case October 16, 2024. 

NATALIA SCHWEIN: My name is Natalia Schwein, and I'm a third year PhD student in the Committee for the Study of Religion, and I have the absolute joy of serving as an advisor on the recently launched Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative here at the Center for the Study of World Religions. 

Before I introduce our program lead, I'd like to share a little bit about the initiative. This program invites us to explore the profound connections between plants and fungal life and the broader questions around our understanding between of mind and matter and how that shapes humanity's relationship with the so-called more than human world. 

At its core, the initiative believes that by drawing on both academic scholarship and traditional knowledge from land-based cultures, the study of plants and fungi can offer new insights into intelligence, consciousness, and interconnectedness. 

We seek to foster interdisciplinary collaboration across biology, ecology, and the humanities, bringing together scholars, practitioners, and future leaders in plant studies to inspire deeper reflection on coexistence and resilience amid today's global challenges. 

So thank you for joining us on this exploration and it is now my pleasure to introduce our program lead, Rachael Petersen, who will tell us a little bit about today's talk and introduce Professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein. Thank you so much. 

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RACHAEL PETERSEN: All right. Well, thank you, everyone for joining this evening for our talk, The Other Side of the Gateway, Space Rocks as a Pantheist Limit-Case. Some of you may be wondering why we would be talking about rocks, let alone outer space, in a program focused on plants and fungi. 

Or perhaps to some of you that connection may be clear, as the philosopher Emanuele Coccia reminds us, "Plants have made life a perpetual devotion to the sky. They literally eat the sun. And so when we eat them, they render our very bodies a solar event. On a very physical basis, plants bring us into an intimate relationship with the stars." 

In his brief introductory remarks, I hope to further convince you that the seemingly terrestrial concerns of our initiative set the stage for the sweeping celestial concerns that Professor Rubenstein will invite us into shortly. Anecdotally, over the past two years, Natalia and I have co-convened myriad conversations around plant consciousness on campus, grounded in both contemporary plant neurobiology, as well as Natalia said, land-based wisdom. 

This discussion, I have noticed, can provoke two forms of panic, and many people who lack the relational ontologies in which to reckon with the subjectivity of non-human beings. The first form of panic, if plants are conscious, am I a murderer when I eat salad? The second form of panic, if plants are conscious, then what about rocks? In other words, why stop there? 

In defying the traditional taxonomical distinctions between animal and vegetable, the defender of plant mines faces a slippery slope to the mineral, a temptation to abolish that sacred distinction between the organic and the inorganic. You might say that in Western thought, at least the vegetal is haunted, and I would argue taunted by the lithic. I have seen this lithic taunting in my own research. 

In 1848, a now forgotten German polymath, Gustav Fechner, published a book arguing that plants were divinely ensouled. His book was widely panned by philosophers and botanists. In his review of the book, philosopher Hermann Lotzes jeered, "One cannot search for the mind arbitrarily in plants, the darlings of fantasy and remain satisfied with the existence of dead matter in rocks." 

Similarly, a physics professor mocked Fechner saying, "If you're really committed to this plants argument, you must also to be consistent extend divine ensoulment to the stars." In other words, why stop there? And indeed, he wouldn't. He would go on to articulate a full throated pantheism that divinized the messy multiplicity of material reality from its leafy to its cosmic scales. 

Plants for Fechner and perhaps for many of us, can serve as a gateway drug to pantheism, or perhaps to the less metaphysically inclined, panpsychism. If the contemplation of plants offers a gateway drug, then what lies on the other side of that gateway? If we consider ferns, maples, and maitakes to be not only animate but interpersonal, where do we stop? 

What ethical values and social formations become apparent when we extend this consideration all the way to the entire galaxy? This evening we are invited with Mary-Jane Rubenstein to walk through that gateway, to look up from the soil and turn our attention to the space industry as a test of these limits and questions. 

And I think no one is better situated to address these questions than Professor Rubenstein, whose work has explored the historical and contemporary divisions between creator and creation, spirit and matter, but also how these divisions are produced, undergirded, and undermined sometimes by Western scientific and technological enterprises, notably space exploration. 

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Religion and Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of numerous books on the intersection of science and religion, including Pantheologies, Gods, Worlds, and Monsters, which I cannot recommend highly enough, as well as Astrotopia, The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, also very excellent. 

With Lance Gharavi, she is the co-pi of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative Sacred Space project. Please join me in inviting Professor Rubenstein. Thank you so much. 

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MARY-JANE RUBENSTEIN: Thank you so much, Rachael. How are we doing with sound? Is this carrying, OK? Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for being here this evening. Thank you, Rachael, for the invitation to be in this beautiful space where I've never been before. So I'm very happy to be here. Thanks also to Laurie Sedgwick, wherever she is, for organizing all of the details of my visit today. 

I'm so happy to be here with you as you go about the work of thinking with plants and fungi. And in this vein, just six weeks ago-- now here, we're going to start here. Here's the title slide, here's the title slide. Just six weeks ago, I led a discussion group for Wesleyan University's incoming class of first year students, all of whom had been asked to read one book over the summer and come to campus ready to talk about it. 

When I learned that their class dean had chosen Robin Wall Kimmerer's, Braiding Sweetgrass, I reacted, I am confessing it here among friends don't tell anybody, with a little bit of an eye roll. Haven't we all read Braiding Sweetgrass? Shouldn't we assign something more niche and bespoke than this crossover blockbuster of an academic monograph? 

The minute I started rereading it, of course, I realized what an enormous jerk I was being. Not only have we not all read Braiding Sweetgrass, none of my 25 astonished interlocutors ever had. 

But the book runs so consistently, so compassionately against the plasticine grain of our disaster capitalist, one clicking, and doomscrolling, and fast fashioning, and dermaplaning that for me at least, the book left me even more grateful and amazed the fifth or sixth time I read it than it had the first time. 

The students in my discussion group had arrived just a day and a half earlier from New Jersey and California, Texas and Taiwan, Singapore, Kenya, Tennessee. One of them held a paper copy of the book, the rest of them had read it on their phones. Swallowing my Gen X judginess I asked them to share their names, pronouns, and hometowns, and to tell us about a plant with whom they had some relationship. 

The phones disappeared. Into the room tumbled ficus, aloe, magnolias, pine trees, and a rhododendron that was blue last year, but pink this year, the Californian already missed her redwoods, the Jersey Boys extolled their tomatoes, without prompting, more than half of them tied their love of these plants to a human who had taught them to grow, harvest, and steward them. And remarkably, every one of these humans was a mother or a grandmother. 

None of the students, it turns out, had ever thought about plants before. But they all had relationships to plants that allowed such thinking to ignite the moment we summoned them into the room. In the course of one hour, plants became the obvious solution to ecological collapse, frenetic consumerism, urban poverty, big pharma, social disconnection, and most powerfully for them, the quiet nihilism of their everyday lives. 

These students were born in 2006 and have spent their lives on this planet hearing there will be no jobs, no seashores, no birds, bats, bees, rain forests, Social Security or drinking water left for them by the time they grow up. The only conceivable responses to such an apocalyptic mise-en-scéne are rage on the one hand and resignation on the other. And since rage doesn't let you get your work done, resignation is the only way to end up at a place like Wesleyan. 

What the students found so radical about Braiding Sweetgrass was not the notion that plants are animate or even ensouled. Most of them actually accepted that proposition with very little protest. What was amazing was that this book gave them things they could do rather than capitulating to the disaster formula of most ecological writing, rather than leaving you numb with grief and self-chastisement, Braiding Sweetgrass tells you can do stuff. 

You can rake a pond every day for years and bring it back to pondishness. You can rehabilitate soil. You can bring bees and butterflies to a small patch of land. You can gather rushes to make a shelter and then sit there to listen and learn. So why, I ask them, does this work of plant thinking, and plant doing, and plant rebecoming open with a creation story? 

And although none of them had ever taken a religion class, they saw it immediately. Myths set the patterns for the human behavior that produces those myths. So our storytelling literally matters, it makes the world for better or worse. And while they couldn't quite remember the details of Genesis 1 or Genesis 2, 3, they said the Anishinaabe story that Kimmerer tells of Skywoman Falling feels totally different. 

After all, Skywoman is first, a woman, second, in a body, third, dependent on all plants and animals, and fourth, grateful for those creatures and for the gifts by which they bring the world into being all together. So yeah, this feels different from the singular, all powerful monarch who, wait a minute, said one of the Jersey tomato. 

All right, so we've got Skywoman basically, she falls from the sky. And by means of these relationships with all of these creatures and plants, together they assemble what becomes Turtle Island or North America. 

And one of the kids in the back of the room bursts out with, wait, hang on a second, if Skywoman makes the world with all of these animals and these plants and these elements, doesn't that mean that God isn't Skywoman, but all of those things to get together and does this sound crazy? And of course I'm like grinning. And I was like, no, it doesn't. Or in a way it does sound crazy, depending on whom you ask. 

And I start running to the board. The idea is called pantheism. Pan Theos little Greek lesson means all God. It's a heresy. Emerson and Thoreau came close to it. Do they still teach those guys in high school? Weirdly enough, no. I'm so sorry, I can't tell you where to read up on it because anybody who writes on it hates it. And here come your RAs to take you to the next thing on your schedule. So great to meet you all, happy college. 

[LAUGHTER] 

No time for pantheism. As you may have heard, it's something of a perennial problem. People who are drawn to pantheism tend not to talk about it. And people who write treatises about it tend to hate it. I fell into this quagmire upside down and with none of Skywoman's grace 10 or 12 years ago, when I was trying to make sense of the unconscious theologies of physical cosmologies, especially the ones that give rise to what we now call the multiverse. 

The story of the reluctant but increasingly widespread acceptance of the multiverse among professional cosmologists usually starts with what they call the fine tuning problem. Here's how it goes. If any of the fundamental constants of nature were any different, galaxies couldn't hold together, stars couldn't burn, life couldn't evolve. 

If gravity were any stronger, or the weak nuclear force were any weaker, or the cosmological constant were any larger, we wouldn't exist to ask the question of how it all got this way. So how could it possibly have gotten this way faced with a sheer improbability of these parameters? 

Theoretical physicists panic a little bit. It's as if they can hear the theologians on the other side of the door asking them to explain just how bad the fine tuning problem is so the theologians can solve it with God and send their findings to the Templeton Foundation. 

Understandably physicists hate this move, as do most serious theologians, the plugging of scientific gaps with little dashes of divinity. So they search for another explanation. And the best one they've come up with so far is that universes are generated all the time with all imaginable parameters. 

Some will have too much gravity, some too little, most won't work at all. But every once in a while, the twin powers of quantum accident and numerical infinity will produce a universe whose parameters are just right for life and we're in one of those. It's like the monkeys at typewriters, poor thing. Every once in a while you get Shakespeare, we're the equivalent of Shakespeare. 

Scientifically speaking, this is a rough trade-off. You get rid of God but you end up taking on an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes instead. As the physicist Bernard Carr encapsulates the matter, "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse." 

Theologically speaking however, it's not much of an alternative. The multiverse isn't so much an escape from divinity as it is a scientific sublimation of it. God doesn't disappear but is rather multiplied, immanentized, and embodied in the infinite eternal multiverse. Multiverse theorists in other words aren't so much atheists as they are pantheists, all of it divinity. 

So I decided it might be fun to parse this pantheism, as well as some others emerging from quantum physics, cosmology, Earth systems science, nonlinear biology, Silicon Valley. All I needed was some decent literature on pantheism, and it was there that my troubles began. Turns out it's very hard to read up on the history of/or philosophy of pantheism because most people who write about it do so in order to condemn or dismiss it. 

And here are some of my favorite things that philosophers and theologians say about pantheism. They call it monstrous, they call it absurd, horrible, vile, poppycock, an execrable abomination, pernicious and detestable, and forged in hell by a renegade Jew and the devil. That's Spinoza.

[LAUGHTER] 

So the book that I was writing had a change course and ask why Western thought produces this thing, pantheism, that's so unexceptionally terrifies and disgusts it. This is not to say, of course, that Greek-inspired philosophies have some patent on pantheism. 

I do not need to inform the Center for the Study of World Religions that all godness could be said more properly to belong to Vedanta philosophies, Buddhist-- I mean, I'm just surrounded by all of it, Yoruba theologies or Potawatomi mythologies than to the so-called West. 

And this is precisely the problem. When Jewish and Christian thinkers suggest that God might be the world itself, Pan Theos, they're recording divinity as material, multiple, mutable, all the stuff the platonic Abrahamic God is not. 

So in an innumerable slew of anti-pantheist treatises, such spinozist heretics are variously and overlapping charged with feminizing God, primitivizing Him, orientalizing and darkening God of making Him a multiracial, all-gendered, categorically incoherent monstrosity. 

Pantheism that critics charge ravages the distinction between God and world. And if that distinction goes, then there goes that whole Aristotelian table of opposites it holds in place. This is from the metaphysics, male and female, mind and matter, light and dark, culture and nature, West and rest, human and more than human, thing deserving ethical attention and plant. 

Now for a person like me who has been trying to collapse and reconfigure these distinctions since Derrida was a thing, the alleged intellectual disaster of pantheism started looking promising. So the trick for me became not how to avoid pantheism for fear of being branded a heretic, or a girl, or a queer, or whatever, but how to get clear about it. After all, there are so many different ways of thinking the all God. 

In a lecture series he gave on this very campus, and of course, now I'm imagining him in this room where he wasn't. But the American philosopher, psychologist William James said that given the twin absurdities of theism and atheism, the only intellectually respectable position for a modern man is pantheism. I mean, really, he just goes for it. He's like, you have to be an idiot to be a theist and an idiot to be an atheist. The only way forward is pantheism. 

But he cautioned, there are two kinds of pantheism. Monism on the one hand, I think German idealism. And pluralism on the other, I think Scottish pragmatism. As James explains it, monism declares the universe to be fundamentally one. It's like that, you know that joke about the hot dog vendor, make me one with everything that-- this is monism, the hot dog vendor. 

This means the world's stunning diversity is a mere and often illusory expression of some vast, co-implicated whole where we all belong seamlessly to this one. Pluralism on the other hand affirms the interconnectedness of all things with many other things, but it refuses to gather all those things into a single identity or wholeness. 

For the pluralist everything is composed in shifting constitutive relation to a whole lot of other things, but with respectful and loving apologies to Lauryn Hill, everything isn't everything. Our universe, says William James, is more like a multiverse, a word he makes up for these purposes at Harvard. Isn't he amazing? 

Now as you might have heard, James is a pragmatist. So he can't say whether monism or pluralism is true. The camps could just one up each other till the end of days with no clear winner. But James prefers pluralism. He makes a choice for it. He opts in to an ethics that affirms diversity, difference, messiness, which is to say, the world itself as real. 

Bafflingly, maddeningly, James doesn't go on to do us the favor of telling us what such positions might look like. What is a pluralist pantheism? But to jump to the conclusion, I think that recent developments in quantum physics, cosmology, ecology, and yes, botany, allow us to start glimpsing and even assembling pluralist, pantheistic perspectives or what I've called pan theologies. 

These are little hedgehogs by the way. And it is said in the medieval-- this is from, have you ever seen the repository called the Medieval Bestiary? If you haven't spent time there, go run to the Medieval Bestiary. These are hedgehogs and they're taking little berries to stick on their quills and bring them home for their families. 

As I write about this stuff and I was in-- I have been in just magisterial company. The last decade has produced a flood of academic and popular titles on talking trees, mediating mushrooms, insect sociality, mammalian compassion, sacred mountains, panpsychist quarks, and living waters, including, of course, Kimmerer's smash hit of a page-turner, which as one literary agent told me, has broken all the rules of modern publishing. 

Unknown author, tiny press, 200 pages too long not a male suitor in sight, just plants and plant-knowing, gratitude, reciprocity and one animal, vegetable, mineral assemblage named after a songbird doing her best to participate in the ongoing sympathetic dance of creation, sustenance, destruction, and remaking. 

Steeped as I was in all this pan-theological ecoadoration, it came as a total shock to learn what our governments and private industries were getting up to in outer space. And here's where we finally get where we're going this evening. 

Just as the Academy and General Readership alike were getting used to the idea that mountains might be kin, water might be alive, flowers might have preferences, and trees might have memories, the space-faring nations were preparing to mine the Moon for water and maybe helium-3. Jeff Bezos was promising we could use infinite energy if we just moved our families to rotating space pods between the Earth and the Moon. 

Elon Musk was suggesting we hit Mars with 10,000 nuclear warheads to warm it up, and a sudden throng of new startups were promising they'd mine asteroids within an inch of their lives to catalyze what physicist Michio Kaku has called, "another gold rush in outer space." From space tourism, to asteroid mining, to terraforming Mars, the industry's current priorities all depend first on settling the large space rock we call the Moon. 

NASA plans to have a permanent outpost there by 2028. A Chinese rover is conducting a biospheric experiment with cotton, rapeseed potatoes, silkworms and yes, mushrooms. China, if we eat anything, it's not going to be potatoes. It's going to be mushrooms. That's the only thing we're going to be able to-- China and Russia are collaborating on a lunar base. Japan is planning a human settlement called Moon Valley. 

An Indian lunar mission landed over a year ago and the European Space Agency plans to join them all up there in 2031. All of these national and international space agencies are relying on the assurances of private ventures like iSpace which promises access to new business opportunities on the Moon. And Moon Express, whose CEO promised the US House of Representatives he would turn the moon into a gas station in the sky. 

The task for almost all these public and private actors is to find and extract the Moon's water deposits, convert that water's oxygen and hydrogen into rocket fuel, use the metals they find for in-situ construction on and establish a spaceport on the Moon for low escape velocity flights to asteroids and other moons and planets. Basically, it's easier to get off the Moon than it is to get off the Earth, so you need less fuel. 

So the question for me became, is this OK? You may have noticed my tendency to put things simply, but it was and remains a genuine question, is it OK? Is it ethically permissible to turn the Moon into a cosmic gas station? Is it, as NASA administrators and Stephen Hawking and aspirational Marsian colonists insist, perhaps existentially critical to do so? 

Does human survival depend on our getting the hell off this planet? And does that escape indeed depend on our turning the Moon into a gas station? Or is there a reason not to treat the Moon this way? Might the Moon have some right to remain the way it is? 

Written in the late 1970s, a UN agreement nicknamed, the Moon Treaty, requires signatory nations to preserve the existing balance of the Moon's environment. But although about a dozen nations signed this treaty, only one spacefaring nation has done so, this is Australia. And now that Australia is nearing the point of being able to get to the Moon, it's saying it's probably going to back out. 

Many spacefaring nations do operate under Planetary Protection protocols, where you can't contaminate another planet you go to. But everyone seems to agree that since there's no biosignature on the Moon, it falls under category I, for which no protection is warranted. 

The operative stance toward the Moon is perhaps most frankly encapsulated in the words of entrepreneur and space enthusiast Marshall T. Savage, author of a book that's subtitled, Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. "We can't really mess up the Moon," he assures us. I don't know what he sounds like. This is just what he sounds like in my head. 

"We can ruthlessly strip-mine the surface of the Moon for centuries and it will be hard to tell we've ever been there. We could wage unlimited nuclear warfare on the surface of the Moon and be hard pressed after the dust had settled to tell anything had happened." But to ask another simple-minded question, who would want to do that? 

Why would anyone want to strip-mine anything ruthlessly? And who wants to wage unlimited nuclear warfare, for what? For profit? I imagine Savage would respond, stimulating the new economy in outer space for progress, for the future, and then things get very misty and for the salvation of the human species. 

But even if we thought it could save humanity, could we really act with impunity on the surface of our only natural satellite? The answer is probably not. As a group of Australian scholars, lawyers, and activists have insisted in their jointly authored Declaration of the Rights of the Moon, which is a really adorable document, we absolutely can mess up the Moon by polluting its fragile exosphere with rocket exhaust and by irreversibly damaging a landscape that has remained mostly unchanged for billions of years. 

One could, of course, also list the damages that such impending lunar assaults might do to us, like complicating our frictionless takeoffs and landing, or barring our way to knowledge of the early solar system, or involving us in nuclear war in space. But again, the more difficult question is whether it's OK to do all of this to the Moon? 

For space archeologist Alice Gorman, who co-authored the Declaration, strip mining and nuking the Moon is not at all OK. Rights are the purview of personhood, she argues. And the personhood of the Moon is far easier to establish than say, the personhood of ExxonMobil. Corporations you may recall, are persons under US law. 

According to Gorman, the two major features of personhood are memory or the knowledge of past events, and agency or the capacity to act, memory and agency. The Moon, she says, stores memory not just in Neil Armstrong's footprints or Buzz Aldrin's lanyards, or both of their diapers which are still up there, but also in the Moon's own ice craters lava fields. 

In addition to memory, Gorman argues, the moon clearly has agency creating and regulating earthly tides while stabilizing our planet's rotation on its axis. Even on its own terrain, Gorman argues, "The Moon is a very active landscape that places constraints upon the desires of humans to plunder its resources." 

My favorite example in this regard is the trouble the Moon gave Armstrong and Aldrin when they went to install that first flag and realized there was nothing to put the flag into. They had no idea. They thought that they were just going to stick it into there. Just like there's basically there's dust and then there's solid rock. 

And if you watch the footage of the flagpoles installation, you can see the two men laboring over 3 and 1/2 minutes to get the flag in place like there. It's very sweet. They're like, oh, God. And they're trying to get the thing but it keeps falling. And they're like, they're going around this way. 

They do this thing that my uncles used to do at the beach in New Jersey where they kick the dust into a little mound to see if-- you know like your uncle's with the beach umbrella to try to see if that'll work. And the moment that the lunar module blasted off the surface, the flag fell over giving the Moon the last word. 

Now when I wrote this example of Lunar Agency into a book chapter, my editor marked it up and said, this feels like a stretch. I've recorded something like 30 podcast episodes on the intersection of space exploration and religion, and even the most benevolent interviewer will invariably get to the point of saying, OK, but come on, you're not really saying rocks or people? A rock is just a rock. 

This is certainly the position of people like Bob Zubrin, CEO of The Mars Society and Elon Musk's astronautic mentor. To Zubrin the Moon has no right to remain unchanged because clearly the Moon is a dead rock, as is every other planet in the solar system, he insists, which makes outer space the perfect place to colonize. 

Sure, he admits, earthly colonialism has had some unsavory consequences, like the destruction and displacement of countless indigenous communities. But the very doctrine of terra nullius or no one's land that was so misinformed on Earth is finally right this time in outer space. This time there is genuinely nothing there, so we can do whatever we want. 

No people to displace, no bison to push to extinction, no forests to clear-cut or rivers to pollute, just lifeless rocks and empty space, and infinite and guilt-free frontier. As it turns out, however, not everybody thinks this way. 

In late December of 2023, President Buu Nygren of the Navajo Nation wrote to NASA and the US Department of Transportation asking them to delay a mission that intended, among other things, to deposit onto the lunar surface capsules containing human ashes, including the partial remains of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and sci-fi patriarch Arthur C. Clarke. 

As Nygren explained, quote, "The moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours, the Navajo Nation. We view it as part of our spiritual heritage, an object of reverence and respect. The act of depositing human remains and other materials on the moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space." 

In this letter, Nygren reminded NASA that the administration had made a commitment to the Navajo Nation in the late 1990s, when they intentionally crashed a lunar prospector into the Moon to deposit the remains of astronaut Eugene Shoemaker there. As then President Albert Hale told NASA, "The moon is revered, and it regulates life cycles, according to Navajo tradition and stories. To send something like that over there is a sacrilege. " 

To face up to the damage it had done in 1999, NASA sent a delegation led by Navajo Nation citizens to participate in a talking circle with community members in Pinon, Arizona. To Diné astronautics scholar Alvin Harvey the meeting in 1999 was both healing and productive. This is the way he explains it. 

"The ceremonial approach co-led by Native American community leaders made room for the hurt felt by the Diné, the Navajo people, and laid foundations for future collaborations with a shared goal of furthering our connections with the cosmos, turning the incident into a spark of friendship." Because NASA went and showed up. 

It is therefore understandable 25 years later, that the sitting Navajo Nation president would express dismay and even outrage, that NASA had not consulted them as they said they would before embarking on this mission to deposit the remains of some 100 earthlings on the moon. It is understandable that Nygren's letter would be endorsed by the Coalition of Large Tribes, whose member nations all share these concerns. 

In response to this outpouring of criticism, however, NASA responded that the mission wasn't actually theirs. It was run, they explained, by the United Launch Alliance with a lunar lander built by a corporation called Astrobotic and apparently packed by DHL to carry, among other things, human remains on behalf of two outer space funereal enterprises called Celestis and Elysium, which charge customers upward of $13,000 to blast their loved one's ashes into space. 

Here are some screenshots. Here's one of them, it's called Celestis. Here's another one called Beyond Burial. And here's one called Elysium. Sure, NASA was sending their own payloads on this mission along with those private crematorium payloads. And sure, NASA had paid Astrobotic $108 million of taxpayer money to develop the lander in the first place. 

But even though they said that they take concerns from the Navajo Nation very, very seriously, they also said that NASA has no control over commercial payloads. For president Nygren however, this lack of control is precisely the point. How did a branch of the US government get itself into the position of relying on private actors it can't control. Why aren't there regulations about what corporations can transport into space? 

As Navajo Nation official Justin Ahasteen wonders, does this lack of control mean that industries can send whatever they want to the Moon drugs, hazardous materials, nuclear byproducts? "We're saying be respectful," Ahasteen explains. "We're turning the Moon into a graveyard and we're turning it into a waste site. At what point are we going to stop and say we need to start protecting the Moon as we do the Grand Canyon?" 

Notice the strategic move Ahasteen is making. In their letters to NASA, both Navajo presidents referred to the Moon as sacred and revered. Ahasteen changes tactic appealing not to sacred geographies, but to secular conservationism, couldn't we at least treat the Moon as thoughtfully as we treat national parks? 

This tactical shift is a direct response to the aggressively secular rage directed against the Navajo Nation when the news of President Nygren's letter broke. Torrance of social media posts that I will not show here, warned NASA not to capitulate to the backward superstitions of religion. 

And a high-ranking scientist at the European Space Agency told me on a late night bus in Arizona, still yourselves, these Navajo people have no business in science and we have no obligation to listen to them. Saying we can't put things on the Moon is like telling Jewish women they can't sit with the men in the temple. 

Seeing my reaction, he finished up his mini-rant by saying, sorry, I'm European. Have you heard about the Catholic priests? They're all perverts and I hate religion and so does everybody in Europe. 

If you happen to be a scholar of religious studies, you'll recognize this tendency for people who know very little about religion to appoint themselves experts in the field. Thus, we find Charles Chafer, CEO and co-founder of Celestis Memorial Spaceflight saying, "Honestly, while we respect everyone's beliefs, we do not find Mr. Nygren's concerns to be compelling." 

In another news brief, the same CEO said he didn't find the Navajo teachings to be substantive. In yet another, he said, "I don't understand why scattering ashes on a dead planet is desecration." And of course, he didn't sit down with members of the Navajo community to try to understand. What he did instead was to reject the intrusion of religion into interplanetary commerce. 

As Chafer explained to CNN, he gave a lot of interviews last winter. Space should be a secular affair. "Simply put, we do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity's space efforts." Now there's no time to go into it here, but this claim is simply false. I don't usually speak, it's just not true. 

Humanity's space efforts operate for the most part, according to the so-called von Braun Paradigm established by the former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who became a born again Christian in the US and saw space as the next evangelical chapter of American manifest destiny. 

When the crew of Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, they took turns reading from the book of Genesis. When Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, he ate and drank a pre-consecrated Eucharist. Every planet on our solar system except Earth is named after a god. So are most of NASA's missions, as well as those of India and China. Also, they're called missions. 

I could go on, but the point is that there's nothing not religious about space. It's just that some religious practices and teachings are dominant enough to masquerade as secular or simply symbolic, whereas others strike the industry as too religious. Back to Chafer. "I don't want to question anybody's religious beliefs," he assured the press. 

"But having said that, what the Navajo Nation is asking for is basically ownership of the Moon for the purpose of their sacraments, and that's a giant black hole to walk into." It's an excruciating and physically incoherent metaphor, but I will extend it to ask, hasn't Celestis already walked into that black hole? 

What is the deliberate ritual scattering of human remains on the Moon, which purportedly belongs to no one if it's not claiming some ownership for the purpose of a sacrament? By what strange logic can this private corporation conduct religious rituals in space while insisting it's not appropriate to let religion into space? 

Here's one more screenshot promising a new sacred space for remember-- but of course it's a secular sacred space. As rituals often do, this particular one failed. A stream of leaked propellant meant the lander couldn't land, so the ashes never made it to the Moon. But the debate remains open. Does the Navajo Nation have the right to object to such burials? Does private industry have the right to perform them? 

As Harvey explains, the Navajo objection is not about ownership of the Moon, nor is it intended to enforce Diné religious beliefs. Rather he insists, "It's about the right to be consulted, to uphold Native American legal rights, to hold government agencies accountable, and to safeguard the Moon for future generations." 

Now when Harvey says the objection isn't about religion, he's not denying that it stems from religious convictions and practices. In fact, he begins this particular op-ed in nature by reaffirming the sacredness of Earth's only satellite and calling the Moon an ancient relative who many indigenous nations refer to as grandmother Moon. 

But neither he nor President Nygren is asking white CEOs or NASA executives to start revering the Moon or calling her grandmother. It would honestly be pretty awkward if they did. Rather, they're asking to be consulted so that native and non-native folks together might determine whether dumping ashes on the Moon amounts to safeguarding it for future generations. 

As even Michelle Hanlon, a pro corporate space lawyer, admits, "If everyone starts sending stuff up, the Moon is going to get really trashy really fast." By appealing to the well-being of future generations, Harvey is making the same move Justin Ahasteen makes when he says that the moon be treated like the Grand Canyon. 

The point is not to make anyone believe that mountains, or rivers, or even trees, and maitakes are sacred. The point is to act as if they might be, to participate in the ongoing sympathetic creation and sustaining of the world to safeguard it for future generations. And to do so we may well have to start thinking with rocks. Thank you so much. 

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RACHAEL PETERSEN: Well, thank you all so much for coming this evening. We have another talk next month. We're walking back through the gateway, back to the vegetal. Daniel Carranza from the German department will be talking about the vegetative soul and Hegel, Goethe, and Agnes Arber. So register on our website for that. And thank you all for coming. Thank you, Professor Rubenstein. 

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SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 

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