Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

The evangelical creation care movement, though almost invisible to many, has been around for quite a few years.  One of its most visible historical markers is probably the founding of Au Sable Institute in 1979, thirty-three years ago now – but well before that date there were many individuals and a few small organizations seeking to promote what was then called ‘Christian environmental stewardship.’  There are many more of us now, and there is a lot of good work going on, but we still fly below the radar in most cases.

So it was enlightening and important that many of the current key players in this movement were on the phone together last week to share what we’re all doing, and perhaps more to the point, what God is doing to continue to foster and strengthen this movement.

Here’s a brief summary with bullet points of the highlights.  [If you’d like to hear a recording of the phone call yourself, just call  (507) 726-4220 and choose to listen to recording #1.] 

These notes are presented in the order on the phone call.  I am sure any of these folks would welcome a note from anyone interested in learning more; please write to them through the contact page on each organization’s website.  [Tell them Ed sent you!]

Scott Sabin is Director of  Plant With Purpose (formerly Floresta for those who are a bit out of date…)  This is one of our older organizations, having begun as a development organization in Latin America and now with projects and staff in Latin America, South America, Africa, and Asia.  PWP did some important work in Haiti following the recent earthquake.  Highlights recently

• They’ve planted 11 million trees.  Not sure over what time span, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?  It’s a big number.
• Opened a new regional office in Denver (main office is in San Diego).
• Currently involved in a new joint venture not yet public that has the potential link organizations and projects with new sources of funds (if I understood what Scott was describing).

Matthew Sleeth is Director of Blessed Earth, an educational nonprofit based in Asbury, Kentucky.   Upcoming highlights shared by Matthew

• A major seminary project is now in progress focused around a covenant seminaries are being asked to sign to commit to ‘live, preach, teach, hold each other accountable’ for creation care and sustainable activities and lifestyle on their campuses.  To date Denver, George Fox, Colombia and Asbury have signed on – a number of other major seminaries are in process.
• A year of teaching at and in cooperation with the National Cathedral in Washington DC kicks off on Earth Day (April 22) with a special service and recognition of Wendell Berry.

Joe Sheldon is a faculty member at Pacific Rim Institute for Environmental Studies.  Pacific Rim is one of the newest arrivals to the movement, but has a long shared history with Au Sable Institute , having been formed just a couple of years ago to take over Au Sable’s 175 acre Whidbey Island campus just north of Seattle.  The Institute is close to completing negotiations that will leave them with free and clear ownership of the property.  Highlights of the current and projected program…

• Pacfic Rim will continue to host Au Sable students and faculty during the summers;
• Ongoing research and restoration on the largest prairie remnant in Puget Sound, including the introduction of the Golden Paintbrush, a federally listed plant that is now growing 1500 plants strong;
• Partnerships with USFWS, National Park Service and others;
• and ongoing work with local schools and churches.

[Au Sable was to have been represented by new Director Fred Van Dyke, but winter weather in Chicago prevented Fred from joining us.  Undergrads in any field with an interest in creation care or environmental studies should be aware that the Au Sable program is available to supplement course offerings at their home campus. Check out their new website.]

Tyler Amy is the new Coordinator for Renewal, a relatively new student-run, student-led, student-focused organization with chapters on a number of Christian college campuses.  Think of it like a creation-care version of InterVarsity or Navigators(!).  Recent highlights:

• A fall summit (the second one) at Houghton College featured 70+ students from Houghton, Messiah, Eastern, Wheaton, Geneva, and (drum roll….) King’s University College of Alberta.
• Issuance of their second Green Awakenings report, this one focusing on assets and barriers to creation care on Christian college campuses.  [You really need to get this report – it is quite amazing what is taking place on Christian college campuses these days.]

Renewal shares organizational ties with two other organizations that are old and well-know partners in the movement.  He also reported on

Creation Care Study Program (CCSP), Chris Elisara, Director. Similar to Au Sable and Pacific Rim, but offering semester-length study-abroad programs…

• Have moved into new facilities at their campus in Belize;
• Will be opening a new semester program on Camino Island (also in Puget Sound) focusing on sustainability.
• They also have an established and popular program in New Zealand.

Restoring Eden – Peter Illyn, Director, is known for getting students (and others) involved in visible direct-action efforts.  Current plans include

• Spring Break health surveys in coal mining areas of Appalachia – (last yr’s were published in the Journal of Community Health).
• Chapel lectures on campuses, recent trip in Indiana.

Alexei Laushkin is on staff with the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) .  Based in Washington, publisher of Creation Care Magazine, EEN has a number of things going on:

• Last year partnered w/Blessed Earth, Eden Vigil,
• Involved in a highly visible ‘Mercury and the Unborn’ campaign with radio ads, television ads and testimony at some high profile Washington hearings, thus adding a strong evangelical voice to the national discussion.
• Held their 2^nd Day of Prayer for Creation Care in Wash DC, and…
• Their big upcoming event is the 3^rd annual Day of Prayer for Creation Care to be held in Washington on April 26^th.  Featured speakers will include Dr. Chris Wright (primary author of the Cape Town Commitment), Leith Anderson (NAE), Lon Allison (Billy Graham Center), etc.  [Tickets are available for members of the movement – contact Alexei soon!]

Lowell Bliss is founding director of Eden Vigil , an environmental missions initiative operating under the umbrella of Christar, an established and well respected pioneering and church planting mission agency.  Eden Vigil’s recent and upcoming highlights include…

• Monthly publication (via email) of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.  This is a prayer publication unlike any other, and deserves a wider following than it now has (sign up here).
• Lowell has an important book in progress:  Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees.  Now in the negotiate-with-the-editors-and-rewrite stage.
• A new podcast will be launched any day now.  The Agabus Project .  Interviews will feature people like Peter Harris, founder of A Rocha, and Joel Salatin, well-known proponent of sustainable farming and eating.
• “Sending Services” – similar to ‘tent-making missions’; Eden Vigil provides supporting services for Christians going to other countries in secular (environmental) jobs who want to go with a “missionary mindset”.

Tom Rowley is director of A Rocha USA, the US chapter of A Rocha (ask Tom how to pronounce it!), the largest and probably oldest international Christian conservation organization, with a presence in about 25 countries now.  In the US A Rocha is involved in…

• 3 projects – Linden WA, Santa Barbara, and ‘the Texas hill country’, and several others under development.
• The Texas project is a  7,000 acre ranch, and is working with some new grant money on habitat protection, riparian work, and ultimately the development of a Field Study Center.
• The Rowley family recently relocated from Texas to Bend OR and Tom is developing new opportunities in the Pacific Northwest.
• Grass roots orgs can now join A Rocha as independent affiliates.  If you know of a local group that could benefit from a connection with (and the encouragement of) a national organization, contact Tom for more information.

And finally, Ed Brown (myself), Director of  Care of Creation… Our emphasis is on the mobilization of the church toward a God-centered response to the environmental crisis.  This has us going in a number of different directions:

• A long-established work in Kenya (Care of Creation Kenya) working in tree planting, agriculture (“Farming God’s Way”), and training and discipling church leaders, teachers, pastors and development workers about environmental issues and creation care principles.
• A similar new project will be launched in southern Tanzania this year.
• The Our Father’s World seminar is a weekend seminar for churches, presented around the country and in a number of overseas venues.
• Ed is the point person for a Global Consultation on the Gospel and Creation Care to be held in Jamaica October 29 – November 3 of this year, hosted by Lausanne and the World Evangelical Alliance.  Names are now being collected for this invitation only meeting – contact him now if you have people you would like to nominate for participation.

The Creation Care movement is most definitely alive and well.  None of these organizations has the resources they need to do the tasks that need to be done – we encourage you to find your favorite one(s) – send them a note thanking them for their work, and perhaps send a donation from time to time!

[Perhaps you can help us spread the word by reposting this in full on any blog you might have or sharing via Twitter or Facebook.]

Report compiled by Ed Brown, Care of Creation.

[Apologies if any important bullet points were left out…]

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference in Bozeman, Montana.  The announced topic was ‘Human and Environmental Health: Social Justice Implications: A Program for Religious Leaders and others…’  The setting was magnificent:  A century old railroad inn an hour’s drive from the western entrance to Yellowstone Park, surrounded by the mountain ranges for which Bozeman is famous.  But what made this conference unique was the oxymoronic nature of the sponsors.  FREE (The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment) is a conservative institution dedicated to the application of what they would consider ‘sound economic principles’ to environmental problems.  I call them my ‘libertarian economist environmentalist friends’, and while I happily retain my own convictions, I found much that was profitable in this conference.

New Friends

As with any gathering of people around a common concern, the most profitable and enjoyable aspect of this conference was the people.  There were just 25 of us including presenters, and we represented a wide range of intellectual and religious  and career backgrounds.  A number of mainline protestants (Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and so on), a couple of Catholics, one Orthodox priest, two Rabbis (including one who survived the Holocaust as a teenager), and yes, four or five evangelicals. Someone commented than an afternoon hike could have been a joke:  “A priest, a rabbi and a minister went up a mountain…”

John Baden, founder and director of FREE has been doing these conferences for more than 20 years, and is a master of a ‘facilitated discussion’ format:  Everyone has an opportunity to participate, civility is required, and a conversation ensues that is far more in-depth than you would expect with a group of 25 people.   Of course, some of the most valuable conversations happen off-program – in breaks and during meals.  I have several new best friends after this conference that make the investment of time more than worthwhile.

And I have to say that the organizers and presenters are among the most delightful people I’ve ever interacted with.  John Baden wanted us to see his ranch, located just a mile away.  “Before you care about what we know, you need to know that we care.”  What was a broken down ranch when he bought it (a long time ago), is now mostly in conservation easements and features a series of trout ponds (see picture) which he uses to serve local organizations including the Wounded Warrior Project, a very cool program to help rehabilitate wounded veterans by teaching them fly fishing, among other outdoor activities. However much I might disagree with John on aspects of economics , there is no question he cares about the environment – God’s creation – just as much as I do.

Content

Conference content was not completely as advertised.  Of four topical components – economics, environment, human health, and social justice – the first received somewhat more attention than environment and health, and social justice was left to fend for herself.  This was probably to be expected given that the sponsors and many of the presenters are economists, and while not a fatal flaw, did reduce the value of the discussions a bit.

Part of the challenge here was a lack of upfront topical integration.  In my mind I had connected ‘environment’ and ‘human health’:  I see these as two sides of the same coin.  And I would like to have begun with some basic definitions:  What do we mean by ‘health’? Do we mean simply ‘not sick’ or are we looking for something more?   Wendell Berry has things to say that Adam Smith’s disciples need to listen to.

Most of us from the religion side of the table felt that the conference would have been better balanced with one or two presentations from a theologian.  Yes, there is a challenge implicit in that proposition (“Who would we ask?  Catholic? Jewish? Evangelical?”) but still:  In a conference trying to integrate economics, environment and health for religious leaders, the theological perspective was needed.  And this may be one reason it felt like social justice was left out in the cold.

My favorite comment from the floor came from an Orthodox priest after a presentation on how to use economics to evaluate environmental problems:  “The church doesn’t need what you are preaching.  We’ve been telling people how to live for thousands of years…”  He was not entirely correct – even after thousands of years, we in the church have much to learn from all of the other disciplines.  But he raised a valid point.  In a conference for religious leaders, the voice of the theologian needs to be heard.

A Tool – But Only a tool

The most important take-away for me came in a new appreciation for economics as a tool.  One of the early presenters laid it out this way:  “Warm hearts need a cool head.”  It’s not enough to want to help – you need to know which of your possible solutions will really help, what the tradeoffs are, not only in monetary costs but in exchange of one risk for another.  A great example from a toxicologist:  Yes, mercury in fish is a health hazard.  But eating fish is one of the best ways to reduce a variety of other health risks – lower risk of heart disease is just one.  Granted, eliminating mercury in fish would be the best option, what is the best way to proceed in the meantime?  Our current quandary with nuclear power is another excellent example.  How do we balance the risks of a Fukushima against the consequences of another century of CO2 emissions from coal?

Economics is a tool to bring us to the point where we can make an intelligent decision.  And like enthusiastic salesmen in the power tools department at Sears, we were invited to push all the buttons and watch this tool do its thing.

The challenge, of course, with any tool is to keep it in its place.  For a guy with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. And a guy with a new chain saw can be really productive – or really, really dangerous.  I’m afraid that economics looks to me a bit like that new chain saw.  The economist sees the whole world as a balance sheet.  Everything is black and white – cost and benefit, risk and reward, dollars and cents. Things will work out when we finally understand and implement private property rights.  Markets can be solutions to environmental problems.  Um, yes.  Okay.  But. What about things you can’t own? Things you can’t measure? Can you really have a market that is free of manipulation and distortion?

One problem is language.  Economics speaks in monetary terms because we have no other language by which to communicate value.  While economics  really does try to include all costs in a given situation or transaction, in reality the conversation almost always returns to money.  That is the only metric we have to measure risk and reward, cost and benefit.  For the business man, “What gets measured gets done”.  For the economist, “What can be measured can be counted.”  But the only ruler the economist has is denominated in dollars and cents, pounds and pence, rupees and dinars.

Measuring what cannot be measured?

One solution is for those of us who really want to save God’s world is to learn to speak the language of the economist.  If the only way we can save a forest or a watershed is to put a dollar amount on it, maybe we need to do that.  Valuing ecosystem services is one way to do this.

An article in the New York Times this week addresses this issue:

“Currently, there is no price for most of the ecosystem services we care about, like clean air and clean water,” said Stephen Polasky, professor of ecological/environmental economics at the University of Minnesota. He says that because economic calculations often ignore nature, the results can lead to the destruction of the very ecosystems upon which the economy is based.

“Our economic system values land for two primary reasons,” said Adam Davis, a partner in Ecosystem Investment Partners, a company that manages high-priority conservation properties. “One is building on the land, and the second is taking things from the land.”

“Right now, the way a forest is worth money is by cutting it down,” Mr. Davis said. “We measure that value in board-feet of lumber or tons of pulp sold to a paper mill.” What has been missing, he says, is a countervailing economic force that measures the value of leaving a forest or other ecosystem intact.

I have a friend who is giving his life to saving rainforests through investment vehicles.  His goal:  “I want to make it so a tree in the forest is worth more alive than it is dead.”

Will this solve our problems?  Not completely.  Too many things can never be measured – a great deal of this work project remains out of reach of economics, no matter how shiny it is as a tool.

The Challenge of the Cube

I inadvertently had the last comment of the entire conference.  I remembered an illustration I often use in my talks that seemed to capture the challenge we were left with:

Take two Rubik’s cubes:  One is assembled and ‘perfect’, representing the world as God gave it to us, and the world that we would all like to live in – theologians, environmentalists and economists alike.  The other is thoroughly scrambled and needs to be solved.  Economics teaches us how to manipulate the cube, while theology holds up the picture of the solved cube.  (Think about it – the cube is a great picture of the world of the economist, because every move on one side of the cube has a ‘cost’ on the other sides.  And the world of the ecologist – where ‘everything is hitched to everything else’ – thanks, John Muir.)

But here’s the problem:  In my talks, I’ll ask someone in the audience to solve the scrambled cube for me.  (There’s one in every crowd…)  He or she always fails.  Why?  Because my cube has been tampered with.  It’s not solvable.   And that is the world we live in.  Economics is necessary, even essential, for tackling the environmental problems in the world, and all the other problems as well.  But economics can’t solve a tampered cube.  Only God can do that.

And with that, the conference came to an end.

But not our task.  Economists and ecologists and climate scientists and policy makers and politicians cannot put together a world that has been broken by sin.

But God can.

courtesy Thomas Schneider

This is the message we have just sent from Care of Creation to our friends and partners around the world. It’s topic is appropriate to Our Father’s World friends and readers, I think. May you have a truly blessed and deeply meaningful Holy Weekend whereever you are!

“Easter People in a Good Friday world.”

This phrase grabbed the attention of a few people earlier this week – in part, I suppose, because it was heard on NPR. Host Michele Norris was interviewing writer Ann Lamott about Easter. Citing the tension she feels between the world as it should be and the world as it is, Lamott quoted another author, Barbara Johnson: “We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.”

Of course, most of the people around us are actually Good Friday people living in a Good Friday world.

I had a taste what that’s like Thursday morning this week. The setting was perfect – a cafeteria looking out over Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin. The sun was shining for the first time in days, the water perfectly calm with a couple of racing sculls from the University practicing. It would have been a great time to talk about the hope of Easter. But the conversation was dismal – much more fitting for Good Friday, I’m afraid. These are folks who know the environmental situation well. One has been teaching environmental classes – ethics and theology, in fact – since I was a freshman in college. I’ve had many conversations with him over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite this discouraged. He just doesn’t see any hope in the direction things are going today. The other partner in the conversation has read the writing on the wall as she understands it, and has a basement filled with canned food, stocking up for the crash that might be coming, that she thinks is just around the corner.

A bit pessimistic? Yes, but… Make no mistake – the world these folks are living in is real. The threats they were talking about are genuine. Fresh water, climate change, food price crises, peak oil or nuclear disasters – any one of these is sufficient to keep you up at night. As one of my friends said this morning, if you are caught in a food price riot in Egypt, or one of our farmer friends in Kenya suffering the effects of climate change on his tiny farm, for you the crash has already come.

So what does it mean to be an Easter person in this kind of world? Well, the difference is not in the world. We see the same suffering, the same violence, the same disasters. No, the difference is in us: We’ve tasted resurrection power in our lives. The message of the gospel of Jesus has brought us to relationship with God our creator. We were dead in our sins, now we are alive in Jesus and in ways we’ve never experienced before. Caught before in the loneliness of despair, we have now found ourselves members of a new fellowship. Life isn’t all good because of Easter, but it’s different now – we have hope within us, even when navigating a world of despair.

So how do we live? We live on Friday as if it were Easter already. That is what Easter means. Jesus’ resurrection is new life and power and hope breaking in to our present reality. And how exactly do we bring Easter back to Friday?

By living in hope.

‘Faith is confidence in what we hope for’ (Hebrews 11:1).

We do not deny the realities of the world we live in. The problems are real. And humanly speaking, pretty hopeless. But we bring to them the hope that comes from confidence that God is working in the world and in us to bring Easter realities to Good Friday problems.

By living in power. Not the power of the world that always corrupts, but the power of the resurrection, that paradoxically, only comes to those who are willing to die:

“I want to know Christ-yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10-11)

And by living in love. If there is one thing the Good Friday world is lacking, it is love. It should not be surprising that one of the last things Jesus said to his disciples was this:

9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:9-12)

Which reminds me of an amazing line from Wendell Berry:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

Perhaps you think of Care of Creation as an environmental organization. In some sense, yes – we care about and promote restoration and healing of God’s creation and that earns the label ‘environmental’. But we’re about so much more than that. Our goal is that comprehensive, complete “wholeness” Berry speaks of that can only come through “reconciliation and atonement with God.” We’re Easter people – like you, perhaps – trying to bring Easter back into the middle of Good Friday, to do what we can to touch the lives of people and the soil under their feet with both the love of Jesus and the power of his resurrection.

Via Flickr-click for source image

["Old Literature" is an occasional series of posts on works from the past (and in some cases, the not-so-long-ago-past) that still speak today.  Here are some of the earlier posts.]

Wendell Berry maybe best known for his essays on agrarian (hence environmental and ecological) topics; his greatest work, to my mind, is in his novels, all of which take place in and around and concern the “membership” of Port William, a small river town in Kentucky.  My wife Susanna and I recently finished reading (aloud, of course!) Hannah Coulter, and we are now halfway through Jayber Crow.  Yes, I know we’re working backwards – that’s how life is sometimes.  Anyway – last night’s selection caught my attention and seems worth sharing.  Enjoy the selections – but better, get out and read the book!

Jayber, whose religion is real and deep and passionate and mostly of the unorganized variety, is the town’s barber – and gravedigger – and permanent bachelor – and, in this chapter, has just become the Port William’s church janitor.  Jayber’s  observations on the nature of the preaching (and preachers) in this rural church are important, and reflect Berry’s perception of a fundamental flaw in the Christian faith as practiced at that time and in that place:

We must lay up treasures in Heaven and not be lured and seduced by this world’s pretty and tasty things that do not last but are like the flower that is cut down [the preachers taught]…They [had] a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of his works – although they could tell you that this world had been made by God himself.

What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.  They had imagined the church, which is an organization, but not the world, which is an order and a mystery.  To them, the church did not exist in the world where people earn their living and have their being, but rather in the world where they fear death and Hell, which is not much of a world.  To them, the soul was something dark and musty, stuck away for later…

…This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.  To begin with, I don’t think anyone believed it.  I still don’t think so.  Those world condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes.  Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at.  By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best.  The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries.  While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of their children.  And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk.  And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish. [Jayber Crow, Counterpoint Press, p 160-161]

This kind of world-denying religion has largely passed from the scene.  In fact, some would argue that today’s evangelicalism has moved the pendulum far in the other direction – we are so in love with this world and its gadgets that we have lost a sense of the spiritual.  And they could be right. And in that, I don’t think Wendell Berry is any more impressed with our current love affair with everything that begins with a capital I (I-Pad, I-Phone, I-whatever) than he was with the gloom and doom gospel of rural Kentucky.

But still:  It is surprising to me how often I encounter people who  need to be convinced that this present world – the world of “good crops, good gardens” and “hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie” – is of value to the one who created it.  That it really is worth caring about.   It’s almost as if we are in love only with the world we have made ourselves – the world of gadgets and parking lots and gas stations.  Passionate about our technology, we still see God’s world as unworthy of our attention and effort and care.

What is sad about all of this is that it is so unnecessary.  There is no great divide between the visible and the invisible, the material and “spiritual”.    Jayber tells us that after church “they would go home to Heavenly dinners”.  The capital “H” on “Heavenly” is not accidental or incidental:  There’s a connection between Heaven and the dinner table at least when it (the dinner) is done right.  Have we forgotten that our experience with God begins with a marriage feast?  And that God so created this world that when looked at rightly, it would reveal true and permanent realities to us?  The heavenliness of Sunday dinner may say as much (or more) to us about God – his love of beauty, the goodness and yes, even the tastiness of his creation – as some sermons do.  “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

The answer is not to turn our backs on preaching – I am not suggesting we skip the sermon and go right to the pie.  Please – I am a preacher, this is my trade!  No, the answer is to bring the loveliness and beauty of God’s creation into the sermon.  That way we can have our cherry pie and eat it, too.

Flourish Online Magazine has been running a feature celebrating the 30th anniversary of the publication of Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Gift of Good Land”.  This essay draws lessons on “ecological and agricultural responsibility” not from Genesis 1 or 2 or even Romans 8, but from the Old Testament story of God’s gift of the Promised Land to Abraham and his descendants:  “a divine gift to a fallen people.”  And that certainly applies to us, doesn’t it?

Read the essay here, and comments from many leaders in the field of creation care here.  Below is my contribution to this collection…

On being introduced to the world of Christian environmental stewardship about ten years ago,  I found early on that I had a lot of catching up to do.  Wendell Berry was one of the authors I was directed to  who has taught and continues to teach me.  Evidently, this is true of many of my colleagues as well.  It is a privilege to be counted among those who have sat at Wendell’s feet and learned from him, and I am sure I am not the only one who wishes that that learning could have been in person rather than through the pages of his books.

“The Gift of Good Land” appeals to me not only for what it says, but for the method that Berry uses to discover the truths he wants to share.  This is not so much an essay as a sermon, in the very best sense of the word.  His purpose is twofold: “I want to attempt a biblical argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility” and “to examine the practical implications of such an argument.”  I’m not sure how Berry would feel about this analysis, but really, what he’s giving us is an old-fashioned expository message from scripture, complete with exegesis and application.  I know more than a few pastors who could learn from this essay.

This explains to some degree the timelessness of Berry’s message.  He has built his argument directly on the timeless truths of scripture, and he has done so carefully and, look – without using Genesis 1 or 2.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those two chapters, but they are used a lot in building the case for Christian environmental stewardship.  To the contrary, Berry leads us into one of the most important parts of the entire story of redemption, the gift of the Promised Land to Abraham and his descendants and thereby shows us how the principles of stewardship and ecological responsibility can be found on almost every page of the Bible.

The lessons Berry draws from his exposition call us to gratitude, neighborliness and good husbandry.  He reminds us, in one of my favorite lines, that “it might be easier to be Samson than to be a good husband or wife day after day for fifty years.”  These admonitions are useful and balanced because they are biblical.  One of the biggest challenges the environmental movement faces is to figure out what to do with people.  We are, without question, a blight on the landscape, but that is because we’ve lived and used creation selfishly and arrogantly – sinfully, as it were.  Berry gives us permission and shows us how to live in creation:  Not carelessly, nor greedily, but with thankfulness, wonder and awe:   “When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament.”

Learning to do this in the present is our task.  With new technologies appearing every hour, we could do much worse than to follow Berry’s example in returning to the Book itself for guidance.

James Krenov (NY Times photo)

James Krenov died recently.

No, you don’t remember him.  It would be quite surprising if you’d ever heard of him, unless you are one of the dwindling number of genuine ‘cabinet makers’ in the world today.  I hadn’t heard of him either – but his obituary in the New York Times this week makes me wish I had known him.

“Through his school and his furniture, Mr. Krenov inspired a generation of furniture makers with a high regard for both materials and craftsmanship and design with an aesthetic informed by organic, subtle details,” the Web site FineWoodworking.com said…

Behind the shaping and the teaching, said David Welter, the shop technician for the woodworking program, was Mr. Krenov’s credo “that the work had life in it.”

“It wasn’t about showing off technique as much as about having a personality in the work,” Mr. Welter said in a telephone interview last week. “He worked with material rather than on material; it wasn’t a matter of conquering the wood. He had just a killer instinct for wood combination, the colors and textures, melding them to make works with an elegant simplicity.”

He “worked with material rather than on material.”  That is the sign of a craftsman.  And the sign of someone who is “in sync” with the pieces of God’s creation with which he is working (see “Three Cheers for Luddism” and “When You See My Farm…” and “What’s in a Calling?“).

Let us know our wood as we do our hands, and work with it in common respect and harmony,” he wrote in “The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking.”

Wendell Berry would approve.

Not long ago I was reading a 26 year old essay by Wendell Berry (“Two Economies” – included in Berry, The Art of the Commonplace) in which he refers to a short section of a 200 year old poem by William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, when I discovered a one month old news release – and it suddenly all made sense. Sort of.

Okay, I’ll explain. Here’s a bit of the poem:

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.

Now the essay. Berry is trying to untangle Blake’s sometimes mysterious language for us, noting a double Biblical reference to both the harmony of Eden and the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision of “wheels within wheels” (Ezekiel 1):

By “wheel without wheel”, Blake meant wheel outside of wheel, one wheel communicating motion to the other in the manner of two cogwheels, the point being that one wheel can turn another wheel outside of itself only in a direction opposite to its own. [This metaphor] becomes “Satanic” when it becomes a ruling metaphor and is used to describe and to organize fundamental relationships. Against the Satanic “wheel without wheel”, Blake set the wheels of Eden, which “Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.”

There’s more in Berry, and a lot more mystery in the Blake poem itself – I commend them both to you! – but the irony of this reading experience came with a brief excursion into multi-tasking, which is how I found the news release. The National Science Foundation used this headline on their release: Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, once in concert, falling out of sync .

The NSF was reporting on some research that had just come out at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America:

Researchers are discovering that biogeochemical cycles–whether the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, or others–happen in concert with one another. Biogeochemical cycles are “coupled” to each other and to Earth’s physical features.

“Historically, biogeochemists have focused on specific cycles, such as the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle,” said Tim Killeen, NSF assistant director for geosciences. “Biogeochemical cycles don’t exist in isolation, however. There is no nitrogen cycle without a carbon cycle, a hydrogen cycle, an oxygen cycle, and even cycles of trace metals such as iron.”

Now, with global warming and other planet-wide impacts, biogeochemical cycles are being drastically altered. Like broken gears in machinery that was once finely-tuned, these cycles are falling out of sync.

Do you see what grabbed my attention? “Like broken gears in machinery that was once finely tuned…” Blake’s Satanic cogs? It would appear so…

What is my point?

200 years ago William Blake witnessed the arrival of the industrial revolution with great misgiving. He saw giant factories belching smoke and fumes and filled with whirling machinery (“Satanic wheels”) as far more dangerous than sources of smoke and pollution, far more damaging than the injuries being caused. They represented a new force, a force in fundamental opposition to the harmony in God’s creation. But who listens to poets?

26 years ago Wendell Berry sees the same process at work, grown that much more powerful, that much more virulent, that much more dangerous. Who listens to essayists?

And now, in 2009, we can hear scientists – no wooly headed poets these guys – saying the fundamental cycles of creation, cycles we never even knew existed until a few years ago, are “out of sync”. Now there is a lovely modern euphemism whose gentle sound belies its potential for calamity. “Out of sync” in a wrist watch or wall clock means little – precision doesn’t matter. “Out of sync” (or out of tune) in a musical instrument means disaster for the performer but no harm for the rest of us (unless we have to listen). “Out of sync” in a medical instrument, however, probably means death.

What do you suppose “out of sync” means when we’re talking about some of the fundamental processes of God’s creation? I don’t know either, but I don’t think it’s good.

So what shall we do?

Well, if we want to get ourselves “back in sync” with God’s creation wouldn’t you think it would be good to get “back in sync” with God?

Now, there’s a thought…