Environmentalism: Do the Trees Hug Back?

Warning: This is a loooooong post.

Once, at the youth centre I run, there was a cockroach. Not inside - we're a bit too clean for that - but out on the pavement, wandering around, doing his/her little cockroach thing. I watched it for a minute, fascinated. Bugs usually fascinate me, except for spiders. Can't abide spiders.

Anyway, I watched it for a bit longer, then decided to strike up a chat about nature with some of our teens (as most drop-in workers will tell you, any conversation that isn't about cars, music or video games are always a treat). I then pointed it out to a nearby teen. "Hey look," I said. "A cockroach."

Someday, I'll have to apologize to that cockroach. Wherever he is.

Within seconds an impromptu war party was formed with a singular purpose: the systematic hunting down, torture, and destruction of said cockroach and any of its family that had the misfortune to be in the immediate area. The next 45 minutes were spent (by me) frantically trying to herd local wildlife away from the drop-in, while echoes of stomping feet (by the war party) echoed in the distance. A few minutes after Our Friend the cockroach had been sent to an untimely and decidely two-dimensional end, some of the other youth decided their newfound martial skills could be put to use against squirrels, birds, stray cats, etc. Needless to say, this was a time of high stress, for me as well as the unfortunate local fauna.

In the midst of all this, one of my volunteers - an older gentleman with a great sense of humour - jokingly called me a "druid," due to my efforts to protect what little nature surrounded us. Now, I'm not a druid - at least, not it the long whiskers and moonlit ritual sense, nor in the D&D "True Neutral" sense (props to anyone who understood that). And I'm not a druid in the contemporary sense, aligning myself with the pagan movement (which Wanderer will know much more about than I, I would assume). But despite that I still feel a great deal of care towards the Earth and her creatures.

I was really spoiled growing up. Not in the sense that I got anything I wanted, though. No, I was spoiled because my parents had a cabin at a lake near West Hawk in Ontario. It was a 2-hour drive from our house to the main dock, then a 15 minute boat ride to the cabin itself. And then... And then, you were surrounded by the Canadian Shield, with nothing but bush for miles. This might be a cause of stress to some, but to us it was Heaven.

I spent long days and weeks there during the summer. I hiked through the bush, I went swimming and exploring. I sat and read against an oak tree. I climbed the cliffs that were on either side of the lake and watched the sunset from above the trees. I walked past a stag - easily a 14-pointer, with a chest as broad as you've ever seen - as he stood on a rock shelf above me, watching me pass, and I felt strangely humbled and honoured in that moment. I can't tell you how much it means to me to have that place. It is a "thin" place, as my Celtic ancestors would call it; that is, the veil between myself and God seemed translucent, as though we were closer there than anywhere else.

I spent alot of time reading when I was there. Not just the sci-fi/fantasy novels that awkward teens like me often read, but books on biology, natural science, and several articles by David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist. I even read some work by the original Grey Owl, if you can believe that. That greatly shaped my understanding of the world, and when I later became a Christian I often regarded with perplexment the doctrine that the Earth was "fallen."

I simply did not understand. How did the Fall of Man - the effects of which were plain for anyone to see in human nature - suddenly make the whole world go bad? I had an older Christian man explain to me that before the Fall, no animal harmed another and everything ate plants. This I was quite skeptical about. Why did some animals have claws and sharp teeth, then? For especially troublesome plants? And why then would plants have built-in defenses, like thorns or poison, if they were meant to be eaten? Or did all of these features appear the moment the forbidden fruit was taken? Wicked raw deal if you were the antelope grazing peacefully next to the lion when his claws appeared. It simply didn't add up.

I said so to this gentleman, and he told me to look for the signs in nature. "The natural world is Chaos," he said. "Anyone with the Discovery Channel can tell you that. The Fall brought Chaos into God's world of Order."

This too I was skeptical of. Having spent my share of time learning about nature and biology, I knew that the world was not as chaotic as it may seem. What looks to us like disorder is actually an incredibly delicate balance, held together by a law so basic and irrefutable that any economist would recognize it instantly: supply and demand. When there is an abundance of food, whatever group that eats that food will grow until the food source is exhausted or cannot support them any longer. Then, the consumer will dwindle until the supply is rekindled. Again and again on millions of levels of the food chain this balance is played out and preserved.

Other aspects of nature that seem strange and chaotic are not so as well. The bloody chases and deaths that nature shows have been so fond of make it out to be a desperate struggle for survival, with death around every corner. But there is another law that governs Earth's creatures, and that law seems to say that creatures will only take what they need to survive. You won't see cheetahs slaughter a whole herd of antelopes, or the antelopes chase down and kill all the cheetahs. Sometimes after they've hunted the predators eat their prey quietly while the antelope herd stands just a little ways off, occasionally even with the eating cheetahs in their midst. And the animals are not at war with each other. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, they only kill to eat, or to keep from being eaten.

After telling this to my friend, he sat down and pulled out the Bible. Pointing out Genesis 3, he read me the story of the Fall. "So you see," he said, "God said that because of the Fall the natural world was cursed. God said it, that should settle it for us."

Well, it did for me for a long time. And I accepted a great many other teachings that naturally followed from this - that humankind was given the Earth to rule in God's stead, and we were sinful so it obviously wouldn't turn out ok. But still it was ours to control and abuse, because hey, Jesus is coming back soon and we'll be raptured away and not have to deal with the consequences. Right?

Not so much. I was sitting years later and chatting with a theologian friend of mine about the very same topic, and he pointed something out to me: the kind of language God uses to "give" the Earth to humanity is the same kind that a King would use when asking his nobles to look after the kingdom while he was away. Not saying, "Here you go, do what you want," but "Look after this for me, because it's mine and I'm making you my steward." That made a huge difference for me. We still had an obligation to treat the world well! But this didn't sit very well with me if we were looking after a chaotic, self-destructing planet that had no chance of recovery short of the end of the world. Did it still make Biblical sense that this world was a fallen place because of the actions of Adam and Eve?

I re-read Genesis 3. And stopped cold at verse 17: "... and cursed is the earth because of you." Something clicked when I read that again. That sounded different, somehow, than how it had been read to me before. It almost sounded like it was not a curse from God to the Earth, but a prophecy/warning to Adam. "cursed is the earth because of you." Now this is something I'm not entirely sure on, but is it possible that God was saying that because of Adam - because of us - the world was in for some serious hurt? That it would be us who brought a "curse"
upon it, through our actions and attempts to subjugate what we perceived as chaotic?

I know many people have quoted Romans 8: 19-22 in defense of a "Fallen Creation" theology: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now." Is it possible that we are the ones who subject creation to "futility," not because of a curse from long ago but because of our sinfulness, manifested in pollution, waste, and overpopulation? If this is possible, what is our responsibility in terms of response? How does this affect our mission to the world? What are we as evangelicals/emergents/whatever called to do?

I intend to write a follow-up post next week based largely on the conversations that happen after this post, assuming any do happen. If you have any insights or comments, please share them.