Our Only Home

The Earth is the Lord's and all that is in it,

The world and those who live in it;

For he has founded it on the seas,

And established it on the rivers.

-Psalm 24: 1

This is not about politics, this is about breathing.  This is not about partisan squabbling, this is about the water that comprises 70% of our bodies.  Once upon a time, I set myself towards earning a degree in Environmental Resource Management.  I succeeded in at least getting the piece of paper that says so.  I was not a particularly good student, or particularly dedicated to the field.  I had not yet discovered the connection with the Creator that truly drove whatever notions of environmental stewardship at the heart of my pursuit.

My education in this field was broad by design.  In the early 1990's the brains of the Penn State College of Agriculture knew that much of the work that needed to be done vis-a-vis sustainable use and ecological protection was going to be an on the job sort of learning.  So the ERM program was designed to give its graduates a sort of broad spectrum of science knowledge without actually getting bogged down in any of the technical stuff that would have been the stock and trade of say an environmental engineer.

Contrary to what you might imagine, this sort of education did not make me a "tree-hugger." A lot of what I learned was related to sustainable use and impact mitigation.  It was not about preserving pristine wilderness for the spotted owls, it was more about making it so that human beings had clean drinking water, healthy air and good quality soil.  Somewhere in there I picked up the idea that pollution wasn't just bad for polar bears, it was also bad for people. Even before the scientific consensus had crystallized to the extent that it has now, it was pretty well accepted that climate change was a real thing and a real threat to human society, even if the worst case scenarios didn't materialize we were still altering our planet in probably irreversible ways, the consequences of this action, even if they were unknown, had the potential for global catastrophe.

It's been 20 years since I graduated with that degree, and I have spent the bulk of that time dealing with theological, spiritual and ecclesiastical challenges of stewardship, but recently I have noticed that there is probably a much greater connection between my undergraduate training and the work of my eventual vocation. Environmental degradation has always been a primary factor in the occurrence of famine and disease outbreaks, you know the things that periodically smack us in the face and remind us that nature can still kill us whenever she wants to.  Poor soil conservation practices have continued despite the dire lessons of the dust bowl, dying coral reefs and the growing dead zone in the Chesapeake Bay.  We have polluted the rivers of fresh water that are very much like arteries of human civilization, we have overused just about every resource imaginable and burned fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow.

The thing is, and this is what I lose sleep over, we have irreparably damaged the world of tomorrow, the one we will give to our children and our descendants.  In my Preacher life I often teach about how important the Hebrew word nahala is to understanding the narratives in the book of Genesis.  Nahala means something like "birthright" or "inheritance." It is the thing that you pass down to future generations.  You have a responsibility to be a good steward of nahala, you must not disgrace the legacy of your forefathers, and you must add to the good foundation and pass that on to your children.  The stewardship of the nahala is a divine mandate, God chooses Abram, a man whose nahala is about to be dissipated and lost because he has no children.  God's promise to Abram, who becomes Abraham is a new inheritance and a new promise: he will be the father/ancestor of many nations.  The nahala that God gave to Abraham was going to extend farther than any family or tribal heritage could possibly go.

As Paul points out in Romans 4, this promise is still at work in the world because of Jesus, the descendant of Abraham. In fact, from a Christian perspective, the covenant is now wide open, global in scope and eternal in scale.  How is it then that we can blindly follow such a destructive path concerning the resources that we all need?  As much as I endorse small scale efforts like driving less, recycling, composting, gardening and such, many of the problems of environmental degradation are global in scale and therefore fall into the domain of politics and diplomacy.  And the flaws of our current political situation are on flagrant display in Flint Michigan, and around the world.  Occasionally the good guys win, or at least forestall defeat, as has happened at Standing Rock, but there are many issues of air quality, climate change, marine ecology and deforestation that must have some element of global political cooperation.

As one of my ERM teachers quipped back in the day, "We need to stop saying save the earth, the earth will be just fine, we may not be able to live here anymore, but the planet itself isn't going anywhere." Our nahala is that thin and fragile ecosystem made up of air, water and soil that provides the basics for all that we need to stay alive. It's very complex and beautiful, but we don't entirely know the limits of how much abuse it can take, and that should make us all humble. No matter what your faith tradition, even if you don't really have one, remember that you are not the owner of this world, only one of its caretakers, how well you do that is your actual legacy, the only legacy that really matters. Protecting that should not be a partisan issue, the fact that it has become such is perhaps the most dangerous sin of our age.