The Journey of an Accidental Environmentalist, Part 3
Let’s Plant Trees
The view of Cuyamaca is still beautiful, but only a shadow remains of the forest I remember.
A few years ago, I saw a photo on a friend’s Facebook page, which he had taken from a viewpoint in the Rocky Mountains. It was posted with a caption like “Beautiful Nature,” or “Stunning View.” The story in plain sight though, and apparently overlooked, was the fact that, although it was spring and the trees were evergreens, they were mostly reddish-brown. An entire forest was dying. While pundits may debate the relative importance of climate change versus misguided forest management, there was no denying the outcome. A whole ecosystem was changing. Furthermore, this was not an isolated phenomenon. I have personally seen similar bark beetle impacts from northern British Columbia to Alberta to Southern California.
This is just one of many changes taking place around the world right now. For example, it appears that a single wildfire last summer destroyed 10 to 14 percent of the world’s giant sequoia population – trees that have survived every possible adversity for two millennia are now dead.
Closer to home, I can’t help but mourn the state of the mountains where, as a child, I first formed my image of a forest. I remember a section of the highway where the trees used to form a roof over the road and one drove through a lush, dark tunnel. There was one sharp bend in particular that felt like the gateway into another world. When we drove around that curve, I always felt excited; we were arriving in a special place. Today, as we round that same bend, my own kids don’t quite believe me when I tell them that there used to be a forest there. In fact, that area of the mountains has lost 90% of its trees to fire, insects and drought.
I used to regard the mountains as a last refuge from the encroaching banality of civilization. Frequently as I hike, the line from John Denver’s song “Rocky Mountain Suite (Cold Nights in Canada)” runs through my head, “the Rockies are living, they never will die.” Today their death and that of so many special places seem all too likely, and my heart is often heavy.
Photo: Ian Dewar/Shutterstock.com
Beetle damage in Jasper, Alberta
Twenty years ago, in my early days at Plant With Purpose, I was feeling discouraged by our constant focus on environmental degradation, and I wanted to visit places where “the environment was pristine.” After five months of backpacking around the world, what I learned was that there is no such place. From the Canadian Rockies, to the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia, to the smog-covered, deforested, littered Himalayas, every place is damaged. Even the most remote islands in the Pacific are covered in plastic waste and surrounded by bleached coral.
It took this trip to begin connecting the dots for me, although the information is not hidden. Most of us get our news on the environment in a slow drip and usually not in the headlines or on the front page. It rarely pulls in readers the way scandal or outrage will. The recent IPCC report was a brief exception. For a long time, the litany has been overwhelming for anyone paying attention. The stunning loss of global biodiversity, whether crashing bird and insect populations, or the fact that vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 60% in the last 40 years, represent the silencing of billions of God’s stories and songs. Most of those we will never hear. I am reminded of a quote from William Beebe, which used to be displayed at the San Diego Zoo, “when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.” God’s beloved creation, which was pronounced good, is vanishing under our stewardship. It is very hard not to get discouraged.
However, while the earth is in trouble, it is not forgotten or abandoned. Like all good things, God has a plan to renew and restore creation. Once we have given thought to the intricacy, elegance and complexity of the earth, it is much harder to dismiss it as something to be simply forgotten and thrown away. However, I believe the Good News of the Gospel extends to creation itself! Growing up in an evangelical church, I learned that the Gospel is primarily about my own personal salvation. I still believe that is important, but I have learned that it is so much bigger. John 3:16 in the original Greek actually reads, “for God so loved the ‘cosmos’…”
Colossians 1:20 tells us, that through Christ, God is reconciling “to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” All things. The sweeping nature of this reconciliation first came home to me when I was with creation care pioneer and scientist, Dr. Cal DeWitt, in the Dominican Republic twenty-five years ago. Asked to preach (with no warning) at a local congregation, he soon had several hundred people repeating the Greek phrase for “all things” in unison: “ta panta!”
Where does that leave us? Are we merely bystanders, doomed to watch the world burn?
Remarkably, human beings have been invited to participate in the work of reconciliation. This is not new. God has involved humans in the great plan of redemption from the very beginning of time. As I mentioned in Part 2, to me the most striking aspect of Genesis 2:15 is the fact that at creation’s most pristine moment, humans were entrusted with the task of caring for and overseeing it.
That did not change after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden. God chose to work through Noah, and Abraham and eventually the whole nation of Israel in bringing redemption and restoration. That mode of operations continues in the New Testament, which begins with the genealogy of Jesus, emphasizing the always-flawed human beings who were involved in the coming of Christ. Later, in 2 Corinthians 5:18 we learn that through Jesus, we too have been given the ministry of reconciliation. That includes reconciling human beings to God through the good news of Jesus, of course, but reconciling ta panta, all things, whether things on heaven or things on earth. (My own imagination what this might mean has been stretched, as I have watched subsistence farmers begin to work with creation, instead of against it, and witnessed former child soldiers and guerillas return to their families and make peace with their neighbors.)
Even the Great Commission, as it is given in the Gospel of Mark, actually says to share the good news with “all creation” or “every creature” depending on the translation. What if we were to take that passage literally? In Romans 8, Paul says that the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed and that creation itself will be liberated from decay. Christ’s death and resurrection is good news for more than just a just a handful of people, it is good news for ta panta.
There are, of course, a myriad of ways to interpret these passages and I am not a theologian. However, the takeaway for me is that as image-bearers of God, given the task of proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom, we can either be life-giving or death-dealing in our relationship with the earth which we are to steward. It is clear to me which one is the most powerful witness to God’s kingdom.
It also means that, far from being helpless bystanders, we have been given a task - a role to play. I find this to be very exciting! Nothing is more painful than passively standing on the sidelines, watching tragedy unfold, with no way to lend a hand. Part of the good news is that not only can we do something about it, we have actually been charged with doing something about it. We should be actively engaged in the ministry of reconciliation, reconciling all things and there need be no false dichotomy between human well-being and the health of God’s creatures.
A lot of traditional environmental thinking sees humans as the problem, a scourge on nature, even a cancer. The thought is that if we could just remove people from the equation, the world would be a much better place. Certainly, human greed is a scourge. Humans, who have forgotten their stewardship role, are the source of most of the problems that beset the planet. However, it need not be this way.
As stewards of creation, humans can sustainably live in and even positively contribute to the environment. Botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, describes research that has demonstrated that sweetgrass needs careful and selective harvesting to prosper. Where it has not been harvested, it does not prosper. The same is true with many other species. Much of what we consider virgin rainforest in places like the Amazon or the South Pacific, has, at one time or another, been tended as a complex forest garden. With careful and respectful stewardship, both biodiversity and humans can flourish.
In the work we do at Plant With Purpose, I regularly get the opportunity to see humans improving their environment, planting trees and actively restoring the health of their watersheds. I have long believed that the millions of smallholder farmers we serve are the biggest untapped asset for global reforestation and forest stewardship. They are the true heroes of our work. With far less power than most of us in terms of education, economic capacity, social standing and health, they are investing the little they do have in the transformation of their land and finding purpose in rediscovering their role as stewards. Few things give me greater joy than seeing streams, which had dried up, begin to flow again, and soil turn dark, as health returns to a watershed. God’s creation is remarkably resilient, and with care, more comes back than we might imagine.
Part of the good news is that we can participate in God’s redemptive work in the world, but the rest of the gospel is that redemption is not up to us. We often casually talk about saving the earth as if it were our task alone. There is no doubt that the world needs saving, but we are not that savior.
That is tremendously freeing. As I compare the size and scope of my efforts with the sheer magnitude of the problem, the temptation to despair can be overwhelming. As more people are becoming aware of what is taking place, terms like “climate anxiety” have become common. There is a sense of deep discouragement among those who study the environment, and with good reason. Dr. Diana Six, a University of Montana entomologist, was recently quoted in The Guardian saying, “I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner.” People sometimes ask me if things are as bad as they have heard. The answer is “Oh yes. Probably much worse.” I get downhearted as I bear witness to continuous loss in the places I know and love.
However, there is hope in Jesus, and hope is desperately needed at this moment – not so we can sit back and wait for the end, but so we have the courage to keep contending for what is good. Jesus is redeeming all things, and there is hope in that, even though we don’t know exactly what that will ultimately look like.
Armed with that hope, we can begin by contributing what we can, all any of us can, and that is the little that we have. As I have written elsewhere, much like the little boy in the story of the feeding of the five thousand, anything we have to offer is hopelessly inadequate. However, it is what we have, and that is the point. If you remember the story, the five loaves and two fish contributed by the boy are ridiculous in the face of the need. Given in faith, become the raw material for a miracle.
When I see what is being done by our partnering farmers in Tanzania, with tens of thousands of people gathering annually to celebrate voluntarily planting millions of trees as an expression of their faith and purpose; or when I talk with a former guerilla fighter excitedly talking about regreening his watershed and discovering purpose as an emissary of peace, I realize that God has been able to use my five loaves and two fish in ways I never anticipated all those years ago, when “planting trees for Jesus” seemed like such a foolish way to spend a life.
