Environment Care: A Vision of Community and Land
Barriers and Challenges to Building a Foundational Worldview for Living as a Community at Peace with Itself and with the Earth

Janel M. Curry, Dean for Research and Scholarship, Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies, Calvin College

[This paper was based on a presentation titled "Environmental Care: A Vision of Community and Land, "given for Victoria University Anglican Chaplaincy, The Christian Mind Series, Wellington, New Zealand, in November 2002. A version was also published as: Janel Curry, "Environmental Care: A Vision of Community and Land," Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice 11, no. 2 (2003): 11-14.]

I have been driven by my interest in the connection between community and land for some time, perhaps my entire life. I grew up in a Baptist home that was both evangelical and ecumenical. Because my father was a pastor, we lived in several small towns across the agricultural heartland of the Midwest United States. As I grew up, my questions relating to my faith were shaped by the context of the times — the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War — and my family’s theological grounding in Anabaptist thought. Thus, the issues that drove me up through my undergraduate studies were questions of how to build a just society that was at peace with itself.

Alongside these issues of justice and peace among people, I have always had a great love for rural places and land. As I grew, I pondered the difference between my parents’ hometown and my primary hometown. My parents’ hometown seemed to be a vision of health, with its neat appearance, community spirit, and beautiful farmsteads. The town I grew up in had a disheveled look and problems with violence. After a tornado ripped through the center of the community, the director of an outside relief group could not distinguish between sections hit by the tornado and untouched parts of the downtown! The violence extended to the surrounding land that was being strip-mined for coal, leaving beautiful farmland worthless in the process.

How did the lack of community amongst people relate to the suffering of the land?

After college, I served with a Mennonite volunteer agency among the Houma Tribe in Southern Louisiana. My assignment was to establish a link between the present tribe and the historic Houma Tribe in order to gain federal tribal status. Through the process of that research I encountered the depth of relations between people and land. I documented the changed social structure of the tribe that resulted from its migration into the coastal marshes and change from being an agricultural people to hunters and gatherers.1 Also, while collecting ethnographic material, an elderly Houma woman told me about the "woodsmen," dangerous mythical creatures who lived and ate in trees. Once when she was young, the men were gone hunting when the "woodsmen" came, discerned by their horrible smell. The women lit tobacco to keep the woodsmen away. When I asked whether they still existed, she gave me a puzzled look. She said simply that the forest had disappeared. Of course, the cypress forest died through the process of building channels for the movement of oil rigs. As the environment changed, spirituality changed as well.

In graduate school I took a five-week archeology field course along the Minnesota River, excavating a Native American village and adjacent fur-trading post. After digging test pits to locate the village, and spending several weeks shoveling and sifting, several of us set off over our lunch break to search for the river. We proceeded to get lost but did find the river, the rapids, an old Swedish farmstead, the slough, and the cane breaks. By mid-afternoon we had found our way back. Several days later, the professor asked the explorers to find the site of the fur-trading post. The three of us immediately walked to a spot about one-half mile away and dug a test pit and hit pay dirt. How did we know? To this day I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that we had encountered a place. We knew the Blue Heron in the slough, the turtle on the rock each morning when we passed, the large glacial erratic, the land itself.

What is the nature of the connection between people and land? What does it mean to truly "know" a piece of the earth? How does society and government policy either enhance that connection and "knowing" or inhibit it? How does the Christian faith speak to these issues?

In graduate school I encountered the Reformed Christian tradition. This tradition has given me something of another theological home and colleagues to address these questions. The tradition emphasizes creation along with individual salvation, the redemption of all of reality including the Earth and culture, and continuity of this Earth with a future renewed earth. I have found this tradition helpful in thinking through the relationships among God, humans, and the Earth.

The Key Challenge

The key challenge in my faith journey remains the full development of an understanding of humans as placed simultaneously within societal structures and within nature, in a way that neither negates the uniqueness of humans, created in the image of God, nor denigrates the value of God's good earth. The challenge is the full integration of humans, society, and the earth into the vision of shalom that God intends. This challenge is not limited to the Christian community. Jeremy Rifkin, in his book, The Biotech Century, states that the biotechnology issue exemplifies the intersection of morality, societal structures, and nature, yet we have no clear framework for their meaningful integration.2 I see this as the need to develop a biblical perspective that truly "binds life into a whole." Traditional moral precepts have focused on our relations to other human beings, but this is an incomplete conception of our responsibilities. Moral concerns inevitably draw nature into the picture, because life is lived within the context of a place and its ecological circumstances. For example, in his book, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes his work with the Western Apache in recording place names.3 He soon learns that stories are associated with place names. Just saying a place name then, becomes used as a moral teaching (arrows pointed at the heart). The path to wisdom involves knowing the places, the stories, and their meaning as well as walking through that space. What if the Western Apache were removed from that place?

Do landscapes or places unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to that fully integrated life, shalom, or further away? Is there a moral nature to places?

I once had a Christian farmer tell me that he had noticed that the birds disappeared during the farm depression of the 1980s. The groaning of humanity had somehow affected the earth. Did the landscape created by fence-row-to-fence-row farming of the 1980s, leaving no room for wildlife, also somehow speak to us about whether we were in good relations with our neighbors, God, and the Earth? Do landscapes that have a healthy mix of farmsteads, fields, and lands left to wildlife somehow have a positive moral teaching, as opposed to landscapes that are made of large expanses, fields, or pastures devoid of any natural areas, or of any farmsteads?4

Environmental Thinking

Christian thinking on the environment has come a long way from the time of Lynn White’s classic article, "The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis."5 Writings on the theological and philosophical understanding of our relationship with the Earth have grown. Also, our scientific understanding of the impact of humans and the workings of nature has increased. But thus far, these Christian writings, as well as secular writing, have fallen short of the full integration of meaning, nature, and social relations. I still struggle with finding models that describe the relationship between the suffering of people (or their lack of community) and the suffering of the Earth. Beyond those works that are strictly theological, Christian writers who deal with the Earth fall into several categories. Preservationists emphasize the intrinsic value of nature, and call for its being set apart in its natural state.6 Other Christian environmentalists present an equally compelling case for environmental concern, but solutions remain oriented toward individual lifestyle choices such as recycling.7 Economic growth-oriented Christian writers put forth a utilitarian perspective in their treatment of God's creation, often intertwining their arguments with pro-capitalist or pro-American ideologies.8

Secular thinking struggles with the integration of the whole as well, but in particular, with the falleness of social structures. Secular thinking also struggles with giving people a meaningful role: a role that is based neither on the idea that nature is for human use or on the idea that humans should leave nature alone entirely. Thus viewpoints are polarized between biocentric viewpoints and anthropocentric viewpoints.9 Many of the more biocentric viewpoints fail to progress beyond their positions outlined in some of the classic works in social ecology, eco-feminism, and deep ecology.10 Their partial misdiagnosis of the essential reasons for the environmental crisis, whether that be worldview problems, social structures, or male domination, leads to misdiagnoses of the structural changes needed. So the lack of full understanding of human nature and the falleness of the world becomes a problem. Also, some perspectives such as deep ecology or radical environmentalism do not always give realistic alternatives to the dominant worldview, nor realistic views of humans and human nature. On the other hand, anthropocentric views — particularly economistic, free-market viewpoints — dominate much of the actual policymaking but recognize no intrinsic value beyond the market.11

Can a theocentric alternative get us out of the dualism of ecocentric versus anthropocentric? Can a biblical view help us recognize inherent value and yet give humans something useful to do? Can it provide a realistic view of humanity and social structures, a needed contribution to secular thinking?

Building the Christian Perspective

I offer the following as possible pillars on which a Christian perspective could be built for the fuller integration of life into a whole. First, we need to develop an integrative model of the relationships among God, humans, societal structures, and the Earth that is more complete than we presently have. Such a model must move beyond traditional concepts of human stewardship of creation to embeddedness in social structures and the Earth. Humans and their cultural creations are part of nature.

Second, we must build on the assumption of the relational nature of human beings. Many biblical scholars and Christian theologians now understand the "image of God" not as a list of characteristics but as an ability to be in relationship.12 We have yet to understand fully how this profoundly relational nature finds expression in the relationship between humans and land.13 I have recently completed a study on the environmental perspectives of seminarians at four institutions. In this research I found a connection among valuing the Earth as God’s creation, attachment to place, and attachment to community. A group of seminarians identified attachment to a physical community and to places as idolatry. These same seminary students could not conceive of the Earth as having any meaning to God other than as a stage on which God’s salvation story for individual humans was played out.14 Valuing God’s good Earth, and loving and committing ourselves to our neighbors and the places we live are intertwined. We need to come to terms with Christian perspectives that claim these types of deep attachments and relationships to be idolatrous.15

Third, we should assume a covenantal perspective. This perspective is an alternative starting point to the dominant individualistic perspective of society. The covenant is not a limited relation based on self-interest, but an unlimited commitment based on relationships of loyalty and trust. A covenantal perspective, with its emphasis on community and social obligations, should extend to our understanding of the Earth’s relationship to God and our relationship with the Earth.

Fourth, in recognition of the interrelationship of all aspects of reality, we should draw on the insights of modern ecology.16 But we most go beyond to see social structures, place, and ecology as interrelated and irreducible.

And finally, we need to address the problem of assigning value to the Earth and human community. Presently, intrinsic value has no place. Economics informs the populace of financial costs of choices but avoids the question of what is possible and what should be desired. The question of value must be addressed when it comes to the issue of intrinsic value of nature but also the value of being in community.17 What presently dominates is individual choice as determining value. Both community and nature are devalued in the process.

The Earth is crying out for Christians to begin to take seriously their relationship to it and the relationship of the Earth to our Creator. The land suffers alongside human communities, yet we fail to recognize and probe the deep connections among the suffering. Perhaps we should do as Wes Jackson suggests to begin the process of understanding:

What if we employed our rivers and creeks in some ritual atonement? Their sediment load is largely the result of agricultural practices based upon arrogance, tied in turn to an economic system based upon arrogance…but perhaps we need an annual formal observance in the spring — when the rivers are particularly muddy — a kind of ecological rite of atonement, in which we would "gather at the river." Maybe we should ally ourselves by virtue of a common watershed…for a watershed can and often does cut through more than one bioregion. There would be nothing abstract about a common covenant among people of a common watershed.18Back to Top

1) Janel M. Curry-Roper, "Culture Change and the Houma Indians: A Historical and Ecological Examination," in A Cultural Geography of North American Indians, eds. Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1987), 227-241.

2) Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998).

3) Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1996).

4) Janel M. Curry-Roper, "Embeddedness in Place: Its Role in the Sustainability of a Rural Farm Community in Iowa," Space and Culture 4/5 (2000): 204-222.

5) Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155, no. 376 (1967): 1203-1207.

6) Kathleen Braden, "On Saving the Wilderness: Why Christian Stewardship Is Not Sufficient," Christian Scholars Review 28, no. 2 (1998): 254-269.

7) Loren Wilkinson, ed., Earthkeeping in the '90s: Stewardship of Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); R. A. Young, Healing the Earth: A Theocentric Perspective on Environmental Problems and Their Solutions (Nashville: Boardman & Holman, 1994).

8) E.C. Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

9) William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996).

10) Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1992); Bill Devall, "The Deep Ecology Movement," The Natural Resources Journal 20 (1980): 299-322; Karen J. Warren, "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 125-146.

11) J.L. Bast, P.J. Hill, and R.C. Rue, Eco-sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (Lanham: Madison Books, 1994).

12) Douglas J. Hall, "The Spirituality of the Covenant: Imaging God, Stewarding Earth," Perspectives, December 1998: 11-14.

13) John R. Wood, "Biophilia and the Gospel: Loving Nature or Worshipping God?" in Living in the LambLight: Christianity and Contemporary Challenges to the Gospel, ed. Hans Boersma (Vancouver: Regent College, 2001), 153-176.

14) Janel M. Curry and Johnathan Bascom, "Place Seen Through the Eyes of Faith: Conceptual Understandings Among Seminarians," Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, April 2000.

15) Janel M. Curry-Roper, "Contemporary Christian Eschatologies and Their Relation to Environmental Stewardship," The Professional Geographer 42, #2 (1990): #157-169.

16) Kenneth R. Young and Karl S. Zimmerer, eds. Nature’s Geography: New Lessons for Conservation in Developing Countries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

17) Janel M. Curry, "Care Theory and 'Caring' Systems of Agriculture," Agriculture and Human Values 19, no. 3 (2002): 119-131.

18) Wes Jackson, Alters of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth (New York: North Point Press, 1987), 155.