Seventeen high school students and their four counselors looked at me with some skepticism as they disembarked their yellow school bus into a parking lot. Removal of invasive species at LeSuer Nature Preserve in Monmouth, Illinois, was on their morning schedule. Trucks roaring down the interstate nearby and pristinely kept soccer fields weren’t the setting they expected for their morning of creation care and environmental restoration. The LeSuer Preserve doesn’t look like much from the parking lot, but beyond the asphalt is a 16.5-acre experiment in caring for creation — for biologists, learners and theologians alike.
The students, a cohort of high schoolers attending the Lux Summer Theological Institute for Youth, gathered around the biology professor leading our endeavors for the morning. He began with a question for us: What is a weed? The students responded with their own definitions. One said a dandelion. Another said a plant you don’t want in your yard. Our biologist provided this definition: A weed is an organism out of place. A mouse in a field isn’t a weed, but a mouse in your kitchen might be. Tall prairie grass has its place in the prairie, but it is a weed quickly pulled out of a vegetable garden. A zoonotic virus, harmless to its animal host, can cause disaster among humans when it escapes its place. What is a weed? A lot depends on who is in charge of the place where the question is asked.
Deciding which organisms are out of their proper place, or defining a “weed,” is a tricky business. At LeSuer Nature Preserve, the task was to remove a plant that botanists have determined is out of its place: Lonicera maackii, or Amur honeysuckle. Though endangered in other places in the world, it has taken over much of the indigenous ecosystem and woodlands in the Midwest. On a spring day, the honeysuckle is beautiful, with fragrant white blossoms that have a sweet, edible nectar. Even so, it is out of place in the Illinois prairie and woodland ecosystems. Removing the honeysuckle is more than an act of preservation, it is an effort to restore and recreate the historical, native ecosystem that sustained the land before pioneering humans changed the landscape.
As I stood in the parking lot that morning, I listened to the roar of the traffic, and smelled the not-so-faint scent of the pork processing plant in town. Remembering with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of “Little House on the Prairie,” that this place was once all wild grassland, a question nagged at me. So, I asked our resident ecologist: “Are human beings weeds?” A somewhat pensive silence ensued. Lonicera maackii awaited us, so we didn’t dwell on it long, but we concluded it wasn’t the best question for an ecologist to answer if we’re looking for good news. The scientific answer is that human beings are, more often than not, organisms that have stepped out of their place. Like Amur honeysuckle, we often do more harm than good to the ecosystems that thrived before we arrived. We have entered the Anthropocene age, an era marked by the profound and overwhelming impact of human activity on our world’s climate and environment. Our ecologist reminded us that nature often wins in the end, and that humans may not be part of that future if they permanently damage the fragile ecosystem that makes human life possible. Ecological reflection on our future grows bleak where science is concerned. What about our theology? At the metaphorical and practical crossroad of parking lot and preserve, where is our place, the place that God intends for us? Are we more or less than weeds in God’s creation?
Where is the place that God intends for us?
In the beginning, the book of Genesis tells us, God’s creation is good. Human beings are given responsibility over that good creation in the commands of having “dominion” and to “till and keep.” This stewardship of dominion and tilling does not permit a sort of “do what you want” kind of theology. Instead, our place and relationship to creation is defined by the way we were created. Created in God’s image (Genesis 1), our care for creation is to be modeled on the care that God has for creation. If we have a sense of superiority over creation because of our divine image-hood, we should remember that we have also been created from the Hebrew adamah, the very loam and mud of the earth itself (Genesis 2).
Our place is the world we inhabit, amid the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the wild animals and every creeping thing. While our place is established in creation, the psalmist proclaims God’s ultimate dominion:
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it;
for he founded it on the seas
and established it on the waters. (Psalm 24:1-2)
In the final analysis, our care for creation must be always attentive to God’s creative goodness at work in the world and our rootedness in the dust of creation itself.
Are we more or less than weeds in God’s creation?
The second question still lingers. If a weed is an organism out of place, do the realities of the Anthropocene era mean we have become weeds in God’s creation? Does our impact on the creation that surrounds us make a difference to our “weediness”? Are we the mouse in the field or the mouse in the kitchen?
The parable of wheat and weeds in Matthew 13:24-30 resonates with our age:
The kingdom of heaven is like someone who planted good seed in his field. While people were sleeping, an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat and went away. When the stalks sprouted and bore grain, then the weeds also appeared. The servants of the landowner came and said to him, “Master, didn’t you plant good seed in your field? Then how is it that it has weeds?”
“An enemy has done this,” he answered.
The servants said to him, “Do you want us to go and gather them?”
But the landowner said, “No, because if you gather the weeds, you’ll pull up the wheat along with them. Let both grow side by side until the harvest. And at harvesttime I’ll say to the harvesters, ‘First gather the weeds and tie them together in bundles to be burned. But bring the wheat into my barn.’ ”
The biblical narrative helps human beings sort out our place in relation to creation and the Creator. We are appointed stewards of creation, and we are planted in God’s field. Always granted the capacity of good, nurturing wheat, we are also potential weed-hazards; organisms destructive and hence, out of place. Like our kin in the first garden, the knowledge of good and evil can mean the difference between home and exile. In an epoch defined by humanity’s imprint on the face of the planet, the risks of weediness are high. The science of ecology pulls the alarm and theology beckons over its sounding din. The reverberating tone of God’s goodness makes care for creation one of the most pressing issues of our time. It transcends borders and communities, though the burden of climate change often falls most heavily on people of color. Wildfires on the West Coast of the United States impact communities threatened by the flames, but also contribute to the poor air quality and health of populations in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Rising waters around the world destroy homes on coastlines and small islands, but the cost of climate refugee resettlement has global reach. These are just some of the impacts of creation care (or lack thereof) on human beings, and the implications of failing to care for creation on diverse non-human ecosystems are countless.
A way forward
Revelation 21 offers this way forward: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” God is still in the world, creating and recreating. The promise and invitation are that we are intended as co-creators in every age. There is hope even for weeds. Emily Dickinson penned, “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee … and revery”
In most lawns, clover is a weed. It’s not terribly harmful, but it’s not well respected on a golf course. To think that a prairie might be restored from a single clover, a bee and the gift of revery is a hopeful theology. If we are weeds, why not be clover? Each day provides opportunities for creation care, and we are rarely just one clover. The 17 students who took on invasive Lonicera maackii are partners in care for God’s creation. So are the students who faced invasive sumac at the same nature preserve a few years before. Revery, or joyful thoughtfulness in creation, is a first good step. With a bit of work, a lot of care, and the spirit of the Creator, a new earth is just on the horizon.
Jessica Hawkinson Dorow is currently a graduate student in library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She and her family live in Monmouth, Illinois.
"creation" - Google News
October 21, 2021 at 04:12PM
https://ift.tt/3aY99UL
Finding our place in the care of creation - The Presbyterian Outlook
"creation" - Google News
https://ift.tt/39MUE4f
https://ift.tt/3bZVhYX
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Finding our place in the care of creation - The Presbyterian Outlook"
Post a Comment