God Is Green: Sandra L. Richter's Stewards of Eden makes the argument for Christian environmentalism

Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters 
By Sandra L. Richter
InterVarsity Press; February 2020

One might expect that the most ardent believers in God would also be the most committed and dedicated environmentalists. After all, if you truly believed that all of existence—the universe, the Earth and every living thing on it—were the work of a benevolent creator, wouldn't you also devote yourself to the care of that creation, prioritizing its protection alongside the other priorities of your faith?

And yet we know that is not the case. In fact, here in the United States at least, it often seems that the opposite is true, that the way we have been gradually sorting ourselves throughout the last few decades has made it seem that, in general, the most religious among us (or, at least, the most performatively religious among us) are Republican and conservative, while the most environmentally conscious among us are Democratic and liberal*, and never the twain shall meet.

There are plenty of reasons for this, I suppose (I've been working my way through Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, and while it doesn't address this specific topic, it does explain how and why we divide ourselves into political teams, and how the beliefs of one team quickly become seen as anathema to the other). But "Because religious people are hypocrites" isn't the answer, although certainly many of them are (and not, I should say, because they are religious people, but because they are people, period).

One of the reasons that Sandra L. Richter, a teacher, scholar and author of 2008's The Epic of Eden, identifies for that disconnect is a matter of theology, the too-widespread belief that God's creation is "bound only for destruction." If the world is going to end any day now, something Christians have believed since Jesus was still walking the Earth, then why fret overmuch about how inhospitable to human life the climate will be in a few more decades, or if a species or two or three thousand go extinct? During the creation story of Genesis, God gave humanity dominion over the Earth, right? Therefore, it's ours to do with as we please.

Not only is that an extremely dangerous way to run a planet—or anything else, for that matter—but scripture pretty explicitly warns against it**, and the dominion philosophy itself is a matter of interpretation, one that believers have probably leaned into over the centuries because it's the most convenient interpretation.

Richter's book looks to passages of scripture to reveal different messages in sharp contrast to the dominion philosophy, and things that seem like far more modern concerns than what an Iron Age civilization might have codified into their spiritual laws, like sustainable agriculture and the care for domestic and wild animals. None of her interpretations are exactly a stretch, either. If it comes as a shock that the Bible lays out the proper way to practice animal agriculture, well, that's probably because Christians tend to ignore large swathes of their own Bible, particularly the Old Testament, generally only turning to books like Leviticus or Deuteronomy to cherry-pick passages they can use to justify discriminating against the LGBTQ community.

Richter starts at the beginning—of the Bible, and of the world. Though we traditionally gravitate to the terms "be fruitful and multiply" and "dominion" in the two creation stories, Richter offers the alternatives from Genesis 2:15: "Then Yahweh Elohim took the human and put him into the garden of Eden to tend it and to guard it."*** Though it is mostly simply a matter of connotation, it's amazing what the shift from having dominion over something to tending, guarding or shepherding it can have.

In the following chapters—each of which, I should note, is fairly short and extremely readable, regardless of your familiarity with the Bible—Richter takes a passage from scripture, expands upon it to explain what it meant and how it would have been applied in Biblical times, and then brings up a modern "case study" in which it applies.

So, for example, after the opening chapter on the creation narrative and humanity's place in the world and in God's plan, she discusses the covenant between God and Israel as a landlord/renter agreement (that is, we might live on Earth and have a special place on it in God's plan, but it's his, not ours); that God ordered that both the land and beasts of burden be given periods of rest  (during the seventh year and the seventh day, respectively); that God prescribed sustainable methods for gathering wild birds and bird eggs and forbade the "environmental terrorism" of burning the crops and cutting down the fruit trees of enemy nations; the importance of caring for the widows and orphans of society; and, finally, what the covenant means today, after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and how we should live our lives.

Some of this will seem trivial from afar—such as, say, reading a review of the book on a blog—but Richter's arguments are certainly compelling. These Old Testament laws are eminently practical as well as encouraging a degree of empathy for other people and other creatures. That is, if you exhaust the land, you won't be able to grow anything out of it. If you work your livestock to death, then you won't have them to help you plow or grind grain. If you take every bird and all the eggs from every next you find, you will soon be out of birds and eggs. If you destroy the food source of an enemy nation, then neither your nor they will have access to that food.

It's certainly strange to think of something that seems so specific and dated as Deuteronomy 25:4, "do not muzzle an ox while he is threshing",  could or should have ramifications today, but if God wanted his people to allow one of their working animals to enjoy mouthfuls of food while producing it, even if that meant nutrition that was ultimately being taken from them and their families, how would God be okay with pigs packed into tiny cages, chickens with their beaks soldered off and the full catalog of nightmares that goes into the production of most meat? (Richter devotes about eight pages to these).

What is most striking about all of these ancient examples is their context. Richter thoroughly describes the day-to-day life of ancient Israeli society, and repeatedly drives home the fact that most people were somewhere in the area of "just getting by"; they were always a tragedy (or even run of bad luck) away from starvation, and, even at best, could expect lean months every year. So God wasn't asking these people to simply inconvenience themselves the slightest bit, like so many of the sacrifices that  our society could be making in the 21st century to improve life on Earth, but he was asking actively hungry people to sacrifice necessary food in order to care for the land, care for the animals and care for one another.

It's not until the last chapters that Richter really gets to the New Testament, at which point the gospels, the epistles and the Book of Revelation are consulted, mostly regarding God's plan for the Earth in the future, and her argument that returning to the original arrangement of Eden, the redemption of that original plan for creation is, in fact, the end goal. That is, God's creation isn't necessarily destined for destruction, and all that really matters are the souls of the faithful, but that humanity, Heaven and Earth are all to be redeemed (You've probably heard the phrase "a new Heaven and a new Earth" before).

Now, I should perhaps clarify that I approached the reading of the book as a believer, and someone with a lifetime of Catholic education and the attendant familiarity with the terminology and the source material (Well, "lifetime" meaning kindergarten through earning my bachelor's degree, the end of my formal education). I'm not entirely sure how this will read to an atheist or agnostic then, but belief doesn't seem to be necessary to read and enjoy it—while Richter is herself a believer, her book works as history and an environmental treatise as much as it does an articulation for Christian-driven environmentalism.

It is well-written and easy to read though, so I don't think a non-believer reading because of their prior interest in the environment would necessarily be repelled by it or find it overly confusing, but the intended audience is clearly a Christian one. After the end of the book, there's a "Resources For the Responsive Christian" appendix, listing 17 ways to "take action" on "environmental stewardship,'  most of which can be practiced by anyone (In fact, if you're already concerned about the environment, I imagine you already practice many of these things).

To oversimplify, a truly Christian response to the environmental crisis seems to start with a simple matter of reframing, of thinking of ourselves not as the lords over creation, but as its shepherds, and as thinking of ourselves not as the owners of the world, but as renters living on God's world.

But it's Richter's book, so I should give her the last word:

The introduction of this book asked the question: Can a Christian be an environmentalist? My answer is, how could a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve, redeemed and transformed by the second Adam to live eternally in the resurrected Eden, be anything else?

If you're a Christian and aren't convinced of that, I would highly recommend the book that comes between Richter's question and her final words.



*Here's how Richter puts it:

Why has the church, historically the moral compass of our society, gotten so lost on this topic?

On reason is politics. Not kingdom politics, but American and international politics. I think that most would concur that the traditional political allies of the church are not the traditional political allies of environmental concern. If you are pro-life, it is assumed that you cannot also be pro-environment. If you are a patriot, you supposedly cannot also be a conservationist. Or to be more forthright: in the United States, if you are an environmentalists, it is assumed that you are a Democrat--and Democrats, supposedly, are not pro-life. If you are a Republican , it is assumed that you cannot also be pro-environment. In other words, somehow environmental advocacy has been pigeonholed into a particular political profile and has become guilty by association. But of course, Christians are first the citizens of heaven, and therefore our alliances and our value system are not defined by American politics.

**Regarding predictions of the end of the world, I always think of Mark 13:32: "But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." The context is clearly that of "it could be any day now, so be ready," but Jesus quite literally says no one knows. Given that he said that millennia ago, I think the safest philosophy is that it could be any day now, or it could be another couple millennia. So the best bet is to not render the world uninhabitable and continue down any paths that will kill us all off before that. 


***The only Bible in my apartment is The New American Bible with a 1987 copyright I was requited to purchase for an introduction to the Bible class in college in 1997 or so. Its version of the line is "The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it." Regarding the verbs of what Adam/the man/humanity is meant to do in the garden, Richter looks to the original Hebrew words, and explains them in her notes. 

Degrees of separation: The architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement on the two worlds of 2050

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis 
By Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Alfred A. Knopf; February 2020

The world is either going to meet the goals set forth in the United Nations' 2015 Paris Agreement, or it is not. Which way things go in the next 30 years—whether we're able to keep the planet's warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius or if we exceed that—will determine which of two drastically different worlds we'll be living on in 2050.

Laying out and detailing those two worlds is the premise of The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, co-authors who know the Paris Agreement inside and out. They should; after all, as the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and her senior policy advisor, they helped create it (or, as the cover refers to the pair, they're the "architects" of the agreement).

They label the two worlds as the "World We Are Creating" and the "World We Must Create," and devote a chapter to speculating about each.

The former, in which the world made no more progress on reducing emissions beyond what was achieved by 2015, is on a path to being more than three degrees warmer by 2100. In 2050, it's already an absolute nightmare, and it's hard to imagine a scarier dystopia in any depressing sci-fi or scary horror movie without resorting to fantasy elements involving, I don't know, zombies or the monsters of the Book of Revelation being added on top of the climate-driven hazards.

People will need to wear masks when they leave their homes, for protection from air pollution and surface ozone levels. Over 2 billion people will live in the hottest parts of the world, where temperatures can reach 140 degrees as many as 45 days of the year, which is the point at which the human body can't survive exposure for very long .

The world will be consumed by conflicts over resources, between the rich and everyone else within a country's borders, and between countries themselves, although most countries' armies will have become "highly militarized border patrols," attempting to keep out climate refugees. "Natural" disasters like hurricanes, torrential rain, forest fires and catastrophic flooding will be common place.

The future of humanity is so uncertain that suicide is common, and there are dark arguments being made about such things as whether what relatively few resources are left should be enjoyed now by the current generation, as it may be one of the last, or if attempts should still be made to conserve them for the future.

Here in the United States, it's the coasts, where rising sea levels swallow up cities, and the southwest, where it's becoming uninhabitably hot, which suffer first and the most, but the interior of the country will be subject to flooding, infrastructure collapse, food insecurity and disease. Conflict with Mexico will be at an all-time high, as thousands of people from South America try to migrate into the more livable U.S., away from the burning equator.

Those are just some highlights; they go on for bout a dozen pages.

The other world of 2050, the one we must create, is obviously a far better alternative. Having successfully halved emissions every decade since 2020, we'll be on a path towards a world that is no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

Cities will be getting greener and greener, with trees and plants everywhere, from rooftops to what used to be parking lots and parking garages. Cars will be rarer than ever, and those that are around will be electric—the only people who will ever get behind the wheel of one with an internal combustion engine will be hobbyist who pay for the privilege to do so at special tracks. Those who lost jobs in the fossil fuel industry have been retrained  and now have good paying jobs working on building a train system in the United States, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing newer, greener buildings. Vegetarianism is now common, and "most young children cannot believe we used to kill any animals for food. Thanks to greater connectivity, "more people work from home, allowing for more flexibility and more time to call their own."

This world won't be completely perfect. Sea levels will still rise, animal species will still be lost, the world will still be warmer than it should be. But the very worst damage will be mitigated. (Remember, even if we magically stopped using all fossil fuels and stopped factory farming overnight, the world would continue to warm because of all the emissions we've already pumped into the atmosphere. Metaphorically, the climate crisis isn't a light switch, that can be turned on or off, but more like a train, that must rather gradually slow before coming to a stop.)

I'm not going to lie; parts of the "World We Must Create" chapter struck me as somewhat pie-in-the-sky, and not just the part about children growing up in a world in which a diet of meat seems alien to them. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also imagine that private car-ownership will become a thing of the past, with people getting around in  cooperatively-owned self-driving electric car an and neighbors voluntarily forming food purchase groups and taking turns securing and delivering groceries.

While many of the elements they suggest will be part of the second, livable world seem perfectly suited to politically liberal urban environments, I have a hard time imagining them taking hold in some of the places I've lived in, and some of the places my family still live in. I mean, Seattle, New York City, almost any sizable city in California? Sure. Columbus or Cleveland? Sure, perhaps—I would hope. But places like Ashtabula, Conneaut or Mentor, Ohio? Erie, Pennsylvania? I'm sorry, I just can't see it.

Of course, Figueres and Rivett-Carnac have an answer to my inability to imagine their better world taking hold everywhere (Even, I suppose, in the small-ish, rust belt cities I've lived most of my life in.) Following the two worlds section of their book comes sections detailing three mindsets and then ten actions. One of those three mindsets is one they call "Stubborn Optimism," an intentional reprogramming of cynicism like my own and the "learned mindset of hopelessness."

Using neuroscience techniques of changing your thoughts to change your thinking familiar to me from behavior therapy, this chapter was a particularly helpful one, suggesting ways to "reprogram" yourself so that you can face the existential threat of climate change without crumpling into a fetal position. There's a nice passage where they write that when your mind tells you this, think that, covering many possibilities (For example, when your mind tells you it's too late to make a difference, "remember that every fraction of a degree of extra warming makes a big difference" and thus doing anything to reduce emissions helps; when your mind tells you it's impossible for a country to abandon fossil fuels entirely, know that Costa Rica has already done so; and so on).

As for the ten actions, these are each rather broad, general actions that can be tackled individually or collectively, at a variety of scales; some involve changing the way one thinks, others taking concrete steps in the physical world: Let go of the old world; face your grief but hold a vision for the future; defend the truth; see yourself as a citizen, not a consumer; move beyond fossil fuels; reforest the Earth; invest in a clean economy; use technology responsibly; build gender equality; engage in politics.

Throughout their book—which at just under 170 pages is an easy, quick read that shouldn't take more than a sitting or three to fly through—they continually refer back to their own experiences in negotiating the Paris Agreement, something that seemed impossible after the failure of the previous attempt to work out a global climate agreement in Copenhagen, as well as sharing anecdotes featuring familiar figures of inspiration: The Buddha, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, John F. Kennedy and so on.

Beyond the dramatic binary between the two potential Earths of 2050 and the mindsets and strategies to achieve the far preferable one, The Future We Choose reads a bit like a blueprint for a climate movement and a bit like a self-help book, albeit a self-help book in which one helps one self help the planet, and, by doing so, oneself...and everyone else.


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As talk of a Green New Deal spread, there has been discussion of the best historical analogy to compare it to, the consensus seemingly being President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933-1939 programs, projects, reforms and regulations, imperfect an analogy as it may be

This is something I've puzzled over myself, and am therefore always interested in hearing what others think on the matter. I mentioned in the earlier post on Naomi Klein's On Fire, wherein she took up and explored the fitness of various historical analogies. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also touch on the subject in their book, offering a few more possibilities:

"Because climate change is unlike any other challenge that humanity has had to face, we have no template for the kind of political, economic, and societal transformation needed now--but there are a range of extraordinary examples we can learn from. Movements of civil disobedience from the early twentieth-century suffragettes to Gandhi's drive for Indian independence to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 1960s civil right movement to the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia—to name just a few—are all inspirational insofar as they mobilized vast numbers of people to champion their causes. An open, inclusive narrative and a sense of working collectively to change history for the better took them further than they ever imagined possible. As Nelson Mandela said, "It always seems impossible until it is done." 

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Published in February, the book was obviously written before the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and the precise ways it would change our lives could be known, but reading and re-reading it during this long spring, there were a couple of things I found particularly noteworthy, things that may have jumped out at you while you were reading this post.

For example, the idea that wearing face masks when leaving one's home could become not only commonplace but necessary in the future. They wrote:

"You think about some countries in Asia, where out of consideration sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any.
...
When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford)."

Apparently, homemade cloth ones just won't cut it in the nightmare world of +3-degree warming in 2050.

The other, positive world of 2050 also reminded me of this spring's lockdowns, however, particularly the mention of people working from home more often, which has the benefit of reducing emissions associated with commuting to and from work, and the increase in flexibility and free time (although, as so many of us have learned these past few months, there can also be some drawbacks to working exclusively from home, particularly regarding child care.)

Repeatedly the book brings up the possibility of new—or, as we've all since learned to call them, novel—diseases, something that should cause more palpable, tangible anxiety now that we're suffering through a pandemic.

There are multiple ways in which environmental degradation can and will lead to disease outbreaks, from deforestation and increased human/wild animal interaction exposing people to denser populations leading to easier transmission.

Then there's this, from the chapter on "The World We Are Creating":

"Melting permafrost is also releasing ancient microbes that today's humans have never been exposed to—and as a result have no resistance to. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks are rampant as these species flourish in the changed climate, spreading to previously safe parts of the planet, increasingly overwhelming us. Worse still, the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance has only intensified as the population has grown denser in inhabitable areas and temperatures continue to rise." 

Truly, there is no worry that the climate crisis can't exacerbate.