Looking for Nature

Here in Nebraska we have had a variety of weather the past couple of weeks, with some days inviting us to spend time outdoors, and other days leaving us happy to shelter indoors.

On one of those more inviting days, my daughter and I decided to walk at Lake Hastings, an artificial lake surrounded partly by both residential property and some city parkland. I took my camera along hoping to snap some “nature” photos – trees in early bud, birds, and so forth.

Now we weren’t walking in “nature” as I might usually think of it; we were in a city park walking on concrete, and it was difficult to get a photo without catching some bit of a park bench, disc golf basket, or sidewalk in the photo. I said something offhand about not being able to take “nature” photos there because of all the stuff made by human beings, and that got us into a discussion of what we mean by ‘nature’ and ‘natural’.

If I’m walking along a creek bed and come upon a beaver dam, I consider that an interesting part of a nature walk. Why not view the dam that human beings built to create this lake in the same way? Why distinguish human beings and our creations from everything else in the world? After all, human beings are part of God’s creation.

Human Beings and “Nature”
Setting us and our products apart from other living things tends to dispose us toward just the sort of thinking that most “nature-lovers” want to avoid, the sort of thinking that sees the rest of creation as resources for us to use however we choose for whatever human purposes we choose. It makes it easy to abuse the resources at our disposal to the point where we find ourselves now, slowly waking up to the real limits of certain resources and the negative consequences of our often careless treatment of creation. Alternatively, this distinction between human products and everything else can lead to the sort of thinking that romanticizes “nature” to the point of ignoring the needs of human beings, setting up a clash between environmentalism and issues of human justice.

We do, in fact, use words like ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ to categorize certain experiences and issues. Even if the impact of human beings on the air, water, and web of life on this planet can now be considered to be all-pervasive, it’s still useful to be able to have words that somehow name the idea of something untouched by human activity. On the other hand, it seems very important to remember that the distinction that such words seem to describe is an artificial one. I first heard the phrase ‘built environment’ from my green architect friend Sara Sweeney, and that seems a useful way to name the distinction; it reminds us that what we have built is indeed a part of that interconnected web of everything around us that is our actual environment.

Caring for Creation and One Another
When used carefully, the phrase ‘creation care’ can point us in the same direction, reminding us that Christian stewardship extends to all of creation, including human beings and the things we produce. Caring for creation includes caring for one another. Looking at the eight Millennium Development Goals that are aimed at halving extreme poverty and disease by 2015 is one way to remind ourselves that everything around us makes up our environment; those issues we place in the environmental category when we are speaking more casually are in fact intertwined with several other issues that we might not initially place in this category called ‘the environment’. MDG #7 is the goal of ensuring environmental sustainability in the ordinary sense of the world – reversing the loss of natural resources and increasing the amount of clean water on our planet. This goal impacts other goals related to improving human health and economic development, and the way we achieve those goals will in turn impact environmental sustainability.

The Church has traditionally worked to relieve the suffering of people who are hungry, sick, or living in poverty. In today’s world, working to ensure environmental sustainability is a necessary piece of that traditional church work, and effective work in those traditional areas will include attention to environmental sustainability. When we are being careful with language and using our words with precision, we realize that religious environmentalism is a new perspective on some very traditional concerns of religious folks. And still, when it’s time to relax and retreat and look for God in the world around us, we all know what a “nature walk” is, and we know that it might be just the thing to remind us of the presence of the Creator of all that is in everything around us.

As for my photos that day at Lake Hastings: I ended up with a series of pictures from the edge of the lake. Over the winter, all sorts of plastic objects have been washed up along with the more “natural” debris of sticks and dead fish. The number of bottle caps, pieces of plastic cups, drinking straws, and bits of plastic toys was shocking, and made me wonder what effect all of this has on the fish, birds, and other living things in and around this little lake, and what effect all of that has on the human community. The plastic bits along the shore of our local lake are as much a part of our environment as are the beautiful sunsets and the snow geese that have arrived this week. Removing them from the picture too often allows us to deny the reality of the consequences of our choices, and the reality of the work we have been given as stewards of creation.

Ecology and Homekeeping: Gladdening our Hearts

Most Americans think of February 2 as Groundhog Day. Much is made of Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil and whether he sees his shadow. Here in Nebraska, where we are often blessed with some noticeably warm sunshine at the beginning of February, we have our own Unadilla Bill. Even if it leads to a prediction of six more weeks of winter, it’s hard to feel bad about a sunny Nebraska day at the beginning of February.

In the Church, February 2 is the Presentation of our Lord, when we remember Mary and Joseph presenting the baby Jesus at the temple forty days after his birth. Luke’s account of this event tells about Simeon and Anna recognizing the baby as the Savior, the Messiah. This day is also known as the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, and as Candlemas.

This point forty days after the Nativity is midway between the dates we use now for the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring. Some old calendars considered this to be the beginning of spring, and in places with milder winters, early February does seem like the beginning of spring. Even here in Nebraska, we begin to see the earliest signs of winter’s end. Flocks of geese were in the sky around Grand Island on Sunday, and we know the first migrating cranes will arrive soon. The days are noticeably longer, the sunlight feels warmer, and sunny days usually bring about some thawing of ice and snow.


Homekeeping
The folk traditions around this time of year involve not only trying to predict exactly when winter will end and spring begin, but also have some elements of purification and preparation for new life. We think of spring cleaning as something to do when winter is definitely gone, but the tradition of spring cleaning probably shares it origins with the early February blessing of new candles and preparation for spring. Spring cleaning is something we no longer practice with the gusto of previous generations, but it wasn’t long ago that the work of thoroughly cleaning and airing everything in the home was essential after a long winter in close quarters heated by coal, wood, corn cobs, or dung. Good homekeeping was necessary for both survival and comfort.

The root ‘eco-‘, as in ‘ecology’, refers to an environment or habitat, and comes from the Greek root for house or household. The question of the relationship between human beings and our natural environment, God’s good creation, is in a way a question of housekeeping or homekeeping. A spirituality of how we live in our environment is a wider application of a spirituality of homekeeping.

I think about the women who were homesteaders in Nebraska, living initially in sodhouses that were very different from the sorts of homes they had known “back East” or in Europe. The winters must have seemed terribly long. What joy they must have felt when they saw the first signs of winter’s end! Our challenge in thinking about human beings and the environment is not really very different from the challenge of these homekeepers on the prairie: Given where we find ourselves, given what is, how do we maximize the beauty and comfort of our home so that we not only can survive, but also can nurture the total well-being and health of those living in our home?

Beyond sustainability
There is today a lot of talk of sustainability, of stopping and reversing the damage to our environment so that we can continue to survive. But good ecology, good planetary homekeeping, points beyond mere survival to supporting an environment in which we can thrive and flourish, living fully as God’s sons and daughters. One of the table graces in The Book of Common Prayer (p. 835) says “Blessed are you, O Lord God…for you give us food to sustain our lives and make our hearts glad.” God’s gifts are meant not only for our sustenance or survival, but to gladden our hearts, to give us joy. A well-prepared, nourishing meal shared with good company feeds more than our bodies!

What other sorts of practices in our homes, parishes, and communities lead us to care for creation and one another in ways that help us to go beyond mere survival to thriving and flourishing? What nourishes both body and soul, making our hearts glad? Please click on Comments and share something that sustains both body and soul.

Integration and Migration

In a thoughtful comment on the first post for this blog, Fr. Ron Whitmer talked about the importance of addressing the issues we gather under the label of ‘the environment’ in an integrative way, recognizing that all sorts of issues, including cultural and spiritual issues, are part of the discussion. One of the frustrations for some people in thinking about the environment is that it is so difficult to get a handle on what we are talking about. Perhaps this is because “the environment” is not a single issue, but rather a different perspective on everything we human beings do: a holistic perspective that emphasizes the web of connections throughout all of creation. There is no place to draw a line a between environmental issues and other issues.

Integration and interconnections have been on my mind, along with migration. My husband and I have been traveling since a couple of days after the last post. In fact, this particular post for the Nebraska Green Sprouts blog is coming not from Nebraska, but from the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Before that, we spent some time with our son in snowy Syracuse, New York, followed by a couple of days back home contending with ground blizzards and frigid temperatures. I know that when we return at the end of this week, January will be nearly over, and a couple of weeks into February we will start looking and listening for the first signs of the sandhill cranes returning to the Platte Valley on their annual migration, the first sign of spring in south central Nebraska. I’m already looking forward to seeing the cranes again, and I’m thinking about the plans some of us at Saint Stephen’s are making to weave our community celebration of the crane migration into our liturgy on March 22.

Albatrosses and Whales

One of the joys of coming to Kauai this time of year is that people from cold places on the mainland aren’t the only creatures who migrate here in the winter. Humpback whales and Laysan albatrosses are among the winter visitors, and we have seen several of both at the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge, one of my favorite places on Earth. Standing up on Kilauea Point on Sunday afternoon, we saw humpbacks spouting and occasionally jumping up from the water, and even heard a tail slap on the water. One of the volunteers reminded me that because the ocean is so vast and the whales so far away, they look much smaller than their actual size of 40-50 feet long. (This would explain why the tail slap was so loud!) Similarly, against the big blue sky, the albatrosses that nest on a cliff by the Point don’t appear to have wingspans of six feet across, but they are indeed that big. Both Laysan albatrosses and humpback whales migrate from the northern parts of the Pacific, near Alaska, to give birth in the warmth of this part of the Pacific. The albatross parents take turns tending the young and foraging for food; the parent who is foraging for food sometimes travels back to the waters off of Alaska to find food – mostly squid, but other types of marine life that are found near the ocean’s surface.

Plastic and Us

Unfortunately, marine life isn’t the only thing that looks like food and floats near the ocean’s surface. Something I remembered from a previous visit to Kilauea Point was an exhibit of various plastic objects that had been found in the guts of dead albatrosses. I’ve been reading Thomas M. Kostigen’s book You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet. One of the chapters of this book is about what Kostigen calls the Eastern Garbage Patch, a huge collection of trash in the North Pacific Gyre off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. Unexpected items from cargo ships and from people along Pacific coasts are part of this body of trash, but other things get to the sea from places very far from any seacoast. Many environmentalists remind us that when we throw something away, there isn’t really any such place as “away”. Plastic items that aren’t recycled or at least thrown “away” by methods that prevent their being rinsed into or blown into waterways can eventually end up in a big river that empties into the sea. All the oceans are interconnected; eventually, over a very long time, something that ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, can find its way to the Eastern Garbage Patch. The Monterey Bay Aquarium reports that around the world, up to one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating plastic.

Just after sunrise yesterday morning we went for a long walk along Poipu Beach. As we walked, we saw scores of jellyfish that had been washed up by the tide. The jellyfish themselves looked like bits of plastic, but they were still pulsing with life. I wondered why there were so many of them. I saw a Hawaiian man walking along the beach with a small net in his hand, and starting walking over to see if could tell me about the jellyfish. By the time I came along, he was about to tell a couple of other visitors the legend of the beach naupaka flower, a charming story. When he finished the story, he held up his net and pulled out a plastic pop bottle. His net was full of litter that had washed up on the beach! He told us where plastic bottles can be recycled near Poipu Beach, and encouraged us to recycle or reuse plastic when we got home to the mainland, and to encourage others to do so. And so I will! (The jellyfish, he told me, are found abundantly during a certain point of the lunar cycle because of the effect on the tides.)

Aloha and Agape

There is great excitement today in Hawaii as Barack Obama, the first Hawaiian President, is inaugurated. Much is being made, and rightly so, of his being the first African-American President. Racial integration is about removing artificial divisions among people and realizing how interconnected we all are, a cultural piece of the environmental puzzle. But in Hawaii there is also hope in the perspective a spirit of aloha might bring to our national political life. Aloha is love, openness to others. I saw a sign on a church on Kauai that said agape love is aloha. Being a Nebraskan, not a Hawaiian, I don’t know if that is an accurate take on ‘aloha’, but I know that agape love for one another, an unselfish concern for others, is something essential that Christians can -- and should -- bring to discussions about all the interconnected issues we face as a nation. It is a key spiritual element in caring for our environment, including one another.

The Feast of the Epiphany

The Feast of the Epiphany

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, the day we mark the manifestation or appearance of Jesus to the Gentiles.

The Gospel reading for this day (Matthew 2:1-12) is Matthew’s story of the wise men following the light of a special star, a natural object that they understood to be a sign of the birth of a king. We don’t know the exact location of “the East” that was home for the wise men. Wherever it was, it was a foreign land; Matthew tells us that they returned to “their own country” by a different route when a dream warned them not to return to Herod. We can only guess at what their native religion or belief system might have been. Still, even though the star didn’t point to the birth of new king in their own country, they noticed the star in the sky and knew it signified something of great importance. More importantly, it touched their hearts; Matthew says that when they saw that the star had stopped, they were “overwhelmed with joy”. The star and the distant event to which it pointed had a deep effect on them.

People who pay attention to the sky, the changing seasons, the incredible variety of life on our planet Earth, often experience joy and wonder and wholeness. Spending time outdoors paying attention to God’s creation leads us to open our hearts in gratitude. We don’t need to be able to name these experiences as ‘God’ for them to have a deep effect on us, and for us to know they point to something more. Those of us who do use traditional religious language describe such experiences as ways to connect with God. Being outdoors and taking the time to look around and listen is one of the most accessible doors or openings to the Holy. Such experiences not only give us a sense of God’s presence, but they often change us in profound ways.

As we talk about the light of the Epiphany star and connect it to the light of Christ in the world, the hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere are slowly increasing. On the plains, the angle of the sun and the weather conditions on some days combine to produce beautiful colors in the sky at sunrise and sunset. Cold, clear nights result in starry skies that make it easy to imagine following a special star night after night to see where it leads.

Launching this blog seems to me like a fitting way to mark the Feast of the Epiphany. Environmental issues directly affect the traditional social concerns of the church such as poverty, disease, hunger, and social justice. During Epiphany, the Church talks about bringing Christ to the world, about revealing Christ’s power to bring healing and wholeness. To bring Christ to a world where environmental issues have come to be understood as fundamental to all our economic, social, and political concerns, the Church needs to bring these issues into the center of our conversations and our work.