An Environmental Ethic; learning from the neighbors

Planting a garden is to reaffirm an inherent unity with the ecosystem. However, I was not always a gardener, while I like to be outside, my parents didn’t garden. It wasn’t until I spent more time at my neighbor’s home that I learned the value of a garden. It was a few miles to there house, through the woods weaving in and out becoming entangled and untangled.  When I arrived to the neighbor’s often I would see them pulling up weeds in the garden, making cuttings, or harvesting vegetables. It was a foreign world to me, curious to know more I would join them and reap the fruits of labor.  Often staying for dinner, which always entailed bringing in that days harvest of fragrant, bright colored, earth encrusted vegetables and herbs. Learning to cook fresh food began here. Sharing a meal was nature’s gift to us after hours of conversation, contemplation, and cooperation in the garden.  My mouth still waters thinking of steamed green beans with basil pesto and corn on the cob. This early experience embedded in me a deep desire to live and nest my heart in the land, water, and wildlife…beginning with the fungi in the soil.   

Evolution of creation...

The interactions of cellular life within me are as much an ecosystem as the forests, vegetable gardens, and flower beds around me. As Biologist, Lewis Thomas remarks, it is an illusion to believe that humanity is separate from nature. From the very interior of our cells, we are a product of millennia of evolution. The motor that moves our cells and creates energy, the mitochondria, “ turn out to be migrant prokaryotes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there.”(4) The replication of this pattern, in the current cellular form helps me see that more amazing than the diversity of life on earth is the uniformity. The earth is a reflection of the inner cellular form.  Imagine the water that rushes over rocks and flows down bending rivers as the same fluid that passes in between our cellular membranes. And yet, the same fluid that fills our joints and makes up our cerebrospinal fluid. Along the watershed at the Earth dance retreat facility, it was drawn to my awareness that the water is the same within as without. The rocks my bones, and the roots my ligaments. My breath the wind and the soil my flesh. The body is a microcosm of the macrocosm.

Through the evolutionary proliferation of life on earth from the single cell to emergent multicellular organisms, theistic evolutionary belief supports the notion that a divine source of life is constantly evolving and animating all that is.  Molecular biologists and theologians Peters and Hewlett developed the theology of ‘continuing creation’, which describes how evolutionary theory and biblical scripture are complimentary and support one another. Divine action and purpose in the process of evolution is evident to me when I step outside and witness as life unfolds. There is a stream in front of my home that is filled with brook trout and rainbow trout. Before we can go fishing we wait for a rainy day when all the night crawlers surface. These worms remind me of my own digestive system, the way they move across the ground is similar to the way my intestines push food through my own system. Designs like this are repeated across creation, and are developed in simpler systems like the worms to re-emerge in more complex multi-cellular organisms. In Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development, author Stephen Kellert supports this notion that humans have developed and evolved in relationship with nature. In the Colorado Rocky Mountains, as me and twenty other students snowshoed through the mile high pines, the park ranger began to intimate  to us the details of this new place.  Of the wildlife that can call this place home, deep within the subnivian layer of snow under the soil the wood frogs are hibernating. The frog has developed the capacity to slow down its system until spring when the snow thaws and they come to life. The frogs are an indicator species to signal any abnormalities in the shifting environment. Over time people have learned to look to these frogs for their own survival, indicating subtleties that have greater implications for ecosystem health.  No species is created for itself, it seems we are all connected to the divine creator as a part of the divine creation. 

Spiritual Awakenings on the road to Emmaus...

Faith in divine action and purpose in the evolution of creation, took me on the road to Emmaus. The road to Emmaus is a biblical reference to an early resurrection appearance of Jesus after the crucifixion and the discovery of his empty tomb. He met two disciples along a country road going to the town of Emmaus. He listened as the two disciples were grieving his recent death. They invited this stranger in for dinner. As Jesus broke the bread the disciples finally recognize it is Jesus. For Christians the resurrection of Jesus represents the promise of new life after death.  This story is represented in many ways by the arrival of spring and the practice of gardening. During the winter, much of life is covered under blankets of snow- being put to rest until the spring arrives. Seeds were cast from plants that would soon fade into fall and lay dormant until enough light, water, and nutrients can be gathered to grow. And out from under the dark soils the seeds took root. In Northfield, I was seeded, but my heart was still in the bluffs of Houston county- the place that I knew as home until I moved for college. I learned to swim in the muddy banks of the Mississippi river, hunt and track deer through the woods, forage for food, and play softball in the hay field with the neighbors after a day of work. When I moved to Northfield, I lost everything, the family, friends, and land that built me. Wendell Berry writes in one of his poems “to live is to love”. With a love for life, I came to St. Olaf to study the natural sciences. But I was lost in a foreign land, a seed drifted afar, and waiting for the warm sun, moisture, and nutrients I needed to grow. I didn’t get to spend much time exploring the lands and people surrounding Northfield. Into my second year I continued doing my homework and studying for long hours, but something was still missing. I knew very little about the history of this place called Northfield and knew little about my classmates because my head was always in a book or staring into the computer screen. I was dis-illusioned, my education was getting in the way of learning. A vital piece was missing- real human interaction with the landscape. I was still grieving the loss of my home- my place. I didn’t know my place anymore. With the intention of reconnection myself to the land and people I sought out to engage myself in the community and found my way on the road to Emmaus church.  A new friend and acquaintance from school knew I was struggling to have faith and acceptance for myself and where I was in life. She invited me to go to a church service with her one Sunday. The sermon brought me to tears, I had to face the reality of how disconnected I had become. With much courage and some extra support from my new friend, I went forward to the altar to pray. The man praying for me that day suggested I meet with a Stephen Minister if I thought it would help. A Stephen Minister is a layperson of the church trained to listen and care for those suffering a loss of any kind.  It was like thirsting and being offered a drink- I accepted his invitation that day and was called by a woman the following week to go on walk. A total stranger to me at the time, she first asked me why I wanted a Stephen Minister. I described my need to have someone to talk to outside of school, with the constantly shifting environment at college; I needed to have someone to see more consistently. She was there to offer a listening ear and through many weeks of walking and talking I realized that all my issues were all symptoms of “nature-deficit disorder”. This term, coined by author Richard Louv and further explored in his book Last Child in the Woods is one way to describe the current epidemic of folks disconnected from the land. As we went through the arboretum and natural lands on our walks I began to see myself as connected to a life force greater than my own. As I became more familiar with the territory, I also became more familiar with my own self- my internal landscape and the energy that ebbed and flowed in and out of me like the tides of the waves.  Looking back I am so grateful I had moved- had I not moved away I would not have consciously identified the deep connection I have with the earth and certainly would not have been motivated to connect others to the moods and cycles of the natural world. It is as theologian Robert Corin Morris describes about gathering wisdom in his piece Disillusionment, Deliverance, and Delight, he says,

“True delight in God’s ways sometimes comes only after the discomfiting loss of various forms of ignorance, illusion, and innocence. Looked at this way, disillusionment can be seen as an event of purifying grace, an open door toward wisdom” (21).

Wisdom had found her way emerging out my darkness as a seed emerges from the dark soil. During this time I kept going to church with my friend from school and had some time after the service to socialize with the other folks there. On the way out of church one day I noticed a table set up with fresh vegetables on a stand free for anyone to take. After asking around a bit I learned the church had started a garden the year prior and they needed some help planning out this years garden. It seems my heart has always been enchanted by gardens and this was my opportunity to connect more closely with the people and land of Northfield, allowing the seeds in my heart to sprout and take root.

A Community Approach

I am now teaching youth ministry at the church, developing a curriculum to plant the church gardens.  My teaching domain focuses on the relationship between humanity and creation by practicing the art and science of gardening. Many outdoor education programs with a gardening focus emerge as a result of a problem facing the health of people and the environment. The goal of gardening is to establish a relationship between people and the place they live. Traditional education often gets in the way of learning because knowledge is compartmentalized and emphasizes individual learning. Gardening offers an alternative to this traditional model by offering activities that create connections between disciplines. Without many available intergenerational teaching models, there is plenty of opportunity to create programs that offer a place for mentorship and intergenerational learning. Gardening encourages adults to share the history of the place while children invite imagination, play, and curiosity to the activity.

picture by: Didi Nwe