Regreening the Desert - The Power of Life to Come Back if We Will Let It

A few years ago, I was pointed towards a documentary following a scientist named Dr. John D. Liu as he explored the capacity of devastated ecosystems to be restored.  The documentary blew my mind – and I strongly encourage you to watch it.  You can watch it for free on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

The central story in the documentary is about the Loess Plateau in central China.  Millenia of unsustainable farming and grazing practices took a huge area that had once been utterly lush and bountiful and turned it into a desert with completely depleted soil (i.e. “desertified” it).  In the late 20th century, however, Chinese scientists and civil engineers came together and designed a new reforestation campaign in which they planted, among other things, 66 billion trees.  I was astonished to find that after only a few decades, what had been an utter wasteland had been restored to a flourishing, green place, teeming with life. 

The documentary explores several other reforestation projects in different parts of the world and through this you begin to learn how powerful and resilient life is.  In Jordan, an area that had been overgrazed for ages is fenced off and within 3 years, plants they thought had gone extinct in the 1800s start growing up out of the soil, completely on their own.  In a scientific re-foresting project run by a man named Geoff Lawton (also in Jordan), we learn more about the amazing ability of plants, strategically tended, to transform desertified spaces and even build their own water cycles.  Deserts have very little soil, and no plant cover for the soil – so all the water that falls on the ground evaporates easily, or simply runs off, leaving the soil dry. However, as small drought-resistant plants are planted and take root, they shade the dirt, protecting the water from evaporating as quickly.  Their roots secure the soil and absorb more water into the system.  As their leaves fall and die, they start to build soil around themselves.  As more ground cover builds and root systems develop, soil increases, along with a host of microorganisms.  As this happens, larger plants are able to start taking root.  With larger plants, there’s more shade and more soil, and so more water is absorbed in the system.  As more water is absorbed, it is run up through the plants and emitted from their leaves in a process called evapotranspiration – and as this happens, more moisture collects above them.  This in turn creates more clouds and ultimately rainfall.  It absolutely blew my mind that plants actually help to build their own rain fall and water cycles. 

So what does this have to do with our lives here in Philadelphia?  We live in a city, and in cities we don’t tend to deal much with excessive grazing or poor agricultural practices.  But we do deal with a lot of concrete, tree removal, huge parking lots, damaged and vacant lots, and development that has been done without any consideration for the local ecosystem.  As a result, creation is groaning here in Philadelphia – it has been hurt, damaged, and even somewhat desertified in certain areas.

But the life God has created in this world is powerful and resilient.  And so if we can be intentional and consistent about planting new plants in our yards and on our streets and in our parks; and if we can protect our parks, and clean up our vacant lots, and mitigate our toxic brown fields, and plant community gardens … we can help Philadelphia grow into a robust, healthy, and restored ecosystem.  God’s living system around us has this capability – we just need to give it room to breathe.

Now there are a LOT of practicalities to this, but that’s not the purpose of this post (there will be many other posts where we’ll focus on that).  The purpose of this post is simply to share a story about just how powerful and capable of resilience life is – and to show that if we can protect it, give it room to breathe, and help it strategically to regain its foothold, it can return to us in ways we never thought possible.

RESOURCES:

“Regreening the Desert” Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

“Kiss the Ground” documentary – you can find it on Netflix, Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime

Homegrown National Park: www.homegrownnationalpark.org 

Tree Tenders (PHS): https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs

HP Community Garden – Contact Mike Wilcox at huntingparkgarden@gmail.com 

Called to Dance With Creation

Genesis 1:28 reads, “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”  This is a beautiful and powerful calling for humanity – yet it is also one of the most misused verses in the Bible.  Understood in its context, Gen 1:28 is a calling for human beings to rule over creation with the love, care, and justice of the Creator whose image they were placed on earth to represent.  We are here to express God’s heart towards His Creation.  Yet too often this verse is used by Christians to say that God has given humanity permission to use Creation however we see fit in order to advance our own cause.     

But the reality is that Genesis 1:28 is not an invitation to use Creation like a slave – rather, it’s an invitation to dance with Creation in a way that makes her grow and flourish.  Even more than this, the calling is to marry human life, culture, and creativity with her in such a way that she becomes even more beautiful.  We can see this in the trajectory of the Biblical story as a whole.  In Genesis 2, human beings are set in a Garden to care for it.  After the whole story of the Bible – the fall, the saga of Israel, the arrival of Christ, and the age of the Church – we arrive at Revelation 21-22, when the New Heavens and New Earth have been established, God and human beings are living together again, and all is made right.  What do we see here?  God’s story for humanity does not end in a return to the Garden of Eden – rather, it culminates in a garden CITY.  The New Jerusalem is a place where the artistry of human beings (the city) has merged with the creative beauty of God (the river, trees, leaves, and fruits that run through the city) in a new way that has made everything even more beautiful than it was in the beginning. 

This, then, is the Gen 1:28 calling for humanity.  It’s to steadily, and with great service and care, marry human creativity with God’s creativity into a new tapestry where both are honored and both flourish even more together than they would apart.  A healthy human society that is pursuing this calling will weave throughout itself traditions that honor, integrate, showcase, and protect Creation.  As it develops technology, laws, health systems, and art, it will do so in a way that elevates the beauty and health of the natural world – and through this the two will flourish together.

So the question is: how well are we living out this vocation?  The deforested and concrete jungles of our cities, the trash strewn about our blocks, our polluted waterways, our poisoned air, the great Pacific garbage patch, and the ever deepening climate crisis (to name a few things) all speak to the perversion and dysfunction of our way of life.  Rather than dancing with God’s Creation, we have oppressed her and harvested her like a slave, abusing her, extracting from her, depleting her, poisoning her, and in many ways deconstructing her.  We have been a profound and highly effective agent of death in God’s beautiful world – and that death is beginning to spread back over us.  Because of what we have done to her, we now need to restore her to health before we can even consider dancing with her.  This, then is the urgent calling of our time.  Wherever we are and in whatever way we can, we need to orient ourselves towards healing and restoring the living system around us.  We need to plant new plants in our neighborhoods, clean poisoned lots, protect our waterways from pollution, slow and stop all the trash we’re throwing into her, and stop pouring fossil fuel emissions into her atmosphere.   In many cases, we need to just try to leave more and more of her alone so she can start to heal herself. 

We’ll engage the practicalities of this calling in later posts this month.  But for now, consider the Garden of Eden of Gen 1 and the Garden City of Revelation 21.  Our calling has always been to dance God’s creation from Gen 1 to Rev 21 but instead we have enslaved her, used her for our own purposes, and ultimately left her bleeding on the side of the road, just like the robbers in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Yet despite the fact that we are the robbers, through the grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit we have been invited to change direction and participate in the work of the Good Samaritan.  We’ve been given an opportunity to join God in healing the damage we’ve caused.  This path is set before us – and it is urgent, because the Creation is bleeding heavily from the wounds we have inflicted.  But there is a real path of new life, if we are willing to take it. 

RESOURCES:

“Regreening the Desert” Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

“Kiss the Ground” documentary – you can find it on Netflix, Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime

Homegrown National Park: www.homegrownnationalpark.org 

Tree Tenders (PHS): https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs

HP Community Garden – Contact Mike Wilcox at huntingparkgarden@gmail.com 

Working Together to Slow the Train

It is human nature to avoid facing challenging realities – especially when they ask something of us.  Our current normalized way of living our lives with respect to Creation presents us with a reality that none of us want to face.  The burning of fossil fuels to power our way of life is poisoning our air and killing people at a higher rate every year than COVID did at its height.  Our use of materials and treatment of the land is filling our earth and seas with trash, destroying habitats, and causing species to go extinct every 7 seconds.  Our burning of coal, oil, and natural gas is heating the planet, giving it an internal temperature increase, like a fever, that is causing all of its systems to go out of whack.  This fever is already causing massive disruption, damage, and refugee crises around the world and, unless reduced by 50% by 2030 and entirely by 2050, is threatening to plunge the global ecosystem – and with it human civilization – into catastrophe. 

Our way of life is like a train charging along a track towards a cliff.  There is still room to slow and stop the train, but the track is getting steadily steeper and steeper, making it harder and harder to do so.  We are in a time of profound global urgency with respect to the living system that gives us all life – and we all have a part to play, for good or ill.

So who is on this train?

            There are some people who have never looked out the windows of the train and remain focused on what’s inside the car – they’re just living their lives as they always have, totally unaware.  There are some who have dared to look out the windows, but when they see what’s happening, it’s too overwhelming and so they turn back around, pretend everything is fine, and continue to live as they’ve always lived.  There are some who look out the window and fall understandably into despair and inaction – there is diagnosable pandemic of “climate despair” today, particularly among the young.  Others are actually invested in the train and are (incomprehensibly) doing everything they can to keep others from looking out the windows.  “Everything’s totally fine,” they say, wanting to get every dollar out of the trip, and telling each other that they, at least, will be fine because they each have a golden parachute for when the train goes over the cliff.  All of these people, whether through action or inaction, are participating in the tragic trajectory of the train. 

However, there are others – and their numbers are growing every day – who are doing everything they can to stop the train.

            So who are you in this metaphor?  And who is God’s Church called to be?

            I invite you to join the growing number of people who are working together to slow humanity’s collective train and keep it from going over the cliff.  How can you get involved?  There are so many ways.  First, I would invite you to begin by looking out the window and facing the reality we are in.  Take personal responsibility to learn about the climate crisis, about how you can reduce your carbon footprint and live in better balance with God’s Creation, and about how you can join with others to become a part of the community that is working to slow the train, stop it, and ultimately change it into a different kind of train.

            See the resources below for ways that you can learn.  And I invite you to join the Philadelphia Christian Climate Fellowship, or PCCF.  We meet monthly and are working together to build engagement and energy around creation care within and through the Church.  We are doing a tree planting in a community garden on Sat, May 18 – you can register here: https://CreationCare.org/Gardening-Day     

RESOURCES:

Allen 3-part teaching series on climate action - bit.ly/biblicalclimateaction 

CWP resource on how to reduce your household carbon footprint: www.cwpeasternus.org/net-zero-household

CWP resource page: https://bit.ly/philly-creation-care-resources 

Join the Philadelphia Christian Climate Fellowship (PCCF) by emailing Allen Drew at AllenCWP12@gmail.com