This past weekend, I spent a couple days camping near the Pictured Rocks of the Upper Penninsula with some very close friends. The outlooks and landscapes were stunningly beautiful, and the community was only what friends well aware of each other's quirks and faults can give.
At one point in the weekend one of my fellow campers asked me, "Since when have you become so environmentally friendly?"
This question made me pause for a second, because I'm not really sure when it all started actually. I've always been very concerned with matters of justice, most readily as they pertain to me, and the conviction inside of me to take action against injustice has grown as well. However, bonfires, feeding wildlife, and eroding landscapes don't automatically suggest injustice, and at first glance my inherent desire for justice shouldn't be set off by such things.
In this case, I really can't point many places other than my good old liberal arts education. In recent biology classes, I encountered the beauty, complexity, and intricacy of the natural world we live in. I realized the significance of genetic diversity, of microbial soil content, of erosion control. But I didn't encounter and realize in merely the theoretical, but rather my eyes were opened wide to the realities of right Now. I was shown the plot of land that contained a 300 year old forest until it was cut down to make way for tennis courts, and told how multiple species had most likely gone extinct as a result. I read about the millions of microbes that live in each inch of soil, and am reminded each chemically treated corn field I pass of the destruction of this underground life and the subsequent ramifications. I listened as a professor explained how an African village he visited had become dessert because of foresting and the following erosion of all topsoil.
I guess it was just a process of realizing just how fragile this world we live in has become as a result of our strains on it, coupled with a reverent fear of not understanding how it is this world even works.
Restorations workers in Washington D.C. were trying to recreate habitats along the waterways in the area, and this work included planting a native shrub that had long lived on the shores of these rivers. In some areas, this restoration work went fine, and the shrubs grew well as they had before human interference. However, in other areas of the same rivers, the shrubs hardly grew and ended up being quite sickly. After looking into the issue for quite some time, it was determined that the reason the shrubs weren't growing well is because there were no bears in the area. True story.
What scares me is how many more "shrubs" exist in nature, many with "bears" that aren't so noticeable, but just as counterintuitive and unexpected.
At Creation, the cultural mandate was pretty simple; fill the earth, subdue it. We've had little problem with the filling the earth piece, but I think we've fallen short when it comes to the understanding necessary to subdue the earth. Unfortunately, this ignorance has left us in quite a crummy state of affairs at present.
Even more unfortunately, the crummy biological reality at hand is not just a "shucks" on the cultural mandate. The disregard for nature's complexity may affect our lives. We'll likely dig deeper into our wallets to pay for the coming tanks of gasoline, we may miss out on seeing a couple more species of animals before they leave for good. However, there are millions of images of the true God that, on top of the poverty that first-world capitalism (see Epiphanic Mysteries for a good summary) has pushed on them, they will now face further drought and famine, higher resistant disease, more extreme (and fatal) weather patterns, and more. Herein lies the environmental tie to injustice, and here also do I start making a scene (although sometimes overreaching).
So I guess I'm environmentally friendly, nature truly is a beautiful thing. But the heart of it for me belongs in the injustice that this all is causing for the already oppressed in the world. This is something worth speaking up about.
(for the curious, an alpha bear controls a section of river and has hunting privileges, and all younger or weaker bears would have to hide in bushes along the river, sneaking out to catch fish when given the chance. All the extra nutrients from fish waste and bear excrement are necessary for the shrubs to thrive)
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