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Our creation disconnect

 

 

 “… I have never really felt like I was ‘from’ anywhere; home to me … is  a shared electronic dream of cartoon memories, half-hour sitcoms and national tragedies.” --- Douglas Coupland (1995, p. 174)

 

Think about the place where you live

Wonder why you haven't before --- R.E.M.’s Stand (1988)

 

Two of the classic responses to the warnings about global warming are “Great!  It’s too cold here in the winter anyhow!” and “I don’t see any changes going on.” In response to the former, it’s not so great for organisms that are incapable of automatic climate-control.  As for the latter, not seeing environmental changes does not mean that the changes are not occurring.[1]  Either a) change is so gradual that we acclimate to our changed environment without noticing it,[2] b) we are not looking in the right place, or c) more than likely, we have become so disconnected from nature that we are not looking at all.  In his recent book Last Child in the Woods, author Richard Louv (2005) laments the current state of environmental detachment among children in America:

“The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature.  Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions.  As likely as not today, “summer camp” is a weight-loss camp or a computer camp.  For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality.  Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear --- to ignore.  A recent television ad depicts a four-wheel drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly beautiful mountain stream--- while in the backseat two children watch a movie on a flip-down video screen, oblivious to the landscape and water beyond the windows.” (p. 2)

 

This detachment is best exemplified in the simple quote of a 4th grade boy that Louv interviewed in San Diego, who said, “I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” (p. 10)  Ultimately, detachment from nature has led to a condition that Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder,” which he posits can either manifest itself as or exacerbate the effects of ADD, ADHD, autism, and obesity in children (pp. 98-111).

            Louv describes the factors leading to our children’s detachment from nature, including television, commercialism, park rules, poorly designed outdoor play areas, apprehensive parents keeping their children close to home, mandated school curricula that do not allow for time to play outdoors, and even the proliferation of organized sports and other opportunities for our children:

 “The cumulative impact of overdevelopment, multiplying park rules, well-meaning (and usually necessary) environmental regulations, building regulations, community covenants, and fear of litigation sends a chilling message to our children that their free-range play is unwelcome, that organized sports on manicured playing fields is the only officially sanctioned form of outdoor recreation...  We tell our kids that traditional forms of outdoor play are against the rules... Then we get on their backs when they sit in front of the TV – and then we tell them to go outside and play.  But where?  How?  Join another organized sport?  Some kids don’t want to be organized all the time.  They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.” (p. 31)

 

            Louv points to a 2002 British study that found that 8-year-olds were “better able to identify characters from ... Pokemon than native species from the community where they lived.” (p. 33)  My hunch is that children can also name more species of dinosaurs than they can extant native species of birds.  It is with reluctance and great embarrassment that I recount the following incident from my family’s vacation to northern Minnesota this summer:  My 3-year old son Tommy and I were standing on the shore of Lake Itasca (where the Mississippi River begins), looking out over the lake, when a swallow began flying back and forth over the water some distance away.  I had just pointed out the great-blue heron on the far shore and then said “Look Tommy!  There’s a swallow!”  “What kind of swallow?” asked an intrigued Tommy as he watched it glide above the water.  “I think it’s a barn swallow,” I said.   Tommy then looked at the swallow through his binoculars (although I’m not convinced he’s skilled enough with binoculars to see something flying around) and declared “I think it’s a tree swallow.”  Now, sometimes Tommy might contradict me just to be ornery, but in this instance he seemed genuinely convince that it was a tree swallow...  and wouldn’t you know... he was right.  So this 38-year-old Ph.D. ornithologist was duly put in his place by his 3-year-old son!   The point of this digression is that if we take interest in our native plants and animals, we can easily pass this interest down to our children. 

            Television is an easy target for those who want to cast blame for our environmental disconnect, but Louv posits that television is only one facet of a larger cultural shift in American society:

 “… each hour of TV watched per day by preschoolers increases by 10% the likelihood that they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders by age seven.

      “This information is disturbing.  But television is only part of the larger environmental/cultural change in our lifetime: namely, that rapid move from a rural to a highly urbanized culture.  In an agricultural society, or during a time of exploration and settlement, or hunting and gathering---which is to say, most of mankind’s history---energetic boys were particularly prized for their strength, speed, and agility.  … [A]s recently as the 1950’s, most families still had some kind of agricultural connection.  Many of these children … would have been directing their energy and physicality in constructive ways: doing farm chores, baling hay, splashing in the swimming hole, climbing trees, racing to the sandlot for a game of baseball.  Their unregimented play would have been steeped in nature.” (p. 100-101) 

 

Louv suggests that commercialism contributes to our detachment from nature in that nature is not a product for sale.  Advertisers want children to buy their toys and video games, not go out and climb a tree or explore the nearby woodlot.  However, nature did eventually find its way into our commercialism in the form of nature-oriented retailing.  Louv describes the rise of the Nature Company, the mall outlet where one can buy such things as inflatable snakes and dinosaurs, brass pine cones cast from actual cones, and cd’s of nature sounds. (p. 60)  We now surround ourselves with sterilized pseudo-nature and even build subdivisions with nice environmental-sounding but completely incongruous street names like “Valley View Drive” and “Meadowlark Lane” to substitute for any meaningful connection with God’s creation. 

            Steven Bouma-Prediger and other Christian scholars have described our environmental disconnect as losing our “sense of place” and point to environmental abuse as a manifestation of this loss.  Says Bouma-Prediger:

“We care for only what we love.  We love only what we know.  We truly know only what we experience.  If we do not know our place---know it in more than a passing, cursory way, know it intimately and personally---then we are destined to use and abuse it.  For we will care for our home place only if we love it, and we will love it only if we know it, and we will know it only if we experience it firsthand---only if we see the great blue heron arch its prehistoric wings in flight, only if we hear a song sparrows and the chickadee, only if we smell the scent of a skunk or wild onion, only if we feel the warm sun of spring or the brisk breeze of autumn, only, in short, if we have and take the opportunity to know our place.” (p. 37)

 

Much of our loss of a sense of place can be attributed to our new-found mobility.  Dave Mahan (2001) points out that Americans move an average of fourteen times during their lifetime, thus making it easy to lose a sense of place.  He likewise posits that:

“We also live in time rather than place.  We know how long it takes us to get somewhere, but we are often oblivious to the countryside we pass through….  If we don’t appreciate, understand and care for the land where we live, aren’t we in an ecological sense really homeless?  … If you have a sense of place then nature is much more than scenery or backdrop for the important stuff in life; the natural world is a key part of the reality of your daily life. 

      “Living without a sense of place is significant because it directly impacts our environmental behavior.  In the course of feeding, heating and covering ourselves we all engage in environmentally destructive actions…  Our environmentally destructive behavior is generally done out of ignorance.”

 

According to Wendell Berry (1990) and others, colleges and universities contribute to this problem of “homelessness.”  Says Berry:

“The child is [no longer] educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to LEAVE home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.” (p. 163)

 

 Bouma-Prediger (2003) shares this view:

 

“Colleges and universities … Christian or secular, tend to educate for upward mobility, to alienate people from their local habitation, and to encourage the vandalization of the earth... Students who have no intention of staying anywhere too long... demonstrate a profound geo-political, historical, and aesthetic ignorance...  Without any sense of commitment to place, one pays no attention to neighbors, cares little about the dynamics of local community politics, never comes to understand the stories that have shaped this place to be the place it is, and never hangs around enough to appreciate the art, literature, poetry, and folk traditions that this place has fostered.” (p. 281 & 283)

 

Ultimately, as DeWitt (1994) posits that, because of our alienation from the Creator and creation, we cannot “make right again a world that we really do not know… We cannot appreciate [and value] that of which we are unaware… [and] appreciation leads to … stewardship.”  Bouma-Prediger calls the attitude of care the “hardest piece of the puzzle” (p. 24) to cultivate.  Accordingly, he calls for experience as the first step toward caring: “We care for only what we love.  We love only what we know.  We truly know only what we experience.”  We thus have two conceptually similar formulas for becoming effective stewards of creation:

· DeWitt: Awareness → Appreciation → Stewardship 

 

· Bouma-Prediger: Experience → Know → Love → Care

 

In essence, the first step toward creation care is to see, too smell, to hear, to name… to intentionally enter and re-connect with our natural world.

            Unfortunately, beyond the myriad forces that have acted to disconnect us and our children from God’s creation, Louv sees several other “barriers” to getting our children re-connected with nature, including the lack of unstructured free time, lack of quality environmental education, and the not-necessarily-irrational parental fear of traffic, crime, stranger-danger, and nature itself (what Louv calls the “Bogeyman syndrome” [3]).  He explains that our children are taught about the rainforests and how to “save the planet” by recycling.  They are shown videos of indigenous people displaced by development, and that “between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than 10 thousand acres of rainforest will be cut down, making way for fast-food, ‘hamburgerable’ cattle.  But “...lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder.” (p. 133)  Likewise, Van Dyke et al. challenge science educators to change how we teach about creation: “We must begin to teach students how to celebrate creation and not merely measure it.  And we must make these things the foundations of our teachings, not merely a ‘devotional’ appendage.” (p. 38)  

 

Sensitivity to the bondage to decay

 

As we experience and become aware of God’s creation, we will likely become acutely conscious of the “bondage to decay” that creation is experiencing.  Case in point, I took my environmental science students out to Northwestern’s prairie near Hawarden to do some IOWATER water testing of Sixmile Creek.  One of the water quality measures is to quantify what species of benthic macroinvertebrates are present.  The presence of highly sensitive species would indicate good water quality, while the presence of only those species tolerant of pollution and contaminants (or the complete absence of species) would indicate low quality.  I gave my students little dip nets to catch critters with, and within a few minutes, one student came back and asked me whether “turds are a low-quality species,” as he had scooped some cow(?) poop out of the stream as it floated past.  Of course, all the students were repulsed by the thought of cow turds floating in our waterways.  Upon learning that this was not an aberration and that most of the waterways in Iowa are not safe for recreational use, these students were suddenly having second thoughts about participating in the Battle of the Mighty Floyd.  From these and other experiences in my class, these students became acutely aware of the groanings of creation that they had blissfully ignored for so long.

 

The “groanings”

 

As we increase our awareness of God’s suffering creation, what do we see?  In his book For the Beauty of the Earth, Bouma-Prediger summarizes the groanings of creation as human population growth,[4] hunger,[5] deforestation,[6] water scarcity and impurity,[7] land degradation,[8] waste production (i..e., trash), energy misuse, air pollution and acid rain, global climate change, and loss of biodiversity.  Since loss of biodiversity is a key impact of invasive species, I will focus this groaning.

Bouma-Prediger estimates the current rate of loss of biodiversity to be approximately 3 species of plants and animals per day, which is 100 to 1000 times the “background” extinction rate, the rate of extinction occurring in the archaeological record of the recent geological past.  Of this “biotic holocaust”, Sheldon and Foster (2003) write:

“We would argue that it is this human-induced extinction that a steward must guard against.  Scientists tell us that the present rate of extinction matches that of the 5 major extinctions in the past.  What is different today is that one species, humankind, is clearly driving the process.” (p. 375)

 

According to Brennan and Withgott (2005) and many other environmental science textbooks, the major causes for species extinction are habitat alteration, invasive species, pollution, human population growth, and overexploitation,[9] although the authors acknowledge that “the reasons for the decline of any given species are often multifaceted and complex and, as such, can be difficult to determine.” (p. 470)  

            Some may argue that environmentally speaking, change is natural and that species that cannot adapt to change are naturally selected against.   After all, the environment is not a static system.  Much of the present-day midwestern U.S. at one point in the past was submerged beneath a shallow ocean and was covered with ice as recently as 10 to 12 thousand years ago (Prior).  Since that time, species have redistributed themselves across the continent (Townsend et al. 2003 p. 62) and in some cases have probably gone extinct.  Even when climate is stable, the natural process of ecological succession typically occurs, wherein certain species supplant other, earlier successional species.  Weedy annuals are typically replaced by perennials and woody species (e.g., trees), and later-successional and climax species, being more shade-tolerant than early-successional species, germinate and grow in the shade of the early-successional species, eventually outcompeting them for resources and excluding them from the area.  Gradually a climax community would become established, and early successional species, having been squeezed out, recolonize the area only after some kind of disturbance.[10]  In extremely dry areas (e.g., short-grass prairie), succession often does not lead to the establishment of trees, with exception being along water courses, where sufficient moisture is more readily available.[11] 

            The argument that environmental change is natural and therefore it’s “too-bad-so-sad” for any species unable to adapt ignores the fact that virtually all extinctions occurring on this planet are caused by humans.  While God has wisely gifted species with the ability to adapt to changing environments, the rapidity of the change that we are forcing upon the rest of creation is unparalleled at a large scale except perhaps for the changes that induced the five historic mass-extinctions found in the earth’s fossil records.[12]  The timescale necessary for an evolutionary response is typically much longer than the amount of time we now give many species to adapt to their new environment.  For example, birds on isolated islands that have lost the ability to fly over thousands of years because there were no ground predators to evade cannot be expected to regain their flight upon the sight of a feral cat or a brown tree snake (or human, for that matter[13]).  Given the prolific nature of these and other invasive ground predators, the flightless birds do not stand a chance, evolutionarily speaking.  So while some point to the nature of evolutionary processes to mitigate our responsibility for the global loss of biodiversity, the fact is that humans affect the system in such a way as to remove the evolutionary time scale from the equation, and therefore the “too-bad-so-sad” argument is not very persuasive.[14]  This argument also ignores our stewardship directive (see next chapter) and the fact that God loves his creation and receives glory and praise from all of His creation:

“As our wanton exploitation of nature renders increasing species of animals and plants extinct, there are fewer kinds of praise that can be raised to the Lord… there are fewer and fewer trees that can point upward to God and rustle their leaves in applause to the King of the universe.” (Campolo 1992 p. 129)

 

            With our increased ability to transport organisms across the globe, the story of the invasive species plays itself out time and again, with a new actor playing the role of villain.  Students often ask me why God created invasive species.  God created the species; humans make them invasive.  For example, feral pigs have been decimating the native Hawaiian ecosystem for years.  As Clements and Corapi (2005) point out, “The pig is simply living out its pigness wherever it finds itself,” (p. 50) which in this case is where humans have placed it.  “The pig has no instrumental value to organisms other than humans in this habitat, and severely impacts the instrumental and intrinsic value of the ecosystem.” (p. 50)  They therefore conclude that in order to protect the integrity of the native ecosystem, it is our Christian responsibility to remove the pig from the island.   

As we look at a landscape or biological community that is changing gradually and imperceptibly, by the time we notice that there is a problem it is often too late to do much about it, or it becomes a goliath task to do something about it.  For example, almost immediately after the cane toads were introduced to Australia, people realized that the toads were not “doing their job,” and the 300 or so cane toads on the continent at that time would have been easily removed.  It was not until the toads numbered in the thousands and became a nuisance that people realized the problem on their hands, and although there are a few promising leads in the efforts to eradicate the toads from Australia (e.g., introducing an all-male gene into the population; Taylor and Edwards 2005), the probability that these expensive efforts will be 100% effective appear slim at best. 

            Just prior to the introduction of the cane toads, scientists had observed a short-term, significant inverse relationship between cane toad and cane beetle numbers after the introduction of the toads onto the islands of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and they erroneously concluded that cane toads were putting a dent in the beetle population.  Of course, correlations do not prove cause/effect, and soon after the cane toads were introduced to the Australian continent, scientists determined that they do not eat cane beetle grubs and that the correlation was spurious.  Thus, in the case of the cane toads, no information on the imprudence of the introduction was available at the time of the introduction, but today many invasions are facilitated despite readily available evidence of the potential harm.  Although not so challenging a problem as the cane toad, the Eastern redcedar is often aided in its spread by a blissfully ignorant public and is another example of a species not recognized as a problem until it is out of hand.  Hundreds of acres of mixed grass prairie at the Nature Conservancy’s Niobrara Valley Preserve near Valentine, Nebraska, are being invaded by redcedars spreading from those originally planted by a neighbor as windbreaks and shelter for his cattle.  As the planted redcedars matured, the females began producing berries that were eaten by birds, which then defecated the seeds across the Nature Conservancy’s land.  By the time John Ortmann, current manager of the preserve, was hired, he had hundreds of acres of prairie pastureland peppered with thousands of small cedar trees that had spread into the preserve.  If allowed to mature, the redcedars in the preserve would further reduce the grazing capacity of the land and would take over the pastures, as cows and buffalo will not eat them.   The neighbor has now decided that he has “just the right amount of cedars.”  Of course, he now has hundreds of acres of mature redcedars in his pastures that are getting bigger and bigger and are producing thousands upon thousands of seeds.  He’ll probably soon come to his senses and begin removing the cedars, but if he doesn’t it will mean that the Nature Conservancy may be fighting a battle they cannot win.  The hillsides at Inspiration Hills now face the same peril.  Hundreds of small to midsized redcedars dot the hillsides, and it will take the coordinated effort of many individuals (perhaps a church group and/or dorm) to return the landscape to pre-invasion condition.  Inspiration Hills actually leases the hillsides for grazing, and they are losing money because of the decreased production due to the cedars.  If the cedars are allowed to mature, they will become too large for hand tools and cumbersome chain saws will be necessary, so expeditious efforts to eradicate the redcedars are warranted.

            Our environmental ignorance manifests itself in one species invasion after another as people discard their pets into the environment, smuggle produce on airplanes, fail to clean their fishing gear, boats, and trailers when transferring them from one body of water to another, and even knowingly plant species that they know are invasive.  Someone in Paullina reportedly has a yard full of purple loosestrife Lythrum salicaria, a species whose spread has reached epidemic levels in many states.  The species completely alters wetland ecosystems, threatening the bog turtle Clemmys muhlenbergii and many species of plants in the northeastern U.S. and elsewhere (GISD 2005k; WSDE).  Although sale of the plant has wisely been banned in Iowa, it is not illegal to possess the plant or give it away. 

 

             Ultimately, we cannot care for what we do not know.  We cannot be good stewards of God’s creation if we remain disconnected from and disinterested in creation and make no attempt to re-connect with nature and raise our own ecological awareness.  As Campolo (1992) explains:

“Respect and concern for the environment has to come from this special kind of spiritual sensitivity to nature.  Statistics on the depletion rates of the rainforest or the facts about the destruction of the ozone layer won’t do it.

      “Only if we, as a people, once again fall in love with nature and subjectively empathize with the sense of the transcendent that can be encountered there will the careless destruction of the environment distress us.  Only if we … “have eyes to see and ears to hear” the sacred presence in the midst of the natural is there any real possibility that we will become caretakers of God’s creation as He has called us to be.” (p. 122)

 

Beyond being grounded in such spiritual sensitivity toward nature, our acts of stewardship should also be “informed by our scientific understanding[15] and by stewardship principles given to us in scripture.” (Mahan 2001)  With an understanding of the causes and effects of our disconnect from the rest of creation and a framework for overcoming this environmental ignorance, we further explore scripture and our stewardship responsibility in the final chapter of this paper. 

 

 

 


[1] I do not wish to expound on the topic of global warming, as I am intentionally avoiding having to spend scores of pages of writing simply convincing the reader that the phenomenon is real.  

 

[2] Speaking to this phenomenon of acclimation with regard to the urbanization and development of our natural landscape, Black Hills resident and author Dan O’Brien (1993) states, “It strikes me that the human characteristic that is perhaps most unfortunate is our ability to get used to almost any insult to our senses if it comes gradually enough.” (p. 19)  In essence, unless one is in close relationship with one’s environment, small, gradual changes will go unnoticed.

[3] As an example of parental reaction to the Bogeyman Syndrome, Louv points to the proliferation of indoor play areas at fast-food restaurants: “Seeking a safe alternative to outdoor play, some parents drive their children to fast-food restaurants and let them loose in admission-free indoor tunnel-mazes and accompanying “ball pits.” (p. 129)  Louv points out that, ironically, the ball pits are almost never cleaned and can harbor bacteria and viruses, and are thus a health hazard to children.  He also points out that “the Environmental Protection Agency now warns us that INDOOR air pollution is the nations #1 environmental threat to health” (via toxic mold, allergens, bacteria, carbon monoxide, radon, and lead dust), with indoor air quality being two to ten times worse than outdoor air quality.  (p. 130)

 

[4] This in and of itself perhaps should not be considered a “groaning,” as it is the impact of these people on the planet’s resources that is the issue.  If everyone on the planet were to live the lifestyle of the average American, the carrying capacity of the planet would be 1.8 billion people, meaning that we would need almost five Earths, as there are now 6.6 billion people on the planet (U.S. Census Bureau).  The overuse and misuse of resources causes creation to groan, and the more people, the more overuse and misuse will occur.

 

[5] According to Bouma-Prediger, 1.2 billion people on the planet suffer from undernourishment.  Our ability to catch/harvest and produce food has leveled off, and current population trends and with more of our crops being put into alternative fuels, the number of undernourished will rise.  

 

[6] According to Bouma-Prediger, at least 200 million hectares (an area larger than Mexico) of forest on our planet vanished between 1980 and 1995.  Beyond the forests being cut for wood, many of our other forests are dying from disease, acid rain, air pollution, etc.

 

[7] Beyond the obvious problem of water pollution, our world and its inhabitants suffer from a lack of fresh water.  Rivers, lakes, and groundwater aquifers are all drying up as we overuse our freshwater resources.  The Aral Sea, once the 4th largest lake, now holds less than ¼ of its previous volume, and once supplying humans with 44,000 tons of fish per year, no longer contains fish.  The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California.  The San Joaquin Valley in California has subsided over 75 feet from the depletion of the groundwater aquifers beneath it. 

 

8 desertification, erosion, etc.

 

[9] overharvesting and overconsumption of resources

[10] An example of a small-scale disturbance would be mature tree dying and creating a break in an otherwise closed canopy.  A large-scale disturbance might be a forest fire or clear-cut (Townsend et al. 2003; Brennan & Withgott 2005).

 

[11] Our tallgrass prairie faces a tenuous fate in that over 99.5% of the original 38 million acres of tallgrass prairie in the north-central U.S. and Manitoba has met the fate of the plow and has become “functionally non-existent over the past 100 years,” while much of the remaining prairie, without proper prescription of a burning regime and/or grazing and trampling, will be overtaken by woody plants and trees (USFWS).  Case in point, the Loess Hills, which run from just north of Sioux City south to the Missouri border, are an almost solid swath of forest and agricultural fields, but prior to the 20th century and the removal of fire and grazers, the hills were almost entirely prairie.  Today there are some relict patches of tallgrass prairie left in the loess (cont.)

[11] (cont.) hills, but many of these patches are heavily managed because they are constantly being invaded by woody species (Perley).

 

[12] For example, the Creataceous extinction of 65 million years ago is thought by many to have occurred as a result of an asteroid or large comet colliding with Earth (Campbell & Reece 2002 p. 491).

 

[13] Students sometimes ask me whether humans might be considered an “invasive species.”  The dodo birds Raphus cucullatus would probably think so, but we can’t ask them...

 

[14] The “too-bad-so-sad” argument is also based on flawed logic…  People today would find it unconscionable to land on a heretofore undiscovered, remote island and then run around bludgeoning all of the native flightless birds, but many of these people would have no qualms about introducing house cats onto the island, with the cats then killing all of the birds.   In both scenarios, humans have caused the extinction of the birds, but in the latter scenario, humans are removed from the carnage, which of course makes it ok…

 

[15] Kenneth Petersen (2003) echoes the importance of scientific knowledge in being effective stewards in his essay The Educational Imperative of Creation Care:  “The immensity of this stewardly responsibility is imposing, and we readily appreciate that we can steward with wisdom and competence only if we understand Earth’s fabric and creatures and its processes and rhythms.” (p. 433)  Although Petersen sees education as foundational to our effectiveness as stewards, he also faults our educational system for much of our current state of affairs: “But if the … trends in the planet’s condition and in educational output are true, our educational systems are, at best, lacking something, and have, at worst, misdirected many generations of young people.  For it is the “well-educated” of the world that are primarily to blame for the aforementioned groanings of creation, and more of the same kind of education will only exacerbate the pain.” (p. 434)