Heirloom tomatoes and push lawnmowers
Three scholars find hope in the midst of climate crisis through collaboration.
Sylvia Keesmaat lives on an off-grid permaculture farm in Ontario. She’s writing a book on climate grief. It begins with a simple ask: to go outside and “learn the space where you are, even if it’s an urban environment.” Keesmat remembers canoeing the wetlands as a child, both of her parents pausing to paint and photograph insects. “When we don’t hear the language [of the land], when we don’t hear those birds or those insects or those frogs, we don’t know what we’ve lost,” she says.
Though January was frigid, my hometown of Edmonton had an unseasonably warm start to winter this year. It’s hard not to worry about the future given the signs of climate change all around us. I spoke with three Christian scholars, each a doctorate in their field and deeply involved in studying creation care. Keesmaat teaches online at Bible Remixed and hosts community events on her farm, including an annual sale of heirloom tomato seedlings. Steve Bouma-Prediger teaches at Hope College and takes his students into the Adirondacks every May. Bouma-Prediger first “fell in love . . . with wild places” when he spent a summer at Camp Manitoqua and was asked to co-lead a boundary waters canoeing trip. That first experience of wilderness produced a vocational calling to what he refers to as earth-keeping. Norman Wirzba teaches at Duke Divinity School. He grew up on a farm in Southern Alberta, which informed his specialization in theology, ecology and agrarian studies.
“None of us is called to do all of the work” of addressing climate change, Keesmaat says, “but we are called to participate.” Wirzba highlights conversation as a simple but powerful tool. “What I really want to see people do is talk with each other about what’s possible, saying, hey, how can we be creative?” says Wirzba. “It’s not because community is going to make everything better. But when you’re in community with other people, you can figure out together what things you can do to prepare each other to help address the suffering that people are already experiencing.”
Listen to Indigenous voices
“We need to collaborate with others,” agrees Bouma-Prediger. “This truly needs a communal response. And that could be your neighborhood, your city, your province, your country. Ultimately, the whole globe.” Bouma-Prediger, for example, uses a push lawnmower – now, many of his neighbours do too. Bouma-Prediger’s encouragement is for people to look at their lives and decide what unique action they and their larger communities can take, whether it be carpooling, exploring alternative energy resources, writing local government representatives, or something else.
For Wirzba, agriculture is an essential framework for sustainable environmentalism. His goal is to think about environmentalism by “engaging with people who actually live on the land, from the land, and through the land. And that has been Indigenous peoples and agricultural people – people who sit at the intersection of natural processes.”
Keesmaat also finds hope in the growing involvement of Indigenous and Black communities in talks about the climate crisis. “Indigenous peoples have faced an apocalypse around the land that sustained them; being pushed off the land and then watching that land be clear cut for farming. Watching the animals that supported them, that caused their cultures to flourish, disappear. We’re realizing that people who have faced this before have some wisdom for us. We can learn from black communities and indigenous communities about reconnecting with creation. So that gives me hope.”
A new generation
About hope, I ask, how do we maintain it when the climate crisis remains so overwhelming? Keesmat returns to climate grief: “When we raise our voices in lament, we’re also saying we’re not satisfied with the way things are. We want change to happen.”
Bouma-Prediger says that our culture has bought into consequentialism: “It’s the dominant ethic of our culture: you should do something only if there’s a good chance of positive consequences. If there isn’t, then don’t do it.” But then he warns, “Don’t be a consequentialist. Jesus wasn’t. Lots of people weren’t. They did the right thing regardless. God will deal with the consequences.”
“The danger is to think that hope is something like a vaccine,” Wirzba says. “If you have it, you’re protected. That’s not what hope is, to say that God’s going to take care of everything. I think God calls people to be agents of love in the world. And that means we have to figure out what we’re going to do to be a source of help to each other, to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our lands, to our animals – because we’re called to take care of all of them. And when we do that work of figuring out how we’re best going to take care of each other, no matter what the bad stuff is that comes, we will be in a better position.”
Bouma-Prediger already sees the younger generation taking this approach. “Their passion for caring for creation is high and growing,” he says. “Likewise, different parts of the church are waking up. I think a new generation is much more aware of the biblical call to be earth-keepers. To quote Genesis 2:15, that’s our human calling: to serve, and protect our home planet. I see more young people doing that.”
While the anxiety, grief, and even apathy caused by the climate crisis is very real, there’s lots to be hopeful for – and there’s something each of us can do. Together, we’ll be ready to face the future.
