Words matter. The words we will read before and during our brief time together are words concerned with the natural world. In different times and places, these words have given shape to the care and brutality, the love and avarice that have characterized our troubled relationship to “the environment” or, as Christians name it, Creation. Our task is to read this body of environmental literature with breadth, surveying its vast terrain, and with depth, interpreting it in light of God’s new creation already breaking into the old.
If we wish to resist our culture’s dominant paradigm of earthly destruction, of “running Genesis backward, decreating” as McKibben puts it, if we want to “serve and preserve” the fertile soil that Genesis tells us is worthy of our care, then we will be attentive to this language for the wisdom it offers. Our time to act, both in this class and in this era of species extinction, topsoil loss, and climate disruption, is short. It is clear that our leaders have no answers. The words we read (and the words you may someday write?) just might. Or if not answers then at least patterns and stories we can live by. We will therefore approach these words—essays, poems, and stories—with reverence for what they might teach.
We will read with charity, which is to say, we will first try to understand what a writer is saying before we offer our own interpretation. We will also critique their words and argue with them. We will take joy and laughter where we find them, for our situation is far too dire for pessimism. We will be looking for a language that limns the shape of God’s kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. We will be looking for a language that can make us whole.
Texts:
1. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, ed. Bill McKibben, Library of America, New York. 2008.
2. Course pack with selected readings