Environmental ethics Archives

Cover image of 'Plundered" by David W. Swanson

Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice, David W. Swanson. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514007747) 2024.

Summary: The tangled roots of racial and environmental injustice. Traces exploitation and oppression of people and land to a common root of greed.

The basic premise of this book is that systemic racism and environmental destruction stem from a common root. Specifically, greed, and its outworking in theft, in the eyes of David T., Swanson, are the sources of what he sees as two intertwined ills. Often, those subject to racial injustice also suffer from depredations on the environment. The point of this book is not to argue what are disputed ideas in some quarters nor to propose policies for society as a whole. Instead, Swanson asks how churches might engage in caretaking of both people who have suffered injustice and the land they inhabit, often in urban settings.

Swanson comes uniquely qualified to address these questions. After training as an outdoor educator, Swanson experienced a call to establish a church on the South Side of Chicago, New Community Covenant Church, where he has lived with his family and worked the past fourteen years. The book reflects his own efforts to love and care for the people and place of the South Side of Chicago, specifically the Bronzeville neighborhood.

Before addressing his key insight, Swanson begins with the gift of creation, weaving biblical narrative and insights of Indigenous Christians into his sabbath day walks by Lake Michigan near the Center of Science and Industry, through the woodlands, canals, and lagoons of what was the site of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. From here, he considers our vocation, which he describes as priestly caretakers. As priests, we both bless the Creator and the creation. As caretakers, we seek the flourishing of all God’s creation, recognizing that our flourishing depends upon it.

Then, Swanson explores what we have actually done. We have so refashioned creation, resulting in mass extinctions and changing weather patterns. Scientists contend we have entered a new era in Earth’s existence, the Anthropocene. We have pursued extractive and exploitative policies not only with the creation but with ethnic minorities, the Black and Brown peoples of our country. As a result, these people often suffer the worst effects of our environmental depredations in what is called environmental racism. As Christians, we have often been complicit. Real healing can only begin with repentance, leading to repair, reconciliation, and renewal.

Part of how this happens, Swanson contends, is through our detachment from our place. We often do not know where our water, food, energy, clothing, and other necessities come from. And so we often can be oblivious to the exploitative and extractive practices implicit in our existence. But there is hope and the last two chapters in part one begin exploring what priestly caretaking under Christ’s redemptive work might look like in our communities, from gardens, to welcome of newcomers, to fighting for the quality of local schools.

All this comes in the first part, under the heading “tangled roots.” The second part is headed ” becoming naturalized.” Instead of detachment, Swanson considers what it means to become indigenous to a place. Swanson urges three practices to nurture our relationship with our place and its people. Instead of detachment, we nurture belonging, listening to and learning about our community. Instead of unceasing exploitation, we sabbath, resting both ourselves and the rest of creation and practicing generosity. Finally, in place of greed, we nurture virtue–prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love.

Priestly caretaking is not idealistic utopianism. Rather it is a form of “long obedience in the same direction. Swanson writes:

“Caretaking in the ruins of industrialized extraction and exploitation is a generational commitment. Who can say how long it will take for a racialized people centered on Jesus and pursuing repair together to find that creation has re-exerted its formational power over them? How long will it take for a people who’ve been severed from the earth to learn to walk humbly and gently among their creaturely neighbors? There is no program for this, no curriculum or metrics. There is only the good and slow work of learning together how to exist as a blessing and a gift.”

What I appreciate about this book is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It doesn’t propose macro solutions for racism or environmental problems. Swanson does for urban communities what Wendell Berry does for rural farming communities. Both focus on care for people with names and their place. We can’t seek restoration everywhere if we don’t practice it somewhere. Swanson invites us to begin where we are to engage the long, slow work of community caretaking.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Hope for God’s Creation: Stewardship in an Age of Futility, Andrew J. Spencer.Brentwood, TN: B & H Academic, 2023.

Summary: A theology of creation care that grounds an ethic of stewardship and hopeful practice, anticipating the new creation.

Many Christians in the evangelical community are either cautious or even skeptical of concern for the creation. They think of it as either a re-arranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic, or grounded in a pagan belief system. So it was interesting to read this account of creation care written by a Southern Baptist educated supervisor of training at a nuclear power plant. I found it an account tempered by caution against excess while actively advocating for our responsibility as God-appointed stewards to care for creation and proposing active steps one may take. Most of all, I found an account that grounded creation care ethics and praxis, not in the urgent cries of the moment, or the current findings of science, but in a theology for creation care.

Spencer begins with the idea that we care for creation for the glory of God. He addresses the idea of “creation subject to futility” by observing what follows, the hope of redemption for our bodies and all of creation. That hope means we live in hope, leading to actions that anticipate that renewal without the illusion that we will accomplish it, actions that in some cases bring substantial cleanup, as has been seen in many of the rivers, skies, and resurgence of some endangered species. This hope counters the despair in much of the environmental movement.

With that, Spencer contends both for the necessity of care for creation and against the danger of environmentalism becoming an all-encompassing ideology, supplanting the gospel of the kingdom for Christians, stifling evangelical proclamation and other worthy concerns. He weigh’s Lynn White’s classic article blaming Christianity for exploitation of the environment, arguing that while aspects are accurate, the story is far more nuanced, and much environmental depredation may be traced to a modernity that removed God from the picture. He traces environmentalism in the US, how evangelicals both engaged in environmental efforts and how environmentalism became entwined with the culture wars, resulting in increasing evangelical suspicion

The second part of the work focuses on theology. He proposes four doctrinal questions that serve as the basis for creation care ethics and practice:

What are the sources of authority for environmental ethics?
Why does creation have value?
What is the human role in creation?
What is the end goal or final state of the created order, and how does it come about?

The following four chapters discuss each of these in turn. As one might expect, scripture is the Christian’s final authority, and yet we may learn from science as a form of general revelation without being compelled to accommodate scripture to science or undermine its authority. We learn from science without succumbing to scientism. He turns to the value of creation, which he argues has both instrumental value for its use and inherent value as good because God made it so. Only God has intrinsic value and is worthy of worship. Spencer traces the effects of the fall and what has, is, and will be restored in redemption, the value of which is signaled to us in the incarnation. Given this framework, we are warned against both pantheism and dualism.

Humans are called to steward creation for God’s glory. Spencer challenges the anti-human bias in some strands of environmentalism. Despite our limitations and failures, we have a role as God’s redeemed to point toward the healed and restored contours of the new creation. As we look toward new creation, we pursue the substantial healing both in our own life and the creation while realizing that only Christ will purge all evil from the world and fully renew all things. Spencer argues on the basis of word studies that all will not be burned but rather disclosed–a judging and purifying prior to restoration.

So how then does this theology say we ought live? First he addresses the church and environment. He is careful not to allow the environment to usurp the mission of the church but argues, a la Francis Schaeffer, for the church as a “pilot plant” in which creation care is part of the holistic discipleship that encompasses all of life. The aim is not to allow green practices to take over church life but rather to ask how God may be glorified in all things including our facilities and grounds management.

He then turns to conspiracy thinking and political conflict, both of which undermine the gospel. Rather than contend about climate change, he uses a “Pascal’s Wager” argument that a life of restraint will be good for us and the creation even if climate models don’t prove out. Rather than becoming embroiled in political conflict at the national level, he calls for a localism that brings people together to solve ground level problems that often is much less divisive and corrosive.

Finally he addresses how we may live hopefully in our own practices: thinking about the costs, environmental and otherwise of missions, sharing resources (do we all need snowblowers?), considering our landscapes and the suburban ideal of emerald lawns, living with wonder, leading quiet lives, exercising restraint on consumption, care in purchasing and growing food, and sabbaths, which give us and our infrastructure a rest.

While some environmentally-minded readers will balk at his warnings about mission drift and the risk of a big ideology of environmentalism usurping the church, what Spencer does is lay a basis for churches that are suspicious or concerned about such things to take steps of creation care. He invites us to do so not because it is culturally relevant or that “science tells me so” but because the Bible tells us so and it glorifies God and is part of following Jesus.

While some would consider this insufficiently “progressive,” it would be a great leap forward for many churches to so theologically form their members and instruct them in whole life discipleship. I think he wisely de-centers our hyperfocus on national politics to think about the old axiom that “all politics are ultimately local.” Noting the push for example toward electric vehicles, he raises the question of local charging sites in our communities–where will we put them? Spencer moves us away from the memes and soundbite debates to the kind of thoughtful and nuanced thinking and praxis that Christians must become better at both to honor God, win others, and serve the common good.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.