It’s hard to believe that it’s thirty years ago, but thirty years ago—almost to the date—I was with a group of college friends hiking Mount Washington from the west. We went up the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail to Lake of the Clouds. It was a bright sunny day and relatively warm for April in New Hampshire. The spring melt was pouring down the ravine in wonderful eddies and waterfalls, and there was still plenty of snow above timberline for some snow climbing to the summit. What a day.
In fact we enjoyed it so much that six weeks later we were back. It was another exquisite day though warmer and with much of the snow already gone. And by mid-way up the trail, I was furious. The Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail is popular trail and over the Memorial Day weekend great throngs of kids hiked it and had very effectively trashed it. Soda cans, candy wrappers, and used baggies were strewn all over the trail.
On our way down we filled some bags with the trash trying to restore what God had put there.
Now someone might be tempted to think that this is a great analogy for the story of the Bible, a story of restoration. The biblical story begins in a garden—fresh, newly created. The story evokes visions of a pristine wilderness area bursting with lush growth. At least that’s how I imagine it.
Then came the breaking of God’s law—the Fall.
“Cursed is the ground because of you,” said God. “Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Gn 3:17b-19)
Driven out of Eden, the story of humanity and of our relationship with God as we’ve trodden this cursed ground seems as though it should end up back in the Garden. Doesn’t it? All the trash cleaned up and the marvelous, all-natural freshness of Eden restored. Just as my college friends and I picked trash as we came down the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail, so the Earth will be picked clean of human encroachment.
It’s tempting to think about it that way, but, in the final analysis, the Bible is not a story of restoration. It’s a story of recreation. “Behold,” God says in Revelation 21, “I’m making everything new.” Eden will not be restored. Instead something better will happen: all things will be recreated—recreated with an unexpected twist. The grand story that began in a garden doesn’t end in a garden. It ends in a City—a city with a garden running through its heart (like Manhattan), but a city nonetheless.
Let’s think about this for a moment. What is a city? It’s an artifact—or, more accurately, a whole complex of artifacts. Cities are not created out of nothing, but by shaping the stuff of creation. This final city, the New Jerusalem, descends out of Heaven to the New Earth. It’s a perfect city, but it’s a city. Not organic, not growing, but fashioned and shaped out of stone and wood and metal. The Bible values humans as makers who take the raw materials of creation—stone, trees, mineral ores—and create. In fact, the creation is incomplete without human beings to shape it. Even in the Garden, God called humans to tend the Garden and rule Earth’s creatures. The Bible sees human activity as a positive good in the midst of creation. We shape and improve what we are given in creation. So a city is a complex of artifacts.
Second, a city is a habitation for people—people who belong on the Earth. Dr. Jay Richards of Acton Institute tells of receiving a letter from “a leading botanist at a prominent scientific institution.
“The letter,” Richards writes, “was mostly agreeable and even complimentary. But near the end, when humanity became the subject, its tone darkened. The scientist said he disagreed with me that human beings were part of the plan, as it were. On the contrary, he complained about ‘the devastation humans are currently imposing upon our planet’ [writing]:
“Still, adding over seventy million new humans to the planet each year, the future looks pretty bleak to me. Surely, the Black Death was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe: elevating the worth of human labor, reducing environmental degradation, and, rather promptly, producing the Renaissance. From where I sit,” the botanist concluded, “Planet Earth could use another major human pandemic, and pronto!”
Contrary to the sentiment expressed by this scientist, people are NOT “always and everywhere a blight on the landscape” to use naturalist John Muir’s phrase. Instead, the biblical view is that Earth was shaped by a benevolent Creator to be the habitat that sustains and enriches human life even as humans sustain and enrich the Earth through human creativity and human industry.
A Christian environmental policy must be one that elevates human beings, that lifts them from poverty and pollution. Writing in the Winter 2006 Wilson Quarterly, Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who says he once held “left-wing Greenpeace views,” wrote:
…if we are smart, our main contribution to the global environment 30 years from now will be to have helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, sickness, and malnutrition while giving them a chance to compete in our markets. This will make a richer developing world, whose people will clean up the air and water, replant forests, and go green. (p 40)
Last Saturday my wife and I went to the Cezanne exhibit down the street at the National Gallery. When Cezanne painted landscapes that included homes or villages, he did it such a way that the homes and villages—and thus the people inhabiting those homes and villages—belonged as surely as the trees and mountains that surrounded them. So if you’re hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the Blueridge of Virginia, if you packed it in, pack it out. By all means, let’s clean up the trash (something we in the wealthier nations have done with effectiveness already). But let’s remember that human industry and human belonging on Earth must form the basis of any sound environmental policy.
Featured Image Courtesy of IkunI/freedigitalphotos.net
