“There are FIVE Movements,” declares new Institute on Adaptive Leadership & the Environment.
Lowell Bliss (center) meets with Vice President Al Gore and fellow panelists as they prepare for their presentation “The Gospel in the Ecological Crisis,” Union Seminary, June 2014. Rev. Gerald Durley (back to camera) is a leader in the Civil Rights, Environmental, Climate, and (Faith-based) Creation Care movements.
I was five months old when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. I was eight years old when the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. In other words, I grew up, as almost all of us did, with the modern Environmental Movement. Today however it is important to recognize that there is not just one movement related to environmental care, but rather FIVE, at least five. This is particularly true for Christians, for white Christians, and for anyone who has ever identified with evangelical Christianity. This summer, Eden Vigil severed its last official tie with one of these movements and will seek to serve, to the extent of our wisdom, each of the five movements as an Institute of Adaptive Leadership and the Environment at William Carey International University.
Before I describe these five movements, let me explain why it is important to differentiate them. First, there is the danger of thinking that your chosen movement—the one that you might identify with or operate in—is the only movement, or the most important movement, or the one movement that can move the needle on addressing the environmental crisis where the others have failed. Granted, the leverage of your movement might be greater for a particular environmental issue, or in a particular region, or among a particular people, but this is true only at that one point. There is no guarantee that your influence transcends that point, and often your contribution at one point is offset in the big picture of environmental care by your neglect, or competition, at another point.
Secondly, there is the danger that when you find yourself alongside someone in what you think is a joint project for the common good of Earth, that you will project your values, loyalties, and potential losses on that partnership, assuming that they are shared by all. Earth care is earth care, isn’t it? What you think is good partnership might be, in effect, subversive to your partner.
1. The Environmental Movement
The environmental movement is the overarching movement, the one ostensibly launched by Rachel Carson, et.al. Save the whales! Give a hoot, don’t pollute! “Smog” as a new coinage for smoke + fog. Ban DDT. David Suzuki. The burning Cuyahoga River. Depending on how old you are, your consciousness will have its own list of icons. We could call this the movement we inherited from our childhoods, but more accurately it is the movement we continue to participate in as part of our shared humanity. In a recent interview, David Gushee introduced his new book Introducing Christian Ethics by saying,
One of the things I say in the book is that this question “how should we live?” is a general human question. I even say that it’s wired into us, like fundamentally. … I think that fundamentalist and evangelical Christians were taught to separate ourselves from the general human quest to know how to live. I think it goes back to the conflicts with science and evolution in the 19th century, but also [to] a not very appealing spirit of Christian superiority. “We know the truth. They are desperate pagans, so we can’t listen to them. We can only listen to ourselves and our Bibles.”i
Consequently, Gushee has begun to argue “more recently for a sense of Christian participation in the common human quest to know truth, to build a better world, to live in better ways on the planet.” Any one of us may divide ourselves out for the sake of a different movement (as evangelicals may have done in the creation care movement), but the success of any of our movements depends on cooperating in our shared human quest to care for the home in which we are embedded.
2. The Climate Movement
Mohamed Nasheed was the president of the Maldives from 2008 and 2012, and an early leader in a climate change-specific movement ostensibly launched by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore, and Bill McKibben. As the first democratically elected president in 30 years, Nasheed could have prioritized any number of issues. Instead, Nasheed turned his attention to the eco-system of his low-lying island nation. Even then, he could have focussed on issues of over-fishing, trash and rubbish accumulation, coral mining, overpopulation, or freshwater availability, etc.ii Instead, Nasheed understood the urgency of climate change. The average elevation of his islands is one meter above sea-level, and so the threat of sea-level rise was imminent. “We are not prepared to die,” Nasheed would later tell the COP18 climate summit in Poland, “We are not going to become the first victims of the climate crisis. Instead, we are going to do everything in our power to keep our heads above water. Climate change is a national security issue for us. It is an existential threat.”iii
I remember in 2015, the year when the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21, watching an organization like A Rocha grapple with how much to feature climate change in their work. A Rocha was and still is the world’s largest Christian conservation agency and has been traditionally devoted to issues of biodiversity loss and habitat restoration. Since climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss and eco-system devastation, it may seem like a “no-brainer” to join the climate movement, but it wasn’t so clear cut back in 2015. I remember one major creation care leader admonishing me in 2010: “Climate change is like diabetes, a slowly unfolding disease; in the end, it can kill you, but there are plenty of other current creation care issues that will likely do you in before that.”
The urgency of climate change has won out, eclipsing all other issues in the environmental movement. As a subset of the environmental movement, the climate movement seems to have won the majority of the attention, with the resulting access to funding and activist energies. Granted, the urgency, as per Nasheed’s perspective, suggests that this is maybe how it should be. Nonetheless, the Stockholm Resilience Centre reminds us that there are eight other planetary boundaries that need our simultaneous attention, three of which are more critically breached than climate change.iv The danger is that we will ignore the good and important work that others are doing in the environmental movement which don’t have easy reference to climate change. Perhaps climate change is like diabetes after all, albeit having reached a critical stage quicker than what my colleague imagined in 2010. But that doesn’t mean that the other “diseases” aren’t still out there, that they haven’t also grown in urgency, and that they don’t demand a fair share of attention in the triage unit. For example, when is the last time you have given any thought to the “insect apocalypse”? One famous study of nature reserves in Germany found that the overall abundance of flying insects had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years.v You won’t find the insect apocalypse on the agenda at a COP climate summit.
3. The Creation Care Movement
I returned to North America in 2007 after a fourteen-year stint as a missionary in India. When I launched Eden Vigil in 2009 I automatically knew which of the five movements I wanted to be part of--creation care--and which movement I wanted to help launch-- environmental missions.
Faith-based leaders in the environmental movement had landed on a good term: creation care. Creation: like my colleague Fred Gluck of the organization Care of Creation used to say, “those who believe God created the world, should be first in line to take care of it.” Care: a break from the Dominion model of interacting with the environment, or even the emotionally-distant Stewardship model. Our work could be about love. The second edition of Steven Bouma-Prediger’s For the Beauty of the Earth was released in 2010, and at the time, surely had the most oft-quoted line: “We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know what we experience. If we do not know our place—know it more than a passing, cursory way, know it intimately and personally—then we are destined to use and abuse it.”vi
Nonetheless, if you harken back to evangelical Christians writing in the beginnings of the environmental movement, you don’t get a sense that they needed, or wanted, separate nomenclature or segregation from the secular movement. I’m thinking about Francis Schaeffer’s 1970 engagement with Lynn White, Jr., entitled Pollution and the Death of Man.
“The hippies of the 1960s did understand something,” Schaeffer said, “They were right in fighting the plastic culture and the church should have been fighting it too.”vii But by the time Al Gore lost a hotly-contested election in 2000, the general population of evangelical Christians wanted nothing to do with the inconvenient Mr. Gore, with hippies, or with secular environmentalists whom they called watermelons, i.e. “green on the outside but red on the inside.” Faith-based environmentalists knew they needed their own approach if they were going reach their constituencies, especially white American evangelical congregations. For example, in 2008, I used to go around to small groups in churches in Kansas and show Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, but before I pushed “play,” I had a twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation entitled “A Christian Introduction to An Inconvenient Truth” where, among other things, I told the reassuring story of Sir John Houghton. Houghton was an atmospheric physicist and the co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Group for the IPCC’s Fourth Summary Report. I shared a clip from Houghton speaking at a prayer breakfast (“one of ours”) for pastors (“some of ours”) at Wheaton College (“one of ours”). Houghton was a devout evangelical believer (“one of us”) who actually organized prayer meetings (“one of ours”) for his fellow Christian scientists (“more of ours”) at these IPCC meetings.
The danger, as David Gushee mentioned earlier, is that our messaging feeds into “a not very appealing spirit of Christian superiority” and into separation from the very partnerships required to address the crises of the environmental and climate movements. That was not a mistake that Sir John Houghton made. The more apparent danger, however, involved segregation from a fourth movement: the environmental justice movement.
4. The Environmental Justice Movement
Dr. Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University, publishing as early as the 1980s, is considered “the father of environmental justice,” but the EJ movement leader I discovered when I began looking around was Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx. In her 2006 Ted Talk she defined the essence of environmental justice as: "No community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other."viii Looking at EJ from the outside—as I was—I didn’t see a great deal of interest in the climate movement from BIPOC communities. The issues they promoted were primarily NIMBY—“Not in my Backyard Yard”—injustices of industrial parks and landfills in Carter’s South Bronx or toxic formaldehyde plants in Charlotte Keye’s rural Mississippi. The BIPOC community seemed to be wrestling through their own mobilization to environmental action. I remember seeing one Black mom quoted after Ferguson: “Don’t talk to me about endangered species; that’s what our sons are.”
But what BIPOC environmental leaders were actually working out was their own approach—and it would be different than creation care. In 2015, the Lausanne WEA Creation Care Network was hosting their Canada/US Consultation on Creation and the Gospel at Gordon College in Massachusetts. I was on the organizing team and we purposefully assigned one member to the task of recruiting a diversity of delegates. John worked hard but in the end, we only had a handful of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous participants, many who also remained largely quiet during the proceedings. What was happening? Weren’t they also evangelical Christians? It was my first glimpse that BIPOC leaders didn’t simply want to get invited to our events, and that there was such a thing as our events, meaning that “creation care” wasn’t necessarily their category. They preferred to gather under the term EJ. Maybe they didn’t buy into the agenda to “turn back the clock” to when privileged people experienced a more pleasant environment. I also caught a glimpse that new environmental and climate policies could be as unjustly implemented as any other policy. What did EJ leaders know that we creation care leaders didn’t? We weren’t necessarily listening.
This isn’t just a danger for the creation care movement, but also for the (secular) environmental and climate movements. In 2016, a study in the UK demonstrated that “environmental professionals” are the second least diverse profession in the UK, followed only by farming. ix
Nonetheless, the danger for EJ leaders themselves is that they will get boxed into too limiting a frame, much like what happened to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si when headline writers said, “Pope Calls Climate Change a Moral Issue.” True, climate change is a moral issue, but it is so much more than that. Pope Francis would have us understand that climate change is a love issue, and a worship issue, even a Jesus issue. In the course of seven days at COP26 in Glasgow, I had two meetings: one where World Council of Churches leaders told me that faith-based groups seem to have decided on the term “climate justice” as how to characterize their work, while at the same time discovering that not all socio-religious groups understand the concept of justice in the same way. The other meeting was with a group of black pastors from the UK where my contribution was, “The term ‘climate justice’ makes sense, but if we are going to use Micah 6:8 as our basis, then we must learn how to honor all three of the requirements: to do climate justice, to love climate mercy, and to walk climate-humbly with our God.” Is there such a thing as “climate humility”? Let’s go find out.
5. The Environmental Missions Movement
The final movement that Eden Vigil Institute continues to want to serve—but not exclusively, and not without knowledge of its dangers—is one that I suppose I helped launch. In my book Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees I credit Peter Harris (missionary to Portugal, founder of A Rocha) and Ed Brown (whose organization, Care of Creation, had work at the time in Kenya) with first using the term “environmental missions” in print: something akin to the familiar concept of medical missions. Missionaries could take care of soul, body, and the eco-systems in which those embodied souls were embedded. In 2010, Ed and I organized an “Environmental Missions Consultation” at my home church in Manhattan, KS. We were joined by 25 missions and creation care leaders and the most important outcome of our four days of discussion was a definition:
Environmental missionaries are those sent cross-culturally to labor with Christ—the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all creation—in caring for the environment and making disciples among all peoples.x
Is it accurate to call what now exists of creation care among missions a “movement?” I suppose even the twitch of the pinky finger of a comatose patient can get labeled “movement.” Nonetheless, the category felt established when it got mentioned in the second edition of the textbook Introducing Christian Missions: “environmental missions” listed on a sidebar on page 16 of “Key Terms in Mission” along with such classics as “10/40 Window” or “Incarnational Mission.”xi And we felt established when we got picked up by the Lausanne Movement in such language as:
Environmental missions among unreached people groups. We participate in Lausanne’s historic call to world evangelization, and believe that environmental issues represent one of the greatest opportunities to demonstrate the love of Christ and plant churches among unreached and unengaged people groups in our generation (Cape Town Commitment II.D.1.B). We encourage the church to promote “environmental missions” as a new category within mission work (akin in function to medical missions).xii
The danger for those in the environmental missions movement is that they will segregate themselves similarly to the creation care movement. Another danger is that they will abandon solidarity with the other movements out of self-interest. I was once about to speak at a church event, when the pastor called me aside. “I like it when you talk about how environmental missions can get missionaries visas into closed countries,” he told me, “but I would advise you against mentioning the topic of climate change to this audience.” This audience also happened to be my donors. Church-planting missions has always been tempted by utilitarianism in our methods. The faith missions/personal missionary financial support model has always been tempted by “marketing.” An environmental missionary maintains his or her integrity by claiming the humanity of the environmental movement, the scientific integrity of the climate movement, the prophetic stance of the creation care movement, and the humbling, corrective insight of the environmental justice movement.
I no longer identify as an evangelical Christian. I now call myself a “Christ-follower in an Earth-honouring faith,” but that’s a topic for a subsequent article. I’ve been a commissioned missionary since 1993 and on the personal support-raising model to boot. That changed on July 11, 2022 when I moved to William Carey International University and when Eden Vigil became the Eden Vigil Institute for Adaptive Leadership and the Environment. As an Institute (not an academic department), and without a Ph.D., I call myself “academic-adjacent” and am still trying to discern this new field of play. Eden Vigil will surely be less of an activist organization, less of a practitioner. We hope to be a center of wisdom and thought leadership whereby what we gather can be used in service—true service, helpful service, sensitive and appropriate service—to not just one movement, but to all five.
Footnotes
https://peteenns.com/episode-211-david-gushee-christian-ethics-the-memory-of-jesus/
Karthikheyan TC. Environmental Challenges for Maldives. South Asian Survey. 2010;17(2):343-351.
https://thecvf.org/our-voice/statements/member/nasheed-we-are-not-prepared-to-die/
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
Steven Bouma-Prediger, For the Beauty of the Earth Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2nd ed. 2010, 21.
Francis Schaeffer and Udo Middlemann, Pollution and the Death of Man, (Wheaton: Crossway, 1970) 24.
Carter, Majora “Greening the Ghetto, Ted.com: https://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal?language=en
https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/The-two-sides-of-diversity-2.pdf
Lowell Bliss Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2013. 17.
A. Scott Moreau, Gary R. Corwin, and Gary B. McGee Introducing World Missions 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015, 16.