Given in the Berkeley Lake ward, 2022-08-14
When we lived in North Carolina, our house was on the outskirts of Durham, near one of the final intersections before the end of the city and county limits and the start of fairly open nature, with rivers and wilderness and hiking. When we lived in Utah, the mountains loomed over the valley and we were minutes away from hiking up mountains or through canyons.
When we were looking for houses here in Atlanta, right before we decided to buy our house in Peachtree Corners, we drove around the area to get a feel for the city. I work in downtown Atlanta at Georgia State University, so I knew that Atlanta was densely populated. But as we drove around out here in the suburbs, I figured we were on the very far outskirts of the city, close to nature. We drove up Peachtree Parkway/Medlock Bridge Road and crossed the Chattahoochee River and I was convinced that we had reached the end of Atlanta and that beyond that was open nature. We turned around at the Atlanta Athletic Club golf course and I was excited! We would be just minutes away from open nature, just like we were in North Carolina and Utah.
After we moved in, I had to get some stuff from Home Depot. Google Maps told me to drive up Medlock Bridge Road and I remembered that that’s past what I had imagined as the edge of Atlanta—where open nature starts. Why would Home Depot be way out there? I got in my car, crossed the Chattahoochee, passed the golf course, and then discovered that the city… kept going? For a really long time? Atlanta is huge. We’re way further away from “wilderness” than I had previously thought, which was surprising (and a little disappointing).
I have long loved being out in nature. For years, I’ve gone camping, walking, hiking, and backpacking in the mountains of Northern Utah, the deserts of Southern Utah, the Appalachian mountains here in the east, and the beach in the Carolinas and Georgia.
Beyond the fun and enjoyment I’ve found in spending time outside, time in nature for me can often turn transcendental and spiritual. As a teenager camping outside of Capitol Reef National Park in Southern Utah, I loved looking up at the night sky and seeing the details of the Milky Way in the absence of light pollution. Seeing the sunset along the Pacific Ocean and the sunrise along the Atlantic while watching my kids frolic in the sand makes me feel both melancholy and joyful.
I’m hardly the first person to notice the deep sense of wonder and spiritual connection that we feel in nature. We’re reading Psalms in Come Follow Me this week, and the psalmist often turns to nature in their praise and metaphors. In Psalm 19, we read that “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). Nature itself acts almost like scriptures, teaching us about God. Alma teaches a similar principle in the Book of Mormon, stating that
all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator. (Alma 30:44)
But why is nature so central to the gospel? Why is it almost scriptural? And what does this all this mean in the era of climate change, as we’re facing the loss of so much ecological diversity? There are dozens of more standard parts of the gospel we could talk about—faith, repentance, baptism, even tithing. Why talk about nature?
Today I want to talk about two related questions about the purpose of nature and our responsibilities towards it in the gospel:
- Why did our Heavenly Parents give us a beautiful natural world in the first place?
- What is our responsibility to the natural world?
First, why even have an earth? One of the unique doctrines we’ve learned through the restoration is that our life on earth is not the beginning of our overall eternal experience. We existed in a a premortal realm where we learned and developed and grew. We made choices—including the all-important choice to follow our Heavenly Parents’ plan to leave the premortal realm, get a body, and be tested.
We learn from Alma in the Book of Mormon that “this life is the time for [us] to prepare to meet God,” (Alma 34:32) and the Book of Abraham teaches that we became mortal in order to be tested and to see if we “will do all things whatsoever the Lord [our] God shall command [us]” (Abraham 3:26).
If the whole point of our mortal life is to be a sort of final test, why conduct the test on a fancy complicated earth? In a science fiction version of the Plan of Happiness, I could imagine our Heavenly Parents just ushering us into a sterile white-walled, brightly lit room, putting a veil of forgetfulness on us, giving us a test, wishing us luck, and waiting outside until we finished. That would certainly be a lot fast and easier than creating a whole world and solar system and galaxy and universe full of billions and trillions of plants and animals.
Why go through all that trouble for just a test?
I would argue that the test of mortality isn’t just something we can complete in a notebook in a sterile room. Mortality requires living a full life, and that life needs to happen somewhere. In the Book of Moses, God explains that this earth is central to God’s mission of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. That’s not just because it just happens to be the place where all the testing action happens—there’s something about the earth itself that is central to the test.
The earth is beautiful. As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, there is something transcendental and often spiritual about being in nature. We learn deeper spiritual truths from beautiful things. We can learn truth from art and from music—there’s a reason people enjoy museums and live concerts. Nancy just spoke about the book of Job. Even though it might not be a historical account of an actual Job, the poetry of the story conveys eternal truths. The parable of the Good Samaritan was just a story—there was no historical Good Samaritan, but it remains one of the most famous parts of the New Testament because it is a beautiful story. We can learn truths from other forms of literature as well—J. R. R. Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth, for instance, teaches us about human nature, friendship, respect for nature, the dangers of unchecked power and unrighteous dominion, and the necessity of hope.
Beauty and aesthetics can change our behavior. This applies to art and literature, but also to nature. George Handley, an LDS theologian and naturalist, has said that
The purpose of art [and nature] has always been to teach us to see anew, to hear the old words in new ways, [and] to see strangeness and wonder in the old and familiar. … Art… teaches us to transform ourselves in relation to where we already are, [to] breathe new life into our locales… [and] to see the surprise and awe that can be found in the most ordinary and unexpected places. (Handley, 57–58)
This awe and surprise and wonder—the transcendence I talked about earlier—encourages us to live better, more faithful lives, and transforms us. Handley argues that:
Pleasure in nature leads to care and devotion much for the same reason that we love children, for example: not because they are good but because they are beautiful. … [F]aithful effort spawns aesthetic appreciation, which in turn inspires increased affection and devotion. (Handley, 56)
As the psalmist says, the earth is beautiful and reflects God’s love. Alma was right when he said that all things denote that there is a God. But the beauty of nature goes beyond just testifying about God. The earth is beautiful for its own sake, and we can find joy and transformation in that beauty. We become better people—we become more like God—because of that beauty.
Nature doesn’t just provide the backdrop and scenery to our human story. It is central to who we are, how we live, and how we thrive (Handley, xv). Nature is, like our fellow human brothers and sisters, a partner and a testing ground in working out our salvation. (Handley, 28).
So far we’ve seen that the earth is central to the plan of salvation, not just because it’s the stage where we’re tested and tried, but because its beauty and the diversity of its creations lead us to become better, more God-like people.
This leads to the second question I want to explore. What responsibilities and duties do we have for all this creation?
In the account of the creation in Genesis, we read that the very first commandment God gave to Adam and Eve—a commandment before the two contradictory ones to not eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and to multiply and replenish the earth—was to dress and keep the garden of Eden. They had to name and care for the animals and tend to the plants and general environment. That was their first responsibility. In Moses 3:19 we learn that all these animals have living souls and are thus “capable of experiencing happiness as they fulfill the measure of their creation” (Nash 2013).
Our job as humans is to be stewards over all this creation and help it fulfill that measure of its creation. In 2013, Elder Marcus B. Nash taught:
LDS doctrine is clear: all humankind are stewards over this earth and its bounty...and will be accountable to God for what we do with regard to His creation. … How we care for the earth, how we utilize and share in its bounty, and how we treat all life that has been provided for our benefit and use is part of our test in mortality. (Nash 2013)
God cares about how we treat the earth, and we abdicate our responsibilities as stewards when we mistreat it. President Ezra Taft Benson taught that
Irreverence for God, of life, and for our fellowmen takes the form of things like littering, heedless strip-mining, [and] pollution of water and air. But these are, after all, outward expressions of the inner man.
President Gordon B. Hinckley made the same point more succinctly, teaching that “This earth is his creation. When we make it ugly, we offend him.” (Nash 2013)
To be righteous, conscientious, and diligent stewards of the earth, it is our responsibility to take care of it, particularly now in the face of climate change.
Our care and stewardship for the environment is more expansive than just separating our garbage from our recycling in our kitchens. The world’s environmental problems have not emerged from a vacuum—they are closely linked to social problems. In 2015, Pope Francis issued an encyclical titled “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home,” where he outlines a Christian responsibility to nature and the environment. In it, he states that
The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation.
He then teaches that environmental problems today disproportionately harm (1) the poor of today and (2) future generations, and that it is a universal Christian duty to concern ourselves with the plight of the poor and to plan for and consider the future.
The pope is not alone in making a connection between environmental and social degradation. Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that
True disciples [of Christ]…would be consistent environmentalists—caring both about maintaining the spiritual health of a marriage and preserving a rain forest; caring about preserving the nutrient capacity of a family as well as providing a healthy supply of air and water (Nash 2013)
Taking care of both environmental causes and social causes, though, is a tall order, and requires a lot of difficult work.
We also cannot do it on our own. We must act collectively. Collective action is really hard, though, especially in the face of free riding and overuse.
Collective goods like the natural environment, public health, public parks, and other shared concepts and spaces create a natural incentive to overuse them. In the world of economics and policy, these kinds of collective things are called common pool resources—you can’t stop other people from using them, but one person using (or missing them) stops other people from using them. Imagine a shared refrigerator in an office. Anyone in the office can put their food in it, but as it fills up with people’s lunches and leftovers during the week, it prevents others from using it.
The main issue with common pool resources is that they lead to natural overuse. With a shared fridge, you’ll want to use up as much space as possible early in the week to make sure you can have good lunches. Farmers who share a common water supply will often overuse it to ensure that others don’t take their water. Fishermen will often overfish early to get the best catches, thus depleting fishery stocks. Factories emit high levels of carbon dioxide because there’s no mechanism to stop them from doing so, and those emissions make life worse for both humans and nature. Our natural incentive is to free ride and overuse these resources.
The really tricky part about fixing common pool resource problems is that we cannot do it on our own. One fisherman who decides to be a good citizen and not overfish will likely end up fish-less while the others overfish. The fishermen need to act collectively amongst themselves and agree on terms and policies that guarantee fairness and equity in fishery access. An office needs to collectively set rules and norms about how the shared fridge space works.
It is often tempting to treat our spirituality and our progress on the covenant path as something we can do completely on our own. The scriptures, however, teach us otherwise. One powerful theme running through the book of Jacob in the Book of Mormon is the idea that salvation is a community endeavor. Jacob teaches that sin is often rooted in deeper social and structural issues—particularly the sin of inequality—and that it is our responsibility to address those more structural root causes. LDS theologian Deidre Nicole Green states that
The work of reclaiming souls and creating a righteous society is not a solitary endeavor—it always involves a social component. (Green 2020, 32)
Addressing root causes through collective action is also necessary for good Christian stewardship of the earth. Again, it is really tempting to retreat toward individual action and believe that
As long as our intentions are good and our private code of conduct is sufficiently disciplined, we convince ourselves that we can ignore, or even deny, the existence of collectively created global pollutions, destructions, and injustices. (Handley, 72)
But we can’t do that. Just like how we cannot fix global pandemics through individual action alone, and how we cannot address sin through individual action alone, we cannot address both environmental and social degradation through individual action alone. By all means, do individual actions! Recycle! Conserve resources! Don’t over consume! Try driving less and biking or walking more! Spend more time in nature! Donate to or volunteer with nonprofit organizations that focus on helping the poor and the marginalized! Individual actions are necessary for being good stewards.
But collective actions that address the underlying forces that have led to environmental and social degradation—particularly inequality, which drives both pollution and marginalization—are also necessary. The Church has been a good example of getting involved in these deeper underlying issues. Many of the Church’s new meetinghouses and other buildings earn LEED certification, following national standards for environmentally friendly construction and design. The Church has weighed in on state-level environmental policy issues in Utah, particularly related to water use and air quality. Individual members of the Church continue to advocate for better environmental policies and social policies to help improve sustainability and reduce poverty.
Our twin spiritual duties of environmental stewardship and our responsibility to care for the poor are inextricably linked. There’s a deep connection between the way we treat the environment and the way we treat each other. And both issues—environmental and social—must be undertaken collectively in order to be effective.
We’ve explored two related questions. First, we’ve seen that this earth is more than just a convenient and pretty location for the test of mortality. Our Heavenly Parents created the earth specifically for our mortality. The earth is beautiful for its own sake, and we can find truth, joy, and personal transformation in that beauty. More importantly, we can become more like God because of that beauty.
Second, we’ve seen that God cares deeply about how we treat the earth, and that when we make it ugly, we offend God. We have responsibilities as stewards over the earth and are supposed to tend to and take care of nature. These stewardship responsibilities are not limited solely to environmental concerns though. Social challenges are closely linked to environmental challenges and as Christians, it is our responsibility to focus on both.
I encourage all of us (me included!) to make a more concerted effort to be good environmental stewards while simultaneously helping those who are most adversely affected by environmental crises. This is hard, but necessary work, and it requires both individual and collective actions, but it falls within our covenant responsibilities as members of the Church. And finally, I encourage all of us to seek out more wonder in the natural world. The earth truly is full of the goodness of the Lord and we can grow more like him by focusing more on this stage of mortality.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Green, Deidre Nicole. 2020. Jacob: A Brief Theological Introduction. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Handley, George B. 2020. The Hope of Nature: Our Care for God's Creations. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Nash, Marcus B. 2013. "Righteous Dominion and Compassion for the Earth." LDS Newsroom, April 12. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/elder-nash-stegner-symposium.