From the start the environmental movement has included voices that wanted to bear witness to a spiritual dimension in the stewardship of the planet. Sometimes that dimension seems to amount to little more than the awe human beings sense when faced with the grandeur, beauty and order of the world. At other times various eastern monistic or naturalistic pagan notions are introduced, wanting to account for the fact that more than technical, scientific, economic, and political issues are at stake. I sympathize with these efforts because I am convinced that not only does creation, in the words of the ancient Hebrew poet, “declare the glory of God,” but that, even more starkly, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” We are stewards of God’s good world, and the foundational command to work and tenderly care for the earth remains in effect.

            In recent years the mainstream movement to care for the earth has tended, at least in my hearing in the media, to become increasingly secularized and politicized. Although there are important and lovely exceptions, even many of the voices in the church have been cast in this mold.

            One voice that has resisted this unfortunate tendency is Wendell Berry. He speaks quietly but powerfully from a distinctly Christian perspective, and does so in a way that even those who reject the faith often pause to listen. Thus I was glad when the February 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine—a periodical not known for its sympathy to historic Christianity—arrived with a lengthy excerpt from Berry’s new book, Our Only World.

            A brief excerpt from that excerpt:

            We need to acknowledge the formlessness inherent in the analytic science that divides creatures into organs, cells, and ever smaller parts or particles according to its technological capacities.

            I recognize the possibility and existence of this knowledge, even its usefulness, but I also recognize the narrowness of its usefulness and the damage it does. I can see that in a sense it is true, but also that its truth is small and far from complete.

            In and by all my thoughts and acts, I am opposed to any claim that such knowledge is adequate to the sustenance of human life or the health of the ecosphere.

            Do even the professionals and experts believe in it, in the sense of acting on it in their daily lives? I doubt that they do.

            To this science, the body is an assembly of parts provisionally joined, a “basket case” sure enough. A mountain is a heap of “resources” unfortunately mixed with substances that are not marketable.

            There is an always-significant difference between knowing and believing. We may know that the earth turns, but we believe, as we say, that the sun rises. We know by evidence, or by trust in people who have examined the evidence in a way that we trust is trustworthy. We may sometimes be persuaded to believe by reason, but within the welter of our experience reason is limited and weak. We believe always by coming, in some sense, to see. We believe in what is apparent, in what we can imagine or “picture” in our minds, in what we feel to be true, in what our hearts tell us, in experience, in stories — above all, perhaps, in stories.

            We can, to be sure, see parts and so believe in them. But there has always been a higher seeing that informs us that parts, in themselves, are of no worth. Genesis is right: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The phrase “be alone” is a contradiction in terms. A brain alone is a dead brain. A man alone is a dead man.

            We are thus as likely to be wrong in what we know as in what we believe.

            We may know, or think we know, and often say, that humans are “only” animals, but we teach our children specifically human virtues — evidently because we believe that they are not “only” animals.

            Another question of knowledge and belief that keeps returning to my mind is this: Are there not some things that cannot be known apart from belief? This question refers not just to matters of religion — as in Job 19:25: “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” — but also to ordinary motives of family and community life, such as love, compassion, and forgiveness. Do people who believe that such motives are genetically determined have the same knowledge as people who believe that they are the results of choice, culture, cultivation, and discipline? Or: Do people who believe in the sanctity or intrinsic worth of the world and its creatures have the same knowledge as people who recognize only market value? If there is no way to measure or prove such differences of knowledge, that does at least prove one of my points: There is more to us than some of us suppose.

            We may know the anatomy of the body down to the anatomy of atoms, and yet we love and instruct our children as whole persons. And we accept an obligation to help them to preserve their wholeness, which is to say their health. This is not an obligation that we can safely transfer to the subdivided and anatomizing medical industry, not even for the sake of cures. Cures, to industrial medicine, are marketable products extractable from bodies. To cure in this sense is not to heal. To heal is to make whole, and is not so ideologically definable or so technologically possible or so handily billable.

            This applies as well to the industries of landscapes: agriculture, forestry, and mining. Once they have been industrialized, these enterprises no longer recognize landscapes as wholes, let alone as the homes of people and other creatures. They regard landscapes as sources of extractable products. They become forms of surface mining. They have “efficiently” shed any other interest or concern.

            We have come to this by way of the disembodiment of thought — a mentalization, almost a puritanization, of thought — that deprives us of the physical basis for a sympathy that might join us kindly to landscapes and their creatures, including their human creatures. This purity or sublimity of thought is hard to understand, for it has come about under the sponsorship of materialism. Perhaps it happened because materialists, instead of assigning ultimate value to materiality as would have been reasonable, have abstracted “material” to “mechanical,” and thus have removed from it all bodily or creaturely attributes. Or perhaps the abstracting impulse branched in either of two directions: one toward the mechanical, the other toward the financial, which is to say toward the so-called economy of money as opposed to the actual economy (oikonomia, or “house-keeping”) of goods. Either way the result is the same: the scientific-industrial culture, founded nominally upon materialism, arrives at a sort of fundamentalist disdain for material reality. The living world is then treated as dead matter, the worth of which is determined exclusively by the market.

            This highly credentialed, highly politicized disdain, now allied with the similar disdain of highly spiritualized religions, is limitlessly destructive. We cannot say that its destructiveness has been unnoticed as it has been happening, or that the dissolutions, and the dissoluteness, of mechanical thought have not been, by some, well understood. The poet William Butler Yeats prayed: “God guard me from the thoughts men think / In the mind alone” (“A Prayer for Old Age”).

…The history of the lawn begins at least 900 years ago in Great Britain and Northern France, both of which have maritime climates with relatively mild winters and warm humid summers that are ideal for many different grasses. In its inception, the word ‘lawn’ may have referred to communal grazing pastures—clearings in the woods where sheep and other livestock continually munched wild grass into submission. Even today, some place names retain the memory of these early lawns: Balmer Lawn in England, for example, encompasses 500 acres of grass pasture. Soon enough, people found other uses for grasses: aesthetics, sport and leisure. King Henry II (1113 to 1189) had gardens at Clarendon Palace that boasted ‘a wealth of lawns’ and Henry III (1216 – 1272) ordered laborers to slice up tracts of naturally occurring turf and transplant them to his palace. The world’s oldest bowling green, in Southampton, England, has been maintained since at least 1299.

            In ancient times, lawns were not always expanses of unbroken green, however. Some medieval paintings of gardens depict carpets of turfgrass stippled with various flowers, such as lily of the valley, poppies, cowslips, primroses, wild strawberries, violets, daisies, and daffodils. People walked, danced and relaxed on these flowery meads, which were meant to imitate natural meadows. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans used white clover, chamomile, thyme, yarrow, self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) and other low-growing meadow and groundcover plants—sometimes mixed with grasses—to create lawns and pathways on which to walk and mingle. In the early 1900s, a weed known as cotula (Leptinella dioica) began invading bowling lawns in New Zealand. When the groundsman of the Caledonian Bowling Club tried to get rid of the weed by scarifying the lawn, he only quickened its spread. Rugby players noticed, however, that they ran faster and played better on the tightly knit, smooth carpet formed by the weed than on grass. By 1930, Caledonian Bowling Club replaced all its grass with cotula; other clubs did the same.

            For most of history, however, mixed plant lawns and non-grass lawns have been the exception, in part because a smooth, well-kept, lush grass lawn became as much a symbol as a functional part of one’s property. In the early 19th century, vast grass lawns surrounding manors were not only aesthetically pleasing—providing unobstructed views of an estate—they were also further proof of wealth. To keep their lawns neat and trim, British aristocrats and landed gentry had to look after grazing animals—most commonly a flock of sheep—or hire laborers to slice through overgrown grass with scythes….

Halloween costs. Someone has projected the numbers for Halloween purchases in 2012. I suppose it has to be done so companies know how much to produce and stores can plan for shelf space and sales. I hope we can Skype with the grandchildren or at least see pictures of their costumes—I only wish they lived close enough to come scare some candy out of us. In any case, Halloween spending is projected for 2012 as follows:

            Candy: $1.94 billion

            Decorations: $1.89 billion

            Adult costumes: $1.21 billion

            Children’s costumes: $1.05 billion

            Cards: $340 million

            Pet costumes: $93.1 million

Desire for relationships. Wherever we look today there is the debris of fragmented relationships littering the landscape. Divorce, abandonment, abuse exist both without and within the church. It is not entirely surprising, then, to learn that 50% of single Americans under thirty believe marriage is “becoming obsolete.” And since they remain God’s image bearers, it is not entirely surprising to learn that 19 out of 20 of those single Americans under thirty want to get married.

Security & freedom. It does not take a lot of scholarly reasoning to realize that increasing security measures in a society can result in a loss of or decrease in freedom. Knowing this, of course, is not an automatic reason to oppose any particular security measure, but it does suggest that unless a free people remain vigilant an honest desire for greater security can erode their freedoms indefinitely. Though thoughtful citizens may disagree on where the point is, surely some point must exist beyond which added security is too costly in terms of the loss of freedom it entails. Perhaps I am missing something, but this discussion seems to be absent, or is so politicized as to be worse than useless. And that does not bode well for the future. Here’s a fact that may be useful for this discussion, should it begin: The U.S. Border Patrol can legally perform warrantless searches 100 miles from land and maritime borders, within which slice of the country 2/3 of all Americans live.

The Dead Sea died. Scientists have drilled down into the lakebed of the Dead Sea, extracting cores that allow them to study the history of the lake. Over the past several decades the Dead Sea has been shrinking, and researchers have disagreed as to whether it could dry up completely. In the core, 253 meters (830 feet) down, they found smooth pebbles that suggest the Sea was once completely dry. The pebbles sat on top of 45 meters (148 feet) of salt, the amount that researchers believe would be left today if the Dead Sea dried completely. “The researchers estimate that the lake vanished 120,000 years ago. A warmer climate at that time could have dried up the Dead Sea's water sources. Today the Dead Sea is threatened again, this time by the diversion of water from the Jordan River for irrigation and other uses. Now fed only by mountain runoff and underwater springs, the Dead Sea dropped 10 meters between 1997 and 2008.”

Sources: Halloween spending in “Datastream: in Wired (October 2012); Marriage data from “Harper’s Index” in Harper’s Magazine (February 2011) page 11; Border Patrol data from “Harper’s Index” in Harper’s Magazine (February 2011) page 11; “Dead Sea once turned to dust” in Science News (December 31, 2011) page 9.

“There has never been a more effective killing machine. Researchers estimate that mosquitoes have been responsible for half the deaths in human history. Malaria accounts for much of the mor­tality, but mosquitoes also transmit scores of other potentially fatal infections, in­cluding yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, lymphatic filariasis, Rift Val­ley fever, West Nile fever, and several types of encephalitis. Despite our tech­nical sophistication, mosquitoes pose a greater risk to a larger number of people today than ever before. Like most other pathogens, the viruses and parasites borne by mosquitoes evolve rapidly to re­sist pesticides and drugs.”

These quotes are from an informative and fascinating article on dengue fever [The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2012, pages 38-46] and a new approach to wiping out the species of mosquito—the Aedes aegypti—that carry it.

“As adults, the mosquitoes are eerily beautiful: jet black, with white spots on the thorax and white rings on their legs. Yet Aedes are among the deadliest creatures on earth. Before a vaccine was discovered in the nineteen-thirties, the mosquito transmitted the yellow-fever virus to millions of people, with devastating efficiency. During the Spanish-American War, U.S. troops suffered more casualties from yellow fever than from enemy fire. The mosquito also carries dengue, one of the most rapidly spreading viral diseases in the world. According to the World Health Organization, dengue infects at least fifty million people a year. For the fortunate, a case of dengue resembles a mild form influenza. But more than half a million people become seriously ill from the disease. Many develop dengue shock syndrome or a hemorrhagic fever that leaves them vomiting and, often, bleeding from the nose, mouth, or skin. The pain can be so excruciating that the virus has commonly invoked nickname: break-bone fever.”

There is no cure for dengue, not even any adequate treatment. We may be hearing more about it in the media because the Aedes has invaded the United States, bringing dengue, as our world has become increasingly globalized. Which raises three questions for me.

First, since I have not been particularly troubled by this problem while it remained primarily outside the U.S., is my interest in the topic now ethically compromised as a Christian?

Second, if the apparently best solution to the problem of eradicating the Aedes lies in releasing billions of genetically modified mosquitos into infected areas, does the benefit of this approach (Aedes populations drop dramatically) outweigh potential risks (though scientists have built in safeguards, no one can fully predict all possible effects the modified creatures will have once released into the wild)?

And third, many people fear this sort of advance in science. Rather than studying nature, they say, scientists here are playing God, not only seeking to change living creatures in fundamental ways, but seeking to wipe out an entire species. For the Christian, that translates into remembering that God called his creation “good” before the fall. Dengue fever is an obvious result of that fall, but that does not make the Aedes evil. Can we justify eradicating them? And if the answer is Yes, where is the bright line over which we will not step to destroy other species that we find troublesome?

Further reading: “Mosquitoes Remade” in Science News (July 14, 2012) pages 22-26; and the World Health Organization on dengue fever online (www.who.int/topics/dengue/en/)