Category: Creation Care
Becoming a Perennial: A Conversation with Grace Olmstead
In Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind (March 2021) Grace tells the story of her hometown of Emmett, Idaho, where her great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived and farmed, and where her grandparents and parents still live. Through...
The Dust Bowl, Remembered
In clean, cool air the morning after a thunderstorm, while blazing pink and golden light spills over the horizon before becoming a deep cerulean crown over a sweltering summer afternoon, it is difficult to imagine the conditions in Texas only...
The Cost of Food in America
Americans often boast about the cheapness of their food. Here in the U.S., we spend less on food than any other country in the world (about six percent of our budget, on average). Even other first-world countries—like most European countries—devote...
The Virus and the Earth
Drawing attention during a global pandemic to the plight of air and water quality, endangered species, rising sea levels, and ecological sustainability might appear ill-timed at best, or grossly tone deaf at worst. While doctors and nurses labor under extreme...
Earth Day 2020: Toward a Humane Environmentalism
Earth Day has become a political Rorschach test. Whether the mention of this day summons images of pagans dancing naked around a flowery meadow or kids cleaning up plastic around the school yard depends on which way someone leans in...
Why Protecting Rivers is a Conservative Cause
Rivers play a pivotal role in our national imagination. In school, we learn about Abraham Lincoln’s travels on the Mississippi River, or Lewis and Clark’s passage along river routes toward the Pacific Ocean. From the Bible, we learn of the...
Farmers and Humanists in an Age of Crisis: Technology, Death, and Resurrection
As a teenager at my parents’ small-town church, I heard men in business suits express relief that they made it out of the farm where they grew up. “I got out,” they would say. The implication: I moved up. I...
An Interview with Laura Dunn, Director of “The Seer”
Tomorrow I hope to publish a brief review of Laura Dunn’s new film “The Seer.” It’s a unique film and a hard one to pin down because while it is a portrait of Wendell Berry, Berry himself is never actually...
Evangelicals are not modern gnostics. We’re materialists.
There’s a scene in HBO’s John Adams miniseries that remains one of the most succinct summaries of today’s defining cultural battle. The scene features the two guiding stars of the American founding, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The two friends are attending...
Genetically Modified Food: Mark Lynas and Your Inner Luddite
Earlier this month, Mark Lynas, a leading environmental campaigner and erstwhile anti-GM food crusader, delivered a lecture to the Oxford Farming Conference that brazenly combined penitence and pugnacity, offering a public recantation of his own views on GM food while...