Let There Be Less:
A Christian musing on nature, faith, and farmers’ markets

by Emily Ruppel
 

            Profligate.

When we think of nature, the green hills of our earthly home bursting forth with vegetation every spring, this isn’t the word we usually choose to describe our feelings of wonder and gratefulness. Recently I re-read some of my favorite nature essays, and in a literary move that continues to surprise and unnerve me, “profligate” is just the judgment essayist Annie Dillard passes on the natural world in a memorable chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the famous memoir of her time living alone in the woods of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

The more biology I learn, the more Dillard's sentiment resonates with me when on a walk or reading the latest from scientific journals. As every evolutionary biologist knows, death, competition, and random environmental pressure are the chief currencies of beautiful diversity. Yet these oft-gruesome mechanisms lay mostly hidden to the untrained eye—more often than not, what we see and celebrate with poems and paintings are only the thriving, unblemished survivors. Dillard writes: “Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil... This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”

Charles Darwin expressed similar frustration with our inability to apprehend and appreciate the enormity of the suffering that transpires daily and without comment in the world outside our windows. In The Origin of Species, he writes (beautifully), “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.... as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence...”

As a science enthusiast and as a Christian, I am awed, and humbled, and troubled by my easy existence upon a planet so palpably fraught with peril. I truly can’t imagine what it might be like to live in fear for more than a few moments at a time. I have never needed and gone long without warmth and safety. I have never in my life known hunger. The security of my enviable white, middleclass urbanite existence seems to place me so far outside the harsh grind of the natural world that I can’t help but feel a discomforting otherness when visiting forest and field for a break from the city’s concrete monoliths.

So much of what surrounds us is so easy to take for granted, including our own abrupt appearance in the drama of earth-bound biology. For a Christian, it would seem ignorance in the face of all this pain is problematic; we need not take the creation story literally to perceive that in it, we are called to watchfulness. A very basic reading of Genesis 1 and 2 will yield a sense that God watches over the world and charges us to do the same. Our responsibilities include, I think, understanding that for anything to survive, ourselves included, there must be sacrifices made on our behalf. For churchgoing folks, this will be a familiar theme.

It’s in trying to appreciate the scale of this necessary sacrifice that today has me befuddled, nonplussed. Darwin and Dillard protested all the unbelievable pain and waste in nature—or at least our willful unawareness of it. I’m no theologian but I’ve read a little on the theme of theodicy, or the problem of suffering in a world rumored to be watched over by a conscious divinity endowed with limitless power and love. In all that literature, one strand of consensus seems to be that there are absolutely no easy answers. Today, right now as I write this, our fellow human and animal cousins are suffering, suffering massively, for reasons that seem to coalesce in the frustrating proclamation that that is just the way things are.

But they are also suffering in ways that are entirely preventable, in many cases totally unnecessary. And that’s not problematic on a theological level, it’s problematic on an ethical one. This kind of suffering is not about survival, it’s about the unwillingness of those who possess the most power to live more simply, spend more frugally, and generally be aware of what our personal conveniences cost in more than mere dollars and cents. We don’t have to look hard or far, nor be very educated to see the effects of first-world manufacturing and eating habits on the animals whose homes we destroy or whose dignity we blithely obliterate in the name of “progress.” Must we in Christian watchfulness acknowledge the price of our daily meat and potatoes in the amount of animal suffering they cost and the vast, likely irreversible losses of biodiversity first-world creature comforts require—not to mention the costs to come if we can’t halt the tide of anthropogenic climate change?

Humans as a competitive species have evolved more faculties to dominate more ecological niches and master more natural resources than any animal that has ever come before us. Some will tell you these faculties and resources are God-given, and that our dominion over the earth includes appropriating what we like for our uses while we’re here (it’s all getting scrapped in the second coming, anyhow)!

I think our tendency to ignore, or worse, shrug our shoulders at the suffering of others is a misappropriation of our singular ability as human beings to make conscious, deliberate choices about the way we conduct our lives. While on a daily basis we may see ourselves as more apart than a part of nature, nothing we do has no effect upon our earthly home and those we share it with. Thinking of nature as that wild or pristine thing outside our windows is a gravely unwise way to view our privileged place in it.

As environmental scientist Stephanie Rutherford says quite well, “if we imagine ourselves as outside of nature, then there are only a very limited number of ways in which we can both interact with and work to preserve it. Nature becomes incarcerated, sequestered, set aside and spoken for. It becomes a place to visit, something we can walk away from. It becomes an experience to buy or an artifact to display. In short, what is forgotten in this neat narrative is that, in fact, animals, plants, bacteria, and so on, are lively, always already enmeshed in our daily lives, and co-constituting our very being in often taken-for-granted or unpredictable ways.”

As a Christian and as an animal with a conscience, whether evolved or gifted from a mindful divinity, I try (and often fail) to make choices that—at least in some way—can help reduce the gratuitous amount of pain that exists in my small corner of the universe. Not because it is explicitly required of me—but because I believe “loving the least of these” includes living more simply and more locally in as many ways as I reasonably can. This spring as the farmer’s markets open and it’s easier than ever to do so, I’d like to start moving my failures to the margins; I’d like to start making a more deliberate attempt to give back a portion of what I’ve been given to causes that help interrupt the graphic narrative of capitalist waste and add another vote to the already-strong movement for justice and love in the way we consume.

In a gesture that is, I hope, both meaningful and quantifiable, I plan to use the Judeo-Christian tradition of tithing to help me conceptualize this commitment and keep myself honest. While it's not necessarily mine to know what's being done with that other, more traditional, ten percent, committing ten percent of my monthly purchases to what one might call "loving consumption" is a promise I can make with even more confidence. With a ten percent spending commitment to loving consumption, I will know that portion of my income is going somewhere I can almost see: back to my community, back to businesses that support sustainability, back to farmers and manufacturers who don't just use ethics in production as a marketing ploy (Chipotle, I'm looking at you), but see it as inseparable from their reasons for going into business in the first place. I could, quite easily, source at minimum ten percent of everything I eat from farmers within a twenty-mile radius of my apartment, everything I buy from merchants and grocers who live in my community and whose products are certified cruelty-free. Meatless Monday is a growing tradition in American households; perhaps a gesture like this one could be even more meaningful to those of us who are trying to cultivate more sustainable habits in resonance with our Christian faith background.

We can (and probably should) picket the White House on these issues, we can (and definitely should) vote the way we hope will lead to change, but politics can be a hopelessly slow, obfuscated process overseen by public servants who, once sworn into office, seem to universally sell their beliefs for corporate sponsorship; by contrast, our dollars count. Literally. The more people clamor for ethically raised meats and unprocessed, untraveled fruits and vegetables in their diets, the more the businesses that really run this country will be obliged to invest in them. A small, ten percent change of diet and purchasing habits among the large Christian community in America could represent a groundswell of significant decisions that have real impact in real time on how our cities source their necessities and thus, how much we help or hurt our beastly brethren now and in the long run.

All this just to say: it doesn’t take much to be and feel involved in making our world a kinder, gentler place. While it won’t change the fact that “nature” will remain a rough neighborhood, we can make a few choices a day that lessen the price of our stay on this planet. To quote Annie Dillard a final time: “I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them…”

I hope someday to be able to see as eloquently as Annie Dillard sees—to walk outside and perceive without effort the bright, brutal gifts that besiege me at every pass. Nature not pure and package-able, but complex, cruciform. Humanity’s rarest privilege is probably not our singular claim to wisdom (as the Latin in our species designation “sapiens” suggests) but rather, our sole ability to apply a salve of sorts to the woundedness of all this wonder. Christ in his gentleness and compassion invites us, I think, to do so.

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Emily Ruppel has been writing novels since she was five years old, beginning with Blacky, (about a black horse), and quickly followed by Blacky Out West, neither of which can be purchased on Amazon.com. 

Yet.

Until that day comes, Emily will be living and working in Pittsburgh as a doctoral student in the Rhetoric of Science program at Pitt. If you've ever heard someone say, "The data speak for themselves," then you might know what's at the heart of Emily's research when she says: "No, they don't."

Before heading to Pittsburgh, Emily enjoyed serving as the Associate Director of Communications for the American Scientific Affiliation and as the Web Editor for The BioLogos Foundation. She continues the editing and publishing of God & Nature magazine as a freelance project for the ASA. Contact Emily with questions and comments at: emily@asa3.org