If you’re like me, you are well aware of the literary giants of the past, but seldom actually read their works.  And we are the poorer for it.  John Muir is one I always wanted to get around to reading, and finally have—to my enrichment.

In earlier posts I mentioned how, by his extremely harsh discipline and appalling reflection of the Christ he preached, Muir’s father, Daniel, had turned his son away from the church.  One of John Muir’s biographers, Edward Hoagland, remarked, “This amok Presbyterianism helped to estrange Muir from Christianity but not from religion, and paradoxically made him gentler toward everyone but himself.”  Hoagland, himself an accomplished nature writer, also had a poor attitude toward the Christianity he knew.  Both he and Muir decried “the emphasis Christianity placed on the afterlife at the expense of what seemed a proper reverence for life on earth.”

Hoagland in his introduction to Muir’s book The Mountains of California pointed out that well before Muir, Christianity had been seen even by some of its own adherents as having a totally inadequate understanding of our stewardship responsibilities regarding the creation of the God we claim to love and worship.  He quoted an earlier American naturalist: George Perkins Marsh.  In his book Man and Nature, Marsh “counterposed to the biblical theory that Nature was a wilderness mankind should ‘subdue and rule,’ the idea that ‘Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. . . .  We are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling. . . .  The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.’”

Ever heard the word “usufruct”?  I had not until I began reading Wendell Berry.  What a great word it is.  It means “the right to use and enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another as long as the property is not damaged.”  It’s what Thoreau did when he borrowed a neighbor’s ax and returned it to the man sharpened to a finer edge than when he received it.  And it is an apt description, I believe, of what we should be practicing regarding the natural world given over to us by our Creator to care for and use in a non-destructive manner—indeed, used in such a way that its value is enhanced rather than diminished.

But back to John Muir the bard:  Regardless of the mess his father made of the faith, Muir kept his belief in a loving God, and throughout his life he continued to utilize biblical terminology in his nature writings.  In The Mountains of California, the great naturalist spoke of the glaciation that created his beloved Yosemite Valley as the result of untold billions of snowflakes he called “flowers of the sky.”  Here is one of his many poetic descriptions about that awesome natural wonder:

Contemplating the works of these flowers of the sky, one may easily fancy them endowed with life: messengers sent down to work in the mountain mines on errands of divine love.  Silently flying through the darkened air, swirling, glinting, to their appointed places, then seem to have taken counsel together, saying, “Come, we are feeble: let us help one another.  We are many, and together we may be strong.  Marching in close, deep ranks, let us roll away the stones from these mountain sepulchers, and set the landscapes free.  Let us uncover these clustering domes.  Here let us carve a lake basin; there a Yosemite Valley; here a channel for a river with fluted steps and brows for the plunge of songful cataracts.  Yonder let us spread broad sheets of soil, that man and beast may be fed; and here pile trains of boulders for pines and giant sequoias.  Here make ground for a meadow; there for a garden and grove, making it smooth and fine for small daisies and violets and beds of heathy bryanthus, spicing it well with crystals, garnet feldspar, and zircon.”  Thus and so on it has oftentimes seemed to me sang and planned and labored the hearty snow-flower crusaders; and nothing that I can write can possibly exaggerate the grandeur and beauty of their work.

Sitting here growing weary of a long and hard winter that still has an aggregation of “snow flowers” a foot deep outside my door, I have to confess that Muir has stirred up a great longing in my soul for another visit to that awe-inspiring “theater of God’s glory” (using the words of John Calvin, a far better balanced “Presbyterian” than Daniel Muir.)

See you outdoors!

Dean

We didn’t have animal rescue centers in our town when I was a kid—just the “dog pound.” As the name implies, dogs were considered the animal most worthy of rescue.  They may have taken cats, reluctantly.  The fact of which was impressed upon my young mind when pulling a burlap sack out of Butler Creek, I opened it to discover a few rocks and a half dozen drowned kittens.  Shocked and indignant, I vowed to myself to be an animal rescuer.

My first endeavor in that pursuit was to “rescue” a nestful of baby mice I’d discovered under an old board pile: eight or ten little “pinkies.”  I had always heard the country legend that if you disturbed a nest of whatever sort, the mother would not return.  So now I was obliged to care for the squirming little creatures.  I picked up the nest with all its downy plant material and brought it home.  Finding an old berry box and some cotton batting, I made a wonderful new nest; and to keep it warm, I placed it on the top of the fridge where the heat rises from the coils.  Seeing them calm and content, I went on to other kid’s business.

Now my mother was a screamer—a really loud screamer when she was startled.  Heart-stopping screams, which is what I soon heard from the kitchen.  Then her summons:

“DA,” (short for Dean Alan), “come here right now!”

I had two older brothers, but why she immediately suspected this little “nature boy” was a suspicion well justified, given past events.

“What in the world is this?” she asked, holding the berry box and the poor little pinkies now aroused—and deafened—by Mother’s having discovered them by foolishly sticking her fingers in the mystery box before looking.  So I had to explain to her that I was now the surrogate mother to the mice—my having disturbed the nest and for sure causing their mother to abandon them.

Blood pressure now more normal, she continue the query:  “O, so you are now going to feed ten little mice until they can feed themselves?  Do you know that a mouse probably nurses her babies every half hour?  Are you going to get up at night every half hour and nurse baby mice?  Did you notice how little their mouths are?  What are you going to find that’s small enough to feed them with?

At that point I was feeling a lot like Job being question by God about what he thought he knew about the creation.  I mumbled a suggestion about using my sister’s doll bottles, the tiny little ones girls used then for their clever toy infants, which had little round mouth holes where water from the bottle would go down a plastic tube through the body to wet their miniature diapers.

My sincere suggestion was cut off by Mother’s cruel laughter—cruel because of what she then suggested: “No, you’re going to have to kill them; and the most merciful way is to flush them down the toilet.”  I was horrified at the thought—my dismay made more intense by the growing realization that my first rescue was not going to be successful.  But I sure was not going to drown them.  I knew how ugly animal drowning was.  I offered a counter plan: I would gas them.

“Gas them with what,” she asked with amused skepticism.

“Carbon monoxide,” was my reply.  And, believe it or not, after explaining my quickly devised plan, Mom turned the whole euthanasia project over to me and my oldest brother, Dick, who knew how to drive—at 14 and illegally [Our dad was a car dealer].  Dick would start the car, and I would put the mice in the tailpipe until they went to sleep for the last time.  Simple and merciful.

Sadly, the endeavor was not that.  Poor communication between the back of the car and the driver’s seat resulted in my inability to stuff a rag in the tailpipe behind the mice before Dick started the car.  Quick ignition and a mighty V-8 “vahrooom” sent the poor little pinkies out across the asphalt as though fired from a cannon, which required me and my friends who had gathered for the mercy killing to have to end their misery by killing  them with quick stomps.

Because we associate mice with unhealthful home conditions and generally kill them whenever we discover them, most folks laugh when I tell that story.  Good riddance, we think: pinkies grow up to be dirty rodents.  In a sense, though, the story is an illustration of how our carelessness, disinterest, and ignorance of God’s creation often cause great and unnecessary misery for His other creatures.  While I didn’t know the story of Job’s divine correction when I was eight, I do now.  And I’m grateful that the Creator has allowed me to live long enough to gain a far greater appreciation of all animals and their place in His economy—and in His heart of compassion.

“The eyes of all look to you [Lord], and you give them their food at the proper time.  You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. . . .   The Lord is good to all; and he has compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:16, 9)

See you outdoors!

Dean

While the extreme cold temperatures in Grand Rapids are moderating and the sun is shining today, our condo is getting colder: yesterday the furnace fan stopped working.  When Marge and I left the place for work this morning, the house thermometer was down to 62°.  So until the furnace repairman comes tomorrow morning, it will indeed be cold comfort for us at home.  “So where is global warming when you need it?” I thought to myself.

Ironically, when I came to work this morning one of the first conversations I had was to respond to a question: “So, Dean, how does this record cold and snow fit into the global warming theory?” The best answer I could offer was something like, “Well, the climate-change people say that one of the characteristics of global warming would be wild fluctuations of temperature and precipitation—given that patterns we have come to accept as standard will change: jet streams, hemispheric air circulation, ocean currents, and so forth.  So who knows?”

That got me to thinking about how a Bible-believing follower of Christ might think about global warming.  Here’s my thinking about it today:

1.  Science can never be 100 percent certain of its conclusions. One of the drawbacks of basing our behavior on the conclusions of science is that while it is one of the most certain of all disciplines, it can never have complete knowledge of all the variables and possibilities.  The majority of climate specialists tell us that global warming is happening and that it is likely caused in large part by the behavior of human beings.  But some scientists believe it may be caused mostly by the sun becoming hotter, or some other factor.  The difference between those two conclusions, however, has critical implications: we can do something about human behavior; we can do nothing about a hotter sun. Aristotle gave us an important truth that relates to this: It is better to act in a timely fashion on a fact half-proved than to wait until it is too late to act on a fact fully substantiated.  We love certainty, but the truth is that many of the decisions we are required to make have to be made in the absence of total certainty.

2.  Regardless of whether or not we can prove we’re causing global warming, we know that some things humans do are not good for us or for the earth. We know that we should not keep tilling into our soil what is harmful for us to ingest, pouring into our water what we should not drink, and emitting into the air with what we should not inhale.  On these matters, the science is a lot more certain.  For all we know, global warming may not be nearly as harmful as the consequences of other human practices, the facts of which we currently have little definitive scientific knowledge.

So my conclusion is not to argue or fuss about the big upper story question about whether or not people are causing harmful climate change, but to look to the ground level questions about what we can do to keep the biosphere as pure and healthful as God made it.  Old evangelist Bob Jones, Sr. told a great story that applies here [my having heard it once or twice every year I was at Bob Jones University!]:

A stagecoach company was seeking to hire new drivers for its hazardous route through the mountains.  The hiring agent asked several job seekers just how close they could drive a team of horses and a stagecoach to the edge of a precipice.  Most bragged about their skills: three feet, two feet, one foot, even six inches.  None of them got the job.  The only one hired was the guy who said, “I have absolutely no idea how close I can drive to the cliff side; I always drive as close to the mountain side as I possibly can.”

The purpose of this post is not to start a debate about global warming or even suggest what followers of Christ must do to either address or not address it.  It’s merely to suggest a couple ways we can approach the question.  I’d love comments on whether or not my thinking here is reasonably and biblically sound, but I wouldn’t want the post to lead us into the great debate on the causes or even the reality of global warming.  There are dozens of Websites dedicated to that.

See you outdoors,

Dean

This story by Dr. Paul Brand has appeared in many publications since the early eighties.  It was the one that first touched my heart and set me on the path as an advocate of creation care—as it has numerous others.  You can read it in its entirety in RBC’s Discovery Series booklet “God’s Good Earth.” And you can watch his story on RBC’s Day of Discovery webpage.  You may recall that Dr. Brand and Philip Yancey collaborated on the book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. If you’ve never read the story, you are in for a treat.  If you have, it is still a joy to read again.

See you outdoors!

Dean

A Handful of Mud

I grew up in the mountains of South India. My parents were missionaries to the tribal people of the hills, and our lives were about as simple as they could be-and as happy.

There were no roads. (We never saw a wheeled vehicle except on our annual visit to the plains.) There were no stores, no electricity, no plumbing. My sister and I ran barefoot, and we made our own games from the trees, sticks, and stones around us. Our playmates were the Indian boys and girls, and our lives were much the same as theirs.

Rice was an important food for all of us. And since there was no level ground for wet cultivation, it was grown all along the streams that ran down the land’s gentle slopes. These slopes had been patiently terraced hundreds of years before; and now every one was perfectly level, and bordered at its lower margin by an earthen dam covered by grass. Each narrow dam served as a footpath across the line of terraces, with a level field of mud and water six inches below its upper edge and another level terrace two feet below. There were no steep or high drop-offs, so there was little danger of collapse.

Those rice paddies were a rich soup of life. When there was plenty of water there would be a lot of frogs and little fish. Egrets would stalk through the paddy fields on their long legs and enjoy the feast. Kingfishers would swoop down with a flash of color and carry off a fish from under the beak of a heron.

And it was here I learned my first lesson on conservation.

I was playing in the mud of a rice field with a half-dozen other little boys. We were racing to see who would be the first to catch three frogs. It was a wonderful way to get dirty from head to foot in the shortest possible time. Suddenly, we were all scrambling to get out of the paddy. One of the boys had spotted an old man walking across the path toward us. We all knew him as “Tata,” or “Grandpa.” He was the keeper of the dams. He walked slowly, and was stooped over a bit as though he were always looking at the ground. Old age is very much respected in India, and we boys shuffled our feet and waited in silence for what we knew would be a rebuke.

He came over to us and asked us what we were doing. “Catching frogs,” we answered. He stared down at the churned-up mud and flattened young rice plants in the corner where we had been playing. I was expecting him to talk about the rice seedlings we had just spoiled. Instead, the elder stooped down and scooped up a handful of mud. “What is this?” he asked. The biggest boy took the responsibility of answering for us all.

“It’s mud, Tata,” he replied.

“Whose mud is it?” the old man asked.

“It’s your mud, Tata, this is your field.”

Then the old man turned and looked at the nearest of the little channels across the dam. “What do you see there, in that channel?”

“That is water, running over into the lower field.”

For the first time Tata looked angry. “Come with me and I will show you water.” A few steps along the dam he pointed to the next channel, where clear water was running, “That is what water looks like,” he said. Then we came back to our nearest channel, and he said again “Is that water?”

We hung our heads. “No, Tata, that is mud.” The older boy had heard all this before and did not want to prolong the question-and-answer session, so he hurried on. “And the mud from your field is being carried away to the field below, and it will never come back, because mud always runs downhill, never up again. We are sorry, Tata, and we will never do this again.”

Tata was not ready to stop his lesson as quickly as that, however. He went on to tell us that just one handful of mud would grow enough rice for one meal for one person, and it would do it twice every year for years and years into the future. “That mud flowing over the dam has given my family food since before I was born, and before my grandfather was born. It would have given my grandchildren and their grandchildren food forever. Now it will never feed us again. When you see mud in the channels of water, you know that life is flowing away from the mountains.”

The old man walked slowly back across the path, pausing a moment to adjust with his foot the grass clod in our muddy channel so that no more water flowed through it. We were silent and uncomfortable as we went off to find some other place to play. I had experienced a dose of traditional Indian folk education that would remain with me as long as I lived. Soil is life, and every generation is responsible for all generations to come.

The hand of man

I have been back to my childhood home several times. There have been changes. A road now links the hill people with the plains folk, but traditional ways still go on. The terraced paddy fields still hold back the mud. Rice still grows. And the old man the boys call “Tata” is now one of the boys I used to play with 65 years ago. I am sure he lays down the law when he catches someone churning up the mud, and I hope the system holds for years to come. I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

The Nilgiri hills, or Blue Mountains, were a favorite resort in the hot season for missionaries from the plains. They were steep and thickly forested, with few areas level enough for cultivation, even with terraces. The forestry service allowed no clearing of the trees except where tea, coffee, or fruit trees were to be planted. These bushes and trees, in turn, held the soil-and all was well.

Thirty years after my encounter with “Tata” I was back in India, a doctor and a missionary myself, with a wife and growing family. We began going to the Nilgiris for every summer holiday, and our children reveled in the cool air and lush forests. But something was different, or soon became so.

A new breed of landowners had begun to take possession of the land. These new “farmers”-former political prisoners who, following India’s independence, were given tracts of land-had not farmed before. They had never been exposed to a Tata teaching them the value of mud. They wanted to make money, and make it fast. They knew the climate was ideal for potatoes, and that there was a market for such a crop. Forests were thus cleared on sloping land, and potatoes planted. Two and even three crops could be harvested per year, and money flowed freely into their purse.

But harvesting potatoes involves turning over the soil, and monsoon rains often came before a new crop could hold that soil. Not surprisingly then, as my family and I returned to those mountains of boyhood memory, the water now looked like chocolate syrup. It oozed rather than flowed. We were seeing rivers of mud. I felt sick.

I went over to ask old Mr. Fritschi and his wife, a dear Swiss couple living in Coonoor on the Nilgiri hills, about the havoc that was being wrought and to find out if there was anything we could do. They had been missionaries of the Basel Mission but were long retired and now owned a nursery of young plants and trees. They loved to help and advise farmers and gardeners about ways to improve their crops. It seemed to me that these devoted people would know if there was some way to advise the landowners about ways to save their soil.

Mr. Fritschi’s eyes were moist as he told me, “I have tried, but it is no use. They have no love of the land, only of money. They are making a lot of money, and they do not worry about the loss of soil, because they think it is away in the future, and they will have money to buy more.” Besides, he continued, they can deduct the loss of land from their income tax as business depreciation.

Thirty more years have passed and we have left India. But every year I go back to visit Vellore Christian Medical College and take part in the leprosy work there. I do not, however, enjoy going back to the Nilgiri hills. I look up to those slopes and see large areas of bare rock of no use to anybody. Those deforested areas that still have some soil look like gravel. And the clear streams and springs that ran off from these areas 60 years earlier are dry to day. When the rains come they rush in torrents and flood, then they go dry.

Oh Tata! Where have you gone? You have been replaced by businessmen and accountants who have degrees in commerce and who know how to manipulate tax laws. You have been replaced by farmers who know about pesticides and chemical fertilizers, but who care nothing about leaving soil for their great-grandchildren.

NOTE:  Dr. Brand would be delighted to know that with a great deal of effort and time, the Nilgiris are being reclaimed.  Though the paddies are gone, the hills are now filled with tea plantations.

When I opened the eastern drapes this morning I became a delighted observer of a phenomenon that happens only a few days a year.  The sky was cloudless, the wind was calm, the sun’s rays were still low, the snow reflection was blinding, and there were no degrees on the thermometer: the official Grand Rapids temperature was 0.0.  Those weather factors create the effect of turning the moisture in the air into dust-sized crystals that tumble, turn, and twist in the sunshine in such sparkling splendor that nearly all who see it are virtually unanimous in their choice of metaphor: dancing diamonds.

It’s one of those days, however, that you’re glad to be mostly an indoors observer.

And it is one of those days that virtually compels you to your reading chair (Friday being my “day off”).  I could not resist the compulsion, and picked up the David Grayson book I’ve been reading month by month.  It is titled The Countryman’s Year, published by Doubleday in 1936.  Its chapters are the twelve months of the year.  I finished “December” around Christmas time, and started “January” last night—finishing the month this morning.  “David Grayson” is the pen name chosen by Ray Stannard Baker for books he wrote about the simple agrarian life.  He was a successful journalist who eventually settled down on a gentleman’s farm in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his unmarried sister. He makes many references to his desk, where he composed dozens of articles and many books—a couple of which earned him a Pulitzer Prize: a multi-volume biography of Woodrow Wilson.  His Grayson books, however, are no doubt what allowed him to be a gentleman farmer and not have to farm for a living.  The books he sold by 1936 totalled 750,000—an amazing number for the Depression era.

I’m thinking that the WOC community might enjoy some of his “January” thoughts, his chapters being mostly composed of journal-type snippets.  You will note from many of these what the writer of Ecclesiastes concluded: “there is nothing new under the sun.”

[Written at the end of the Great Depression] Consider, after losses of goods of money—am I not the same man I was yesterday?  Have I not the same friends, the same passion of interest, as for nature, books, or music?  Have I not still my thoughts, my occupation?  Have I not my dear family?

One of the things that irritates me extremely—in short, makes me angry [me too!]—is the insulting disregard, common in this country, of natural beauty.  Piles of old tin cans and rubbish dumped in a beautiful roadside brook—I know of such a case—motorcars left to rust in open meadows—fine trees needlessly hacked to make way for eyesore telephone poles—all billboards whatsoever!—these things are evidence of our lack of civilization.

Sorrow is often the price we pay for love: it is worth it.

Blessed that man who has a citadel in his own soul: a place where, having fought, he may retire in peace.

Not long ago I ran across an excellent addition to the litany proposed by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (1930) which ought also to be adopted in this country:  “From all destroyers of natural beauty in this parish and everywhere: from all polluters of earth, air, and water: from all makers of visible abominations: from jerry-builders [builders using inferior workmanship to build inferior structures], disfiguring advertisements, road hogs, and spreaders of litter: from the villainies of the rapacious and the incompetencies of the stupid; from the carelessness of individuals and somnolence of Local Authorities: from all foul smells, noises, and sights—good Lord deliver us!”

Observation without sympathy never leads to comprehension—oftener to apprehension.

Tenderness of understanding is often wanting in men of intellectual power.  They are without pity, and without pity the world is iron and frost.

The new magic words now sweeping the world are “control,” “management.”  We are taking or trying to take vast new domains of human life out of the realm of accident and chance.  Birth is to be controlled, money managed, industry planned, production regulated.  I sat today for a long time listening: I heard no one say anything about self-control.

You can find some of Grayson’s (Baker’s) books online here.

See you outdoors!

Dean