Refugia Faith

Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth

Debra Rienstra, Debra Rienstra

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506473796
• eBook ISBN: 9781506473802
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth explores how Christian spirituality and practice must adapt to prepare for life on a climate-altered planet.

Refugia (reh-FU-jee-ah) is a biological term describing places of shelter where life endures in times of crisis, such as a volcanic eruption, fire, or stressed climate. Ideally, these refugia endure, expand, and connect so that new life emerges.

Debra Rienstra applies this concept to human culture and faith, asking, In this era of ecological devastation, how can Christians become people of refugia? How can we find and nurture these refugia, not only in the biomes of the earth, but in our human cultural systems and in our spiritual lives? How can we apply all our love and creativity to this task as never before?

Rienstra recounts her own process of reeducation--beginning not as a scientist or an outdoors enthusiast but by examining the wisdom of theologians and philosophers, farmers and nature writers, scientists and activists, and especially people on the margins.

By weaving nature writing, personal narrative, and theological reflection, Rienstra grapples honestly with her own fears and longings and points toward a way forward--a way to transform Christian spirituality and practice, become a healer on a damaged earth, and inspire others to do the same.

Chapter 1

From Despair to Preparation

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.

—Psalm 96:12

I’m in my car, of course, because 28th Street is no place to be on foot. I’m on my way to Meijer, the original one-stop-shopping megastore. Long before Walmart, the Meijer chain (pronounced “Meyer”) began with a little grocery business opened in 1934 by Fred Meijer right here in Grand Rapids. In fact, the Meijer location I usually patronize was built on the site of that original store. Today there are more than 250 megastore locations throughout Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. You can get all your groceries at Meijer, plus baby booties, air filters, lawn chairs, goldfish (the living kind as well as the little crackers), video games, earbuds, gardening gloves, hammers, work boots, panty hose, greeting cards, live orchids, booze of all sorts, lottery tickets, laundry baskets, and lamps. Your prescription drugs too. There’s a pharmacy, a bank branch, and a nail salon. “If Meijer doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.” That’s what we say in West Michigan.

We have Costco too, and I like shopping there. I appreciate buying in bulk. It’s convenient and efficient. If I have to go to Costco and Meijer, then I’ll head east out 28th Street and go to the big Cascade Meijer across from the Costco. It’s right by Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods, past the Home Depot. On my way out there, I’ll pass car dealerships, dozens of restaurants, gas stations and oil-change joints, two big malls, a couple strip malls, a Bed Bath & Beyond. Our house is located in a pleasant residential neighborhood only a couple miles from 28th Street, and thus we enjoy easy access to any shopping we need. From my yard, I can hear the traffic noise from 28th Street, but it’s fine. I’m used to it.

I’m also used to the ugliness of 28th Street. I don’t even think about it. Two lanes of traffic each way plus the middle “suicide lane” for left turns, utility poles lining each side, a jungle of power cables strung across and along the road, traffic lights about every quarter mile, a riot of signs filling my view for miles ahead. Apart from the sad excuse for grass struggling to grow in the curb strips, everything is paved as far as I can see. There’s a sidewalk carved out between the big-box-store parking lots and the roaring streams of traffic. One feels sorry for people who need to walk down it. Here and there, trees that look like lone survivors of an asphalt invasion breathe acrid exhaust from cars and trucks. Some businesses attempt to cultivate a few flower planters near their doors or some hardy daylilies at the bases of their thirty-foot signs. Otherwise, it’s asphalt, concrete, metal, and electric light everywhere you look.

Behold the pinnacle of postindustrial consumer capitalism, at least the end-user part of it. It doesn’t exactly feed the soul, but as I say, it’s convenient. I rarely think about the land beneath the asphalt or what’s been destroyed or what’s missing. Woods? Was this place covered with eastern white pine before White people settled here? Maybe it was one of Michigan’s famous oak openings? Were there wetlands with herons and frogs and fish? Did Ottawa clans establish seasonal camps here? I have no idea. Does it matter now? As far as I remember, it’s always been 28th Street.

The standard North American middle-class lifestyle—affluent, comfortable, even fun—is the simultaneously wondrous and absurd culmination of human struggle over millennia. Who can condemn our deep-seated drive to relieve suffering and live better? No one wants to starve or freeze or die of disease. We have found ways over centuries, via a vast web of human ingenuity, to give us (in the United States and other highly developed countries anyway) ridiculously abundant food, convenient roads and transportation, widespread literacy, astounding building technologies, tailored consumer goods for every need and comfort, and choice, choice, choice. That’s the dream.

At least it was. Today more of us are coming to understand that our glittering panoramas of prosperity are built on ugly scaffoldings of environmental devastation and injustice. This way of life is unsustainable for the planet and unfair for the people whose lives and landscapes are sacrificed to provide it. But what now? What do we do? In nature, a state of imbalance usually prompts some kind of disturbance, and out of that disturbance the system trends toward some new and maybe different equilibrium. Perhaps we can begin, then, by inviting a disturbance of thought and conviction in this moment. We can ask what assumptions and habits we ought to deconstruct and what new commitments we might make. This is what happens in refugia during a severe disturbance: much is dying, but much is also being renewed. Refugia, therefore, are painful but also brave spaces.

The Great Acceleration

My parents came of age during World War II and were married in 1948. They began their adult lives precisely on the cusp of America’s postwar boom. My mother’s parents were immigrants from the Netherlands and my father’s mother from Hungary. Their families were poor during the Great Depression, so after the war, Mom and Dad fully embraced the American dream of upward mobility and prosperity. They had suffered their share of poverty and insecurity, they figured, and now they wanted a beautiful home, nice things, and money in the bank. They wanted the college educations for their children that were never possible for them. And that’s exactly what they got. Postwar America delivered.

Bill Bryson, in his wry and irreverent memoir, calls the 1950s “The Age of Excitement,” and I know what he means based on Mom and Dad’s attitudes.1 In their minds, everything was just great in America. We were building the economy, making big cars and major appliances. We were the most powerful, amazing nation in the world. Technology, given a little time, was going to solve every problem. One of Mom’s favorite sayings, in the context of any complex problem—from communicable disease to rocket propulsion—was “They’ll think of something.” Who “they” were was never entirely clear, but . . . someone? Some expert somewhere?

She was expressing her trust in the myth of progress. In ancient times, people looked back to a golden age, a time of perfection that could never be recovered, only longingly mythologized. They imagined history on a slow, downward slope. From the beginnings of the modern era, though, people began to shift their gaze forward toward a golden future. Renaissance-era Europeans imagined a fresh start in the “New World,” and later, with the Industrial Revolution, people in the West believed a new age of prosperity would arrive thanks to technology and the indomitable human spirit.2 White America in the 1950s exemplified that future-oriented optimism, and Mom and Dad were swept up in it.

They were also devout Christians. I don’t mean to belittle their faith in God by describing their simultaneous faith in American ingenuity and prosperity. My mother, especially, lived her Christian faith sincerely and well. But they were people of their time and place, as are we all. And thus it’s unsurprising that they, like many other ordinary adults in the 1950s and ’60s, did not much worry about brewing ecological crisis. The compulsion to be hopeful and positive was too strong, the cornucopian promises of consumer advertising too alluring. Mom and Dad concerned themselves with their children, friends, church, and weekly bargains at the grocery store and the shopping mall. Beneath this enthusiasm, it’s true, lurked shadows of childhood scarcity they could never entirely relinquish. My dad fretted over every small extravagance because it might land them “back in the poor house.” Nevertheless, nestled in prosperous, Midwestern, White America, they took for granted technological progress and economic growth. Sure, there were troubles, but overall, the world was getting better and better.

They both died in 2015, having lived through what now looks to be a sweet spot of human optimism. In their later years, they had enough to deal with just managing the typical hardships and griefs of old age, so we didn’t talk much about world events. I wonder what it would be like to try to explain the climate crisis to them now. “Well, you see,” I would have to say, “all that fantastic prosperity was created without paying sufficient attention to nature’s limits. Humans just took and took and took, ignoring the fact that we were destroying at a pace much faster than nature could replenish. And then there’s the human cost: slavery, exploitation, land theft, wars over resources. Can we talk about White supremacy?” I don’t think they would be dismissive, but still, this would be an earful for people whose lives were based on a promise of limitless prosperity that seemed to be true.

Now we know. We can’t avoid the truth. We can’t use the earth as both “supply-house and sewer” indefinitely.3 Nature has its limits. There’s only so much it can supply and only so quickly it can repair itself. All life systems are interrelated too, so it’s virtually impossible to avoid cascading effects. Cut down a rain forest, and you doom wildlife to death by habitat destruction, reduce the carbon absorption the trees provided, release more carbon into the atmosphere by burning, and invite soil erosion and desertification. Destroy or alter enough of the earth and burn enough fossil fuels, and you literally alter global weather patterns, acidify the oceans, and turn earth into—as Bill McKibben puts it—a “tough new planet.”4 In our determination to make human life more secure and more pleasant for some, the powerful have ignored all this, sometimes stupidly, sometimes knowingly. In fact, we sometimes cultivate ignorance to cover our malevolence and greed. As Thomas Berry observed in the 1990s, “Because of our need to fuel the industrial world, we have created a technosphere incompatible with the biosphere.”5 One group estimates that if everyone on earth, all 7.8 billion people, were to live like average Americans, we would require the resources of four earths to support that way of life. Americans aren’t even the most extravagant. We’re ranked fifth in resource use, behind Kuwait, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.6

The most commonly cited metric for the trouble we’re in is, of course, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Beginning around 1750 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise, and the pace of increase accelerated steadily until around 1950. At that point, the carbon load shot upward, so the graph tracing this increase looks, famously, like a hockey stick. But the problem is not just CO₂. Other graphs look like hockey sticks too as they trace increases in population, of course, as well as water use, fertilizer consumption, and international travel. Right along with steep increases in carbon dioxide levels came similarly shocking rates of increase in methane production, average surface temperature, flooding, deforestation, and species extinction.7 This period is sometimes called the Great Acceleration.8

This incredible transformation of the planet was made possible by the amazing power of fossil fuels—coal, natural gas, and oil—which increase the energy at human disposal by many powers of ten. Ethicist Larry Rasmussen notes, “While in the early years of the industrial era, 94 percent of the world’s energy was supplied by human labor and animals, and fossil fuels and water only 6 percent, by the time of the dramatic upswing of the 1950s, 93 percent of all energy was supplied by oil, coal, and natural gas.”9 In fact, he writes, “In the prodigious half-century from 1950 to 2000, the global consumer economy produced, transported, and consumed as many goods and services as throughout the entirety of prior history.”10 We humans have been extracting and then wielding fantastic power.

Unfortunately, as Bill McKibben wrote prophetically back in 1989, fossil fuel also allowed us to bring about the “end of nature.”11 He meant, at the time, that there is now no place on the planet that does not feel the influence of human activity. Even the remotest Antarctic ice sheet is affected by temperature rise resulting from fossil fuel emissions. Even the loneliest stretch of ocean is affected by acidification as the ocean attempts to absorb the huge load of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Nature has its ways of restoring balance, but humans are now too powerful. Nature can’t keep up.12 Since 1989, the acceleration has gotten much worse. We are on the steep upward slopes of a lot of hockey sticks. Even if we were to stop carbon emissions tomorrow, the carbon already in the atmosphere will continue to affect the earth’s systems for centuries.13 The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report offers particular models of how much, where, and when. The effects of our human carbon dump, for example, will mean continued sea level rise “for centuries to millennia.”14

As frightening as it is to look at all those graphs and read the grim predictions about feedback loops and tipping points, we might be tempted to say, with my mom, “They’ll think of something.” Can’t we just fix this with technological advances? After all, “they” are already thinking of—and implementing—solar panels, permaculture farming, electric cars, and a thousand other genius ideas. Didn’t I hear that carbon sequestration is coming right along? A lot of us are changing our lifestyles now. A little.

It won’t be enough. We can spur each other on to personal piety all we want, and it won’t be enough. It’s true that individual actions are important. They help shift our own hearts and nudge us all toward a new normal. Still, we are caught up in global systems here, powers and principalities that our personal nibbles of virtue aren’t going to alter by themselves. Environmental writer Mary Annaïse Heglar, in a 2019 article, describes how people she meets feel the need to apologize to her for all their personal environmental sins. She really does not care about people’s personal sins or pieties, she writes, because there are much bigger things at stake: “While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries—the authors of said devastation—off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into.”15 In other words, we cannot possibly muster enough personal consumer virtue to alter the fundamental systems in which we live. This is both a practical and spiritual fact.

We will need every technological tool we can summon, along with a daunting amount of unified political will, to bring about rapid shifts in our entire energy infrastructure, transportation systems, agricultural practices—everything, really. It’s the Great Work, as Thomas Berry put it, not the Easy Work. Wise and inspired people of all backgrounds are trying to lead the way, but it’s difficult to move entrenched power even one inch. And we’re all implicated, all embedded in these ways of life. Nothing we do is entirely innocent.

Even so, I’m trying. I ride down 28th Street in my electric car, and I try to avoid buying things at Costco or Meijer wrapped in ridiculous amounts of excess packaging. I buy eggs and some pasture-raised meat from a local farmer. We recycle, of course, and never buy bottled water. We even put solar panels on our roof—which earns us a lot of virtue points along with a tax credit. Still, I feel vaguely guilty about every bag of trash I put on the curb, every gallon of gas I burn in our second car, every plastic shampoo bottle full of palm oil. I can’t do enough. Or maybe I don’t want to. There’s always some other “sin” I haven’t repented of. I don’t even know how to live a completely virtuous life, earthwise. That’s not how I was raised.

I was raised in the Christian faith, though, and now I wonder: What does my faith offer to help me make sense of this moment in history?

Clash of Kingdoms

While the Christian church in the West—as many have observed—has largely cooperated or at least coexisted with the myth of progress and the promise of affluence, Christian tradition also offers resources to critique and challenge that myth. During the four weeks leading up to Christmas, for example, many branches of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• October—Douglas, Michigan
• Introduction: The Great Work and the Little Work
• Chapter 1: From Despair to Preparation
• Chapter 2: From Alienation to Kinship
• Chapter 3: From Consuming to Healing
• Chapter 4: From Avoiding to Lamenting
• Chapter 5: From Resignation to Gratitude
• Chapter 6: From Passivity to Citizenship
• Chapter 7: From Indifference to Attention
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Suggested Resources