From the Editor: Facts on the Ground

“Treat the world as if it really existed.” - William Stafford

Nearly 100 years ago the Dust Bowl drought blew through the Great Plains, lifting tons of topsoil into the sky, ruining farmers for years and rattling American confidence for decades.

The dust clouds towered 30,000 feet at times, and the wind took them as far as the East Coast and the Atlantic. The rich dirt of these heartland “flyover states” (so-called) was suddenly floating over New York and Washington, D.C. There, if the drifting dust clouds were red, you knew it was soil from Oklahoma; if black, Kansas; if gray, then Colorado or Texas.

The natural world transmits its own data, a kind of counter language to what’s scrolling on our sleepless screens. It’s a relief to be reminded that we are part of that counterworld, which we might still plausibly call the real world.

These semaphores from a wounded earth signaled a reckoning. Humans didn’t cause those desiccated years of no rain in the 1930s, but human decisions to overplough the ground in the 1920s helped turn the coming drought into catastrophe. Overploughing reflected the economic frenzy of the unfettered Roaring Twenties: the volatility of crop prices led to planting practices that exhausted the soil by the time the early-’30s drought arrived … just after the stock market crash of ’29. And so, in a display of historically bitter timing, the Dust Bowl struck during the worst years of the Great Depression. It’s as if the natural world was paying attention to the headlines and enacting its own grim justice against heedless humanity.

Today’s ecological emergencies don’t come color-coded as sky-born portents, not usually. They play out in wildfires merging, coastlines rising, water systems rotting. Then the newsfeeds move on to other things. We’re expected to forget last week’s crisis. But our nervous systems don’t. They absorb the traumatic images of each conflagration and brace for the next historic flash flood or political maneuver to strip eco-policies of their promise.

As a matter of public and mental health, maybe it’s time to erect a huge pan-hemispheric scoreboard that would clock the jostle between progress and setback, action and mischief, on the global warming front. It would track greenhouse gas emissions (these have increased by 34 percent since 1995) but also the strides made at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.[1] It would chronicle the precarious conditions of small island states and a rising global demand for coal, but also improvements in energy efficiency and increases in wind power adoption.

This fanciful scoreboard would be visible everywhere. It would be unavoidable. You couldn’t not see it. Its solid details would serve as an antidote to vaguely escalating dread. It would also disrupt habits of merry indifference. It would complicate the frictionless experience of our retail transactions, by which we maintain our innocence about the carbon costs and human exploitation behind so much of our comings and goings and daily deliveries.

The scoreboard idea, alas, only goes so far. (Who would fund it and who would decide which reliable facts get posted?) In the meantime, the world’s weary nerves are not without other resources. Durable streams of information and repair await elsewhere. Yesterday I took my regular little walk along a nearby creek. It’s good when possible to get off the grid a minute. It’s nice to take a break from globalization. Whether the water is roaring after last weekend’s rain, or has a murky and lethargic flow, it carries along on its own glittering physics and life force. It is jarringly unimpressed by human headlines or excuses. 

A nervous system can find balm in that. I don’t want to sound sentimental about the “wisdom” of the great outdoors. But the natural world transmits its own data, a kind of counter language to what’s scrolling on our sleepless screens. It’s a relief to be reminded that we are part of that counterworld, which we might still plausibly call the real world. On these walks I can usually sense an interior shift—mind, heart, soul, and spirit opening up to something planetary. I realize my consciousness had been hungering for this vastness, had been patiently (or impatiently) waiting for it.

At such moments the Meister Eckart insight pops into mind: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” The brain would happily reduce this famous line to a mystic metaphor, but this idea of a portal onto the world (a window on the soul, as is said) is something pragmatic and concrete—a scan or interface provided by the senses, any one of them, or all of them, plus maybe a sixth sense too. Here we are, placed in the indestructible cosmos for a time, and our little portals of perception are connected to it, and we set out daily by its glittering flow. This is our ballast and credential as citizens of creation. And it comes with a duty to face moments of decision.

Society’s habitual arrangements would have us forget the creation connection, the value of preserving it or advocating for it. Scarred by greed a century ago, battered by the latest moves of human hubris, earth continues to absorb our abuses. But our cruel neglect doesn’t get the last word. Each of the essays, articles, and interviews in this Reflections issue provides proof of the resilience of that bond with creation. These writers offer their own ballast: they share with readers the pragmatic resolve they’ve found in their encounters with the environmental facts on the ground. That ground is now shared with the new YDS Living Village, with its extraordinary testimony to the power of ecotheology, Living Building design, financial fortitude, and an ethical commitment to the planet’s future. Faith and action seeking the light: God’s green earth waits for us to catch up to its healing invitation.