Creation Care In An Age Of Despair

My professor turned from the chalkboard strewn with soil particle diagrams. “Where does the vast majority of the mass of a tree come from?” The room of 51 college students stared blankly back at him. Gradually, you could hear the hush of awe spreading through the room as the light bulbs went off in our heads. “The CO₂ in the air,” one student said. Giant sequoias, the avocados on your kitchen counter—all plants materialize from thin air via the wonder of photosynthesis.

If this isn’t proof of a God who spoke all things into existence, I don’t know what is.

If we accept that the cosmos was made by God and that “all things are [his] servants” (Ps. 119:91), several things should follow: joyful worship in response to our Creator for his creation’s beauty and bounty, an eagerness to care for this creation out of love for God and our neighbors, and a sense of hope that the God who created everything will make it blindingly new.

This hope-infused Christian creation ethic is the perfect antidote to eco-anxiety on one hand (“It’s all on us to keep the planet alive!”) and escapism on the other (“The earth is temporary, so why care for it?”). If Christians lean into our biblical calling to steward God’s creation (Gen. 1:26-2:15), we’ll demonstrate our hope for all of creation and our love for its Redeemer to the unbelieving world, particularly my own disconnected and pessimistic generation of Gen Z-ers.

Do You Feel the World Is Broken?

Many in my generation feel viscerally that the world is deeply broken. Christians have language for this. We’re told that “the whole creation has been groaning” (Rom. 8:22)—groaning for the glorious redemption in Christ, through whom God will “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (Col. 1:20). We feel it in our societies, families, and schools: in the way pollutants a community never asked for take the lives of its members, in the way increasingly erratic weather events sweep away homes and livelihoods, in the way insecticides used on our croplands bleed across the human placenta to cause birth defects.

Caring for the earth involves (among other actions) caring for our health, our children’s health, and the health of our neighbors both down the street and halfway across the globe. This is part of why the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has gained traction among conservatives in a way that surprises observers like The New York Times. There’s a growing sense that destroying and misusing God’s creation isn’t only bad for the planet but also deadly for people—an affront to the dignity of beings who bear God’s image. Creation care is a clear way we steward our God-given bodies and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Better Vision for Creation Care

The world’s vision of stewardship is inadequate because it doesn’t recognize the creating. It believes the fine-tuned clockwork of life is due to happy (and impossible) chance and that it’s on us to uphold the precious balance if we want the planet to survive. But acknowledging a Creator changes the whole rationale for conservation.

Acknowledging a Creator changes the whole rationale for conservation.

Throughout Scripture, God’s people and the land are often blessed and cursed together. We can pursue the co-flourishing of humanity and the earth because both were made to thrive in tandem. How else could it be if the “earth . . . and the fullness thereof” was made with an eternal purpose by a single Creator (Ps. 24:1)?

We know the One whose mind-boggling majesty is displayed in every corner of creation: the One who in infinite wisdom decreed for legume roots to talk to soil bacteria so both could live in merry symbiosis—and so we could enjoy chickpeas and lentils. If this is the God we serve, will caring for his creation not be an act of love for him?

I yearn for other Christians to open their eyes and ears (and heart) to the majesty of God’s creation: to the wonder of birdsong; the delicate grandeur of vanishing forests and the algal blooms of dying lakes; the quaking aspen as it breathes in the sunlight, its leaves glistening like diamonds. These are fingerprints of the God who’s beyond our deepest imagination. We see his creative touch in the universe of color within a daylily, the dance language of honeybees, and a hundred million fireflies singing thanks. If we don’t hear this praise coming from all around us, perhaps we have too low a vision of our Creator.

We too should sing. We can act boldly to care for the earth and our neighbors because we sing, because we know the One who made it all. And we know him because he revealed himself and promised he’ll restore all things.

Symphony of Praise

Environmental stewardship is a song we sing, not a burden we carry. And joyful stewardship through simple lifestyle changes draws in the anxious and gives them a category for thinking about ecology from a place of joyful hope, not fear, despair, or guilt.

Environmental stewardship is a song we sing, not a burden we carry.

Across the world, Christians are on the move. Glimpse faith at work in the living testimonies of the “church forests” of Ethiopia, watershed restoration efforts by Plaster Creek Stewards in Michigan, or the mission-centered ECHO Global Farm in Florida. These faith-driven actions restore biodiversity, water quality, and food security—in ways that bless both land and people and point to an abiding hope.

What can you do? Learn the names of the trees and birds by your house. Compost for the sheer joy of it. Think twice about the destination of your Coke can. Consider making a green roof as a summer project. Plant oak trees and leave the leaf litter untouched for the critters and the caterpillars that will later grace your garden as butterflies.

Don’t underestimate the joy that little acts of stewardship can bring. Do it for the glory of the One who made it all—the same One who will make all things right again. We have peace because we trust. We act because we sing. And may the watching world join in the eternal and deafening symphony of praise.