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<\/a><\/p>\nGiving an interview always leaves unfinished business. In my interview with KCPW on Wednesday, a caller (later identified as Scott Howell, Democratic candidate for US Senate in Utah) asked my opinion of HB 148, a piece of legislation recently passed by the Utah State Legislature and signed by Governor Gary Herbert. I said that while in theory taking back federal lands into state control could result in better stewardship of those lands, I didn\u2019t have confidence that this piece of legislation was motivated by concerns for or commitments to sustainability. I know this because these are the same legislators and the same governor who also emphatically deny climate change is real and human-caused, who actively support the coal industry, who advocate for fracking, and are only willing to ask industrial polluters to place voluntary restraints on themselves to help improve Utah\u2019s declining air quality. They are also the first to discourage the development of clean and renewable energy sources. It is because behind this policy lies a theological view of stewardship with which I fundamentally disagree.<\/p>\n
In 2010, I participated with dozens of citizens in an initiative called Faith and the Land, where we gathered in small communities of faith\u2014Quakers, Episcopalians, Jews, Mormons<\/a>, and others\u2014to discuss the value of wilderness in our spiritual lives. These were not political discussions about policy. We simply met to discuss what wilderness experiences mean to us on a personal level. What emerged was a remarkable consensus about our need for these lands as sources of spiritual renewal. (http:\/\/action.suwa.org\/site\/DocServer\/faith_and_the_land_4-10_Layout_1.pdf?docID=4001<\/a>)<\/p>\n A small group of us went to Congressman Rob Bishop\u2019s office in Brigham City to plead for greater protection of wild lands in Utah. Representative Bishop has never been warm to the idea of wilderness preservation, but because he sits on the natural resources committee of Congress that determines the fate of federal land in Utah, it seemed necessary to open the dialogue. Oddly enough, at one point in the discussion he turned to me and began to debate me about the meaning of the mandate to Adam and Eve to \u201cdress the garden.\u201d He said that it was clear that our purpose on this earth is always to improve on nature, which for him seems always to mean to develop it. If there are natural resources in the desert, God fully expects us to make use of them. I was a bit stunned by this and tried to point out that this was a theology with no ethics since it can\u2019t make a distinction between actions that enhance and actions that degrade the health of a place. I was a little embarrassed by what felt like was turning into a Sunday School discussion with my fellow Mormon, so we let it lie at that. I wish I had at least asked him that if God gave us fossil fuels, he also gave us the sun, the wind, and the heat of the earth too. Why don\u2019t we have an obligation to use them too?<\/p>\n Not long afterwards, representatives from each faith group went to the state capitol building. A few of us, including me, spoke to represent the others. This is what I said:<\/p>\n This remarkable interfaith effort of over 250 people from 11 different faith communities represents an exceptional undertaking for two reasons: first, it shows that a vital source of our spiritual health and renewal is access to wilderness; second, it shows that our shared love and care for wilderness unifies an extraordinary diversity of people in Utah. Our beliefs might differ, but our values harmonize on this essential point: wilderness teaches us humility, wonder, respect, and gratitude for the Creator. Wild beauty has a special quality: its joys are spiritually meaningful because they are unexpected, like grace. Wild beauty teaches us about our small but important place in a diverse, complex, and interdependent world and inspires the moral value of self-restraint. We are on a clear path to privatize, develop, and ruin every last wild and beautiful place in America. As the great LDS thinker, Hugh Nibley, once said, \u201cthe appreciation of beauty is nothing less than the key to survival.\u201d When we get to the point where beauty is dispensable, we are in trouble. Wild beauty is a gift that requires our best stewardship.<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n When I was finished, state legislator Mike Noel approached me. Noel is known for his vehement anti-environmentalism. He called me \u201cbrother\u201d and assured me that he agreed with most of what I had said. He insisted that he was a good steward of his ranch in southern Utah. I told him I had no doubt that that was true, and that I had no experience ranching. But I told him that when I had seen him recently lead a group of ATVs up the Pariah river in defiance of federal designation, I felt it was a desecration and not a good example of the \u201cleave no trace\u201d Boy Scout ethic, let alone the upholding of the law, which is so central to Mormon ethics. I pled with him to expend more energy articulating the importance of stewardship and less on battles with perceived enemies of his community. He asked me if I had ever seen what God does to that river in the springtime. I didn\u2019t know what he meant. \u201cHe washes it clean every year in the spring runoff.\u201d His theology too seemed absent of a real sense of ethics; he seemed to live in a world where choices didn\u2019t really matter because we can\u2019t do real harm, certainly not irreparable harm, to the earth.<\/p>\n A similar theology seems to be behind climate change denial. Sarah Palin once claimed it was arrogant to believe that we could warm the earth, echoing a claim that Charlton Heston had made a generation earlier about the ozone layer, suggesting that the world is perpetually able to renew itself, that we are living on some kind of ethics free planet which will perpetually absorb our wounds. Heston\u2019s views were echoed too by novelist Michael Crichton who saw the earth\u2019s age and complexity as reason, not for caution or conservative approaches to its uses, but for us to cease our worrying. Several years ago, when I tried to argue over email with the editor of the Provo Daily Herald, Randy Wright, about the paper\u2019s consistently irrational attacks on climate change science, he pointed me to Heston\u2019s recitation of Crichton\u2019s strange world without ethics: (http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ozO4YB98mCY<\/a>).<\/p>\n
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\nIt is human arrogance, however, to assume that stewardship gives us unbridled license to do as we please to nature or to act in short-term interest only. It is wrong to assume that nature always needs human development and improvement in order to have value. I like to remember that the Bible, for example, teaches that God used the words \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cvery good,\u201d to describe a world not yet inhabited by humans. I also like to remember that He commanded Adam and Eve to \u201cdress\u201d the garden but also to \u201ckeep\u201d it and \u201ctake good care\u201d of it. Of course, there is a place for gardening, extracting needed resources, and developing land. But if we assume we can use up nature without limitations, we will not only ruin its remaining wild beauty, but we will degrade ourselves. We live in an age of rapid growth and aesthetic impoverishment. To protect wilderness requires the highest principles of love, gratitude, modesty, humility, and self-sacrifice and provides more opportunities for more people to derive spiritual benefits from enjoying the wilderness responsibly.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\nThere is a reason why deserts, mountains, and sacred groves are sought by prophets. It is because, as these people have witnessed, wilderness enhances spiritual and physical health and the bonds of family and community. We endanger our health and those bonds if we stand aside and allow continued unrestricted use of ATVs, unhampered development, fossil fuel extraction, and environmental degradation. To get serious about preserving wilderness is to get serious about living a more reverent and gentle life. We are here today to call upon our elected leaders to work with us to make meaningful progress in protecting Utah\u2019s public and shared heritage of extraordinary wild lands.<\/em><\/p>\n