Bart H. Welling

BART H. WELLING {[email protected]} is an associate professor of English and an Environmental Center Fellow at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, where he teaches a range of courses focusing on animals and environmental issues in literature and film, in addition to modern American literature surveys and other classes. He and his wife, Elizabeth Siobhain MurphyWelling, are the parents of five children: Autumn, Solstice, Orion, Chora Belle, and Linnea (“Nimi”). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I express appreciation to everyone who contributed valuable feedback on early versions of this essay at the inaugural Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference in March 2007 at Brigham Young University, and at the Mormonism and the Environment Conference held a few weeks later at Utah Valley University. I am grateful to the English Department of the University of North Florida for facilitating my travel and research associated with the project, and offer special thanks to George Handley of Brigham Young University and Boyd Jay Petersen of Utah Valley University for making it possible for me to speak at the Utah Valley University gathering. This essay is dedicated with great love to my grandmother, Dorothy Dixon Harrison, with whom I had many interesting conversations about Mormonism and the “question of the animal,” and whose passion for literature and learning never ceased to inspire me, along with countless other young readers.

“The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal

Articles/Essays – Volume 44, No. 2

The recent collections New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community and Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment both demonstrate in myriad ways that the time is right for LDS scholars in the humanities and other Saints to speak up about the environmental crises which, as President Gordon B. Hinckley has asserted, render creation ugly and offend its Creator.However, whether we participate in Christian conversations on “creation care” or secular debates on the idea of wilderness, or both, it is impossible to avoid noticing some troubling gaps between Mormonism’s unique doctrine and history, which have challenged the anthropocentrism of mainstream American attitudes and behaviors toward the nonhuman world in a number of important ways, and the current LDS status quo, in which environ mental concerns are often dismissed as the province of “extremists.” Everyday LDS life bears less and less of a resemblance to that of the early Saints, for whom sustainable agriculture and green building techniques avant la lettre were practically as integral to the gospel as baptism by immersion or the Book of Mormon.