Volume 44, No. 2

The reach of environmental problems today urges us to consider more carefully how interdependent we are with one another and with the entirety of ecological processes across the globe. Environmental degradation has reached a scale that the otherwise forward-thinking conservationist Aldo Leopold had not yet imagined in 1949, making his call for a land ethic even more urgent to heed. However, we can only see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in those things that our experiences, culture, and values have taught us are real—or at least that help stimulate our minds to imagine. 

Many faithful Mormons are not familiar with pronouncements concerning environmental stewardship by current and former Church leaders because such teachings typically do not receive as much emphasis from the pulpit and in Church curriculum materials as other more core teachings. Nevertheless, the LDS canon of scriptures and the teachings of Joseph Smith and subsequent LDS Church leaders reveal a rich theology pertaining to the origin and purpose of the earth and to our responsibility as stewards over nature’s bounty. 

Ideas, like everything in the universe, do not exist in isolation. Ideas bear traces of the past, are in a state of continual evolution in the present, and are intertwined in dialectical relationships with other ideas and the world in which they are immanent. Even ideas considered revelatory, having issued from a source beyond the din of the mundane, are tangled in relationships between the revelator, the receiver, the world, and the medium (linguistic or otherwise) by which messages are transmitted.

Ecological theologian and cultural historian Thomas Berry has suggested that we are entering the “Ecozoic” age, which he defines as “that period when humans would be present on the earth in a mutually enhancing manner.”Here Berry is expressing a hope that human creativity can transcend the destructive and short-sighted culture of the modern age, which has precipitated the greatest environmental crisis in human existence—a crisis that recently featured the largest oil spill in U.S. history. By mutually enhancing, Berry means not simply a benign human presence on the earth, but the emergence of an ecological consciousness that nests the human economy into the larger earth system, a sort of human-earth symbiosis.

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. 

I’ve been asked to speak about the power of personal revelation today. But I’d like to tell you a (slightly) different story about revelation, one full of highs and lows, but in recent years perhaps more lows than highs. Or maybe more accurately, more questions than answers. And while revelation has remained deeply personal for me through these years, one of the central, ongoing questions in my life has been my connection to you, to all of you, to the Church, to everyone else, to the world itself.