Saving Southern Appalachian Brook Trout

A version of this essay was originally published at the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, September 7, 2022.

For many Americans, summer offers a chance to get away and re-create outside. That was the case for me at the beginning of August, and off my wife and I went in search of cooler temperatures. We found what we were looking for in a little 100-year-old cabin, loaned to us by friends. It lies in the middle of a several-hundred-acre finger of land jutting into western North Carolina’s Nantahala National Forest. We were thus surrounded on three sides by over 800 square miles of Southern Appalachian oak-heath wilderness.

 Our unusual situation, staying in a privately owned old-growth forest, enveloped by public land, allowed us easy access to otherwise remote areas of the National Forest. We took advantage. Our hosts had told us about one particular stream in the forest that was a good place to beat the heat. So on day-2 of our residence, we loaded a daypack and set forth.

 An hours’ hike brought us to a gorge where we could hear the gentle hum of moving water. A muddy scramble ensued, grasping at the roots of rhododendrons, and assisted by a rope anchored for the purpose. Thus we made our way to the stream, a stair-step jumble of rapids, potholes, and pools flowing over ancient granite boulders belched up by the earth during the collision of North America and Europe hundreds of millions of years ago.

 We enjoyed an afternoon spent alternately soaking in the frigid potholes and warming ourselves on the sun-soaked boulders, before hiking back to our cabin, where we ate a leftover pulled pork and cornbread dinner, and then gloried until bedtime in our lack of internet access or cell phone service.

 The rest of our week in the mountains was spent similarly. It wasn’t until we returned home that our hosts informed us that the stream where we spent that splendid afternoon of day-2 happens to be a haven for North Carolina’s only native trout species, the Southern Appalachian brook trout. I had contemplated bringing fishing gear with me, but decided against it, not wanting to add another dimension of logistical complexity to our trip. Hindsight is 20/20. I have never caught a Southern Appalachian brookie, and now it maintains its position among the potentials on my “bucket list.”

 Brook trout prefer precisely the kind of water we were soaking in: pristine, remote, cold, well-oxygenated headwaters at high elevations. This preference of theirs is the cause, under one aspect, of there being so few of them now. Beginning in the late 19th century, extensive logging was introduced to the Southern Appalachians. Logging roads  and rail lines tend to follow the path of least resistance, viz. stream beds and river valleys. Splash dams were built to help get logs to mills downstream. The loss of tree canopy allowed sunlight to reach streams, causing water to warm. Brook trout populations paid a dear price.

 Around 1900, noticing the decline in brook trout populations, other species began to be introduced: rainbows from out west, European browns, and genetically distinct brook trout from up north, all of which seem more adaptable—or heartier—than our Southern Appalachian natives, which in their turn either hybridized with their Yankee cousins, or retreated even further into the remoteness of the remaining wilderness. And of course during the intervening years, the native brookies, like fish and wildlife everywhere, have had to contend with habitat loss due to the seemingly invincible force of human population growth and development.

 But the history of Southern Appalachian brook trout and their habitat has not been all unmitigatedly bad news. In 1911 Massachusetts Republican John W. Weeks introduced congressional legislation, the Weeks Act, that empowered the federal government to purchase and protect private land necessary for the flow of navigable streams. The bill also allowed land protected under its auspices to be conglomerated into national forests. President William Howard Taft signed the bill on March 1, 1911. To date some 20 million acres of land in the eastern US have been protected by its provisions. Among these tracts is what would become, in 1920, Nantahala National Forest—together with its brook trout habitat.

 And of course the Weeks Act is just one of a number of sound pieces of conversation conservation legislation at the federal, state, and local levels, that have brought about a situation in which “the good old days” of hunting and fishing are, in many respects, now: the Pittman-Robertson Act, the Migratory Bird Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Magnuson-Stevens Act, among many others. None of them are is perfect—nothing is, this side of paradise. But the perfect must not become the enemy of the good. Seeing that it doesn’t is the task of everyone who loves to hunt and fish, who loves the outdoors, and everyone who values the economic opportunities afforded to stakeholders and communities that rely on the fruits of the earth and the seas, which really means all of us.

 Were it not for the vision of men like John Weeks or, William Howard Taft, fishing for Southern Appalachian brook trout would be only an increasingly distant memory, beyond the possibility of living experience or (as in my case) aspiration. Next time I’m bringing a rod.

Firearm Spirituality: Lessons from a 30.06

A version of this essay was first published at Covenant, February 16, 2022.

I am a hunter. I have written a fair amount about hunting from a theological point of view. Among other things, hunting provides me with lean, healthy food, comparatively free of the synthetic chemicals that saturate most commercially produced food. It also limits my participation in a food economy that evaluates animals (and everything else) in terms of their monetary value and, in consequence, tolerates a great deal of cruelty and pollution.

I went deer hunting five times this season. The highlight of my season was when a young buck walked by my blind, about 10 feet away, unaware of my presence. He was so close I could hear his feet in the grass. He was legal to shoot, and I had permission from my host, the landowner, but I knew that he was not the sort of deer that my host really wanted shot. He had fine, symmetrical antlers, and an athletic build. But he was young, probably two-and-a-half years old. While the oldest known white-tailed deer was a twenty-four-year-old captive doe, at Kerr Wildlife Management Area, in Texas, most deer don’t live past the age of about six in the wild. Bucks are sexually mature at one-and-a-half, and a healthy buck, given a chance to breed for several seasons, will pass on good genes to his offspring, thereby strengthening the herd over time. I let the young buck go, feeling myself blessed and contented by such a close encounter.

By that point in the season, I had already killed one doe. I hoped for one or two more so as to have a good supply of venison for the year. Not only is venison healthier than commercially raised beef, but beef has become very expensive lately. Furthermore, there is an overabundance of deer in my part of the world. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources permits each hunter in my county to shoot twelve per season, two of which may be antlered (i.e., mature males). A friend whom I took hunting wound up killing a mature buck and gave me the meat because he was visiting from New York and didn’t want the hassle or expense of having it shipped. I killed another doe toward the end of the season, quite a large one, and so wound up with a freezer full of venison, almost two hundred pounds of it. It was a bit more than I could accommodate, and so I was able to give some to friends in need.

 As a hunter, I am also a gun owner. I do not apologize for this. Guns are tools, and like any tool they must be appropriate to the task at hand. For many years I have hunted large game with a Winchester, Model 70, chambered in 30-06 (pronounced “thirty aught six”). It is a classic and imminently serviceable rifle, with a handsome, if unrefined, walnut stock, and a controlled feed bolt action based on a renowned design by Mauser and first introduced in the 19th century. I opted for 30-06 because ammunition is relatively easy to find, it has a long and proven track record on a wide variety of game, and because it is a quintessentially American round. It was introduced in 1906 (thus the “06” in “30-06”) by Springfield Armory of Springfield, Massachusetts, the primary manufacturer of firearms for the U.S. military from 1777 until it closed in 1968. Many, perhaps most, military rifles were chambered in 30-06 during the middle part of the 20th century, including the primary service rifle for the U.S. military during World War II and the Korean War, the M1 Garand. Over 5 million M1 Garands were produced, and U.S. military machine guns continued to be chambered in 30-06 through the Vietnam War, after the Garand was replaced, first by the M14, then by the M16, and finally by the M4, the primary U.S. military carbine in use today. But soldiers coming home from World War II and Korea naturally sought out rifles chambered in 30-06 for hunting. It was what they were used to.

The “30” in “30-06” refers to the caliber, or diameter, of the bullet. In the United States calibers are typically measured in hundredths of an inch. So a 30-caliber bullet is approximately 30/100 (0.3) of an inch in diameter. Bullet calibers touch on many aspects of shooting, like the bullet’s ballistic coefficient, a measure of its ability to overcome wind resistance in flight. One of the most important measures affected by caliber is the amount of energy the bullet conveys to a target when it hits at a given distance, usually measured in foot-pounds of energy. All else being equal, hunters generally want the highest amount of terminal energy possible, because high terminal energy helps to kill game quickly, minimizing (or entirely eliminating) the animal’s suffering, as well as the need to track it after it has been shot. A well-placed shot on a deer, using a well-designed 30 caliber bullet, will kill it almost instantly. Because bullets generally travel considerably faster than the speed of sound, the deer will literally be unconscious before the sound of the shot reaches its ears, and dead a few seconds later.

When a trigger is pulled, the tension on a spring inside the trigger mechanism is released, causing a pin to strike the primer on the back of the cartridge case inside the rifle chamber. This causes a spark, which in turn ignites the propellant powder inside of the cartridge case. The resulting explosion propels the bullet, seated in the opposite end of the case, forward, out of the cartridge case, down the barrel of the rifle, and out of the rifle’s muzzle. There is a corollary to the muzzle energy of a bullet leaving the bore of a rifle, and those familiar with Isaac Newton’s third law of motion will have deduced it: the energy transferred by the explosion to the rifle itself. This energy (likewise generally measured in foot-pounds) is denoted by the word “recoil.” 

 Because the chambers of firearms are made of thick steel, the energy produced when the firearm is discharged generally travels straight back, down the buttstock of a rifle. In autoloading rifles, this energy is put to a useful purpose, cycling the action of the rifle, ejecting the spent cartridge case, and loading another cartridge into the chamber. In a bolt action rifle, such as my Model 70, the shooter does this himself, by turning the bolt handle, pulling the action back to eject the spent cartridge case, and pushing it forward again to load a fresh cartridge. On non-autoloading rifles, no energy dissipates through the cycling of the action.

 Most of the recoil energy from a rifle’s discharge winds up in the shooter’s shoulder. This energy can be considerable, especially in larger-caliber rifles firing heavier bullets. The 30-06, for example, generates relatively strong recoil (almost 20 foot-pounds), though just within the threshold of what most adult shooters find tolerable. The problem here is not just the unpleasantness of being punched in the shoulder: shooters can develop the unfortunate habit of jerking the trigger, flinching as they pull it, as they anticipate the recoil. And this can result in inaccurate shots, missing an animal altogether, or (even worse) wounding it and having it run off. I am not particularly averse to recoil, and I have never missed an animal, nor wounded one, because I jerked the trigger or flinched as I fired. But for the last few years, my right shoulder has been bothering me, especially when I articulate my arm in certain ways or lift heavy things.

 On my last hunt of this deer season, I had been sitting in my blind for several hours and had seen nothing. I had recited Evening Prayer, mostly from memory, and with a little help with psalmody and Scripture readings from an app on my smartphone. Finally, about 10 minutes before the end of legal shooting light, just as the sun was setting, several does materialized on the far end of the clearing, about 200 yards away. Through my rifle scope I picked out the largest, and watched her as she fed up to a tree that I knew to be exactly 100 yards from my blind. As I was preparing to pull the trigger, going through my instinctual checklist — double-checking distance, making sure there were no other deer (or anything else) behind her, nothing that looked like a dependent fawn in the vicinity, remembering that I had put on hearing protection, finding the rifle’s safety latch with my thumb, etc. — I noticed that an awareness of my achy right shoulder hovered in the back of my mind, that I was compensating for it by taking extra care at each step of the shooting process. The buttstock is pressed firmly into my shoulder. The crosshair is just behind the doe’s shoulder. My breathing is slow and steady. I am prepared to allow the inevitable blast and punch to surprise me, focused on not anticipating it. The doe’s head is down, she is feeding again, and standing broadside to me. I push the safety latch forward with my thumb and feel the gentle click of it disengaging. I am ready. About one heartbeat past the end of an exhalation of breath, the crosshair is still where it is supposed to be, and I gently squeeze (don’t jerk!) the trigger. 

There is the familiar blast and punch. I see the muzzle flash in the rifle scope, and beyond the flash the doe leaps and kicks out her back legs. This almost certainly means that the bullet has gone through her heart. I instinctively chamber another round, and follow her through the scope as she bounds into the woods. Deer are amazing creatures, even shot through the heart and both lungs, as this one was, they can survive for a few seconds, enough time to run for a hundred yards or so. The best way to prevent this is by aiming a little farther forward and a little higher than the traditional advice, which is just behind the shoulder. Aiming a little farther forward and a little higher will place the bullet more squarely on the shoulder itself, still a shot through the cardiopulmonary system, but the shoulder bone will cause the bullet to expand faster, as it is designed to do, creating more hydrostatic shock as it enters the deer’s chest cavity. There is, moreover, a major junction of cervical and thoracic nerves just behind the shoulder blade, the brachial plexus. A high shoulder shot destroys this junction, a major element of the peripheral nervous system. This doesn’t necessarily kill a deer faster, but it causes it to lose consciousness instantly, before dying a few seconds later. Yet old habits die hard, and I had aimed just behind the shoulder, so the doe ran.

I heard her fall somewhere in the woods. Re-engaging the safety, I set the rifle down and reached for my shoulder, probing it with my fingertips, rubbing at the ache. The recoil had not made it any worse, but it had made me more aware of it. 

I waited about 15 minutes before leaving the blind. If given time and not pursued, a deer that has been injured will usually bed down after running a short distance, and usually die fairly quickly. But if an eager hunter begins to track it too soon, the deer will typically try to get away, surviving on adrenaline, and outpacing the tracker or crossing a property boundary. The net result can be an unrecovered deer, and an animal’s life wasted. To mitigate the risk of such an unfortunate outcome, it is good for hunters to foster the discipline of sitting quietly for a while after they shoot, giving the deer time to die. I had heard this doe fall a few seconds after the shot, crashing against the brush. I was confident that she was dead, but it is best to err on the side of caution.

It was dark when I left the blind. I texted my host, telling him that I had shot a doe, got out my flashlight and walked to where the deer had been standing when I shot her. There was a fair amount of bright blood on the ground — a good sign. Bright red blood, or blood that is pinkish and frothy, means that a deer has been hit in a vital area (pinkish froth is caused by small oxygen bubbles from pulmonary action, and indicates that a deer has been hit in the lungs). I followed the blood spatters in the direction I had seen her run. The trail led into the edge of the woods, and I pressed through the brush, following the blood, pausing after each spattered leaf to scan for the next one. After a few minutes, I saw her in the beam of my flashlight, piled up in the brush, dead. 

 I heard my host pulling up in his truck. Fetching a blaze-orange bandana from my backpack, I tied it at eye-level around the trunk of a small tree next to the deer in order to mark the spot, and pushed back through the brush into the clearing and signaled to my host with my flashlight. When we got back to the deer, we knelt down together in the leaf litter and prayed, thanking God in the name of his Son for the life of this deer, for the well-stewarded habitat that had sustained her, and for the sustenance she would become for us, asking God in his mercy to make us worthy of such gifts, and never let us take them for granted.

 We loaded her into the bed of my pickup, and I drove to a processing place the next town over. On arrival they weighed her: 136 pounds, very large for a doe in this part of the country. After processing, I would get a little less than half of this “on the hoof” weight in meat, the rest being bones, viscera, and hide. After I explained to the processor what I wanted — hamburger, sausage, a whole bone-in shoulder (for braising), and a selection of roasts — I drove home. 

 It was late when I got there, and my wife was already in bed. I built a fire and poured myself a glass of bourbon, sat down by the fire and ruminated on the day’s events. When I judged the ice to have melted enough to pacify the bourbon, I lifted the glass to take an initial sip. Again, a twinge in my right shoulder. The achiness has come and gone over the last few years, but with the passage of time it comes with greater frequency than it goes. My left knee also likes to fuss from time to time. One afternoon, hunting in the mountains of western Colorado last season, it put up a very petulant fuss indeed, as I was making a pretty steep descent off of a mountaintop in the snow. We had to find another way down to accommodate the raging knee.

 What underwrites all this? Old injuries. The need to lose weight. The advent of middle age, reliably confirmed by my increasing affinity for “smooth contemporary jazz.” That’s it, most fundamentally: the slippage of time, and the dissolution of the flesh that accompanies it, the gradual return to the elements out of which I was formed. This of course is the common destiny of all flesh, something I share with the animals I hunt, a point of connection running between me and the doe I had killed, as though following the trajectory of the bullet from the rifle pressed into my achy right shoulder, to the spot covered by the crosshair just behind the doe’s:

 These wait all upon thee, that thou mayest give them food in due season.

When thou givest it them, they gather it; and when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good.

When thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: when thou takest away their breath, they die, and are turned again to their dust. (Ps. 104:27-29)

Hunting signifies a lot, and among the things it signifies most forcefully are the inevitability of death, and the necessity of death in order to sustain life. These facts are inescapable. Even vegetarians must contend with the fact that in our time agriculture is the number one cause of habitat loss, and that habitat loss is the number one cause of species extinction. No matter what you eat, animals must die to make your eating possible. Human life, and the whole range of its activities, is a grand memento mori, if we care to see it, and therefore a reminder of our fall from grace, our aching need for healing, forgiveness, and resurrection. Hunting is certainly so for me, and this season it was underscored by the beastly recoil of my 30-06.

technology and the sacramentality of created nature

A sermon preached at All Saints’ Church, on the 5th Sunday of Lent, 2019.

“Thus saith the LORD, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters… Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?” God is talking here about the renewal of the whole earth through the death and resurrection of Christ.

When I was an undergraduate at Sewanee, I took a class on Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the Canterbury Tales. My professor, Dr. Robert Benson, was a learned and genteel Catholic from Louisiana, with a fondness for tweed jackets and duck hunting. He would sometimes pause during his lectures and stare out of the classroom window, across the quad at the ivy growing on the sandstone buttresses of All Satins Chapel, and he would sigh wistfully, as though he were watching the sad yet inexplicably beautiful death of a beloved relative. One day he was lecturing on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the protagonist of which is a rooster named Chaunticleer. As though to confirm some private suspicion about the barbarism of contemporary culture, he suddenly asked for a show of hands from the students present who had actually seen a real, live rooster on a real, live farm. Out of twenty-five or thirty students, five or six of us raised our hands. Dr. Benson sighed and continued his lecture.

Scientific method and technological advancement are a boon and a blessing in many ways, yet they can also serve to insulate us from God’s most basic language: the language of the physical creation. Think about all the typologies and tropes of the natural world used by Biblical writers: heat and cold, hills and mountains and trees, rain and dew and fire and wind and snow and stars and sheep and lions and roosters and oceans and rivers and fish – and the list could go on and on.

My point is that we modern people tend to insulate ourselves from elemental realities created by God, and used by God to reveal his own character. The divine realities signified by these biblical tropes are more distant to our consciousness because of our modern tendency to seal ourselves off from the natural processes of life and death that constitute existence on earth. We don’t seem to like looking at them, feeling them, smelling them – they offend us, they make our lives uncomfortable and inconvenient. But by insulating ourselves from them, we can put ourselves in danger of forgetting the very character of the God we claim to believe and to worship…. by sealing ourselves off from the realities he has ordained to reveal himself. And we can be in real moral danger when we begin to take the terms of our technological advancement to be normative – when we begin to regard the ethical limits on the pattern of human life to be set only by the limits of science, technology, and human ingenuity. The danger is that God’s wisdom and omnipotence begin to be displaced in our consciousness by human power and ingenuity.

When roughly 80% of the population of the US live in urban areas, with light pollution and industrial haze, is it possible to know what it means for our Lord to be the rising of the Morning Star? When agriculture is increasingly controlled by massive corporations, and accomplished by automated processes, can we know what it means to separate the wheat from the chaff? Do we even know where our Grape Nuts come from? (I don’t mean Publix.) Do we know, in an age of composite board and prefabrication and polyethylene, what it really means for the stone that the builders rejected to have become the head of the corner? How many US citizens today, indeed, have ever seen a mother hen gathering her brood? Can we feel the God-ordained blessing and heritage of children in an age where the act of sex can be technologically divorced from the very possibility of procreation? In such a context, can we understand ourselves as the children of the eternal Father, begotten by the union of God and man in the flesh of Jesus Christ, and born in the blood and water flowing out of the side of our crucified Lord? In an age of light emitting diodes and halogen lamps, do we know what it is for the virgins to be trimming their wicks? Does our society even know what virginity is? Can we understand what it means to go up to Mount Zion, or to carry our crosses up the hill of Calvary when the only mountain-climbing we ever do is in an air-conditioned Subaru? Can we listen with Elijah for the voice of God in the whirlwind in an age of facetime and podcasts? Can we taste the water or the wine or the milk or the honey in our iced-non-fat-cinimon-mocha-no-whip-soy-milk-frappaccinos? Do we feel the fear of Moses or Jonah or Noah or Saint Paul when we look at the ocean? Would we use their words to describe the sea – words like “deep” and “dark” and “chaos” –when, if we’re lucky enough to venture out on the sea at all, its on a Princess Cruise Ship with wifi and 24-hour buffet meals?

I’m not against technology. I’m not trying to foist a utopian agrarianism on you. I own a late-model iphone. Kate and I are looking forward to going to Highlands later this year and doing some mountain climbing in an air-conditioned Subaru. I’ve been vaccinated against Measles and Mumps and Diphtheria. When I get a headache I take ibuprofen. Moreover, I’m not in the habit of preaching sermons that are all questions and no answers. There’s too much of that in the Episcopal Church, and I think it’s a way for priests to avoid the controversies that are probably inevitable when you see yourself under a solemn obligation to proclaim the Gospel and to teach the apostolic faith. But I worry that both as a culture and as individuals, we place more and more confidence in human ingenuity; I worry that we will manage not only to insulate ourselves from that which is deadly or toilsome in the created order, but that we will effectively insulate ourselves from the Creator God who reveals himself through them – that we will forget – or worse, that we will reject -- the teachings of Scripture, because we no longer speak the language of creation in which they are written. I worry that increasingly we find in the teachings of Scripture and the Church to be spoken in a foreign accent that menaces our comfort – that we sit in a kind of ethnocentric judgment on the rhythms of God’s speech and are only capable of finding in them things that are obscure or patriarchal or outmoded or undemocratic, or objectionable in some other way. We are in danger of becoming Gnostics, of thinking that salvation is all about something as insipid as a compassionate frame of mind. But anyone who has been in war, or faced a terminal disease, or faced the untimely death of someone deeply loved – anyone who has been through something like that, something REAL, can tell you that frames of mind cannot save you. They certainly can’t give life to the dead.

When I was in high school I became a vegetarian. When people asked me why, I condescendingly cited Leo Tolstoy, who was an apologist for Vegetarianism. But I didn’t really do it out of any deep conviction – I mainly did it to be cool and controversial, to be a fly in the ointment of what I saw as the un-cool and unreflective traditionalism of those around me.  But as I got older and began to appropriate for myself the faith I inherited from my parents and grandparents, I gave up Vegetarianism. As I came to believe for myself the truths of the faith, I saw that God couldn’t care less whether I was a vegetarian. I saw that what he wanted for me and for all mankind was that we should share his love for what he made, and rule it responsibly, out of obedience and by way of sharing in his own work. He wanted me to see the world and its creatures with his eyes, and to say with him:  behold, it is good.  This meant I could eat meat. For me, it also meant that I should face the created facts and implications of my share in ruling creation, and I did feel a little honest sorrow for the animals that are killed to nourish me – so I became a hunter, in earnest. Not because I enjoyed killing animals, but rather the opposite. If I was to nourish myself with the flesh of God’s creatures, I felt I should face the consequences in a tangible way. The pleasure of hunting, for me, is the mixed smell of leather and horses and pine trees, or the muddy husks left behind the peanut harvest, or the sun rising over flooded timber, or to watch the dogs find and point a covey, or the moment of authentic shock, renewed in my body every time the birds flush, or the breathless instinct and infinitesimal calculation that raises the gun to my shoulder and picks out a single bird from the panicked dance – or just as often, fails to. Once I sat in a treeline in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico, watching and hoping that a bull elk in the valley would feed up my way. He never did. But as the sun set, a bobcat emerged from the trees opposite me, about 400 yards away, and walked straight toward me, to within about ten yards, as I was sitting still, camouflaged against the trees. Finally the big cat figured something wasn’t right and bounded off, after we had sat staring at each other for what seemed like an eternity. 

For me, the unmitigated pleasure of hunting ends with such things. The rest is mitigated. With the trigger pulled, the sublime interplay of senses and instinct are thunderously interrupted – the clear air thickens with the smell of burnt cordite and – if I’m lucky – one of God’s creature’s is dead. I do not enjoy dressing birds and feeling the warm, sticky blood run down my fingers. And I feel a very sincere contrition when, as sometimes happens through carelessness or an overestimation of my marksmanship, I have to face the varied consequences of a wounded, suffering animal.

But I think that while the process of taking life clashes with my deep-seated sense of compassion, it is somehow meet and right tangibly to engage the necessity of blood being shed to sustain my life. And I believe that this side of Paradise, this engagement is something God wants from us: to feel the pain and the blood and the sorrow that is necessary to nourish us in a world corrupted by the lie that human flourishing and human ingenuity share a single limit. And whenever mankind starts to feel confidence in himself and his ability to sanitize and sustain his own life, there is an earthquake, or a war, or a hurricane, and the reality of our ignorance and impotence reemerges to stare us in the face. As my father-in-law likes to say, the ants win, in the end.

Likewise, every time I begin to feel the misplaced confidence in my ability to self-sanctify, I find myself on the business end of a low-cut blouse or a careless remark or a third helping of spaghetti, and I re-discover just how profound is this slavery to my passions and appetites.

So what does God want from us? Does he want us to throw away our iphones and ibuprofen and return to nature? I don’t think so – or at least not necessarily. But he does want us to see the depths of the natural and moral evil that surround us, the ways that we have corrupted the world he made to be our home, and to realize the correlative depth of our powerlessness in the face of it. He wants us to see and fear the moral chaos and darkness that he has sacramentally written into the very depths of the sea. He wants us to face the fact that because of our sin, the world is broken, and that we have backed ourselves into a moral and even a biological corner, from which we can only escape momentarily through the shedding of innocent blood: and he has sacramentally written this reality into the bloody business of old testament sacrifice, when the priests of the temple would slaughter and burn thousands of animals in a day. And in a lesser way, God has written it into the natural rhythms of the hunt.

God wants us to face these facts – to face their physical as well as their spiritual reality – and he wants us prayerfully to cry out to him for mercy, because he knows that he is the only one who can save us. God wants us to find, as Isaiah says, the pathway he has made through the mighty waters of our world’s darkness and chaos, a pathway back to the safe harbor of God’s own compassion.

And this pathway is the sacramental life of the Body of Christ.  When we walk it with penitent hearts, when we approach the elements and the narrative he has set aside for our healing and deliverance with true contrition, we will find there the victory he has wrought on the cross over the world’s brokenness and death. We will be able to see THROUGH the fact that maybe I never felt loved by my father, or that I find myself assailed again and again by the same disordered lust – we will be able to see the marks of Christ’s victory in the shedding of innocent blood, or the helplessness and fear attendant on a diagnosis of cancer, or in the psychological scars of addiction or sexual abuse. And if we live and die in the grace of this holy narrative, we will find, at the end of it all, the resurrection to life eternal. God has promised, and he will not go back on his word: but its up to us to believe his promise, and to take him up on his offer in humility and penitence.

“Thus saith the LORD, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters… Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?”

In the beginning: a theological foundation for environmental ethics

Originally published at Covenant, March, 2019.

Come now, I will tell thee—and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away—

the only two ways of search that can be thought of.

The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be,

is the way of belief, for truth is its companion.

The other, namely, that It is not, and that it must needs not be,—

that, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all.

For thou canst not know what is not—that is impossible—

nor utter it; . . .

. . . for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

                                                                        -Parmenides of Elea

In his book, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,” Michael Pollan quotes a scientist who participated in a study of Psychedelic drugs at Johns Hopkins in 1999. The experience changed his life.

Turner is now an ordained Zen monk, yet he is also still a physicist, working for a company that makes helium neon lasers. I asked him if he felt any tension between his science and his spiritual practice. “I don’t feel there’s a contradiction. Yet what happened at Hopkins has influenced my physics. I realize there are just some domains that science will not penetrate. Science can bring you to the big bang, but it can’t take you beyond it. You need a different kind of apparatus to peer into that.”

The book of Genesis makes a similar point: an impenetrable veil lies at the bedrock of creation, and the domain God inhabits lies beyond that veil – or perhaps just that “God” is our name for that unutterable Being beyond being. “In the beginning God…” There is thus at the very heart of the orthodox Christian consensus this remarkable claim, that this is all that we can know by means of positive knowledge, even when it is aided by divine revelation: In the beginning, God.

Yet sense experience, empirical science and deduction, cannot take us even that far. The natural sciences are, by definition, concerned with nature, and the doctrine of creation is the doctrine of the creation of created nature. The question of what is anterior to created nature thus rules itself out of bounds when it comes to the discourse of the natural sciences. This is not a peripheral insight with respect to Christianity, but sits at the very center. In the eighth century, St. John of Damascus, Doctor of the Church, in his “Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith” (Book I, Chapter 3) wrote:

In the case of God, however, it is impossible to explain what He is in His essence, and it befits us the rather to hold discourse about His absolute separation from all things. For He does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence , but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself. For if all forms of knowledge have to do with what exists, assuredly that which is above knowledge must certainly be also above essence : and, conversely, that which is above essence will also be above knowledge.

It is curious to think that intellectual technology has made so little fundamental advancement not just since the time of John of Damascus, but since the Eleatic philosophers of the 6thcentury BC. We begin therefore in the company of Parmenides: “thou canst not know what is not – that is impossible – nor utter it.” That What Is Not should utter itself, though, and that such an Utterance should be wrapped up intrinsically with the discourse of What Is, canbe known, only not by an empirical way.

We must begin then with the “data” of being, the data of created nature. We must begin with the acknowledgement of nature’s “givenness.” I mean this in the philosophical sense of its being a fact of the matter: “The world,” said Wittgenstein, “is all that is the case.” I also mean “the data of nature” in the related theological sense of nature’s being a “gift” that is given to us. Both senses of nature’s “givenness” are facets of what I mean by the “data” of nature – the word “data” being a participle of the Latin dare– “to give.”

Next we may contend with the question of who gave this gift, and to whom? And of course, as Christians, we must attend to the witness of Scripture, Genesis being our lodestar on this score. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” (Gen. 1.1); and “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it,” (Gen. 2.15).  Thus, while there may be other recipients of the gift of nature, it is at least given to man, who is also enmeshed within it, both to cultivate it and to care for it – which is what “tilling” and “keeping” connote. “Tilling” means a concern for nature’s flourishing, and “keeping” means that we are to be invested in this undertaking as stewards and heirs, not slavishly as bondsmen, let alone as rapacious usurpers.

Here arises a vexing question: why? Why did God create the heavens and the earth, human beings, and all the rest? In the Christian account, at least, it costs him an awful lot of grief, and would it not have been better for him to have saved himself the trouble? A myriad of answers might be given – indeed they have been given – to this question. But at the most fundamental level, we can say that God created the world because he wanted it to be created, he desired that it should be. He, as it were, affirmed it in its being, said Yes to it, assented to it. And it is precisely this divine “Yes” that brings the world to be, as it were in the same gesture. God makes the world because he wants it made. The Being beyond being desired that being should be.

We may infer from this fact alone that nature is good, and Genesis says so explicitly, in case there were any doubt:

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. (Gen. 1.31-2.2).

God has made this world because he wanted it made, because in some sense he delights in it. He has set us in the midst of it, as a part of it, and has given it to us, to cultivate it and to care for it. This cultivation and care are thus duties and obligations for which we are answerable to God, to whom the world always belongs, because God has never relinquished his claim to what he made. Actions, habits, ways of thinking (ideologies) and ways of life that are incompatible with this mission are therefore wrong. They are derelictions of the highest kind of duty, the kind that we owe to God. Such derelictions are thus, one may say, serious sins.

This, for Christians, must be the foundation for environmental ethics.

Pronghorn restoration and the future of US fisheries

Originally published at the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s blog, December, 2018.

I am fascinated by pronghorn antelopes. I don’t remember the first time I saw one, but the first time I had an opportunity to look at them closely and purposefully was last year while elk hunting in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. It turns out that some of the best pronghorn trophies are from precisely that country. The weird little creatures are prolific there, as they are in various places through the central part of the continent.

Pronghorns are the only surviving member of the family antilocapridae – “antelope goats” – although the fossil record shows that during the Pleistocene period there were a dozen or so other species of antilocapridae indigenous to North America. Indeed during the Pleistocene, there was an abundance and diversity of wildlife in North America that rivaled or exceeded the Mara ecosystem of the east African plains – the Serengeti and environs. In addition to various types of ungulates and grazers, pronghorns, deer, elk, elephants, camels, horses, zebra, wooly rhinoceros and the like, North America was home to a vast array of predators too. Dan Flores in his natural history, American Serengeti, lists bears, saber-toothed cats, wolves, coyotes, jaguars, cougars, steppe lions, scimitar cats, cheetahs, and hyenas as once roaming the North American landscape.

Most of this staggering biodiversity disappeared about 10,000 years ago, during the Quaternary extinction event. Paleontologists debate the cause(s) of this mass extinction, but it may well have had to do, at least partly, with overhunting by humans, who were becoming prolific throughout the world at that time.

Pronghorns do not seem to have been among the American Indians’ favorite quarry. Bones with the marks of butchering turn up at prehistoric sites, but are much less common than the bones of mammoth, bison, or even rabbits. Market hunters in the 19th century didn’t care much for them either… that is until they had shot-out all the buffalo. Beginning in the 1870’s and through the end of the century, market hunters began to turn their rifle sights on pronghorn, and they were slaughtered by the tens of thousands.

The late nineteenth century also saw the development and widespread use of barbed wire on ranches throughout the pronghorns’ range. This new technology was often lethal for pronghorns because they don’t jump. They can jump, they just don’t seem to realize it, a curious aspect of their behavior that is doubtless the consequence of their having evolved on grasslands where there’s not much to jump over. When barbed wire was deployed on the range, it often proved an insurmountable barrier. Entire herds were killed by blizzards, huddled against wire fences that stood athwart their southerly migration routes, or they starved to death in overgrazed pastures with plenty of forage just on the other side of a couple strands of wire.

Although it is impossible to know for certain, there were likely between 30 and 40 million pronghorns living in North America at the beginning of the 19th century. About 20 percent of the total lived in Texas, mostly in the desert scrub of the Trans-Pecos, and the shortgrass prairie of the Llano Estacado. Yet a survey in 1924, after decades of indiscriminate hunting and fence building, found only 2,407 Texas pronghorns remaining. Hunting was banned in 1903, and efforts to restore populations began in earnest in the middle of the 20th century. 

Early this year I had the opportunity to join a group of biologists and wildlife professionals in the high plains of the Texas panhandle, where pronghorns were reintroduced and have done fairly well. We captured over 100 of them, using net guns fired from helicopters, took samples of hair and blood and feces, attached radio telemetry collars, loaded the animals into trailers, and trucked them about 500 miles to the Trans-Pecos, where they were released to supplement smaller local herds, and to enrich and diversify the Trans-Pecos gene pool.

This was the most recent of several similar expeditions over the last decade or so, underwritten by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Borderlands Research Institute, and a myriad of local hunting and conservation groups. The aim is to undo the last century’s overharvest and negligent extirpation of these creatures that belong to the prairie. The effort is working, albeit slowly, and abetted by the increased use of modified fencing that pronghorns can shimmy underneath. There are about 12,000 pronghorns in Texas today – a long way from the teeming millions that were present two centuries ago, but also a lot better than the 2,407 counted in 1924.

There are lessons here for managers and utilizers of many species, not least the managers and utilizers of fisheries – lessons, that is to say, for those with ears to hear, the conservation-minded. Under the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), first passed in 1976, many marine fisheries have recovered from years of negligent overharvest akin to what bedeviled the pronghorn. Other fisheries, by dint of a tapestry of ecological realities or because they occur in waters beyond the reach of MSA management, remain depleted or are trending perilously downward. Scientists estimate that 97% of the bluefin tuna that once swam in the ocean are now gone.

Yet the MSA story is by and large a success story. Forty-five fish stocks have been rebuilt since 2000. And what’s good for fish is good for fishermen and coastal communities. Commercial fishing revenue is trending upward, as are sales impacts from recreational fishing, tackle, boats, marine equipment and the like.

The point is that while humans certainly cause ecological problems, as the only rational actors on the scene, humans are also the only possible conceivers of solutions to ecological problems, and sometimes – sometimes – a sustainable human-wildlife symbiosis can be achieved. Some day I hope to have a chance to hunt a Texas pronghorn. In order for that to happen, there have to be enough of them on the land to make and keep hunting sustainable. For the conscientious recreational sportsman, hunters and fishermen alike, this equation means that there is work to do. That work comes in many guises, but a big part of it is cultivating in ourselves virtues that make the tragedy of the commons avoidable. This means principally the cultivation of a “resource first” mindset. Understanding that while the harvest of fish and wildlife is good and it’s a way of life that we cherish, the presence of fish and wildlife is the precondition for the sporting traditions we love. You cannot hunt and fish for what is no longer there.

For what its worth, I am convinced that this is the solution to the broader problem of the pressure that growing human populations are putting on wildlife everywhere. If human populations were unflappably virtuous, then I suspect the ecosphere could support a lot of us and a lot of wildlife too. As it is, too often we evince too ready a willingness to over-exploit natural resources for the sake of the almighty dollar, right up until those resources are gone. Witness market hunters turning to pronghorns after (nearly) finishing off the bison. This is, in essence, the tragedy of the commons.

When it comes to recreational anglers, the virtue of catch-and-release is hard to gainsay, from a conservation point of view. God knows I’m not above throwing fish in the cooler, and God knows I love to eat fish that I catch. But it should go without saying that we ought to harvest only what we will eat, and eat what we harvest. It certainly ought to go without saying that we should obey applicable laws as to seasons and limits and so forth. We ought to prefer to harvest abundant species, make an effort to release fish alive, which might entail learning to use descenders for reef fish or other inconveniences. We ought also to educate ourselves about food webs and the importance of forage fish for target species and, in consequence, the importance of legal protections for forage fish.

But perhaps more than anything else, it is incumbent upon conscientious hunters and anglers to make sure that the laws that govern natural resource management are right, that they are based on the best available science, that they are conservative, erring on the side of caution, and that abundance is high on the priority list of both managers and legislators. And because managers and legislators take their cues from stakeholders, abundance has to be a value esteemed highly by recreational hunters and anglers too. And that means education and action, making sure that our opinions are informed, and that we speak up and speak out, that we make our opinions known to managers and legislators.

Travelling across the Texas panhandle in 1899 for the Bureau of Biological Survey, naturalist Vernon Bailey, counted all of 32 pronghorns. Over a century later, in the same region, I saw hundreds, thanks in no small part to the efforts of conservation-minded sportsmen in the intervening years. It shows what’s possible, and holds open the door to hope for a better future.

Abundant game species need conscientious & engaged sportsmen

Originally published at the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s blog, October, 2018.

To me, September 1st means the beginning of the end of summer. It’s the opening day of dove season, and the beginning of the hunting season more broadly construed. It marks the time when I begin to focus less on rod and more on gun. This year on September 1st, I was in a sunflower field in south Georgia. It was obscenely hot, a south Georgia kind of hot, where you’re teased by passing clouds and momentary breezes, but you mostly sit and swelter. I was posted up next to a hay bale, and kept adjusting myself to take advantage of the few inches of shade it afforded at midday.

I was desperately attempting to insert the lower part of my left leg into the shadow under the curve of the hay bale’s fat middle, adjusting and readjusting my stool with that end in view, when the hunter immediately to my left, about thirty yards away, shouted ‘Bird!’ to the hunter about thirty yards to the left of him. I squinted just in time to see the dove diving toward a mojo decoy hanging from a mock power line. I saw a burst of feathers as the bird crumpled, and just as the sound of two shots reached my ears: ‘BOOM! BOOM!‘

And so it was on. Birds came in by two’s and three’s pretty steadily from the surrounding pine forests for the next hour or so – and thank God for that, since it was harder to focus on the blistering sun when all my psychic energy was absorbed in missing shots. With dove, the ratio of shots-taken to birds-in-the-bag is generally considered to be a more important and revealing metric than simply how many birds you kill. In a field such as the one we were shooting, any fair-to-middling shooter can take a limit, and all twenty or so of the hunters present did in fact shoot limits. The question is: how many shells did you fire to take that limit? The answer, in my case, is more than I care to disclose. I will offer as an excuse the fact that I was getting used to a new shotgun – and the fact that said shotgun is a 20 gauge over-under, i.e. and not a three-shot, 12 gauge meat collector. But the afternoon also vindicated Nash Buckingham‘s observation in 1947 that dove shooting ‘offers more challenges to the finer phases of field gunning than any other sporting species.’ Quite.

That first dove was followed pretty quickly by a steady trickle of his friends during the ensuing half hour or so. Then two things happened simultaneously. First, it started to drizzle. It was one of those late-summer drizzles in which the sun is still shining in a partly cloudy sky, but the little shower was enough to take the edge off the blistering heat. Seemingly at the same moment, the sunflower field exploded with doves. The birds were corkscrewing this way and that as the report of shotguns erupted from all sides. The birds looked almost like bees swarming over the tops of the sunflowers, arching and buzzing all over the place in twos and threes, fours and fives, groups that bisected and trisected each other, joined together and separated, a chaotic scene with so many targets that I had to remind myself to aim at individual birds. My natural instinct in such situations is to aim at groups rather than picking out an individual bird, and this leads only to misses or at best accidental hits.

I focused my attention and did manage to aim this time around, and my aim improved sufficiently for me to finish my limit of fifteen birds in the next twenty minutes or so, cooled by the light rain and energized by this very fine phase of field gunning.

That kind of dove hunt is rare in my experience. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of dove shoots I’ve been on when the birds were as plentiful and the shooting as fast-paced as it was on September 1st of this year. All of the guns had collected their limits and were out of the field in a little over an hour and a half, nursing cold beers by the tailgates of trucks once the shooting stopped, and by turns complimenting or ribbing each other on the day’s marksmanship, comparing shotguns, laughing and lying and declaiming, comparing this hunt to other opening days in years or decades past, remembering long-gone companions from those other hunts: brothers, friends, dads, and dogs.

It was the kind of dove hunt I love. Good shooting and bag limits all around are merely the catalyst for what’s much more important: the conviviality, the friendships made or renewed. But the abundance of birds plays its part too, and we can’t take them for granted. In the early part of the 20th century, the future of wingshooting didn’t look so bright. Year-round shooting of doves and other species, the lack of bag limits, and the inability of natural resource managers to enforce regulations in any event, led to sharp and noticeable declines in bird numbers. The lack of a federal regulatory framework had made these problems possible. And it was forward-thinking sportsmen who understood the dynamics of the issues at play, and what was at stake. Hunters like Nash Buckingham, Ding Darling, George Bird Grinnell, and many others, saw what was happening and were willing to get their hands dirty advocating with their elected representatives, and crafting the conservation policies that would lead to the recovery of morning doves and many other game birds. It is thanks to those men and their work that experiences like this year’s opening day are still possible.

A similar revolution has been ongoing in the arena of fisheries policy and management. Thanks to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and its two reauthorizations in 1996 and 2006, a large number of depleted fisheries have recovered or are on their way to recovery. And what’s good for fish is also good for those who like to catch fish. But the future of the Magnuson-Stevens Act is uncertain. Legislation like H.R. 200 – and even the more benign Senate version of the so-called ‘Modern Fish Act’ (S. 1520), assuming it would be reconciled with the House version – could erode the very management provisions that have led to the recovery of our fisheries in the first place, a recovery that anglers around the country, and certainly in my part of the South, have noticed. This year’s was one of the longest red snapper seasons in a long time. I refer to things like science-based annual catch limits, legal accountability for people or sectors that take more than their share of fish, and the legal requirement that managers rebuild depleted fisheries as quickly as is feasible.

I want my children and my grandchildren to be able to have the same kinds of experiences I have had in the field and on the water. I want them to be able to stand around docks and the tailgates of trucks long after I’m gone, to be able to crack open a cold beer with their friends, and not just remember how it used to be, but give thanks for how it has remained. And for that to happen, America needs conscientious hunters and anglers now. We need hunters and anglers willing to get their hands dirty, to call their elected representatives and insist that the future of hunting and fishing not be sold out for the short-term economic interests of a few, to insist on resilient and intelligent laws that will ensure that our fish and game populations remain abundant for us and for future generations.

To risk stating the obvious, seafood comes from the sea

Originally published at the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s blog, August, 2018.

I love fishing. I also love seafood. As a recreational fisherman, I almost invariably release what I catch. Which, incidentally, belies the rhetoric of some of my fellow recreational anglers who advocate for fuzzier science, looser regulations, longer seasons, more allocation, and larger limits. “We want to catch more fish! We need to catch more fish!” they say. But the point is: you can catch all the fish you want – you just can’t kill as many as you want, not without doing harm to the fishery. For those of us who are in it for the love of the game, catch-and-release remains the most responsible dictum. One need not concern oneself with slot limits and the like when all you take are pictures.

I say that I “almost” invariably release what I catch. I admit that from time to time I have been known to toss a few fish in the cooler for supper, and I don’t feel guilty about it. Hogfish are particularly hard to resist. Nevertheless the vast majority of the seafood I consume I get from either the grocery store or a restaurant. And of course grocery stores and restaurants don’t make fish ex nihilo. They in turn buy them from wholesalers and suppliers who, in their turn, get them from commercial fishermen, who take them from the ocean. This we know, although the mediation of the supply chain can make it feel like one is immune from having to make conscientious choices in favor of conservation. But that clearly isn’t so. It may seem like your red snapper came from a pile of ice at the grocery store, but in truth it came from some reef in the Gulf of Mexico.

It can feel awkward squatting in the aisle of Trader Joe’s, rooting through their canned tuna offerings, cross-checking labels with the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch app on one’s iPhone. I speak from experience. People are apt either to look at you as though you were insane, or to ask whether you work there and whether you might be able to point them toward the kimchi. Be that as it may, when you get a hankering for a tuna salad sandwich, you have a duty to remember that way down the line from your consumer choices there are fish being removed from the ocean. Some of them are being removed responsibly and sustainably. Others aren’t.

Using the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch app is one way to make sure you’re not inadvertently contributing to overfishing and the companies that underwrite it or turn a blind eye. There are other ways too, easier ways, ways that don’t require you to learn the ins-and-outs of the health of various stocks, the differences between longlines and purse seines and so forth. You can, for example, patronize only those retailers and brands that have a demonstrable and transparent commitment to healthy oceans, such as, in the case of tuna, Wild Planet, Whole Foods, American Tuna, or Ocean Naturals. You’ll generally pay a little bit more, but virtuous business practices aren’t the cheapest, and the benefit to you is an environmental apocalypse forestalled, and a clean(er) conscience.

With some species, the choices are even simpler. For example, Capitol Hill’s favorite fish, red snapper, can be purchased from retail outlets with reckless abandon if you can afford it – and that’s a big “if” at $21 per pound the last time I checked. Red snapper only come from the Gulf of Mexico, and buying them from grocery stores or restaurants means rewarding a commercial fishing sector that has, over the past decade or so, demonstrated a pretty steadfast commitment to conservation, fishing under the sector’s allocation year after year, and generally playing by the rules. That’s in stark contrast to my own recreational sector, which has more often than not been out of compliance, exceeding its annual catch limits, and generally about as accountable as a drunken rodeo clown. I hold out some hope that this is changing, with the novel management regimes introduced this summer for recreational red snapper under the guise of exempted fishing permits for the five Gulf states. We shall see. But in the meantime, order red snapper from the menu, and rest assured that the premium you pay goes to the good actors under a management regime responsible for the recovery of a fishery that was about two-minutes-to-midnight in the early 1990’s.

Which brings us to the subject of restaurants. When I was growing up, there was nothing finer than a plate of fried catfish, coleslaw, and hushpuppies at the local catfish joint. They also served frog legs, shrimp, and a variety of nastiness made from surimi. The joint burned down a few years ago under suspicious circumstances – and those suspicions were confirmed when arson investigators finished their work and the owner went to jail. I’m confident that sustainability was pretty low on the owner’s priority list, most of his energy being devoted to insurance fraud. On the other hand, the ecological impact of catfish aquaculture seems negligible as compared a number of alternatives.

To this day I’m not above tucking into a plate of fried catfish, but my gustatory horizons have expanded. So has the vision of restaurateurs. Last year I attended a Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) appreciation event hosted by Chef Ryan Prewitt at his New Orleans restaurant, Peche. We sucked fresh Gulf oysters, drank beer, and listened to several fishermen, chefs, and line cooks explain the benefits of MSA to seafood lovers. Later that evening I rode to heaven in a bowl of Prewitt’s gumbo and a plate of Gulf shrimp. To make a long story short: quite a few formerly depleted fisheries have recovered or are in the process of recovering from overfishing thanks to management under the MSA over the past several decades; more fish in the oceans means more fish to catch; more fish to catch means more fish to cook and eat. And that’s very good news for seafood lovers like me.

Ryan Prewitt and his tribe are leading a revolution, doing for marine fisheries what Alice Waters and her followers did for local and organic food at Chez Panisse back in the 70’s. And thank God for their willingness to enter the fray of politics and advocacy, and even more for their willingness to educate their patrons and the rest of us, to push back against the unexamined assumption that the story of the best seafood available begins in the ocean, and not in the backroom of a restaurant or a grocery store.

Deserts and oceans: what bighorn sheep can teach us about marine fisheries

Originally published at the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s blog, March 9, 2018.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to assist with a desert bighorn sheep (ovis canadensis nelsoni) recovery and translocation project in the Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas. We captured 82 bighorns by helicopter, carried them to a processing station where we collected blood samples, hair samples, nasal swabs and the like; GPS telemetry collars were attached, and the sheep were loaded into trailers and trucked to another expansive wildlife management area along the Rio Grande, near Big Bend National Park. There the bighorns were released to pursue their chief interests (grazing, mating, avoiding mountain lions) in the company of others of their species who had already made the area their home.

When some very tough English-speaking ranchers first came to that part of west Texas in the late 19th century, desert bighorns were a native part of the landscape, eking out a living together with the other creatures that call the desert home. Part of what makes a desert a desert is that there is comparatively little of anything there, and though no one knows for sure, biologists estimate that there were only about 1500 bighorn sheep in the Trans-Pecos region of Texas in 1880 – the only part of the state that has the kind of craggy, mountainous habitat bighorns like.

As is often the case, the human newcomers to the region had a checkered relationship with native wildlife. They hunted bighorns for food and also because they competed for forage grass with domestic sheep, goats, and cattle – despite the fact that the state of Texas outlawed the killing of bighorn sheep in 1903. Diseases introduced by domestic livestock, like scabies and pneumonia, also took their toll on the population. By the early 1940’s, there were only about 150 bighorns left in Texas, and the last native ewe was spotted in the Sierra Diablo Mountains in 1958.

Around the same time, forward-thinking wildlife managers began restoring habitat and reintroducing bighorns to west Texas from neighboring states, beginning with 16 sheep brought from Arizona in 1957. By the early 1970’s the herd had grown to about 70. The sheep expanded their range, while efforts continued to supplement their numbers with translocated sheep from other areas. Today desert bighorns may be found not just on the wildlife management areas where they were originally reintroduced, but also on nearby private and federal lands, as well as in the Coahuilan desert of northern Mexico. Wildlife managers estimate that by 2015 the population of desert bighorns in Texas had been restored to its historic level, and the herds continue to grow.

This ongoing conservation success is directly parallel to the conservation successes in our marine fisheries under the management regime established by the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which has delivered us from the dark days of overharvest in the middle of the 20th century. Just since the year 2000, 34 fish stocks have been rebuilt. Two-thirds of formerly overfished stocks have been rebuilt or are well on their way to being rebuilt. These conservation successes prove that what’s good for fish is good for fishermen and associated industries. Combined, the commercial and recreational fishing industries generated over $208 billion in sales in 2015, while the combined commercial and recreational fishing industries support more than 1.62 million US jobs.

It’s therefore puzzling why some want to gut the Magnuson-Stevens Act of the very management tools that have made these conservation successes a reality. This past summer, bowing to a coterie of recreational industry interests, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross lengthened the recreational red snapper season in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico by fiat, from 3 to 42 days. The extended season led to recreational anglers exceeding their Annual Catch Limit by 70% and set back the stock’s rebuilding schedule by years. What’s most bewildering is that Ross extended the season knowing full well that doing so would cause this damage – though the expected damage appears now to have been underestimated – and he did it anyway. In a memo to Ross from Earl Comstock, the Commerce Department’s director of Policy and Strategic Planning, Comstock wrote that a lengthened 2017 season “would result in overfishing of the stock by six million pounds (40%), which will draw criticism from environmental groups and commercial fishermen.” It did indeed draw such criticism, and rightly so. The decision is obviously bad for conservation, and therefore bad for fishermen. It also appears to have been illegal, insofar as the first national standard of Magnuson-Stevens states, “Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing…” The lengthened season also drew a lawsuit, as a result of which the department was forced to release Comstock’s damning memos.

Just so, bills like HR2023 in the House, the so called “Modern Fish Act,” and its counterpart in the Senate (S1520) would weaken or eliminate a number of the very management provisions of Magnuson-Stevens that brought US fisheries out of the dark days of overfishing and set them on the road to recovery. Among other bad ideas passing under the guise of management “flexibility,” these bills will eliminate concrete rebuilding timelines for a number of stocks, and weaken the requirement that recreational fishermen fish within annual catch limits. All of which represents an effort to shift the aim of marine fisheries management away from stock abundance and toward allowing more removals than is sustainable in the long run.

As with bighorn sheep in the Trans-Pecos, so with our nation’s fisheries: through the foresight of conservation-minded management policies, populations have rebounded from historic lows even within living memory. But the efforts to achieve rebuilt populations of wildlife and fish have required care, attention, and restraint from those who engage with those populations, be they ranchers, commercial fishermen, hunters, or recreational anglers. But the discipline and self-restraint that rebuilding and restoration demands of us is well worth the reward: it is the only path to a future in which our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the outdoor experiences we have been fighting to preserve.

Here’s to hoping that efforts to impose “flexibility” on our fisheries are defeated by those who understand the value of abundance.

Yosemite, 1903, and two poles in fisheries management

Originally published at the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s blog, January 30, 2018. 

In his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry identified two poles running through America’s engagement with its natural resources. These two poles he calls exploitation and nurture. “The exploiter is a specialist,” says Berry, “the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health – his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s.”

Berry of course is a Kentucky farmer, and his overriding concern is with land management and husbandry. But these same poles, or closely analogous ones, are discernible in today’s fights over fisheries management. The divisions are too many to enumerate, but one thinks of commercial vs. recreational; inshore vs. offshore; fly fishermen vs. users of traditional tackle; hippy environmentalists vs. rugged outdoorsmen. But these kinds of hard distinctions lead to policy vacillations, winner-take-all fights at state, regional, and federal levels. And meanwhile its “Grab what you can while you can, and devil take the hindmost,” and the resources about which everybody claims to care, suffer.

The decision of Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, to extend the 2017 red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, demonstrated a shortsighted concern for the economic impact of management policies on recreational fishing industry interests, at the expense of the longer-term health of the red snapper stock. Emails disclosed by subsequent litigation show that the Commerce Department knew full well that their decision would lead to overfishing, and thus set back the rebuilding of the stock by as much as six years, and they did it anyway.

Similarly, H.R. 200, the inaptly named “Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act,” which was reported out of the House Natural Resources Committee on a strict party-line vote, would eliminate or weaken the very management provisions of the Magnusson Stevens Act that have led to the ongoing recovery of so many of our nation’s fisheries, including red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. A paradigm case of the exploitation of a natural resource for the sake of short-term economic gain, and at the expense of the long-term viability of that resource. Exploiters vs. nurturers.

In 1903 a scion of the exploitation tradition, President Theodore Roosevelt, met with a leading figure of the nurturers, the naturalist John Muir, who served as guide as the two camped in Yosemite and talked at length around the campfire about conservation in America. Seeds planted on that trip would lead to Roosevelt establishing 6 national parks, 18 national monuments, and scores of national bird sanctuaries, wildlife refuges, and national forests – a durable legacy that we still enjoy, and proof of the good that can be done with balanced, long-term approaches to natural resource management.

Fisheries policy should not be as polarized as we have allowed it to become. Robust, rebuilt stocks are in the interest of all Americans, just as they belongto all Americans – whether they realize it or not, and whether they utilize the resource or not. But the policy landscape is not all destructive contentiousness either. It’s gratifying to note, for example, NOAA’s certification of LA-Creel in Louisiana, and it proves that ways forward are possible when state and federal agencies work together towards a common goal. It also demonstrates the flexibility of the Magnuson Stevens Act and the council process, even as they stand.

There are indeed two traditions – exploitation and nurture – running through the history of American conservation. But America’s best and longest-lasting conservation successes have come about when all sides have sat down at the table and worked together for the good of the resources we share. Fishermen of all stripes would do well to remember what happened around a campfire in Yosemite in 1903.

Think globally; fish locally

Originally published at the Marine Fish Conservation Network’s blog, January 23, 2018.

A thought that saturates my consciousness with respect to conservation in general is what I have come to think of as the psychological problem of urbanization. Since the high middle ages, in the West, people have been increasingly, gradually, aggregating in cities. And this aggregation is speeding up. A threshold was crossed in the American South in the 1990’s when, for the first time, more people lived in cities than lived in rural areas. 

Urbanization is by no means merely a Western phenomenon. China now has 102 cities with populations over one million. Sixteen of those cities have populations over ten million. The population of Lagos, Nigeria is now 47 times what it was in 1950. More people now live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area (my home) than lived in all of North America, according to the best estimates, in 1492 – when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Urbanization as a trend has been going on for a long time, certainly for centuries, but the pace and the scale, when coupled with world population growth overall, have picked up enormously in the last half century or so. The full implications of what urbanization will mean, economically, socially, and in other ways, will be manifested only gradually.

The physical effects of urbanization on the environment seem to be a mixture of good and bad, but mostly bad, and the good remains mostly in the realm of potential. Birth rates among city dwellers tend to fall to, or below, replacement levels, for example; and the aggregation of people makes per capita energy consumption marginally more efficient in cities than in rural areas. On the other hand, cities are notorious heat islands, on average several degrees warmer than surrounding rural and wild areas. Impermeable surfaces – rooftops, concrete roads and such – have deleterious effects on soil hydrology, erosion, downstream flooding and eutrophication, causing or exacerbating algae blooms and dead zones in coastal wetlands and marine habitats.

But a less tangible implication of urbanization on the environment is psychological. People in cities are simply further removed from the primary realities of nature: soil, water, sunlight, animal and plant life. City dwellers spend more time indoors and are seldom confronted with, for example, the fundamental sources of the products they consume. That wood comes from forests or that a tuna salad sandwich was until recently swimming merrily through the sea, are facts that simply do not confront people living in cities. Of course most city dwellers are aware of these facts, but their awareness of them is not at the forefront of their consciousness. They are abstractions.

This in turn is a political problem. That people are politically engaged with issues they care about is a trivial point. But people tend to care about issues with which they are confronted. The contours of a syllogism begin to take shape. The human population of the planet is shifting to cities, which means the ecological consciousness of the earth’s population is diminishing. In democracies such as our own, this means that political pressure in favor of conservation is diminishing proportionately. The upshot: the psychological effects of urbanization are bad for the environment.

I recently had an opportunity to take a bunch of city-dwelling kids fishing. Some friends and I, fishermen all, teamed up with a local ministry that serves urban kids whose dads aren’t around. None of the kids had ever been fishing. We trundled out to a ranch with some well-stocked ponds along the Trinity River, and spent the afternoon catching bluegill, crappie, and largemouth bass. A local tackle shop outfitted us with rods and reels that the kids could keep. A few boxes of nightcrawlers and crickets rounded out the gear list. We concluded the afternoon with hotdogs, chips, and coke. All the kids left with trophies and big smiles on their faces.

The experience reminded me of the parable of the sower, a story told to another group of fishermen two thousand years ago:

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold… He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

I’m under no illusions about the planet-saving efficacy of our little day trip. To say it was a drop in the bucket would perhaps be overstating the case. It was a drop in the ocean. But for me it was a matter of truth-telling demonstration, and a matter of duty. The city lights obscure the reality of the natural world from those kids and everyone else who lives there. The truth about sunlight, soil, water, fish, food webs, and about our place in the grand scheme of things, is a complex truth to say the least. It can perhaps only be demonstrated – glimpsed – piecemeal and for a few hours at a time, here and there, in threads and patches. But for those of us who know and care, for anglers, that is, who understand the moral weight of our custody of our natural resources, there is in a sense nothing else to do but tell the truth to whoever’s willing to listen. Before long, those kids will be eligible to vote. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to sow a little seed.

Edward Abbey, righteous Gentile (a short appreciation)

Originally published at Covenant, June 28, 2017.

I am a slow reader. I chalk this up to my most formative training having been in analytic philosophy, a discipline in which if one does not read slowly, one may as well not read at all. But I’m also a slow thinker — not a bad thinker, I think, but a slow one.

Slow reading has its benefits. One develops a taste for words and a corresponding appreciation for wordsmiths. One of Wittgenstein’s insights was that it is impossible to think outside of a language, and I suspect this fact accounts for my savoring of English, the language in which I do almost all of my slow thinking and reading, and for my appreciation for master crafters of English words. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sidney Lanier spring to mind, among many others. I bet they were slow thinkers too, for what it’s worth.

I have been slowly reading Edward Abbey lately. He was recommended to me almost simultaneously by Wendell Berry and our own Christopher Wells. Abbey merits slow reading, and he’s a first-rate wordsmith, or close to it. Paradoxically, though, he doesn’t strike me as a slow thinker. Quite the opposite.

The quickness of Abbey’s thought and prose accounts for what’s best and worst about him. (Funny how material conditions often account for what’s both best and worst in people and things — consider, for example, the capaciousness of Anglicanism.) Abbey is manly, in the virtuous and unfashionable sense of that word, forever getting in adventures and close scrapes, pausing occasionally in a kind of sun-burnt contrapposto, lighting his pipe as he regards a lizard or a shrub or some ecological outrage, passing judgment, and bouncing off down a desert road in his ramshackle pickup.

He is incorrigible and irreverent. This is charming more often than not. But his irreverence in particular can carry him away, in the judgment of this sympathetic clergyman, and sometimes smacks of vicious pride. Abbey obviously wants to offend his readers. All of them. And I suspect that readers who claim not to be offended are really just being spiritually pusillanimous.

Abbey’s was a great soul, and his judgments are correct in the main. Wendell Berry’s 1985 panegyric (anthologized in What are People For?) gets it right. The best reason to read Abbey, says Berry, is “for the consolation, for the comfort of being told the truth.” Namely, that we are causing problems for the rest of creation, and that those problems are symptoms of a deeper sickness, a sickness for which laws and policies, to say nothing of “clicktivism,” can be but topical analgesics. As Berry puts it,

There is no longer any honest way to deny that a way of living that our leaders continue to praise is destroying all that our country is and all the best that it means. We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

Abbey’s commitment to irreverence would have prevented him from agreeing that a country can mean something, but his prose (and his life) betray that deep down, he understood that it can. The speed of his thought and prose are indeed explicable in terms of Augustine’s restless heart. What is needed is swift obedience to the ancient summons Conversi ad Dominum (“Turn to the Lord”) — an intuition more readily grasped, I think, by Robinson Jeffers, a poet Abbey admired. The final lines of Jeffers’s poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic,” say better, perhaps, and perhaps better because they take more time in saying it, what Abbey drove so furiously toward:

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say —
God, when he walked on earth.

On the precipice of Holy Week

Originally published at Covenant, April 9, 2017.

Palm Sunday is to me the most disorienting liturgy of the year. We begin with a festal procession, waving palm fronds and shouting our Hosannas to the Messiah. Then suddenly it is as though the brakes are applied and there is a screeching turn. The colors change. The mood darkens by several shades. The Passion is sung. Yet more bitterness is portended: betrayal, torture, death. Holy Week is here.

We know what lies ahead, on the other side of the middle distance. Easter is but one week from today. It’s a funny feeling when one makes an effort to engage these mysteries with a more deliberate attention, like looking at contour lines on a familiar map. It’s a pilgrimage we make every year. Unlike the apostle Thomas, perhaps, by now we ought to “know the way” (John 14:5) — every turn, every landmark. And yet. Today, as ever, it only manages to be portended. The destination is somehow a long way off.

I have been in a melancholic mood lately. The death of my mother last month — the death of a beloved parishioner last week. Two voids hollowed out of my consciousness, two presences obtaining now only in my memory, and in an obstinate trans-cosmic distance, strangely located in the eucharistic Host. I am reminded of how the Gospel says that when Jesus was crucified

behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matt. 27:51-52)

Good Friday. It all lies in front of us.

Palm Sunday’s weirdness is of a different stripe, even though it’s all connected by inexorable steps. My death too is somewhere on the map, or on an adjacent plat somewhere over the edge. But it is most certainly out there. Would I want to locate it, given the chance? I don’t know.

The immediate task is Holy Week. God gives us just enough light to take the next right step, to make the next good decision. I feel like the Christian life is a twilight life, a seemingly endless pre-dawn gray. Seemingly endless. But it stands in stark contrast to the pitch-black midnight of the world’s incredulity.

The other day I watched a Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner, reggae music, and a nose-ringed, hijab-wearing photographer. They joined a protest against (or in support of) everything (or nothing). It was an almost perfect expression of our world’s ubiquitous pointlessness.

Yet “the true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (John 1:9). Maranatha. It is just enough. I am reminded of an interview in which Rene Girard was asked to explain the text “Except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened” (Matt. 24:22). He said:

It means that the end times will be very long and monotonous — so mediocre and uneventful from a religious and spiritual standpoint that the danger of dying spiritually, even for the best of us, will be very great. This is a harsh lesson but one ultimately of hope rather than despair.

There are yet many miles to go. Much to endure. With respect to Palm Sunday, this precipice on the edge of Holy Week, resolute words from Luke’s gospel stand out: “When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51).

A catechism of nature (6): circles of disturbance and perception

Originally published at Covenant, February 8, 2017.

I love squirrel hunting, and I go as often as I can. Ironically, I haven’t killed a squirrel in years. That doesn’t matter to me. If I killed one, I would eat it gratefully. But what I like most about squirrel hunting is being in the hardwood forests where squirrels live. In my part of the world, hardwood forests lie mostly along riparian corridors, and my favorite place to go is just such a corridor of oaks and pecans and cottonwoods running along a clear, limestone-bottomed creek. I occasionally see squirrels there, and somewhat less occasionally will shoot at one. But what I really love is settling in at the base of a stately red oak and just looking and listening.

Getting to my spot requires some effort. As you come to the edge of the woods, there is a little ravine to cross, and an old barbed-wire fence. The brush is thick along the edge of the woods, and there are plenty of briars and vines that reach out to grab shirts and snatch hats. During the fall and winter, the ground is littered with leaves that rustle and crunch under foot. I like to think that I can move silently through the woods, like a Caddo warrior, but that isn’t true. I am an uncommonly large, city-dwelling white boy, and I can’t get to my spot by the creek without a good deal of blunder and clatter and imprecation.

If you want to see wildlife in the wild, blunder and clatter and imprecation are not your allies. The Lord said to Noah, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea” (Gen. 9:2). I have confirmed this by experience. If you want to see wildlife, it is best that they not know you are there.

With that in mind, I wear earth-toned clothes, and once I have blundered into my spot, I get as comfortable and as quiet as I can. I sit still and wait. At first there will be only the sound of the wind in the trees and the water over the rock, but after half an hour or so, animals will reemerge from their hiding places. Birds perch and chirp, voles scuttle in the leaf litter. If I’m lucky, something higher up the chain of being will manifest itself — a deer, a turkey … or a squirrel.

I once listened to a lecture by an outdoors professional about how to move through the woods. He laid out the dynamic in terms of concentric circles surrounding a person moving through the woods. If, like me, you are a blunderer, then the circle closest to you is the “circle of perception,” the immediate vicinity that you see and engage with as you clamber over fallen logs and curse the briars attempting to filch your hat. Beyond that circle of perception, and extending very far beyond what you can perceive, is a “circle of disturbance,” the area within which the fear of you and the dread of you has fallen upon the animal kingdom. And the disturbance ripples outward beyond what you immediately create, as disturbed animals in turn disturb others.

A few years ago, Christopher Solomon reported in The New York Times:

Studies in recent years by many researchers … have shown that animals such as birds, mammals and even fish recognize the alarm signals of other species. Some can even eavesdrop on one another across classes. Red-breasted nuthatches listen to chickadees. Dozens of birds listen to tufted titmice, who act like the forest’s crossing guards. Squirrels and chipmunks eavesdrop on birds, sometimes adding their own thoughts. In Africa, vervet monkeys recognize predator alarm calls by superb starlings. (“When Birds Squawk, Other Species Seem to Listen,” May 18, 2015)

Animal “language” is far more nuanced than we knew, and can distinguish between various kinds of threats and their locations and the like. “Don’t get eaten by that lurching human who has just twisted his ankle!” peeps the warbler to the chipmunk. As it were.

The thing to realize is that the size of one’s circle of disturbance is inversely proportional to the size of one’s circle of perception. If you are only aware of what is immediately around you — the root on which you have just twisted your ankle — then you will be more apt to frighten animals you don’t see with your ruckus. But as your attention extends further out, you naturally slow down and move more quietly, and the area within which your movements elicit attention (and alarm) shrinks back toward yourself.

There is a spiritual lesson in all of this. God is the archetype of stillness and silence, and this divine stillness and silence is manifested most fully within this world on the cross — the still silence of our crucified Lord who sees all and disturbs none. It is then no coincidence that “before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:13).

When our attention is focused narrowly on ourselves and the things and people in our immediate vicinity, we wind up blundering heedlessly through life, creating a great deal of psychic commotion, and a large circle of spiritual disturbance. But by slowing down, becoming still and quiet, and by allowing our attention to range further afield, encompassing all things, and ultimately expanding beyond the horizon of all things and reaching out to him “who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:6), we will discover real stillness, the divine peace that passes all understanding.

Which is to say that our spiritual circle of disturbance will have shrunk to nothing, engulfed by Calvary when it is set up in our hearts.

Evangelical catholicism: the ecclesiological vision of archbishop Michael Ramsey

Originally published at Covenant, in 2007. Slightly revised and republished in two parts in 2017, here, and here.

It was suggested to me that I might usefully write something around the evangelical-catholic vision of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, of blessed memory, and about how that vision might illuminate the issues we currently face.

I would first say: if you have never read Ramsey's wonderful book The Gospel and the Catholic Church, you should drop everything you are doing, find a copy and read it. Ramsey combines a very lucid and straightforward style with uncommon insight into Holy Scripture's deepest meanings.

With respect to unity, per se, Ramsey explicitly devotes an entire chapter to the subject – appropriately enough that chapter is called "The Meaning of Unity". But of course what he says throughout The Gospel and the Catholic Church bears on the issue of Christian unity.

The value of Ramsey's vision is that it is anterior to the fractious debate over human sexuality ongoing within the Communion. Whatever one's view on human sexuality, one is free to embrace Ramsey's evangelical-catholicism. Indeed, if the debate within Anglicanism could be shifted to THIS level (an attempt at shifting represented by the proposed Covenant), a way forward might be found for the resolution of particular contentions around human sexuality, and whatever else.

In what follows I will develop Ramsey's suggestions, on the one hand that the unity of the Church is an entailment of Jesus Christ's having given his life for her sake; and on the other hand that for individual believers, and for particular groups of believers, communion with Jesus Christ -- living into his given life -- is constitutive of their participation in the sacramental life of the One Body. Lastly, I will suggest ways in which Anglicans, and particularly Anglicans in North America, both "conservative" and "liberal" (I mean for the quotes to indicate the inexactitude with which those terms apply to churchmen as such, given the terms' inevitably secular connotations), might practically inhabit Ramsey's vision of the Church as both evangelical and catholic.

The purpose of the Church, according to Ramsey, is to gesture toward the cross, to point the way toward "the question-mark of Calvary at the centre of its teaching." The Church is there as the fellowship instituted and sent by Christ to proclaim the Gospel, the Good News that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Christians "are sent to be the place where the Passion of Jesus Christ is known and where witness is borne to the Resurrection from the dead" (p. 4).

This is indeed the Good News for which the world had groaned, and for which the hearts of many in the world remain restless. So the scribe Ezra writes: If I have found favor in thy sight, O Lord, show this also to thy servant: whether after death, as soon as every one of us yields up his soul, we shall be kept in rest until those times come when thou wilt renew the creation, or whether we shall be tormented at once? (4 Ezra 7.75) For the advent of the Messiah was the advent of creation's renewal. His sufferings herald for all who receive him, who believe in his name, "power to become the children of God" (John 1.12). In Christ therefore is the fulfillment of God's promise to his people, that he will take them to himself, that they will be his, and he theirs; that they will know that he is the Lord, their God (Exodus 6.7). In Christ, God has remembered his promise of mercy.

Christ is manifest in his obedience-unto-death as the chosen of God, the Father's only "biological" heir -- the only One with whom the Father shares his essence. Jesus Christ is at once the ekklesia, the race elected by God to be the custodian of his promises, gathered into one flesh, self-offered in perfect devotion, an anamnesis of the promises of God. Ramsey quotes Wellhausen: "The Messiah is the Incarnation of Israel's universal rule, He and Israel are almost identical, and it matters little whether we say that Israel HAS or IS the Messiah." On the cross "Israel rejects Israel, and in the isolation of Calvary Jesus alone is Israel, the Son, the Servant. The vineyard has been lost to its former husbandmen, and the PEOPLE OF GOD consists only of the ONE who, rejected by His own, is dying on the Cross, alone the Servant who obeys and alone the place where the name and the glory and the will and the promises of God are seen. Jesus Christ, in His solitary obedience, IS the Church" (p.21).

Yet the death of Christ at once shows the essential unity of the Father and the Son, and consummates the mutual society of God and man. "From the first, the will to die was a part of the Messiah's identification with men" (p. 23) – the Son left his divine prerogatives, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and came to earth not to be served but to serve. The self-giving of God manifests itself in history, within the context of fallen creation, as the humiliation of the Son. Yet we know the self-abandonment, the kenosis of Jesus as the revelation of Messiah, as the drawing-near of the Kingdom – because the Kingdom is where God reigns, where his will is done, and on Calvary Jesus Christ does the will of his Father. On Calvary, God's Kingdom comes (John 19.19). Thus the Cross manifests the essential unity of Father and Son, in a bond of love that is itself divine. "Behind the historical events there is the unity of the one God. This unity overcomes men and apprehends them through the Cross" (49).

The identity of the self-abasement of the Son with the inheritance of the Kingdom in history cannot be apprehended by "those who are perishing". Therefore the Cross is the destruction of the wisdom of the wise, and the thwarting of the cleverness of the clever (1 Cor. 1.18). As Ramsey says, "the philanthropist, the reformer, the broad-minded modern man can never understand, in terms of their own ideals, what the Church is or what it means" (4). "For the Church exists for something deeper than philanthropy and reform, namely to teach men to die to self and to trust in a Resurrection to new life which, because it spans both this world and another world, can never be wholly understood here, and must always puzzle this world's idealists" (8).

The world will never understand the Church because the world will never understand the Cross – because the life of the Church is the gift of the Crucified. The broad-minded modern man sees in the Church a society constituted in renunciation of the telluric contexts within which the modern man seeks to earn a living, within which he looks for life. For the Church's fellowship "springs from and bears witness to the events of Jesus in the flesh. The events created the fellowship and the fellowship mysteriously shares in the events" (48). In his beautiful systematic work Hymn of Entry, Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita asks "What is my calling? It is, if possible, to die in God."

Thus not only is the historical life of Christ the wellspring of ecclesiality, but in an event of mutual recognition -- which is the epicenter of every relationship, and of relationship itself -- the Church finds her vocation in bearing-witness (marturew – 1 Cor. 15.15) to God in Christ. Her essential work is in gesturing towards the Bridegroom, in recommending him to those beyond the borders of her common life, that all people might find fraternity in the bond of Christ's peace, that he might be all in all.

This side of the Last Things, the ecclesial life, and the UNITY of this life, is constitutive of the Godward gesture that is the Church's vocation in history. "…This unity is connected with the truth about Christ Himself. It is the unity of His own Body, springing from the unity of God, uttered in the Passion of Jesus, and expressed in an order and a structure" (47). And because ecclesial unity is at once a gift, as well as an historical making-known of the truth of God in Christ, its universality precedes its locality. "Thus each group of Christians will learn its utter dependence upon the whole Body. It will indeed be aware of its own immediate union with Christ, but it will see this experience as a part of the one life of the one family in every age and place. By its dependence upon the Church of history it will die to self-consciousness and self satisfaction" (44). And "by their place in the one Body they are to learn to be humble and dependent and to die to self. Let them consider the Body and exist only as members of the Body, and they will learn of Christ's Cross whereby men are lost as separate 'selfhoods' and found as members of Christ and of one another" (52).

Ecclesial life – life in Christ – includes a conviction of the valuelessness of the local – of individuals and individual groups – outside the terms of the local's being an instantiation of the universal (cf. St. Paul's phrase "the church of God which is at Corinth" -- 1 Cor. 1.2). A group or an individual's membership in the one Body therefore "includes the redeemed man's knowledge of death and resurrection through his place in the one visible society and through the death to self which every member and group has died" (50). Acts of disunity are thereby betrayed as inimical to the life of Christ – as in a real sense anti-Christ. Yet any act uninformed by the life of the whole Body is just such an act of disunity. "For every part of the Church's true order will bear witness to the one universal family of God and will point to the historic events of the Word-made-flesh" (50).

Innovations, "new things" or new truths putatively undertaken or revealed by the Holy Spirit to an individual or group within the one Body must therefore be explicable in terms of the witness (martus) they bear to the Gospel – to the historical reality of God in Christ – as well as in terms of their status as gift to the whole Body. And here naturally issues of mutual recognition, inter alia, arise. "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God" (1 Jn 4.1), and "if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silence in church and speak to himself and to God… For God is not a God of confusion but of peace" (1 Cor. 28, 33). Ramsey notes St. Paul's rebuke of the Corinthians for their factionalism and self-consciousness, for their failure to die to separate selfhoods and become alive in Christ: "To possess a gift is to feel no pride of possession, for only in the life of the one Body is it of use or of significance" (53). Ramsey might have gone even further: a gift is only realized as such in the gratuity of its being-given; "to possess" a gift is to nullify its character as gift (cf. Jacques Derrida in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money). Gifts are for giving.

Anglicanism has become factious in the extreme, and one cannot help but wonder if the spirit of Christ-like gratuity, of self-effacement for the sake of the Body, has been quashed by a climate of hyper-self-consciousness. One wonders whether TEC might not be given pause by the non-recognition with which its "gifts" have been met by the one Body (both within the Anglican Communion and within and among our ecumenical partners). One winces at the self-awareness of TEC's rhetoric: "our church law… our canons… our autonomy… our Constitution… our founding principles… our own liberation from colonialism…" etc. (cf. the TEC House of Bishops "Mind of the House" resolutions from March 2007) -- all of which are held up as our exclusive possession as well as our first order commitments. One would do well to ask whether TEC has not "succumbed to the peril of thinking of these gifts as possessions of their own and interpreting them in terms of human wisdom, knowledge, and individual ownership" (51) – terms born of the spirit of Anti-Christ, as we have seen, inimical to the life of the Body.

Neither has TEC given an adequate theological account of how her innovative gifts bear witness to God in Christ. There has been much talk of "justice" and of the making-possible of our gay and lesbian brethren's appropriation of what is theirs by right. But if same-sex sexuality is to have a place within the one Body, it must be accounted for in terms of the given life of the one Body. It is not enough that it should be accounted for in terms of the autonomous life of the Body's members -- in terms, in other words, of the rights and prerogatives of individuals and groups. We know something of the iconography and sacramentality of the gift of human sexuality. But the one Body has rooted human sexuality in the differentiation and complimentarity of the sexes, which our Lord himself placed under the rubric of creation and grace in one of his very few explicit teachings on the subject: "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh…?" (Mat. 19.4). And as intimated by St. Paul in Ephesians 5, the Body has known the gift (the datum) of sexuality within the one Body as complimentarity within differentiation, as iconographic of the mutual self-gift that takes place between the different but complimentary natures of God and man in the one flesh of Jesus Christ, the theanthropos – the consummation of which is constitutive of the one Body's given life.

How might Anglicanism gesture "toward the question mark of Calvary at the center of its teaching" (4), even amid the difficulties and disagreements we face? Here are some far-fetched ideas:

1. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the liberals are right: a.k.a. how might TEC be Christ-like? –

If, as TEC seems to be claiming, the gift of sexuality must be revised or elaborated, let this revision or elaboration take place within the context of the common life of the one Body, within the spirit of mutual recognition and self-gift which alone characterizes the love by which our Lord said we would be known (Jn. 13.35). Let TEC offer her gifts in patience and humility, knowing that love is patient, kind, and does not insist on its own way (1 Cor. 13.4-5) – knowing that in autonomy she is nothing (1 Cor. 13.2). And if it is true that TEC's interlocutors in the Communion at large are blinded and ignorant, as many within TEC have suggested, let TEC bear the burden of their brothers' and sisters' blindness and ignorance, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6.2). Let TEC bear it "with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4.2).

2. Assuming, for the sake or argument, that the conservatives are right: a.k.a. how might the dissent / Network / "Global South" be Christ-like? –

For the conservatives' part,let them listen in humility for the voice of the Spirit in their interlocutors, knowing that the Spirit's groanings are too deep for words, even traditionalist words. Let them be willing to suffer at the hands of the litigious. Let them be eager to be defrauded to keep the scandal of factionalism away from the consciousness of the unbelieving world for whom the Lord suffered and died. Let the conservatives prefer to suffer injustice for the sake of the souls of their brethren; let them know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins (James 5.20).

And in any event, whoever is right:

Would that this difficult season of disagreement in the Anglican Communion were characterized by Christians competing with one another only to give the most extravagant gifts of self, to be the most gratuitous in their outpourings for the sake of one another. Would that the secular media told stories about parishes and dioceses attempting to give away their property to one another, rather than seeking to hold onto it at almost any cost, like ravenous dogs snarling over scraps. Would that when Anglican Christians sat down to eat, they might wait for one another, that the world might know that the Father sent the Son.

Audacious alternatives: clean energy and justice at Standing Rock

Originally published in The Living Church magazine, 2016.

On December 4, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would deny permission for the Dakota Access Pipeline to pass under Lake Oahe, the sole source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux. Protesters at Standing Rock and their supporters, including Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, celebrated the announcement, even as the pipeline’s builders, Energy Transfer Partners, vowed to complete the project without rerouting it.

The Dakota Access Pipeline and the protests surrounding it are underwritten by a tangled web of related issues ranging from climate change, to the need for energy independence and clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels, to the injustices done to indigenous peoples. This knotty political mess our society has gotten itself into is difficult, if not impossible, to sort out equitably.

I was struck recently by a Web meme showing a special forces soldier — a SEAL, judging from his uniform — holding a sign that obscured his face. The sign read, I didn’t join the Navy to fight for Al Qaeda in a Syrian civil war. Following the thread of political motives and national interest, one observes how our nation has involved itself in Middle Eastern conflicts based on our alliances with societies with whom we have very little in common, other than a shared humanity and a shared interest in extracting oil from the Persian Gulf region. One observes too that hundreds of thousands of people have died, just in the last decade, because of this shared interest, even as untold others have been injured, bereaved, or displaced.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called for a Manhattan Project-style clean energy initiative. His call fell largely on deaf ears as U.S. opposition to the 2005 Kyoto Protocol built during the Bush administration. Yet Friedman’s idea remains good and has arguably become only more urgent as a scientific consensus has coalesced around anthropogenic climate change in the intervening years.

Yet it remains true that even if the political will for such a project existed, the world could not simply and suddenly stop burning fossil fuels without bringing about a global economic catastrophe, and the immense human suffering that such a catastrophe would certainly entail. Like the prehistoric animals who got stuck in petroleum seeps and died, global society now finds itself bogged down in an oily mire. Like it or not — and few informed and farsighted people like it — carbon-based energy is the patrimony of contemporary mankind. The broad question is how we will elect to spend that patrimony. As David Biello has written: the short-sighted option is to continue to burn fossil fuels until there are none left to burn, or until climate change forces a radically different way of life on us. The alternative, though, is to use fossil fuels in the service of finding clean, renewable energy alternatives, and building infrastructure for those alternatives. I devoutly hope that we will elect to pursue the latter course.

The research and development for clean energy alternatives, still in their infancy, to say nothing of building a global infrastructure to support them, will take years if not decades. The immediate need to extract, move, refine, and burn fossil fuels seems inescapable. Yet this fact evinces another conundrum: easy access to fossil fuels drives down prices and reduces economic incentives to search for clean alternatives.

What should we make of the situation at Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline, in light of such broad considerations? Energy Transfer Partners claims that the pipeline is state-of-the-art, and that the contamination of drinking water from leakage is extremely unlikely. Yet concern for the contamination of drinking water seems to have led the Army Corps of Engineers earlier to reject a proposed route for the pipeline under the Missouri River near Bismarck. And just one day after the corps announced its refusal to permit an easement for the pipeline under the Missouri River, the North Dakota Department of Health announced that a rupture had been discovered in the Belle Fourche Pipeline in Billings County, about 150 miles from Standing Rock: more than 130,000 gallons of oil had leaked into the Little Missouri River.

These developments hardly instill trust in the assurances from producers that potential ecological harm is negligible. And in any event, there is a very long track record of the U.S. government, and the economic interests it too often represents, breaking its promises to Native Americans. To my mind, the strongest argument against the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline has less to do with its ecological effects and more to do with just deference to the Standing Rock Sioux. As David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, said in an interview with PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff on Dec. 2:

It’s unfortunate that this nation continues to treat our tribe, and tribal nations around the country, in this manner. … History will show that the federal government, the state government, has always built the economy … off the backs of our nations. And this is another example.

That is indisputable. Native American society has paid a heavy price for the economic greatness of America. Writing in The American Conservative, Henry Chappell quoted the Sioux writer Vine Deloria, Jr., whose book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (University of Oklahoma Press, 1969) rebukes the hypocrisy of the United States in its declamations on the importance of keeping international treaties, in particular with Russia:

Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these statements. America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement, despite the fact that the United States Government signed over four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indian tribes. It would take Russia another century to make and break as many treaties as the United States has already violated.

From coast to coast for four centuries, from the Jamestown Colony to the Treaty of Temecula, the Trail of Tears, the Comanche Wars, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and on and on, it seems too much to hope that Standing Rock might mark a turning point in the nation’s dealings with American Indians, that a just and durable solution might be found, and that such a solution might serve the pressing need to use the natural resources at our disposal to find cleaner and more sustainable energy alternatives.

Let’s be audacious enough to hope this, and as we await the fulfillment of that hope, to find less poisonous ways of living.

A catechism of nature (5): autumn

Originally published at Covenant, December 2, 2016.

I.

Anglo-American folklore has designated October’s full moon the Hunter’s Moon, much as September’s is called the Harvest Moon. They mark the arrival and deepening of autumn.

Over the past month or so, the polar jet stream has made its first chilly incursions into my part of Texas. I have turned the air conditioning off in the house and opened the windows. Evenings have been delicious and mornings crisp.

My daily walk follows a course beneath live oaks, pecans, sweet gums, and a series of four bur oaks — my favorites (I try to ignore non-native ornamental trees). The nuts have begun to drop, crunching under foot, making a mess of the sidewalks. Most days I pick up a few pecans and eat them as I walk. This provokes indignation from the squirrels. They run up and down the trees and chatter at me, the thief.

Following their designated forms and ends, inbuilt by the divine wisdom, “mightily and sweetly ordering all things, reaching from one end to the other,” the flora and fauna are preparing for the coming cold. Migratory birds are on the move. Recently, on a walk in the countryside, it thrilled me to hear the rush of wings from blue wing teal and starlings as they swooped overhead. Without the city noise, you can actually hear the beat of their wings.

Josef Pieper wrote,

Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality. … For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the world of creation. (“Leisure: The Basis of Culture“)

II.

By the middle of December, it will be cold, and the natural world will have quieted down. During the spring and summer all is a riot in woods and fields. From the microbial level and on up the ladder of being, everything is on the move, creeping and eating and singing, bearing and being born. But during winter, all is calm, all is quiet. It is, in the end, no coincidence that Christians sing “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve, a few short days after the winter solstice.

I make a concerted effort to spend my days off outdoors, and I enjoy it most when the days are cold. I am an avid hunter and fisherman, but it strikes me that these activities are really more occasions for something else: for looking at the natural world and trying to understand it and, by trying to understand it, trying to understand something of what is above and behind and beyond it.

That I enjoy this seeing and seeking-to-understand has been a consolation during the first part of autumn, because dove season has been a bust in my corner of the world. Two weeks ago I set up my decoys, loaded my shotgun, and sat next to Jeb, my bird dog, against a hackberry tree by a field of cut milo. In two hours, we saw one single dove fly into a mesquite thicket on the other side of the field, well out of range. But the sun lay beautifully across the gentle contours of the land. Meadowlarks and killdeer gleaned among the browning stalks; a kestrel amused himself ambushing grasshoppers; and much to my surprise and delight, confirmed by my binoculars, a bald eagle was riding thermals in the distance.

Pieper writes,

We may read in the first chapter of Genesis that God “ended his work which he had made” and “behold, it was very good.” In leisure, man too celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of the Creation. He looks and he affirms: it is good. (“Leisure: The Basis of Culture”)

Seeing that the created world is good is an aspect of our likeness to God. We participate in a divine activity when we are at rest, still and silent; or rather, being still and silent is a material condition for participating in this divine work, seeing what God has made, and understanding that it is very good.

The natural world itself reflects this. The litter of pecans and acorns on the ground marks the coming end of the warm season’s labor — eating and singing and reproduction, photosynthesis and metabolism. The hardwood seeds that wind up in the ground will absorb nutrients from the soil during the winter stillness, like students in a catechetical school (scholē in Greek means “leisure”), waiting to be baptized by spring rains and illuminated by the all-conquering sun’s ascendancy at the vernal equinox.

III.

The grandfather of contemporary conservation, Wendell Berry, has written:

The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it. If God loves the world, then how might any person of faith be excused for not loving it or justified in destroying it? (“What are People For?” p. 98)

Christianity in America has had a propensity to cede its authority to the liberal order. This was less noticeable before the middle of the 20th century, when the ethical sphere of liberalism was itself shaped by Christian commitments. But now that faith is waning, incompatibilities and divided loyalties are bubbling increasingly to the surface of American life. Before we are anything else, Christians are Republicans and Democrats and, above all, consumers. The proof lies in an honest assessment of how willing you would be to move houses in order to integrate your family more fully into the life of your church, in comparison with how willing you would be to move houses to make your retirement goals more attainable.

Similarly, the degradation of the natural world was less noticeable when the world’s population was smaller and per-capita energy needs were a fraction of what they are now. But it is ever more difficult to ignore, as many have noted, the loss of biodiversity that has accompanied human population growth and, as Ephraim Radner writes,

changes to the earth’s atmosphere, the distribution of water on the surface of the earth, chemical compositions of water and soil, structures of subsoil layers, and so on. These changes correlate with the shifting distribution of life on the earth, and the expansion and activities of human beings have caused them. (“No safe place except hope: The Anthropocene epoch”)

The concentration of human populations in cities, which began in western Europe in the 12th century and has now accelerated frenetically and gone global, means that many people live their lives almost entirely cut off from the primary realities of nature and of natural processes. As Gerard Manley Hopkins said: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” It is extremely difficult to see and understand the need for pollinators and the habitats that sustain them when all one knows of one’s food is that it comes from a supermarket.

Life inside the bubble of liberal institutions and markets hobbles our ability to participate in a divine work, to see the world as it is, and to see that it is very good. Christians must therefore find opportunities for leisure, in the way that Pieper meant, leisure as a form of “that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.” Seeking these opportunities is not a matter of “self-care” or relaxation. Teresa of Avila spoke of the “determined determination” necessary to remain still and quiet, susceptive to God’s initiative. This is in fact “our bounden duty and service,” a form of counter-witness, of subversion and sabotage in enemy occupied territory. And it presupposes the courage to apprehend that our society is, as often as not, about the unwitting task of wrecking the good reality we are no longer able to see. “Woe to you! for you are like graves which are not seen, and men walk over them without knowing it” (Luke 11:44). Sacrificial cults always hide their victims from themselves.

Duck season is about to open. I have spent the last month or two studying migration patterns, reading the reports of wildlife biologists about spring breeding patterns and rainfall in latitudes thousands of miles from my home. I have been visiting nearby lakes and streams and taking note of who is passing through — pintails, gadwalls, and mallards — and wondering at the genius, always one step beyond what is empirically verifiable, the traces of the Choreographer of this dance. When I pull the trigger on my shotgun and see a duck fold and fall, when the hunt becomes the kill, it will be a small moment in a process of seeing and seeking-to-understand, a process that stretches from spring rains to thanks returned after a satisfying midwinter meal, and back again.

A catechism of nature (4): the sea

Originally published at Covenant, August 16, 2016.

What can the sea tell her,

That she does not now know, and know how to bear?

She knows, as the sea, that what came will recur,

And detached in that wisdom, is aware

How grain by slow grain, the last sun heat from sand is expended on night air.

Bare flesh of an old foot knows that much, as she stands there.

—Robert Penn Warren from “Foreign Shore, Old Woman, Slaughter of Octopus”

I.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus: “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole — a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole — it is this that is mystical” (6.45). When seen from a sufficient height, human life, human ingenuity, recedes into insignificance. During the Holocene Wet Phase, much of the Sahara was a verdant savannah, teeming with animal and human life. During the Cretaceous Period, Texas was at the bottom of the sea.

When I was in the discernment process for ordination, I recall being asked on a psychological evaluation whether I was afraid of deep water. The question stopped me. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be disqualified due to insanity or irrational phobias; but on the other hand, I had resolved going into the exam to be scrupulously honest. The question conjured images of floating in the open ocean at night, with thousands of feet of dark water and who-knows-what between me and the ocean floor. I answered that Yes, I am afraid of deep water.

Gazing out of the window of an airplane on a recent flight to Bermuda, I thought about deep water. The waters of the open ocean are dark, even in broad sunshine, and incomprehensibly vast. Seen from an airplane, ocean islands and all the human doings that they sustain seem insignificant and fragile surrounded by the limitless blue. Geologically minor jostlings of the earth’s crust can cause immense disruptions to human life, calamities for coastal and island communities, as happened during the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, which led to the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Nearly 16,000 people lost their lives. Most of them drowned.

Yet as I stared out the window of another airplane, flying from Texas to Wisconsin last year, I saw the entire middle part of a continent brought under the plow, a checkerboard of farm roads and telltale pivot irrigation. Mankind is small in comparison of Tellus Mater, but we are many (Mark 5:9).

II.

God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:28)

The stewardship of the earth and the seas, and of the resources that come from them, is a matter of obedience. Yet we often seem to be failing, abated in this failure by economic systems that incentivize mere exploitation. Likewise, the exponential growth of the human population over the past century, which shows no signs of slowing, is putting immense pressure on wildlife and other natural resources. Stock assessments of the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery indicated that by 1990 the fishery’s spawning potential was just 2.6 percent of what it would be without any fishing pressure — a ratio insufficient to sustain either the fishery or the human communities that rely on it.

When it comes to the dominion mandate from Genesis, laissez-faire policies are no longer adequate, if they ever were. Creative solutions, across the board, are necessary — solutions that evince due humility in the face of the vastness of earth, sky, and sea, and more particularly solutions that evince due humility before our common Lord. But dominion must also defer to the dignity of work, create, sustain, and reward solidarity between rich and poor, recognize the family as a fundamental economic unit, and foster an ethic of responsible stewardship and simple agency at the most local levels possible.

Perhaps most importantly, new solutions must elicit from man a delight in the primary realities of creation, and not merely habits of exploitative utility. Delight in creation is a facet of our likeness to God (Gen. 1:31), and its abatement therefore is a symptom of sin. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote (“God’s Grandeur”):

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

III.

When ancient peoples looked out at the sea, they recognized a vast and ungovernable power, at once life-giving and lethal, a source of food and the abode of dragons. One thinks of Leviathan, Behemoth, Rahab, or Jonah and the whale.

In February of 2007 fishermen in the Ross Sea off of Antarctica caught a squid that weighed over a thousand pounds. It was a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), a species affected by an evolutionary phenomenon called abyssal gigantism. Colossal squid can grow over 40 feet long and have the largest eyes of any known animal, sometimes over a foot in diameter. Yet biologists estimate that, due to a very slow metabolism, these enormous creatures require only about an ounce of food per day, suggesting that they spend most of their time lurking in ambush, like the “young lion” of Psalm 17. They have been known to attack sperm whales and, according to maritime legends, even ships.

As I was recently examining a depth chart of Bermuda, I noticed that the Atlantic drops precipitously to over a thousand fathoms (over a mile deep) a short distance from shore, showing Bermuda to be the peak of a steep volcanic mountain. The deepest part of the Atlantic is the Milwaukee Deep, north of Puerto Rico, at over 27,000 feet. “There go the ships: and there is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to take his pastime therein” (Ps. 104:26). What else lurks in those waters? What of human artifice, what human lives, have been lost in them down the centuries? What lies at the bottom, and why does it lie there?

Yet every morning I read in Psalm 95: “The sea is his, for he made it.” And as the Lord reminded the precocious Job:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements — surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Or who shut in the sea with doors,
when it burst forth from the womb;
when I made clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stayed?”
Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
and caused the dawn to know its place … ? (Job 38:4-12)

A certain diffidence behooves us in the face of creation’s mysteries. It is the task of the natural sciences to interrogate creation, but the relation is properly dialogic. Nor are we, priests and kings of creation, exempt from interrogation. Augustine reports (in Book 1 of Confessions) how earth and sky and sea bore witness to him, “by their beauty of order,” of the sovereignty of God — “He made us!” they cried with one voice — and how this led naturally to introspection: “I turned my thoughts into myself and said, ‘Who are you?’”

Who are we, indeed. Who do we now think we are? Creation’s beauty of form, Augustine says, is visible to all “whose senses are unimpaired.”

IV.

There are intimations sprinkled throughout the Old Testament that God will subdue the waters of the earth, along with the overwhelming powers of darkness and death that inhabit them in the cosmologies of ancient peoples, seemingly the residue of the watery, primordial chaos of Genesis 1:2. There are intimations too that as often as not mankind has allied himself with the pelagic darkness, that the subdual of the latter will coincide with our judgment.

On August 4 of this year, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would lift a ban on the creation in laboratories of human-animal hybrids, so-called “chimeras,” beings that are part pig and part human, for example. And there is no doubt that these things are to be created only to be killed on the altar of “medical research.” Cures will be promised — just as Moloch promised to water the crops of the sea-faring Carthaginians in exchange for their children’s blood. How this prospect, soon to be a reality, does not inspire widespread revulsion is beyond me. It is like the sight of a drowning shorebird, covered in oil. But much worse.

For behold, the Lord is coming forth out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed upon her, and will no more cover her slain. In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Isa. 26:21–27:1)

Joseph Ratzinger has suggested (in Jesus of Nazareth vol. 1) that this is one facet of Jesus’ descent into the waters at his baptism, the fulfillment of his promise once and for all to subjugate the roving powers of the formless void. And Jesus himself connects his descent into the waters of the earth with his descent into the earth itself, at his death (Mark 10:39). Yet judgment coincides with mercy. The ungovernable powers of the world will be brought into subjection and, in the same motion, the meek of the earth will be delivered.

Thou smotest the heads of Leviathan in pieces: thou gavest him to be meat for the people in the wilderness (Ps. 74:14).

dispatch from a white priest in Dallas

Originally published at Covenant, July 18, 2016.

Two Sundays ago, churchgoers heard in the familiar story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) Jesus’ answer to a question put to him by “a lawyer,” namely: “Who is my neighbor?” The tragic shootings of two black men by police raised for our nation yet again the twin questions of Who is my neighbor? and How I am to love him? Alton Sterling was shot in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile outside of St. Paul. The horrific events in my city of Dallas arrived soon after.

For the record, I believe there are at least four sins committed by our nation that cry to heaven for vengeance:

1. the genocide of American Indians;

2. state-sanctioned abortion;

3. the defrauding of laborers of their wages (according to the Social Security Administration, illegal immigrants and their employers have contributed more than $100 billion of their wages to Social Security in the past decade and, because they are here illegally, they will receive little to none of that money);

4. and slavery.

Our nation has sowed the wind, and I am afraid that we will reap the whirlwind. When it comes to the legacy of slavery, we are beginning to see it more and more. And if you don’t believe in corporate sin or corporate guilt, you haven’t read the Bible.

I don’t have any political answers. And frankly, I don’t think there are any answers for our nation anymore. We have denied ourselves access, politically and corporately, to the resources that animated the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The heroes of that time proclaimed from the rooftops that their work was underwritten by the imperatives of their faith in Jesus Christ. I have in mind men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jonathan Myrick Daniels. The latter was a white, Anglo-Catholic seminarian from the Church of the Advent in Boston who was shot to death in Alabama in 1963 when he threw himself between a shotgun-wielding white construction worker and a 17-year-old black girl. Martin Luther King called this “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”

But our misguided rulers are deliberately and systematically squeezing Christian faith out of our nation’s public square, because the idea that our authentic identity must be found wholly in the election of God’s only Son strikes at the very foundation of the vision of the neoliberal market state, which understands itself entirely in terms of guaranteeing and celebrating individualist, consumerist autonomy. We are now supposed to choose our identities as freely and as whimsically as we choose which brand of toothpaste we buy. We are told that our freedom to choose trumps even the structure of our chromosomes. But Christian faith stands in the way of that so-called freedom. The signs of the times, in this respect, are there for all to see. The hour is late.

W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” (1919) is a word in season, an eerie and prophetic voice for this moment of history. The poem has been floating through my mind in connection with our cultural moment, ever more and more:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It is cold comfort to recognize yourself among “the best” simply because you “lack all conviction.” How is it that this poem so trenchantly foreshadows, in 1919, the political situation of the West almost a hundred years later?

I am not convinced that René Girard and Walker Percy were wrong when they suggested that the Apocalypse began at the Battle of Verdun (see, respectively, Battling to the End[MSU Press, 2010] and Love in the Ruins [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971]). The words of a brave and innocent four-year-old-girl, trying to comfort her distraught mother, have been echoing through my head. If you watched the video of the aftermath of the Philando Castile shooting (which I do not necessarily recommend), you will know what I am talking about. It’s okay, Mommy. It’s okay. I’m right here with you.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

So, I fear, we contemporary Americans are rudderless when it comes to figuring out who our neighbors are and how to love them.

But we Christians aren’t. We should know, because our Master has told us, and commanded us to live it out. Nor can we forget the exegetical consensus of the Church Fathers, that Jesus is himself the one figured by the character of the Good Samaritan. We are the ones lying in the ditch, battered and helpless. Jesus is the stranger who comes near in mercy, bathes our wounds with the sacraments of his healing and reconciliation, the one who lodges us safe in the bosom of our holy mother, the Church, until he comes again.

My congregation is a small one. But one of the things I cherish most about it is its racial diversity. Authentic integration doesn’t happen naturally: take a look at a typical school cafeteria, or at the neighborhood demographics of any American city. Authentic integration is supernatural. We are one people of God, gathered like grains of wheat from the disparate hillsides of class and ethnicity, gathered in peace around one altar, worshiping one Lord. Saint Paul said to the church in Corinth: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17).

Like many people, I feel a sense of foreboding about what is coming on our nation and our world (cf. Luke 21:26). But the peace of Jesus is rooted in my heart, and that peace transcends all foreboding and all understanding.

With Saint Paul (Col. 1:9-14), I pray that we may be strengthened with all power, according to the glorious might of God, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has already delivered us from the dominion of this world’s gathering darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption and forgiveness — even from the sins of our own nation that cry to heaven for vengeance.

A catechism of nature (3): edge effect

Originally published at Covenant, June 7, 2016.

The Gospels indicate that mankind lives on a cosmic boundary, between the treading down of Jerusalem and the end of all things. The Lord called this borderland “the times of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24). Elsewhere I have quoted Vaclav Havel:

We must honor with the humility of the wise the limits of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence.

Cardinal Newman too wrote about this metaphysical boundary, of how the course of human history veered sharply at the Incarnation, when the Maker of all things crept quietly across the border of space-time:

For so it was, that up to Christ’s coming in the flesh, the course of things ran straight towards this end, nearing it by every step; but now, under the Gospel, that course has … altered its direction, as regards His second coming, and runs, not towards the end, but along it, and on the brink of it; and is at all times equally near that great event, which, did it run towards, it would at once run into. (Sermon XVII, “Waiting for Christ,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons)

Ecologists speak of an “edge effect,” of the biotic conditions marked by the boundaries between habitats. Where woodland runs up against cultivated land, for example, hunters know to look for cottontails or bobwhite quail, where sunlight and wind create the right conditions for the kinds of plant communities such animals like, shade-averse shrubs and vines, leafy forbs and so forth.

There is a temporal edge effect too: the dusk and the dawn, sharpening the attention of the wading bird and the fisherman alike, temperature differentials and changes in light and barometric pressure stirring the frogs and the fish to action.

The borders between changing seasons awaken the migratory instincts of many species. It takes four generations of monarch butterfly to make their annual pilgrimage from the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico to their summer habitat in southern Canada, and back again to Mexico. Some unfathomable instinct urges the generations there and back, wave on wave across a continent of mortality and reproduction.

Over the Memorial Day holiday I went fishing at a farm pond known to harbor the South’s favorite freshwater game species: micropterus salmoides, the largemouth bass. Largemouths are voracious and fierce, which goes a long way toward accounting for their popularity among anglers. The fastidiousness of the trout fisherman is wasted on largemouths, especially in the spring, when warmer water temperatures and the exertions of the spawn incline them to attack almost anything dangled in front of their faces. “But,” as Havilah Babcock noted, “bass fishermen can be dumb too, which sort of balances the books and explains why they sometimes catch each other.”

Encouraged by this intelligence, I loaded my rods and tacklebox into the truck, together with Jeb, my bird dog, an enthusiastic fellow idiot, and set out after Sunday Mass to join a another clergyman-angler looking for fish, and renewal, at the farm pond.

Fishing is usually slow in the heat of mid-afternoon. And so it was last Sunday. We caught a few in the shade of some willows, along a hogwire fence that spring rains had caused to jut improbably a few yards out into the water. But for the most part, the heat lay heavy and the fish weren’t biting.

Having been at this game for many years, I should know better, and yet I always sink into a mild despair as the afternoon wears on. But as the sun touches the horizon and the temperature drops just perceptibly, the first frogs begin to croak, and the waders and shorebirds begin to flutter about and position themselves a little more strategically, and the casual angler does well to shake off the afternoon’s torpor and attend to his business.

So we did, and our attention was rewarded by an uptick in the action. The pieces de resistance were two truly enormous bass that my companion landed in quick succession, each of which I estimated to be over seven pounds. As the light faded, we fell back to the tailgate and toasted the outcome with a couple of cold beers, as thunderclouds rolled over the horizon in the distance. Lightning, too, loves the twilight.

As we sat on the tailgate, watching the stormclouds on the horizon, the lightning was constant yet there was no thunder, and the clouds seemed stationary, locked over the monoculture and suburban sprawl in the distance to the east, the graveyard of the blackland prairie. We were again on the edge of something exceeding our competence, a patchwork of boundaries. Psalm 102 hung somewhere beyond the borders of my consciousness:

They all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed …

A catechism of nature (2): the vernal transgression of boundaries

Originally published at Covenant, May 10, 2016.

One of my favorite places to visit in the spring is a creek running through a farm at the precise point where geology has dictated that man should stop growing cotton and start ranching cattle, where the Ozan formation abuts the Austin chalk and the West truly begins. The natural elements of this geologic border are something to behold. The creek is clear and cold, with a limestone bottom, and hemmed in by virgin hardwoods. Around the periphery native bluestems and switchgrass riot with the wildflowers amid stands of post oaks and the occasional bois d’arc.

Man has an innate propensity to seek and to test his limits and the limits of his world. Yet some boundaries simply cannot be crossed. Wittgenstein urged his readers to consider the eye’s relation to the visual field:

Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.633)

And death, the absolute limit of life, is like that: “Death is not an event of life. … Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit” (6.4311).

We grope our way in the darkness toward, one hopes, the light and the life. As odd as it seems, it is hard for me to see a prairie after spring rain without thinking of the great liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh’s poignant description of a baptismal liturgy of the fourth century. He describes an aged bishop leading the newly baptized from the semi-darkness of the baptistery to the church door:

There he bangs on the closed doors with his cane: they are flung open, the endless vigil is halted, and the baptismal party enters as all take up the hymn, “Christ is risen …,” which is all but drowned out by the ovations that greet Christ truly risen in his newly-born ones. As they enter, the fragrance of chrism fills the church: it is the Easter-smell, God’s grace olfactorally incarnate. The pious struggle to get near the newly baptized to touch their chrismed hair and rub its fragrance on their own faces.

Vaclav Havel, the liberal activist under Soviet rule and the first president of Czechoslovakia, described the experience of walking to school as a child, in a 1984 essay (“Politics and Conscience”):

As a boy, I lived for some time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk to school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of some hurriedly built factory, in all likelihood in the service of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens.

I have been struck by the etymology of the word Lent ever since I first encountered it. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for the spring season — lencten — and is related to the word long, having to do with the “lengthening” of the daylight hours after the winter solstice. Light and warmth return to the world, and as Prudentius wrote of the dawn, so we may say of the spring:

Earth’s gloom flees broken and dispersed,
By the sun’s piercing shafts coerced:
The daystar’s eyes rain influence bright
And colors glimmer back to sight.

We tend to think of Lent as a time of fasting and self-denial, and so it is. But it is appropriately accompanied by an expectant, spiritual joy, because it is oriented toward the full flowering of Easter dawn, and even during Lent the soul rightly revels in its expectation. Such considerations led George Herbert to welcome the “deare feast of Lent” (“Lent” in The Temple).

The vernal continuum of Lent-Easter is the corporate living out of the Lord’s words to his disciples: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). And the natural order, being the most primordial of God’s temporal utterances, responds and corresponds.

O Lord my God, great are the wondrous works which thou hast done, like as be also thy thoughts, which are to us-ward —Ps. 40:5

Seeds that have fallen into the soil begin to sprout and grow, and the face of the earth is renewed by the manifold glories of the flowering plants. “The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:28).

Biblical commentators down the centuries have made much of Easter being on the “eighth day,” and thus fulfilling God’s purposes in creation, when he said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth” (Gen. 1:11).

In its broadest construal, time, itself a created reality, underwrites the orientation of all things toward their destinies, what in the unfashionable terms of Aristotelian metaphysics are called “final causes.” “Moreover, the seed is potentially that which will spring from it, and the relation of potentiality to actuality we know” (On the Parts of Animals I.1).

Late winter’s dormant destinies are disclosed by the spring. The margins and medians of Texas highways, and the little “prairie remnants” accidentally preserved on the edges of cultivated or developed land, or by the establishment of rights-of-way for railroad tracks or power lines, are all redolent of resurrection at Easter. All bear witness that “if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40). Mother Nature sings her Te Deum at the resurrection of her Lord. “The glorious company of the angiosperms praise Thee!”

The ubiquitous bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, pink evening primrose, prairie verbena, asters in their myriads, glimmer back to sight. It delights me to see this vast army of witnesses each spring, and I find myself seeking wild and semi-wild places to watch the wakeful glimmering.

There is something compelling about borders, something evocative of life and movement. Nor ought we to forget that movement is a sign of life. Seeds must, in the process of their sprouting and growth, transgress the border of the ground from underneath, feeling their way in the darkness toward the light, and so attain their prescribed statures. Yet the Lord sets boundaries for his creatures, great and small. His words to the seas are apt: “Thus far shall you come, and no farther” (Job 38:11).

The earth herself enacts the baptismal liturgy in prototype each spring. My piety leads me to get near and to see, to absorb the fragrance of renewal, mindful of Paul’s admonition that our failure to heed the lessons of nature leaves us without excuse (Rom. 1). The lessons seem to me to be especially urgent given the gathering late winter darkness of our time and place. As Vaclav Havel said:

We must draw our standards from our natural world, heedless of ridicule, and reaffirm its denied validity. We must honor with the humility of the wise the limits of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence.