New experiences in remote landscapes have been one of the most incredible parts of my journey in science. I was 21 years old on my first hike into the alpine tundra to greet Old Man of the Mountain, a High Mountain sunflower, on top of Gothic Mountain, north of Crested Butte, Colorado. Each step took my breath away. It was beautiful and I was not a fit 21-year-old. I was far more focused on good grades and relieving stress with hush puppies and beer.
I’d arrived in Crested Butte a week late for my field science research program in the summer of 1993, because I’d been accepted to another program too and had been in Costa Rica exploring tropical ecosystems. I thought I might want to be a tropical biologist, and I had three weeks there to give it a try. On our one free day at the La Selva Biological Field Station, I chose to hike for five miles into primary rainforest that was old and smelled Earth. Dank, raw, chemically-rich soils releasing their perfume into the air above the narrow, dark trail on which I walked. The tree canopies felt miles above my head. There were insects everywhere, many that could kill me. And I was alone. I had asked to do the hike on my own, and the professors leading the program had let me.
I wanted to know what it would feel like to be on my own in a landscape so unfamiliar, and if I would be afraid. The journey began with curiosity, joy and wonder then segued to terror. After a few miles of easy hiking across flat terrain amid ferns, ants and house plants – species just like the ones we put in our homes, I could go no farther. A massive canopy tree had fallen across the path. Going over it was dangerous. Under not possible. Around would have meant walking off trail into the forest for 100 meters amid life-threatening insects and snakes. Not a good choice when with other people and certainly not a smart move on my own.
So, I chose to backtrack on the trail I was on and then detour onto another trail. I’d been required by the professors to draw on a map exactly where I would go, so they would know where to start looking should I not be at the rice and beans dinner at 6pm in the dining hall. I’d been hiking for only an hour or two when I took the detour.
My soul, the deep and wildly curious center of me, couldn’t walk back the way I had come. I needed to take another path. To know what else was in that forest. To experience what I had not yet seen or heard.
I do the same thing in the classes I teach and ones that I have taken. Same thing with books and with people too. There is a primitive need that pulls me into the dark away from all that I know to learn something about which I know nothing. I’m human, so there is fear as I do this. Uncertainty. Hope too. Hope that I’ll uncover what I’m seeking, though if asked at that moment of detouring what I’m looking for I wouldn’t be able to say. Looking. Just looking.
This tendency of mine took me to sea, the tropics and up mountains as I explored where on our planet I wanted to study the Earth. Cold places won. I love the cold and the species I meet there. The remoteness of the coldest parts of our Earth was also appealing. And even though Bear loves cold too, and there is lightning, permafrost sink holes and ice, the insects weren’t going to kill me in the Arctic or on top of mountains.
Have you ever opened a book and thought, ‘hot damn’? Or perhaps it was ‘God damn’? Talked with a person and been in disbelief about all they said. Not because you didn’t believe them or that the book wasn’t good, but because the ideas offered were so wonderful. So needed.
Known that the ideas were the light for which you’d been searching in a dark forest. The way. That has been my experience with theology.
The books I’ve been reading and people I have met are consciousness-expanding. They are what I am seeking now and was seeking years ago in my senior-year high school English course as I pondered what is on the horizon for the future of humanity. As I study theology, I can see that what I have known about our planet through ecology is a small window into a reality that is far bigger. I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t continue this journey though I have no idea where it will take me. Where it can take us.
I had a similar experience when as an early career ecologist I was in awe of Earth science. I attend my first annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2003. It was huge, 25,000+ people. Many folks had the scientist look dressed up in Patagonia and Mountain Hardwear. I was in San Francisco in the Moscone Center walking from talk to talk, poster to poster and around the exhibition hall. There were thousands of presentations. And the topics were on everything you can imagine about the Earth, the sun, and the universe.
I went to talks about plants and soil, which is what I’d studied in High Mountains for my PhD and then in a polar desert in Greenland. And I went to talks on sun physics, oil in the deep sea, earthquakes, ice sheets, and dust, its origins in the world’s deserts and where all it landed. Dust from the Gobi Desert in Asia landing in Hawaii. Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa landing near about everywhere across Europe and the Americas.
And, then I had a moment of insight. My favorite talks at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) meetings were about the interconnectedness of our planet. How ecosystems developed over time. How nutrients arrived via dust into those ecosystems. And about how carbon and water flowed because of dust, nutrients and ecosystem development over time. That any place on Earth was dependent on another place on Earth, on another, on another for essential Earth elements, for seeds that fly and float, and for what we choose to do. A human action in the U.S. affecting the Arctic. One in China affecting the U.S. Most all of us everywhere affecting small island nations and remote mountain communities due to melting ice and rising seas.
In the 1990’s throughout my PhD, talks about global connectivity weren’t common at ESA meetings. They were common at AGU meetings. The researchers bringing these ideas into the realm of ecology were ecologists who had detoured to AGU. So, I detoured too. To AGU and Earth science.
I had been studying biogeochemistry as a discipline within ecology as part of training in the biological sciences since spring of 1992, my sophomore year of college. I loved the subtitle of the book for the course. Isn’t that how most of us pick courses in undergrad? The book was titled Biogeochemistry: An Analysis of Global Change by Dr. William Schlesinger. He was a professor at Duke University, and I was a student at Duke University. Magic? Destiny?
I also happened to be working in his lab via a collaboration with the lab of another Duke Biology professor Dr. Boyd Strain. I was on financial aid with work study support, and after a year working in the housing office, I’d gone to a lead researcher in Dr. Strain’s lab and asked for a job. For a work study student at Duke in the 1990’s, the college would pay me $7 of my $8/hr wage and the lab would only need to pay $1. I proposed that it was a great deal for them. They agreed.
I was willing to do whatever needed doing. And what needed doing in biogeochemistry and plant physiological ecology laboratories was dishes.
My job was as a research assistant, and mostly I washed dishes in which plant material had been digested in acid, so that it could be analyzed for its nutrient content. How much nitrogen (N)? How much phosphorous (P)? And how much carbon (C)? So we would know the C:N:P ratio of the plant’s leaves, roots and stems. How much did these plants depend on soil nutrients to pull carbon out of the sky and grow, and how much did they depend on dust from a desert far away?
In 2003 when I went to AGU, I found a home for ecology-thinking within Earth science and haven’t detoured from this track until recently, when I realized there wasn’t a snowball’s chance on a rapidly warming planet that we were going to solve the environmental poly-crisis of the 21st Century without knowing ourselves and weaving something else into our dialogue. I know psychology is essential. And that purpose for our lives is important. That for many people there is a sense of being guided towards purpose by a bigger than us presence. What else was out there? What else could be?
For 30 years since that first alpine tundra hike of wonder and tropical forest hike of terror, I’d stuck with studying our planet through the natural sciences. I’d stopped going to church and gone to cold, remote, magical places that summoned me to them.
Though I was in the Arctic and on mountains for scientific research, I sought to know and breathe the Earth into me. For the Earth’s essence to move into my lungs and be with me wherever I went. She would be protected by my ribs. I protected by her presence.
Recently, in a dreamwork session, I visioned and lived into this way of being in union with the Earth. Breath of juniper and prairie rose air in, breath of me out to the ecosystem and the sky. I don’t think this vision would have been possible for me without years of field experiences, of places where the Earth’s essence had moved into me and become part of me. Nor would my sense that this is possible for others be likely without the books and people I am meeting in theology school. I’d written off church, because the ideas felt rigid and not me.
Theological thinking is different. It’s meaning-rich and diverse. Just as I had found a home for ecology in Earth science, I can see there is a home for Earth science in theology — for Earth Theology. For study and dialogue about a planet that flows from dust to dust, nitrogen as tree to nitrogen as soil, phosphorous in African deserts to phosphorus in Central American rain forests, carbon in sky to carbon in plants to carbon in us.
One of my classmates in my Introduction to Theology course this term wrote about his deep dive book, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul by John Philip Newell who writes about the Celtic monk John Scotus Eriugena. My classmate wrote, “Eriugena lived 815 to 877 CE as a wandering scholar due to the Roman church's enforcement of Celtic monks to ‘conform or get out.’“
“Eriugena believed God is the ‘essence of all things’. He interpreted the Greek word for God, theos as being derived from the Greek verb, theo, which means ‘to flow or run’. Theology is ‘the study of Flow’.“
The Earth is flow, you are flow, I am flow, and God is flow. Thirty years ago, I decided to study flow within the field of ecology, then Earth science and now in theology. This is Earth Theology. It’s the flow of the Earth from continent to continent, from soil to plants to us to sky. It’s the flow of grace, mercy and love into us. And from us to one another to soil, to plants, to sky. I can picture this as aromatic compounds like what you smell when you brush up against Sagebrush or Juniper. But more importantly I can feel it — the Earth and grace into me that is possible through expanding my consciousness that is possible through relationship and connectedness through Earth Theology.
I’m taking another detour. Leaving my job as faculty to found the Center for Earth Theology and engage across Earth science and theology to transform ourselves and our world. It’s reckless to think we could transform Earth changing all her element flows and restore balance, and not transform us. That’s not how Flow works.
The choice to detour in the Costa Rican rainforest when I was 21 years old was terrifying. I knew that if I fell or a snake bit I wouldn’t be on the trail I had said I’d be on. I took the detour anyway. The journey got even more frightening when I began hearing an animal howl and couldn’t picture what animal could make the noise. “The animal must be injured,” I thought. I never saw them, but folks that night told me the animal was Peccary, a hoofed pig-like creature, who often makes that sound.
Just like then, the wildly curious center of me is now risking it all to know what I can only learn if I take the detour into Earth Theology.
Note: This photo is how it begins, the Center for Earth Theology. The mountain in the background is Sleeping Ute Mountain. The A-frame is Heidi’s hut. The big building in the foreground is a gathering place for science, reading, yoga, art, music, prayer. Picture that wall gone and garage doors instead that open to views of creek, mesa and mountains. And love poured back into these lands to rejuvenate soil, watch ecosystems develop, heal the Earth, and through this remember ourselves.