Climate Vulnerability and the Least of These

“Okay, I would start my work at around five in the morning,” Nael told me, “and I would end at seven at night.”

We walked together across his farm in Haiti—right by the Dominican border. “After all that work, I would have enough produce to earn around 33 gourdes.”

The exchange rate between Haitian and United States currency was an easy one to do mentally. 33 gourdes was 33 cents. After fourteen hours of work, that’s all Nael would’ve had to show for his efforts. He explained how he kept finding himself doing more and more work, to earn less and less money. The environment kept making things worse.

“This is a country where you can’t actually reap what you sow,” one of his neighbors said to me. It’s a reality that is unfortunately becoming true to an increasing amount of places.

My work for the Christian environmental nonprofit Plant With Purpose brings me closer to the frontlines of climate change. This includes places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. These are two of the most food insecure countries in the world due to climate vulnerability. Climate-linked droughts have driven people out of the Central American countryside. Droughts in recent years have claimed over 100,000 lives in the Sahel region of Northern Africa.

This image of climate change contrasts sharply with how I was first introduced to the crisis. Climate change was portrayed as a threat to our future, rather than as an already-present problem. When I contrast the charts and graphs showing possible temperatures in 2050 with my real-life encounters in low-income countries, I start to think that we buried the lede.

On top of that, climate was often depicted as a problem seen through scientific, or sometimes political, lenses. I didn’t immediately see it through a spiritual lens.

Nael, his neighbors, and communities like theirs changed that perception.

Our relationship with creation is a spiritual question

Many Christians around the world have a much stronger understanding of how their faith impacts their relationship with their ecosystem than you might guess based on prevalent attitudes within the American church.

For example, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a longstanding tradition of conserving a forest around the perimeter of church sites. These forests can often be seen from above as patches and circles of dark green emerging from otherwise dry, overgrazed land. They are sites of worship, conservation, and even burials for the deceased.

A common practice in the Lutheran Church of Tanzania has been to plant trees to commemorate baptisms and other events in church life.

More often than not, it looks simply like recognizing God’s design in the dynamics of nature. I’ll always remember Christina, a mother living in Tanzania telling me about how much her farm benefitted from her learning how to compost. “God put these small creatures and organisms in our soil,” she told me with delight. “It’s like we’re helping it do what it was designed to do.”

Whenever I encounter parables about seed-sowers and farmers, I remember that the lives of Jesus’ first audience looked a lot more like Nael’s and Christina’s than my own. Their proximity to creation has so much to teach me about my faith, not just in an academic sense, but through lived experiences.

Scripture talks about how all of creation groans as a result of sin, injustice, and a broken relationship throughout all of creation. Redemption, then, is also meant to take place throughout all of creation. Fighting climate change is an essential way to participate in this process.