Kyle Van Houtan | Knowledge of the Universe

Van Houtan:

The idea that comes to us from Revelation is that this new creation, this new Jerusalem, where God will literally dwell with people on this planet is, I’ve heard this talked about as a great city. And the Bible begins in an unpopulated garden, and ends in a great human city. The new Jerusalem is a garden city and it is something that is hard for us to imagine. But it is not the absence of nature, it is the culmination of history, it is the culmination of humanity, and it is the culmination of all creation. So this idea that somehow for humans to flourish, we have to subjugate nature, I think, is false.

My name is Kyle van Houghton. I’m the president and CEO of the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, Florida. I’m also an adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

From rainforests to remote coral atolls, Kyle Van Houtan has seen and studied many marvelous corners of this creation. And his study has always looked both at the particular, observable, scientific questions and at the grand, theological ones. Putting those perspectives together has always been natural to him, even essential. We talk about how he has weaved these passions together and about the response he has gotten from others in the scientific community and through his education in both science and theology. Kyle also offers helpful antidotes to the gloom and doom narratives which are all too easy to fall into when surveying the state of our natural world today, revealing how Christians are particularly well suited to revive hope. This episode is packed full of wisdom, expertise, and fascinating facts about sea turtles. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Welcome to the podcast. Kyle.

Van Houtan:

Thanks for having me. 

Stump:

Thanks for being with us. And I mean being with us in a more literal sense than I usually have for the last year and a half, we’re actually sitting in the same room to record this. How has COVID affected your work throughout the pandemic?

Van Houtan:

It’s hard to remember life before the pandemic, isn’t it? It’s been a pretty heavy few years, it seems. When the pandemic began, me and my family were in Monterey, California. And now we’re in Florida, obviously. I was the chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium on the 13th of March in 2020 we closed our doors because of rising case rates, and a lot of uncertainty about what was happening. And we didn’t open our doors until this past summer. So that was a very intense time, challenging time as a leader. Planning, taking care of my staff, trying to operate stranding responses for injured marine animals, sea otters, in this case, in Monterey. And that was just at work. At home navigating to everyone being at home and my two children doing distance learning and spending a lot more time with them. I think my wife Kelly, and I looked back on the pandemic, especially those first six to eight months, from March to September 2020, with a lot of gratitude. We were just thankful for the time to focus on our family, on our faith, on pouring into our children. We had a lot more time with our children. Life slowed down and allowed us to really focus and I think we formed a lot closer relationships with each other and my family and then also with some of my team members at work. So I actually come out, I know we’re out of it yet, but come out of it very thankful for a lot of the deeper connections.

Stump:

So you’ve switched oceans from Monterey Bay Aquarium to Loggerhead on the Atlantic coast of Florida. What’s the difference in the sort of marine life and science that you do between those two places?

Van Houtan:

So I would say there’s only one ocean.

Stump:

Turns out they’re connected.

Van Houtan:

There’s no ‘s’ in ocean, there’s only a sea. For sure, it’s a different basin of the ocean and the Atlantic is very different than the Pacific; I spent a lot of time in both. I was born in Virginia, I grew up in the Chesapeake Bay, but also lived in Japan for four years, lived in Hawaii for over seven years. So I spent a lot of time in the Pacific as well. 

The ocean really never ceases to amaze me at how fundamental it is for our life on Earth. If it wasn’t for the ocean, our Earth would not be the habitable planet that it is for us. And I could run through all the statistics you’ve probably heard: the salt in our blood comes from the ocean, the oxygen in our lungs comes from the ocean or life in the ocean that made that possible. It’s 97% of the water on our planet, it holds the most biodiversity, feeds 3 billion people a day with their primary source of protein. It’s not something that we worship, but it’s something that we’re immensely grateful for. I think that as a kid, I was not as impressed of that right? I was much more focused on tropical rainforests, and ancient civilizations and their connection to our planet and ecosystems on our planet. But the ocean in Florida is just as salty as the ocean in Hawaii. But it’s quite different, you know? Where we are, to just drill down specifically where we are in peninsular Florida is Juno Beach in Jupiter, is where the Gulf Stream, one of the major boundary currents in our ocean, just touches the tip of our continent there in Florida. The reason that’s so important and so cool is the Gulf Stream goes up the U.S. eastern seaboard and brings warm water off of Cape Cod in the summer, creates those crazy eddies if you look at the satellite off of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Northeast U.S., which creates all the productive fisheries like swordfish and tuna fisheries off the US eastern coast. What’s fascinating for us, I’m at Loggerhead Marinelife Center, it’s a sea turtle focused center, and we have more nesting loggerhead sea turtles there right at that spot in Florida than we really have, except for one other place on this planet. So it’s one of the densest nesting areas for sea turtles on the planet. We get three species of turtles nesting there regularly: loggerheads, greens, leatherback sea turtles, which are like living dinosaurs. They are really amazing animals. But that happens because that ocean current comes right next to Florida. And all those little hatchlings. They basically just swim a few miles offshore, and they catch the train, the Gulf Stream.

Stump:

I remember this from Finding Nemo. 

Van Houtan:

Everyone says that, yeah.

Stump: 

I had small kids at the time.

Van Houtan:

Exactly. That boundary current catches those turtles and takes them kind of like a train out to the where they need to go in the offshore ocean.

Stump:

So what’s the status of sea turtles today? Is their health and flourishing any kind of an indicator of the health of the rest of the planet?

Van Houtan:

For sure. Sea turtles are like drones, they’re out there taking data about what’s going on in the ocean. And when they come to us, they’re kind of telling us of all the threats in real time of what’s going on in the ocean. Sea turtles are all protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. They get a lot of attention by scientists and conservationists and the U.S. government. For the most part, there’s a lot of good news with sea turtles going on. Especially in protecting against direct harvesting, and then indirect harms, from fisheries bycatch in purse seine, or longline fisheries, or in trawl fisheries, we’ve done a lot to curb that. And in the United States our fisheries are the most sustainable of anywhere on the planet, get a lot of attention, a lot of monitoring, a lot of science, a lot of policy goes into that. At Loggerhead we’re a sea turtle hospital. So we see a lot of turtles that come in with problems. And this is great information about what’s happening in the ocean right now. They’re taking all this information, they’re gathering it for us, and they’re reporting it back to us. And so it’s up to us not only to heal and rehabilitate those individual turtles, but to learn from them about some greater issues, and the big macro problems that we need to contribute towards solutions. So we don’t see those turtles again. We’re trying to learn from them — all their harms, all their wounds, all the problems they have — so we can heal them. But also so we can learn and solve the problem again before it starts.

Stump:

What are the biggest issues facing sea turtles? What are the things you’re learning when you see them coming in, the kind of injuries or diseases that they have that are telling about the way we’re caring for the planet right now? 

Van Houtan:

It’s probably not going to be a lot of surprises. Some of the most frequent problems that we encounter are what we might refer to as a syndrome. In other words, it could be caused by many things. It’s not like a clear cut A plus B equals C and we see the turtle when it’s C. So we just got to figure that out. Sometimes it is clear cut. So fishery gear and tangle, man, it’s a big issue: hooks, nets, lines, things of that nature. A lot of this is ghost gear or discarded gear that’s floating around. Coastal pollution is also a really large issue. So we see diseases that are the result, not just from poisons that we might think. You and I might agree, we don’t want to dump oil in the water. But some things that – and by the way, that’s illegal – but also things like nutrients. So phosphorus and nitrogen from agricultural runoff, or just from human wastewater, from the way we treat our sewage. This can cause a lot of problems in coastal areas. And I think some of the biggest problems are just related to our pollution, whether it’s fishing gear pollution, plastic pollution, chemical pollution are some of the biggest issues. Those are some of the biggest things we face. In South Florida we also see a significant amount of turtles come in with traumatic wounds from boat strikes. And that’s something we’re actively learning, trying to understand, and to really drill down on where and why this is a problem and what we can do about it. This was an issue, traumatic injuries and unintentional boat strikes, was an issue with sea otters in California. And sea otters is something I spent a lot of time looking at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we have an active program and rehabilitation in medicine and surrogacy to really revive that population. But this was an issue that was very significant in the 1990s and early 2000s. And just due to simple policy changes, it’s virtually not a problem at all today. So we can, when we understand problems, and we understand their root cause and our agency and our contribution to it, we’re pretty smart as a species, if we’re willing to do something about it, we can enact changes and make a lot of helpful changes. The problem is that usually when we solve a problem, another one pops up. But with sea turtles, by and large, there’s been a lot of good news. 

I think that the biggest issue, which we haven’t talked about yet, is our changing climate. And the crisis that’s really causing across the board. Animals like sea turtles are fascinating because they’re long lived. They can live decades, as long as humans can live really, without any anthropogenic intervention. Naturally, they could live for decades. They may not breed till they’re 20 or 30 years of age, they have this big geographic footprint in their life they’re born in one spot, they may go out to the middle of the ocean gyre where they would last for years and then they would recruit back to a coastline most of them do this and then they spend decades there and then they they’re kind of like salmon they natally home to where they were born through this really cool process in their brain.

Stump:

How do they do that? Sheesh.

Van Houtan:

I’ll get to that in a second. This process could take decades for them right and just think about their travels in everything that they would encounter. They don’t respect political or administrative lines on a map that doesn’t exist for them, they exist for you and me. But imagine what they encounter in that life and going back to being a scientist they’re accruing all these data like literally in their bones. And we can learn so much from them about that. They’re like these sentinels of change and you know, in more biblical language, I like to think about it as they have a witness of their experience and often, convicting to us, this witness is against us, right? I could say it maybe like a scientist, they’re taking data, they’re accruing these chemical signatures and isotopic signatures in their tissues in their blood in their shells in their bones. But they also have a witness, they have a story to tell. And often that is a witness against us, right?

But back to their natal homing, they’re like salmon. The best understanding we have of it now is, you and I don’t look to salmon or turtles and really admire them for their cognitive abilities, right? And we should not because we have a more advanced central nervous system in our brain, we have a frontal cortex, reptiles and fish don’t have those abilities, don’t have that CPU that we have. They don’t have complex social structures. They don’t have behavior like we do, right? However, they have an amazing ability, they can really do some things that we can’t, and one of those is this innate sense to migrate back to where they were born. And this is done via some special cells in their brain, which have iron in them, which function like a compass and allow them to navigate back. And it turns out that even as a very small hatchling, turtles know where they are on the planet by the magnetic field. So they’ve created experimental chambers, aquariums that have a magnetic field of a certain place in the ocean, and the turtles will directionally swim in a certain direction based on the magnetic field of the tank that they’re in. So if it makes it look like they’re in the North Atlantic, they’ll swim east, what they think is east. If it makes it look like the south of that gyro, they’ll swim west. So they’ll kind of swim with the current and even as a small hatchling, they’re kind of programmed by this innate compass in their brain to do that. 

Stump:

To a really high degree of precision, right? To find the ancient breeding grounds where they were born themselves?

Van Houtan:

They can come back to the very beach within a few kilometers. And so sometimes your GPS isn’t even that accurate when it’s a cloudy day. So it is really impressive. Fascinating creatures.

Stump: 

This is an interesting snapshot of the present state of things. And after a bit I want to talk some about the future. But before we do that, let’s go back to the past. Let’s give a little more context to this conversation with some of your own autobiography. When did you know you wanted to be a scientist?

Van Houtan:

I would say the answer is very young. A lot of my family are educators — especially my mom. I was coming around at the age when video games started to be something in one’s house. And my mom just had this sense of you’re not gonna be a kid that watches a lot of TV. We’re not gonna do video games in this house. I was never allowed to have a video game system. I still to this day have not had one. And we don’t have one for my kids. It has been asked several times. But my mom was always saying go outside, you need to go outside. My father grew up on a farm and so I would spend some summers out with my grandparents in Northwest Missouri on a cattle farm and row crop farm and just always outside in nature, in creation, as my grandpa would say. 

Stump:

And you said you grew up around Chesapeake Bay?

Van Houtan:

I grew up around Chesapeake Bay. So my father was in the US Marine Corps. And so we always grew up in all these wonderful hot and humid places around the planet, next to the ocean. So Chesapeake Bay; Southern Mississippi; Okinawa, Japan, is where I spent a lot of time

Stump:

What are some of those early memories of interacting with nature?

Van Houtan:

Definitely on the lake where I grew up in Virginia exploring around in the spring when the leaves are coming out and the frogs and turtles and the fish are all jumping. I think that is a lot of great memories being out in the canoe being like muddy past my knees just walking around the marshes and we would always go out and just capture your little freshwater pond turtles and create little impromptu aquariums and terrariums and stuff. Getting crayfish out of the creek and stuff like that. Going out to my grandfather’s farm and riding around with him over the hills and through the gullies and eating wild berries and pointing out hawks and things like that. I would say those are definitely my earliest memories of being out in nature. Our memory is very associated with smells too. The fall colors, the leaves changing and the deciduous forests and having massive piles of leaves that just smell like these rich tocopherols and hydrocarbons in the plants and crunching out those leaves and smelling them. Being out in a pine forest on a hot summer day and smelling all those ethereal oils coming off those needles. I just have so many great vivid memories of that.

Stump:

So then by the time you’re ready to go to college, it’s like I am all in on this scientific track? 

Van Houtan:

I mean, making a career out of it was something that was like, I have no idea how it’s gonna happen. But I’m just gonna keep on going forward with the science thing. I had a pretty well rounded scientific pedagogy: chemistry, physics, math, calculus, biology, but biology is always where I wanted to focus. And I went to undergrad, University of Virginia, and was an environmental science major. As an undergrad I actually helped teach a couple courses, which was pretty rare, I had that opportunity to do that. I taught birds and fishes, those were the class names, biology of birds, biology of fishes. And got to really dive deep and learn a lot about animals. It’s amazing, if you just pay attention to what’s going on around you, what you will see. Especially out in a forest or in a river or in a prairie or grassland, what you will find if you just have some basic instructions and some some sensibilities and you pay attention. So I just really learned to pay attention, and to observe, and to write down, and to really be articulate about what I was seeing. I was trained to be that. This was kind of what I was doing as a kid, just without formal training, out in nature, looking around, paying attention to what I’m seeing. But I gradually sort of mapped a scientific process on this very sort of natural experience for me being outside. And that was a huge joy to be able to articulate and explain and understand what was happening and why. That was huge, huge fun. 

So yes, I did that as an undergrad. I was an environmental science major and just focused on that. My focus was biogeochemistry, which is a lot of what it sounds like — biology, geology, chemistry, kind of horrifically mashed into one subject. I learned to think about how nutrients and other things cycled through forest systems and mountains, and how things literally flow through them. As I started to get into this subject, really the idea of connection, and how things are connected together, how a molecule could flow through an ecosystem. Literally one water molecule, how it could move through a system, through all these different organisms. I read at the time, in this little epigraph in a biogeochem textbook, a section from Sand County Almanac from Aldo Leopold. He wrote this kind of stream of consciousness fictitious story about molecule x, and how it flows through this ecosystem. How over the years and decades it gradually went further and further, as he said, downhill towards the sea. How there is this march of atoms towards the sea. And he talked about how it went through a plant that shaded the eggs of this bird, how it went through the feathers of a bird that ended up being in a Native American’s headdress. It just was very poetic and it was something that was very intuitive to me, but I had never seen it written down. It really awoke my imagination about the connectedness of things. So when you read Rachel Carson, she’s talking about pollution and how it travels through ecosystems, which was so important for the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, those seminal pieces of legislation in the US. It really begins with this imaginative, but scientifically valid, tale of how things flow through our bodies and our ecosystems. So I started to learn that and I was like, whoa, I want to do more of this. This is really fascinating. I’m in.

Stump:

So to describe a lot of what you did as just observing what’s around you, you’ve been to some pretty interesting places to observe too. So your scientific career, besides sea turtles, has taken you to a lot of places, you spent some time in Africa and in the Amazon in South America. How has visiting these places, perhaps seeing the larger connections all over the planet, not just in our own backyard here, but how has visiting all of those places affected the way you see the world and it’s interconnectivity in that sense?

Van Houtan:  

I have been very privileged to visit a lot of places on this planet, even as a young kid. We went to Thailand in the mid 1980s, I say before it was cool. And I remember one of the experiences you have when you go there. You’re served shrimp with peanuts and cilantro on that. And in the 1980s we didn’t have the cooking channel, right? We didn’t know about all these things. And this mashup, we were like, did they put peanut butter on this? I think you just get an appreciation for the vibrancy and difference in diversity of cultures on this planet. No matter where you go, if you seek it, you will find genuine, kind, wonderful, warm people, and lots of fun things to learn about their culture and their traditions, even if it’s something you’re not familiar with. I felt very thankful for that and had a lot of that experience as a kid. That was something that was very normal for us. I have not been to the polar Arctic or Antarctica, I haven’t seen the cryosphere as we refer to it in science, but I have been to a lot of fascinating places, I’ve had a lot of pretty amazing experiences. One of them was when I was working for the US government doing sea turtle surveys in the South Pacific and American Samoa in a place called Rose Atoll, which I think is called Motu O Manu in Samoan. It’s about an eight hour boat drive across the open ocean given good seas, from the town of Pago Pago in American Samoa. You’re out in the middle of nowhere, there’s like literally this pipe, this stem, this chimney that comes up from a couple thousand feet down. Then there’s a little coral atoll there, this little pipe sound that comes out. It’s a classic atoll with this rim of coral reef and then a hole in the center and then this little island there. And we stayed on that island, Rose Island and Rosa Atoll, for about a week doing sea turtle surveys to see how many turtles were nesting there. To understand in the grand scheme of things how many green sea turtles are there in the South Pacific? This place was thought to be an important place. So we went there and we did that. It’s difficult work because you’re working all night long, that’s when the turtles come out at night to nest and then it’s of course very hot during the day. And there’s just some coconut palms not like there’s a lot of shade, there’s no AC, no electricity. We can’t bring any fresh fruit because it’s quarantined and everything. But swimming around and free diving in that lagoon during the day on those corals was really magical. Being out there and just closing your eyes and saying wait a second, I’m not just in a reef anywhere on this planet. I’m in this coral Pinnacle, in the middle of the South Pacific. You had this amazing feeling of being incredibly small in this big, big world. And I have to say, being overwhelmed by that is not something that was scary. It was something that gave me so much comfort and so much joy. It was not something that all of a sudden my heart rate went up and I was super scared and was like I gotta swim back to shore, the sharks gonna eat me or something like that. No, it was just an incredible feeling of joy, and just felt like the Spirit’s presence with me at that moment, and just felt incredibly encouraged by my smallness, and yet connectedness, to this big world that we live in. I had many experiences like that, but that one is one that stands out, where you just think about your place and how small we are, but yet how important we are, and how important it is to be connected to the big story of what’s happening on our planet. Those are good memories. 

BioLogos:

Hey Language of God listeners. If you enjoy the conversations you hear on the podcast, we just wanted to let you know about our website, biologos.org, which has articles, videos, personal stories, and curated resources for pastors, students, and educators. And we’ve recently launched a new animated video series called Insights. These short videos tell stories and explore many of the questions at the heart of the faith and science conversation. You can find them at biologos dot org slash insights or there’s a link in the shownotes. All right, back to the show!

Stump:

So let’s explore the faith side of things a little bit here. You’ve made an allusion to it a couple of times, that you’re not just a scientist, you’re also a person of faith. Does that also come from childhood? Did you grow up in a faith tradition?

Van Houtan:

I did. Yes. 

Stump:  

What do you remember of that? 

Van Houtan:

So we grew up in a liturgical church that was also sort of charismatic. Those two things usually don’t go together. Again, I said my father was in the Marines, we moved around a lot. One of the benefits we had is seeing how church worked in a lot of different places, the kind of micro politics of the Church, big C, working out in the church, little c as you sometimes say. And my grandparents on both sides were Christians, my parents were Christians, I accepted Jesus, when I was very young. We were a praying family, read the Bible family, talked about it together kind of family. Not like we’re perfect, saintly people at all. But that was always a part of our life. It wasn’t until I went to university until I had this sense that the pursuit of science and the pursuit of faith were maybe at odds. It was never something that I was even aware of as a kid. I remember learning about the Endangered Species Act in 1982, 1983, when I was really young, and I was like, extinction. Like what? That’s the thing, right? I knew dinosaurs aren’t like, in Peru. They’re gone. So I knew what that was, but I didn’t know that was something that we could do as humans, that we could drive another species to extinction. When I became aware of that, I think my moral consciousness and my moral formation, with my faith, and my scientific sensibilities coming together. It really began when I heard about extinction in the US Endangered Species Act. There is this peril associated with these amazing creatures, like lions, and tigers, and bears may not always be around, because of something we’ve done. So that was when I started to kindle the link between my scientific interests, being outside, and then my faith. I think when I realized that university isn’t always the easiest or most intuitive place to navigate weaving those together, because a lot of the university life is, they’ve been doing better in recent years, but it causes you to focus… 

Stump:

University seems like a misnomer, right? It’s not unifying things, we’re drilling down, it’s specializing.

Van Houtan:

It’s supposed to be the place where you can gain knowledge of the universe, of all things. There has been a path to focus on very specific niche subjects and disciplines. One of the things that’s been very beneficial for me, and it’s something that, when I realized that this was something that was kind of native to me, I kind of had to cultivate this intentional, changing scales of observation. And what I mean by that is, we’re talking about disciplines in university and focusing on really niche, specific subjects. But one thing is very important for me as a maker of scientific figures, and data visualization, and taking all this information and putting into a figure. So I can communicate that to people about what’s going on in my science, a huge part of my craft, and what I do. But one of the things that has been really important for me, tactically and strategically, is to constantly zoom in and zoom out, to really focus very closely on things and then to zoom out and say, what’s the big picture of what’s going on here? Why are we doing this? We’re climbing up this ladder? What building is it propped against? Zoom out, zoom in, okay, where am I? And what is mechanically going on with this specific phenomena, this graph, this equation, these data? I think at university, you have to force yourself to connect, to kind of jump between those disciplines. And fortunately there’s a lot going on at many universities to actively do that. However, you still have a Department of Chemistry, you still have a Department of Biology or Department of English. But what if you wanted to look at studies of science, or biographies of chemists, or literature about biology? Do you do that in biology? Or do you do that in english? So it’s not clear sometimes how you cross these disciplines or how you be transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary. And that was something that was a challenge. There was tension there at university for me, I kind of had to make my own path. When I went to grad school, I had the great fortune and blessing of going to Duke University where I got my PhD, and the Divinity School and the school of the environment were something like 225 steps away from each other. I know that because I counted them the many times I walked between them. But there was no link between them. They were literally like different business units of the university, which is a proper thing to do — they’re run differently, different leadership, different deans, granting a different degree. But if I wanted to study the theology or philosophy or ethics of the earth, which one would think would be pretty important to conservation, I had to leave the school of the environment and go to Divinity School. So when I was there, we actively worked to create a joint program between the two because they were literally so close, but unfortunately, at the time, so far away.

Stump:

So you must have had people in your Ph.D. program, watching you take those 225 steps over to the School of Divinity at Duke saying, What in the world are you doing? Kyle, you are wasting your time here. Or at least you’re digressing from this important work we need you to do in the School of the Environment. Did you have people explicitly saying things like that challenging why you’re doing this?

Van Houtan:

Yeah, absolutely. I had a lot of questions about it. And you’re not wrong, both my peers and some of my advisors, some of my professors… When you go through a PhD, you have a committee formed around your direction, and they advise you. It’s called your doctoral committee, sometimes your thesis committee or dissertation committee, there is the chair of that. And there’s usually three to five people on there. When I said to my major advisor, who is the chair of my committee, a man named Stuart Pim. When I interviewed to be his student, I said, I’m going to be honest with you, Professor Pim, I’m debating about going to divinity school right now in a seminary or getting a PhD in ecology. And I was kind of squinting my eyes, and kind of shrugging my shoulders, and like, I don’t know what he’s gonna say, but I’m just gonna be honest with him. This is who I am. He’s gonna maybe tell me to like, go rub rocks, and I never want to talk to you again. Or, I don’t know. And he said, if that’s what you want to do, then you must come to work with me. He said, I’m a Christian too. And we need to connect these. So by going to Duke with such a great divinity school they have there and with the many professors, I enrolled in a few of the classes. And Stanley Hauerwas taught an ethics class, Christian ethics. I just approached him after class one day, told him who I was. And he said, I’m going to be on your committee. I didn’t even I didn’t have the courage to ask him. And he just said, I’m going to be on your committee. He tutored me and that connection was immensely influential. Because I didn’t go to bible college undergrad, I didn’t have any formal scholarly training in theology, or hermeneutics, or ethics, or any sort of biblical formal training at all. And so he just threw book after book after book at me, made me read it, made me write an essay, drilled me on it. It was the reddest ink of any papers I ever got back in my life. But he was hugely humbling, and then very influential. 

Stump:  

So these are two positive examples of people responding to your interdisciplinarity. I’m not just fishing for controversy for the sake of drama here, but I would guess that some people are in similar circumstances and would love to hear how you responded to that, too. 

Van Houtan:

I had an officemate who did not agree with or understand, and actively challenged these pursuits. She would get pretty frustrated with me. I had a bookshelf, a case, and there’s all these theology and ethics books on there. And then she was like those books shouldn’t be in here. This is the science school and I just don’t get why you’re doing this and I was talking with someone else and they don’t get it either. I said, tell me what you do your PhD on. What’s your topic? She said, well, I study how nitrogen moves through the soil through tree roots. And I said, why is that important? This is a conversation that happened over 45 minutes or something, you want to condense it. She’s like, well, because it helps us understand how plants take nitrogen up out of the soil and the cycle of nitrogen in the soil. And I’m like, why is that important? And she’s like, because it helps us understand the cycle of those things with carbon, how carbon moves to the soil, and then is uptaken by plants. And I’m like, why is that important? And she’s like, because it helps us understand the cycle of carbon in the air, and then ultimately, the cycle of carbon on earth. And I was like, why is that important? And she said, because that helps us understand climate change. And I said, why is that important? And she was looking at me.

Stump:

She hasn’t slapped you yet?

Van Houtan:

Yeah. And she’s like, my brain is hurting, and I’m getting upset at you. And I’m serious. I’m not kidding. Why is that important? What is your reason for why is that important? And she said, because, I guess, we want humans to live on earth, and we don’t want it all to blow up. And I said, why is that important? And then she’s just kind of looking at me, like, duh? But I’m like, so what I’m doing is what you’re doing — I’m on a specific subject, I was looking at how birds moved in the forest in a tropical rainforest in Brazil. Don’t get me started on that topic, because it’s a whole thing. But I’m also looking at the other end of the big picture, of why what we’re doing is just or good and important. And then I’m working from both ends. I’m starting at that other end and then I’m working towards the science and I’m doing the science and then working towards the other end, at the same time. And then she’s like, okay, now I get it. So I think that was important for me to kind of derive it for her from the big picture to the small picture, and then the small picture back to the big picture.

Stump:

That’s really interesting. So let’s come back to your work now, your professional work, with this faith perspective in mind now. From having zoomed in a little bit on the science now zoomed back out, to hear about your own faith perspective. Can you give us a fuller, more integrated view now, a more holistic view of your work in terms of what we might call, at a conference like this, where we’re both sitting, of creation care? What is it that you’re doing and how does that connect to the why is that important question that you were just quizzing your classmate on? The work that you’re doing and the kind of answer that you give to a question like that, that’s informed as fully by your faith as it is by your scientific expertise?

Van Houtan:

I think the question that you think about a lot is, if you’re a person of faith, if you’re a Christian… You’re thinking, okay, God created this planet, as good. And yet there is so much that’s not good in our planet. He inserted himself, and dwelt among us to make things right. And called us to join him in that work, and to make all things right. To literally, as Jesus said, to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth, to dwell among us and to heal our planet. Now, if that’s like our big moral project in the church, and the church is where that’s supposed to happen. If Christians are the ones called to do that, if that’s our project, what does science have to do with that? What is science’s role in the big Christian project? And what is my role as a Christian in the scientific community? These are kind of the questions that I’m asking myself all the time. One of the temptations I have as a scientist, that I have to be careful about, is to get involved in things that are really interesting to me from a scientific standpoint, but maybe aren’t that important. There’s a lot of scientific research projects that I could get involved in, that just… I can’t prioritize them, because there’s more important things to do. So that’s something that I have to be careful about and rein in the scientific curiosities, because I’m curious about everything, Jim. But I think that, particularly of late, in the last 5-10 years, I’ve really begun to focus on prioritizing the questions of deep importance. I would say there’s probably two big problems I’m working on right now. One of them is climate change, and really trying to articulate the status of where we are in this crisis. And then the landscape of inequity of climate change, of where the causes are coming from, where the problems are going to happen, or are happening right now. 

That’s been huge for me. One thing that has been really helpful for me as a scientist, from my Christian training, and from my Christian upbringing, is the taking of the long historical view, the big narrative arc of what’s happening on our planet. I think in science, we are often focused on too small of a time or too small of a geographic area, or too small of a disciplinary phenomena. And connecting it all together and trying to make a big picture is something that I’m really trying to do a lot of work. Whether it’s climate change, or plastic pollution, or coastal water quality, the things that we’re working on, we’re trying to connect to these really big problems that we’re trying to solve.

Stump:

Let me ask you to say one more thing about humans within all of this, that you’ve been talking about creation care. And I’ll ask it from the perspective of contrasting it between two extremes that we often often hear when we’re talking. Maybe on the one hand about the environment. And people who are concerned about polar bear habitats, or the sea turtles who have some plastic that are that gets wrapped around their flippers or the the fishing gear that gets that it’s, “come on, we need to take care of these animals,” and almost has the attitude of humans be damned, they’re the problem and all of this. The other side of people who are genuinely genuinely concerned about creation care, though, can sometimes make it sound as though care for the rest of the creatures are only a means to the end of caring for humans, as though we’re the only thing that matters. And we want to make sure we take care of the environment and the biodiversity that’s there because our lives depend on that. Is there something missing? Is there something true in each of those sort of extremes, where I focus only on these other creatures that are suffering and going extinct? Or I’m only focusing on humans, there must be some truth and something missing in each of these perspectives, isn’t there?

Van Houtan:

So one thing I would start with in responding to this is to say that humans are creatures, and humans are animals. It may sound like Captain Obvious, but one of the things that seems I see so much in the way people talk about, they say humans and versus other animals, you said other creatures, which is, I think, the right language to use. We often view ourselves as not animals, right? We are mammals. I’ve done this before, where I’ve gone through the Linnaean classification system, you know, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and started with species and kind of work backwards to kingdom and with humans. And I’m like, Oh, it’s animals. We’re not fungi, we’re not archaea, right? We’re not bacteria or viruses, we’re actually animals. So when we talk about sea turtles, and whales, or redwood trees, we’re talking about other creatures, we are creatures, we were made, we did not make ourselves. We are gifted creatures, we are uniquely gifted creatures, we aren’t the only creatures with language. Dolphins have language. We aren’t the only creatures who have a very developed sense of social structure, elephants have that. We aren’t the only creatures who can solve problems, crows can do that. 

Stump:

Or use tools… 

Van Houtan:

Notice I didn’t say chimpanzees anywhere. Because you know, there’s a lot of really talented creatures. I would say that in Genesis, one of the things that’s very humbling to me, if you read the story of Noah, is that God makes a covenant with all other creatures, to which we are not privy. That we do not mediate. RWe have powers, we have knowledge, we have skills, we can make 747’s, we can make nuclear bombs, we can go to space, we can drill down the center of the earth, probably if we wanted to. Not a wise idea, but we could do that.

Other creatures cannot do those things. So we are given some unique and special abilities. But we are not the only creatures and we are not the only creatures that have a connection or a covenant with God, with our Creator. And I think that that’s very humbling. But is it too much focus on the other creatures or the non human creation? Or is it okay to focus on that as like the necessary support system for humans to flourish? I think if you look back even in the Bible, but if you look back through recorded history, you find a lot of examples that when the natural ecosystems are destroyed, that a human group suffers. So the idea of human and non-human flourishing being unlinked, that somehow humans can flourish by subjugating nature, I think is a myth. In other words, not like a story, but like a falsehood. That is, it is not true. So when you look at like just in the Bible, the cedars of Lebanon, which I’ve talked about, and others have talked about a lot, when they are deforested, a human group suffers. When the prairie ecosystems of the United States are destroyed, the Native Americans suffered, and usually it’s associated with very extreme human suffering or genocide. So the idea that humans can flourish, and the natural world can be subjugated, I think is false. And the idea that somehow on the converse, that for the nonhuman world to flourish means that humans need to suffer, I think is also false. And I’ve been reading Revelation a lot recently, and a lot of commentaries on that, and the New Creation and the New Jerusalem, and, and how that’s discussed in very symbolic and very difficult language to kind of jump into as a, as a 21st century, you know, American and understand the text of Revelation. But the idea that comes to us from Revelation is that this new creation, this new Jerusalem, where God will literally dwell with people on this planet is, I’ve heard this talked about as a great city. The Bible begins in an unpopulated garden, and ends in a great human city. The new Jerusalem is a garden city. It is something that is hard for us to imagine. But it is not the absence of nature, it is the culmination of history, it is the culmination of humanity, and is the culmination of all creation. And so this idea that somehow for humans to flourish, we have to subjugate nature, I think, is false.That’s big theology right there. But I think just going down to something like fishery and managing fisheries, like a tuna fishery, or salmon fishery, you know, we can manage these things sustainably, while we use them, we can eat fish, and have robust populations of fish. We just have to manage that. And the best way to do it is with science. And so I think that that’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. 

Stump:

So I said, we’re going to talk about the future. we’re about out of time for this. So perhaps we put the future into a future conversation that we have, but let’s end at least with maybe asking for some advice. I think most of the people listening to us are pretty well convinced that this is an important thing, care for creation is an important thing, and that they’re motivated by their faith, and they also understand the science of it. But maybe we don’t always know what do we do now? I’ve read the recent IPCC report, or at least the summary of it, and it looks like a pretty grim future that we have to look forward to. Can you give any helpful sort of practical advice, pointers toward good important things that particularly communities of faith might be involved in, that can help in some way? That can give us some sense of agency that we can do something about this, rather than that we’re just victims to whatever apocalypse is coming? Anything hopeful in there that you might point us toward? Ways that we can be hopefully engaged with the current circumstances?

Van Houtan:

I’ll start off by saying something that I think is important, which may not seem super encouraging at the outset, and that is, we are called to be faithful, we are not called to be effective. I think we want to be effective, and it is good to be effective, it feels good to be effective, but we are called to be faithful. The effectiveness of our actions is ultimately not in our hands. And if we seek effectiveness, we will lose faithfulness. That has been my experience. So that is what I think we are called to do every day, is to be faithful. Some days, we get to be effective. Those are good days. And when we remember those days, we write them down in our journals and we come back and we say, yeah, that was a great day. But we are called to be faithful and not effective. I think there is a lot of wisdom in that. That’s not from me, I didn’t come up with that. But I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. But how can we be hopeful? I think the hope that we have is that this creation, to which we are presently apart and very blessed and thankful to have seen, is not our idea. It’s the Lord’s idea. And it’s his creation, it’s his responsibility to care for it. We are invited to be a part of that project, which is a great joy and humility. And we have such gratitude about that. We are invited to be a part of this wonderful project that God is doing on earth. And, and that’s what I think gives me a lot of hope, what a privilege. and we are given, like, we already talked about unique abilities in that project. From the science standpoint, there is all sorts of opportunity for gloom and doom. I’m about to publish a paper on climate change, which tells some pretty scary stuff, unfortunately. But I think it gives us clarity about our current status and our current predicament that hopefully prioritizes how we need to move forward. I think that the good news is that we are given some agency to do something, we have abilities to make things happen. Working together, that we can do great things, I think that that’s what I’m hopeful about. Looking for the redemption and for the good in all things is something that I think really is something that we Christians need to do more of. I think we have a unique ability as Christians, with the theology that we have in our understanding of this planet, to understand the predicament that we’re in, maybe more clearly than others. But I think we also have the mandate to find the hope and the redemption in all situations. That, for me as a scientist, is not something a lot of my scientific colleagues are doing. But that’s something that I’m actively trying to do, is to find that hope. I’m at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, Florida. It’s free to the public. Anyone can come in 362 days of the year, I’m pretty sure, maybe 363. One of the things that’s amazing to me still, after doing this many years, is seeing the look on people’s faces when they see those sea turtles. We’re a hospital and people can come in and watch different turtles, and just the joy that connecting with other creatures gives people. Whether it’s holding a butterfly in your hand that was just trying to suck some nectar out of a flower, or if it’s watching a foot long little green turtle that’s getting rehabbed learn how to swim again, the simple pleasure and joy in seeing that. Let’s not forget that.

Stump:

Well, you said the sea turtles are a witness to what we have done to this planet. You, in your own way, have been a witness to some pretty important parts of the work that’s been going on to God’s faithfulness. And we thank you for that. Thank you for talking to us. Hope we can do it again sometime.

Van Houtan:

Yeah, it was great to be here. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Jim. 

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.