America, the land that we love, is withering beneath human pollution. Twenty years ago Harry Cauldill chose the title My Land is Dying to convey the devastation wrought by strip mining for coal upon the mountains where he, and I, reside. Sadly, this title also applies to the farms of the Midwest, the grainfields of the high plains, and even the fruitful valleys of California. Our land is dying!
Ironically, these lands are being depleted of both natural life and human population. The ecological and social distress derive from the same causes.
The forests and grasslands of America once teemed with life in complex ecosystems. During three centuries forests were cleared and grasslands were plowed for agriculture. At first this clearing accommodated an influx of human settlement on farms where many grains and crops sustained livestock, fowl, and families, along with wild birds and small game. During the past 40 years, however, modern farming has not only depleted the vitality of croplands but driven people, wildlife, and livestock from these regions.
Strip mining has done the same in mineral regions. When I began my Appalachian ministry in 1959, the devastating assault by giant earth-moving machinery upon the natural and human community was well under way.
Under pressure from federal law, strip mining practices have improved a little since then, but the basic conditions remain. Eighty percent of the land in the southern Appalachian coalfields is owned by coal and land companies. Millions of unreclaimed acres -- called "orphan lands" because no company accepts legal responsibility to reclaim them -- continue to erode and pollute their environment. As coal employment diminishes, there is little opportunity for an Appalachian people who, although rural, have been rendered landless.
Since World War II, there has been a similar assault upon America's magnificent agricultural lands. The opportunity to farm was central to the American experience as long as the frontier remained open. A century ago, three American farms in four were owned by the family that worked them, while only one farm in four was tilled by a tenant. During the agricultural depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, many owners were forced into tenancy. The last federal agency created to protect small farming was the Farm Security Administration which, in the late 1930s, assisted thousands of tenant farmers who wished to purchase the lands they cultivated.
After World War II, federal farm policy changed. While politicians continued lip service to small farms and family farmers, Congress created the Farmers' Home Administration to finance the consolidation of small farms into larger units that were judged to be more viable. This federal assault upon the smallest farmers was joined by rural bankers, by farm equipment manufacturers, and by the makers of fertilizers and farm chemicals.
In the Deep South, this new policy was enthusiastically received by a white political establishment that saw farm consolidation as a means to force the black population off rural lands. Banks pressed loans upon those farmers who would purchase modern equipment, dismiss their tenants, sell the mules, and tear out fencerows to create larger fields to accommodate new machinery. Tens of thousands of black farmers and field hands were forced to bundle their belongings and board trains for Chicago and other northern cities.
Secretaries of Agriculture commonly boast that these policies have achieved the most productive farms in the world, but in truth they have created a social and environmental disaster. The social disaster is evident in the cities that could not accommodate so many millions from Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and other rural areas.
There is also a social disaster in the countryside. In 1920, when 32 million Americans lived on the farm, the majority of these farm families owned their own land. By 1980, only one million Americans lived on farmland of their own. A slightly larger group worked regularly on farms they did not own, while the largest segment of farm laborers -- three million people -- were seasonal and migrant workers. Although 70 years ago most farmers farmed their own land, today most of those who labor to grow our food no longer have hope of owning the land they tend.
The environmental disaster is equally appalling. As fencerows are torn down and wetlands are filled in to accommodate large farm machinery, fish and wildlife diminish. When farms specialize in single crops, soil erosion rises. Where deadly chemicals are relied upon to control weeds and insects, birds no longer sing and bees no longer buzz. Cattle that once grazed within the family farm community are now segregated to giant feedlots where they endure cruel conditions. Pigs and poultry suffer similar conditions.
Soils are deteriorating rapidly, and ground water is being contaminated with pesticides. Even rain that once brought life now carries poison: Herbicide residues have been detected in Midwestern rainfall. Chemical companies are now patenting genetically-engineered crops designed to thrive in soils contaminated by herbicide residues. Soon there will be vast landscapes where no life can survive except genotypes owned and licensed by a few large companies.
The farm owners that remain on the land work incredibly hard for an uncertain return, trudging an industrial treadmill that speeds up each year. They don't know how to control it, how to slow it, or how to step off. Despite land consolidation and modern technology, the rate of farm failures continues to grow.
We have forgotten how to sustain wholesome rural communities. We have forgotten how to protect rural environments from degradation. We no longer know how to provide opportunities on the land for young men and women who wish to farm. Our agriculture is bankrupt.
ADDRESSING FARM CONSOLIDATION, the Bible is blunt: "You shall not covet your neighbor's land" (Deuteronomy 5:21). The ancient Hebrews had worked the estates of the Pharaoh. They understood that consolidating land for efficient production led to slavery. Those who remembered this slavery dreamed of freedom in "a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:8).
The Hebrew understanding of land was unique. In Egypt, those who were to become Hebrews had been reduced to forced labor: working lands, mines, and manufactures owned by the Pharaoh. Meanwhile, peasants in Canaan labored under a feudal system. Oppressive landlords forced their tenants to abuse the earth in order to squeeze from it every last bushel of produce, while warlords -- seven in those days -- scorched the earth and poisoned streams and wells in order to debilitate their enemies.
At Sinai, the Lord offered the Hebrews a covenant that would help them escape these politics of power. Since priests were understood to be exempt from feudal politics, God called this new people a "kingdom of priests." The landscape they were destined to inhabit God also called holy, removed from the traditional patterns of human ownership, and brought into the realm of ethical decision. "For the land belongs to me," this God declared, "and you are only strangers and guests of mine" (Leviticus 25:23).
Thus the land was drawn within the circle of ethical reflection at the heart of the Hebrew covenant. Since the promised land was an object of ethical concern, human obligations to the landscape and to other creatures who lived there could be prescribed. Land and livestock, trees and crops, were active participants in the covenant community. If they were tended with love and attention, if they were given their sabbath rest and allowed their sabbatical renewal, covenant lands would respond fruitfully to feed the farm family, to nourish the poor who came to glean the leavings, and to sustain wildlife.
Once we practiced agriculture. Families of crops, livestock, and people were sensitive to the natural vitality that surrounded and sustained them. Now rural America is all agribusiness. Industrial enterprises remove all life from the land except that which is marketable.
The feedstock of agriculture was sunlight that grew crops through photosynthesis and built healthy soil through organic decay. The feedstock of industrial farming is oil: oil for fertilizer to grow crops, oil for herbicides to kill weeds, and oil for machinery to tend the fields.
American and European experts eagerly spread this petroleum addiction to the Third World. They encourage the removal of peasants and the consolidation of farms into larger units to grow the "miracle grains" of the "green revolution." These grains indeed yield more per acre, but only when heavily fertilized and protected by herbicides.
Paradoxically, in Mexico, Brazil, and India, as food production rises so does hunger. People are forced to the cities, but the produce from their consolidated farms does not follow them there. More often new owners raise crops for export to Europe, Japan, and North America because such crops earn hard currency to pay interest on international debts.
Thanks to sunlight, photosynthesis, and lively soil, farmland once contributed net energy to civilization in the form of food, and it often contributed fiber and lumber as well. Modern farmland, however, has become a parasite upon civilization, requiring far more inputs in the form of oil, coal for electricity, and metals and minerals for machinery than it returns in food energy and other products.
To obtain the oil, coal, minerals, and materials that are consumed so wastefully in our society, we strip the land, endanger wildlife, foul rivers and coastlines, and send our sons and daughters to distant deserts to wage war. When the extraction is completed, corporate lands and leases are often lifeless, unfit for human habitation or the recovery of natural life.
I HAVE FOCUSED UPON LAND and its living community because this is one set of relationships that the Bible considers in detail and that Christian churches are situated to address if they choose to. America's dying rural landscape is dotted with Christian churches and colleges. Many of these institutions are themselves ailing. The strategy for environmental awakening that I propose requires their revival.
This strategy intends to reunite Americans with our landscape and the life upon it. I am inspired by the biblical promise of Jubilee -- a time when God's people challenge the alienation of land in the hands of a few and repopulate the countryside with those who love and need it. My strategy has three prongs: affirming a human need and right of access to nature; beginning land reform in America; and according civil rights to natural life.
Human beings need access to nature to protect our sanity, to arouse senses dulled by the cacophony of urban life, and to protect our awareness of life beyond the control of political and social institutions. Urban children and adults need education about the natural world. We need access to parks. We need bonding with pets. We need experience of the wild. We need to meet others, not human, who are created by God and loved by God. We need to cultivate a new and humbling awareness of humanity's vulnerability within the family of life.
Reform must begin within our churches, which have become intolerably anthropocentric. We imagine that God's redeemed community consists of chosen people only, despite the Bible's clear teaching that the covenant extends to all creatures who stepped from the ark, that God redeemed both holy people and holy land, that God sent Jesus out of love for the world, that God mourns the passing of a bird and takes more delight in the beauty of flowers than in human finery, that all creation waits eagerly for liberation with Christ's brothers and sisters, and that all species in heaven and on earth and in the seas will have reason to praise the Lamb of God as their redeemer.
SECOND, IMPLEMENTING THE HUMAN RIGHT of access to nature requires land reform. The vast rural landscape of America, stretching from sea to shining sea, is again a frontier ripe for settlement. Beyond the suburban fringes and the interstate exits, human population is dwindling and populations of many animal and plant species not favored on commercial farms are declining toward extinction. This landscape is littered with machinery and thinly garrisoned by those required to attend the machines. Except for these remnants, the land is available to a society that might wish to reclaim it in the interests of life.
It is time to reopen this frontier and claim the land for humanity and other species essential to a healthy ecosystem. Personal freedom is not secure when the majority of Americans are denied access to the land that is our birthright; nor can there be social justice when land is withheld from the poor. The land erodes and life upon it declines because it is exploited impersonally rather than tended by people who come to know it intimately and love it fervently.
"Land reform" is a political program to take land from the control of the few and place it in the hands of the majority -- or, at least, all those who wish to occupy and tend it. Land reform must move beyond familiar efforts to "save the family farm," because in America most such farms were absorbed into large enterprises years ago. Our land, possessed by impersonal corporations and families that have learned corporate ways, suffers under machinery too huge and chemicals too harsh. It needs to be liberated.
I propose to reopen this American frontier that is now all around us, just beyond the suburbs, to the east as well as the west, in mining and farming regions alike. The frontier consists of corporate lands and large private tracts that are managed for profit. Corporations should be forbidden by law from acquiring any lands that society values for biological vitality, because profit motives are not sufficient grounds for just and productive relationships with biological life.
When landless people wish to occupy lands, and when they have been educated and prepared to do so responsibly, regional land reform courts should condemn corporate lands for distribution to those who are prepared to tend them personally. Redistribution would involve not just agricultural lands but also forest lands, mined lands, grazing lands, desert lands -- any land that could benefit from human tending. If corporate lands prove insufficient, large private holdings should be condemned and subdivided as well.
Churches can play two roles in land reform. One is to proclaim, on the basis of biblical teaching, that periodic land reform is essential to a just society. Land reform was at the heart of the creation of God's holy people in the Old Testament. The Jubilee promise of repeated reform, although implemented only once or twice during Israel's troubled history, nevertheless provided a moral beacon that informed the prophetic sense of justice at the heart of Hebrew religion.
Jesus himself, I believe, proclaimed Jubilee at the beginning of his public ministry. The poor heard him gladly, and even the fish of the sea crowded close when Jesus was near. It is time now, in the modern crisis of environmental pollution and attendant social injustice, to proclaim Jubilee again.
Churches can play another important role by initiating and supporting prototype rural communities. Land reform is not likely to rise to the top of the political agenda until its virtues are demonstrated visibly and many problems involved in creating healthy and vital rural communities are addressed and resolved.
One hundred fifty years ago, when America was young and the frontier beckoned, Christian groups initiated many rural experiments in just living and productive work. Often these were inspiring, and some were successful. Today, when the biotic future of our lands and waters hangs in the balance, when the majority of farmers are migrant laborers, and when millions crowd cities without hope or purpose, churches must rise to the challenge again. Churches must pioneer relationships between land and people if communities of redemption are to revive and flourish upon the Earth.
A THIRD REQUIREMENT FOR THE wholesome reunion of Americans with our land and natural environment is to affirm civil rights for natural life. Now that human culture pervades this planet and touches every living system, all parties to a healthy ecosystem need rights within civil society. This civil strategy builds upon biblical insight. Indeed, Hebrew sabbath laws reached more broadly than modern civil codes, conferring rights upon the whole covenant landscape and the various plants and creatures within it.
Several verses in Exodus, for example, spell out the implications of sabbath rest for social and also for environmental relationships:
For six years you may sow your land and gather its produce; but in the seventh year you shall let it lie fallow and leave it alone. It shall provide food for the poor of your people, and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard and your olive-grove.
For six days you may do your work, but on the seventh day you shall abstain from work, so that your ox and your ass may rest, and your home-born slave and the alien may refresh themselves.
(Exodus 23:10-12).
This brief passage is remarkable for its breadth of moral concern. Sabbath law forestalled the vice most characteristic of agriculture: the temptation to turn work into perpetual drudgery. It gave rights to servants, children, and strangers, and it provided rest for domestic animals. The law provided the land itself with fallow time for renewal, and it gave the landless poor access to food. It even upheld a place for wild animals within the agricultural domain. These rights are elaborated in many other texts.
The United States Constitution defines the system that governs 250 million people. The Constitution also provides the legal context for human relationships with 3,600,000 square miles of land within our borders, as well as more than one million square miles of coastal and territorial waters over which our government claims jurisdiction. These lands and waters teem with life in complex ecosystems. At one time these ecosystems maintained their own vitality without human intervention, but now many of them have been modified for human use and have become dependent upon human management.
Given the spread of human population and the growing impact of industrial processes upon the biosphere, even the most wild and remote regions are vulnerable to pollution if society does not protect their integrity and limit human intrusions. I propose an amendment to the United States Constitution that would recognize civil rights for the earth. Like the Bill of Rights, which comprises the first 10 amendments to our Constitution, this amendment would confer rights upon particular communities and individuals -- in this instance ecosystems, species, and natural features -- to shield them from arbitrary abuse by the powerful and assure their access to governmental institutions in defense of their rights (see "Extending Constitutional Protection," February/March 1990).
Such an amendment would require that society treat nature with consideration and preserve natural life and beauty while, conversely, recognizing nature's rights to preservation and considerate treatment. It would affirm the appropriateness of human activities that deliberately alter nature -- such as cultivation, harvesting, and mining -- as well as the physical expressions of human culture that have an impact upon the natural environment secondarily -- such as buildings and roads -- as long as these expressions do not contravene three particular rights: the continuation of species, the vitality of natural systems that support life, and the preservation of those natural features that society values as unique and beautiful.
A constitutional amendment is not a panacea. It would not substitute for political efforts to clean the air, protect the range of the grizzly bear, or set aside natural features of special beauty. It would not remove the natural environment to some realm of safety beyond politics. Rather, it would draw nature into politics more deeply, upon a stronger footing.
Churches can support such an amendment not only through resolutions and pronouncements but, even more important, by beginning to recognize the rights of natural life on church lands and within parish boundaries. We are not stewards of nature but only of those fruits that we may justly harvest. We are, instead, partners to nature in the covenant community of redemption inaugurated by the Lord who created us all and loves us together.
Richard Cartwright Austin was a theologian, a farmer, and the author of Reclaiming America: Restoring Nature to Culture (Creekside Press, 1990) when this article appeared. He lived on Chestnut Ridge Farm in Dungannon, Virginia.
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