A Mormon Land Ethic

A Latter-day Saint response to environmental crisis

This essay was originally published in July 2022.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded on the promise and potential of an immediate relationship with God—with the divine. Harold Bloom wrote that “what [Walt] Whitman sang, Joseph Smith actually embodied. To be Adam early in the morning, confronting a God who had not created him, and who needed him to become a God himself.” This encounter occurred—not so coincidentally—in the woods. In an interview published in 2021, Madison Daniels—Faith Organizer for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance—remarked that Mormonism is among the “earthiest” religions. There is, I believe, an important connection between the directness of the spiritual experiences offered in Mormonism and the natural world, the earthiness we are surrounded by.

In some ways, this connection is obvious. The woods and fields are the proto-church and the supra-church—they are the “church without walls.” If nature naturally instills in us the belief that all is sacred, religion formalizes and ritualizes such intuitions. The Restoration movement emphasizes, over and over, that there is more to life than meets the eye—more hidden in the earth, streaming through the woods, and echoing through the canyons. One of the most awe-inspiring promises, especially of the early Restoration, is the concept of Zion—a holy land, a sacred land, a land where peaceful living lets the earth “fulfill the measure of its creation.” In this theology the very location of heaven is brought down to earth; the earth is all we need and, indeed, all we will ever have.

This is simply a brief sampling of the unique theologies and practices that Restoration thought possesses and enacts, while there are deep and meaningful lines of thought and practice that extend throughout Christianity generally. In his remarkable essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Wendell Berry explores these inherited traditions and patterns that help us observe and honor the natural world. He speaks of rediscovering ideas native to Christianity that are essential to the survival of both “Christianity and creation.” For instance, Berry writes, “we will discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein.’ In biblical terms, the ‘landowner’ is the guest and steward of God: ‘The land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.’” Thus, stewardship replaces exploitative ownership. This earth must, and should, survive far beyond our brief lives, and as stewards we become restorers of the earth and creation.

Wendell Berry continues: “We will discover that God found the world, as He made it, to be good, that He made it for His pleasure, and that he continues to love it and find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us.” And “we will discover that the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God.” This continual creation seems exquisitely resonant with the concept of a continual Restoration. When seen as living, breathing creatures, our compassion and love for creation and our religious heritage will deepen.

In 2 Nephi 28:21, as Nephi writes of erroneous philosophies, he quotes a common one—the idea that “All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well.” All is not well—nor was all ever completely well. The ideas of stewardship, the earth’s sanctity, the perpetual creation, and other ideas sacred to the Restoration tradition—and many other faith traditions—stand in stark contrast to many of our everyday actions, or inactions, toward the creation. They also illuminate the sad state of the creation—notwithstanding its continued loveliness. As we survey the current state of creation, let us briefly survey the stance of Restoration thought on reality. For we must be thoroughly immersed in it to understand and accept the state of creation.

The Restoration tradition is sometimes referred to as the “most American religion.” The poet Walt Whitman wrote in his seminal book, Leaves of Grass, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.” The extolling of unmediated knowledge, unchecked by clerics or nobility, is radically democratic and radically American. But what does that mean in an everyday sense? I believe it means, at least in part, that we must give priority to what is right in front of us. Simply put, we must have eyes to see and ears to hear. The promise of a revelatory reality also means reality is, in and of itself, revelatory. Although there may be psychic and spiritual benefits of this knowledge, there are also somber lessons in it.

So, to return to our main line of thought, what is the state of creation in 2022? To illustrate its current state, I will cite just a few statistics—not to depress or demotivate, but to illustrate the stakes and the seriousness of the creation’s—and by extension our own—sickness.

North America has lost 2.9 billion breeding adult birds since 1970 (with an estimated 10 billion breeding birds in 1970 and 7.1 billion today, this represents a 29% decrease)—a finding which, according to the study’s co-author, “suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling.” According to the 2019 Global Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), “1 million of an estimated 8 million animal and plant species worldwide are threatened with extinction. Freshwater mussels as a group are among the nation’s most endangered categories of animals. Most U.S. mussels live in the Southeast, a region that has the world’s highest diversity of these mollusks: 302 known species. At least 26 of these species have already gone extinct, and another 87 are federally listed as endangered or threatened.”

“The rusty patched bumble bee was once among the most common and widespread bumble bees in the East as well as an important pollinator of plants ranging from native wildflowers to crops such as cranberries, blueberries, apples, and alfalfa. Today, the bee has vanished from nearly 90 percent of its range.” Even a cursory glance around many Utah communities will illustrate some troubling trends: invasive plants such as Cheatgrass, Russian olive, and Myrtle spurge are crowding out native plants that other native species depend upon for survival in turn. If we don’t look away, we can observe, first-hand, the unraveling of creation right from our front yard—something great and terrible indeed.

So what is the Restoration’s response to ecosystem collapse, climate change, habitat loss and degradation, and extinction? How will a tradition so animated by the concept of purity respond to the defilement of creation? I’m not exactly sure, and there likely isn’t one pre-ordained outcome, but here are a few possibilities.

1. We can begin to read our local land and landscape as closely and carefully as we read religious texts—for the hand of divinity is in it. Mary Oliver wrote, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” The Restoration project seeks, audaciously, to save everything and everyone (bringing to mind the Buddhist vow “However innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to save them”)—but we can only even attempt to save what we love, and we can only love what we begin to notice.

2. We can sanctify scarcity. In Doctrine & Covenants 59:18-20, the careful use of resources is extolled, “for unto this end were they made to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.” Restoration thought not only sanctifies all living things, it sanctifies universal concepts that expound important truths. What would sanctifying scarcity look like? I imagine it as extending principles already well-enshrined in our belief system. We understand that our mortal life is scarce and fragile so we strive to avoid activities that damage, shorten, or diminish our lives. Similarly, sanctifying scarcity may entail focusing our resources on needs and limiting wasteful luxuries. It may take the form of buying re-usable or used goods, gardening, or investing in sustainable local agriculture (among many other potential possibilities). Doing these things will ensure that the whole tapestry of life is left undamaged, unshortened, and undiminished for future generations.

3. We can engage in environmental rehabilitation. The Church’s organizational structure is wholly designed for action. A Zion-motivated work ethic is one of the Church’s most remarkable inheritances. We can channel this heritage, individually and collectively, and get some dirt under our fingernails in pursuit of a Zion environment—a creation worthy of the society we are striving to build. The Rabbi Tarfon said “It is not up to you to finish the task, but you are not free to avoid it.” The great work of environmental restoration is an intimidating task, but we can’t let the scope fool us. The most important work for us must be done in our own communities. Environmental restoration—the restoration of creation—mostly consists of deceptively simple actions. We can plant native trees and pollinator gardens, bike and walk more and drive less, remove invasive plant species from our yards, and more. Essentially, we must learn how to “keep house”, in the words of Wendell Berry, in peaceful and conscientious ways. This approach to the restoration of creation is a way of life, but one that I believe Restoration thought can prepare us for.

A seldom-quoted passage from the Doctrine & Covenants, in Section 51:16-17, directed towards the members of the early Church, reads: “And I consecrate unto them this land for a little season, until I, the Lord, shall provide for them otherwise, and command them to go hence; And the hour and the day is not given them, wherefore let them act upon this land as for years, and this shall turn unto them for their good.”

Let us stew on the phrase “let them act upon this land as for years, and this shall turn unto them for good.” A prophetic aphorism if there ever was one. Imagining our lives here and living with the full willingness and intention of settling here, truly becoming native to the land, and disciples of it, will surely, as promised “turn unto us for good.” We must live on the earth as if we will be living here forever. In so doing, we will “act upon the land as [if we were going to be here] for years.” Imagining ourselves in this wider, and to some extent, inexplicable, tapestry of things will produce a land ethic, a lived theology of respect towards the creation, one worthy of Restoration thought. Such an attitude will seek to imitate Jesus’ avowal of love for the sparrows and will extend care and compassion across the entire breadth and width of creation.

Henry David Thoreau said in his own inimitable way that “in a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return.” The intensity of this love we are to imagine, to summon to our memory, depends on our ability to recall our own unearned enjoyment of the creation. Let us thus seek to restore it with the compassionate love typified by Jesus—with the hope that in its restoration our own understanding of the divine’s many other gifts will be restored as well.