TOKENS PODCAST: S3E9
An interview with Peter Harris, Anglican clergyman and founder of the highly esteemed Christian conservation non-profit A Rocha International. Peter and Lee discuss why the political polarization of the climate crisis in the United States is more an accident of history than a theological necessity; the ways in which fundamental Christian orthodoxy supports ecological conservation; and how, the preservation, or decimation, of much of the biosphere is dependent upon the choices of evangelical Christians.
ABOUT THE GUEST
After working as an English teacher at Christ’s Hospital, and then as an Anglican clergyman near Liverpool, UK, Peter and his wife Miranda moved to Portugal in 1983 to establish and run A Rocha’s first field study center and bird observatory. In 1995 the work was given over to national leadership and they moved to France where together with national colleagues they oversaw the establishment of two other centers while travelling to resource the growing movement of Christians active in nature conservation. Peter and Miranda returned to the UK in 2010.
The A Rocha story is told in Peter’s first two books: Under the Bright Wings (Regent College Publishing, 2000), and Kingfisher’s Fire (Monarch, 2008).
Keeping Faith in Fundraising (Eerdmans, 2017) has been written with Rod Wilson and raises questions about the nature of philanthropy and fundraising in contemporary culture. Fundraising has been an essential element of life for both authors and so they reflect, from experience on both sides of the Atlantic, on how Christians can best raise funds with integrity.
In October 2019, Peter and Miranda, along with their colleagues Chris and Susanna Naylor, were in a horrific road accident while on a work trip in South Africa. Only Peter and the driver survived. He has spoken about life since in this short film. At the end of May 2020, Peter retired and continues to serve A Rocha in a voluntary capacity.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee Camp: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Peter Harris: It was just very striking to me that none of my own ethological or environmental friends ever darkened the door of a church and never when I was in Christian circles or very, very rarely did I ever hear anything about what seemed obviously going to be the issue of our times, which was the collapse of the biosphere. I have never felt any need to abandon my own biblical convictions in order to have a thoroughgoing career or life or passion, for caring for creation.
Lee Camp: That's Peter Harris, ordained Anglican clergyman and co-founder of the international Christian conservation effort A Rocha.
Peter Harris: Scripture doesn't just talk about you and your life, but talks about the whole creation.
So that was the personal push to find some way in which I could bring my worlds together of environmental passion and my Christian faith.
Lee Camp: On today's episode, Peter talks about the ways in which his Christian faith has informed his passion for life, and lifelong work, toward conservation and restoration; how he responds to the widespread amount of climate science denial in the evangelical community; and the surprising and hopeful places in which, as he puts it:
Peter Harris: You can see from space where Christians have been at work for the creation.
Lee Camp: All this coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp: Peter Harris after working as an English teacher at Christ's hospital, and then as an Anglican clergyman near Liverpool in the UK, Peter and his wife Miranda moved to Portugal in 1983 to establish and run A Rocha first field study center and bird observatory. Its work is then grown into an international conservation organization, including work in the United States.
Welcome, Peter Harris.
Peter Harris: Good to be with you. Thanks Lee.
Lee Camp: It's a delight to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time. Joining us here from England. Would you tell us a little bit about what first prompted, uh, your founding of A Rocha?
Peter Harris: Yes. It was, as you say, in the early 1980s, and for personal reasons, I was quite involved in ornithology and it was just very striking to me. That none of my own ethological or environmental friends ever darkened the door of a church and never when I was in Christian circles or very, very rarely did I ever hear anything about what seemed obviously going to be the issue of our times, which was the collapse of the biosphere.
So there were some circumstances that came about that pulled us into it in a practical sense. We were planning actually. My wife had grown up partly in Africa and we were all signed up to go and train clergy in Tanzania, but the Bishop wanted to send our kids away to boarding school at the age of six.
And we'd both been to boarding school fairly young, and we weren't up for that. And the mission society generally was beginning to wonder what to do with us, I think. So we counter proposed that, wouldn't it be a good idea if there was some kind of practical Christian initiative that showed what Christian thinking meant on the ground, if it was applied to particular nature conservation issues. And we didn't know what that would look like, but we felt we didn't want to just write more books or talk more talk. We wanted to go and do a project and see how it shook out. So that was the short story.
Lee Camp: What are some of the specifics of the kind of work that you were doing there in your first outpost in Portugal?
Peter Harris: So we picked a particular issue, which was the very rapid transformation of the Mediterranean landscape through essentially uncontrolled tourism. There was a huge impact. So the era of the South of Portugal, where we were typically had about something like 150,000, 200,000 people living there. And now there were 4 million people a year showing up on holiday. So you can imagine some of the impact and the habitats that were rare and important were just disappearing. Like there was no tomorrow. And then on top of that in those days which was the early eighties, a lot of people had come back from the Portuguese colonial Wars, enjoying using their guns. And so they were, they were out shooting and there was an estimate that something like 10 million migratory birds a year were being shot going over the Portuguese skies and the Spanish guys going South migrating South into Africa. So there's a huge problem with illegal shooting.
And on top of that if any Portuguese student wanted to learn about environmental things. They pretty much had to do it in the classroom. In Lisbon. There were very few opportunities for field studies and all of that came together with our conviction about community and creating community with all comers.
We were quite influenced by Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri and the possibilities of Christian hospitality extended to all comers. And people reading your life, rather than just hearing what you said and what you talked about. So it all came together with this project and we were. And still are actually, 35 years later fighting to protect one of the last important wetlands of the Western Algarve, the Ria de Alvor. We're still in court. We're still battling on, but it hasn't been, 90 something percent of the South Portuguese coastline is under concrete now, but that estuary in the surrounding landscapes is still there as important habitats. And so it's an ongoing thing.
Lee Camp: Now we'll talk a bit more about this later, but for setting the context it's often presumed in the American context, that conservation concern for the creation, climate control, climate change, are more typically construed in the American Christian context as sort of so-called liberal issues that are not truly grounded in biblical theology.
And yet you were very insistent about making your case for your work from an explicitly Christian theological perspective. So could you take us through maybe one or two kind of major theological constructs that have informed your work?
Peter Harris: Yes. If I could do some reasonable theologizing and contextualize my answer for people listening. So I've probably been to your country, I don't know, 30 or 40 times. And I've done a lot of listening over that series of visits. But it seems to me as an outsider, as it does, I think to many international visitors, that the ways that things have ended up where they are is actually quite random. Circumstantial.
There isn't a logical flow to that. And so I have never felt any need to abandon my own biblical convictions in order to have a thoroughgoing career or life or passion. For caring for creation. I think it was John Stott called Psalm 104, the world's first ecological poem. I mean, I'm a keen student of Hebrew and have been for 40 years and immersed in that Old Testament world.
You see that the narrative, if you like, that begins with creation is one that just runs right the way through the scriptures, to the new creation at the end. And we find our place within that narrative and within that redemption. So for me, I suppose the key mobilizing concepts for A Rocha as a biblical, professional, conservation organization and incidentally, every conservation organization have their reasons. I really don't accept this idea. There are faith based or not faith based organizations. We just make our reasons explicit. The, the key reasons for us would be, first of all, we are really responding to a creator God who is distressed at the grief of what Hosea calls the morning of His creation.
So it's not as though this is our initiative, our activity. We're simply responded as we were created to those two big Bible words, Shamar and Navarro to keep and work the creation, but that work of creation, that service of creation that is in those verbs is finding our Christ-like identity within creation as those in the image of God. That's our first calling as humanity, but it's a responsive call. it's God's creation and we're responding to his first irrevocable call to care for it.
The second thing is that it's important to notice that the roots of the trouble come down to our broken relationship with God.
I was listening to a fascinating podcast from Regent College in Vancouver last night by Matt Lynch about violence in the Old Testament. And he was pointing out how there is a tremendously strong link between human violence and ecological distress. And that human broken relationship with God, according to the prophets anyway, will always inevitably result in ecological breakdown.
Hosea spells it out. Most clearly where he says, you know, there's bloodshed following bloodshed and the fish of the sea and the birds of the air are dying. And it's natural for the prophets to see ecological trouble as the natural consequence of the broken relationship with God. Therefore it follows that it's only in the restoration of our relationship with God that we're going to find some hope and some way of getting our way back and that's awfully inconvenient, if you take a purely secular edited view of reality. But it's fascinating that even the most technical stuff, we just had the Dasgupta review on biodiversity finance here in the UK. And one of the key takeaway points of the review is that economics is not going to save the world.
This is a matter of values. This is a matter of what people care about, what they value. And we have to face the fact that essentially the ecological problem is a human problem. Christians would say at least that the human problem has everything to do with our broken relationship with God, which breaks our relationship with each other, which breaks our relationship with creation.
But, then there's the hope I have to just say the third, you know, leg of the stool, if you like for this, is that similarly we understand from the New Testament that all creation will be drawn into what Paul calls, the glorious freedom.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
Peter Harris: Of the sons of God. He says, using the entitlement of the sun within that cultural framework, apologies to my gender listeners.
Lee Camp: Yeah, it does seem like on that last note there, well, even when you started from creation to new creation and then this last point towards hope that there's in scripture, these very basic teachings that are often overlooked for whatever reason. An accident, perhaps as you noted earlier. But like Romans 8, Colossians 1, I would assume had been significant to you that point to the fact that salvation is not merely a personal individualistic construct, but it's construed as entailing the whole of the creation. And was that something that you came to slowly or was that something that's kind of in your Anglican tradition was always there?
Peter Harris: You mean me personally?
Lee Camp: Yes. Uh huh.
Peter Harris: I did come to it slowly, but I think there was a great change happening. So put briefly, my adult Christian life began when I was spent a year in Thailand before going to Cambridge to read English literature. And I think at that time I had a great dissatisfaction with a very narrow, personalized view of what the Christian life might be about. And books like Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death, and Francis Schaeffer's work. And John Stotts increasing embrace, if you like, of the relevance of the gospel for the poor that were gripping our imaginations in the early 1970s.
And then reading theology later in Cambridge and coming across “?” and Abraham Kuyper, and some of the reform tradition there, you see that, insistence, that the gospel makes a difference to everything. I think what was new was then reading Jürgen Moltmann when I was training for ordain ministry and studying Hebrew with Alec Motyer and seeing that there's this whole narrative there.
Which. We all wear spectacles when we read our texts, don't we? And I was, and I still am. We all are. It's, you know, one of the great difficulties, but one of the great wonders of working in a cross-cultural environment. Those spectacles had trained me to look for what's in this gospel for me and my life.
Cause I was, you know, 500 years into Western humanism. I'm of course the center of the story. I have, of course the only thing, this is all about, you know, me and my life and my feelings more than that. If you're reading literature and you're deeply into the romantics. You know, me and my feelings...
… but then you discover, hang on a minute, this is not the world of those texts, but rather the world of those texts is God's creation.
And so it was slow. But as I say, then there was the personal push to find some way in which I could bring my worlds together of environmental passion and particularly ornithology and the study of birds and understanding of migration with my Christian faith. I think all of us have to wrestle sometimes, don't we, with those discordant, if you like, elements. Why has God made me this way? What's that about? And how do I put it all under one roof in a way that doesn't mean that the walls are shaky. And I'm, I'm still doing that. I think that's a lifelong push towards integration in Christ. Isn't it?
Becoming whole in Christ and reconciling in Christ, all the different elements that we bring from our biography. But then we add sometimes through other provisionally from our theology.
Lee Camp: You mentioned the romantics. Would you give a bit of commentary on how you might see your theological commitments to conservation standing in continuity with or contrast with the romantic streams that might inform some environmentalism of today?
Peter Harris: Huh. That's a really good question. Um I don't know if you know the philosopher Alain de Botton, but he. He wrote a piece called “Love Actually,” where he was essentially saying hyper romanticism or the sense that you have to have some powerful authenticating feeling, which will provoke you into action. He was criticizing that in the context of human relationships and marriage. And, if you like, the endurance of relationships and saying, well, that may be the contemporary orthodoxy. But really, I feel that much activism, if you like, in environmental terms, can perhaps suffer from the same thing. That we're looking for an overwhelming experience of nature, which validates then what we do.
But I think God's view of us is perhaps a bit more realistic and thinks maybe our feelings have a certain amount to do with what we ate at lunch and whether the sun is out today and a number of other things. And perhaps the biblical understanding of feeling is very, very different. And even though it's words like love, which we read In scripture, going back to Matt Lynch again, yesterday, he was saying, we may share these English translations of these words, but what they meant at the time may have been very, very different. And clearly the will the desire in that way that Sandra McCracken has so wonderfully sung about, you know, with reference to Augustine. It's the conversion of desire, I think, that is needed to propel us towards something that will endure. Not to disparage the great experiences that Coleridge and Wordsworth and others were intoxicated by.
Lee Camp: Yeah. How do you narrate the role of the human and human communities, urbanization versus rural agrarian, romantic depictions of the natural state of the world? It seems that there might be some tension between the biblical narratives notion upon the human community as, from the very beginning, cultivating the garden to use that analogy or literal practice versus almost seeing the human as an enemy to conservation.
Peter Harris: Well, there's been a very interesting development within biology and ecology itself. I would say in recent years, which has allowed for a greater convergence, I would say between the biblical view and that which has currently being drawn upon within those sciences. When we began A Rocha, we took the name A Rocha from the Portuguese for a rock, because the idea was you start with the rock and then you build your ecology upwards. That gives you the soil type. That gives you the vegetation and then the insects.
It comes from the ground upwards, but we've recently come to understand how the role of top predators is critical in maintaining the health of an ecosystem. And there was this very well-known experiment or experience in Yellowstone National Park with the reintroduction of wolves which in turn pushed away the deer and the rabbits out of the habitats, where they were and allowed those habitats to recover and so on and so forth. And the whole thing gets back into some equilibrium. When you know a top predator from where their eyes are in their head. Basically, if they're looking behind them, something's going to eat them.
So your rabbits and your pigeons, and they all do a great job of looking behind. You know, and if you look at the human eyes, they are set forward. You know, we are the predator. And so I think we do play a critical role. It is, you’re right, you say one that scripture embraces from the beginning in Genesis 2, where we're tilling the garden. Psalm 104, which we mentioned earlier, is a commentary on Genesis in the sense that you get the picture of the season, the species, but the people are there fishing and farming and working the land. And the challenge for our generation now, after some disastrous, centuries, but certainly decades of degenerative exploitation of creation, is to understand the biblical wisdom of what a regenerative economy looks like, because we are well over the boundaries of any kind of sustainable life now on God's earth. And that's the challenge.
It's not that we're going away. And even in some of the most remote habitats that we tend to think of as virgin or unspoiled, such as the Amazon rainforest. My former board chair, Professor Ghillean Prance, who spent 40 years doing his field work in the Amazon on the human use of plants, tells me that there are fire pits throughout the Amazon. Charcoal fire pits. And this looks like a garden environment rather than one that is entirely left alone. And that is probably why it has the diversity that it does have.
Lee Camp: That's remarkable. That’s fascinating. One sort of practical or pragmatic sociological reality seems to be that very often the conservation movements, sustainability movements, care for the climate. And climate change movements seem to be marked by a certain level of anxiety. And there's been some studies about, climate anxiety and the impacts even as having upon children and so forth. What's your take on the anxiety and what's your take on the possibilities that your theological approach or reading might have as providing some alternatives?
Peter Harris: Again, a very good question. I think the horizontality of contemporary society, where we have to be the answer to our problems, piles on anxiety. As does the sense of guilt that you often hear coming out of the rhetoric of environmental organizations. I think it was the economist that said that, you know, the modern environmental movement is pretty much like the contemporary environmental movement without any redemption.
You know, you've got this beautiful beginning and then you've got the obvious culprit who is us. And then the contemporary narrative is so we're all doomed. And I think that that does pile on the anxiety. I have grandchildren who are anxious and we have a former colleague, Panu Pihkala in Finland who's done a lot of work on eco anxiety, and this is the thing. There's no doubt about it. Even my daughter's work, Joe Sweeney's work, on depression as identified ecological anxiety is one of the things that's playing in for young people today. And you hear that in what Greta Thunberg and others are saying, but there is that sense that while with Christians, everybody would agree this is a human problem.
If you think, well, gosh, we have to find these solutions and that's it. Given the propensity of people for extraordinary egotism and selfishness, it's not a very good lookout. I was talking recently with friends working in green investment. And we were talking about whether the markets or even the algorithms can be cynical, or whether you just have to have a cynical person running those markets or running those algorithms for it to become cynical.
But there's absolutely no doubt. There's a lot of cynicism out there. There's a lot of greenwashing out there now that these things are becoming fashionable. People are scrambling for green credentials. and that doesn't reassure the anxious because they can see that some of these rafts being floated downstream are pretty flaky pieces of equipment and they may not, they may not carry them.
So I think that as I've experienced in my personal life: if your only resource is yourself, then you would be in a poor state. But if we live in a world that is loved by its creator, who far more than us yearns for its healing and wholeness, that's going to give you some practical hope isn't it?
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
If you are one of our regular listeners, and you've not yet done so, would you please today go to Apple podcasts online and give us a glowing 5 star review? That will in fact help us reach more folks. And we'd be delighted if you'd recommend the Tokens Podcast to a fellow podcast listener.
Currently you're hearing a brilliant composition from our music director Jeff Taylor, one of our "Class and Grass" segments, Haydn's Creation followed by the fiddle classic Billy and the Low Ground, taped for a live show we taped here in Nashville on sustainability.
You can always reach us, tell us where you're listening from, or let us know some of the things you'd like to hear more about. by emailing us at podcast@tokensshow.com. Also remember you can sign up for our email list, or find out how to join us for a live event, all at tokensshow.com. You've been listening to our interview with Peter Harris, co-founder of the Christian conservation organization A Rocha International. Coming up, we'll hear more from Peter about the correlation between American Evangelicalism and climate science denial; a bit of contention about warm beer; and some signs of so-called "practical hope" in the climate crisis. Part two in just a moment.
Part 2
Welcome back to Tokens Show and our interview with Peter Harris.
Lee Camp: There's a common retort among some that presumes a tension between care for the poor and conservation or progressive environmental policy. How do you respond to that?
Peter Harris: I think it's always useful to unpack some of the presuppositions behind that. It depends what you mean by poverty and what you mean by development and, and what the trade offs are going to be. But I think it's an old argument because I think these kind of distinctions have become rather passe.
I read an excellent paper recently by Ben Lowe and Ruth Paddy, the boss. And gosh, I'm forgetting the third author who will now never forgive me, but they go, uh, precisely exploring this terrain. And the real, the obvious, points to be made which are that the first people who always suffer from any environmental degradation are the poor.
The poor always lived downstream and downwind, and they are the least protected. They live an unmitigated relationship with creation. And therefore when the links get broken they're already in deep trouble. So I think that the first thing that needs to be said is that there is no contradiction.
The second thing to be said is that it's always more appealing to our emotional life to deal with symptoms rather than causes, but upstream of a lot of the things that happened to the poor. The environmental causes, which just drive poverty faster and deeper, whether it be climate change and unpredictable weather patterns, when you're trying to plant your food, whether it be, you know, the collapse of the resources that you need just to get by.
So for me, it's all part of the same thing. I think it's been a very unfortunate argument in one sense between those who've been most concerned for human development and those who've wanted to look to the wider creation.
Lee Camp: I'd like to go back to your commentary early on in the interview that from your 30 to 40 visits to the United States, it seems that the way in which things have turned out in American evangelicalism seemed to be historically contingent, accidental, I think was the word you used.
Would you share with us a bit more about why you think, what are some of the factors that have led to that sort of disjunction between American evangelicalism and care for the creation?
Peter Harris: Well, of course I'm wary as an outsider, of making any commentary. You know, if an American person came over here and criticized warm beer and cricket, you know, you might find me getting a little defensive, so, but.
Lee Camp: I will, I will say that it would be hard to convince me to like warm beer. And so I understand what you're saying. However, however…
Peter Harris: I rest my case, Lee.
Lee Camp: However, I do think sometimes it's precisely hearing from an outsider that might help us see things we might not see.
Peter Harris: Well I've, I've had friends like Andy Crouch and Eugene Peterson who've kind of executed some of it for me. The kinds of things I hear from those like me who were concerned about it from within your country are. There's been a very unhelpful politicization of so many things. And not just this.
And in fact, conservation, as, as you know, began on the right wing of USA politics originally, as it still is in many parts of the world. It's not a particularly left wing concern, so there's that, but by migrating to the left, it became bolted together with issues that Christians want to take issue over very directly. But they come as a package.
So I've spoken in churches and meetings in the USA and often being said, well, hang on a minute. You clearly are anti-family, but you'll at least agree that there's nothing specifically anti-family about, in fact rather the opposite, about wanting to have a healthy environment in which people can live. So it's that kind of rather baffling association that has been difficult. I think also there's been a mistrust of science generally within, if you'd like to use the word, the evangelical community, and that perhaps has some historical roots in two things. First of all, a very bad tempered and ill qualified argument over the origins of creation. Usually not conducted between paleontologists and Old Testament scholars, but between others. So you've got to kind of wariness of science there and, and then perhaps the thought that it was science that has led to the technology, which has provoked abortion and other medical advances about which people are very uneasy in different ways.
So there's, there's a sense of mistrust of science. And probably finally one would say that in every country, the church makes a cultural accommodation. And one of the dominant cultural themes that you live with in the USA is hyperindividualism and a pretty pronounced materialism. Both of which are inimical to shallow as scripture understands it, where you have strong community relationships.
As you know, when the Bible says you in the New Testament, it's normally plural.
Lee Camp: Right. Plural.
Peter Harris: But reading it in English, we just personalize it and read it for me. And then the idea, which is a religious one, that the more stuff you have, or the more money you have, the happier you will be is just hardwired into people's expectations.
Maybe because they've come from situations where they had very, very little money and very, very little security. You know, I'm compassionate. I'm not pointing any fingers here, but I have got to know through, raising money for, A Rocha. You know, it's a keen ministry that I follow. I think it's a Holy ministry to finance good work. I've come to know a number of wealthy people and it just doesn't seem empirically the case that the more stuff you have, the happier you. You just seem to pile on your worries. Just like Jesus said, you would.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Peter Harris: So it's those kinds of things that play in, but really for every country, and culture, you could do the same kind of exegesis.
And if they don't touch cricket and warm beer, I invite your listeners to execute British culture at the moment, um and, and have fun with that.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Well just with regard to cricket, I know so little about it that I cannot even speak in any sort of condescending way about it.
Peter Harris: Uh, you just have no idea what you're missing. Test match special, and digestive biscuits, or some of the glories of world civilization, you know?
Lee Camp: Digestive biscuits. I will give you. Yes. Uh for a while we could get those in the international aisle at our local grocer but, no longer, they've gone.
Peter Harris: But just think you're shut out from the controversy as to whether India just now prepared their pitches in such a way that no English batsmen would survive more than 30 minutes out there, you know?
Lee Camp: You mentioned earlier as well the grief of God. And so allow me, if I may kind of, to set out three perhaps realities, three points of consideration, and ask you just to comment on this. So it seems to me that there's a sort of, one in doing any kind of work of mission which I would say, I think I've read enough of what you've said to construe your own sort of work under the theological heading of mission.
So there's the work of mission along with the specter of grief in doing that mission, because it gets set alongside the sense of loss between the gift and the promises on the one hand and the present realities on the other. That there's this beautiful promise of what could be, and of what we've been invited into.
There's the realities that we see before us and in the tension between those two, there's this possibility of having to deal with a lot of grief, and learn how to hope well. And I, I don't have anything in particular in mind. I'm just, uh, mindful of, it seems to me that people who give themselves to a life of doing mission in the way that we just described are pointed to, to give their lives to a sense of vocation, have to deal with a lot of grief along the way, because you're constantly dealing with the tension between what could be and what truly is. So what does that look like for you to narrate? How have you narrated that to yourself theologically and or how have you journeyed through that personally?
Peter Harris: Well, uh, your second question is quite a big one as you maybe know. The first one, I am very influenced by Chris Wright's work. And I understand that the mission is the mission of God and we are drawn into it as the people of God. So I wouldn't really make a distinction between particular people who've had a calling which will necessarily bring them into suffering or grief.
And any other Christian, I think this is, the mission of the people of God. This is all of our, this is all of our mission. And the question is whether as C.S. Lewis said, we will protect ourselves from the cost of love. Love makes us vulnerable. And in that vulnerability, which God first knew in giving his blessing to creation, and then knew sharply in the suffering of his son. We see the vulnerability which we will inevitably be drawn into if we will open ourselves to the world as it is. So I would strongly resist any professionalization of mission in that sense that the church has called into God's world as following Jesus Christ, who said, pick up your cross and follow me. There isn't actually any other way. The only other way is to kind of build the flimsy walls of self protection which we all do. And that perhaps is just briefly to say that I've thought about this a lot.
Lee Camp: About 15 months prior to taping this interview, Peter and his wife Miranda were in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. With them were the CEO of A Rocha International, Chris Naylor, and Chris's wife Susanna. The four of them, along with their driver, were in a car accident.
Peter Harris: These have not been the easiest times for me since the accident in South Africa, which costs the lives of my wife and my dear colleagues, Chris and Naila.
And I think that as I've thought about that, I've realized that I too had those walls in place. I guess I was just hoping some of the things that I'd seen many friends go through, or some of the situations I'd seen around the world, or lived alongside with people around the world, in their grief.
I think we all somewhere, I hope, gosh, I hope that doesn't happen to me.
And it did.
So when it does, nothing in one sentence changes, you're really just joining the normality of the world, which Paul says is a creation groaning. It's probably not a very wise strategy to defend yourself or distance yourself from that, because that is the world.
And that is the normal. It's just that abnormally I had for many of my years, lived a very privileged existence in multiple ways. So I, I've been thinking about that a lot, but I do think the normal Christian life is one best, lived, not armored against the way the world is. Because of course, as Jesus also said, when you find yourself close to those realities, that's when you're closest to his very presence because he himself gave his life for the world.
And the incarnation is the answer. There's no answers except you know, I'm with you here, as we try and make sense of this together and put one foot in front of the other each day. Grief shortens your horizons. That's for sure.
Lee Camp: Thank you.
I'd like to turn here to think a bit about practice and potential signs of hope. I was fascinated to read a quotation you had from a Texas philosopher. The quote is “The church may be in fact, our last best chance.”
And he said this with regard to care for the creation. Which is a shocking thing, certainly to hear a Texan say and to hear someone say about the church in the American context, but could you give us some commentary on why that could possibly be the case?
Peter Harris: Yeah, I think that's extremely practical. So one of the things that we did a long time ago. In fact, it was Simon Stewart, our current chief exec, who was then working with conservation international, who kind of led the exercise. We were talking more and more about the biodiversity hotspots. So something less than 2% of the planet's surface that holds, you know, 70% plus of the most endangered diversity.
Given that we all agree, whether we're Christians or not, that we're in the Anthropocene, that it's people's decisions and choices that is really affecting what goes on most of all. It's surely critical to find out what those people believe about the world around them, because that's going to determine the way that they treat it.
And so what we did was we just thought we'd undertake a very simple mapping exercise, and just look at: who lived in these biodiversity hotspots and what did they believe? And it was astonishing to discover that very, very frequently in obvious places like Brazil or Northeastern India, which is kind of over 90% Presbyterian or, or Papua New Guinea with 80% evangelicals or wherever.
You've got not just Christian populations, but evangelical populations living there. So on the negative side, if they don't understand that authentic Christian belief is about the restoration of all of those relationships that we've talked about between us and our creator and between us as people and with creation.
If we don't understand that we are going to be a plague on the earth, and indeed we are being a plague on the earth because most of global evangelicalism driven by misseology is from the West that have been extremely anthropocentric and truncated. And that me narrative, we talked about not really a biblical narrative, they're lethal, they're toxic.
They're destructive. So put negatively, there's a terrible problem. Put positively, if those Christians farming in Texas or in Manitoba where you've got lots of Mennonites or in Northeastern India, understand that not only does God care about how their family is doing and how their marriage is doing and how they're treating their workers.
But he also actually cares about the soil they have in their care, and the water and the trees and how they're getting their energy for their lives and their food. That possibility for transformation is extraordinary because they're the stakeholders in the most fragile places on earth.
So it's very practical. And it really makes a difference.
Lee Camp: What are some signs of hope that you see?
Peter Harris: Well, there are plenty, actually. I sometimes say you can see from space where Christians have been at work for the creation. So the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, the Alvor parish in Portugal, the Vallée Les Baux in France, Sulawesi in Indonesia, where Lynn Clayton is a fantastic Christian working for the rainforest, the Atewa forest in Ghana with the A Rocha team there. You know, you can see from space, the difference Christians have made. And those are tremendous signs of hope. But I'm also very hopeful because a lot of my Christian friends in the investment world, in the business world, out of Christian conviction now, rather like in the times of slavery where people couldn't see what the future economy looked like, but they knew they had to stop doing that. Some of my friends now have got to the point of saying, we don't know what a regenerative economy looks like, but we do know there's no future for a degenerative economy. It's a huge risk to my business. That's a huge risk to my finances, to my investments. And therefore some fascinating initiatives are emerging and they're giving me hope.
I'm, off the side of my A Rocha volunteer desk, quite involved with a group called North Star Transition. And it's amazing to see some of the stuff that's going on. And we're hearing about that. There’s quite a lot of hope actually. I do think there's some critical moments ahead though. I think the cop that's coming up in Glasgow in November on the climate's really important, we're really hoping that the issue of biodiversity loss won't get kind of overlooked in all the focus on carbon and climate but there's great work being done.
Conservation works. You just have to do a lot more of it, but it does work. It does make a difference.
Lee Camp: For someone listening, who has not yet begun to take these sorts of concerns and questions seriously; what might be some practical first steps you would suggest for such listeners?
Peter Harris: Yeah, read. You mentioned some of the passages earlier, you know, put yourself under those biblical texts, have a look at Colossians 1. Have a careful read through the gospel of John. I think, ponder that. Take those glasses off and start to notice everywhere that scripture doesn't just talk about you and your life, but talks about the whole creation.
A friend said to me this morning, an economic journalist, he said, well, economics doesn't change anything. And that's what the Dasgupta Review said. But, we have this transformative resource in scripture, which is there to change us and anybody who gets involved with the three persons, God has got to be up for change.
So I think that's the first thing, open yourself in prayer, and in scripture. It's the classical disciplines to God changing your mind perhaps and maybe allowing you a bit of distance from either a familial or a political or a cultural tradition, which has made these things difficult for you.
Maybe even start by acknowledging the pain that may be there when you look this thing in the eye, that's tough. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is I do think that exposure to poverty changes a lot of people's minds. The big push for the global church to change its mind about all of this is coming from the poor world, where Christian leaders really understand what the good news means. Not just for their people, but for their place.
The good news needs to be written in the place as well as the lives of people. And the more we expose ourselves to poverty and its realities, the better we understand the injustice that is driving environmental damage. And the more we understand that this isn't a political issue. This is an issue of a biblical humanity.
So those would be the things I suppose, I would say, but I don't want anybody to think I'm occupying any moral high ground here. You know, I am a person in great need of transformation and learning, you know, as much as I possibly can. Miranda and I did have a practice of exposing ourselves to the commentary of our friends from the poor world when they stayed with us and when we stayed with them and listening hard. I think that's really important for those of us who come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds.
Lee Camp: Was there any particular shape that opening to their commentary took? Or was it mainly just listening?
Peter Harris: Yeah. Mostly just listening. And of course, some of these surprising answers you got sometimes. So I remember driving away from a leaders forum where we'd had leaders from 20 countries around them. My Kenyan colleague was coming back to spend a week with us afterwards, coming to stay. And as we drove away, you know, it had been a long hot conference with 70 people.
I was absolutely exhausted. And I said, gosh, I could kill for a beer. And when we got back to the end of his stay, I said, you know, Kip, I'd love to know what you think about the way we're living and about, you know, as we always did. I said, is there anything that really shocked you? And he kind of with a wicked grin, he said, yeah, it was when you said you could kill for a beer. Cause in the East African church, you know, alcohol is obstinate. Yeah. So that, that was, you know, so anyway.
Lee Camp: But it sounds like your practice has been to intentionally ask your friends for their commentary.
Peter Harris: Yeah. I think that's really important. Iron sharpens iron, it says in Proverbs and.
Lee Camp: Indeed, yeah. That's very helpful.
Peter Harris: And it can be very painful of course, because we British people do understand that we have the golden key to the best culture on earth, you know? So, like I said earlier.
Lee Camp: Yes, or beer and cricket.
Peter Harris: There you go.
Lee Camp: We've been talking to Peter Harris, founder of A Rocha International about his work and care for the creation. Thank you so much for your time and for your good work in the world.
Peter Harris: Thanks very much, Lee.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with Peter Harris, Anglican clergyman and co-founder of the Christian conservation effort A Rocha International.
Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, and send to podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, and Tom Anderson. Our engineer Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
We close with a bit of the wonderful old hymn "Day is Dying in the West" which seems most appropriate for this episode. This is the Lipscomb University A Cappella Singers, along with the most outstanding Horeb Mountain Boys on one of our live shows taped here in Nashville, Tennessee.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feelings Studios.
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