Peter Illyn, Restoring Eden

Peter Illyn is executive director of Restoring Eden, a nonprofit working to make environmental stewardship a core Christian value.

This morning the blizzard ended and the sky cleared. I awoke early -- apparently before anyone else, because I couldn't see one footprint in the snow. It was as pristine a backdrop as could be imagined. The woodpile the students are slated to move today, however, is now buried under three-foot snow drifts.

I can sense the students are getting cabin fever. They have been stranded here in Haines, Alaska, by the snow and ice for a week now, able to tolerate only short excursions outdoors. Yesterday, they went to the local radio station and helped out there with processing a mailing. Tonight, we celebrate our trip with a traditional Tlingit feast of salmon, halibut, crab, goat. and seal. Local tribal elders will be coming to fellowship with us. At 2 a.m., the students will board a ferry to head down to Juneau and then fly home to sunny Florida. I head to Anchorage.

Restoring Eden is focusing a large portion of its outreach efforts on students at Christian colleges with strong biology or environmental science programs. We start and support campus environmental groups, we host student trainings on leadership and political activism, and we speak at chapels and in classrooms.

I spent all of yesterday writing grants and trying to figure out how to consolidate my spring travel schedule, since I promised my wife I would stay home for a while. The biggest cost of my traveling is emotional: I come back a bit of an outsider, having to work myself back into the family rhythms. (I also come back to a group of female llamas that had been abandoned and somehow made their way up to my farm. We've fed them for three months now, and they are officially a part of the family.)

As Restoring Eden grows and we are able to add support staff, I'll hire people who are self-directed and can work faithfully without daily supervision. I long for the time when I can hire directors for campus outreach and communications. But I don't want to add staff until my funding stream has matured.

Yesterday, I was blessed to receive a phone call asking me to speak on a panel at the Telluride Film Festival. I am being featured in a documentary about the spirituality of free-flowing rivers. Last year, I was able to take the filmmakers out with my llamas on a short hike into a grove of ancient cedars and cottonwoods. That was great, and speaking on the panel sounds like fun.

Today, I am also working on a newsletter article called "Are you a bellybutton Christian?" On three separate occasions, I have heard tribal Christians describe themselves as bellybutton Christians. This reflects their sense of an umbilical-cord connection to Mother Earth that has provided them with food, shelter, clothing, and medicine for eons. They talk about the struggle to not lose their bellybuttons when they move out of a traditional subsistence relationship with nature. But many Christians I talk to feel that the phrase "Mother Earth" is somehow pantheistic or new age. This fear reflects the church's foolish disconnection from the reality of our humanness.

This disconnection became apparent at a Christian Rock Festival where I was hosting a table. A young man came by and told me that, "Earth doesn't matter, because we're not animals." I glibly responded, "Dude, you have nipples. You're a mammal. If I covered your mouth with my hand, you would quickly discover your mammalian need for oxygen." I don't mind the environmental ignorance as much as the self-righteousness that seems to come with it.

Restoring Eden works hard to create an educated, connected, grassroots movement of Christians willing to speak out. Today I'll spend some time on the phone working with the director of our new partnership, Chris Elisara of the Creation Care Study Program, which offers students the opportunity to spend a semester in either Belize or in New Zealand and Samoa. The students spend four months taking courses such as "God and Nature," "Sustainable Community Development," and "Literature of the Wild." When the students return, they become the leaders of the campus chapters of Restoring Eden.

Restoring Eden has been able to take advantage of media coverage to broadcast its message of loving, serving, and protecting God's creation to the general public. One reason Restoring Eden gets good media coverage is our strategy of bumper-sticker messaging. The goal is short, simple, to-the-point messages that are easily repeatable. The favorites are:

Your soul needs the wild.
If you love the Creator, take care of creation.
God's original plan was to hang out in a garden with some naked vegetarians.
Extinction isn't stewardship!

Too many groups, trying to become agents for social change, produce vast amounts of material that no one actually reads. Having solid information on your side isn't enough. If a common-sense argument was sufficient, Ralph Nader would be president, hemp would be legal, recycling would be mandatory -- and I'd be skinny! The failure to change is not simply about lack of information; it's about lack of a heart connection. The goal is to reach a critical mass of advocates who then tip society toward sustainable behaviors. The church has a name for a community-wide paradigm shift: a revival.

I long for a revival of faithful, loving, and wise stewardship; of a celebration of the wonder and wisdom of creation. It's time to get out our tambourines, set up a tent on the edge of town, and start singing.