Engaging in our Entangled Worlds
Jennifer A. Sheffield
in conversation with Dr. Luke Beck Kreider
Dr. Luke Beck Kreider works with students on issues that answer questions such as: How are we ensnared by our collective histories? How does the violence of war impact the environment? How do contemporary, social justice movements challenge traditional Christian ethics? What can we learn from peacemaking practices? And are we too “entangled” to engage effectively in the most critical calls to action that we are faced with?
He credits his work with, The Sanctuary Lab, at UVA – which explores climate change and its affects on sacred sites – as profoundly impactful, but admits as he wrote his dissertation, entitled, Theologies of Peace and Ecologies of Violence as a PhD student thinking, “Why am I doing this?” But, over the year of COVID-19 lockdowns all the theologies in the world came down to what his two-year-old son taught him about having a sense of place.
Jennifer Sheffield: Thank you so much, Luke, for being available to discuss your work with us.
Luke Beck Kreider: Thanks for reaching out and offering to do this. I’m taking a walk while we talk.
JS: Is there a personal thread involved in the work and interests you pursue or was this completely professional, and something that you were introduced to?
LBK: I would describe it as an interweaving of two interests that have been with me from the time that I was a kid. I was raised in a church environment, in which issues of peace and justice were pretty core to the identity of the congregation. I was also in a congregation of folks, who were world-renowned for their contributions to international peacebuilding, and I wanted to be like those people when I was a kid, so I went to college [at Goshen College] to do peace studies, and religion, as separate majors.
My interest in environmentalism at the time was personal. I didn’t study that at all, but I was involved in the eco-clubs on campus, and it was part of my personal practice. When I went to graduate school [at Yale Divinity], I got very interested in the study of religion and ecology and environmental thought and all of the debates while I was studying peace studies as it related to religion. The two fields didn’t talk to each other, so I got interested in the connections between them – first, at a theoretical level. How can these two fields dialogue with each other? I was then introduced to more concrete materials, related to environmental, and political issues, and I let that drive my academic work.
(Birds chirping.)
JS: What piques your interest today? Are there any new approaches you’re intrigued by?
LBK: I am more and more influenced by indigenous climate studies, and challenges that indigenous climate movements present to mainstream ways of understanding climate change as a problem—what is at stake in climate justice, and what a climate justice movement has to accomplish to be “just.” That makes colonialism and the literature related to decolonization in North America an increasing interest. It was not on my radar when I started doing this work at the intersection of violence and environmental issues, but it became inseparably linked to the way I think about them. I have been turning to literature on settler colonialism and indigenous climate studies, and I am currently intrigued by how we can do the work that I do in religious and environmental ethics while acknowledging the ways that the ecological relationships, and the social and political histories of a place are “entangled,” that hasn’t been done before.
JS: Are there resources to address merging these different discourses we are just not using?
LBK: Well, I certainly think that one of the reasons I’ve been so interested, in turning to indigenous climate studies, and the literature on colonialism, or why I wanted to have a case study around the movement at Standing Rock, for example, (Stewardship, Settler Colonialism, and Solidarity. Rooted and Grounded. AMBS. Oct. 15, 2021) is because there are environmental justice movements that make the connections very clear between political or social violence and our environmental issues, but without turning directly to the language of conflict. I have been directing my audience within religious environmental circles to take that literature more seriously, to teach us how to understand, and confront, our social and our ecological relationships and movements for indigenous rights and environmental justice in communities of color.
Another, very different kind of answer is that there is a big trend towards what is called environmental peace building, which has noticed that violent conflict is linked to environmental issues, whether it is through environmental scarcity, or sea level rises that lead to political crises. The consequences of warfare mean that conflict is deeply “entangled” with environmental issues, so environmental peace building has emerged as a paradigm for thinking through how to integrate environmental management or care into the policies of peacebuilding. I have a lot of critical questions, for environmental peacebuilding movements, when there are underlying issues like in water conflict.
JS: How can religious communities engage in the environmental peacebuilding movements?
LBK: The first step would be to question – what are the environmental justice movements going on in my place? In my neighborhood? In my region, or bioregion? There are probably movements trying to confront these relationships between environmental issues and violence, broadly speaking, or structural violence or social injustice. In my work, I call upon white, Christian communities to apprentice, to offer themselves in solidarity and follow the leadership of movements that already exist. Of course, there are all kinds of ways to do that work poorly and well but it means finding and learning what it means from others to confront these kinds of “entangled” relationships. It is through that practical work that Christians, and other religious communities that don’t do this work naturally, can articulate their deepest commitments to that work. They can understand how solidarity can be articulated as a practice of Christian love. To me it’s this back and forth between the practice that we are doing, and the reflection upon our deepest commitments and traditions.
JS: Do you believe we are reluctant to come to these calls to action, because we don’t consider them religious obligations, or have lost connections over time?
LBK: I think there is definitely an aspect of that, especially within the communities I am in conversation with. That’s a story that is easy to tell about North American Christianity that it doesn’t have this religious connection to ecological sensitivity or care, but most of my work is pitched towards Christian environmental communities that have taken on environmental care or duties to the environment as a major part of their identity. I think that is a huge movement and a really important one, and my work is to push that movement to think and act more sensitively, and to make connections between ecological issues and social injustice or social or political violence. My work is not focused on a critique of Christianity as a whole as being un-ecological or anti-ecological, because I’m working with folks who are adept at articulating Christian commitments in ways that do connect the deepest aspects of their faith to environmental care.
JS: To integrate it, do they use biblical references or are they focused solely on the social aspects?
LBK: Definitely within Christian environmentalism there are lots of different ways of doing this work. One of the most influential uses biblical motifs of stewardship. God’s very earliest commandment to human beings was to take care of the Earth, so if you read my thesis Theologies of Peace and Ecologies of Violence, I think that way of doing “Christian environmentalism” has been deeply ambiguous. But if you would turn to the most sophisticated, articulate theologians or pastors in local movements, I don’t think you will find anything alarming. They're saying that people have a serious Christian obligation to take care of their place or the Earth that is rooted in their faith, who they believe Jesus Christ to be, and what they believe God to be doing to redeem creation and they feel called to participate in God’s redemptive work. They're saying God doesn’t just save humans, God saves all the Earth, and God wants flourishing for all creatures.
That is present in a wide range of ways; stewardship is just one of them. I’m one of many within this conversation trying to point out neglected spots in this field, and develop ways Christians talk about this stuff, that are more in tune with the politics of our ecological relationships, to environmental justice issues, and ways that even our best forms of environmental care are complacent.
JS: Now, you are in religion, but are getting involved in several departments in a university setting. How have your collaborations shifted as you’ve moved?
LBK: That is a great question. At UVA they have a strong program in the environmental humanities based around what faculty are doing and have a great faculty network that filters down to the graduate level. I was involved in lots of interdisciplinary programs and groups asking environmental questions from different disciplinary backgrounds and I helped write a grant-supported project that asked, ‘How is the idea of ecology as a concept shaping how humanities people do their research?’ Then, as a postdoc at UVA, I was involved in project called The Sanctuary Lab, which was trying to find a model of research based on methods in the humanities that could incorporate skills from the arts, sciences, and social sciences, and so we were planning trips to sacred sites and thinking about ways to study how social, cultural, and ecological change is “entangled” at religiously significant sites when climate change fundamentally alters the ecosystems of these places that are supposed to be windows into the divine realm or places set aside as sacred. When global forces threaten, or alter those places, how are the communities that hold them sacred making sense of that? Our team included an environmental scientist, a composer, an environmental lawyer, and religious studies folks and we talked about the arts of attention, meaning different ways of attending to these sacred places, studying them and learning about them. That was a really short experience, but a really profound one, for me. It helped me figure out how collaborative work is done.
I’ve only been at Yale for one year, and it’s been more about teaching and the privilege of working with students pursuing their joint degree between religion and ecology and the Yale School of the Environment and the Divinity School. Having those students in my classes has been excellent. The expertise and interdisciplinary capacity that they have has really enriched those classroom conversations. From here, I’m moving to Indiana where I’ll have a joint appointment at Goshen College in the sustainability studies program and the Department of Religion, Justice and Society. So again, I’m excited to have opportunities to be part of a program focused on engaging with environmental problems and to be a bridge between those departments, to facilitate collaboration between students, faculty, and what is going on around campus.
JS: Now, you speak positively about ways in which things are “entangled,” but what happens when nations prepare for war? In your article for Religions, “Christian Ethics and Ecologies of Violence,” you talk about the two as interwoven, and write: “Yet there are important differences between environmental ethics and the ethics of violence. While the two must now be interwoven, they cannot be collapsed into each other without problems.” What are the problems?
LBK: With that quote, I’m thinking about our moral imaginations about social life; about how we relate to each other as people and what justice looks like in our human communities of many traditions. This is a critique geared towards the West; so I think the ways that we have thought about politics and social ethics, don’t have the environment in the picture. The moral frameworks we’ve inherited from environmental ethics are very different in that there is so much we don’t know about the ecological communities we are a part of. My worry there and why I say they cannot be collapsed without problems, is that I worry about our non-ecological political imagination overriding any ability to listen to the Earth for communities’ to form and flourish. When I say they can’t be collapsed, I do not want to see our traditional ways of thinking about the ethics of war overlaid on how we should deal with environmental problems. Similarly, most of the thinkers I am acquainted with don’t have the resources to fully integrate with the political side and wrestle realistically with the ways that environmental, and political issues, are “entangled.”
JS: What functions of environmental movements are important if racism, or a reality like war is already deeply rooted in a community? How do we change?
LBK: If I knew!
JS: Are there aspects of ethics that can be applied to bringing people together?
LBK: I think people are inclined to change when they see what’s happening with these “entanglements” and so as much as I think my first instinct to your question is, ‘I don’t know,’ or read this book, or read the right articles, as an academic, I have that instinct to educate yourself and let’s talk about them in the right ways, and a big part of my project is to find new ways to talk about and make connections for specific communities and meet them there. More profoundly I’m inclined to think that when coalitions of people can gather around issues in which they have different things at stake and learn what the connections are, they can join in. From whatever limited capacity we each have, minds change, political possibilities change and then, people start to think about the religious dimensions.
JS: You also suggest because we have a “conquering instinct” as humans that is working against our ways of understanding why “stewardship” is so critical.
LBK: Right. I think there’s something deeply ingrained in some of the communities I come from and speak with, this idea that the goal is to control the world, meaning the Earth and the social relations it hosts, and try to improve them in ways that fit our moral imagination, with our understanding of what’s good in the world. I say in my stewardship article (“Dominion and Dispossession: Christian Environmental Stewardship and Settler Colonialism”) that I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the idea that people have an obligation to care for the Earth, but because of the ways that functioned historically in ethnic cleansing, genocide, and forms of change to the landscape—like this continent was turned into either private property or federally owned wilderness—both those projects were involved in displacements and created ways of imagining what Earth is for, that perpetuate this legacy of Earth as property.
Another part of the legacy I think is important is how stewardship still expresses itself as a movement to save land from violent others. It still pitches itself as a dualistic conflict. In the settlement of this country, it was about this argument that native people weren’t improving the land, didn’t cultivate or have enclosures so they weren’t making an improvement to the land. Thus, we were going to redeem the land and that was going to be a form of caretaking. I think Christian stewardship tends to articulate itself as a movement against the violence of modernity, too, and I get nervous about that language because it’s inherently antagonistic and polarizing. I wish Christians could find a way to articulate the importance of caring for the earth that doesn’t start with an enemy but that still haunts us. So many religious groups are doing wonderful work and I’m not dismissing all of this wholesale. I mean it as a subtle, but important, paradigm shift that I’m certainly not alone in being a voice for.
JS: That makes sense. What are the groups you speak with most in your work?
LBK: I don’t want to limit the scope, but some of the folks I’ve had conversation with are connected to my own Christian denomination that I grew up in and I’m still in conversation with and that is Mennonites. Mennonites have expressed and practiced and theorized some of the most profound versions of Christian stewardship, yet I’ve still been participating in conversations that are trying to amplify the voice of justice movements and the significance of environmental concerns within Anabaptist communities drawing attention to these issues, and encourage more thought, about the social, racial dimensions of environmental concerns within Anabaptist circles.
JS: Has your work expanded to having international conversations? The world is at war right now and so we are seeing these things happening in real time.
LBK: Right. When I was working on my dissertation, then as I’ve been working on turning it into a book, part of my work with The Sanctuary Lab was planning trips to the Jordan River Valley with a research team. I was involved in planning the agenda for that trip and wanted us to focus on water conflicts in the Jordan River Valley and their relationship to the wider conflicts in that region. Both trips got canceled because of COVID-19, then I moved on to Yale, but the global scope of all this was at the forefront of my mind when I started the project and so that is where my more recent thinking is going. The global scope is very important.
What’s going on in Ukraine right now is an example of some of these concerns. For one, Russia deliberately occupying Chernobyl raised a lot of environmental concerns about kicking up radioactive dust and what Russia is doing there, because Ukraine is a really dense, industrialized country. There are short-term, then really long-term environmental effects of warfare in that situation, not to mention, the normal effects of depleted uranium. What it means to “Stand with Ukraine” is going to unfold over time, not the immediacy of this conflict. Whatever the outcome, there are going to be generations of environmental concerns.
JS: What about the scarcity aspects, and the agricultural aspects as well?
LBK: Of course, food security is going to last longer than the military campaigns and that’s another thing, speaking of “entanglement” is you see the way that Russia uses oil reserves and its angle on the global fossil fuel market as a weapon against folks that come to Ukraine’s aid. It is not news, that oil is a factor in contemporary global conflict but another aspect of that is as climate politics continue, and eventually we move to a post-fossil fuel economy, it’s important to think about that as not just a change of energy infrastructure but it’s going to be a huge change to the global world order. If energy continues to be a major factor in geopolitics, I think a big question for climate justice is not just how are we going to get to net zero but what our future looks like when we can still fight, and kill and have wars over renewable energy and who has access and who doesn’t.
JS: You mentioned access. How do you create it without perpetuating violence?
LBK: I don’t know the right answer, but it’s an important climate justice question. How do you make a transition this big in a way that is efficient that doesn’t reinforce all the worst things about the structure of the global political system? One of the messages from indigenous climate studies is that climate change is “entangled” with much deeper, longer standing dimensions of colonialism which have always been about human environmental change through violence, so there would be a thousand ways to get to net zero that continue to ask native people to bear a lot of it and not give them a voice in global or domestic politics. Those are issues that can get lost in climate justice movements but because of the urgency it’s inconvenient to point out the deeper dimensions.
JS: Lastly, what symbolism has come up in your work with religious identities?
LBK: Certainly the idea of a “steward” is a powerful metaphor so that’s one symbol that has shaped our relationship to the environment as enlightened, or divinely appointed caretakers. I think lifting up other ways of imagining that relationship is a big part of the work of religious studies and the environment. Honestly, I’m not ready to say we should move from this metaphor to that metaphor, but I am drawn to language like kinship in thinking about the ecosystem we inhabit.
JS: We have experienced major changes recently with COVID-19. Has something changed in the context of current events because of how they shook up the ecosystem?
LBK: That’s a good question. I am not exactly sure if this story answers the question in a way that is relevant, but one thing that happened to me was the very basic challenge of not being able to go anywhere or see anyone, or travel, so the dynamics of COVID lockdown drove me and my two-year-old son to spend time just walking around our neighborhood and looking at stuff. It helped me think about my place in my neighborhood and myself as deeply knitted to this super local environment because I was seeing what everything was through his eyes as he found his place in the world; like we’re going up the hill now and at the top of the hill is a street. Just finding our place in the world together by being outside was a profound experience. It made me think about how my academic work connects me, and can be connected to the actual place where I live. My son and I would go down almost every day and stand on the bridge over the creek and throw sticks in and it made me think about how I understand myself and my academic work in relation to the waterways that run through where I live.
JS: That's a great story! It’s hard to put a lot of this into layman’s terms.
LBK: There’s a lot of abstractions, and not a ton of examples. Being able to tell these stories on the issues that matter is the most important thing.
Jennifer A. Sheffield is a journalist with more than twenty years of experience in writing for daily and monthly news and popular lifestyle publications. Currently, she is pursuing a Masters of Teaching at the University of Virginia. She has covered sports, the arts, outdoors, business, and engaged with community leaders to respond to national events at the hyper-local level. She also contributed as a media relations intern with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Since earning her Bachelors of Arts from Skidmore College in Anthropology she’s studied at UCL in England and Boston University's College of Communication .
