In their greed they will exploit you with deceptive words.

In our era, climate justice and reparations are the same project: climate crisis arises from the same political history as racial injustice and presents a challenge of the same scale and scope. The transformations we succeed or fail to make in the face of the climate crisis will be decisive for the project of racial justice, and vice versa.

Tangled Roots

This book describes how two of the world’s great crises, systemic racism and environmental destruction, share the same tangled origins: greed and its ravenous manifestation, theft. It also invites Christians to reclaim our unique vocation as caretakers whose worshiping presence begins repairing all that has been plundered.

Disappointingly, some Christians still dispute the existence or extent of systemic racism and environmental destruction, and there is little I will say in these pages to change the minds of the skeptical. More hopefully, increasing numbers of Christians acknowledge these injustices and have found in their faith the motivation to seek justice for their neighbors and the earth itself. These women and men join others whose personal experiences of exploitation and subsequent biblical reflection on those experiences have fostered the wisdom and resilience needed to survive societies built on greed.

While more and more people are concerned about justice as a matter of faith, many still miss the connection between the wealth extracted from racialized communities and wrung from exploited land. We miss the relationship between living in harmony with our neighbors and with the ecosystems we share. We think of these as discrete catastrophes with little overlap. Advocates for justice will understand the need for racial and environmental repair, but this is different from understanding the origins and animating assumptions they share.

How do we do this? How do we hold together two of the most urgent justice concerns of our day in a way that brings harmony to both? At the outset I should admit that the scale of these disasters often overwhelms me. As we will see, the greed behind environmental and racial injustice has an old and awful history. Far from being exceptional to contemporary life, the covetousness that animates white supremacy and ecological plunder is one of the foundational forces organizing our society.

In the beginning, God created people to be a presence for the good of all creation—plants, animals, landscapes, and other people were all meant to thrive in the presence of God’s image-bearers. But any notion that we might still live this way will strike most of us as unlikely or impossible. We assume the existence of people in any given place will alter it, often permanently, and not for the better. While walking through a lakeside park near our home, my eyes bounce between the birds migrating between Canada’s vast boreal forest and the tropical jungles of Central and South America and the litter ubiquitous in our throw-away culture. Our way of life leaves behind toxins in the air, microplastics in the waterways, and less biodiversity in the ecosystem. We build societies on assumptions of racial segregation, class inequality, and gender disparity. We may not want these transgressions to define us but we tolerate them as acceptable collateral damage for the status quo we’ve come to accept.

The gap between God’s intention and our experience of this groaning world makes me wonder: Is God’s original call to live as caretakers of creation still available to us? Is it possible to reclaim our original vocation? Just as importantly, in a world wrecked by plunder, does creation retain the power to care for us, to form us as communities of caretakers? As you will find, I’ve come to believe strongly and hopefully that the answer to each of these is an unambiguous yes. It’s by living as communities of caretakers that we will discover the way to quench the ravenous inferno that manifests as racial and environmental injustice.

Reconciling Roots

For over a decade our multiracial congregation has nurtured a vision of Christ’s reconciliation across our city’s racial divisions. We’ve been learning to live into the possibility-stretching implications of our Lord’s life, death, and resurrection. We’ve done this imperfectly, of course; as the pastor of this multiracial community, I’ve made countless mistakes. But God has been faithful and with the Spirit’s help we’ve taken real steps toward a shared life of righteousness and reconciliation. Even so, despite all God has done for our diverse and eclectic church, the ministry of reconciliation can feel like juggling one too many balls or spinning one too many plates. At any moment the entire endeavor may be blown apart by our racialized society’s powerful gusts.

More recently we are learning that, in addition to reconciling us to God and one another, Christ also reconciles us to the rest of creation. We’ve begun paying closer attention to the unique history of our place, allowing the channels of shalom carved by previous generations to shape our priorities and perspectives. The community garden we care for on the grounds of Jackie Robinson Elementary School is more than a charitable act; tending that particular soil for the past decade has taught us about the vegetables and herbs that thrive in our lakeside microclimate as well as what produce is...