Magazine Fall 2023 Change, Resilience and Obedience to God’s Call
by Amanda Sparkman, Associate Professor of Biology
Adapted from her talk in Westmont Chapel, March 3, 2023, as part of the Conversation on the Liberal Arts: “Educating for the Unknown: Liberal Arts in the Age of Climate Change”
I want to talk to you about change. Resilience in the face of change. And obedience to God’s call.
First, change. Change is the way of the world. From the tropical rainforests of South America, to the tundra of Asia, to the boreal forests of Europe, to the savannahs of Africa, to the deserts of Australia, to the pack ice of Antarctica, and all across the ocean that gives way to the chaparral and oak woodland here, where we are, at the base of the Santa Ynez Mountains in North America: Change is continual.
Here at Westmont, the temperature rises and falls through the day as light gives way to darkness. Sometimes the air is light and dry; sometimes it is heavy with moisture, bringing fog and — occasionally — floods. Some days the air is so still you can see the lizard on the path to Winter Hall blink. Other days the wind chases all the lizards into their homes in holes and shrubs, and the oaks and sycamores and eucalyptuses are tossed about and their limbs fall across the trail that runs around campus. All this we can see in our days here, in our time. But the changes go deeper.
Once these hills were entirely woodland, chaparral and grassland, and the footprint of humans was lighter than it is today. Fires have swept through long before there were any buildings to protect, and floods have tumbled down vast boulders, again and again, as thousands, tens of thousands of years have passed. Once this land was deep beneath the ocean, where the clams we now find preserved in layers of rock burrowed and breathed and filtered tiny bits of food from the water. Once these mountains rose out of the sea as tectonic plates collided. Even now, the ground beneath our feet continues to move over millennia, shifting northward. You can give a very slow wave goodbye.
Change is the way of the world. And we — living creatures, humans and other animals, plants and fungi, bacteria, protists, viruses — we know nothing if not how to deal with change! Our resilience, our ability to meet change head on, to withstand and even flourish in the wake of change is so fundamental, we may scarcely even notice it. When you walk into the dark from the bright outdoors, did you think about the ways your eyes adjusted themselves, your pupils dilated, gathering in the scarce rays of electric light in this room?
Your body is continually doing you these little favors. Your muscles and lungs adjust to the exertion of an uphill trek. Your white blood cells grow, divide and spill into your blood and tissues to fight off a virus. And your mind, your conscious self, is continually adjusting, taking in information from your perpetually changing environment, deciding what to do or not to do.
Biologists define plasticity as the marvelous capacity to change our behavior, our physiology, which genes our cells turn on and off. Deep in the design of all God’s creatures is this ability to adjust, to change strategy, to do something new in the face of changes in light, temperature, moisture, nutrients, wind, waves and — not least — other individuals, whether predators or prey, competitors or mutualists, friends or lovers, strangers or enemies, peers or professors.
Some of the changes we living things respond to may be mild and are easily adjusted to. When the weather turns cool, pulling on a sweater, growing a few more feathers and a bit more fur, staying underground a bit more. Some changes are harsher. Losing a stream means that a newt lacks enough water to lay her eggs. Losing a home or an office to a wildfire. Losing a loved one to a mudflow. Our Westmont community, human and non-human, has had to find ways to be resilient in these situations. After a wildfire, chaparral shrubs, still deeply rooted in the ground, send out new shoots; snakes emerge from the burrows where they found refuge; the scrub jay plants an acorn in the bare soil and, eventually, an oak seedling begins to germinate, and the community rebounds, even as the scars, the history of the burn, remain.
But we are not always resilient, either in the short or the long term, and change can wear us down. The leaves of the toyon shrub, which loves the light, may become yellow and brittle when the sun is too hot. The rangy coyote may become rangier and sicklier when it finds too few small animals to fill its belly. Sometimes the soil lacks enough seeds to return the land to what it was before disaster. Sometimes loss, and the ensuing grief, nearly overwhelm us, and we languish.
Change is the way of the world. And the world is startlingly, continuously, if not perfectly or limitlessly resilient. Some of the changes we face today are what we or those before us have always faced: changes in sea, earth and sky, wind and waves that the messiah might have been able to command but that we have little power over. What is new, however, is the scale to which we, human beings, Homo sapiens, have become a force of nature.
Humans have been so extraordinarily good at growing our population, and we have spread so far and so thoroughly across the globe, that scarcely any living thing is left unchanged by our presence and our activities. In my mind this is no cause for concern. We are, after all, creatures embedded within the ecosystems that sustain us, and we change them even as they change us. We dig and chop and build and dig and chop and build some more. We invent. We are fabulous inventors! And the structures, objects, chemicals that we have extracted, modified, synthesized, are scattered across the planet, many beautiful, many full of history and meaning, many exercising important and meaningful functions.
But how we have gone about expanding our habitat and the ways in which we have bent the earth’s resources to new uses have not come without costs. Massive biodiversity loss. Widespread pollution. Climate change. These are the three most troubling side effects of how humans have come to occupy the planet. Nearly a quarter of species are in decline globally today because of human activities. Pollution — our plastics, our chemicals, our waste in all its forms — is defiling large stretches of land, air and water, compromising the health and beauty of individuals and ecosystems. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere from our industrial activities is changing our global climate in ways that are already becoming so severe that governments the world over are grappling with how to deal with the threats to the health, livelihood, justice, stability and peace of their region. Fisheries and agriculture already begin to feel the strain. Heatwaves, drought, wildfires, extreme weather events and rising seas: These are no longer simply nature acting on us. These are new consequences of the additive effect of our species on the rest of the created order at a global scale. And we’re pushing the resilience of many species, ecosystems and human communities to their limits.
What, then, is God’s call in this world of change, both ancient and human-caused?
God’s call is the same as when it was first written for us in his word, since Jesus taught us the two greatest commandments: the first, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and all your mind; and the second (which, Jesus pointed out, is like it): Love your neighbor as yourself.
If the newt in the stream has no water to breed, if the oaks languish due to lack of rain, if your neighbors’ house floods, what is your responsibility? What should you do? It would take a more sophisticated ethicist or theologian than I to tell you what you ought to do, if anything, for the newt or the oak, if you had no hand in the dearth of water that they suffer from. But what you owe to your neighbors is clear — offering to watch their kids, making them meals, making sure they have a place to stay warm and dry and safe while their home is being restored, helping restore their home, striving to ensure that your neighbors have everything they need to respond resiliently to this difficulty would be your moral duty.
But what if you, somehow, inadvertently, caused the flooding at your neighbors’ house? What if you were the one who somehow diverted the stream behind both your houses, and that’s how the water made its way into your neighbors’ when the rains came? Would it simply be enough to care for your neighbors in the after- math without trying to eliminate the cause of the problem and doing your best to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Of course not! You should re- structure the stream again, removing the future danger to your neighbors and their property.
I hope this simple illustration helps you see it is not enough to exercise our God-given capacities for resilience for ourselves or our neighbors here at Westmont or across the globe. To truly love our neighbors and the rest of creation we have been called to steward, we need to examine our actions that have created challenging, deeply damaging changes in the first place and rectify the situation!
But how to do it? Biodiversity loss. Pollution. Climate change. These changes to our planet, to our local communities, are so big! There are so many people on this planet, so many cultures, religions, businesses, schools, governments and institutions of all kinds. Each of us is in some way part of creating the problems, however inadvertently, with the ways we use energy, land and resources. When we pause to try to take it all in, it can be overwhelming. How can we be obedient to God’s command to love our neighbors given the vast scale and complexity of these challenges? It’s not just that obedience is hard — but it is hard to know exactly what obedience might be!
I want to suggest two things to remember as you strive to be obedient to God: be truly, faithfully resilient to change; and take responsibility for its causes.
Be truly, faithfully resilient to change; and take responsibility for its causes.
First: You are not alone!
So many people all over the world are working diligently in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their churches, in their offices and classrooms and labs and businesses, to meet these challenges. And Westmont is no exception. So many people here can walk with you on this journey at whatever level you want to engage. The Gaede Institute focused its 2023 Conversation on the Liberal Arts on exploring the Liberal Arts in the Age of Climate Change. A Gaede Conversation a few years back provided the catalyst for our environmental studies program.
Faith. Climate. Action., a summer workshop at Westmont, hosted students and faculty from Christian colleges across the country, training them to be effective communicators and advocates about climate change in their church and campus communities. Westmont students can take an environmental studies course and seek out professors, environmental studies minors and alternative majors. They can reach out to our Students for Sustainability and Garden Clubs and our new sustainability, garden and biodiversity interns.
The Westmont Community Garden is a buzz of activity under our fabulous new garden manager and sustainability coordinator, Janell Balmaceda, who is working to bring us together as a campus community to steward our resources. She and her team are launching our first-ever Westmont community-wide initiative to make a difference together by making small choices every day to eat more plant-based foods and less meat to reduce our community’s carbon emissions — and foster our own physical health!
We can do so much together. I think re-imagining some of the ways we live on this planet calls for learning, listening, creativity, ingenuity,
dreaming, hope, reaching out for help, comforting each other, praying and rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty in God’s good earth. Together! You are not alone.
Second: Fear not!
God is with us! He laid the earth’s foundation. He made the clouds the garments of the sea. He gives orders to the morning and shows the dawn its place. He made the vast expanses of the earth. He fathers the drops of dew and gives birth to the frost from the heavens. He binds the constellations. He gives the ibis wisdom and the rooster understanding! He counts the clouds and tips the water jars of the heavens when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together. He satisfies the hunger of the lions, provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God. He knows where the mountain goats give birth and watches the doe bear her fawn. He gives the wild donkeys the wasteland as their home. The hawk takes flight by his wisdom, and the eagle soars at his command.
These words, from the book of Job, testify to the limitless and unending power, creativity and love of the creator for all his creation, no matter what we humans, in all our brokenness, have done and continue to do. As Psalm 46 reminds us, God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.
Fear not! The world is full of change. God has created us with an astounding capacity for resilience, and together, with God, we can be obedient to his call to love and care for our neighbors and for all that he has made.
