Category: md-5-2

In July 2013, Todd Wynward sat down with author and activist Ched Myers to discuss the concept of watershed discipleship and dream about building an alliance among faith-rooted groups engaged in localized, bioregional living. Below are Todd’s reflections.

Might watershed discipleship be the good news that we so desperately need to rouse us from our paralysis?

I don’t have an easy relationship with institutional Christianity. All too often, organized religion ends up supporting the warlike tendencies, ravenous greed, and socioeconomic inequities from which Jesus sought to liberate us. In our missionary zeal to share our affluent North American version of Christianity, we spread a lot of bad habits along with good news. Our religion, tied so closely to American militarism and capitalism, has lost much of its ability to be prophetic or transformative in today’s world. Most modern secular progressives view Christianity as a laughable superstition, if not downright dangerous and destructive.

Perhaps the truly urgent “mission” today is not to save others but to save ourselves. Perhaps it is our culture and our religion that need converting. As a North American steeped in a culture of affluenza, I have to agree with Ched Myers’s stark analysis of our current condition: modern Western society lies drugged in an “ecocidal slumber.” We’re fully aware our actions are causing the corrosion of earth’s basic life-sustaining systems. We know we could make better choices. Yet we lay paralyzed, trapped by our compulsive habits and comfortable lifestyles.

Ched holds up a strange hope to our postmodern paralysis: the Bible. He asserts that “the prophetic traditions indigenous to both testaments may alone be capable of rousing us” from our addictive malaise.

The Bible—our best spur toward urgent action?

It’s an unconventional hope for modern progressives who—for good reason—run away from anything claiming to be “Bible-based.” Yet Ched contends the Bible might be the best tool available to get modern America to drop the iPad and get off the couch.

It’s an interesting proposition. Do ancient scriptures hold enough social critique to radicalize slumbering evangelicals AND enough social credibility to galvanize cynical progressives? Perhaps. Ched thinks so. He describes the power of the prophetic strands that weave through the Bible: The reflective poems, warning tales, grand sagas, and radical histories of Scripture summon us to remember our origins and the ways of our ancestors, invite us to imagine and work for a restorative future, and call us to liberate and heal ourselves and our home places.

Reform of habits—such as recycling, eating locally, and shopping responsibly—is important, Ched affirms, but to become the people we need to be to face our environmental crisis, we’ll need to do much more: we’ll need to practice transformed living through watershed discipleship.

Watershed discipleship? It’s an odd, almost jarring term, invoking and synthesizing two domains rarely joined in our imaginations: one scientific, the other religious. Yet I’m becoming convinced it is exactly this kind of unitive consciousness—both data-driven and deeply spiritual—that is needed if we are to play any significant role in our planet’s healing.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ched that those seek to practice watershed discipleship must embrace the motto: “We will not save a place we do not love; we cannot love a place we do not know.” Knowing a particular place—experiencing its characteristics and being molded by its constraints, its bounty, and its boundaries—is essential to watershed discipleship. It is the “re-placed” identity we as a species must vitally embody if we are to rouse from ecocidal slumber.

So what is watershed discipleship, exactly? As a fledgling movement emerges, it’s clear that no one knows quite yet. It’s the kind of “guiding framework” that could motivate us to move mountains of malaise and despair, but it needs some clarity. Watershed discipleship remains a work-in-progress, an intriguing and powerful concept only discovered and defined as we live it out in our places each day. To be a disciple within my watershed is a concept I understand; to be a disciple of my watershed is a concept I want to explore.

Region As Rabbi

Watershed discipleship, when lived out in daily practice, actively resists our culture of affluenza and converts us to Sabbath living. Sabbath living, as Ched writes, is the antithesis of conspicuous consumption; rather, it is about gift and limits: “the grace of receiving that which the Creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession.”1

Is this what Jesus meant when he said the meek shall inherit the earth (Matt 5:5)? The ancient Hebrew for meek is ⁽ ānāw—meaning the humble, those who do not grasp and hoard, those who do not think too highly of their own importance and needs. Is Jesus saying these are the ones who can coexist and live within the blessing of creation, while the haughty and the grasping are unable?

Through the lens of watershed discipleship, another of Jesus’ well-known sayings takes on new meaning: “Consider the lilies of the field” (Matt 6:25). Jesus seems to be saying, “Examine how the lilies thrive where they are planted; model your life upon what they teach you.” Be a student of God’s creation that thrives in your watershed. See your region as your rabbi.

Seeing your watershed differently leads to acting in your watershed differently. As I learn to re-inhabit the place I live, I’m seeing my region as my rabbi in three specific ways.

Watershed as Sustainer, Teacher, and Corrector

Try on this idea: All of my food needs, my watershed can provide. Sounds crazy? It does to me. I mean, I know most human societies for all of history were sustained by their watersheds, but those were primitive people, primitive times, right? What about my Italian parmesan and my Florida orange juice? What about my olive oil and coconut milk?

Can all the items my family loves be sourced in my bioregion? Of course not. But this line of inquiry leads me to pursue two questions. First: How much of what we desire can be sourced from our watershed? In the high deserts of New Mexico where I live, the answer is bleak. For my family to obtain what we like eating, I’d have to drive hundreds of miles before I found the first orange tree or avocado orchard. This leads me to a second question: To what extent can we become creatures who thrive within the limits of our bioregion? In other words, to what extent can we adapt?

Wait—me, adapt my wants to my watershed? As an entitled American consumer steeped in egocentric values, this suggestion is not only absurd; it is scandalous. I’m trained to buy whatever I want whenever I want, without a second thought to planetary consequences. To be asked to limit my lifestyle, to curb my appetites, fills a part of me with indignant fury and fear. “I’m an American!” I want to roar.

Yet my watershed, my rabbi, corrects my spoiled behavior. Just like in any master refines and re-forms an immature or out-of-shape disciple, my rabbi corrects me as part of my training. This is a kind of conversion, metanoia, or transformation of worldview and habits that early followers of Jesus underwent. They were taught to walk away from the self-advancing values of Empire and instead care for the poor, love their neighbors, and anticipate a modest bounty of daily bread. These age-old precepts were central to the teachings of Jesus; they are equally central to the teachings of my watershed. They cause me to look anew at the two troubling and transformative questions raised earlier: What can my watershed provide? How can I adapt my wants?

A few years ago, some neighbors and I decided to have some fun with these questions. Instead of bemoaning the arid sparseness of northern New Mexico’s high country, we began to explore what kinds of food sources could thrive in our dry mountain environment. At the same time, with a perverse joy, we began to break from Empire-based thinking and explore whether we could learn to be happy with what our watershed provided. My ranching friend, Daniel, has managed small herds to see which livestock could thrive with minimal inputs while being maximally useful to us. What has he found? Goats and sheep, we want to keep. They adapt well to our bioregion, are fairly easy to manage, and provide milk, cheese, meat, kefir, and yogurt. But yaks? Not so much. After five years of experimentation and hard work, Daniel concluded that they’re substantially more trouble than they’re worth. As for vegetables and fruits, we’ve found success with plenty of the usual fare—carrots, onions, beets, tomatoes, zucchini, apples, plums, and greens galore. Also, under the guidance of my mentor gardener Seth, I’ve adapted my habits and taste buds to foods that can thrive in my region. I now appreciate hand-ground cornmeal, new types of beans, high-altitude quinoa, plum preserves, wild amaranth and lamb’s quarters, sorrel, kale chips, broccoli leaves, and unfamilar varieties of squash and potatoes.

I’m finding that many of my current life practices—habits formed unconsciously growing up within a culture of excess—have no part in the life of a watershed disciple, nor of a serious Jesus follower. Even as I adapt, however, a large part of me wants to remain an unconscious and self-absorbed consumer, a well-trained cog of empire. Are you feeling it too? We both know it’s easier to remain a spoiled child instead of becoming a responsible adult. Yet in this “watershed” moment of history—with our existence in the balance—it’s clear the earth itself is calling affluent North Americans to do something old-fashioned: repent, turn around. To exist within the limits of our watersheds, we’ll need to release our attitudes of entitlement and re-program our voracious appetites.

Toward A Bioregional Food Covenant

What concrete steps can we take to thrive within the bounty—and the boundaries—of our bioregions? If we are to survive much longer as a species, many of us infected with unbounded affluenza need to make this question central to our lives. As David Orr writes: “It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to our infinite wants.”2

My wife and I have done a bit to reshape ourselves to our region: we live in a yurt in the Sangre de Cristo mountains near Taos, New Mexico. We milk goats, shear sheep, plant trees, catch water, and try to grow a lot of our food in the high desert. My wife and I each have more than two decades of experience as wilderness educators, river guides, and camp directors. Both of us have spent more than a thousand days—three years of our lives—in open country and in wilderness, sleeping under the stars. More than once we have been called feral. Recently, a citified visitor from Philadelphia giggled in awe when she entered our small dwelling, and immediately started snapping photos. She simply couldn’t believe we use a composting toilet and carry water to our yurt by hand in buckets, like millions of people across the world.

Before you get too impressed, let’s be clear: we’re pretenders. My family still has laptops and a cappuccino maker, cell phones and Netflix. We daily take our son to soccer practice in a Prius and monthly drive a hundred miles to shop at the nearest Trader Joe’s. Even though we homestead in the high country, we’re still entangled in Empire.

What’s a concrete step we can take to begin localizing our appetites? Here’s a practical idea that might incite a movement: a 25/75/100 Bioregional Food Covenant. To join, an individual would make this pledge: “By the year 2025, I will source 75% of my food from within 100 miles.” The specific numbers I’ve chosen are, by nature, arbitrary; yet if a 25/75/100 covenant can be attained in our challenging high desert climate here in northern New Mexico, then likely it’s a covenant that could be made by most Americans.

Can a modest personal vow like this make a big difference? In light of the massive global crises we face, an individual vow may seem ludicrous. But think again: if a critical mass is reached, a humble vow like this could change how humans live on our planet. Let us count the ways:

It enriches local economies. Thousands of families committing locally for the long term establishes new demand and new markets, creating an incubator for regional companies to grow, sell, and distribute good food within their communities. Hard-earned cash becomes “slow money,” circulating longer within the region, causing more healthy cycles of exchange for local goods and services. Right now, there are few local growers and very little local food available in America, because most of us don’t demand it.

It corrects our crazy consumption. Sourcing much of our food locally means adapting to our watershed, letting it instruct us how to be. It means learning to live within healthy natural limits. It means no longer being able to buy whatever I want whenever I want from wherever I want, without a second thought to planetary consequences.

It improves individual health. Kale or Krispy Kreme? This may not be a fair comparison, but the point is this: when communities encourage one another to eat food produced off the land, better health is likely to develop. Affordable access to farm-fresh food is a promising antidote to many of modern society’s illnesses.

It reduces petroleum, packaging, and pollution. Currently, the majority of mega-chain food travels a thousand miles or more to reach your local grocery store. Massive amounts of petroleum are used to improve soil, grow, process, store, preserve, package, and deliver food that could be grown and transported within a few miles of home. Reduced travel and storage means reduced packaging and pollution.

It encourages active citizenship. Once we commit to eat from our bioregion, we naturally care much more about its health—about the quality of the water, soil, and air around us. We see the beautiful complexity of the interconnected living systems required to produce good food. We start organizing in creative and clarifying ways like the New Mexico Coalition for Community Rights. This organization encourages regional groups to adopt Community Bills of Rights, asserting that corporations are not above people, and declaring that all citizens of a watershed have an inalienable right to clean air and clean water.

It boosts “community resilience”—the ability of one’s home region to thrive in the face of change and shocks from the outside, as articulated by Transition Network founder Rob Hopkins.3 A bioregional food covenant would build local capacity and infrastructure, reduce dependency upon external providers, promote sustainability, and increase biological diversity in one’s region.

The 25/75/100 Bioregional Food Covenant is a practical idea that might incite a movement. What might our nation look like if a groundswell of communities across the country took on this covenant and patiently worked with their farmers and sellers to obtain 75% of their food from their own region by 2025?

Watershed discipleship, based on the prophetic tradition, is a promising hope for rousing the culture; a bioregional food covenant, based on Watershed Discipleship values, is a promising action that might just convert the culture. It might just be the thing to rouse us from our paralysis. It might just be the antidote affluent Americans need, as a first step on the path of watershed discipleship.

Todd Wynward is a Mennonite who lives with his family in Taos, NM. He has been engaged in experiential education and social change movements for twenty years, and has spent more than a thousand nights outdoors. He is the founder of a wilderness-based public charter school, leads backpacking and river trips for adult seekers, and is an animating force behind TiLT, an intentional co-housing community. Patheos.com calls his novel The Secrets of Leaven “a delicious mystery . . . exploring deep questions.” His blog, Undomesticated, can be found at http://leavenrising.com.

Would you risk being baptized in your local river or pond? In many places—such as northeastern Indiana where I used to live—immersing oneself in a local body of water now means exposure to a bath of chemicals and coliform bacteria, particularly after a rain, and at certain times of the year when crops are being sprayed. Most bodies of water in the United States have a fishing advisory that tells consumers how many fish can safely be eaten before health may be adversely affected by the toxic load the fish carry. In less “developed” countries across the world, where there are no environmental regulations, rivers function as a moving trash heap, carrying garbage and dead fish downriver from factories and villages. This failing health of our rivers and the watersheds that feed them is symptomatic of a greater global pathology wrought by industrial civilization.

The language of environmental catastrophe is apocalyptic: a garbage patch of plastics the size of Texas floats in the Pacific; a coal slurry spill into North Carolina’s Dan river evokes Isaiah’s vision of Edom’s streams turning to pitch. Meanwhile, a Coca-Cola plant in India’s Uttar Pradesh guzzles groundwater in return for spewing out toxins affecting local streams and soils.1 In early 2014, Freedom Industries was responsible for the leak of a hazardous coal washing chemical which left residents of nine West Virginia counties without potable water for five days, causing toxicity to the Elk river watershed.2 Every year, the world loses more and more topsoil to the sea due to industrial farming practices and deforestation.3 Details of the destruction are fastidiously collected. Peak oil, peak phosphorus, and peak water coalesce out of data points into pinnacles on scientists’ presentations. If the world has not already passed these peaks, it is surely on the cusp, they say.

This accumulating evidence suggests that humankind needs a drastic change in our way of life. Yet the looming catastrophes prophesied on the lips of our modern science sages fail to elicit change. We continue living like lemmings dangerously close to the looming cliffs of peak oil, peak water, and peak phosphorus. Perhaps we can no longer imagine a form of life without consumption based upon petrochemicals, industrial agriculture, and prepackaged food. We need a revolution of imagination. Yet, Bill Mollison, cofounder of the permaculture movement, reminds us of the “futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”4 The change from toxic consumption to regenerative production must thus begin at the local level.

Disciples desperately need resources that will animate a church ready to stand against the tide of ecocidal petro-capitalism. This issue of Missio Dei Journal addresses this need for transformation by integrating ecological and theological concerns under the framework of “Watershed Discipleship.” Coined by theologian Ched Myers, Watershed Discipleship recognizes that environmental theology and ethics are often too disconnected from the everyday life of the faithful. Implicit to this paradigm is the understanding that the watershed—a geographic area drained into a body of water—is the primary unit of ecological systems, and thus the place where disciples can exert the most influence. Since water is fundamental to life, species within a given area are all connected by the flow of water through it. Thus, by invoking the watershed in our Christian discipleship, we acknowledge that our faith is bound to the land, plants, and creatures within it, as well as the water coursing through all of them. Our faith must follow the aquatic contours of the land, first, because we affirm the goodness of the earth, waters, and their creatures. To despoil the land is to spite the Creator—“there are no unsacred places,” writes Wendell Berry, “only sacred and desecrated places.”5 Second, we acknowledge that water issues are justice issues. Access to clean water is foundational to human health and wholeness, and increasingly a privilege of the wealthy.

Watershed Discipleship offers missiology a more holistic attention to context. If “mission is the mother of theology,” then place is the mother of mission—which is to say that mission occurs in particular regions, home to specific peoples and habitat to distinct flora and fauna. By re-placing discipleship in the foreground of the watershed, the church acknowledges that we both influence and are shaped by the specifics of our location. We are always followers of Jesus in a certain place. The climate, topography of the land, and the flow of water over it define that place. Daily losses of unrecoverable species and unique ecosystems caused by the gluttonous consumption of industrial civilization interrogate our idea of discipleship. If a missiology of “re-place-ment” is to mean something, it must cause us to reexamine the ways our livelihoods interact with the watersheds we inhabit.

Second, Watershed Discipleship provides new approaches to transform the ruin of global ecological systems wrought by industrial civilization. If watersheds are the fundamental unit of ecology, re-placement helps disciples perceive the level at which they can affect real change. Because we live during a watershed moment in history—a time when industrial civilization is at its peak and the actions taken by industrial societies in the coming years could affect the globe for centuries—we can act out of love for all the world by acting with integrity in our own unique places. By cleaning and protecting our watersheds, one at a time, we may reverse the steady poisoning of the world.

Finally, by placing ourselves under the tutelage of our own watersheds, we begin to know what it means to be “placed.” The solutions for making life work in an ecological context are already under our feet. The cactus survives drought by catching and storing enough rainwater to survive the dry season. Dryland human communities do the same with cisterns. Ephemeral vegetation thrives on the shady forest floor by leafing out before the overstory does, thereby catching enough sunlight to live through the shady summer. Animal communities depend on these ephemerals for nourishment in the sparse days before spring—historically, many humans have as well. How does the squirrel live through the long winter? Not by importing goods with fossil fuels, but by storing up enough during times of abundance. Followers of Jesus must consider again the “birds of the air,” and the “lilies of the field” (Matt 6:26–29). By doing so, we join the chorus of creation, with each species inhabiting its niche in the world. Understanding the topography and soil, how the birds and foxes make it through winter, or the times when the native flowers bloom—these things teach us what it means to live with integrity, fully integrated in place.

Water lies at the center of our Christian sign of baptism and our current ecological crises and, thus, deserves deeper theological treatment. This paper explores visions of “redemption as rehydration” in the prophetic literature, then it traces resonant themes into the Apocalypse’s “river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1). It next explores how water provides a “metaphorical map of God” and why hydrologic systems should be a key characteristic of how humans dwell in creation. The paper concludes with a call to watershed-based discipleship as a faithful response to Christian mission amidst our looming environmental catastrophes..

“El agua es la vida!” –New Mexican proverb

“The health of our waters is the principle measure of how we live on the land.” –Luna Leopold

The ancient Christian ritual of baptism articulates an ecological fact: without water there can be no life. We rightly speak of baptismal waters as the symbolic source of renewal in Christ—a metaphor predicated in part upon the deep biblical tradition concerning “living waters” I will explore below. Today, however, Christians can no longer responsibly invoke this venerable tradition without also acknowledging the ecological realities of our context, which include the systematic dehydration of the earth by industrial civilization.

Deepening and interlocking environmental crises stalk our history, including climate destruction, species extinction, and declining natural fertility. Among these, one of the most pressing is “peak water.” Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute describes this as the critical point, already reached in many areas of the world, where we have overtaxed the planet’s ability to absorb the consequences of our water use.1 Its global symptoms include widespread desertification, water insecurity, declining water quality, and the drift toward international water wars.2 The grim specter of peak water represents the dark opposite of baptism; it portends only death. It is a keystone “sign of our times” that reveals afresh the old gospel imperative to “turn around” as an historic ultimatum.

End-game ecological trends press Christians to re-read our tradition from the perspective of the groaning creation, as did Paul in Romans 8:21–22—including and especially our theology and practices of mission. Water is a strategic place to start. It is the resource we North Americans arguably most take for granted—a privileged and unsustainable conceit that must change. This paper will argue for re-centering faith and mission around “watershed discipleship” as a matter of social justice, ecological sustainability, and theological fidelity. This imperative proceeds both from ancient biblical visions and current realities of water scarcity.

Prophetic Visions of Redemption as Rehydration

The biblical story begins (Gen 1:2) and ends (Rev 22) in a “waterworld.” This represents a primal scriptural expression of basic ecological truth: water is the single most important component in the birth and continuation of life—we might say, the Alpha and Omega of creation. Water thus deserves more careful social, ecological, and theological attention than it has received in our churches.3

The first half of this paper will look at John the Revelator’s extraordinary eschatological vision of social and environmental restoration through a divine “rehydration” of the earth. John was clearly nurtured by a recurring strand in Hebrew prophetic literature, so let me begin by acknowledging this rich “imaginary” of an ancient desert people.4

It remains a well-kept secret in our churches that the tradition of prophetic judgment in the Hebrew Bible articulates divine salvation most often in terms of the renewal—not destruction—of the earth. In Isaiah, for example, the imperial civilizations that surrounded (and oppressed) Israel are indeed promised demolition by divine judgment; the land, however, is rehabilitated through “rewilding,” as undomesticated animals re-inhabit decaying cities (13:19–22) and wild birds roost in abandoned fortresses (34:8–15).5

One expression of redemption as the restoration of creation is found in prophetic visions of eschatological reforestation. Israel’s seers may have understood that the arid climate of their Palestinian homeland was not natural but rather the result of historic processes of desertification due to the relentless imperial economic exploitation of the land. Indeed, ecological archaeology has established that the ancient Mediterranean world was largely deforested by the time of the eighth-century prophets.6 This may explain their rage over the clear-cutting of highland hardwood forests (Zech 11:1ff.; Isa 14:3–8, 37:22–24; Solomon was also guilty: 1 Kgs 5:6ff.). They longed for Yahweh’s judgment that would save the threatened forests: “The cypresses exult over you, the cedars of Lebanon,” Isaiah inveighs against the king of Babylon, “saying, ‘Since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down’ ” (Isa 14:8).7

The most well-known example of this motif is found in Isaiah 35, which begins with the promise that parched lands will once again host “the glory of Lebanon” (Isa 35:1ff.; i.e., the great cedar forests of the north). The poem goes on to promise not only an end to human physical disabilities (35:3–6a) but the healing of creation itself:

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,

the grass shall become reeds and rushes. (35:6b–7)

Restored habitat brings the return of wild animals (see also Isa 43:20). And all this renewal is made possible because water is flowing again everywhere.

Second Isaiah echoes the idea that both people (especially those marginalized by empire) and forests will be restored:

When the poor and needy seek water,

and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst,

I the LORD will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.

I will open rivers on the bare heights,

and fountains in the midst of the valleys;

I will make the wilderness a pool of water,

and the dry land springs of water.

I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive;

I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together. (Isa 41:17–19.)

Just as Pharaoh’s army was drowned in the old Exodus story (Exod 14), here the travails of empire similarly disappear under water.

The promise of rehydration recurs in the proto-apocalyptic oracles of several later Israelite prophets. Joel prophesies that “all the watercourses of Judah shall flow with water, and a spring shall issue from the House of the Lord and shall water the Wadi of the Acacias” (Joel 4:18; njps). Zechariah portends: “In that day, fresh water shall flow from Jerusalem, part of it to the Eastern Sea and part to the Western Sea, throughout the summer and winter” (Zech 14:8; njps). But the most elaborate development of this motif is found in Ezek 47:1–12, the culmination of his lengthy description of eschatological Israel, its land and temple-city (Ezek 40–48).

The first part of the oracle narrates in refrain how water is flowing out of the temple toward the four directions (47:1–2). Then comes another refrain in which the rising tide is measured, from ankle, to knee, to waist-deep, to “a river that could not be crossed” (47:3–5). Implied here is the rehabilitation of the Gihon spring that (inconsistently) supplied water to Jerusalem.8 Ezekiel then imagines Palestine “greened” all the way to the Dead Sea (47:6–12). But unlike the flood of Genesis 7, Ezekiel’s surging river is life-giving, indicated by the explosion of fecundity that occurs within and beside it: “everything will live where the river goes” (v. 9).9 The vision culminates with an ever-bearing, perennial riparian forest, providing food and medicine (v. 12). This nod to the Garden of Eden story is later re-appropriated by John the Revelator, effectively bracketing (like the waterworld image) the biblical story.

Israel during the biblical period was a dry place indeed, with only a couple of major rivers, few perennial streams, and unreliable springs. So these extraordinary visions of redemption as rehydration bear witness to the fact that in Palestine, water lay at the heart of environmental sustainability, social justice, and divine concern.10

The River of the Water of Life

John of Patmos’s “river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1ff.) is patterned in part on Ezek 47. A careful examination of this image reveals a rich theological and ecological texture. First and foremost, this eschatological river stands in stark contrast to the realities of John’s late first-century CE readers. Those living in arid Mediterranean climate were familiar chiefly with the stagnant, torpid water found in small ponds, seasonal wells, catchment tanks, ritual baths, or clay pots. Domestic water quality was often poor (hence the advice of 1 Tim 5:23). John’s river, however, “shines like crystal” (lampron hōs krustallon; Rev 22:1; cf. 4:6). This is not a supernatural assertion but a poetic observation: pure water indeed appears crystalline when it is flowing freely (think of the dancing silver strands of a mountain stream). The phrase “river of the water of life” (potamon hudatos zoēs) connotes exactly that: the running, bubbling, lively water of a spring or brook.11 Experiences of such “living water,” as the Gospel of John puts it (hudōr zōn; John 4:10; 7:38), were rare indeed for this desert people. This signals a dramatic restoration of life to the land and those dwelling on it, just as the Hebrew prophets had envisioned.

John’s river, moreover, flows through “the middle of the great street of the city” (Rev 22:2; niv). The Greek term plateia connotes the main thoroughfare (or plaza) of a Hellenistic metropolis. Poignantly, earlier in the Apocalypse this plateia was the space of political violence, where the bodies of two prophets murdered by the imperial beast lay in public view for three and a half days as a spectacle of state terror (Rev 11:8–9). But now this street has become “pure gold, transparent as glass” (Rev 21:21).12 The New Jerusalem’s main street has dissolved into a river of life that washes away the blood of empire.13

There is another way in which this river symbolizes liberation from empire. Elsewhere in Revelation the water of life is depicted as a spring (pēgē). The martyrs who live “before the throne of God . . . will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them; for the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of living water” (zoēs pēgas hudatōn; Rev 7:15–17; author’s translation). This is a pointed recontextualization of Isa 49:10, an oracle of emancipation. Moreover, this spring is a “gift” (Rev 21:6; tēs pēgēs tou hudatos tēs zoēs dōrean); “Let the one who thirsts come forward, and . . . receive the gift of living water” (22:17; hudōr zoēs dōrean; author’s translation). Here is more midrash on the subversive vision of second Isaiah—“All who are thirsty, come for water, even if you have no money” (Isa 55:1; njps)—which was a rebuke of the currency-dependent commodity markets of empire and a reassertion of the gift economy of nature.14

Yet, these living waters are not springing up from the ground, but “proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:1; nkjv). This primal notion of Yhwh as a cosmic fount, too, is found in several places in the Hebrew Bible. “For with You is the spring of life,” sings the Psalmist (Ps 36:9; MT, mĕqôr ḥayîym; LXX, pēgē zoēs). And Jeremiah laments:

My people have committed two evils:

they have forsaken Me,

the fountain of living water (MT, mĕqôr mayim ḥayîym; LXX, pēgēn hudatos zoēs)

and dug out cisterns for themselves,

cracked cisterns that can hold no water (Jer 2:13).15

Lastly, as in Ezekiel 47, John’s freely and abundantly flowing river provides habitat for the tree of life, which yields spectacular fruits each month (Rev 22:2). Its twelve crops correspond to the central symbolic number of the Apocalypse (in which dōdeka appears 20 times). This figure also represents the restored nation of Israel, hearkening back to its roots in the tribal confederacy (a theme also explicitly addressed in Ezek 47:13–48:35). But for John of Patmos, this is an inclusive political vision. As in Ezekiel, the leaves of the tree are for healing, but here specifically for the nations, including presumably the “kings of the earth” who have been welcomed into the city (Rev 21:24). Even empire is healed in the end—but only when eclipsed by the ecology of life.

The Revelator has cosmically “transplanted” both tree and river from the primeval garden (Gen 2:9ff.) into the heart of the eschatological city. But the former has transfigured the latter: it is unrecognizable as an urban space—at least as defined by our civilization, which builds cities over and against nature. The New Jerusalem has been thoroughly “permaculturized,” a lush food forest taking the place of the hard urban jungle. And all because the world has been resaturated with the waters of life.

These prophetic visions represent profound articulations of social and environmental restorative justice from a people for whom dehydration was a daily reality. They speak equally sharply to today, in which our lands are again parched and compromised by imperial hubris. Hostage as we are to the specter of “peak water” and resource wars, we would do well to reconsider such old wisdom.

God’s Map: Theology and Geography

In a society characterized by (and dependent upon) the relentless commodification and privatization of the primary gift of life, how might we embrace the radical and compelling biblical hope that every thirst will be quenched? The task facing us is both theological and practical.

If all talk about God is necessarily metaphorical, then surely water is a primary theological trope, as suggested by the frequent biblical imagery identifying water tightly with the divine. Four essential characteristics of water certainly pertain also to the Creator.

First and foremost, as noted, there can be no life without water. It is the primary building block of creation, covering 71% of the earth’s surface and constituting on average 60% of the human body. It restores but cannot be destroyed—though if it is degraded it can lose its healing character.

Second, water is the only natural element that can exist in all three common states: liquid, solid, and gaseous. Moreover, in the hydrologic cycle it circulates from the heavens (condensation, precipitation) to earth and beneath (infiltration), to the sea and other large bodies of water (surface runoff, groundwater discharge), and finally back to the heavens (evaporation). These many forms represent a great circle of life—which one might argue also characterizes the circulation of the Spirit.16

Third, water manifests a spectrum of traits often attributed to the divine. It can be patient and accommodating, flowing around obstacles, yet also has the power to wear down the greatest physical structures (or burst them apart through expanding ice). Water makes hard things smooth over time; it is also an amazing solvent and thus is rightly used in purification. It can be still and gentle but also relentless and ferocious. Surface water has the capacity to carry but also to drown—immersion can lead either to life or to death (the Bible is full of examples of both).

Finally, water is a symbol of justice. It is most substantial and alive when fluid, but can turn morbid if stagnant. It wants to flow downward, seeking level, a poignant metaphor of divine concern for the “lowest.” Thus Amos famously appeals for “justice to flow down like a perennial stream” (Amos 5:24; author’s translation).17

Water thus provides a kind of metaphorical “map of God.” Conversely, it also figures fundamentally in God’s map of creation. To illustrate this, compare the two photographs below.

Above is an aerial photograph of the San Rafael Swell on the Colorado Plateau in Utah.18 It shows clearly that even in the most arid climate on the continent, the single most distinctive and defining feature is the way water flows. A theological reading of this universal geographical truism would conclude that water patterns are the chief design features of a creation that has not been re-engineered by human society.

In contrast, the image below is an aerial view of nearby Las Vegas, NV, whose patterns are typical of modern urban sprawl.19 What is evident from such an (over)built environment is not where water flows—that is almost impossible to discern—but rather where automobile traffic flows. It is virtually all artifice.

The profound differences between these two design patterns capture the essence of what is ecologically unsustainable about industrial civilization. If our defiance of nature (represented by the second image) has brought us to the brink of collapse, then a radical response is called for—that is, one that goes to the roots of how the earth was/is made (represented by the first image). We have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere, and only the map that is woven into creation can lead us home. That map is defined by water.

John Wesley Powell, the first non-native person to raft successfully down the Colorado River in the 1860s, gave us our first modern definition of a watershed:

It is that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of the community.20

The fact is, wherever we reside—city, suburb, or rural area—our lives are deeply intertwined within such a “bounded hydrologic system.” Precipitation hits the ridges and either flows into our watershed or into a neighboring one, drained by a watercourse and its tributaries (even if buried under concrete).

The area covered in the water’s journey from its origination in the natural hydrological cycle to its end point in a particular body of water such as a pond, lake, or ocean is the watershed. Each one is made up of a unique mix of habitats that influence each other, including forests, wetlands, fields and meadows, rivers and lakes, farms and towns. The 2,110 watersheds in the continental US come in all sizes. The Mississippi Basin is the 3rd largest watershed in the world, draining 41% of the lower 48 states into the Gulf of Mexico. The Ventura River watershed where I live is a scant 227 square miles.

All life is watershed-placed without exception—and our ignorance about this fact is disastrous. Brock Dolman, a permaculturist and founder of Occidental Art and Ecology Center in Northern California, argues that “watersheds underlie all human endeavors and form the foundation for all future aspirations and survival.” Cupping his hands, he invokes the metaphor of a cradle, which he calls a “Basin of Relations,” in which every living organism is interconnected and dependent on the health of the whole. This form of “social, local, intentional community with other life forms and inanimate processes, like the fire cycle and the hydrological cycle,” he says, represents “the geographic scale of applied sustainability, which must be regenerative, because we desperately are in need of making up for lost time.”21

Watershed mapping is a practical tool for advancing our literacy in the actual landscapes that sustain us.22 It can help us re-imagine a world beyond maps that are social re-productions enshrining problematic historical legacies of colonization and exploitation, while rendering nature secondary (or altogether invisible). Kirkpatrick Sale’s definition of bioregionalism is helpful here:

Bio is from the Greek word for forms of life . . . and region is from the Latin regere, territory to be ruled. . . . They convey together a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, its topography and its biota, rather than by human dictates; a region governed by nature, not legislature. And if the concept initially strikes us as strange, that may perhaps only be a measure of how distant we have become from the wisdom it conveys.23

Below is a recent watershed map of the US imagined by John Lavey.24 Political boundaries are often straight (no continental US state is without one), while watershed ones never are. Straight lines are the first order of abstraction, alienating us from the topographical and hydrological realities that sustain life. How might our political culture change if our most basic unit of governance was “nature rather than legislature”?

Toward Watershed Discipleship

In the environmental movement, bioregional thought and practice has spread widely and matured deeply over the last quarter century.25 Yet this school of thought has been almost entirely ignored by Christian theology and ethics until very recently.26 However, I am convinced that a watershed paradigm not only holds the key to our survival as a species; it can also inspire the next great renewal of the church—in light of, not in spite of, the looming ecological endgame.

What would it mean for Christians to center our identity in the topography of creation rather than in the political geography of dominant cultural ideation, grounding our discipleship practices in the watershed in which we reside, within which everything must be engaged in terms of environmental resiliency and social justice?

In our education and organizing at Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries we are proposing “watershed discipleship” as a framing idea, which seems to be resonating widely. The phrase is an intentional triple entendre.

1. It recognizes that we are in a watershed historical moment of crisis, which demands that environmental, social justice, and sustainability be integral to everything we do as Christians and as citizen inhabitants of specific places.
2. It acknowledges the inescapably bioregional locus of an incarnational following of Jesus: our discipleship and the life of the local church necessarily take place in a watershed context.
3. It suggests that we need to be disciples of our watersheds. In the New Testament, discipleship is a journey of learning from, following, and coming to trust the “rabbi”—which in this case is the “Book of Creation.” The challenge here, to paraphrase the argument made in 1968 by the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum, is that
   • We won’t save places we don’t love.
   • We can’t love places we don’t know.
   • We don’t know places we haven’t learned.

From the beginning of human history, nothing was more crucial to the survival and flourishing of traditional societies than literacy in and symbiotic relationship with one’s watershed. It remains the case today—but we have a long way to go to reconstruct the intimacy required to know and save our places.

Obviously, understanding contextual Christian mission fundamentally in terms of healing our world by restoring the social and ecological health of our respective watersheds is a perspective still marginal in our churches. Yet, I believe ecclesial communities re-grounded in their watersheds can make an enormous contribution to the wider historic struggle to reverse the looming ecological catastrophe—and in the process, recover the “terrestrial soul” of a faith tradition that too often tends toward docetism.27 Christians are deeply culpable in the present crisis, but we also have ancient resources for the deep shifts needed.

Watershed discipleship is an expression of Christian mission because it seeks to partner with God’s mission of healing. The Apostle Paul claims that creation is “groaning in travail” waiting for the “children of God” to be fully “revealed,” in order that we might partner with the divine work of liberation and healing (Rom 8:19–24a).28 This suggests that our primary human vocation is not to re-engineer creation for exclusive human benefit—an impulse biblically identified with the fall in Genesis.29 Rather, the mission of the church is to help humans rediscover our proper place in, and to work for the healing and preservation of, the community of creation.30

Key to Creator’s ecological and eschatological redemption of creation is the renewing power of the water of life. This is previewed in Christian baptism, which in turn animates our mission to inhabit and incarnate that blessed hope in a thirsty world. Watershed discipleship can and should help define the shape of that mission in this historical moment of crisis.

Ched Myers is an activist theologian who has worked in social change movements for almost 40 years. His books include Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Orbis, [1988]2008) and, most recently, Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice (with Matthew Colwell; Orbis, 2012). He is a co-founder of the Watershed Discipleship Alliance (http://watersheddiscipleship.org) and works with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in southern California (http://bcm-net.org). His publications can be found at http://chedmyers.org.

Bibliography

Aberly, Douglas. Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment. Philadelphia: New Society, 1993.

Aboriginal Mapping Network. http://nativemaps.org.

Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home! A Bioregional Reader. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990.

Barlow, Maude. Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. New York: New Press, 2008.

Bell, Alexander. Peak Water: Civilisation and the World’s Water Crisis. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Luath, 2012.

Carr, Mike. Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. Sustainability and the Environment Series. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.

Chellaney, Brahma. Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Dolman, Brock. Basins of Relations: A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting and Restoring Our Watershed. 2nd ed. Occidental, CA: Water Institute, 2008.

Gleick, Peter H., ed. The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. Vol. 8. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014.

Hiebert, Theodore. The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

If Americans Knew. “Water in Palestine.” http://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/water.html.

Loeffler, Jack, and Celestia Loeffler, eds. Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.

Myers, Ched. “The Cedar Has Fallen! The Prophetic Word vs. Imperial Clear-Cutting.” In Earth and Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet, edited by David Rhoads, 211–23. New York: Continuum, 2007.

________. “From ‘Creation Care’ to ‘Watershed Discipleship’: Re-Placing Ecological Theology and Practice.” Conrad Grebel Review 32, no. 3 (Fall 2014): forthcoming.

________. “From Garden to Tower: Genesis 1–11 as a Critique of Civilization and an Invitation to Indigenous Re-Visioning.” In Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, edited by Steve Heinrichs, 109–21. Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2013.

________. Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994.

National Geographic Education. “Mapping the World’s Watersheds.” http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/mapping-watersheds/?ar_a=1.

Oosthoek, K. J. W. “The Role of Wood in World History.” Environmental History Resources. http://eh-resources.org/wood.html.

Peppard, Christiana. Just Water: Theology, Ethics and the Global Water Crisis. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014.

Powell, J. W. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. New York: Dover, 1961.

Prandoni, Marita. “Know Your Lifeboat: An Interview with Permaculturist Brock Dolman.” Eco Zine. EcoHearth. November 10, 2011. http://ecohearth.com/eco-zine/eco-heroes/1088-know-your-lifeboat-an-interview-with-permaculturist-brock-dolman.html.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985.

Scott Cato, Mary. The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Snyder, Gary. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1995.

Thayer, Robert L., ed. Lifeplace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Prophetic Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.