Calvin DeWitt is an environmental scientist and a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is also a practicing Christian. From 1979-2005, DeWitt served as president and director of the Au Sable Institute for Environmental Studies, an organization that enables college-level students to study ecology and the environmental sciences through a theological lens of caring for the "Creation." Through his writing and traveling across the world to speak on Creation Care, DeWitt plays a critical role in furthering the dialogue between scientists and the religious community to engage evangelicals in environmental stewardship. In 2000, DeWitt worked alongside some 50 other evangelical scientists to build a bridge to the religious community in order to mobilize action on climate change policy. This resulted in the Evangelical Climate Initiative, signed in February 2006 by close to 100 prominent evangelicals, including Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life.

DeWitt puts his environmental ethos to work in his everyday life. In the early 1970s, he and his wife, Ruth, decided that they wanted to live closer to the natural world, so they purchased a home in the middle of a Wisconsin wetland. After visualizing the developments cropping up around them, DeWitt engaged the community to form a land stewardship program. The town of Dunn is now recognized as a national example of a sustainable community and has twice received the Renew America planning award. Calvin DeWitt told LIME about the theory and the practice behind his faith and his life as a naturalist, and why the two go hand in hand.

LIME: How did your childhood shape your environmental-based and faith-based ethos?

Calvin DeWitt: My upbringing held together science, art, craftsmanship, and religion as a kind of fabric. I didn't realize how unusual that was until I got into my teens and then came across people who were religious and suspicious of science, or who were scientific and suspicious of religion.

So my childhood held all this together, which was really wonderful because I was able to pursue my observations as a very young naturalist, which started at age three when I had a turtle in my backyard. That grew into a pretty substantial backyard zoo. Right alongside of it was theological and biblical education that I was getting from the school I attended and also from the church, which was all very solid academically. It was a scholarly end-up approach to biblical and ethical teaching. And so those two—ethics and theology—were really strongly interactive with my work in studying the natural world.

We were taught very early that there were two books that we could read with confidence because they were of the same author. Those were the book of God's word and the book of God's works (which meant the Creation, the environment, the birds, mammals, plants, soil, stars, and the atmosphere). The best way to read them was as a coherent reading within and between those two books. I never really went through the creation/evolution crisis because of that. This book was just open to me to read and I could do it without any hesitation.

So I collected fossils and they were on my dresser. I grew up right in the city of Grand Rapids, and our lot was only 40 feet wide. But we had a nice home there and my father eventually gave over pretty much all of the backyard to my backyard zoo. And he allowed me to build a special room in the basement for my tropical fish, scorpions, cockroaches, and all sorts of worm cultures that I used to feed my animals. At peak I had 39 parakeets that I was breeding. And I took detailed notes. So I was kind of a born scientist but also kind of a born theologian because the two were not seen as different.

LIME: What denomination did you grow up in?

DeWitt: In the Christian Reform Church, which technically is the Christian Reform Church in North America. But it's a small denomination that originates from reform churches in the Netherlands.

Part of its tradition comes through a person by the name of Abraham Kuyper. He interpreted reform Christianity as being relevant to all these different fields of human endeavor: science, religion, art, politics, bricklaying, house painting, and home keeping. All of these things were legitimate areas for work, and life was always to be lived as vocation, as a calling. So what we were taught growing up was that we had to discover our gifts. We really had to engage in all sorts of different things. And I did that in music and arts and woodworking, in carving and in study, in doing scientific experiments, reading the Bible, reading theological literature, and reading novels. It was a very holistic growing-up that respected the full spectrum of knowledge.

And I'm still a member, in a congregation called Geneva Campus Church. It's right at the heart of the University of Wisconsin and is attended mainly by professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students.

LIME: Was there a certain point in time when you realized that the world did not view science and religion as holistically as you do?

DeWitt: A glimmer of it came when during the summer time, I would go to a vacation bible school with a friend from another denomination. I was between 13-15 years old at the time when I discovered that in some churches, what I was doing was rather suspect, that science was suspect. I had never encountered that before. It was a very mild encounter. So I began to get just a glimmer of the fact that I was being brought up in a different Christian tradition than some other Christians were. And once I got to college, then I started to meet some students who had entirely different upbringings.

Later, in about 1961, when I was doing my fieldwork for my PhD in the deserts of southern California (along with my wife, Ruth, who assisted me), I began to realize there was a much greater rift within American society. That rift occurred within churches as well as all of our other institutions.

The rift fell between nature being studied and appreciated and used as a source of awe and wonder and inspiration on one hand, and nature or land being viewed strictly as a commodity to be bought and sold on the other. In my youth I never had a view of nature as something you would carve up and buy and sell to make money. It just never occurred to me. But in 1961, as I was doing my research on the desert iguana on the open desert, I began to see people come on to the desert and level off sand dunes, water them with water from water trucks, lay a concrete slab and then build houses across them. I remember Life magazine touted this development that I was watching emerge in Riverside County, California as bringing the desert back to bloom like a rose.

What I actually saw there on those leveled dunes was sand blowing and drifting across the roads. One house had the sand whipped right out from under it and the house was cracked in two. That was really my first direct experience with what I think is greed and deception and exploitation of the Creation as a commodity in a way that was dishonest and unethical. That of course made me realize how people looking at development in America could see it in two different ways. One was the person who benefited from the sell of say, mangroves, that had been cut off and filled and turned into house lots right in the path of hurricanes. The other side was looking at mangroves as these remarkable ecosystems that actually have a role of protecting the coasts from the damaging waters and floods from hurricanes. I had never thought of myself as an environmentalist. I was doing what we call environmentalism before there was even such a term.

LIME: So how did you find a way to fuse your worldview as an environmental scientist with your religious ethics?

DeWitt: In the late 1970s, I was asked to consult for the newly formed Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies. This coincided with the awareness that I had of the emerging movement called the moral majority. It made no reference to God as Creator, no reference to the Creation. That was my perception and that was the milieu in which I was asked to consult. What I suggested was that they provide environmental stewardship courses and programs for evangelical programs across North America. After a year they asked me to be the director of it. That's what I was until November 7, 2005, when I retired from it.

The institute was formed then to address, in the evangelical world, the real problem of this degrading of the environment and how we can transform the way we work and live in order to make environmental stewardship front and center in our lives. So this started with a handful of colleges that soon became 14 colleges and universities, and now there are 60 evangelical colleges and universities, a few of which are in Canada. Then I extended it to southern India and also to East Africa.

One goal was to reinstate the whole idea of caring for Creation, and point out the fact that we are living in a world that increasingly views the Creation as a bank of resources, or as a mechanism, and no longer as a book to be understood, read, and responded to with stewardship.

Students that come into Au Sable Institute get transferable credits to their home colleges or universities. This has produced people who are ecologists, environmental scientists, and experts in related fields. They're also taking positions in government and in the Nature Conservancy and other environmental groups.

Interestingly, Christian colleges and universities produce a lot of people in the business world. But they weren't producing anyone in the ecological areas. One of the ideas was to train people who could influence the churches to get on board - which they weren't - on the issue of caring for Creation. The churches had become rather self-focused on individual people, but the whole Creation was something that was being left out. That started in the Industrial Revolution and just intensified, and it began to affect and infect churches everywhere. Looking at the Creation was less and less a part of worship services and the churches' agendas. So my aim in developing the institute's program was to bring to evangelical Christianity and to the wider Christian world what it once had, which was a fairly sensitive view of caring for Creation.

LIME: What are you most enthusiastic about in the growing dialogue between scientists and the religious community?

DeWitt: We've turned the corner on the whole issue of climate change. There still are detractors but we've turned that corner. And with that turn have come a whole lot of other things, like the topic of endangered species, and global pollution problems and so forth. I think, too, that we're turning a corner on helping parents, schools, and churches to reinstate the study of nature—taking children into the field, having them express wonder for the beauty of animals and plants, water and air, and so forth. I'm not sure how far that's going to develop, but my hope is that it's going to develop fully and get back to Creation study, to nature study, and this is really what fosters good environmental stewardship.

LIME: How might this change the way that we view the environment?

DeWitt: A few years ago, I was standing next to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, and it had just reached its peak—it was going to go for another four or five minutes. A woman next to me had a little boy and she said, "Well, we've seen Old Faithful," and she turned and left. She was collecting things that she could say she had done, but she had absolutely no capacity to behold. What's coming is a time when we will actually behold the lilies of the field, and behold the birds of the air, which means not just check them off your checklist.

That's really what happens when you transform your view of the world from one that is simply a collage of commodities and resources, to one that itself gives inspiration and some sense of the beauty of the world. If you behold - which is kind of the biblical way—you will learn far more than what you can by just checking off species on a checklist. Once we do that, we're going to be seeing the land we occupy, like our yards and our gardens, very differently.

Image: Cornwall Calling