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Calvin’s commitment to what we now call “environmental sustainability” draws upon a strong legacy. As a Christian liberal arts university, we have rooted our environmental sustainability work in a vital faith expressed through academic rigor as well as practical action.

Environmental sustainability work at Calvin has for many decades been driven by the passion and commitment of faculty, staff, and students. In 1980, for example, faculty colleagues and the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship published Earthkeeping: Christian Stewardship of Natural Resources, an early contribution to ongoing reflection on Christian discipleship and broader environmental concern. The hard realities of a destabilized climate coupled with the implication of our Christian witness only intensified after that early effort. Calvin responded with the founding of an ecosystem preserve on campus, a student-led environmental stewardship coalition, the establishment of the Bunker Interpretive Center and Plaster Creek Stewards, and a green revolving fund that promotes energy efficiencies on campus. Calvin’s Board of Trustees approved our first Statement on Sustainability in 2007. In 2016, Calvin achieved its first Silver Rating for sustainability achievements. And in 2019, another group of Calvin scholars published Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care. Through these milestones and many more, Calvin faculty, staff, and students have persisted in engaging environmental sustainability work as part of our faithful response to the world’s needs, seeking to serve as agents of God’s shalom for all creation.

Today, ������Ƶ continues to deepen our commitment. We are working to weave environmental sustainability through all dimensions of our life together, not as an extra topic or boutique interest, but as a foundational learning goal and even a method of learning for the whole campus community. Through personal and collective action, we strive to create a formational experience for all community members. Calvin faculty regularly produce scientific research and theological writing on environmental themes. Our Plaster Creek Stewards program continues to heal our local watershed and nurture relationships with our neighbors, while the nature preserve’s education center serves both the campus and the community. Our curriculum incorporates substantial environmental content into every student’s learning through our Core 100 course and through required sustainability courses. Students engage in environmental research and related projects through their courses, internships, and all-campus, student-led initiatives.

We recognize that this work takes place in the context of an urgent historical moment. Anthropogenic climate change impacts people across the globe with increasing severity. Moreover, persistent inequities in wealth and power mean that climate impacts hit hardest for the world’s most vulnerable people. In fact, pollution, land degradation, and biodiversity loss threaten not only people but the living world on which we all depend for survival—the world that God loves. Thus, we engage in environmental sustainability work as a way both of loving our neighbors and honoring the intrinsic value of all creation.

������Ƶ’s mission—to equip students to think deeply, act justly, and serve as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world—demands that we prepare students to face this moment in history through sound study, wise action, and determined purpose. Therefore, we seek to nurture excellent critical thinkers and creative problem solvers who demonstrate resilience and intellectual humility. We seek the wisdom to recognize that the problems we face are not only technological and pragmatic, but moral and spiritual.

Our mission further invites us to imagine with students the future we long for, a future that reflects God’s loving care for all people and all that God has created. This is what environmental sustainability means, as we understand it: a set of practices by which the creation, including people, can flourish, both now and into the future. As we continually explore which practices best serve that vision, we struggle together through curiosity, study, reflection, and experimentation.

At Calvin we join with many other Christians and with people of all faiths and sincere conscience all over the globe to hear, as Pope Francis urges, “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” _¹  As a teaching and learning community, we are called to serve, therefore we step out in faith, confident that our God will use our faith-filled work to bring about healing, reconciliation, and hope.

“For the Spirit that God has given us does not make us timid; instead, his Spirit fills us with power, love, and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7)
 

_¹ Pope Francis, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Encyclical Letter, 2015, Vatican: the Holy See, 2015, par. 49.

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” –Psalm 24:1

Calvin’s commitment to environmental sustainability is based on our conviction that this world is not ours, but God’s. The witness of the scriptures, as interpreted by historic Reformed Christianity, tells us that God created this world out of love and generosity, affirmed the belovedness of the created world in Christ’s Incarnation and bodily Resurrection, and continues to sustain the creation through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.

In the creation accounts of Genesis 1–2, God creates a marvelous world and declares it “very good” (Hebrew: tov me’od). God gives the first human beings permission, limits, and vocation. On one side of the dialectic, humans are made in the image of God and given dignity and authority to “rule” (rada) and “subdue” (kabas) the earth. In Genesis 2, however, this authority is tempered with humility and responsibility: humans, drawn from the soil of the earth and in-breathed with God’s life-spirit, are called to “serve” (abad) and “protect” (shamar) the earth, to guard and observe it. Humans are also invited into rejoicing and resting, reflecting God’s first Sabbath. This human vocation entails limits, as indicated by the injunction not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

When human beings violate the limits inherent in our care-taking vocation, this sin damages the relationship between humans and the earth as well as between humans and their Creator. Yet God continues in steadfast love for all creation. The Old Testament covenants with Noah, Abraham, and the people of Israel testify to God’s determined love as well as God’s commitment to justice, and this love and justice includes concern for people as well as for creatures, land, and water. We witness God delighting in wild creation in Job 38-42 and in Psalm 104. Jesus invokes lilies, sparrows, and seeds as teachers of wisdom. The earth is not merely a stage on which the drama of human redemption plays out, but a manifestation of God’s glory and a source of ongoing divine delight. 

The New Testament teaches that the redemption God intends for the beloved world includes far more than saving souls for heaven. Instead, John 1 describes Christ as the one through whom all things were made. Romans 8 depicts a whole creation groaning in anticipation of redemption, and Colossians 1 testifies that Christ is reconciling to himself all things (Greek: ta panta) in heaven and earth. Revelation 21 helps us imagine the destiny of creation with a compelling vision: a renewed (kainos) creation, a garden city, complete with a river and a tree whose leaves heal the nations.

As we reflect on God’s unfailing commitment to the created world as well as to humans made in the divine image, we have many reasons to lament. While God gives permission for us to use and develop the earth’s resources and to enjoy the fruitfulness of the earth, sin has led us to distort and abuse our privilege and neglect our responsibility. We have destroyed entire species, plundered and polluted land and water, and carelessly indulged our greed in the pursuit of wealth and power. Many centuries of anthropocentric arrogance, colonialism, racism, and violence have led to severe injustices among people and severe destruction of the earth.

While sin has always been destructive, humans are now so numerous and technologically powerful that we can and do wreak irreparable damage to the earth. The industrial revolution and advancing technology have indeed made life far better for many people; however, we have now reached the point of “ecological overshoot.” That is, our patterns of extraction, consumption, and waste outpace the earth’s ability to heal and replenish itself. Science has established “unequivocally” _² that burning fossil fuels has raised CO2 levels in earth’s atmosphere, disrupting the global climate system in ways that cost us billions of dollars, destroy lives and habitats, and threaten to create much worse disruption.

In the Reformed tradition, we speak of both “general revelation” and “special revelation.” General revelation refers to the creation itself as a revelation of God’s glory and power. Special revelation refers to Christ and the Word that testifies to Christ, offering us saving knowledge of God’s plan of redemption. Because we honor God’s general revelation, the Reformed tradition takes science seriously as an important path to knowledge, a powerful tool for observing physical systems. In other words, we use the tools of science to observe nature so that we can reliably discern what God’s creation is telling us. Therefore, we accept the overwhelming scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change and the resulting call to urgent action. This science is confirmed by the testimony of people all over the globe already distressed by the impacts of climate change.

The current climate crisis results from a complicated mix of amazing human ingenuity, gaps of knowledge and foresight, and culpable greed and deception. History frequently demonstrates that God allows us to experience the consequences of sin. Nevertheless, God is faithful. God continues to endow us, despite our stubborn sinfulness, with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, compassion, and more. We cannot save ourselves, but by God’s grace and guidance, we strive to act justly and wisely, seeking to repair the damage we have done and transform our systems and institutions to align with the earth’s carrying capacity as well as with God’s justice. We do this work out of gratitude and love for God. Through it, we witness to the redeeming work God is always already doing.

Environmental sustainability work is thus a faithful and necessary response to God’s love and grace. Though the problems are extremely complex, and we do not always agree on the best solutions or approaches, we engage this work with joy, partnering with God, with each other, and with the earth itself, endowed by God with beautiful capacities for healing and renewal that we must respect and nurture.

_²  IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 1-34, doi: 10.59327/IPCC/AR6-9789291691647.001, Section A-1, p. 4.

The term “sustainability” can refer to three main areas: wise financial stewardship; environmental responsibility; and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

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������Ƶ is committed to sustainability in all three areas, and the three areas are inevitably interrelated. We define sustainability in general as follows:

Sustainability emerges from choices that promote a flourishing natural environment, social justice, and economic viability both now and for generations to come. ₃

In this document, we are addressing these interrelated spheres from the angle of environmental sustainability. Thus, we can consider each element of this broad sustainability definition in ways that highlight relevance to environmental sustainability.

emerges from choices
Sustainability is an emergent phenomenon. That is, human choices push us either toward or away from a sustainable status. This phrase emphasizes the crucial role of human choices as well as the ongoing challenge of seeking environmental sustainability amid divergent human motivations and changing conditions.

a flourishing natural environment
Humans, like all creatures, alter natural environments to survive. However, humans have vastly greater power than other creatures to alter nature, and we have done so in damaging ways. Sustainability entails that we recognize the danger of “ecological overshoot” and strive to avoid it. In other words, sustainable practices avoid depleting natural resources—such as fresh water, old-growth timber, or fertile soil—more quickly than they can be regenerated. Moreover, sustainable practices minimize “waste” (a concept that does not exist in nature) and refrain from introducing toxins and pollution into our environment. Instead, we seek to promote ecosystem health, engage in regenerative ecosystem management, and take care to meet human needs without devastating natural systems. As our guide, we adopt a posture of reciprocity and gratitude toward the nonhuman world. We honor all creation as God’s gift and seek to fulfill our vocation as attentive caretakers. We ask not merely “what do we want?” but “how can we honor God’s marvelous world?”

social justice
Because of sin, humans have a tendency toward greed, disregard, and injustice. These moral failings result in many kinds of suffering, including environmental inequities that harm people. For any system or process to be truly sustainable, it must be sustainable for all who are touched by it. Thus, environmental sustainability seeks equity and social justice, so that all people may receive the benefits of healthy air, water, and soil, as well as healthy diets. Environmental justice calls us to repair those systems and practices that supply health and luxury for some while “externalizing” the costs onto others through polluted, degraded, desertified, or otherwise impoverished “sacrifice zones.”

economic viability
Sustainability entails economic viability but regards economic systems as serving a higher goal: the well-being of all creation, including human well-being. Healthy economic systems serve long-term environmental flourishing and equity among people; therefore, sustainable practices seek to align economic systems with the ecological carrying capacity of the earth as well as with the promotion of secure, healthy, and meaningful human lives. 

now and for generations to come
When God calls us to love our neighbor, this includes future generations. Sustainability, therefore, requires intergenerational responsibility, loving our neighbors across time. This commitment demands that we avoid ruinous practices that damage land, water, and biodiversity for future generations. Instead, we seek to leave the earth better than we found it.

In many ways, sustainability is just good sense: damaging the world on which we depend is foolish, expensive, and wasteful. Even so, true sustainability is a challenging vision that requires compromises, hard choices, trade-offs, and decision-making with imperfect information. As a liberal arts university, we have the privilege of bringing all academic fields to bear on the complex challenges we face, inspiring students and all whom we influence to engage this work with determination, cooperation, and faith. And we partner with people all over the world to work on these problems together.
 

₃ This definition, developed by the EESC, mirrors the definition of sustainability adopted in the 1987 United Nations Brundtland Commission report (www.un.org/en/academic-impact/sustainability).