In Kenya and other “third world” countries, people live much closer to the land than we do in the USA. When I use the phrase “close to the land”, I don’t mean it to apply to where we live or how we spend some of our recreation hours.

What I mean is that the land, and the condition of the land, is as important to many people as your job is to you.

Living close to the land means that you depend on the land for your basic needs of food, shelter and clothing.

For those who live close to the land, if the land stops producing due to drought, erosion, bad farming practices, climate changes or other disasters, they loose their ability to provide for themselves and their families.

The importance of this is to realize that the condition of the land and it’s ability to produce food, give you raw materials to build shelter and perhaps support animals or crops that in turn provide raw materials for clothes is absolutely critical to life in many countries.

In the USA, we have been shaped our society so that technology allows us to live quite far from the land. In the 1920s and 1930s when people began the migration off of the land to cities we also began to loose our connection with the land. That migration was made possible in part by farming methods that allowed the land to feed more and more people with less and less work. Those methods included the use of machinery to replace human labor and the increasing use of pesticides to increase crop yields.

Since that time, the vast majority of us have lost our connection with the land (and for that matter with nature). If it rains (or doesn’t) we might be slightly inconvenienced but it is not usually a life threatening event. We can still get food, we can still get to our homes and we can still get to work.

This lack of connection has led to our treating the land and nature as if it will always be there. Since we don’t have a connection with it, we tend not to make it part of our thougth process. And, if we don’t think about it, we tend not to care about it.

This, then is part of the reason that the environment in developed countries has not been a big topic of conversation until recently. We have forgotten what it is to be connected to the land.

In Genesis 2:15, the Bible says that God placed man in the garden to work it and care for it. And in Genesis 1:11 – 24, we are given a picture of what this garden was like — full of creatures, full of vegetation, trees and fruit.

Sadly, many of us have forgotten that beauty and provision that God gave us. We have placed ourselves so far from “the garden” that to most of us, it never existed.

If you are trying to figure out how you fell about the condition of the earth today, why not start by turning back to the land. I’m not talking about growing your own food (although that’s a great idea) or building your next house out of straw (another good idea) but, I am talking about spending time close to the land. Start with a hike, start with a walk in the park or start by walking to work (all of these without your headphones). Spend time enjoying the gift that God has given us in this earth.

We care about what we enjoy… and caring after all, is the first step to change.