192. Dorothy Boorse | The Eyes of Flies are like Jewels

Dorothy Boorse describes herself as a child who used to be caught up looking at ants and other small and overlooked things. Later microscopes enhanced the possibilities of her attention. She followed science as it revealed its beauty to her but science also became a tool to help solve problems, to promote health and to improve the lives of people. She hasn’t worked out the answers to all the questions but she offers the wisdom gained over a career studying ecology within a community of Christian faith. 

Theme song and credits music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Other music in this episode by Northern Points courtesy of Shutterstock, Inc.

Episode Transcript

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Boorse: Well, it's interesting because I always cared about the planet, but I have internally attention over a couple of things. And one is that adoption is a very painful process sometimes for the adoptees and the bio parent. But also I'm very sensitive to the fact that adopting from a poor country to a wealthier country comes with almost a sense of colonialism. And we were genuinely trying not to promote that at all. But I think for me, what's been most both distressing and eye-opening is after we adopted, I was writing something about Guatemala, and I realized that Guatemala has this long history of American intervention in which America policy and even material help and military help helped to disenfranchise and remove people from the land that were indigenous people. And they now are extremely poor, living in these very limited areas. And I was adopting one child and pouring all this effort into one person, but my country had made those conditions harder. And to add to that, I also sponsor a child down there, but decisions being made in my country and maybe even my own life, the way I live, was making it harder for my sponsored child at the same time that I was good-heartedly trying to pay to help them. And I think that just sitting with that complexity, mourning the fact that my life is within systems, and those systems may be unjust and they may be unfair, and I didn't start all those systems, but I can be a part of stopping them. However, let me just say I have not solved problems in Guatemala because I've only solved problems for a very limited number of people.

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Stump: But it's certainly given you the eyes to see the kinds of problems that many of us are sheltered from, right?

Boorse (45:49):
Boorse: Yes. Right. Yes.

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Stump: One of the things we constantly hear about climate change is that it's going to affect people in places like that much more severely than it is us. My own situation, I'm fairly sheltered by the Great Lakes around here, that we're going to be okay for a while at least. But climate change in Guatemala right now is a crisis, right?

Boorse (47:59):
Boorse: Yeah, it combines with other crises. And yes, it is. But I guess I would say I think that it is helpful to think about ourselves as being a part of the greater body of Christ. And sometimes when I talk to people about climate change, they are very unaware of the lives of Christians around the globe. Now, I think we should care about people, whether they're Christians or not. But the Bible does talk about the body of Christ and does talk about us being brothers and sisters. And if we take that really seriously, then we need to think about that. So, I think that phrase, think globally, live locally is probably pretty helpful. You can't solve all the problems in the world, but it changes how you think about things when you know that, for example, in Vanatua and Kiribati and Tuvalu, all nations in the South Pacific made of small coral islands, that they are all outspokenly yelling on the world stage, that they're drowning, that this isn't a future. This is now. And like you said, it's not in the future, it's now and it's extreme. And when you think about it that way, it helps. So, one of the things that I find is that when I talk to people, you have to find the vocabulary that helps them. And it doesn't always help to talk about climate change. Sometimes it helps to talk about it in terms of the great commission. How can you carry the gospel to the world if you don't care about the problems of the people you're encountering? This is one of the reasons why we have medical missions, which I mentioned before. It's one of the reasons why we have world vision and the great humanitarian efforts. If we can picture this being a part of humanitarian work, which I'll tell you, world vision has climate change staff because they care so much about this. If you can think about it in those terms, then it changes the conversation a little bit.

Stump (49:05):
Stump: In the wake of events related to science that have ensued since the most recent inauguration, BioLogos has been involved in a campaign to proclaim that science is good, which sounds fairly basic, but has needed to be proclaimed a little bit. And given the expertise of our founder, Francis Collins, and our new president, Kristine Torjesen, they both come from the worlds of health and medicine. Lots of our examples have been drawn from things you're talking about there of health and humanitarian aid around the world. But that's not the only way science is good, right? That's not the only way that science can be leveraged for what we Christians call the Kingdom of God. Can you make a little speech about how ecology is one of those good things for the world, for people, for the Kingdom of God? Can you connect those at all for us?

Boorse (50:10):
Boorse: Oh, my gosh, yes. So, I think a lot of times when ecology is good, it's because it shows us how to prevent a problem rather than have a problem and solve it afterwards. So, a lot of health, unless you're talking about public health, a lot of health is we have a problem, somebody is sick, now, we've got to solve it. But the tools to prevent problems then come out of public health and policy. Well, ecology is sort of the same way. When we find out, for example, here's an example. When we discovered that phosphorus getting into lakes was causing a lot of the pollution that causes algal blooms, then we knew something that allows us to put up vegetation buffer zones around lakes, to have rules about what septic systems you can have. And I don't know about you, but every place I've lived that's had lakes, there's been lake management associations because overdevelopment of lakes has caused so much water pollution. So, I am sometimes trying to explain to people, but I'm using science to do it. It's the science that showed us what the problem was. It's the science that explains some of the things we could do to solve those problems. Water pollution is a really good example. Another is, it was scientists who figured out the impact of lead and mercury on human health. While that's health, it's environmental regulations that have resolved a lot of that in the U.S. And people in the U.S. are more than 90% less likely to be overexposed to lead than they were in 1970. And there's several other criteria pollutants that are the same way that they've dropped precipitously because of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. So, it was the science that showed us that we needed to make policies to protect the environment, and that was for the purpose of protecting human health. And let me just say, as an ecologist, I don't believe that the only reason to protect the environment is to protect human health. But many of our laws, that is the flow of thinking. But I believe as a Christian, we ought to be protecting the rest of creation. Humans are part of creation, and then, there's the rest of creation because God told all of the creation, both in Genesis... At creation, but also after Noah, to go and be fruitful and multiply. That was for all the creatures. That wasn't just for humans. So, we can't be saying the rest of creation can't be fruitful because that clearly honors God when trees can grow and rivers are not polluted.

Stump (51:16):
Stump: Okay, good. I think there's one more topic I'd like to get to here before we get to the end. And it's something you've thought a good deal about. It's our sense of place, our connection, or maybe lack of connection to the land. How did this become an important topic for you?

Boorse (52:21):
Boorse: Well, I love it that you're asking this because 20 years ago, I got a grant to promote a sense of place at Gordon, and we did all these different things, including opening up the Gordon Woods and giving guided tours. The woods are always open, but giving guided tours to people from all these churches around us. And so, having a sense of place is really important to me. But I think there's a couple of ideas there that are critical. And one is that when you look around the world and you look at the people who live lightly on the earth, that is, do less damage or alteration, very often, they have a very strong sense of place. That is, they know where they are, they know where they're from, they know about the other organisms that live there. They know about the rocks. They know about the weather. And for many, it's indigenous people that have that sense because their background may go back many, many generations. And yet, most of us don't get that. I did in Pennsylvania because my father's family had been there since the 1700s. And my mother's side was from West Virginia. So, they'd only been there for one generation in Pennsylvania, but that's regional. And they went back for generations in West Virginia. So, I grew up with local history and local natural history, and we were always going to these historical things where people enacted being colonists and settlers and all this stuff, or learning about how Native Americans had done things. And when I left, I've learned about the nature in different places that I've lived, but I've never had that complete sense of place that I had growing up. And I somewhat mourn that, and I wasn't really able to give that to my kids the way I'd hoped. We've done a lot of hiking, we did some camping, but people have different interests, and we've had the electronics revolution, which completely changed everything. So, yeah.

Stump (53:27):
Stump: Earlier this year, Colin and I were in Hawaii with A Rocha, the environmental group, and had the privilege of interacting with a couple of different ecological projects run by indigenous Hawaiians. There was this palpable sense of their connection to the land that their ancestors had inhabited. They identified themselves by their family's names for the wind and rain and the valleys they're from, and they emphasized your relationship to the land stands alongside your relationship to God and your relationship to neighbor. But given the way I grew up, it feels a little romanticized because I grew up in I think, four different subdivisions that were on the outskirts of small towns in Michigan and Indiana, and we had no words for the wind and the rain besides wind and rain. And there were farmers not far from me who worked the land. And all those subdivisions I grew up in used to be farmers' fields, I'm sure. But over my lifetime, even those local farmers were bought out by big corporations who did the best to extract whatever they could from the land. So, given that kind of background, how do I develop a sense of place? Sorry, if I'm turning this into a therapy session, but what can I do about it?

Boorse (54:32):
Boorse: So, I have a number of comments that are coming to mind. First of all, thanks for mentioning Hawaii. I had told you before that I recently went to Hawaii as the faculty member talking about the environment and ecology and whatever with a group of students. And I'd never been to Hawaii. And so, I studied like a crazy person so I could talk intelligently about volcanic island formation and the natural history. But we also went to a number of different places where we had tours or whatever, where we met native Hawaiians talking about their own experiences. And we had exactly that same sense. And I think I don't have a simple clear answer in part because I haven't solved it, but I do have some ideas. So, one thing that I saw in Hawaii and that I also saw in New Zealand was people who were not indigenous recognizing the value of indigenous wisdom and experience. So, signs would be in multiple languages, including indigenous language, or even people that we talked to who were Hawaiian residents, but not indigenous Hawaiians would use Hawaiian terms for things. And they bothered to learn them. They bothered to learn what the birds were and the plants were and these other things. And I was really struck by that because I'm in Massachusetts and I don't see everybody paying as much attention to what the Native American terms were for different things were in my place. So, one thing that I do think you could do is just personally try to find out some things about what lives in your place and what the history of that would be. I don't think we're going to end up with special vocabulary for the kinds of wind, but I think that might be too much of a reach. The other thing though is to say, "Okay, so one way of having a sense of place is to live in the place where your ancestors lived for 1,000 years." Most of humanity does not get to do that. Or maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like most of humanity doesn't get to do that. Certainly in America, most people don't. So, you might ask, there are other ways of having a sense of place, and one might be as a traveler. And there are people that go to Hawaii, and what they try to learn about is what's there, like you did, like I did. And there's people that go and what they want is, what can I get there? And I think even in your subdivision, you could ask, what is here? What should I know about it? So, one year, I tried to write every day for a year about my yard. I did not succeed at that, I will tell you. But I did write a lot. I wrote a lot. I wanted to know, what kind of dirt do I have in my yard? What kind of grass do I have in my yard? What kind of weeds do I have? Where does the water come from? Why are there so many acorns some years and not other years? How come all of my chipmunks disappeared? Well, that was because there was a cat in the area. How come that squirrel is dead? Oh, why did the mourning dove suddenly make a nest in my rhododendron? We have a third of an acre, which for some people is going to sound enormous and for other people, it's going to sound very small, but it is not an enormous plot of land to have to study. But it was really interesting how many questions I could ask. And I think it all comes down to where you put your attention and intentionality.

Stump (55:38):
Stump: Well, thanks, Dorothy. This has been a stimulating, fun, engaging conversation with you, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to hear about your place and to hear about the work you've been engaged in, and to hear about the issues that are important to you and ought to be important to all of us. So, thank you for that. And thanks so much for talking to us.

Boorse (56:43):
Boorse: Thank you. It was wonderful. Credits Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.