Abstract
I approached Jennifer Ayers’s book Inhabitance with a mixture of curiosity and resistance. I am not a religious educator but have for 10 years taught classes focused on environmental sustainability, which is one of the themes of Ayers’s impassioned, idealistic, but also deeply learned and surprisingly persuasive book. I figured I may be able to learn from her arguments, but I was prepared to categorize them as irrelevant to the pedagogies of my field. As it turned out, I was mostly right about the first, but mostly wrong about the second.
Ayers’s arguments revolve around the importance of teaching proper “inhabitation”—that is, how to best recognize ourselves as embodied inhabitants of God’s creation, and how to allow that recognition to lead us to a greater stewardship of the relationship all human beings have both with and through the natural world. This recognition, she believes, is an imperative task: “Despite years of effort in ecclesial, educational, and public policy spheres in the United States, we remain, collectively, destructive inhabitants” (p. 3) of the world. Given that the mounting costs associated with climate change, watershed pollution, resource depletion, deforestation, and more only prove her right, Ayers’s determination to propose something entirely new is certainly justified.
Ayers claims that the education in inhabitance which we need requires moving away from the classroom tropes of environmental education: abstract facts about natural patterns and cycles do not connect us with nature, nor build our affection for it. Ayers lays out her aspirations toward the end of the book’s first chapter: “While human beings might possess usable knowledge about their surroundings, this does not imply inhabitance . . . Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance, cultivating ecological faith . . . requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions’. It requires a reorientation of human identity and life so that human beings remember who they are” (pp. 17–18). Making the ideal of earthy, tactile, transformative cultivation central to her educational vision, Ayers develops a detailed theological and pedagogical context for the broad range of examples which form the heart of her book.
She highlights a Presbyterian congregation in North Carolina that organizes environmentally-oriented flotillas down a local river, as part of their commitment to protect their community’s watershed. She discusses a mostly immigrant Lutheran congregation in Wisconsin that sponsors agricultural classes and connections to neighborhood farms to help parishioners feel a part of the local food system. And she praises the Church of the Pilgrims in Washington DC, which has brought compost from the church garden into the sanctuary, filling the baptismal font or covering the communion table, as a way of communicating a liturgical understanding of the environmental cycle which we are all entwined with. Ayers does not address the reception of these approaches, though she does quote one church member who observed that such originality “works better for some people than for other people” (p. 113).
It would be easy to be cynical and dismiss this project as more performative than substantive. While Ayers is sensitive to this point and regularly emphasizes the need to counter the white liberal elitism which can easily creep into the “reorientation” approaches she thinks necessary, it is nonetheless impossible to deny the radical idealism energizing her arguments. That idealism is not, however, especially activist. True, she profoundly challenges America’s Christian and educational establishments, insisting that teachers resist the pressure for “content coverage” and instead focus on cultivating “slow knowledge” through creating opportunities for reflection (p. 73). However, she barely touches upon the cultural and structural forces standing in the way of an education in inhabitance—especially within the mainline Protestant churches Ayers primarily discusses—which would translate into the creation care she considers imperative.
That is perhaps to the book’s detriment, but such activist advice is not the book’s aim. Ayers is a teacher speaking to other teachers, urging us to “envision . . . a way of inhabitance that may not yet be entirely possible,” holding out the hope that the communities we build through our teaching “can imagine and do and become that which one person cannot on their own” (p. 129). Her aspirations are supported by tightly woven argumentative threads, drawing upon ecologists, theologians, philosophers, educators, and poets—and yet, the dense learning present in the book never weighs down the writing. On the contrary, this is a clear and succinct book, one which persuasively connects the ordinary work of education—including my own—to a high environmental purpose. Whatever your connection to religious education, it deserves to be read.