Carol S. Robb, San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union

Carol S. Robb is Margaret Dollar Professor of Christian Social Ethics at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California (MDiv and DMin), and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California (MA and PhD). She has published on issues of economic ethics, feminist ethics, and environmental ethics. Her most recent publication is Wind, Sun, Soil, Spirit: Biblical Ethics and Climate Change (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

Herb Gardens and Solar Panels 

A course I teach every spring semester, “Environmental Ethics,” consistently contains a project component to make this course one instance of theory/practice integration. The course is one of three I teach that fulfills the ethics requirement in the Master of Divinity (MDiv) curriculum, and it may be the only course in ethics these students take. One of the learning objectives is that students learn the major language and concepts of ethics, and the delivery system for achieving this objective is ecological literature. I have required a class project in this course, but in each class the students choose the project. The main guideline is that the project be an arena for the students to learn one or more new skills that prepare them to live more lightly on the earth. The propensity among this demographic is to want to teach someone else something new; however, this does not fulfill the requirement.

The assignment is difficult to conceptualize at the beginning of the semester, so I allow several minutes at the beginning of several classes to gather ideas and find out what each proposer believes would be the new skill resulting from the project. It is not necessary to have only one project per class, but it is preferable. Sometimes we’ve had three or four, because not every student is residential and the skill levels can vary widely. The choosing process can take a while. That’s okay, because in the meantime we are reading three different texts that reflect and demonstrate three different modes of moral argument — teleology, deontology, and virtue — and each emphasizes valuable but distinctive insights about what is necessary to “heal the earth.” The teleological text emphasizes the necessity to build incentives into public policy. The deontological text emphasizes a Kantian approach to clarifying principles and weighing priorities when principles conflict. The material content of this text challenges the anthropocentrism characteristic of the “Great Chain of Being,” a worldview typical of most church cultures. The virtue text emphasizes the positive effect on character of choosing to live a life disciplined by the commitment to simplicity, even if no one else chooses that discipline. It nevertheless provides a “slim” theoretical basis for viewing positive social and global effects emanating from individual or local ecological practices.

Examples of class projects include the preparation of a potluck lunch for class with ingredients from the low end of the food chain. Another class chose a potluck, and each person brought the recipe for their dish and documented where every ingredient originated and how many food miles it traveled. One class said they didn’t want to just feed themselves, so they developed an herb garden for the seminary community.

A later class learned how to make a fence and enlarged the herb garden so as to grow vegetables. When the seminary needed to appropriate the land for another purpose, the director of facilities worked with me to choose another location, and he provided a fence and above-ground irrigation. (When new people were continually being folded into the garden, they did not know the location of the below-ground irrigation pipes, and they poked holes in the pipes with their garden tools.) Several classes have chosen to learn to grow food organically, or to plant and grow California native plants in support of native pollinators. The two projects have different emphases, but share a common effort to maintain a garden primarily for human food production that nevertheless supports biotic communities in the soil and in the surrounding trees.

One class asked three different solar companies to visit campus and submit proposals for solar installations. The director of facilities chose one of the proposals and installed solar thermal panels on a large historic home that houses eight students living cooperatively. Later, in another class, a team of students tried to organize the residents in a 1965-era dormitory to be more frugal in their use of energy — to no avail. So they wrote a proposal to the Facilities Committee of the Trustees to install solar thermal panels on the roof of the dorm. The committee commended the proposal’s merits, and the delivery of the students’ presentation to them, and referred it to the vice president of development. She helped write a cover letter for the proposal to submit to a trustee and her family foundation, which funded the solar panels and their installation. These projects boosted the students’ excitement and sense of self-worth immensely.

As these projects unfold, the whole class made its way through the semester with other assignments, including a take-home midterm exam given to them at the beginning of the class term but due in the middle of the semester; class discussion of the assigned reading; and a written moral argument of the student’s own choosing due at the end of the semester on a topic related to ecology.

San Francisco Theological Seminary is located in Marin County about twenty-five minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA, one of the mainline denominations. The student body is represented by a slim majority of Presbyterians and is ecumenical because it is part of the consortium The Graduate Theological Union, which has nine different seminaries and several centers and institutes that deal with a variety of denominations and religious perspectives. The student body is ecumenical in its own right also.
 
The student body has an international component. International students are in large part from Korea, with Japan, the United Kingdom, Philippines, Vietnam, Ethiopia, China, Indonesia, and Kenya also sending us students, just within the past five years. The international component of the student body is significant for two reasons. The status of pastors and church and denominational leaders tends to be high in the represented countries, relative to their status in the United States; and in the sending countries, the base of the population may be agricultural with high poverty rates. If the class chooses to work in the community garden, some international students experience “status inconsistency,” as the work for the course involves digging in the dirt, but they feel the practice is beneath their station in life or the one to which they aspire. Further, the country of Korea in particular mandates two years of military service from young males and that service tends to include hard labor in agricultural service. For Korean men, work in a garden has its pleasures, but it conjures conversations and images from their time in military service. The American students tend to be urban or suburban, but their grandparents may have lived for at least part of their lives in rural/agricultural areas. These students tend to be pretty far removed from the land. They may have memories of moms, dads, and/or grandparents who required that they help with vegetable gardening, but they are not fond memories. 

These different contexts mean that when the class chooses organic gardening or gardening with native perennials, the reports often include accounts of emotions that surfaced when coming to terms with their military and/or family history. Students from Korea and Africa also report a strict gender assignment of roles related to food production. They need to challenge and adjust to these roles in order to fulfill their assignment, which can generate some anxiety. The very act of telling the class about the gender roles helps everyone know what they are thinking about and what is significant to them in the midst of the dirt.

A component of the class project is that I, “the teacher,” am working alongside; and physical labor loosens the tongue. Each person becomes more of a person and less of a role in this context, as the setting allows for knowing each other multidimensionally. I am always the teacher, but students may be more accomplished in a specific task and I share the job of problem-solving. More importantly, being out of the classroom makes it likely that each of us has the opportunity to listen to people’s stories about where they’ve been and where they are going. I also get to hear the gossip about my colleagues’ classes.

The Environmental Ethics course receives pretty positive student evaluations and my perception is that the project component is functional in student learning on at least two grounds. The first is that anxiety increases as students learn more about how dysfunctional national and international economic and political policies can be from the perspective of the triple bottom line (economic, social, and ecological accounting). The project component provides a structured arena, which they themselves have created, to do something positive and perhaps effective. As Howard Clinebell has said, as we heal the earth, the earth heals us. I think he’s right. A second way the project component is functional is that throughout the assigned reading, no matter what project they choose, they begin to understand why their new skills are legitimate and contribute to a new way of living. Their new practical learning has theoretical grounding.

Such integration of theory and praxis can also occur in other ways. In a recent Doctor of Ministry class focused on theological and ethical perspectives on climate change, for example, I again built in a class project. But perhaps because the class was four weeks in the summer instead of thirteen or fourteen weeks in the spring, the project component served primarily a social function. DMin students tend to choose San Francisco Theological Seminary for its location rather than its theological tilt, so the student demographic is very heterogeneous politically and theologically, and the experience of working together outside the classroom is valuable in getting to know people they otherwise might not want to know. 

The breakthrough in this class, however, lay in a different area. I knew some students were placed in my class and it was not their first or second choice. I anticipated resistance from some students to the premise of the class. The prospect of having to use precious summer class hours debating whether anthropogenic climate change is a valid phenomenon scientifically was something I wanted to avoid. The assignment for the first class was sent in advance to those enrolled. My assignment was to bring to the first class a two-page paper describing the effects of climate change in the city or region of their choice. All chose the city or region where they are in ministry. I suggested they type into the search bar “your city or region + climate change.” Examples would be “Seattle + climate change” or “Annapolis + climate change.” All brought two-page papers to the first class and all found some evidence of climate change in their area on the Internet. The two-page paper became the introductory paragraphs of the moral argument they were to write during their class with me, to be addressed to their congregations in whatever theological manner is appropriate for their audience. No time was spent debating whether climate change is a legitimate concern and they had a theological and ethical product to take back to their ministries. I am now a proponent of the two-page paper as a way to stimulate research on a matter that might seem daunting. This type of project can really help to cut through some of the anxiety experienced when reading about ecological crises and it can help connect theory and praxis even further.

Resources

Clinebell, Howard. Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.

Syllabus - Environmental Ethics - Robb