Peas In The City: Part 2
May 20, 2008
Dr. Matthew Sleeth is a former emergency room director and chief of medical staff, who now writes, preaches, and teaches full-time about faith and the environment. He is the author of Serve God, Save the Planet (Zondervan).
This post was originally posted in Creation Care Magazine. Part One can be found here.
The first dream of our city is a principle that undergirds its very foundation: All are welcome. This does not simply mean that the doors to the city are open to everyone. It means that this welcome is made real through city planning that does not isolate the rich from the poor, the young from the old, or the business from the residential. Much of this type of functional isolationism is both the product and cause of automotive dependence. It results in a positive feedback mechanism: greater use of the car necessitates that more people have them. As a result, autoless-based methods of transportation become less available, and the air is made less wholesome. More roads are built, and more pedestrians fi nd themselves confronted by impassable rivers of concrete. The final outcome is a city built for a sedentary lifestyle conducive to its attendant ills.
As worldwide demand for gasoline increases and the supply diminishes, those cities that plan accordingly will flourish. The transformation of the urban landscape has already begun. Bikeways and greenways represent the future. In a generation, America’s most walkable cities will be those that plan and build them today. Picture the downtowns that have been revitalized in the last two decades. It is not by chance that they feature areas closed to vehicles and open to pedestrians. Cities that are most inviting also integrate businesses and residences.
Perhaps no trend is more wholesome in its promise than local agriculture. For the Christian, this trend has biblical implications. The Bible begins in a garden. On its last page we are given a description of heaven, God’s city, in which both an “unpolluted” river and a “tree of life” that bears fruit year round stand at the center. Talmudic writings say that this tree is so great that it would take 500 years to climb it. We, as followers of Jesus, are instructed to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth—trees and all. How do we bring about this fruit bearing tree? There is a beautiful symmetry in buying one’s produce from the hand that grew it. Encouragement of local agriculture, urban gardens, and community supported agriculture build the face-to-face relationships that the human heart craves.
The city of shalom models The Golden Rule. It cannot be peaceful at the cost of another’s welfare. Our brothers and sisters are upstream and down. We are connected to each other by a river of morality. The vast majority of this country’s cities are built on rivers. The Rocky, Smokey, Catskill, and other mountains give life and water to these cities. But something is happening to one of our mountain ranges. In the vast Appalachian area, the mountains are disappearing. Trees are knocked down. Bulldozers scrape the creatures off of the forest floor and amass them in piles. Holes are dug, and explosives remove 97 percent of the mountain to get to the remaining 3 percent—its veins of coal. The equivalent of one atomic bomb is detonated every 10 days in leveling the mountains of West Virginia alone. What, you may ask, do they do with the 97 percent of the mountain that is removed to get to the coal? They throw it in the stream and river beds of the valleys.
Our city of peace does not shoot itself or its sister cities in the foot. It does not cut off its very headwaters. A city of peace is powered by clean sources. If coal is needed, it is mined using ethical methods. Period. The city of peace does not profit from the violent end of its headwaters.
The last dimension of urban shalom centers on the economy. The most vital and resilient forms of capital is moral and spiritual wealth. Who and what is the trustee of that capital? Our city comes to rest one day a week. There can be no shalom without a Sabbath. Its institutions of spiritual growth are its houses of worship. The symbol of God is the tree of life—and the city’s residents are reminded of this by the trees that line the streets, greenways, and parks.
One method of urban church building has been the following—drive from the city’s center until you can afford the land and then build a church. I look forward to the day when the downtown church is really the downtown churches. Imagine going into its lobby and getting on the elevator. “Going up—first floor: Catholics. Second: Presbyterians. Third: Evangelicals.” Then a massive auditorium would be available to all, as well as an intimate chapel and well-equipped classrooms. If the believers in the same God cannot learn to share here on earth, how will they get along in the city of God?
Let us all pray that the future of our cities is built upon a wholesome environment, an urban shalom, filled with greenways, urban gardens, and the peace—and the peas!—of the city.
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