For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what is left. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove. – Exodus 23:10-11

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 28, 2015): Exodus 23

The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s affected 625,000 square miles (400,000 acres) of land in the United States alone. The agricultural catastrophe also extended up into Canada, affecting mostly the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Dust Bowl severely exasperated the economic conditions in North America, making the depression of the 1930’s worse than it needed to be. The cause of the Dust Bowl is not really in question. The 1920’s had not only presented North America with an excellent economic conditions, but above average rains also allowed the Great Plains to be cultivated like they had never been before. Returning soldiers from the World War I were promised free land, or at least very cheap land, in the Great Plains. And they arrived in droves to accept their gift. The pressure and the expectation for new wheat crops continued to keep the farmer plowing more and more of the lands of the Great Plain. But the rains didn’t last. The 1930’s presented a time of below average rains, and droughts that swept over the Great Plains in three waves – 1934, 1936, and 1939-40 – but some areas didn’t see rain for eight long years. The farms were built miles from water, and as long as the rains came, the farms worked. But there was no longer any protection for the land from the drought. And the land, which had been covered with a protective covering of grass, was tired. With its protective covering of grass removed, the result was vast dust storms that roamed the plains as the tired unprotected land simply turned its soil into dust. The Dust Bowl was an early example of what happens when we don’t understand the effect that we can have on our environment.

The biblical Sabbath laws were an early attempt to understand our own relationship with our world. We know that, as part of the human race, we need at least one day off in six – one day away from work – in order to maintain a healthy body. But the biblical injunction for rest doesn’t stop with us. It reminds us that our world is based on a very fragile balance – and that it is our responsibility to maintain that balance. And all of that starts with the instruction that once every seven years we need to allow the land to rest. Let it produce what comes naturally, allow it to replenish the nutrients that it needs to continue to produce crops. It is an ancient practice, but it is a practice that for the first part of the Twentieth Century we seemed to forget.

But we are wiser now. So why is it that, sometimes, that it seems, especially in religious circles, that we forget our relationship with this fragile world? Why aren’t we more worried about the ecological footprint we are leaving on the planet? Why aren’t we doing more to erase that footprint? Our behavior toward the environment today seems to mirror the attitude of the farmers of the Great Plains in the first part of the Twentieth Century. It is essentially the same biblical practice. Our biblical instruction is simply that we are to care for this fragile world. The world has been placed by God into our wise hands for exactly that purpose.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 24