Through blighted pastures, by poisoned waters

The roaring outside my window is loud as a freight train, but it’s a train that keeps on going, hour after hour, never making its departure. The sound of it sometimes wakes me in the night.

It’s not a train, really. It’s the drill from the fracking site down the road, where my dad used to have a little prayer hut, in the early 1990s. Back then the land was different, a solitary plateau jutting starkly from the artificial canyons and gullies surrounding it, the mining industry’s legacy. Surface mining, sometimes called strip mining or mountain top removal, had its heyday in the 1970s, when corporations with their dynamite and monster shovels chewed up the land, swallowed the coal, and spit out the leavings. 

Yet amidst the wasteland, that high place stayed untouched. The Island, we called it. There was only one road up and down, and if you took it, you rose above the sandstone highwalls beetling over toxic pools, and reached a tableland of about 30 acres, green meadow leading to shadowed woods. There was something fantastic about its unscathed status, as though some holy spell were cast over the land, protecting it.

Dad had a prayer hut up on the Island because, inspired by the desert fathers and mothers, the Christian monastic tradition, and even nineteenth-century nature writers like Henry David Thoreau, he wanted to get away from the hubbub of the world and meet God in silence, in the peace of nature. The Island was an altar reaching toward heaven, where we could go to find God in nature’s unsullied beauty. 

One reason we easily find God in nature is that we easily find joy and peace and happiness in nature. How do we find God in nature when nature is shattered and poisoned, to the point of becoming dangerous? Scholar, preacher, and activist Leah D. Schade coined the term “eco-crucifixion,” to talk about the way humans torture and destroy nature. The face of God we meet, in the mutilated world, is the bloodied face of Jesus, who calls people to enter more deeply into solidarity with all those who are suffering and cry out for liberation, not just human beings, but all living things.

Now, that altar of my father’s is no more. I’ve written before about the shock of moving back to the region and finding that the Island was gone. Just gone. The coal companies came back for what they’d left, and the hand of God could not protect the high place from being dynamited and bulldozed and hacked and flattened. After that they turned it into a quarry, then half-heartedly reclaimed it.

Meanwhile, nature was doing its own awkward yet astonishing work of reclamation. The vast areas the coal companies left unreclaimed, the dead land and heaping spoil banks, the cliffs and canyons, have become a bizarre wilderness, a landscape both healed and scarred. It’s not just the topography. The soil chemistry has changed. The life that can be sustained there is different. 

That broken wilderness was part of the landscape of my youth. I loved the untouched fields and rolling hills and deep ravines, reminiscent in parts of the moors of southwest Yorkshire where the Bronte sisters lived (also in impoverished coal country). But I also loved the spoilbanks. They were a great place to get lost in and explore, and you never knew what you’d find there. The remains of hobo encampments. The skeletons of coyotes. In one place, a fleet of rusted, abandoned hearses. No idea why.

In the summer of 2025, for the first time since I was a teenager, I went up what was left of that solitary road and found, not the enchanted high place of my youth, but at least a grassy meadow, with a few tentative trees. Nature was healing, once again. But in the fall of that same year, an oil and gas company applied to have the area turned into a drilling unit. 

Every fracking well has a name, and so does every unit. The name of this one is the “Good Shepherd Unit.” The land is owned by the Christian ranch and retreat center where my family lived for nine years, during our era of living mostly off-grid. We grazed sheep in those days, and knew all about the Good Shepherd who leads the flock through green pastures and beside still waters. Strange that Christians can recite Psalm 23 while destroying the pastures and poisoning the waters. 

The bizarre alliance between the American church and capitalism yields realities like Christian organizations profiting off exploitative extraction, and the Good Shepherd name highlights how dystopian this is. It’s not the first time Christians have sold out our principles for wealth and power. Whole spurious theologies, like the Doctrine of Discovery and the “white man’s burden” have been developed to defend infamy in God’s name. 

Yet while the powerful used religion to oppress, others found in it a source of liberation. Oppressed people turned toward Jesus, Mary, and the saints for solace and fortitude. The gospel teachings of Jesus gave reformers a template for justice, not only in rebuilding the church, but in challenging violent oppressors. 

The Christian pursuit of the divine through creation’s beauty has become a veritable industry, with retreats and spirituality centers marketing rest, enlightenment, inspiration, rejuvenation. Meanwhile, people without financial or geographic privilege have no access to these resources. To meet God in creation can feel impossible in landscapes that are fractured and wounded, whether urban wastelands or rural communities blighted by industry. We look for the fingerprint of God. All we find are the smudges of humanity. With the threat of data centers looming over low-income rural areas like mine, it feels as though a vast evil hand, like the hand of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, is coming between us and God. 

I write this having just taken a stroll across the field near my house. The field was recently sprayed heavily with weed killer in preparation for planting, so it’s a corpse field, covered with flattened dead grasses. Still it was beautiful in the fading light. I wondered, though, whether I should take deep breaths out there, where so much poison recently soaked into the Earth.

The field was recently sprayed heavily with weed killer in preparation for planting, so it’s a corpse field, covered with flattened dead grasses. Still it was beautiful in the fading light.

Rebecca Bratten weiss

Is there something deeper and richer, albeit harder and less immediately satisfying, in finding the divine precisely in those areas of creation most devastated by human greed and violence—just as oppressed peoples’ theologies of liberation are deeper and richer and truer to the gospel than theologies of prosperity or dominance? 

It’s easy to love nature when nature makes us feel good. Can we love the countless beings, the souls we share this planet with, when they are broken and disfigured and do not give us joy? Can we put our fingers into Jesus’ wounds and find divinity?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a writer and academic residing in rural Ohio. She is the digital editor for U.S. Catholic magazine and can be found at rebeccabrattenweiss.com.