John Jeavons expects that 20 years from now most of the world’s people will be struggling to eat.

Jeavons, a developer of sustainable agriculture methods, delivered this dire message at a three-day workshop I recently attended. Although his vision might seem to approach the apocalyptic, this class was not “How to Build Your Own Backyard Bomb Shelter” or “The Book of Revelation Explained!” It covered a more humble subject, one to which we moderns have paid far too little attention: soil.

According to Jeavons, the simple dirt in which we grow our food could soon become disastrously scarce, and he promotes its replenishment with an evangelistic fervor.

This Earth Day there will no doubt be much talk of how to solve climate change, population density and our energy problems, talk that will make appeals to saving that vague abstraction known as the environment.

But perhaps it’s time to turn our attention to caring for something concrete, like the host of living organisms beneath our feet on whose health our own health — and that of our neighbors — depends. Perhaps it’s time to give the kind of attention the Yahwist writer in Genesis gave in describing our vocation as God’s creatures: till and keep the adamah, the fertile soil.

As a result of wind and water erosion fostered by conventional farming practices, between six and 24 pounds (depending on the world region) of farmable soil are lost per pound of food eaten, he said. In the U.S. our farmable soil took 3,000 years to develop. In just 250 years we have managed to squander 75 percent of it, much of it now resting at the bottom of the oceans.

It’s possible to skim past such numbers with glazed eyes; given more than a moment’s thought, however, these facts become astounding. Perhaps we should change that popular bumper sticker from “No Farms, No Food” to “No Soil, No People.”

“While soils are becoming increasingly depleted, the world population is growing, water is becoming less available, and other resources are increasingly in short supply,” Jeavons said.

To combat this trend, Jeavons has developed a small-scale, sustainable agricultural method he calls “Grow Biointensive.” Jeavons’ high-yield, low-input food-raising methods are being used by people in 141 countries, and taught by organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, and the Peace Corps.

Jeavons directs Ecology Action, a think tank for promoting and developing the biointensive method, and is the author of “How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine.”

He is a practicing Episcopalian. “My faith has been key in anything I’ve been able to do,” Jeavons told me. In addition to teaching people how to grow food, he believes that “we share our love through the spiritual food of the Eucharist.”

His faith, and through it his desire to create a better world, has been and continues to be the hope that keeps Jeavons going. Over the last 30 years and with a core group of committed followers, Jeavons has been quietly improving the soil and growing food crops on a steep, once-eroded hillside farm in Willits, Calif.

Jeavons, with his white hair and beard, has the air of an academic even when he’s digging in the dirt; his signature look is a tweed cap and coat with blue jeans.

During the past three decades, he has developed a method for growing food that’s 99 percent sustainable and doesn’t depend on oil. Unlike conventional farms, which are heavily dependent on petroleum fertilizers, the fertility loop at Jeavons’ farm is nearly closed. And he has reduced the space it takes to feed one person: from three-quarters of an acre to one-tenth of an acre.

One of his methods is growing soil. He plants nitrogen-rich crops like alfalfa and carbon-rich crops like corn and harvests them to make into compost. That compost is then fed to the soil, which will supply enough energy for all his other food crops.

“If you grow healthy soil, you will have healthy plants. Healthy plants will grow healthy people,” he said.

During the first hour of our workshop Jeavons cited studies indicating that as little as 36 to 52 years of farmable soil remain on the planet — information that tempts me to despair. I think of God’s command to till and keep the fertile soil, and how human history is a long record of our failure to do that just that.

“Don’t despair,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you all these things unless there was something we could do about it.” We then spent the next three days learning how to replenish our Earth.

And that is the hopeful conclusion as this Earth Day approaches. There is a lot we can do about it, and I’m grateful that there are John Jeavonses in the world who can show us how. We still can learn to make the care of the soil — and the attendant forms of creation care that flow from it — the daily vocation it so needs to become. In the coming decades, our lives may depend on it.

Originally published at Faith&Leadership

This food task force is but one example of a groundswell of interest among churches. For a faith whose central sacrament is the Eucharistic meal, a number of Christians are seeing the far-reaching implications of that meal for how they eat. And they are beginning to ask some hard questions. Why, for example, must that old warhorse known as The Church Potluck still feature tables brimming with Jell-O, high fructose corn syrup, and other “food products” we know to be bad for us? And why should our food supply be so dependent on fossil fuels which are quickly disappearing? Why has the number of malnourished people in the world (one billion) been surpassed by the number of obese? Clearly our eating habits are destructive. How, then, do we rethink the way we eat and what resources for that re-imagining do we already have within our faith tradition?

Before meeting we all read Michael Pollan’s instant classic “Letter to the Farmer-in-Chief” as well as a recent essay by agrarian theologian Norman Wirzba on his work with Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson to develop a 50-year farm bill.

Bishop-in-chief of the NC Methodist Conference Al Gwinn referred to these articles as places where the church needs to perk up her ears, and began the discussion on a sobering note: “We know that our society is going down an extremely treacherous path that does not have any potential of a good ending given the way we’re traveling.”

The bishop was followed by Dr. Ellen Davis, professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School and author of the excellent Scripture, Culture, Agriculture—Reading the Bible Through Agrarian Eyes (foreword by Wendell Berry), who said that one of the best resources for thinking about the way we eat and grow food is the Bible:

It’s difficult to go more than a few chapters in the Old Testament without seeing reference to land or food. The biblical writers were particularly interested in arable land. They were remarkably attuned to the incomparable value of land and its fertility. Situated in a semi-arid climate with erosion-prone soil, Israel had no margin for error. A point of connection here in the U.S. is that while we had a huge margin for error a few centuries ago, we’ve used it up. We’re like ancient Israel in that we now occupy a marginal ecological niche.

Dr. Wirzba, also present at the meeting, then asked,

How do we envision an economy in which the health of land and people together can be established? We need practices in which we can reestablish our relationship with the land. This is where church gardens are so important. To be in a garden is to learn that we need a new relationship with creation. It’s where our own lives become a gift to be given to others. Gardens can be a powerful witness to the world for the church to be able to say, ‘this is how you receive the world, this is how you receive each other, and this is how we share God’s goodness. This is how we resist treating each other as commodities.’

Stan spoke up to encourage our group to think about land use. “The local re-design of our food system requires land, any and all kinds, for gardens, local market space, and supporting storage and handiwork,” he said. “Churches need to actively seek donated land wherever it is available, and provide that space to community partners to nurture local food alternatives.”

Rev. Jeremy Troxler spoke next. Jeremy is a former tobacco farmer. Despite his awe-shucks demeanor he is an elegant spokesman for the agrarian way of life and is now director of the Thriving Rural Communities program at Duke Divinity School. “We need our parishioners to see that sustainable farming is not a liberal agenda,” he said. “In fact it’s really the way my grandfather lived. We need to use the deep wells of scripture to find ways to express that clearly to our congregations.”

Lunch that day was an all-local menu of onion and broccoli quiche, a salad of Jericho lettuce and sugar snap-peas, and fresh strawberries for dessert, all grown in the church’s community garden and on neighboring farms.

Before we ate Stan said something that’s stayed with me. We had been talking about the recent groundswell of interest in agriculture among churches. Shaking his head slightly and speaking in a hushed, almost reverent tone Stan said, “There are 830 churches in the NC Methodist conference. Think if every one of those started a garden or produced their own food. Once they are in motion—that’s an unstoppable force.”

Heads around the table nodded in agreement. The bishop blessed the food. And then we feasted.