Getting Back to the Garden: An Interview with Theologian and Climate Activist Latricia Giles
In this Climate Connections, local artist Lilly Bechtel speaks with C3’s Residential Climate and Equity Program Manager and theologian Latricia Giles She talks about a new way of seeing the Adam and Eve story and other themes found in scripture.
In the story of Adam and Eve, after biting into the forbidden apple of knowledge, Eve (and by proxy, Adam), were banished from the garden forever. Or so the story goes.
But what if one of the most influential creation myths of American culture did not require such a rupture of land and people? What if banishment from the garden was not a requisite of spiritual growth? How would our relationship to land be different today if it held the belief that we deserved such a garden? That in fact, we had never left?
These are some of the questions I discussed when I sat down last month to speak with Latricia Giles, a graduate of Wake Forest School of Divinity, climate activist, and C3’s Residential Climate and Equity Program Manager.
Latricia was raised in the Bronx, NY, the last of six children in a Baptist family. “I always felt I had to be the best,” she said, “not only because of my color, but because of my family and the expectations of those around me. I thought I would go to divinity school and get a husband, maybe run a church together, and be happy being some kind of first lady.”
So it was quite a shock when, in the course of divinity school, Latricia realized she was gay. “It didn’t fit with my narrative of leading a good life or being a good Christian, and I fought it for a long time,” she told me. “It was hard for me to believe that accepting myself on that level would be useful to anyone, when there was so much other work in the world to tend to.”
While Latricia was struggling to contain and deny parts of her personal life, she was also struggling to maintain very particular ideas about what her social justice work did and did not mean. At the time, climate change seemed to Latricia to be one of those pesky issues that just didn’t seem to be going away and seemed repeatedly besides the point. Whenever it came up in school lectures and circles of discussion, her response was: “I’m black and my people are being shot down in the streets, so I don’t have time to hug trees.”
Latricia largely maintained this strict exclusion of environmental issues from her justice work, until in one of her school projects called ‘Watershed Discipleship’ she was asked to research the history of a body of water surrounding her hometown. This carried Latricia back up to the Bronx, where she found environmental damage so intrinsically linked to housing, health, and racial inequality, that at the end of the project she found she could no longer consider climate and race an “intersectional issue.” Because, in Latricia’s words “there is no one intersection where race and climate meet and then go their separate ways. They have been right alongside each other the entire time.”
In the American story, as well as so many stories throughout the Bible, to be deemed deserving of God’s love is to be deemed worthy of land. The narrative of white supremacy, often underpinned and defended by religious supremacy, had shed so much blood in the name of those who were deemed deserving, and caused exile, migration, and death for those who were not. Beginning to look back on America’s history through this lens, Latricia started to see where exploitation of people had been inextricably linked with exploitation of the earth’s resources. “If you see yourself as a conqueror, and you have this idea of eternal heaven in the back of your mind as a justification for your actions, what motivation do you have to care for the world right in front of you? That started to really trouble me, that idea of some eternal bliss, far away, far over there.”
And what does it mean for a culture to be largely infused with various stories of guilt, shame, and unworthiness; of exile from the garden of their own instincts and desires? How does it shape our relationship to land when our own inner soil is suspect territory? How can we learn to care for and protect the bounty around us before we tend to the bounty within?
These days, Latricia is putting the final touches on a personal theology which she summarizes as the “fuck it and get free” approach. For her- a black, gay woman in America- committing to her own joy is one of the most subversive ways of challenging a system which has systematically devalued her life. She sees her work of joy and her work of activism as one and the same, “ because I can give voice to the disparities and injustices I see, regardless of how that truth is received, because I know that any truly radical work has to begin with the work of being at peace with myself.”
Towards the end of our conversation Latricia tells me: “learning how to love myself, and trusting that God still loved me, is what opened me up to meeting my wife. And that experience of loving someone is as beautiful and as holy as it gets. It’s what has allowed me to step forward in full service to others.”
The moment when Eve bit into the apple, she was trying to acquire the ‘seed of worldly knowledge’ and for this she was eternally punished. Or so the story goes. But instead Latricia has claimed a new story: one in which that forbidden seed has brought knowledge of and love for herself; a terrain that one no one can deprive her of or exile her from. This lush, internal garden is what, perhaps, could be described as at the core of Latricia’s climate work: the idea that we all have a right to a space where we can drink clean water, breathe fresh air, and move freely and without fear of the exploitative greed of others.
When I ask Latricia about her current beliefs in relation to the teachings of the Bible, Latricia laughs a big laugh and tells me: “I still believe in the free-flowing love of Jesus as a model, but I now know that that love was sent for all of creation, it wasn’t just sent for one group,” before adding, with a wink and a smile, “God’s too big for that.”