November has a way of slowing people down. The growing season is winding to a close, the leaves are finally letting go of the trees, and a lot of East Texas folks find themselves standing in the yard a little longer than usual this time of year — not working, just looking. There’s something about November that makes people reflective, and for anyone who spends real time with soil, that reflection tends to land in the same place: what does it actually mean to take care of a piece of land?

It’s a question with surprisingly deep roots — literally, all the way back to the opening chapters of the Bible.

In the Beginning, a Job Description

Genesis 2:15 is one of the first things we learn about human purpose in Scripture: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Before the fall, before sin entered the picture, before any of the brokenness the rest of the Bible deals with, humanity’s first assignment was land care.

What’s remarkable is what’s packed into those two verbs, “work” and “keep.” In the original Hebrew, “work” is the word abad — to cultivate, to labor, to serve. And “keep” is shamar — to guard, to protect, to watch over carefully. Put those together and you get a job description that still fits anyone who owns a yard, a farm, or a flowerbed in East Texas: cultivate it AND protect it. Produce something from it AND guard what’s already there.

That’s not a small distinction. A lot of people think of land in one of two ways — either as something to be used up for what it can produce, or as something to be left alone and never touched. The Genesis mandate rejects both extremes. It says the ground is meant to be worked, actively and skillfully, and it’s meant to be kept, carefully and responsibly, at the same time. That tension is one every good gardener and farmer lives inside of, whether they’ve ever thought about it in theological terms or not.

What “Dominion” Actually Means

A few verses earlier, in Genesis 1:28, God tells the first humans to have “dominion” over the earth. That word has taken some criticism over the years. Back in 1967, a historian named Lynn White Jr. published a widely read essay arguing that Christian “dominion” thinking was actually a root cause of ecological damage — that treating the earth as something humans rule over gave people permission to exploit it.

It’s a criticism worth taking seriously, because it pushed a lot of Christian thinkers to go back and look more carefully at what “dominion” meant in its original context. And what they found is instructive. The Hebrew word behind “dominion,” radah, shows up elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe how a king is supposed to rule over his people. That’s the key detail. A king’s rule was never meant to be about exploitation — it was meant to be about justice, protection, and care for those under him. A king who used his people for his own gain wasn’t exercising legitimate dominion at all. He was a tyrant.

The same logic carries straight over to how we’re meant to treat land. Dominion isn’t a license to strip a piece of ground of everything it has to offer and move on. It’s a call to rule it the way a good king rules — with responsibility, with an eye toward its long-term health, and with genuine care for what’s been placed under your authority.

A Christian Case for Environmental Stewardship

That debate over dominion theology didn’t stay confined to academic journals. It made its way into the evangelical world in a big way through a 1970 book by the theologian and pastor Francis Schaeffer called Pollution and the Death of Man. Schaeffer’s book is widely considered the founding document of evangelical environmentalism, and he wrote it, at least in part, as a direct response to the criticism that Christianity was to blame for ecological carelessness.

Schaeffer’s argument wasn’t that Christians should adopt secular environmental politics. His argument was simpler and, honestly, more compelling: Christians should be leaders in caring for creation because creation actually belongs to God and has real value simply because He made it. In his words, “Christians, of all people, should not be the destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect… We should treat each thing with integrity because it is the way God has made it.”

That line has stuck with a lot of people who work the land for a living, because it reframes the whole job. A patch of grass, a young oak tree, a bed of soil that’s been compacted and neglected for years — none of it is just inventory. It’s part of what God made, and it deserves to be treated with the kind of care that reflects that.

The Land as a Living Community

Around the same time this conversation was picking up steam in Christian circles, a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and essayist named Wendell Berry was making a similar case from a different angle. In his 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Berry wrote one of the more striking lines you’ll find on the subject: “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.”

Berry wasn’t writing as a theologian, but his agrarian philosophy carries a similar weight to what Schaeffer was arguing. For Berry, caring for land was never just an economic transaction — plant this, harvest that, move on. It was a moral obligation. He treated the land as a community to be served, not a resource to be exploited. Anyone who has spent real years working East Texas clay soil, watching what happens to it when it’s cared for properly versus when it’s overworked or neglected, knows there’s truth in that. Healthy soil really does connect everything else — the grass above it, the roots running through it, even the water that moves beneath it.

Soil Shows Up All Through Scripture

It’s not just Genesis. Jesus himself leaned on farming and gardening imagery constantly, because it was the world his first listeners lived in every day.

In the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-23), Jesus describes a farmer scattering seed across four different kinds of ground — a hardened path where the seed never takes root, rocky soil where it sprouts fast but can’t survive, thorny ground where it gets choked out, and good soil where it produces a real harvest. He wasn’t giving a lecture on soil science. He was using something his audience understood intimately — how ground condition determines outcome — to describe how people respond to the Word of God. But the metaphor only works because everyone listening already knew: soil quality matters. You can’t get a harvest out of compacted, neglected ground no matter how good the seed is.

Then in John 15:1-8, Jesus describes himself as “the true vine” and his followers as “branches,” with the Father as “the vinedresser” who prunes the vine so it produces more fruit. That’s not generic imagery — that’s the language of someone who knew viticulture up close, the patient, sometimes painful work of cutting back a vine so it can grow stronger later. Anyone who has ever pruned an overgrown rose bed or cut back a crape myrtle in late winter knows exactly what that feels like. It looks like loss in the moment. It’s actually preparation for growth.

A Different Way of Seeing the Ground Beneath Us

Taken together, these threads — the Genesis mandate to work and keep, the reframing of dominion as responsible rule rather than exploitation, Schaeffer’s case for treating creation with integrity, Berry’s vision of soil as a living connector of lives, and the biblical imagery of soil and vine woven through the Gospels — add up to something worth sitting with, whatever your own beliefs about faith and land might be.

Land, in this way of thinking, isn’t just a resource to be managed for output. It’s something to be cultivated skillfully and protected carefully, treated the way it’s meant to be treated rather than simply used up. That’s a standard that predates modern environmentalism by thousands of years, and it’s one that still shapes how a lot of us out here in the Piney Woods think about the dirt under our boots.

November has a way of slowing people down long enough to notice things like that. Maybe that’s the whole point of the season.

Author: Billy Forrest