I would like for the university, including the administration and alumni, the Boards of Regents and Trustees, the Sewanee community, and our surrounding neighbors to embrace the vision of Sewanee as an exemplary environmental community with the Domain as the centerpiece of this vision. By exemplary environmental community I mean the kind of place that is so lived in and so taken care of that other people will hear about us, see us out, come here and see what we are doing and--because of the intrinsic quality of what we are doing--seek to emulate our approach elsewhere. In short, I want us to live with each other and upon this land so that we set a good example for others to follow. I want this example to be what we set for each other. I want it to be what we show to our students so that it serves as a model of their own understanding as they go from here to address similar problems where they will live and work. I want it to be what others will come here to learn about.

So much of what we have attempted, so much of what we have aspired to, in environmental terms mirrors the fashions and concerns of other places. It is time for Sewanee to realize the genius of its place, of its heritage of the land, of its history as a community and to model itself for others to mirror. I believe we have inherited an arcadian treasure unique in America. Surely other groups hold more land--most timber companies do--surely other groups hold more critical ecosystems; surely there are communities that have greater human and economic resources than we do. Yet, no other university in America has the land trust we already hold. No other group of concerned environmentalists have as the focus of their concern a large tract owned by a Christian university. It is the triple inheritance of land, people, and faith that can enable Sewanee to do what no other community can do: to envelop the land in a vision of the transformed human community: to realize in the harmony of the Christian vision of creation the true spiritual ecology of people and plants and animals, of wind and water lived out in ecologic communal harmony fulfilling our purpose as a university and a people.

I do not for a minute mean by this any ecologic pantheism. I do not espouse any mysticism of nature. I mean something quite different. It was the great gift of Aldo Leopold to teach us the meaning of ecology as the dynamic science of communities upon the land. But it is the great gift of our tradition as Christian people to embody the full meaning of community upon the earth. The vision I hold is of the spiritualization of Leopold's vision or the naturalization of our Christian vision--the transformation and extension of the fundamental concept of Christian community to include the ecologic communities of the land we live from and upon. I call this spiritual ecology. It does not accept nature or our understanding of ecologic function in the natural world as the final word about the meaning of our life on this planet; neither does it accept any theology that so denaturalizes itself that being, life, and value are severed from time and place. Theology must move beyond dualism and our community must move beyond polarization.

I understand spiritual ecology to be a theology of incarnation that is doubly anchored in the reality of God and the orders of Creation. The orders of Creation are inclusive of the human community and of the other communities with which we are interrelated. It is this vision that can enable us to see whole what others can only see in part, to see connection where others can only see distance, to see responsibility where others can only see utility. Sewanee, the University of the South, has because of its heritage a more than adequate theological base for envisioning a spiritual ecology incarnated in our multiple forms of community upon this land. No other township, no other college, no other landowner has available for the management of land such a convergence of land and spiritual vision. Sewanee more than any other place can model a spiritual ecology for the nation.

We do not have to be dependent upon derivative environmental concerns. We do not have to be led by the hand. It is time for us to lead: to accept and live out the meaning of our heritage of land and faith, to show others by how we live here how good it is when people live together in unity with the land and the communities of the land that support them. In Tennessee, in Franklin County, in America it is time for Sewanee to step forward and be the kind of university, for us all here to be the kind of community, that no one else can be. No one else can do what we can do. The critical components--the people, the land, the faith--do not exist elsewhere in the unique combination they take on here. We have been called not only to this place but by this place to become the embodiment of the community of the people of god sustained in faith to hold fast all that is good. The ultimate land trust is not a corporation; it is a community of people who undertake to live together by a common vision, by a sustaining faith, that they incarnate upon the land in their life together.