A Rocha USA is deeply committed to responding to suffering in the natural world, recognizing our interconnectedness to Creation. We work toward restoring diminished or broken relationships with Creation that arise from our inaction, injustice, and even violence toward the world around us. In the …
Core Commitments
You Are There: Conservation and the Local Church
“The local church is the best way to restore people and their places.” So begins You Are There: Restoring Churches, People and Places, the recent release by pastor and A Rocha board member, Robert Campbell. In it, Campbell examines local conservation work from the vantage of one particular place …
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Valued or Valueless?
By John Humphreys Why do we care about nature? The answer might simply be, “Because it is God’s creation”. In other words, the natural world is a gift beyond price that we are duty-bound to treasure. Alas, much of the world does not share this view. As Pope Francis put it so movingly in his …
Where Are You? Start There!
By Tom Rowley, A Rocha USA Executive Director On the heels of an Earth Day observed with growing gloom and corporate cooptation, reasons for hope abound. In recent weeks, I’ve had a slew of conversations with people caring for God’s creation right where they live. The efforts may be small, but …
Hope for God’s Groaning World
By Ben Lowe, Evangelical Environmental Network and Young Evangelicals for Climate Action One of my favorite places in all of America is the St. Lucie River in South Florida. The St. Lucie is a wide tidal river connected to the Indian River Lagoon — the most biodiverse estuary system in the United …
Plastic Christianity
by Tom Rowley, A Rocha USA Executive Director From drink bottles to styrofoam cups to those clamshells that ironically protect organic fruits at Costco, plastic—the material so famously and presciently proclaimed as the “future” to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate—is taking over. Consider the …
An Ethical Framework
By Tom Rowley, A Rocha USA Executive Director If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re sure to get there. When it comes to environmental conservation, that’s exactly where the world is: huge seemingly intractable problems and little consensus on how (and even whether) to address them. More …
Postcard from St Helena
By Peter Harris, co-founder of A Rocha Miranda and I recently visited our son and his family on the island of St Helena. It lies in the middle of the South Atlantic and so the only way to get there is to sail for six days from Cape Town. It was a massive privilege to undertake such an …
Be Fruitful and Multiply–Everybody
By Tom Rowley, A Rocha USA Executive Director Last Wednesday, PBS launched a terrific new television series: EARTH A New Wild. Done in collaboration with Conservation International and Nature Conservancy (both of whom have partnered with A Rocha in the USA and abroad), the show focuses on the …
Hopey New Year
By Tom Rowley, A Rocha USA Executive Director As new year resolve fades and resolutions fail, I offer a more hope-filled alternative: keep your eyes on Jesus. In a world where people are dying, the climate is changing and species are going extinct—a world that is in biblical terms utterly …