Header image portrays Caroline Park at her office in Silver Spring, MD, where she works as a fishery attorney with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
by Noah Guthrie
The following post is dedicated to our former A Rocha USA board member Caroline Park. We are deeply grateful for the ways her hard work and joyful creativity have blessed us, the global A Rocha family, and all sorts of plants, animals, and landscapes across God’s creation.
Song Upon the Lake
Dawn’s gilded sail unfurled across the horizon. Birdsong sweetened the breeze, and a canoe parted the waves of Big Twin Lake.
At length, the two in the canoe stopped rowing. They pondered the quiet symphony of light, wing, and zephyr around them. Then, they sang:
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise him all creatures here below;
Praise him above ye heavenly hosts;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
Big Twin Lake of Mancelona, Michigan. By Caroline Park.
As they fell silent once more, their little human song wove itself into the surrounding creation. Their voices became part of the melody that has endured from the beginning.
One of the two in the boat was Caroline Park, a member of A Rocha USA’s board. At the time, she was attending a board meeting with A Rocha’s partners at the Au Sable Institute of Mancelona, Michigan. Now, having served for six and a half years on the present board, and having served on A Rocha USA’s founding board earlier on, she’s stepping away from her role to focus more on creative pursuits.
Caroline Park (middle) with fellow board members Angela Kantola (L) and David Yim (R) at the Orlando Wetlands Park.
Laying Groundwork for A Rocha UK and USA
Caroline first learned about A Rocha through Peter and Miranda Harris, whom she met during one of Peter’s talks in Washington, D.C. At the time, she was wrapping up a clinical teaching fellowship at Georgetown University Law Center. “I was really intrigued by A Rocha’s approach to things,” she shared. She’d never encountered a Christian conservation group before. As she spoke with Peter, she was excited at the prospect of better integrating her faith and work as an environmental lawyer.
Caroline Park with an important NOAA representative. (The office named in the background is not the office she advises.)
At Peter’s suggestion, Caroline volunteered with A Rocha UK in the fall of 2000. As this branch of the global A Rocha family found its footing in Southall, West London, she helped to upload information to databases, support A Rocha UK co-founders Anne and Dave Bookless with their 3.5 child household, and generally lend a hand with whatever needed to get done.
“It was a very rich experience,” Caroline recalled, “just to see people’s heart[s]” for conservation and community. While in England, she had many enriching conversations with Dave Bookless, the current Head of Theology at A Rocha International, about the biblical roots of creation care. For any readers interested, you can learn about the environmental values woven through each phase of the biblical narrative – from Genesis to Revelation – in Dave’s book Planetwise.
Caroline Park (R) and Dave Bookless (L) in Autumn 2000. Photo from Caroline Park.
In the early 2000s, Caroline helped to incorporate A Rocha USA and also served on its founding board. She did crucial work in building the administrative and organizational systems that enabled this new branch of A Rocha to flourish. Once the project was established, she stepped back to focus on her day job (fishery attorney with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and music commitments for around fifteen years, until A Rocha USA’s current Executive Director, Ben Lowe, invited her to rejoin the board in 2020.
Witnessing the Unfolding Work
As she hopped back into work with the board, Caroline was “excited to see all the different ways that A Rocha USA was engaging.” She’d left the board when the nonprofit was just getting started, but now, she saw active conservation projects, partnerships, and other engagements unfolding across the country.
Caroline (blue backpack, far right of front row) at the Stenis Tract of Austin, TX, where she and other board members removed invasive plants.
In subsequent years, she visited A Rocha’s marine conservation site in Titusville, Florida, where Dr. Bob Sluka labors to protect seagrass, mole crabs, horseshoe crabs, and manatees. She also toured the invasive plant removal and meadow restoration site overseen by Dr. Verónica Godoy in Austin, Texas. In 2025, she was delighted to see the sustainable agriculture and habitat restoration projects taking place at two of A Rocha’s Churches of Restoration in Nashville, Tennessee.
These creation care projects are deeply exciting to Caroline. Even so, she stated, “Always my favorite part of A Rocha is the people.” The members of A Rocha USA’s team come from across the country and the globe, all with different backgrounds, passions, and gifts, yet they all come together to tend to God’s world. What has “filled me with such joy,” she shared, “is that sense of community and working towards caring for creation together.”
Caroline (far right of front row) visiting St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal in Nashville, TN.
Caroline has been a profound blessing to the A Rocha USA team – not only through her help with decision-making and organizational maintenance, but also through her joy, empathy, and inexhaustible creativity. These qualities have expressed themselves through the various songwriting projects she’s shared. Check out some of her songs, like “Revelations” (which was dedicated to A Rocha and her church) and “Chickadee,” on her YouTube channel “@cparkplay.”
“Always my favorite part of A Rocha is the people.”
– Caroline Park, former board member of A Rocha USA
Collaborating with the Creator
Looking ahead, Caroline will continue her fishery law work and is excited to have more time to invest in new art projects. She loves songwriting, arranging music, and performing music, and she also hopes to revisit some of the drawing and painting she used to do when she was younger. She may even tackle a couple of writing projects, including a recent idea for a short-form novel that she’s mulled over in recent years.
“God’s a creator,” Caroline said. “God has created so much beauty in this world.” So, when humans create, it’s an expression of the divine image, and it can be a way of giving back to the beautiful world God has made.
Though Caroline may be stepping away from the A Rocha USA board, there’s a sense in which she’ll continue doing what she’s always done. Whether it’s through environmental law, faith-based creation care, or art, Caroline will always be that song rising from the canoe in the still lake: a voice contributing its little bit of joy, beauty, and life to God’s broader creation.
Caroline Park (center, with jazz hands) with the ARUSA board and some ARUSA staff.
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