“We live in an age unlike any before. We can sit indoors in a climate-controlled home, listening to nature sounds through headphones while remaining totally detached from nature. People are more apt to purchase a CD of songbirds singing than to actually enjoy their coffee outside in the morning. We trade the reality of the songbirds’ melodious calls for a recording that is more convenient in our crammed schedules. We are frenzied and overworked. Society acknowledges our need for nature, yet somehow, we have lost the will to prioritize it. What we do then is cheapen the Creator’s marvels by surrounding ourselves with less perfect imitations: faux plants, junk food, synthetic materials, reality TV (which, of course, is mostly scripted). These things do not hide what they are — their names tell us what we need to know about them. They are fake, fraudulent, and blasé.

I am inspired by the great thinkers, C.S Lewis, Wendell Berry and Francis Schaeffer before me who have each said in much more eloquent words, that modernity has dichotomized the self, such that we no longer reflect our role as caretakers of Creation.

Our landfills are overflowing with imitations that, from their inception, have harmed the Earth. From the extraction and creation process to the production and transportation phase, all the way to your home, where they distract you from your purpose, man has not only failed to take care of what God made, but he has purposefully violated the Earth in his greed to earn money. We can look at any of the major developments of our day — space exploration, mining, oil extraction, airline transportation, vehicle and electronics production — and note the staggering costs of mankind’s avarice.

These issues are the primary reason for the creation of Naturalists Arise. This is as a multi-platform project where nature journal evangelism, documentary photos, and written stories illuminate today’s prevalent issues, while keeping affections in the proper order: God first, Creation second.”

-Meg Jordan