I FIRST CAME across digital media artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s work on social media. While scrolling through a sea of Instagram stories about environmental disasters, civil unrest, and humanitarian strife, I reached a square that made me pause: a multicolor four-panel image from a digital watercolor comic. I took in the top two panels of a gray figure staring out into the sky and then the glimmering, fruited foliage framing the bottom two panels. It felt like a vision from a better, more just future. The text on each panel, though brief, was powerful. I took in each word like a sacred telegram: THE GREAT WOUND / IS HEALED / ALL THINGS / MADE NEW.”
When I was younger, I found comfort in dynamic plotlines nestled in the predictable geometry of print and online comic series. Through Saito’s work, that comfort returned to me, in the form of four panels grappling with climate grief and environmental repair.
When I spoke with Saito about her work, she said that her affinity for comics started in high school. “As a young person, I had a very hard time accessing my own feelings or seeing that my interiority or my life were particularly valuable,” she said. “Comics were a way I could crystallize that value and the meaning of my own interiority for others — make it visible.” Now, Saito’s work conveys the value of the natural world. In her ecological storytelling, we see portraits of people amid towering trees and shimmering waterways. Her human subjects submerge themselves in the elements; her natural subjects invite readers to take a closer look at this numinous world.
Her upbringing in northern Illinois exposed Saito to the tensions between humans and earth. She grew up in a house deep in the woods — “a strip of forest in the middle of this desolate monocrop landscape,” she said, explaining how she saw beauty amid exploitation. “The animals — raccoons and possums — were pests to be managed. Every year the trees and bushes and plants from the forest would encroach further toward the house and every year they would need to be cut back.”
This awareness of the adversarial relationship with the natural world has guided her work and now culminates in her debut book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis (Andrews McMeel, 2025). The first section explores the doom happening parallel to climate collapse. In one story, we see someone curled up in bed, sinking into and verbalizing their sadness post-job layoff. Wildfire smoke chokes the Seattle air around them. In this panel, I see myself, two years ago, numb from financial despair while wildfire smoke cast a noxious orange hue over Philadelphia.
For Saito, these simultaneous sorrows — environmental and financial — are two sides of the same coin: “Capitalism is about extraction. It is about taking something that is a free gift of God and extracting value from it and funneling that profit away from the thing and toward the powerful.” Absent of neoliberal naivete, Saito’s work lays bare the all-too-common outcome of this extraction: hopelessness. The worker who is laid off feels “worthless and hopeless,” she explained. And the ordinary person living through the climate crisis feels guilty about their fossil fuel consumption. “There can be the sense of, ‘I’m consuming too much. ... I’m just taking resources and not contributing anything.’”
Saito’s book takes aim at the main culprits of individual shame and communal overwhelm: consumer capitalism and the fossil fuel industry. “These parts of our capitalist system come together to desecrate human beings and creation,” she said.
Saito explained that her concern for climate justice and her Christian faith have long been inextricably intertwined. Around the age of 10 or 11, she had an “ecstatic experience” at Stronghold Summer Camp in northern Illinois. “It felt like a utopia. I’d never been somewhere where you could just walk,” she said, describing getting to explore a landscape uninterrupted by cars. Here, God’s creation felt different. The land was “more like a sibling than just something to be extracted from,” she explained. Learning about environmental trailblazers such as United Church of Christ minister Dollie Burwell, who organized Black church women in Warren County, N.C., to mobilize against toxic waste dumping in their community, reinforced her eco-theological vision.
But she realizes that vision clashes with the convictions of many other U.S. Christians. “We are seeing right now, in real time, the rise of a Christian fascism that is so completely opposed to any kind of collective action to avert climate catastrophe,” Saito said. And yet, that distance is at odds with the parallel commitments of faith and ecology she holds within her. “Seeking justice for our common home is absolutely not competitive with following Christ.”
In previous works, Saito has used explicitly religious imagery to draw near to the wounds borne by people and planet. She describes her digital Stations of the Cross, which she created during the first year of covid-19, as “a collection of lonely, violent pictures drawn in a lonely, violent year.” Amid humanitarian strife in Gaza, she produced a poignant image of the Christ Child in a pile of rubble, paying homage to a Nativity display used by Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian Munther Isaac during an Advent 2023 service in the Holy Land. And while You Are a Sacred Place features no literal Christ images, each panel — whether of joined hands or fruiting trees — gestures toward the power of holy presence.
When I asked what encouraged her, Saito nodded to this: “God is with us. God has not abandoned us. ... His arm is not too short to save.” I turn to a page of You Are a Sacred Place where, across four panels, moss devours an onshore oil drilling rig and feel enveloped by this great, reaching presence.
Our new normal, without intervention, is climate dysfunction. Where some might concede defeat, Saito calls us to grieve and give of ourselves. “Any work that we do to try to heal the earth, to try to unwind the horrors of fossil fuel capitalism ... [is] participating in a great divine work of healing creation,” she said.
You Are a Sacred Place is not a manifesto or an explicit how-to guide for saving our environment (though, as Saito told me, fossil fuel divestment is a necessary start). Rather, the text’s design, from the square, four-panel geometry to the limited prose per page, creates a meditative space for readers. At first, I struggled to enter this space. Yet, as You Are a Sacred Place reminds me, it is the systematized frenzy of consumer capitalism that created the conditions for environmental ruin. So I slow down, allow my eyes to drink in every line and letter, and open my heart to the messages that will guide the work to come.
Céire Kealty holds a doctorate in theology from Villanova University, where she studied fashion theory, spirituality, and ethics. She lives in Pennsylvania.
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