The EPA Has Abandoned Reason. Now We Build Arks

In July, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an intention to revoke the Endangerment Finding. This 2009 ruling is the EPA policy that says greenhouse gases harm people—a finding that gives the EPA the authority to regulate climate-warming pollution.

Hope is found in the care and hospitality we extend to one another amid the dangers of climate collapse.

If successful, the revocation would enshrine climate change denial as the official policy of the U.S. government and make it much harder to regulate fossil fuel emissions. The authors of the report cited to legitimize this move are a veritable all-star team of five climate-change-denying scientists, an extreme minority who contract the 97% of global scientists who believe humans are causing climate change. The absurdity is compounded by timing: Zeldin’s announcement came in the midst of the summer “Danger Season” when heat waves, floods, fires, and hurricanes leave millions reeling from weather crises exacerbated by climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 98% of people living in the United States have faced an extreme weather alert since May 1, with over half of those alerts exhibiting clear, scientifically established connections to climate change.

It’s tempting to respond to this kind of political maneuver with a proportionately political response: to submit public comments, attend hearings, call our representatives. That impulse is understandable—and it has worked before. But the ecological realities of the climate crisis and the ethical undercurrents of the gospel push us to ask whether it’s enough.

For example, when 46% of the U.S.—156 million people—live in counties with unhealthy levels of air pollution, are we truly honoring our call to safeguard the conditions for our neighbors’ health and dignity? When streams run dry and pollinator populations collapse, are we fulfilling our responsibility to care for the interdependent web of life that sustains us? The gospel’s ethic of love also does not end at the human family—it extends to the sparrows that Jesus says are not forgotten by God (Luke 12:6), the lilies clothed in splendor (Matthew 6:28–29), and the unownable, borrowed donkey who Jesus rode into Jerusalem declaring his way of peace (Luke 19:28-40).

More simply, we have to ask ourselves: How are we to take action for the endangered community of creation?

READ: What's It Like To Be an Evangelical Climate Scientist?

Still, there is a place for participating in the EPA’s comment period and hearings. Not because we expect our clear, rational arguments to win the day with an administration that has abandoned reason, but because showing up can be a spiritual practice. We can approach these acts as training for radical Christians shaped by prayer, ritual, and hospitality. We commit to prayers and rituals instead of statistics and dollar signs—engagement as an act of love, not as the sole engine of change.

Our hope in the process, in either the theological or vernacular sense, will not be found in binders and dockets. Hope is found in the care and hospitality we extend to one another amid the dangers of climate collapse.

Theologian Timothy Gorringe has argued that “in the face of the present global emergency, ark-building might be the task to which theological ethics leads us.” Moral exhortation to the powerful, if it ever worked, is useless with leaders who gleefully parade their immorality. In an age of accelerating climate disasters, increasing deregulation, and fraying civic systems, we need to listen to Gorringe and get to work on Noah-style ark-building—social, physical, and spiritual structures that will help life flourish in a climate-changed world. And these arks must center those most endangered by climate breakdown.

Ark-building is an invitation to practice hospitality. In the storms of the Anthropocene, hospitality is not merely the offering of a bed or a meal; it is the reordering of our lives to make space for the flourishing of those who are endangered. It is a posture of humility and attentiveness—a posture of listening closely enough to the world’s wounds that they become our own, responding with the deliberate shaping of spaces where life can take root again.

Hospitality creates thresholds: gardens that shelter pollinators and shade weary bodies, rooms and rituals that honor creation’s voice, communities that hold steady when disaster scatters neighbors. It demands that we loosen our grip on convenience, comfort, and control, rearranging the patterns of our days so that other lives may thrive.

Like the hospitality of Christ, our hospitality refuses to treat the guest as a burden or an afterthought. Instead, it receives their presence as a gift, trusting that the act of welcome will change the host as surely as it aids the guest. In this way, climate hospitality is not a side project of compassion or charity—it is the daily work of making covenant with creation, holding open spaces of safety, belonging, and joy even as the waters rise.

So yes—submit your public comment opposing the rollback of the Endangerment Finding. But do it with clear eyes about the limits of statecraft and the power of spiritual witness. Then put your hands to the ark-building work that will carry life—human and otherwise—through the floodwaters ahead.

The calling of our time is not only to tell the powers that be: You are endangering life. It is to turn toward one another, toward our watersheds and neighborhoods and the full community of creation to say, like the prophet in Isaiah 4:6, we will make a home here, a shelter from the heat of the day, a refuge from the storm. And when the floods rise, we will welcome in all who are endangered.