We live on an old inner-city block ourselves that is buttressed on its street side by old next-to-new shops and small, hot, walk-up apartments. But behind our house in an old sunken lot against the walls of those tenements, we grow roses and tulips, plant berries and tomatoes, have busy bird feeders, vegetable beds and a hammock next to a rare kind of beech tree that is well over 100 years old. And over the garden on the tar paper roof-top porches of those tenements, old people, unemployed people, sit and watch our garden grow.

One day, I overheard a conversation between two old men, one of them sitting on a stool at the edge of the roof, the other still inside the building: "Come out here and see my garden," one old man said to the other. "There's something new in it all the time." The other old man, obviously new to the place and the view said, "Well, ain't this really somethin’. We're really lucky to live in a pretty place like this."

Point: Environment defines us. If we want to keep our cities growing. If we want them to be the kinds of places where people want to live, then we need to supply the quality that makes life beautiful before beauty succumbs to neglect.

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When human beings find themselves out of sync with nature—when we lack sleep, when we feel cramped by the small spaces in which we spend every day of our lives, when we're smothered by the walls surrounding us, when we lack fresh air and a sense of the seasons—why are we surprised that we become depressed, sluggish, irritated, and on edge? In our attempt to be sophisticated and urbane, we forget that we too are “nature.” Which, of course, is why we are so uncaring about what happens to it while all the while it is happening to us, too. "Nature is not a place to visit," Gary Snyder says. "It is home."

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Nature is the key to the human vision of God. In all its variety, all its beauty, lie two things: the understanding of the greatness of God and the bridge that can bring us to value and be in awe of one another.

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There is no modern spirituality that does not have a creation-centered dimension. What we wantonly destroy in nature, we destroy of human life and dignity. It is a moral obligation of immense proportions now. The only question is how much each of us recognizes the sin of natural destruction. "The greatest danger to our future," Jane Goodall reminds us, "is apathy."