Abi Newhouse’s essay “Stewards” was chosen by contest judge Jackson Bliss as The Hunger’s 2021 Spring Prose Contest Winner. Read what Bliss had to say about the winning essay below:

“For my money, ‘Stewards’ does everything that great writing should do: it elevates our cultural discourse, asks, even requires us to look deeper into the world we've created (and the world we've lost), and poses difficult questions about the stories we tell ourselves about the universe and the role we're supposed to play in it. This essay was beautifully written while also being moving, vulnerable, insightful, and polished to a brilliant luster. I absolutely loved it.”

Stewards

Growing up in Farmington, Utah, it was common knowledge that every summer, the Wasatch Mountains would burn. On a typical Sunday, my family would attend a Mormon church, sing in the chapel, take the sacrament, and listen as neighbors gave talks on gospel principles. In the summer, the songs felt too on the nose: The Spirit of God, like a fire is burning. After church, I would sit with my family on our balcony and eat barbecue, while patches of flames burned across the mountains behind us. Occasionally, we’d turn around and comment on the fire’s progress, barbeque ribs in hand, a look of Oh yeah… on our faces. Later, my dad and I would take our binoculars and zoom in on the flames, and at night, the mountains looked like dark, molten lava, these rings of orange surrounding black. At least one week of every summer looked like this. During the day, I sipped lemonade while watching planes drop flame retardant on the mountains, brick red powder falling like a waterfall from the sky. I gardened with my mother, smoke as our backdrop. 

The fires were so normal that it was easy to ignore them. The mountains were close, but not that close—think of a picture a child might draw: a house, a family standing nearby, zig-zagged mountains in the background with little squiggles of snow—and then transpose that to reality. Though miles away, the mountains still loomed in the background of my life. Many fires I witnessed curled high on the mountains and didn’t reach any houses. But I remember the video footage on the news of gnarled black tree skeletons surrounded by flames and sparks, with the words Evacuation Orders issued for local residents scrolling on the bottom of the screen. Those fires felt more real to a young girl, but since we lived in the valley, I had options: I could stare at the flames and feel an existential dread I didn’t understand, or I could go down to my room in the basement, read a book, play my guitar, and look away. 

My Mormon community dealt with the fires about the same way I did: we didn’t talk about them, really. They were a given; a part of our landscape, a part of our religion. At church, my leaders taught me that the world would burn just before the second coming of Christ. They said the earth was first baptized by water during the Great Flood, and now it needed to be baptized by fire. I wondered at the logistics: where would the fire come from? How would it spread to every part of the planet? In school, I considered this as we learned about climate change, and I started to connect the dots: the burning in my backyard was an aspect of global warming. Perhaps the burning world was symbolic—greenhouse gases warming our atmosphere could be the burning we all anticipated. I, and many of my Mormon peers, wondered if the fires were a part of this inevitable, necessary, precursor to Christ’s return to earth. 

In one lesson about the Second Coming, a neighbor who taught Sunday school told me and my teenage peers that we were the “chosen generation.” I sat there in my knee length skirt and ballet flats, my metal folding chair cold and hard, staring at the speckled carpet. The end of times was always near. Everything was a sign, ubiquitous things I didn’t know were ubiquitous: new viruses, earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars. I got used to this mix of peace and fear: I would witness the calamity of the Second Coming, but I didn’t need to worry because God knew I had followed Him. According to scripture, Christ would protect His followers just as a hen protects her chicks.  

Still, I felt I was running out of time. I heard a rumor of a girl in my congregation who’d received a blessing from a priesthood leader, and he told her she would raise her kids after the Second Coming. She was only a few years older than me; I calculated that the Second Coming would come before I even reached high school. I watched the fires out the bay window in our kitchen, fingers parting the blinds, asking God silently to give me more time. 

I came to find, after praying at 10, 11, 12 years old, that God’s silence, like the fires, was easy to ignore. I realized pretty quickly that He would not talk to me. The only answer I’d get about the end of the world was to witness it. So, instead of worrying and praying, I shut out the existential crisis of a burning world. This ignorance could be interpreted as faith, as me giving my fear to God, but as I lay in bed in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, pushing out the fear didn’t feel like hope, it felt lonely. Belief was fickle. I could believe God sent the fires, but that didn’t make them less of a threat. I could believe the fires were natural, but that didn’t make them less of a religious sign of what was to come.

In worldwide conferences over the years, the leaders of the Church told members that We are stewards of the earth and The beauty of the earth testifies of a divine creator. The idea of stewardship was enticing, though it didn’t come with an instruction manual. I knew I should recycle but knew nothing about the land south of me being sold to big oil companies. I was conscious of littering but had no idea about the toxic pollution from petrochemicals. I had a general sense that saving the trees was a good thing to keep in mind, but also celebrated when acres and acres of land were plowed over to give us Station Park—a huge strip mall, community center, and train station only five minutes from my house. There was this inertia in belief: I never needed to research more, because all these things happened for a reason. They must have been part of God’s plan. 

When I made it to high school, I started praying that I’d live to see important life milestones before the end of the world. Perhaps God would take pity on one girl’s small aspirations. I wanted to kiss someone. Wanted to get my driver’s license. Wanted to go to prom. To visit Europe. The fires roared in the summers, still. At that point, I knew the fires on the mountains could be from natural causes, but that most likely that they were started by teenagers on accident, or by a hunting trip gone haywire, or by someone who turned away too soon before putting out the campfire. The impetus of the fires didn’t matter to me, though, because whether it was teenagers or climate change, the burning still had to happen.  

For Spring Break one year, I went to St. George in Southern Utah with my friends. I had never been before and watched out the car window as the landscape changed—the snowcapped Rockies turned to red rock, sand and sagebrush all around us. The sky was brighter blue when contrasted with the dusty orange hills. We put on swimsuits under our clothes, preparing for our hike through slotted canyons alongside a river, but when we arrived there was no water. 

“That’s weird,” my friend said. “There are usually waterfalls and pools all over.” She had lived in the area a year prior, before moving north. She told us of deep pools and streams that made natural water slides. Our bodies had expected relief from the warmer-than-usual Spring sun. 

Pictures of the trip show us standing in the shade of red rocks, looking down, looking up, looking for an answer to the change. At the time, we called it a dry summer. We were used to those, too. Standing in the sun then, I remembered lying on the carpet in my basement room, listening to the radio. Slow the flow, it’s H20! an ad told me. My sisters and I sang the jingle at the dinner table and asked our parents what it meant. A drought, a perpetual drought in the Utah desert. During the summers, our sprinklers turned on at 7 every morning, and my mother watered her garden with our hose in the evenings. Rain was so rare that when we did have a storm, I’d sit in my living room and watch the sky, begging the clouds silently, as if in prayer, not to part. When we learned about cloud patterns in school—how the rain falls over the mountains and leaves little for the valley—I felt personally attacked. Standing near the dry riverbed in St. George, I didn’t want to see the blue sky, even though we’d just come out of a long winter. I wanted to believe God would send the rain to me on purpose, a gift to his needy daughter, that He’d deliver a full river even for such a small trip, but I knew He wouldn’t: the earth had to change. It was part of the plan.

Growing up with a changing climate so visible made the disasters seem normal. And in some cases, they were. There was nuance to fire, something I didn’t realize until a bit later in my life. Fires are often brought on by natural causes, like lightning or volcano residue. Animal and plant life became accustomed to the way a fire creates a clean slate. Prescribed burns, something Native Americans have worked with for thousands of years, follows this pattern to intentionally burn dangerous levels of vegetation. But according to the National Parks Service, 85% of fires are caused by humans, accidental and unregulated. Someone didn’t put out a cigarette. Didn’t consider the ecological disaster of burning forests for new developments. Or they started a fire on purpose for some other reason, in a strange, human act of aggression. And as those fires burn across the world, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at an unnatural rate. 

Hearing the stories of people starting fires on purpose, with no fire training or knowledge, made me think about the title given to me by the scriptures and the Prophet of my church: we are stewards of the earth. But when it came down to action, steward was just another word. In fact, the Bible also claims we have dominion over all living creatures. We should protect the land, but also, we can do what we want with it. 

At the end of 2020, I watched this paradox from my poorly insulated home office in Washington, D.C. I had moved to the city to get my master’s degree and graduated at the same time Covid-19 shut our country down. The world burned. The Amazon had caught fire earlier that year—friends and internet strangers called into the void that our planet’s lungs were burning. Australia caught fire, too—from pictures, it looked like the whole small continent burned. I felt the same hopeless dread from my childhood and turning away should have been easier when I couldn’t see the fires outside my window. I could turn off my screen and stare at the fire-less alleyway behind my apartment. I could go on a walk in Rock Creek Park and enjoy the smoke-free trails. But I found myself instead trying to face the dread I’d ignored from my youth. The West, which was also ablaze 1800 miles away, was a mixture of past and present: though I had left it, I felt a responsibility to watch over it. And so, every morning before I started work, I checked the fire’s progress. It turned into a meaningless and frustrating cycle: check, dread, switch the screen to something else, check again, dread, dread, dread.

I don’t know what I hoped to see each time I looked back at the fire’s progress, though. A miracle? I had left Mormonism at that point and poured my need for something to believe in into environmentalism. I didn’t pray and ask God if He would slow the fires down and hadn’t for years. I directed all the frustration from God never answering me to the people who kept the world ablaze, which was first: myself, as I started to buy into the idea that individuals could change the outcome of climate change by living a more sustainable life. I composted, I recycled, I switched from shampoo bottles to shampoo bars, I made my own all-purpose cleaner and refilled old bottles with it. I shared these tips and tricks with family and friends. I thought if enough of us banded together, we could change the world. And while these steps do make some difference, I started to feel the same lonely faith in something that just wasn’t fully real. So next, I pointed my frustration at corporations, at the one hundred companies in charge of 70% of carbon emissions. And by pointed my frustration, I mean I vented about it to friends and family. I signed up for newsletters, followed environmentalism accounts on social media, and then sat in my apartment and stewed over all that I could not control.

When I was younger, I tried to see science as a helpful aid to the truths religion taught. It was difficult, though, to believe in such a rigid religion. Mormons believe there is modern-day revelation, but also that some truths are unchangeable. Believing in science and environmentalism felt freer, because the scientific process allows for trial and error. I could wonder what new discoveries would stomp out what we were sure of before without feeling the cognitive dissonance that religion would have offered in a similar situation. Nature taught me that everything is connected and cyclical and only taking the time to know one story would never give me the fullest picture. I couldn’t talk about the destruction of fires without acknowledging their necessity, in the prescribed places at the prescribed times. In “An Obituary to the Land,” Utah writer Terry Tempest Williams says, “I will never write [the earth’s] obituary— because even as you burn, you are throwing down seeds that will sprout and flower, trees will grow, and forests will rise again as living testaments to how one survives change.”

It’s true, of course, that the trees and bushes and flowers throw down seeds during a fire, protecting themselves and their species while we continue to add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Trees develop thicker bark, plants offer fire-activated seeds and fire-induced sprouts while we plow down forests for new developments or factory farms. It’s tempting, even now, to use the plant’s resilience as another excuse to feel some hope from my youth—that God created the plants this way for this purpose. But humans are not plants. When we talk about saving the earth, we’re really talking about saving our species. But instead, we put Band-Aids over gaping wounds—we try to manufacture cycles and end up at a landfill anyway. 

In both religion and capitalism, the burden falls on the individual’s shoulders. While I’ve still kept up as much individual sustainability as I can, I also had to recognize that I was living within a system that would not allow for perfection. I can recycle all I want, but that doesn’t change the fact that the recycling company my apartment building uses has no contractual responsibility to take the recycling to a recycling plant. Their only contract is to take our recycling away. With religion, it was up to me to be a good member—to pray and to go to church and to read my scriptures, but my little actions could never replace what the Mormon institution could do to help fight a burning world. When the Washington Post revealed the Mormon church has amassed $100 billion dollars, the Church responded that part of those reserved funds is set aside for any calamity preceding the Second Coming. I looked around at the Covid-19 pandemic, at the earthquakes in diverse places, at the wars and rumors of wars, and at the mass wildfires and saw only a call from Church leaders for us small people to be stewards of the earth. 

Sometimes, when I’m working in my home office in Washington, D.C., or I’m cooking in our tiny kitchen with the ugly red walls, or I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep, the lyrics come back to me. The Spirit of God like a fire is burning. The song is so purposeful, the tune so manly. I can close my eyes and be right back in that chapel, sitting in a pew with my family, my hands flat on the bench, feeling the velvet patches of the green cushion. The high ceilings with the parallel chandeliers, the tall white walls, the partition open to the gym so more people can fit on hard metal chairs in the back. It smells like Wonder Bread. Men in suits. Women in skirts and dresses and heels. Babies crawling up to the podium. How blessed the day when the lamb and the lion/Shall lie down together without any ire, /And Ephraim be crowned with his blessing in Zion, /As Jesus descends with his chariot of fire! Outside, the world burns and burns and burns. 

Acting as a steward might mean not looking away. It might mean understanding more about the disasters around us. It might mean acknowledging that right now, we’re really bad stewards. The only belief I held onto was that belief was fickle, and that wasn’t from the church, it was something I decided, as a young girl, awake in the dark, wondering why God was so quiet. For so long, I wanted to make the complexity of leaving religion a simple thing, to label the church as “bad” and to label something inherently helpful like environmentalism as “good.” But there is so much in between: I can believe in environmentalism and still sit in my apartment and do nothing but write about how I’ve changed my mind. A different person could be an ecologist and a Mormon. A fire can be helpful. It can be unhelpful. It can be random or purposeful or damaging or beautiful, even if it needs to stop. 

Sometimes I really want to go back to that little girl, staring at the fires from the backyard, from the kitchen window, from the balcony. She was safe in one interpretation. How blessed it felt to be ignorant. To stare at the flames on the mountain in the daytime, to stare at the fire in the dark, to see them on their own, in this one space, scary for a second, and then contained. Taken care of. If I could go back now and take her spot, I’d gather my family, my community, together in my yard, point at the blaze and say, Look. Look at what we’ve done.

Abi Newhouse is a writer based in Washington, D.C. A graduate from George Mason University's MFA program, her work can be found in The American Scholar, Mud Season Review, Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, and others. Currently, she is a contributing writer at District Fray.