an introduction

My name is Logan Crews; I'm a 23-year-old dancer, writer, geoscientist, Dolly Parton fan, and I'm a member of the Episcopal Church's delegation to the 2023 United Nations climate change conference, COP28.

I am a new seminarian, studying at Yale Divinity School, having recently graduated college from Trinity University with a degree in Earth System Science and French. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri before moving to San Antonio, Texas for school, but really, any time I am outdoors in nature, I'm home. Like many, I find God in the trees, in the water, in the dust floating back to the desert floor after a lone car kicked it up on a two-lane road. 

I find God when I'm dancing, too. Better yet, when I'm dancing outside. 

On a church trip to West Virginia when I was 15, my youth group from Emmanuel Episcopal hiked and went up an old fire lookout tower to see the sun set in the mountains. After I saw it dip below the tallest blue ridge, I climbed back down, ventured out into the field in front of the tower, and I danced. I danced barefoot in zig zags across the field, pulling steps from ballet class that launched me above the tall grass and inflated the bottom of my dress with air like a balloon. There was no music, but I danced, and God was there.

For the next week, I will be posting thoughts, reflections, resources, and other information on this blog as I participate as a virtual delegate in COP28. I feel blessed to be one of the youth on this delegation representing the Episcopal Church as we plug into the fight against climate change because younger generations like no others feel the urgency with which we must act. And yet, it barely starts or ends with COP.

As an Ecojustice Fellow for the Episcopal Church, I talked to so many people from diverse backgrounds within the church about the environment and God. Most of the time, nitty gritty policy had no place in our conversations. Most of the time, there weren't big words that only a climate scientist would understand. 

Most of the time, we told stories. Times we felt God's presence in nature, when we learned how to use certain plants in our cultural traditions, or what it was like to have church outside. Also, stories about how our environments have been disrupted. How people are already being displaced or facing health effects from environmental racism and classism exacerbated by a warming world. Discomfort. Anger. Despair.

Even as someone who has sat with climate data for many long nights, studying paleoclimates and previous mass extinctions that are eerily familiar, it's never a number that gets me to care. In fact, the data can be numbing. It's always hearing the stories of my neighbors that reminds me of my moral responsibility to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. It's hearing their experiences with the changing earth that propels me to seek justice for the most vulnerable communities who have already been slammed with negative impacts despite contributing the least to the problem.

You don't have to be a geoscientist. You don't have to be a journalist. You don't have to go to COP. We are all a part of creation, and we all have stories. Tell yours and listen to others'. This is where it all begins.

I ask for your prayers for the next week, and I pray for you reading this that you would know how important your stories are to the health of our planet and our neighbors in creation.

I'm dedicating myself to fighting climate change because if we don't act drastically now, the already groaning earth, our human siblings, and all friends in creation will suffer at a level we can't fully comprehend.

I'm dedicating myself to this fight because somewhere in the mountains in West Virginia, it was safe to take off my shoes and dance in the grass when I was 15 years old, and God was there. 

And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’  —Matthew 25:40 NRSV