Listening to Heidi Steltzer speak, she can sound a little eccentric.
Back in February, on Valentine’s Day, Steltzer spoke on a panel about stewardship of the La Plata Mountains and renewed mining interests in the region.
She floated ideas that some might describe as New Age or spiritual. Phrases like “spiritual crisis” and “collective wisdom.” Questions such as: “Imagine if you didn’t own the land you own, because it isn’t really yours?”
It is the kind of language that can make traditional scientists uneasy.
Which is notable, because for most of her career, Steltzer was one of them.
The former Fort Lewis College professor has a masters and doctorate in climate science and spent decades studying mountain ecosystems and climate change.
She testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology; contributed as a lead author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate; and built a career publishing peer-reviewed ecological research filled with terms like “allelopathy,” “soil biota” and “leaf litter composition.”
Now, in her early 50s, Steltzer has made a sharp pivot from traditional Western academia to more spiritually focused academics. Last year, she enrolled at theology school.
Why? Steltzer is not entirely sure.
She said she followed what felt like a gravitational pull that had been strengthening over the past eight years, as her own “internal climate” began shifting in increasingly clear ways.
She had grown frustrated with the rigid, “in-the-lines” expectations placed on her as a professor at Fort Lewis College. At the same time, she found herself thinking more deeply about what it actually means to help people and questioning whether the traditional scientific approach to climate change was working.
“I started to see science in a whole new way, and with that couldn’t keep teaching in a way that was as constrained as it is in Western education,” she said.
Part of climate science, she said, is rooted in the idea that “you want to save the world.” For decades, many climate scientists operated under the assumption that if they presented people with enough evidence, society would respond accordingly.
Steltzer no longer believes that model works.
Increasingly, she felt the approach was failing – not because the science was wrong, but because information alone was not changing how people related to one another or to the planet.
Steltzer argues that much of what currently falls under the banner of climate work amounts to incremental changes that preserve existing systems rather than work that creates real, significant transformation.
She believes theology school is a place where “other ways of knowing” can be treated as equal. Faith traditions, she said, contain wisdom that science alone cannot provide, and might be the key to more effective climate solutions.
At school, she has become more open to the idea that the Earth and environment can function as a kind of faith system; a system that offers wisdom, lessons and knowledge that could help humanity address not only climate change, but broader social problems, if people became more receptive to listening to the Earth itself.
Ecosystems, she said, may contain lessons humans have ignored, not just biologically, but socially and morally.
“Plants know how to live in community with one another,” she said. “They are brilliant at it.”
There is a growing scientific understanding of underground fungal networks through which trees share nutrients across species, she said. To Steltzer, those systems raise broader questions about reciprocity, mutual care and how humans organize their own communities.
“Do we help other species? Which other species do we help?” she said. “How are our choices different from how a tree makes those choices?”
That line of thinking has gradually pushed her beyond the traditional boundaries of climate science and into theology, philosophy and ethics.
“If the Earth has been trying to teach us something, and we’ve been ignoring it because it doesn’t fit into narrow empiricism, what have we missed?” she asks. “We need science. But we also need theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology – all in the room together.”
In some contexts, she said, it may be even more effective to move beyond explicitly framing work around climate change and instead focus on equity, well-being, human flourishing and faith – efforts that still materially support climate goals.
“The Earth will tell us what to do,” she said.
This is the part that makes some colleagues nervous.
People have told her to be careful, or insist what she is describing is no longer science. But she has also heard good feedback.
After one of her talks, a scientist approached her and said: “You’re doing it.”
The woman, Steltzer said, felt she had spent too long confined within a narrowly defined scientific “box,” while Steltzer was allowing herself to evolve beyond the singular identity of “scientist.”
Next, Steltzer is going to complete a residency in ecotheology with a United Church of Christ congregation on the south side of Denver, a church whose primary ministry is care for creation.
Beyond that, her plan is looser and aspirational.
Steltzer has a property in Montezuma County that she imagines turning into some sort of community center that could host rural residencies and summits, complete with an outdoor reading space and a curated library of 2,000 to 3,000 books spanning faith, ecology, business, philosophy and other disciplines.
Or it could be a place of learning, but one without grades or tests, but rich conversation and shared inquiry.
For now, she is still figuring out the practicalities.
“I’m better at dreaming things than I am at all the nitty-gritty of making it happen,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t really know what’s going on, but I’m just running with it. … That’s faith.”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
