In the Beginning Was the Soil: Parking Lots, Concrete Tombs, and the Caretakers of the Non-Living
In the Beginning Was the Soil:
Parking Lots, Concrete Tombs, and the Caretakers of the Non-Living
first eternal words · before language · while God was hovering
Genesis 1:1 declares God's creative word over formless void to bring forth living order—soil, seed, tree, breath—but humanity now inverts this by paving living earth with non-living concrete, becoming caretakers of asphalt grids and dead matter while starving the living roots beneath, turning stewardship into domination and the garden's abundance into isolated, entombed refugees.
The opening verses of Genesis describe a world without form—darkness upon the face of the deep, void and waiting. Then the Spirit hovers, and God speaks. Light separates from darkness. Waters gather. And on the third day, the first living command: “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”(Gen 1:11). The soil becomes the womb of creation, bringing forth abundance before the sun and moon are set in the sky, before fish fill the seas or birds cross the heavens. In the beginning was not the word alone—the word spoke soil into being as the foundation of all living things.
Three a.m. again. Not with Augustine's Confessions this time, but with a different kind of marginalia—the margins of a city street, the cracked edges where sidewalk meets what was once earth. A single tree stands in a square of exposed ground, perhaps four feet by four, surrounded on all sides by asphalt. Its roots, denied the spreading room they require, have begun to buckle the concrete, a last protest against entombment. The parking lot stretches endlessly, a gray floodplain where no water soaks, where no seed takes root. This dead tree in its concrete tomb echoes the deeper inversion of stewardship—from garden abundance to sealed earth.
The third day's blessing was soil itself. “Let the land produce vegetation,” God commanded, and the land obeyed. But the command carried within it a design: soil was meant to be permeable, alive, breathing—a medium of exchange between sky and root, rain and seed. The Hebrew word adamah (ground) from which adam (human) was formed suggests an original intimacy. We were named from the very thing we were tasked to tend. Genesis 2:15 places the first human in the garden not merely to enjoy it, but le'avdah u'leshomrah—to work it and keep it. The verbs imply service and protection, not conquest and sealing.
But the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:26–28 has been contorted. The parking lot is the physical manifestation of an idea the historian Lynn White Jr. famously traced to certain strands of Christianity: that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.” White argued in 1967 that the faith bore “a huge burden of guilt” for the ecological crisis, and the subsequent quantitative literature largely assumed that dominion ideology is inherently anti‑environmental. Yet many Christian traditions—Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, evangelical—have pushed back, insisting that true dominion leads to self‑sacrificial care, not domination. An evangelical clergyman in Nigeria expressed what many hold: that dominion is stewardship, not a license to waste.
But something has gone wrong. Something is buried here.
The Food and Agriculture Organization defines soil sealing as “the permanent covering of the soil surface with impervious materials such as concrete or asphalt.” When soil is sealed, it loses its ability to absorb rainwater, regulate temperature, store carbon, and support life. Between 2019 and 2022, Germany alone converted an average of 52 hectares of land per day from natural to sealed surfaces. By 2050, nearly 70% of the world's population will live in cities, and fertile land continues to be lost at unprecedented rates. Urban areas can lose up to 50% of rainfall as runoff—ten times more than forests—while dark, sealed surfaces create heat islands that raise temperatures and energy demand. The soil that was commanded to bring forth life now lies buried, its functions disrupted, its community of organisms—insects, earthworms, fungi, plant roots—deprived of oxygen, nutrients, and space.
This is the inversion: we have become meticulous caretakers not of living gardens but of inert tombs. The same hands that were formed from dust now pour asphalt over dust. The same breath that received the Spirit's hovering now exhausts itself maintaining dead surfaces. And we tend the non‑living with priestly devotion—sweeping pavement, repairing cracks, painting fresh white lines, smoothing the gray skin of the lot. We sacrifice ecosystems for the god of storage and convenience. The mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it” was never a license to smother it. Yet the parking lot represents a form of subduing that leaves nothing alive beneath—we have become, in the most literal sense, priests of a concrete liturgy.
The tragedy is that soil sealing is not inevitable. Initiatives across Europe now promote unsealing—the renaturation of parking lots and paved surfaces into near‑natural green spaces. The district of Euskirchen in Germany has created partnerships to incentivize citizens to transform sealed areas back into biotopes, improving local water balance, creating habitats, and reducing urban heat pollution. The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service now provides high‑resolution data to monitor soil sealing and identify which soils are being lost—information that can guide targeted desealing efforts. These are small acts of resurrection, returning breath to buried ground.
At 3 a.m., standing at the edge of a parking lot, the question is not whether dominion was meant to be domination. The theologians have argued that for centuries, and the answer is clear enough for those who read the garden not as a resource but as a relationship. The question is whether we will recognize what we have become: caretakers of the non‑living, guardians of asphalt, priests of a concrete liturgy that offers no fruit, no shade, no seed. We pour, we smooth, we mark boundaries, we flatten—and call it progress.
The tree in its concrete tomb cannot answer. Its roots continue to push against the pavement, a slow insurrection. The soil beneath—if any remains alive—waits. It remembers the third day, when the command went forth and the earth brought forth vegetation yielding seed after its kind. It remembers that it was called good.
We were called to work it and keep it. Instead, we have sealed it and called it progress. But the ground still groans, and the cracks in the parking lot are its prayer.
▸ Soil sealing data: FAO, Copernicus, and German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis).
▸ “Unsealing” initiatives: Euskirchen district, North Rhine‑Westphalia.
First eternal words and everything. Begins before language. Everything. Begins in the void while God was hovering.
