Rev. Dr. Gregory Simpson, Science and Spirituality
"Essentially, I got to meet the humanness in the problems I was dealing with. All along, I was just measuring things. I could tell you how many parts per million of an antibiotic was in milk, and I knew this was wrong. I wasn't looking at it through the human suffering associated with it, I was looking at it through the numbers. When I started to see the numbers in their humanness, through the struggles and the loss of life and the oppression of people, that painted another picture for me and made the different issues become a whole."
Dr. Gregory Simpson is the Pastor of Nauraushaun Presbyterian Church and Co-Founder & Senior Education Consultant of Learning for Life Solutions LLC. He is an active board member of the Spirituality and Sustainability Global Network.
What are your origins - where was your upbringing and what was it like? How have these things informed your passion for the work you do now?
I was born in Glasgow Scotland, where my parents studied at the University of Edinburgh. My dad studied electrical engineering my mom studied food technology. When I was 2, my family moved back to Jamacia, and most of my young years were spent there. At about age 6, we left Jamacia and came to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my dad studied hospital engineering. We later moved back to Jamaica, where I finished all my schooling and got a doctorate in organic chemistry. I worked in Jamacia for four years and came to the U.S., where I worked as a post-doc research fellow for UMass medical school. After that, I moved to New York City, and have lived there since 2010. That's the big picture. My adolescent years in Jamaica specifically oriented me towards issues of the environment. After my Ph.D., I started working in the Ministry of Agriculture as a food safety laboratory manager, where I managed a national program, and that was when I started focusing on issues of the environment. The role opened my eyes to what contaminants can look like, from heavy metals, to industrial waste contamination in the soil, to pesticides and antibiotic residues in milk and eggs. That was when I started understanding the significance of environmental issues. Jamacia is predominantly people of color, so I didn't have to wrestle with issues of race - it was just an issue of the environment. When I came to the U.S., I got a different sense and flavor of what the race issue meant as it related to issues of environment and ecology, dealing with issues systemically. By the time I arrived at seminary, I was focused on 2 things - issues of environment and issues of education. Both of them go hand in hand.
Why did you decide to move from working as a scientist to studying theology and becoming a pastor?
There are a couple of reasons. After a while, you do things so often that you become very competent at them and comfortable with them. After that post-doc, I realized I could somehow explain (with science) any problem that was thrown at me - I could usually figure out what was going on and why it was happening. Later on in my post-doc, the question that bothered me was WHY things were happening. My focus at that time was pregnancy-induced hypertension, and I studied the physiology of pregnancy. It blew me away. All my life, I'd studied plant chemistry. When I got to UMass medical school, it was the first time I'd engaged in physiology and anatomy, and I was astonished when I began to understand all the genes that were involved in regulating the pregnancy process. I could figure out how things were happening, but that never answered the question of why. That question of why couldn't be answered in a lab. It had to be answered somewhere else, and that is when I started inquiring about the spiritual instead of just the scientific. That experience prompted me to do a deeper study in theology and lead me to walk away from the laboratory perspective of my scientific work to studying theology, the bible, and connecting with religious groups. That was the biggest shift that took place in my life, in terms of my mindset and how I thought about things. I was focusing on why things happened as opposed to how. The more I studied, the more I realized there was a parallel track between the sciences and theology.
During the discussion panel you hosted on climate justice and environmental racism, activist Mustafa Ali said - "Whether it's the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc, no matter which book it is, they’re all leading us in the right path." How can we approach faith and spirituality from a place of unity rather than opposition?
The first step is having respect for humanity, for life, because all traditions that seek to identify a connection between the lived experience and god, a deity, strive to out of respect for that diety. In all of these traditions, the Abrahamic traditions and the non- Abrahamic traditions, there is sanctity that is related to life, valuing life through the lens of the diety. Once you have that framework in mind, if you follow those tenants, it is very difficult to dismiss another. Whatever diety you are identifying with is reflected in humanity in its broadest sense. The holistic nature of our response to God (a deity) is that the diety takes care of us and we take care of ourselves in worship to that deity. For that to happen, you must have respect for the other. It doesn't work like that in reality. People have biases, prejudices, and differences. These differences in behavior, culture, ethnicity, and religiosity all weigh into how we interact with each other. Someone will say, "I cannot be supportive of Jews/ Christians/ Muslims/ Buddhists." You can't do it because you can't see it through the ubiquitous experience of god shown through humanity, not in groups of individuals. It's a principle that is problematic for most of us.
I want to hear more about environmental justice and climate justice. How did you become involved in this work, and can you talk about the issues?
Moving to the U.S., I was very clear on issues concerning the environment, especially concerning contaminants, whether it be heavy metals in the soil or antibiotics in the milk. I understood that this was a problem. I came to the U.S. and ended up in seminary, which exposed me to the difference between biology and chemistry and the human suffering that went along with it. It also pointed to the systemic issues that we're now seeing defined as environmental racism, where communities of color are contaminated, they live beside petrochemical plants, dumps, fossil fuel refineries, or fracking sites. What I got exposed to were the social justice aspects of why that was wrong. I knew why it was wrong scientifically, but I didn't have an understanding of the social justice components and the activism that flows around it, and why it flows around it in that way.
Environmental racism, environmental justice, climate justice - these are all functionally related not just to civil rights issues but also to scientific issues, education issues, civil responsibility issues, and social contract issues. It's tied up in a very human experience, in our religiosity. You can't separate the science from the lived experience or the theology from the science. They're all intertwined. You can't see that easily unless you go and experience something in a certain space, you do the mapping. Once you see the maps, your life has to change. You'll either reject it as a fallacy, or you see the truth in it and act differently. That's where I have landed with my work.