Carol Johnston

“HEC has figured out how to work on environmental issues in a largely conservative state.”

Carol’s first memories of nature come from those small moments: playing in the mud and the creek in Georgia as a kid, spending years of her childhood in the Rockies, and getting to touch, taste, smell, and hear nature, living in several places across the Americas (she was born in Panama) as the child of an Army officer and a radical feminist.

Her love and concern for the environment grew during graduate school, when she worked at the Incarnation Center, a summer camp in Connecticut. While there, she learned about protecting at-risk plants and trees, got to observe an osprey living on the lake, learned about spring warbler migration, and so much more.

Carol’s career has been dedicated to the connections between creation care ministry, economics, and ecosystems. One example in an exemplary career: Her doctoral dissertation was a theological history of how economics in capitalism and Marxism ended up leaving both human and natural communities completely out of the equation. “We are still totally dependent on the natural world,” says Johnston. “But societally we have a very unhealthy relationship with it.” She cites figures like the Prince of Wales, who advocates for a shift from working against nature to learning from and working with nature’s unlimited creativity, and Alfred Marshall, an architect of capitalist theory, who stated that it was a mistake to make unlimited production – rather than unlimited health of all things – the goal of a capitalist society.

Carol also worked with Indiana’s former first lady, Judy O’Bannon, on a highly regarded public television documentary on Indiana’s everyday environmental champions.

Carol says she’s especially impressed by HEC because the organization, with Executive Director Jesse Kharbanda at the helm, has figured out how to work on environmental issues in a largely conservative state. She admires the way in which HEC works under the assumption that anyone can be a part of environmental change regardless of their political beliefs.