Chester Ronning Centre (CRC) at University of Alberta Augustana Campus held an informative conversation on February 12, bringing together two accomplished scholars in religion, ecology, and ethics, who shared insight into the connections between water, morality, and human responsibility. The public talk was facilitated by Dr. Joseph Wiebe, director of CRC.

The guest speakers joining the conversation were Dr. Kimberly Carfore, adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco and founder of Wild Women; and Dr. Christiana Zenner, associate professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University. Together, they reflected on their professional journeys and explored how women’s leadership, ecological knowledge, and ethical awareness can shape responses to modern environmental challenges.

Carfore, who also serves as co-chair of the Religion and Ecology Unit at the American Academy of Religion and sits on the advisory board for the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, spoke about her work integrating spirituality, environmental education, and outdoor practice. Carfore explained how she wandered into her field, after a life changing encounter with a copperhead snake. This experience transformed her perspective on the world and spirituality.

She’s explored these themes in her various publications, particularly in the chapter “Doing Theology with Snakes: Face to Face with the Wholly Other” from Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-than-Human World, edited by Matthew Eaton, Timothy Harvey, and Trevor Bechtel.

Carfore’s nonprofit Wild Women, is a space where she encourages women to reconnect with the natural world using place-based learning, and community dialogue.

She explained that her approach centres on helping people understand their relationship to the environment through direct experience, rather than abstract theory. “When I think about the self, I think about the environment that shaped me. I grew up on Lake Huron in Michigan, where it was about five minutes to the Blue Water Bridge where you can see Ontario. Being close to water, I thought a lot about boundaries,” she shared. “Ecological boundaries are different from nation or state boundaries,” she continued.

Zenner expands on those themes through her research and advocacy in water justice. Her academic work focuses on how ethics, power, and environmental systems intersect, particularly within the framework of Catholic social teaching, feminist theory, and anti-colonial analysis. She is the author of Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Global Fresh Water Crises and has worked extensively on issues of equitable access to clean water.

Fun fact: one blogger once speculated that Zenner may have influenced the late Pope Francis’ encyclical, because of his environmental views. A story she shared with much pride.

She emphasized that water scarcity and contamination disproportionately affect marginalized communities, making water justice not only an environmental issue, but also a social and moral one.

“I currently live in New York City, which is a very different kind of topography, both in terms of human geography and physical place. When I first moved to the East Coast from the semi-arid west, the plains of Colorado, I remember being completely stunned by the Hudson River and the abundance of lush natural greenness at all times of the year, and it floored me because my understanding of water was one predicated upon scarcity and seasonal rhythms. The Platte River in Colorado, where I grew up, is a tiny trickle,” she explained, comparing the two rivers in size, and behaviours.

“One of the reasons I came to work on water is that I had long been enthralled by this substance,” added Zenner.

Throughout the discussion, both speakers stressed the importance of ethical leadership and collective responsibility and how it translates into real-world-environment.

Zenner reflected on the role water has played in theology, specifically in Abrahamic religions. She shared the story of Hagar, or Hajjar, and how across all three Abrahamic faiths her journey is inseparably bound to water. Through Hagar and Ishmail’s desperate struggle for survival, water emerges as a divine intervention and a sacred gift that transforms despair into deliverance highlighting the essential role water plays in sustaining life.

The event offered a thoughtful examination of how faith, ethics, and ecology intersect, encouraging attendees to consider their own relationship with water and the broader environment. Carfore and Zenner presented a compelling case for rethinking humanity’s connection to the natural world.