In his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells the story of a sailor cursed by his killing of a mystical albatross and lost at sea as a consequence. As their provisions run out, the sailors begin to sense their impending doom. Parched and thirsty, the mariner looks out upon the sea surrounding him and laments, “Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink.” I have found it hard recently not to think of these lines as I have been escaping the bitter northeastern winter during a semester on leave in southern California. Standing at the coast, looking out upon the Pacific Ocean, it does indeed appear that there is “water, water every where.” Yet if one follows the news, one might begin to fear that there is not a drop to drink.

California is in the midst of a severe drought, currently at three years and counting. It is the worst since an extended six-year drought that lasted from 1987 to 1992. According to the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California, the current drought, which began in 2012, “includes the driest three-year stretch in 120 years of recordkeeping. This drought has been more widespread than most, covering the entire state. The year 2014 was also the hottest on record, which made conditions even drier” (“California’s Water:Managing Droughts,” April 2015). Among the drought’s consequences have been substantial reductions in groundwater supplies, revenue and job losses in agriculture, and environmental dangers to threatened species or ecosystems. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, which supplies water as it melts throughout the warm season, is also at historically low levels; by the beginning of April, it was at only about 5 percent of its average water content for that point in the year.

Governor Jerry Brown responded on April 1 by proclaiming a drought state of emergency. After having encouraged localities in 2014 to pursue voluntary reductions of twenty percent—actual reductions proved to be about half that amount—he this time announced the first mandatory water usage reductions in California history. The reductions do not affect agriculture (a significant omission, since agriculture accounts for much of the state’s water usage), but they require towns and cities to reduce their water usage by 25 percent. Though the implementation details are still being worked out, a reduction of this magnitude is clearly a tall order, and no doubt a harbinger of things to come.

Reactions to an event like the current California drought tend to take one of two forms. The first, well represented by Governor Brown’s mandated reductions, is the conservation impulse. If we face the prospect of having too little water, then obviously we should use less of it. We should take shorter showers. We should stop hand-washing our cars and hosing off driveways. We should cut back on watering our lawns. Indeed, we should probably remove the lawn altogether, opting instead for drought-resistant, native plants and other forms of landscaping, since about half of urban water usage in California is now outdoors. Farmers may need to move out of water-intensive crops like almonds. This impulse tells us to cut back, to use less, to shepherd our dwindling supplies of a precious resource.

The second type of reaction is the impulse to innovate our way out of the dilemma. For example, we can mandate low-flow shower heads and low-flush toilets in new construction. Or farmers can adopt more efficient methods of irrigation that waste less water. (Though ironically, because irrigation run-off contributes to groundwater repletion, this also reduces the rate of groundwater replenishment.) We can recycle wastewater, purifying it sufficiently to make it safe for household use. Or we can turn to something more dramatic, like desalinization plants, a tempting (though expensive) option when one is sitting next to the Pacific Ocean—and, I suppose, the ultimate “says you” to the Ancient Mariner’s lament that there is water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

These are not mutually exclusive impulses. For one thing, innovations like the shower heads or improved irrigation systems are often aimed at conservation. More importantly, it is obviously possible both to conserve and to innovate at the same time. We can switch to drought-resistant landscaping and build desalinization plants simultaneously, if we can afford it. Nevertheless, I suspect that most of us instinctively react to news of the drought primarily in one of these two ways. For some of us, the first instinct is to use less water; for others, it is to look for new techniques of finding usable water where before there was none. Some of us are conservers by temperament, others innovators.

Both of these impulses, it seems to me, have a justification in Christian theology. The conservation impulse we might think of as representing a stewardship model. In giving human beings dominion over the creation, God has called us to be stewards of the natural environment and its resources. We are not to be careless or wasteful. We should not impose burdens on our fellow citizens or on future generations in order to enjoy luxuries like long showers or pristinely manicured lawns. If almonds require too much water, we can eat fewer almonds. We can drive dirty cars. (I sometimes think that I drive the dirtiest car in California.) We can accustom ourselves to golf courses that are not quite as green or to the peculiar beauty of cacti. And we should avoid the hubris of thinking that we can have it all, that we can indulge all of our desires without limit and without cost.

The innovating impulse reflects a more entrepreneurial model. As creatures made in God’s image, humans have been blessed with reason, freedom, and the ability to imitate and participate in God’s creative activity. We are not intended to remain fully confined by the only apparent limits of the natural environment; rather, we can use our ingenuity and creativity to transform those limits and improve the quality of life for ourselves and for others. If agriculture uses too much water, the response is not to abandon certain crops or give up particular foods but rather to develop new and more efficient methods for obtaining, transporting, and using water. Or we can develop innovative schemes for tradable markets in water rights. And if we need freshwater, and we have massive quantities of saltwater readily available, let’s by all means figure out how to take the salt out of the water. If the danger the steward seeks to avoid is hubris, the entrepreneur is more concerned not to be the servant who buried his talent in the ground and was criticized by his master as a result.

On the one hand, then, we have a desire to be stewards of the creation, and a wariness of the hubris that would deny human limitations. On the other hand, we have an embrace of the distinctively human capacities for reason and creative activity, and a fear of the sloth or cowardice that would refuse to embrace them. Two very different instincts—not mutually incompatible, to be sure, but nevertheless pointing in different directions—but each with its plausible justification rooted in fundamental tenets of the faith. These instincts routinely confront each other, moreover, not only in the context of the California drought, but in a range of ­environmental contexts, from climate change to fracking disputes.

According to the canons of clever and persuasive writing, now is the point in this essay when I should tell you which of these two impulses is the right one, which is the more authentically Christian. Unfortunately, I haven’t the faintest idea which that is. Both impulses seem to me authentically Christian. Both appeal to an important Christian value: stewardship in the one case, humans’ co-creative role in the other. Both caution against a genuine evil: in the one case the denial of limits; in the other what we might call a form of insufficient faith in our own God-given abilities. By instinct and temperament, I myself am probably more of a conserver than an innovator, but I don’t believe that conservation alone can solve California’s looming water crisis. We will need innovators also.

This suggests the somewhat obvious and even boring conclusion that responses to the drought will need to reflect both approaches, combining elements of stewardship with elements of entrepreneurship. As I have already noted, the two impulses, though they point in different directions, are not incompatible. The recommendations of the Water Policy Center, for example, contain examples of both approaches. They suggest that low-water landscaping, improved groundwater management, tradable water rights, recycled wastewater, and limited desalinization may all play a role in dealing with the drought. Effective solutions require a variety of responses.

At a deeper level, however, the tension between these two impulses may also suggest something about the kinds of political processes that Christians should defend. If I am right that most people lean instinctively toward either the stewardship or the entrepreneurial model, but also that both approaches are theologically justified, then Christians have good reason to support robustly democratic and deeply representative political structures for responding to the drought (or to other, similar problems). It can sometimes seem as though environmental disputes deteriorate into a shouting match between those who believe that all human intervention in the natural world is evil and those who believe that Yankee ingenuity can invent a way out of any dilemma. What we should really want, however, is a system in which farmers, engineers, salmon fisheries, environmental organizations, golf course owners, carwash operators, urban residents, household consumers, and all the many other relevant interests are represented, and in which the conservers and the innovators within all these groups can advance their best ideas and check each other’s worst excesses. Even with such a system, of course, we might still manage to blow things. But we would have done the best we could have reasonably hoped to do.

In fact, a system of this sort—one that seeks to represent the many interests in society and the diverse perspectives that Christians may be led by their faith to take—may itself be an appropriate embodiment of Christian charity. If each of us brings only a partial perspective to difficult policy debates, then we should not want our own voice to speak so loudly that it drowns out all the others. If we truly care for the creation, and more importantly if we care for the men and women who depend upon that creation with us, then, whatever our own instincts, we should defend a political process that incorporates both stewards and entrepreneurs. In doing so, perhaps we seek to live out the final lesson with which Coleridge’s ancient mariner takes his leave:

He prayeth well, who loveth well,
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Peter Meilaender is Professor of Political Science at Houghton College. This essay was written with the help of research support from Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, which is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The views expressed are solely those of the author.