Earthday

"Earthday" brought up some interesting theological discussions.

One politician, for example, said,

“The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’ On this Earth Day, and every day, let us pledge to our children, and our children’s children, that they will have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and the opportunity to experience the wonders of nature.”

Cybercast News Service repeatedly queried the speaker’s office for two days to determine where the alleged Bible quote is found. Thus far, no one has responded. …

Of course, the global warming controversy has yielded even more discussion about the theological implications and demands of care for the earth.

A brief analysis of the situation, including the fact that we have just had the coldest winter in a century, was posted by Josh S at Cruising down the Coast of the High Barabaree:

No one seems particularly interested in the fact that we experienced the largest single-year global cooling on record last year. Of course, if you're revised your gloom-and-doom label from "global warming" to "global climate change," you can still fit this into the paradigm of "Toyota is going to kill us all with their damn dirty Tundras." Now of course, over the next ten years, we could experience enough average warming to bring us back to the brink the Day After Tomorrow nightmare world we'd been always just on the brink of experiencing, but we don't really know.

From my own perspective, I have two governing thoughts:

1. The climate has always been in a state of flux. A static view of the world--even of its general statistical properties--is simply wrong.

2. Humans are part of nature, not external to it, and the elements of an ecosystem are always changing it. "Man" is not the antithesis to "nature."

That doesn't mean we can't change things in a way that's really, really harmful. Mercury in the rivers and cadmium in the soil are really, really bad things. I would suggest that we should leave the mountains where they are, too. Hunting animals to extinction just because we can is probably unnecessary. However, one of the facts of our world is that humans build cities and farms, and they burn things to get energy (combustion just isn't going away, folks). Sure, we can build and burn smarter, but we're not going to somehow do it so brilliantly that the world is going to to turn into a static system, or that its continual change will somehow have nothing to do with us. We are facts of nature just as much as volcanoes, hurricanes, and predator migration are.

So I guess all I really want to say is that I see no moral imperative to eliminate man's effect upon the environment, because it's simply impossible. I do think we should be smart about how we do things, but that doesn't mean frenetically searching for the world's "pause" button.

A good, more thorough, discussion of Environmentalism and a Christian view of Ecology is discussed by David Rossow.