I’ve been pushing hard all summer on a major writing project with the goal of finishing the intial writing by the end of September.  This is the main reason you’ve seen less posts on Our Father’s World than usual.  Sorry about that – but hopefully the end product will be worth the wait.

In the meantime, enjoy this video clip from Chipotle.  You may know that I’m not much of a fast-food advocate – but this company does seem different.

Enjoy and pass it along!

It has been a year of flood and drought.  This spring’s floods along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are old news to most of us, as is the ongoing drought in Texas, which is breaking records set as long ago as 1917, long before the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s.   

 But nowhere in the world are things as bad as what is happening in East Africa, not far from where Craig and Tracy Sorley are serving in Kenya. 

 The Worst Drought in 60 Years

“Once More Into the Abyss”.   That’s how the Economist news magazine described the developing drought in Kenya and other East African countries a week or so ago:

BLOATED bellies with stick arms and legs; huge eyes staring out of skeletal heads; gaunt mothers trying to suckle babies on withered breasts. The world thought it might never see such scenes again. Famine in Africa, absent for many years, appeared to have gone the way of diseases for which we now have cures or vaccines.

Yet, after the worst drought in 60 years, more than 10m people in the Horn of Africa need emergency food aid. Livestock have been annihilated. Hundreds of thousands of people are streaming into refugee camps in search of help. Malnutrition rates in some areas are five times more severe than the threshold aid agencies use to define a crisis. Many children are already dying of starvation.

Our people in Kenya – Craig and Tracy Sorley and their Kenyan team – live just to the south of the hardest hit areas.  Craig recently sent us the following email:

Dear All,

As I write this email there are roughly 10 million people requiring emergency food aid in the horn of Africa, with people by the thousands fleeing into Kenya and Ethiopia each day due to the extreme drought in Somalia (no rain for 2 whole years).  Closer to home many Kenyans can only purchase 2 pkts of maize flour at a time due to rationing, and according to the relatives of one of our  tree nursery staff members, most stores in Samburu District currently have nothing on their shelves to sell.  Even more distressing, we just learned that 8 women were killed in this same district yesterday due to violence that erupted over conflicts for scarce pasture and water resources.  In my recent visits to Mai Mahiu, just below our home in Kijabe, a similar story is unfolding.  Most farmers will experience only minimal harvest if not complete crop failure (see picture) due to a lack of rain during the most important stages of crop growth.

On a more hopeful note I have also seen a handful of farmers (in Mai Mahiu and Ndeiya) who are using Farming God’s Way and whose yields will be far better than those around them.  In the second picture (which I took just yesterday) you will see the difference that FGW is making in our current demonstration here at Moffat Bible College.  With all inputs being equal, the beans that were planted in the FGW plot are now 3 times as vigorous as the control plot planted in the conventional manner.

While we live in a hungry nation (and a hungry continent) we do have some very promising solutions to bring both spiritual and physical healing to communities.  It is my hope that we can all work together to expand the reach of CCK’s vision for God-centered environmental and agricultural stewardship.

Blessings,

Craig

Cutting Edge Strategy

It is more than interesting that the strategy Craig and his team have been pursuing through the Farming God’s Way program is exactly the kind of intervention that world food authorities are recommending.  The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has just released a reportin which they say,

Food security must now be attained through green technology so as to reduce the use of chemical inputs — fertilizers and pesticides — and to make more efficient use of energy, water and natural resources.

And

Evidence has shown that for most crops the optimal farm is small in scale and that it is at this level that most gain in terms of both sustainable productivity increases and rural poverty reduction can be achieved.

Not Food Aid but Famine Prevention

In the face of an impending crisis like the ongoing drought and famine in East Africa, it is common for organizations to appeal for funds to provide food aid.   At Care of Creation we don’t do food aid.  Lots of other organizations are involved in that kind of work, and we salute them.  What they are doing is important.  But we don’t have the staff or infrastructure, and our calling is different.  Rather then send you a picture of a starving child, describing the tragedy that is, we would rather you look at the healthy plants in the second picture above, and think about what could be.

What we’re doing is working to prevent the next famine, and the one after that.  If we can continue our work of training farmers to take care of their land ‘God’s way’, we will be giving these farmers, their families and their communities a foundation of resilience that will allow them to live more prosperously in the good years, and survive with a little less pain in the bad ones.

Craig and the team need your help, facing their own small drought of funding in the next month or two.  Chronically short of funds, they are overwhelmed with the needs that surround them.  Your prayers – and your gifts – will keep them going.

Floods in Kentucky - Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

Care of Creation, my organization, does a lot of work teaching people in Kenya and other East African countries about the dangers of destroying forests.  God gave us trees for good reason:  In terms of hydrology (water cycles), trees are essential.  They are like the columns holding up the roof of a building – lose the trees, the whole system falls apart.  It turns out that something very similar is going on in the Mississippi River watershed of middle America.  We’re a richer country – but it appears that mere wealth can’t stop a flood.  When we human beings carelessly destroy vital parts of the world God gave us to live in, it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re living in a village in Kenya or on a farm in Missouri.

Lost in the blizzard of headlines over the last week – tornadoes, weddings, the death of a terrorist – is the developing  flood situation in the Mississippi River valley.  The few stories that we’ve seen have focused on what one commentator called a solomonic dilemma:  Whether to save a small, struggling riverside city (Cairo, Illinois) or hundreds of thousands of acres of the country’s best farmland in Missouri.  That case has been all the way to the US Supreme Court in the last 48 hours, with the result that last night the Corps blasted two miles of levees at Bird’s Point, just south of Cairo in order to reduce the pressure on that community’s flood defenses.  As of this writing, the river has receded by a foot – the Corps hopes that they’ll see three more feet of decline in the next couple of days.

Of course, that’s only one city, and the Gulf of Mexico is a long way away.  Look for a lot more excitement on ‘Old Man River’ before it’s over:  This may take a month or more to play out.  But to give you a taste of what’s to come, here are some of the headlines today from Google News (search on ‘Mississippi River Flooding’):

Ohio River Sets New Record, Mississippi Waters Still Rising

Bloomberg - Brian K. Sullivan – ‎4 hours ago‎

The 6- to 10-day outlook from Commodity Weather Group LLC calls for below-normal rain in the southern US, including the Mississippi River valley. “These areas will be drier over the next 10 days, helping to ease the severity of flooding a bit for …

Isle of Capri Casino Hotel in Lula closed due to Miss. River flooding

Today’s THV - Amanda Terrebonne – ‎15 hours ago‎

(KTHV) — The Isle of Capri Casino Hotel announced Monday that as of 3 am central time on Tuesday, May 3, the casino will be closed temporarily until flood waters recede. “As the Mississippi River continues to rise access to our property has been …

Water reaches Tiptonville

State Gazette - ‎4 hours ago‎

Lake County, as well as other counties, is also experiencing rising water levels, both from the Mississippi river and rainwater. Lake County Mayor Macie Roberson stated the northern part of Tiptonville has begun flooding and almost 50 residences have …

As an aside, that last story may be the most important one in the list.  I’ve never heard of Tiptonville (it’s in western Kentucky), nor Lake County, nor Mayor Roberson.  Nor have you (unless this blog has a bigger reach than I expect).    But Tiptonville is a special place for all of the folks who live there, and who are heading into their own slow-motion version of what the tornado victims across the south experienced last week.   We measure disasters with numbers, but the reality is that every disaster is a collection of hundreds, thousands of individual human stories.  It’s people who will suffer in all of these events.

So what’s to be done?  There is not much you can do about tornadoes or earthquakes.  While there are suspicions that a warmer world may lead to more and stronger tornadoes, it appears that the link between climate change and tornadic activity isn’t there yet.   Like earthquakes, tornadoes are part of God’s world – we’ve got to learn to live with them.

Floods are a bit different.  In most places, the natural world doesn’t have drip irrigation.  Our water is delivered in batches.  When it rains, there will almost always be more than we need for the moment – sometimes so much more that we have a flood.  And then it will be dry, sometimes for a very long time.  In this sense, floods are part of the system by which the natural world runs.  And in fact, throughout most of history, floods would have been welcomed as nature’s way of restoring depleted soil with a fresh new layer of silt.

Care of Creation’s project area in Kenya comes to mind as an example of how a normal hydrological system should work.  In this region of East Africa, farmers have long counted on two rainy periods in the year:  The “long rains” come about now and last for six weeks or so.  The “short rains” come in November.  In between, hardly a drop falls from the sky.  In normal years, in normal times, this wasn’t a problem.  God’s creation and human beings had all adapted to this rainfall pattern:  During the brief, intense rainy periods,  the mountain forests acted like sponges, soaking up the rain when it came, and gradually releasing it into streams and rivers over the entire dry season.  Many mountain streams would flow year round, even during the months with no rain.

This system has been severely disrupted – almost destroyed – in East Africa.  Vast stretches of forest have been removed for firewood, charcoal, or to make room for farmland, and the result has been completely predictable:  Erratic rainfall (made worse by global climate change), floods when it does rain, contributing to massive erosion, and then droughts when it doesn’t.  I have personally stood with Kenyans who showed me a dry stream bed that used to flow year round when they were children.  The important lesson:  It is not God who dried up the streams.

We have a tendency to lecture people in countries like Kenya about how dangerous it can be to destroy the natural systems God has provided.  I give some of these talks myself.  Such lectures aren’t misplaced.  People in these countries tend to live closer to the edge than do those in, say, middle America, and when your country’s water supply is fragile anyway, destroying the forests that provide that supply is not ever a good idea.

All of this makes the following Google News entry quite interesting:

Mississippi Floods Can Be Restrained With Natural Defenses

NatGeo News Watch (blog) - Sandra Postel – ‎4 hours ago‎

As riverboat casinos close along the lower Mississippi River as a precaution against disastrous flooding, another form of river gambling is coming under the spotlight — the bet that levees will be able to safeguard cities and farms from the rising …

Take a minute and click through to read the story.  It turns out that here in the US we are doing with our natural wetlands what Kenyans have been doing with their forests:

Over the last three-quarters of a century, while engineers were building hundreds of miles of flood-control structures along the river’s banks, the water-holding wetlands in the Mississippi watershed were being drained and filled to make room for more farms and homes. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have each lost more than 85 percent of their wetlands.  Minnesota, where the Mississippi originates, has lost a whopping 9.3 million acres of wetlands, 62 percent of its pre-industrial total. All together, eight states of the upper Mississippi basin have lost 35 million acres of wetlands, an area the size of Illinois.

Those wetlands worked like a giant sponge: they absorbed rainwater and then released it slowly to nearby streams or the groundwater below. In this way, they mitigated floods and made the job of levees that much easier. But with these natural protections largely gone, levees have been left to do all the work.

So… we could say, with the Kenyan ladies of the cartoon, ‘God, why have you let these floods destroy our homes (again)?’ while looking out at acres of mall parking lots where wetlands used to be.  I think we’d get the same answer.

It’s not God’s fault.

It would appear that when we “pave paradise to put up a parking lot”, there are consequences.

Via Flickr-click for source image

["Old Literature" is an occasional series of posts on works from the past (and in some cases, the not-so-long-ago-past) that still speak today.  Here are some of the earlier posts.]

Wendell Berry maybe best known for his essays on agrarian (hence environmental and ecological) topics; his greatest work, to my mind, is in his novels, all of which take place in and around and concern the “membership” of Port William, a small river town in Kentucky.  My wife Susanna and I recently finished reading (aloud, of course!) Hannah Coulter, and we are now halfway through Jayber Crow.  Yes, I know we’re working backwards – that’s how life is sometimes.  Anyway – last night’s selection caught my attention and seems worth sharing.  Enjoy the selections – but better, get out and read the book!

Jayber, whose religion is real and deep and passionate and mostly of the unorganized variety, is the town’s barber – and gravedigger – and permanent bachelor – and, in this chapter, has just become the Port William’s church janitor.  Jayber’s  observations on the nature of the preaching (and preachers) in this rural church are important, and reflect Berry’s perception of a fundamental flaw in the Christian faith as practiced at that time and in that place:

We must lay up treasures in Heaven and not be lured and seduced by this world’s pretty and tasty things that do not last but are like the flower that is cut down [the preachers taught]…They [had] a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of his works – although they could tell you that this world had been made by God himself.

What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.  They had imagined the church, which is an organization, but not the world, which is an order and a mystery.  To them, the church did not exist in the world where people earn their living and have their being, but rather in the world where they fear death and Hell, which is not much of a world.  To them, the soul was something dark and musty, stuck away for later…

…This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.  To begin with, I don’t think anyone believed it.  I still don’t think so.  Those world condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes.  Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at.  By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best.  The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries.  While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of their children.  And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk.  And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish. [Jayber Crow, Counterpoint Press, p 160-161]

This kind of world-denying religion has largely passed from the scene.  In fact, some would argue that today’s evangelicalism has moved the pendulum far in the other direction – we are so in love with this world and its gadgets that we have lost a sense of the spiritual.  And they could be right. And in that, I don’t think Wendell Berry is any more impressed with our current love affair with everything that begins with a capital I (I-Pad, I-Phone, I-whatever) than he was with the gloom and doom gospel of rural Kentucky.

But still:  It is surprising to me how often I encounter people who  need to be convinced that this present world – the world of “good crops, good gardens” and “hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie” – is of value to the one who created it.  That it really is worth caring about.   It’s almost as if we are in love only with the world we have made ourselves – the world of gadgets and parking lots and gas stations.  Passionate about our technology, we still see God’s world as unworthy of our attention and effort and care.

What is sad about all of this is that it is so unnecessary.  There is no great divide between the visible and the invisible, the material and “spiritual”.    Jayber tells us that after church “they would go home to Heavenly dinners”.  The capital “H” on “Heavenly” is not accidental or incidental:  There’s a connection between Heaven and the dinner table at least when it (the dinner) is done right.  Have we forgotten that our experience with God begins with a marriage feast?  And that God so created this world that when looked at rightly, it would reveal true and permanent realities to us?  The heavenliness of Sunday dinner may say as much (or more) to us about God – his love of beauty, the goodness and yes, even the tastiness of his creation – as some sermons do.  “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

The answer is not to turn our backs on preaching – I am not suggesting we skip the sermon and go right to the pie.  Please – I am a preacher, this is my trade!  No, the answer is to bring the loveliness and beauty of God’s creation into the sermon.  That way we can have our cherry pie and eat it, too.

Long-time readers of this blog will remember John and Dorothy Priske of Fountain Prairie Farms in Columbus Wisconsin.  We’ve been friends for a couple of years and I’ve watched John and Dorothy’s progress as they have developed Fountain Prairie Farms. John stopped by one of my seminars in Madison a couple of years ago and stole the show, and the Fountain Prairie table at the Dane County (Madison) Farmer’s Market is the first place I stop just before Hook’s Cheese and Pecatonica Farm and the guy who sells me purple potatoes. I’m starting to learn that ‘eating local’ isn’t a principle – it’s participating in a web of relationships.

So when I turn on my television for the evening news, and my favorite farmer is featured – that’s exciting stuff! John and Dorothy were named ‘Wisconsin Conservation Farmer of the Year’ for their work at Fountain Prairie. Here’s the story, and here’s a clip:

What’s exciting about John’s vision is that it is a vision. John doesn’t only want to manage his land and cattle in a way that will heal the land – he is also working to find ways to encourage others. If you were to visit the farm during the growing season, you might see as many as a half-a-dozen other projects on the land – chickens, vegetable plots – being run by other folks, mostly young people, who want to learn this way of life and need a place (and an encouraging mentor) to help them do it.

You may never meet John and Dorothy. (If you live in Madison, I sure hope you try to – tell them I sent you, and be sure to try the pot roast!) But what they are doing is important for your world – and I’ll bet there are people in your community just like them. Look for those folks – and if you want to encourage my Farmer John, add a comment and I’ll pass it along to him!

This won’t be a surprise to those who paid attention to some of the serious weather events of 2010:  When Russia’s wildfires exploded, we heard that Russia would be banning wheat exports for the immediate future.  Then Pakistan lost an entire rice harvest and a good deal of wheat due to the worst flooding in that nation’s history – requiring Pakistan to import more than it normally would have done.  And now Australia’s floods are affecting not only coal but  wheat and other commodities.

We had a food-price crisis in 2008 – (see chart) – but that one appears to have been driven by a speculative and greedy market where investors who had no interest in food were grabbing futures contracts in the hope of exploiting the competition between eaters and drivers  in the rise of biofuels, particularly ethanol.  The Great Recession seemed to have provided some relief for eaters, and prices dropped back toward normal.

[Washington Post Graphic - click image for full size]

I’m not an expert – but this year’s food crisis seems to be different.  It is being driven by a disruption in supply, not by speculation in the market, and if this is the case, we need to be listening to people like Lester Brown who says “The new reality is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos.”

If you are an eater 0r a driver, you need to educate yourself on this story.  The Washington Post has a good story from last Saturday.  A couple of excerpts:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently warned that in December its food price index surpassed its previous peak of early summer 2008, fed by particularly sharp increases in sugar, cooking oils and fats. Corn and soy prices were also moving up quickly, with corn hitting a 29-month high Friday.

In Bangladesh, rice prices jumped 8 percent in December. In India, the price of onions soared 80 percent in just one week.

“Now everyone is having fears of going back to the levels of 2007-08,” said Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, a Barclays Capital commodities analyst.

Rising food prices may have been an ingredient in the instability in Tunisia that drove that country’s president, Zine el-AbidineBen Ali, from office Thursday…

Lester Brown has a report out this week on the topic:

Whereas in years past, it’s been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it’s trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and—due to climate change —crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future…

…The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to—that threatens our global future. Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will only trend upward.

Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge, is available here.

So what should a Christian response be? We need to open our eyes:  Big things are happening in our world, but Jesus warned us, didn’t he?  We need to practice stewardship in our own lives so we will be able to help others.  There are good biblical examples for this with remarkable parallels to our own day (rich Christians in one part of the world helping those in another part).  You can help practically by supporting organizations like Care of Creation - our Farming God’s Way program has great potential to increase food supply by making God’s earth healthier.

And some of us may be in a position to do more,  If we have the ear of those in authoriy, or the authority ourselves to modify policies or to move corporations who can make a difference, then the example of Esther probably applies.  Who knows but that God has placed you in the position you are in today for ‘such a time as this?’

Do we live in a world of limitations or one of potentially inexhaustible resources?

Wayne Grudem, writing in Politics According to the Bible, makes this rather astounding statement in an attempt to persuade his reader that there’s really nothing to worry about with regard to the global environmental crisis:

“Long term trends show that human beings will be able to live on the earth enjoying ever-increasing prosperity, and never exhausting its resources.” (p. 332)

I’ll be doing an in-depth review of Grudem’s book in the near future – let’s just say for now that it’s kind of hard to believe that he and I are living on the same planet.  Case in point: two different news items over the last couple of days:

1. From the BBC and the New York Times – Food prices are on the rise again:

World food prices continued to rise sharply in December, bringing them close to the crisis levels that provoked shortages and riots in poor countries three years ago, according to newly released United Nations data.

Prices are expected to remain high this year, prompting concern that the world may be approaching another crisis, although economists cautioned that many factors, like adequate stockpiles of key grains, could prevent a serious problem.

The United Nations data measures commodity prices on the world export market. Those are generally far removed from supermarket prices in wealthy countries like the United States. In this country, food price inflation has been relatively tame, and prices are forecast to rise only 2 to 3 percent this year.

But the situation is often different in poor countries that rely more heavily on imports. The food price index of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization rose 32 percent from June to December, according to the report published Wednesday. In December, the index was slightly higher than it was in June 2008, its previous peak. The index is not adjusted for inflation, however, making an exact comparison over time difficult.

Notice once again that it is the poor who are bearing the brunt of a mismanaged world system.

2. Something you probably have noticed more than food prices:  The price of energy also continues to rise, with predictions of $5 gas (in the US; it’s already well over that in many parts of the world, of course) and $100 per barrel oil:

“Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy,” Birol told the Financial Times. “The oil import bills are becoming a threat to the economic recovery. This is a wake-up call to the oil consuming countries and to the oil producers.” (The Guardian, citing a new report from the International Energy Agency)

Look for a lot more price disruption throughout the world (and your local) economy as the effects of the Australian floods on wheat and coal prices combine with the previous damage caused by the Pakistan floods last summer on wheat and cotton.  You might want to add to that list increasing difficulties in manufacturing electronics of all kinds because of a worldwide shortage of the rare earths necessary for their manufacture, 90% of which are subject to a new rationing system by China. A fascinating sidebar to this story comes from India, where it appears there are severe shortages of… sand. (A couple of years ago there was a trade spat between Singapore and Indonesia over the same commodity.  Who would have thought we’d ever run out of sand?)

It would be really nice to be able to believe with Grudem that we could live here forever without exhausting the resources on this finite planet.  I hope he’ll understand why I’m not quite convinced.

William Wordsworth’s most famous work is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Reflections of Early Childhood.” It is one of my favorite poems, exploring the lost pleasures of childhood that Wordsworth believes are hints of the immortality we left behind:

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

And again,

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Setting aside theological mysteries and controversies for another day, what has preoccupied me for that last month and a half has not been immortality, past or future, but increasing intimations of mortality:  My own,as I have experienced an unusual and thought provoking spell of genuine illness, something unusual for me; but also increasing intimations of mortality in the world in which we live, highlighted by the Gulf oil spill but buttressed by a host of other events.

First, my own encounter with mortality:  Around the first of July I started to experience unusual intestinal symptoms.  No, not what you are likely thinking but rather the opposite:  My entire system began to shut down – a phenomenon known in the medical world as ‘paralytic ileus’.  This continued for the better part of a month, and included several doctor’s visits, one trip to Urgent Care, one to the Emergency Room of our local university hospital, 24 hours in-hospital “observation” (whatever that means), and finally laparascopic surgery for an obstruction that turned out not to be there.  At the end of the experience, all I had was ‘Maybe you had a virus – and the surgery slowed your recovery.’

In the process, I lost 20 pounds in about two weeks.  I missed two conferences for which I had done much of the planning and in which I had significant leadership roles.   I would have told you 3 months ago that these events were among the most important things I would do all summer.  Instead I found myself just trying to get from one day to the next.  You will note that this is the first post in almost two months – now you know why.

The lesson I’ve taken away from this?  The reality of my own mortality.

Let me explain.

I had great plans this summer, important things to do.  People were depending on me. But all it took was a paralyzed intestine to blow the schedule to bits.  I have talents and abilities, thoughts and dreams, just as you do.  But it all depends on a body that works.  When the body doesn’t work, I don’t get much done.

There’s a bigger lesson here – the mortality of the human enterprise.

Consider the BP oil spill.   A company decides to drill for oil in deep water.  They’ve done it many times before, they know there is a lot of oil on this site.  They are convinced that chances of something going wrong are almost zero.  And if something were to go wrong, it’s almost impossible for them to imagine anything more than a minor problem that will be taken care of almost overnight.  But everything does go wrong.  The well explodes.  The “blowout preventer”, an expensive and intricate piece of equipment designed to be the final and fail-safe preventer-of-disaster of last resort turns out to be useless.  The result is more than 100 days of oil exploding into the Gulf of Mexico, billions of dollars lost, one of the world’s most profitable companies reduced to insolvency, hundreds of thousands of human lives disrupted, and unknown damage to some of the richest ocean waters in the world.

Of the millions of people living and working on the shores of the Gulf on the 19th of April, 2010, not one expected that their entire season – tourism, fishing, even oil drilling – was about to be canceled.  But it happened, and looking back from the vantage point of the present, it is hard to understand why we all didn’t see it coming.  Our economy, indeed our entire lives, rests on a foundation much more fragile than we want to think about.

And now bigger things are happening that should call us to the same caution about our biological foundations.  Hundreds of wild fires are blazing in Russia, amid a heatwave that the Russians claim is the worst in a thousand years. Torrential rains and mudslides in China that have wiped out a city and killed hundreds – maybe thousands.  And in Pakistan, a ‘super monsoon’ greater than any ever recorded before has affected more than 10 per cent of the population (15 million is the current number but that is certain to rise).  The flood has wiped out half of Pakistan’s agricultural land in the last two weeks (see the map).  Crop losses alone are in the billions of dollars after the first flood wave, and another is on its way as I write.   No one is yet able to calculate the cost of replacing roads, bridges, oil refineries and power plants.  One UN official guesses that this disaster is worse than the tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and the Haitian earthquake combined.

A friend was in the town of Gilgit, in the far north, when the floods hit.  Here’s his description:

All roads are blocked – to Hunza, to Ghizar & Chitral, to Kohistan and both Kaghan routes. The estimate is it will take 3-4 more weeks to re-open the [main highway]. So supplies are low – no diesel and increasingly less food. We are fine at the Serena but many people are suffering. Local floods and landslides have destroyed and damaged houses as well as taken lives, and the water channels people depend on for daily life as well as their crops have been heavily damaged.

In a phone conversation with another friend in the area I learned that in the same town banks are closing.  Why, are they out of cash?  No, they are running out of fuel to run their generators.

What is the long term outlook?  Here’s the first friend’s analysis:

The talk in Gilgit-Baltistan is about whether or not we are entering a phase of sustained environmental instability. The spectacular Attabad slide / dam from January followed by a summer unlike any seen for a long time raise questions about the stability and predictability of life in this region. Global warming is mentioned though some also mention a history of patterns like this, the previous one being almost a century ago. There is little doubt, however, that this level of natural activity, if sustained, will require significant human adaptation. For example, keeping any roads open to China and down country will become difficult. And now life here depends on those roads, unlike 50 years ago.

To summarize:  We modern humans have developed an increasingly complex society on the same fragile biological foundation we have always had to work with, without remembering how fragile that foundation really is.  ‘Six inches of topsoil…’  We have assaulted our foundation in a variety of ways, not least of which is, of course, climate change or global warming:

NEW YORK — Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says – although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. [AP via Wash Post][Picture is smoke from the Russian fires from a NASA satellite - click for larger image]

What is the solution?  When talking about climate change, scientists and policy makers usually speak of two different but complementary approaches: Mitigation and Adaption – and these approaches work with a variety of human problems:

Mitigation means trying to prevent  a bad, difficult or unpleasant situation from happening in the first place.  Adaptation means learning to cope after that situation has already happened.
In terms of my intestinal difficulties, mitigation involved trying to find the source of the problem and using various techniques to resolve the issue, up to and including my unsuccessful surgery.  Adaptation meant changing what I ate until I found something (like beef broth) that would go down and stay down and still provide me with some nutrition.

Mitigation with regard to the oil spill might have involved extra safety devices as are already in use in many other parts of the world, more inspections or even a decision not to drill in some places even if we can because the cost of a possible accident is simply too great.  Adaptation is what we’ve been watching for the last 100 days – and that experience alone is a valuable lesson that adaptation is always more expensive and more difficult than mitigation.

In terms of the climate change driven phenomena we are seeing this summer, it’s already too late to mitigate.  While we should do all we can to avoid additional green-house gas driven climate change, these fires and floods have already happened.  What these events show is that sometimes it is not just difficult, but actually impossible to adapt.  There is no way to prepare for a flood like that now devastating Pakistan, and you cannot do anything to lessen the impact of the hundreds of fires in Russia.  Both of these are minor events compared to many other predicted effects of climate change, like  increases in sea level.

What does all this mean?  It means we – the human race – are already reaping the harvest of centuries of abusing God’s creation.  We need to prepare for a difficult time ahead.  And we need to repent.  Perhaps God will hear:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.  2 Chronicles 7:14

[See also How Do You Pray About an Oil Spill?]

“Old Literature” is an occasional feature that highlights long-forgotten books, articles, speeches or poems that still speak to us today.  As it happens, there’s some new material that also deserves our attention.  Today, Tending to Eden by Scott Sabin, Director of Plant with Purpose (formerly Floresta).

Scott Sabin and I met about 7 years ago at a conference in Kenya.  He tells about that conference in his new book,Tending to Eden that was just released two weeks ago:

Edith and I took several pastors to a conference on creation care in Kenya.  I was one of the presenters, and in the course of my presentation I showed a slide of the devasted forests around Mt Kilimanjaro National Park.  Pastor Lyamuya approached me later and, with an embarassed smile, explained how convicting it was to see the photo from his own community.  “God entrusted it to us to take care of, and we aren’t doing our job.”

He returned home determined to make a difference.  Collaborating with a number of other pastors in the area, he encouraged all the churches to establish tree nurseries.  They required those going through confirmation classes to plant trees as a prerequisite to graduation.  As a result of these initiatives, nearly 500,000 trees have been planted. [page 68]

That conference was significant for many people:  It was sponsored by and was the first major public effort of the Brackenhurst Environmental Programme, the organization that was to become Care of Creation-Kenya two years later, sister organization to Care of Creation Inc. of which I am the Director.  We have known of many results from that first conference, but none of us at Care of Creation knew of these 500,000 trees until I read Scott’s manuscript a couple of months ago.

And that is probably the most encouraging thing about Scott’s book – he’s reminding us explicitly and implicitly that there’s a lot of good stuff happening in the world.  As bad as the environmental crisis is – and Tending to Eden will not let you off the hook on that score – there are people and organizations working, and working together, to make real and effective change happen.

I identify with Scott – we both came into the creation care movement inadvertently and involuntarily.  He joined Plant with Purpose to help respond to poverty by providing development in the Caribbean nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and now well beyond.  God brought him along a path that showed clearly how poverty, development and environmental degradation are inextricably entwined.  I came into the movement a couple of years later from the world of “ministry” – preaching, teaching, evangelism, church planting.  And God showed me just as clearly that the “gospel” is inextricably linked to caring for his world.

Tending to Eden is remarkable as well for speaking to a pressing issue in the world of foreign aid today:  How can we offer help without hurting people?  Scott and Plant With Purpose are offering a model that offers hope and help in a way that is comprehensive, holistic – and successful.

Check out the book here, and Plant With Purpose’s website here. Or find out more about the book here.  It’s worth it.

Flourish Online Magazine has been running a feature celebrating the 30th anniversary of the publication of Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Gift of Good Land”.  This essay draws lessons on “ecological and agricultural responsibility” not from Genesis 1 or 2 or even Romans 8, but from the Old Testament story of God’s gift of the Promised Land to Abraham and his descendants:  “a divine gift to a fallen people.”  And that certainly applies to us, doesn’t it?

Read the essay here, and comments from many leaders in the field of creation care here.  Below is my contribution to this collection…

On being introduced to the world of Christian environmental stewardship about ten years ago,  I found early on that I had a lot of catching up to do.  Wendell Berry was one of the authors I was directed to  who has taught and continues to teach me.  Evidently, this is true of many of my colleagues as well.  It is a privilege to be counted among those who have sat at Wendell’s feet and learned from him, and I am sure I am not the only one who wishes that that learning could have been in person rather than through the pages of his books.

“The Gift of Good Land” appeals to me not only for what it says, but for the method that Berry uses to discover the truths he wants to share.  This is not so much an essay as a sermon, in the very best sense of the word.  His purpose is twofold: “I want to attempt a biblical argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility” and “to examine the practical implications of such an argument.”  I’m not sure how Berry would feel about this analysis, but really, what he’s giving us is an old-fashioned expository message from scripture, complete with exegesis and application.  I know more than a few pastors who could learn from this essay.

This explains to some degree the timelessness of Berry’s message.  He has built his argument directly on the timeless truths of scripture, and he has done so carefully and, look – without using Genesis 1 or 2.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those two chapters, but they are used a lot in building the case for Christian environmental stewardship.  To the contrary, Berry leads us into one of the most important parts of the entire story of redemption, the gift of the Promised Land to Abraham and his descendants and thereby shows us how the principles of stewardship and ecological responsibility can be found on almost every page of the Bible.

The lessons Berry draws from his exposition call us to gratitude, neighborliness and good husbandry.  He reminds us, in one of my favorite lines, that “it might be easier to be Samson than to be a good husband or wife day after day for fifty years.”  These admonitions are useful and balanced because they are biblical.  One of the biggest challenges the environmental movement faces is to figure out what to do with people.  We are, without question, a blight on the landscape, but that is because we’ve lived and used creation selfishly and arrogantly – sinfully, as it were.  Berry gives us permission and shows us how to live in creation:  Not carelessly, nor greedily, but with thankfulness, wonder and awe:   “When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament.”

Learning to do this in the present is our task.  With new technologies appearing every hour, we could do much worse than to follow Berry’s example in returning to the Book itself for guidance.