Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

The evangelical creation care movement, though almost invisible to many, has been around for quite a few years.  One of its most visible historical markers is probably the founding of Au Sable Institute in 1979, thirty-three years ago now – but well before that date there were many individuals and a few small organizations seeking to promote what was then called ‘Christian environmental stewardship.’  There are many more of us now, and there is a lot of good work going on, but we still fly below the radar in most cases.

So it was enlightening and important that many of the current key players in this movement were on the phone together last week to share what we’re all doing, and perhaps more to the point, what God is doing to continue to foster and strengthen this movement.

Here’s a brief summary with bullet points of the highlights.  [If you’d like to hear a recording of the phone call yourself, just call  (507) 726-4220 and choose to listen to recording #1.]  Read more »

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Dancing at a Pakistani wedding is a safer celebration than gunfire. It's an analogy we can stand to learn in God's "what goes up, must come down" creation.

“What goes up, must come down,” is one of those multi-purpose aphorisms, functional on the natural level as well as the moral.   A physicist might use it to describe the Law of Gravity.  A preacher might recite it in a sermon on Galatians 6:7: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Last week, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab reported that global carbon-dioxide emissions saw their biggest one-year rise, a 6 percent jump in 2010.  (The report is linked here.)  Tom Boden, director of the lab, calls it a “big jump.”  His colleague, Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, was a bit more descriptive: it’s a “monster” increase, Marland said.  Part of the monstrosity no doubt is how the study indicates that emissions are now growing faster than what the IPCC projected as a worst-case scenario in its 2007 report.  A worsened pace of carbon emissions will result in higher projected temperature averages (up now to 5.2° C by 2100, according to MIT models.)

What goes up—including CO₂ molecules—must come down, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it may take 100 years or so.  It is true that our planet’s oceans and vegetation act as carbon sinks, that is, they absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, albeit at a rate slower than what industrial society and natural processes are emitting it.   A single molecule of CO₂ will float unmolested in the atmosphere for one hundred years.  Read more »

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference in Bozeman, Montana.  The announced topic was ‘Human and Environmental Health: Social Justice Implications: A Program for Religious Leaders and others…’  The setting was magnificent:  A century old railroad inn an hour’s drive from the western entrance to Yellowstone Park, surrounded by the mountain ranges for which Bozeman is famous.  But what made this conference unique was the oxymoronic nature of the sponsors.  FREE (The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment) is a conservative institution dedicated to the application of what they would consider ‘sound economic principles’ to environmental problems.  I call them my ‘libertarian economist environmentalist friends’, and while I happily retain my own convictions, I found much that was profitable in this conference.

New Friends

As with any gathering of people around a common concern, the most profitable and enjoyable aspect of this conference was the people.  There were just 25 of us including presenters, and we represented a wide range of intellectual and religious  and career backgrounds.  A number of mainline protestants (Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and so on), a couple of Catholics, one Orthodox priest, two Rabbis (including one who survived the Holocaust as a teenager), and yes, four or five evangelicals. Someone commented than an afternoon hike could have been a joke:  “A priest, a rabbi and a minister went up a mountain…” Read more »

Who knew? Your best way to survive this might be to go to church...

So once again cutting edge research shows that if the church will just be the church, she will be better positioned to respond to crisis than any other institution.  For the last two or three years I have been winding up my presentations with a call to the church toward Repentance (change our attitude toward God’s creation), Restoration (work to restore what has been damaged), and Preparation (be ready for more disasters to come).  A report from NPR this week reinforces the effectiveness of this kind of preparation.

You could start with a multiple choice question:  In the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami, which Indian villagers had a great chance of survival?

a)      Those who were rich.

b)      Those who were influential.

c)       Those who attended weddings and funerals.

And the answer, surprisingly, is … Read more »

My niece Stephanie Burkard has just finished her freshman year at Old Dominion University and wrote the following essay for a scholarship contest.  (See the link toward the end of the piece to help her win…)  I post it here with her permission.  [And if you are also a student and have a piece like this that you'd like to see published, send it my way. ]

I picked up Blue Like Jazz this week.  Chapter 2 coincided with some deeper thoughts I’ve been having.  One sentence sums up the chapter.  ”I am the problem” (Miller, 20).

Read more »

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. Read more »