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.] 

These notes are presented in the order on the phone call.  I am sure any of these folks would welcome a note from anyone interested in learning more; please write to them through the contact page on each organization’s website.  [Tell them Ed sent you!]

Scott Sabin is Director of  Plant With Purpose (formerly Floresta for those who are a bit out of date…)  This is one of our older organizations, having begun as a development organization in Latin America and now with projects and staff in Latin America, South America, Africa, and Asia.  PWP did some important work in Haiti following the recent earthquake.  Highlights recently

• They’ve planted 11 million trees.  Not sure over what time span, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?  It’s a big number.
• Opened a new regional office in Denver (main office is in San Diego).
• Currently involved in a new joint venture not yet public that has the potential link organizations and projects with new sources of funds (if I understood what Scott was describing).

Matthew Sleeth is Director of Blessed Earth, an educational nonprofit based in Asbury, Kentucky.   Upcoming highlights shared by Matthew

• A major seminary project is now in progress focused around a covenant seminaries are being asked to sign to commit to ‘live, preach, teach, hold each other accountable’ for creation care and sustainable activities and lifestyle on their campuses.  To date Denver, George Fox, Colombia and Asbury have signed on – a number of other major seminaries are in process.
• A year of teaching at and in cooperation with the National Cathedral in Washington DC kicks off on Earth Day (April 22) with a special service and recognition of Wendell Berry.

Joe Sheldon is a faculty member at Pacific Rim Institute for Environmental Studies.  Pacific Rim is one of the newest arrivals to the movement, but has a long shared history with Au Sable Institute , having been formed just a couple of years ago to take over Au Sable’s 175 acre Whidbey Island campus just north of Seattle.  The Institute is close to completing negotiations that will leave them with free and clear ownership of the property.  Highlights of the current and projected program…

• Pacfic Rim will continue to host Au Sable students and faculty during the summers;
• Ongoing research and restoration on the largest prairie remnant in Puget Sound, including the introduction of the Golden Paintbrush, a federally listed plant that is now growing 1500 plants strong;
• Partnerships with USFWS, National Park Service and others;
• and ongoing work with local schools and churches.

[Au Sable was to have been represented by new Director Fred Van Dyke, but winter weather in Chicago prevented Fred from joining us.  Undergrads in any field with an interest in creation care or environmental studies should be aware that the Au Sable program is available to supplement course offerings at their home campus. Check out their new website.]

Tyler Amy is the new Coordinator for Renewal, a relatively new student-run, student-led, student-focused organization with chapters on a number of Christian college campuses.  Think of it like a creation-care version of InterVarsity or Navigators(!).  Recent highlights:

• A fall summit (the second one) at Houghton College featured 70+ students from Houghton, Messiah, Eastern, Wheaton, Geneva, and (drum roll….) King’s University College of Alberta.
• Issuance of their second Green Awakenings report, this one focusing on assets and barriers to creation care on Christian college campuses.  [You really need to get this report – it is quite amazing what is taking place on Christian college campuses these days.]

Renewal shares organizational ties with two other organizations that are old and well-know partners in the movement.  He also reported on

Creation Care Study Program (CCSP), Chris Elisara, Director. Similar to Au Sable and Pacific Rim, but offering semester-length study-abroad programs…

• Have moved into new facilities at their campus in Belize;
• Will be opening a new semester program on Camino Island (also in Puget Sound) focusing on sustainability.
• They also have an established and popular program in New Zealand.

Restoring Eden – Peter Illyn, Director, is known for getting students (and others) involved in visible direct-action efforts.  Current plans include

• Spring Break health surveys in coal mining areas of Appalachia – (last yr’s were published in the Journal of Community Health).
• Chapel lectures on campuses, recent trip in Indiana.

Alexei Laushkin is on staff with the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) .  Based in Washington, publisher of Creation Care Magazine, EEN has a number of things going on:

• Last year partnered w/Blessed Earth, Eden Vigil,
• Involved in a highly visible ‘Mercury and the Unborn’ campaign with radio ads, television ads and testimony at some high profile Washington hearings, thus adding a strong evangelical voice to the national discussion.
• Held their 2^nd Day of Prayer for Creation Care in Wash DC, and…
• Their big upcoming event is the 3^rd annual Day of Prayer for Creation Care to be held in Washington on April 26^th.  Featured speakers will include Dr. Chris Wright (primary author of the Cape Town Commitment), Leith Anderson (NAE), Lon Allison (Billy Graham Center), etc.  [Tickets are available for members of the movement – contact Alexei soon!]

Lowell Bliss is founding director of Eden Vigil , an environmental missions initiative operating under the umbrella of Christar, an established and well respected pioneering and church planting mission agency.  Eden Vigil’s recent and upcoming highlights include…

• Monthly publication (via email) of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.  This is a prayer publication unlike any other, and deserves a wider following than it now has (sign up here).
• Lowell has an important book in progress:  Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees.  Now in the negotiate-with-the-editors-and-rewrite stage.
• A new podcast will be launched any day now.  The Agabus Project .  Interviews will feature people like Peter Harris, founder of A Rocha, and Joel Salatin, well-known proponent of sustainable farming and eating.
• “Sending Services” – similar to ‘tent-making missions’; Eden Vigil provides supporting services for Christians going to other countries in secular (environmental) jobs who want to go with a “missionary mindset”.

Tom Rowley is director of A Rocha USA, the US chapter of A Rocha (ask Tom how to pronounce it!), the largest and probably oldest international Christian conservation organization, with a presence in about 25 countries now.  In the US A Rocha is involved in…

• 3 projects – Linden WA, Santa Barbara, and ‘the Texas hill country’, and several others under development.
• The Texas project is a  7,000 acre ranch, and is working with some new grant money on habitat protection, riparian work, and ultimately the development of a Field Study Center.
• The Rowley family recently relocated from Texas to Bend OR and Tom is developing new opportunities in the Pacific Northwest.
• Grass roots orgs can now join A Rocha as independent affiliates.  If you know of a local group that could benefit from a connection with (and the encouragement of) a national organization, contact Tom for more information.

And finally, Ed Brown (myself), Director of  Care of Creation… Our emphasis is on the mobilization of the church toward a God-centered response to the environmental crisis.  This has us going in a number of different directions:

• A long-established work in Kenya (Care of Creation Kenya) working in tree planting, agriculture (“Farming God’s Way”), and training and discipling church leaders, teachers, pastors and development workers about environmental issues and creation care principles.
• A similar new project will be launched in southern Tanzania this year.
• The Our Father’s World seminar is a weekend seminar for churches, presented around the country and in a number of overseas venues.
• Ed is the point person for a Global Consultation on the Gospel and Creation Care to be held in Jamaica October 29 – November 3 of this year, hosted by Lausanne and the World Evangelical Alliance.  Names are now being collected for this invitation only meeting – contact him now if you have people you would like to nominate for participation.

The Creation Care movement is most definitely alive and well.  None of these organizations has the resources they need to do the tasks that need to be done – we encourage you to find your favorite one(s) – send them a note thanking them for their work, and perhaps send a donation from time to time!

[Perhaps you can help us spread the word by reposting this in full on any blog you might have or sharing via Twitter or Facebook.]

Report compiled by Ed Brown, Care of Creation.

[Apologies if any important bullet points were left out…]

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.  Imagine that the atmosphere is a bathtub.  The tap of carbon emissions has just been bumped that much further open, a faster flow.  The tub is filling faster than the drain can regulate it.  Like our friend, climatologist Katherine Hayhoe has said, the thing about climate change (including the greenhouse effect) is that it is “just basic physics,” in this case, illustratable with your own bathtub and cupboard full of towels to mop up the results.

Once, during a summer spent in the Pakistani foothills, we got a report from family friends down on the plains that their young son Timmy had been struck in his shoulder by a stray bullet.  He had been playing outside.  It was wedding season in Pakistan.  Occasionally in exuberance, someone from the wedding party will take an automatic weapon and spray a number of rounds innocently and joyfully into the air.  But what goes up, most come down.  That’s a law of physics.  Timmy recovered well from surgery, but every year some bystanders, many miles from any wedding, are not so fortunate.   To what extent though is “what goes up, must come down” a moral aphorism for a trigger-happy wedding guest?  Whoever Timmy’s assailant was, he was just shooting into the sky, adding to the joy.  Forty one percent of 2010’s monster carbon dioxide increase is attributable to China’s greater output, and an additional 12 percent to the U.S. trying to happily put the financial crisis behind us.

When it comes to CO₂ we can tweak the proverb.  Employing our best street lingo about threatening prospects, we can say, “What goes up, means sumthing is gonna go down.”

Lowell Bliss is the publisher of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, which this month features the Tar Sands of Madgascar.  He and his wife Robynn were missionaries for 14 years in India and Pakistan.

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…”

John Baden, founder and director of FREE has been doing these conferences for more than 20 years, and is a master of a ‘facilitated discussion’ format:  Everyone has an opportunity to participate, civility is required, and a conversation ensues that is far more in-depth than you would expect with a group of 25 people.   Of course, some of the most valuable conversations happen off-program – in breaks and during meals.  I have several new best friends after this conference that make the investment of time more than worthwhile.

And I have to say that the organizers and presenters are among the most delightful people I’ve ever interacted with.  John Baden wanted us to see his ranch, located just a mile away.  “Before you care about what we know, you need to know that we care.”  What was a broken down ranch when he bought it (a long time ago), is now mostly in conservation easements and features a series of trout ponds (see picture) which he uses to serve local organizations including the Wounded Warrior Project, a very cool program to help rehabilitate wounded veterans by teaching them fly fishing, among other outdoor activities. However much I might disagree with John on aspects of economics , there is no question he cares about the environment – God’s creation – just as much as I do.

Content

Conference content was not completely as advertised.  Of four topical components – economics, environment, human health, and social justice – the first received somewhat more attention than environment and health, and social justice was left to fend for herself.  This was probably to be expected given that the sponsors and many of the presenters are economists, and while not a fatal flaw, did reduce the value of the discussions a bit.

Part of the challenge here was a lack of upfront topical integration.  In my mind I had connected ‘environment’ and ‘human health’:  I see these as two sides of the same coin.  And I would like to have begun with some basic definitions:  What do we mean by ‘health’? Do we mean simply ‘not sick’ or are we looking for something more?   Wendell Berry has things to say that Adam Smith’s disciples need to listen to.

Most of us from the religion side of the table felt that the conference would have been better balanced with one or two presentations from a theologian.  Yes, there is a challenge implicit in that proposition (“Who would we ask?  Catholic? Jewish? Evangelical?”) but still:  In a conference trying to integrate economics, environment and health for religious leaders, the theological perspective was needed.  And this may be one reason it felt like social justice was left out in the cold.

My favorite comment from the floor came from an Orthodox priest after a presentation on how to use economics to evaluate environmental problems:  “The church doesn’t need what you are preaching.  We’ve been telling people how to live for thousands of years…”  He was not entirely correct – even after thousands of years, we in the church have much to learn from all of the other disciplines.  But he raised a valid point.  In a conference for religious leaders, the voice of the theologian needs to be heard.

A Tool – But Only a tool

The most important take-away for me came in a new appreciation for economics as a tool.  One of the early presenters laid it out this way:  “Warm hearts need a cool head.”  It’s not enough to want to help – you need to know which of your possible solutions will really help, what the tradeoffs are, not only in monetary costs but in exchange of one risk for another.  A great example from a toxicologist:  Yes, mercury in fish is a health hazard.  But eating fish is one of the best ways to reduce a variety of other health risks – lower risk of heart disease is just one.  Granted, eliminating mercury in fish would be the best option, what is the best way to proceed in the meantime?  Our current quandary with nuclear power is another excellent example.  How do we balance the risks of a Fukushima against the consequences of another century of CO2 emissions from coal?

Economics is a tool to bring us to the point where we can make an intelligent decision.  And like enthusiastic salesmen in the power tools department at Sears, we were invited to push all the buttons and watch this tool do its thing.

The challenge, of course, with any tool is to keep it in its place.  For a guy with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. And a guy with a new chain saw can be really productive – or really, really dangerous.  I’m afraid that economics looks to me a bit like that new chain saw.  The economist sees the whole world as a balance sheet.  Everything is black and white – cost and benefit, risk and reward, dollars and cents. Things will work out when we finally understand and implement private property rights.  Markets can be solutions to environmental problems.  Um, yes.  Okay.  But. What about things you can’t own? Things you can’t measure? Can you really have a market that is free of manipulation and distortion?

One problem is language.  Economics speaks in monetary terms because we have no other language by which to communicate value.  While economics  really does try to include all costs in a given situation or transaction, in reality the conversation almost always returns to money.  That is the only metric we have to measure risk and reward, cost and benefit.  For the business man, “What gets measured gets done”.  For the economist, “What can be measured can be counted.”  But the only ruler the economist has is denominated in dollars and cents, pounds and pence, rupees and dinars.

Measuring what cannot be measured?

One solution is for those of us who really want to save God’s world is to learn to speak the language of the economist.  If the only way we can save a forest or a watershed is to put a dollar amount on it, maybe we need to do that.  Valuing ecosystem services is one way to do this.

An article in the New York Times this week addresses this issue:

“Currently, there is no price for most of the ecosystem services we care about, like clean air and clean water,” said Stephen Polasky, professor of ecological/environmental economics at the University of Minnesota. He says that because economic calculations often ignore nature, the results can lead to the destruction of the very ecosystems upon which the economy is based.

“Our economic system values land for two primary reasons,” said Adam Davis, a partner in Ecosystem Investment Partners, a company that manages high-priority conservation properties. “One is building on the land, and the second is taking things from the land.”

“Right now, the way a forest is worth money is by cutting it down,” Mr. Davis said. “We measure that value in board-feet of lumber or tons of pulp sold to a paper mill.” What has been missing, he says, is a countervailing economic force that measures the value of leaving a forest or other ecosystem intact.

I have a friend who is giving his life to saving rainforests through investment vehicles.  His goal:  “I want to make it so a tree in the forest is worth more alive than it is dead.”

Will this solve our problems?  Not completely.  Too many things can never be measured – a great deal of this work project remains out of reach of economics, no matter how shiny it is as a tool.

The Challenge of the Cube

I inadvertently had the last comment of the entire conference.  I remembered an illustration I often use in my talks that seemed to capture the challenge we were left with:

Take two Rubik’s cubes:  One is assembled and ‘perfect’, representing the world as God gave it to us, and the world that we would all like to live in – theologians, environmentalists and economists alike.  The other is thoroughly scrambled and needs to be solved.  Economics teaches us how to manipulate the cube, while theology holds up the picture of the solved cube.  (Think about it – the cube is a great picture of the world of the economist, because every move on one side of the cube has a ‘cost’ on the other sides.  And the world of the ecologist – where ‘everything is hitched to everything else’ – thanks, John Muir.)

But here’s the problem:  In my talks, I’ll ask someone in the audience to solve the scrambled cube for me.  (There’s one in every crowd…)  He or she always fails.  Why?  Because my cube has been tampered with.  It’s not solvable.   And that is the world we live in.  Economics is necessary, even essential, for tackling the environmental problems in the world, and all the other problems as well.  But economics can’t solve a tampered cube.  Only God can do that.

And with that, the conference came to an end.

But not our task.  Economists and ecologists and climate scientists and policy makers and politicians cannot put together a world that has been broken by sin.

But God can.

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 …

c).  People who have lots of friends, who are socially connected to a community, have a greater likelihood of staying alive during, and of recovering after the event.  Daniel Aldrich of Purdue University has studied disaster response in New Orleans, India, Japan and elsewhere,  and has just published a paper, “Fixing Recovery: Social Capital in Post-Crisis Resilience”.

Highlights from the NPR story:

Aldrich’s findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath….

The problem isn’t that experts are dumb. It’s that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships.

The Japanese government seems to get this. The government there actually funds block parties to bring communities together.

That might never happen in America, but Aldrich thinks each of us can do something on our own: Instead of practicing earthquake drills and building bunkers, we could reach out and make more friends among our co-workers and neighbors.

…”Really, at the end of the day, the people who will save you, and the people who will help you,” he added, “they’re usually neighbors.”

What does any of this have to do either with creation care or the church?

It has everything to do with creation care because our abuse of creation makes disasters more frequent and more deadly.  Take, for example, floods – driven both by paving our landscape (see The Price of Paving Paradise) and climate change.  Wildfires, caused by a combination of mismanagement of forest land (too many years without any fire at all) and climate change.  Oilspills – Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, Yellowstone river – you can kind of take your pick here.  Nuclear disaster in Japan – no, the earthquake wasn’t caused by humans, but the decision to put a plant on a major fault without adequate protections sure was.  The lesson?  As long as we persist in tearing apart the structure of our home, we can expect the beams to keep falling on us.

So where does the church fit in?  The church is not a building.  It’s not a collection of people attending a Sunday morning concert or lecture series.  No, at its most basic the church is a community of people who love and follow Jesus, and who, because of that, love and care for each other.  The church is what Daniel Aldrich is describing in his paper – a web of relationships.

A church that is being the church in this way has already given its people the gift of being prepared for the disaster that has not yet come.  A church that consciously prepares its people for that disaster is on its way to being the first-responder for its entire community.

[Read more on this in Our Father’s World.]

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).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to change the world.  Well, no.  I’ve thought more about how to change campus.  It’s an easier target than the world.  I also know campus and what I want to change very specifically.  Safety is one.  I’ve only ever heard gunshots twice in my life.  I was in New York City once.  The other time, I was chilling on Beth Anne’s porch on 41st street.  Other ones are tuition rates.  I pay a lot of money to go to school.  Thank you so much, federal government.  Because of your financial assistance, our schools have no problem raising prices for things like i-pads at libraries and pizza parties for the social clubs.  Anyone else get mad thinking about this?  Man, I pay for a lot of pizza with that tuition of mine.  That’s why I spend hours working.  So SGA can throw a pizza party!  Not so I can learn the stuff I’m paying to learn.

Where do I find myself talking about this stuff?  Frustrated.  Nothing changes.  I see no difference in my life.

Let’s get bigger than campus here.  World poverty.  How many people live on less than 2 dollars a day again?  Oh yeah, every other person ever to be born.  We care, so we campaign.  We care, so we write letters to our government.  We care, so we cry when we watch the news.  We care, so we expect others to fix that problem!  They’re the only ones who can do anything about it!  What’s your problem, government!  Stop wasting money and feeding some hungry people!  I am conveniently selfless when it comes to fixing problems.  That’s about 3 % of the time.  The other 97%, I think about me.

Several years ago, my family sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth.  It’s a documentary by Al Gore about global warming.  Basically, the world is being destroyed by people.  Now, since then, there has been much controversy about the validity of global warming, but anyone who’s sat at the Faith Academy soccer field overlooking Manila by day knows that people are indeed destroying the world.  As I was saying, my family sat down to watch this documentary.  Now, my father is a smart man and he understood a concept most people are not willing to admit.  ”I am the problem.”  My father made two changes in his life that reflected his understanding of this concept.  The first is he changed the shower head in the bathroom to a water conserving one.  The second is he stopped making foam surfboards.  He now makes wood ones which are better for the environment.  Sure, trees are involved, but for every one cut down, many more are planted, at least I believe Dad started shaping with a kit that promised that.

Dad got it.  I am the problem.  It took me a few more years to catch on, but I get it now.  I am the problem.  I am the safety problem at ODU.  I am the pizza party.  I am world hunger.  I am destroying the environment.  So where’s the shower head that I can change in my life?

Everyone has something they can do- recycle (and drive less ;P).  It costs you nothing to recycle other then minimal effort.  Something else you can do too- and all online!  Go to http://www.castleink.com/ and see what ink cartridges on your printer you can use to cut back on your Manila-smog output.

(This is for a scholarship contest.  The more of you who go to castleink.com directly through this note, the more chances I have of winning.  Feel free to share this with your friends.  Thanks.)

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.

The Egyptian revolution now underway has a personal connection for me – my niece Annie is attempting to pursue graduate studies in the middle of the chaos.  I had a conversation with her mother, my sister Marilyn this morning:  “So what’s Annie doing?  Trekking to the airport every day to try to get out?”  “Not exactly – she’s trekking to demonstrations every day…” Anyone who knows Annie – heck, anyone who knows her mother – would not be at all surprised by that. Marilyn’s family lived in Egypt for a number of years, and she has been covering the crisis very competently on her blog here if you’d like a well-written day-to-day overview including occasional eye-witness reports from Annie.

There are so many dimensions to this uprising that it’s hard to know even where to start.  There are plenty of obvious dimensions of this crisis:  A hard-pressed population’s desire for freedom.  The fear many have of the possibility – maybe remote, maybe not – of an Iran-style Islamic state taking the reins after Mubarak leaves.

Peeling back the layers, though, there is a dimension of this crisis that directly affects the topic of this blog – creation care.  In yesterday’s New York Times we read

Entrenched corruption, the depredations of police forces and demands for free elections have all helped drive the protest movement, but for many Egyptians, rising prices and unemployment were the strongest motivations to stand up to the government.

When people can’t work or can’t even feed themselves they will do desperate things.  From last night’s All Things Considered:

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: Among the many forces driving political unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries is the rising cost of food. Prices for wheat, corn, rice, sugar, coffee and other basics have been surging. A U.N. report shows its food price index is at the highest level ever recorded. Food subsidies in Egypt have helped tamp down some of the anger there, but concerns are growing along with prices.

NPR’s Chris Arnold reports.

CHRIS ARNOLD: In the past six months, the price of wheat and corn has nearly doubled in many parts of the world. And in areas where people spend as much as half their income on food, that’s making it very hard for people to feed their families.

This is at least part of what’s driving the desperation and anger that’s sending people out into the streets of Cairo, such as this protester who spoke to Al-Jazeera.

Unidentified Man: (Through translator) We are tired, ma’am. We are tired. Stop the price hikes. We are suffering. We are Egyptians. We love Egypt. But stop this. We want to eat. We want to live, we and our children.

ARNOLD: Across a continent in the snow-covered city of Davos, Switzerland, economist Nouriel Roubini spoke to CNN.

Dr. NOURIEL ROUBINI (Chairman, Roubini Global Economics): What has happened in Tunisia is happening right now in Egypt. And also, riots in Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan are related not only to high unemployment rate and to income and wealth inequality, but also to this very sharp rise in food and commodity prices.

ARNOLD: So why are food prices rising so quickly? One reason is that bad weather has ruined crops in many parts of the world. There have been floods in Australia and Pakistan. Extreme heat last summer in the U.S. hurt corn production. Russia was hit by a severe drought last summer.

And that is the creation-care connection to this crisis: People are hungry.  Just two weeks ago we commented on this  food crisis, citing Lester Brown:

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.

If we are not willing to feed the hungry for their own sakes, setting aside what Jesus clearly teaches us, would we be willing to feed them for the sake of our own security?  I wonder – and mostly because feeding the poor now doesn’t mean bringing a can of food to church for the food pantry or even donating to an international development organization.  Neither of these will hurt, but when the problem is weather (read: climate) , or water, or soil degradation, they aren’t going to help much either.  Lester Brown again:

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.

And many more scenes like this:

So how do we respond?  Where to begin?  The people of God have got to take these things seriously.  We may not be able to solve all of the problems, but we can start.  Check out some other recent posts on the role of the church in mobilizing in response to problems like this.

Countdown to Cape Town: What does the church have to offer? Part 2

Countdown to Capetown – Final: A Call to Respond

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.

Jim Ball was Director of the Evangelical Environmental Network for many years. He has been heavily involved in efforts in Washington to influence climate policy decisions, and this week is releasing his new book, Global Warming and the Risen LORD.  I’ve been watching the progress of this book behind the scenes for some time, and would encourage you to check it out.  It’s available on Amazon or directly from EEN.

Here’s my review:

Global Warming and the Risen LORD is not quite like any other you’ve read. Checking in at more than 450 pages, it might be best to think of it as three books in one cover: A very good analysis of the science of climate change and current predictions of havoc both in the US and globally; an almost devotional examination of theological principles wrapped around the theme of `walking with the Risen LORD’; and a call for a strategic response that is genuinely comprehensive in scope.

The first section is a necessary summary of current climate science and the effects we can expect from continued global warming both in this country and around the world. It is more up to date than those published a year or two ago as the science and our understanding of likely effects continues to develop, and Ball’s research and notes are truly exhaustive. There is something here that I at least have not run into much in other such books: A look at `black carbon’ (ie. soot from fires and diesel engines) as a significant contributing factor to the warming problem.

The final section on strategy and policy brings together a number of ideas and suggestions as no other book has yet done, to my knowledge. This part of the book could be a manual for those looking to draft policies in government or strategies for nonprofit organizations seeking to work in this area. Several of the author’s suggestions focus on encouraging democracy, enhancing freedom, and fighting poverty in ways that give the lie to those who would have us believe that we must choose between fighting global warming and reducing poverty. The opposite is the case: Global warming makes poverty worse, and it is only when we come up with a comprehensive answer to the climate problem that we will be able to really and permanently address the issue of poverty.

Ball’s theology/devotional section: On the one hand, it sometimes feels more comprehensive than it needed to be: Chapter 14, “Fulfilling the 5 Great Loves”, is good – but I wonder if describing these 5 loves (Loving one another, loving our neighbor, loving our enemies, loving the `least of these’, and loving God back) could have been done in less than 40+ pages. It’s all good material, but there’s a lot of it.

I hope readers don’t give up here, because there is a real gem in the middle of “Risen LORD” – Ball’s account of his own family’s roots in McComb Mississippi. This small town became such a center of anti-integration violence in the 1960′s that it earned the label, `Bombing Capital of the World’, even while the author was riding back and forth to church on a Sunday School bus and learning for the first time of a Savior’s love for him. His exploration of the disconnects between his personal experience and the headlines is eye opening. The point of the story, appropriately placed in a chapter called “Our Need for a Savior”, is this:

Just like civil rights in the 1960s, global warming is one of the great moral challenges of our time. Will we as Christians rise to the challenge? Will our witness encourage our spiritual offspring in the faith? Or will they have to issue a statement to the poor asking for forgiveness for what we failed to do? [P. 201]

The evangelical church spent much of the Civil Rights movement on the wrong side – from the perspective of history it is easy to see that now. Jim Ball’s hope is that this will not be the case where global warming is concerned. Perhaps `Global Warming and the Risen LORD’ will help the church as a whole to look at this problem through new eyes. May it be so.