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).

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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 »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

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: Read more »

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. Read more »