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.

While it is hard to find a mainstream newspaper or magazine that does not have one, two or more stories on environmental topics these days.  Out “in the world” the crisis enveloping God’s creation is apparent and people are concerned.  Scanning the pages of Christian periodicals and journals yields the opposite result:  Little or no coverage of anything remotely environmental.  Which is why it is encouraging to find creation care appearing in two important magazines and journals in the last couple of weeks.  Read on and click through – they are both worth your time.

My colleague in Kenya, Craig Sorley, has an important paper in the latest issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.  The entire issue is devoted to the topic of Creation Care, including topics like Mission and the Care of Creation by Jonathan J. Bonk [HTML or PDF] and Historical Trends in Missions and Earth Care by Dana L. Robert [HTML or PDF].   [All these papers require free registration to read.]

Craig’s paper is titled Christ, Creation Stewardship, and Missions [HTML or PDF] and starts like this:

My Kenyan counterpart recently held a “God and Creation” workshop in a village called Mbau-ini, just a few kilometers from Rift Valley Academy and the Kijabe Medical Center, one of the largest mission complexes in the world. More than 150 missionaries live in the greater Kijabe area. The workshop that day focused on the acute problem of deforestation, and how Christians should be among the first to respond to such problems. Once carpeted by a lush cedar and African olive forest that fed streams out into the Rift Valley, many kilometers of the Kijabe escarpment now lie denuded of forest cover, and the streams have dried up. As my counterpart spoke with passion about the biblical foundations for creation stewardship and how we can honor Christ through caring for the environment, one member of the community, hearing this teaching for the first time, became obviously excited. With urgency he asked: “Why is it that for all these decades the missionaries right here have never told us that God was concerned about how we managed the forests? Why have they just watched this destruction taking place?”

Click through to read the rest of the piece.

At the opposite end of the academic spectrum, Christianity Today – too long silent on the topic of Creation Care, has been positively outdoing itself in the last few months.  Their latest issue features an important interview with evangelical statesman Eugene Peterson and A Rocha founder Peter Harris titled, appropriately The Joyful Environmentalists. conducted by Andy Crouch.  Peter is a colleague and friend with whom I have had frequent correspondence but have never met.  Peterson will be well known to many as a prolific author, most recently of The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible.

One sample question will give you a sense of what you’ll get reading the whole interview:

How do these themes connect with Americans, who mostly live in either suburban or urban environments?

Harris: That’s one distinction between a Christian take on creation and a secular romanticism about wilderness. Think about Psalm 104. In that psalm, which echoes Genesis, you don’t just have “the sea and everything in it”; you have ships on it, working. You don’t just have the land; you have people, working. There is a radical environmentalism that wishes people were not on the planet. That’s not the biblical view at all. A Rocha in the United Kingdom actually works in the most polluted, urban borough of the country, because creation isn’t absent just because people are there. The challenge is how to restore a right way of life, rather than escaping to some wilderness paradise. Fifty percent of the planet now lives in cities. That is where we live out our relationship with creation.

Other recent articles from Christianity Today:

Matthew Dickerson, Who Gets Left Behind? (a fascinating examination of the consequences of eschatological (end-times) points of view.)

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.

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.

In this blog we don’t spend a great deal of time on climate change/global warming.  This is not because we do not believe it’s a problem – it is.  But in the larger picture of what is happening in God’s creation, climate change is one of many problems, including loss of biodiversity (extinctions), water, deforestation, chemical pollution – the list could go on and on. The January issue of the Journal of the Royal Geographic Society, one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world, devotes itself to the question of whether and when the globe might reach a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius (7 degrees F) and what such a temperature rise might mean.

This is not good bedtime reading, but you need to at least take a look. Keep in mind that the 2070′s (see the first article below) are within the lifetime of today’s college students, and that this is not material from the radical edges of the blogosphere.  These are some of the world’s most respected scientists, but – considering the scenarios they are describing – some of them are more optimistic than I would have expected.

Below are some of the articles in this issue with a quote or two from each.  The content is free today – I’m not sure if it will remain so.  I have copies if the links to the articles no longer work – drop a note in the comments or send me a message.

When could global warming reach 4°C?

The A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a rise in global mean temperature of between approximately 3°C and 7°C by the 2090s relative to pre-industrial, with best estimates being around 5°C. Our best estimate is that a temperature rise of 4°C would be reached in the 2070s, and if carbon-cycle feedbacks are strong, then 4°C could be reached in the early 2060s—this latter projection appears to be consistent with the upper end of the IPCC’s likely range of warming for the A1FI scenario.

Regional temperature and precipitation changes under high-end (≥4^°C) global warming

[Note: The point in this paper is that 4 degree warming globally will very likely produce a number of ‘hotspots’ where regional warming is much greater than 4 degrees.  Also keep in mind that all temps are in Celsius…]

Under the high-end models, Northern Africa is projected to experience high (greater than 6^°C) temperature increases and large precipitation decreases in both DJF and JJA, suggesting that this region is most at risk from high-end climate change. In addition, during JJA, Southern Europe and the adjacent part of Central Asia are projected to warm by 6–8^°C, together with a decrease in precipitation of 10 per cent or more. This result suggests that drier soils, a consequence of the reduced precipitation, are the cause of the elevated temperatures, as the evaporative cooling effect will be smaller.

Water availability in +2°C and +4°C worlds

In a +2°C world, population growth in most large river basins tends to override climate change as a driver of water stress, while in a +4°C world, climate change becomes more dominant, even compensating for population effects where climate change increases run-off. However, in some basins where climate change has positive effects, the seasonality of surface run-off becomes increasingly amplified in a +4°C climate.

…changes in mean annual run-off in a +2°C world are generally amplified in a +4°C world: drier areas dry further and wetter areas become wetter.

By examining a subset of the world’s major river basins, we have shown that the picture for water stress in each river basin is dependent on the magnitude of the climate change and the nature of the population growth. For some river basins, the effects of climate change become large enough to offset the large increases in demand in a +4°C world, e.g. in the Ganges; in most basins, however, climate and population growth combine to increase stress or climate change is insufficient to offset increased demand.

Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa in a 4^°C+ world

Agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa faces daunting challenges, which climate change and increasing climate variability will compound in vulnerable areas. The impacts of a changing climate on agricultural production in a world that warms by 4^°C or more are likely to be severe in places. The livelihoods of many croppers and livestock keepers in Africa are associated with diversity of options. The changes in crop and livestock production that are likely to result in a 4^°C+ world will diminish the options available to most smallholders. In such a world, current crop and livestock varieties and agricultural practices will often be inadequate, and food security will be more difficult to achieve…

Sea-level rise and its possible impacts given a ‘beyond 4°C world’ in the twenty-first century

The range of future climate-induced sea-level rise remains highly uncertain with continued concern that large increases in the twenty-first century cannot be ruled out. The biggest source of uncertainty is the response of the large ice sheets of Greenland and west Antarctica. Based on our analysis, a pragmatic estimate of sea-level rise by 2100, for a temperature rise of 4°C or more over the same time frame, is between 0.5 m and 2 m—the probability of rises at the high end is judged to be very low, but of unquantifiable probability. However, if realized, an indicative analysis shows that the impact potential is severe, with the real risk of the forced displacement of up to 187 million people over the century (up to 2.4% of global population).

Climate-induced population displacements in a 4^°C+ world

In the event of a 4^°C+ warming, not only is it likely that climate-induced population movements will be more considerable, but also their patterns could be significantly different, as people might react differently to temperature changes that would represent a threat to their very survival. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that a greater temperature change would affect not only the magnitude of the associated population movements, but also—and above all—the characteristics of these movements, and therefore the policy responses that can address them.

Population movements associated with climate change impacts are expected to take place mostly at the internal level, over short distances, and eventually on a permanent basis. Overall, it appears that the most significant impact of a 4^°C+ warming on migration would be to reduce populations’ ability to move on their own terms, as many people would no longer have the choice to stay or to leave when confronted with environmental changes.

On the other hand…

Climate-induced migration should be addressed not only within the framework of climate change, but also within the discussions on the global governance of migration. In many cases, migration does not have to be envisioned as a humanitarian catastrophe, but can also be a solution to environmental disruption, which would allow people to relocate into safer areas and to cope better with climate change impacts.

Rethinking adaptation for a 4^°C world

With weakening prospects of prompt mitigation, it is increasingly likely that the world will experience 4^°C and more of global warming. In such a world, adaptation decisions that have long lead times or that have implications playing out over many decades become more uncertain and complex. Adapting to global warming of 4^°C cannot be seen as a mere extrapolation of adaptation to 2^°C; it will be a more substantial, continuous and transformative process.

…We therefore show how it is possible to systematize an approach to the resulting decision-making challenges in ways that have the potential to reduce the disempowering impacts of uncertainty, by disaggregating the decision-making process into actionable steps that use well-established methodologies. To do this, we have shown how the lifetime of a decision interacts with the different types of uncertainty and the nature of potential adaptation responses. The resulting six categories of decision pathways require distinctive risk-management strategies and tactics, all of which are individually well understood.

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we continue to explore the answer to an important question:  When the problems raised by the environmental crisis are as big and technical as they seem to be, what exactly does the church bring to the table?  Do we really have anything to offer? [Find the whole series to date here.]

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An agent for change

We concluded in chapter four that the environmental crisis is essentially a disease caused by sin and by sinfulness.  Essentially, bad behavior (materialism, greed, selfishness) caused and perpetuated by a tendency toward and an inability to break out of bad behavior patterns lies at the root of the whole problem.  Any psychologist or psychiatrist could tell us what we need to do:  Break the pattern so we can stop the behavior.  If this sounds like therapy, you’re right.  Therapy is what we need.  And this is something the church is very, very good at:  Helping people to understand their sin and guilt, coming to God for forgiveness and help, and changing how we live.  We need to apply our ability to confront and change behavior to creation care.  Environmental problems are sin problems – and sin is something the church knows how to handle.

Will it work?  Can Christians make a difference?  These are early days – but the signs are promising.

Here’s one brief example:

In the Chesapeake Bay area, a community of local fishermen listened to a graduate student, Susan Drake (now Susan Emmerich); they became aware of the disconnect between what they said they believed in church on Sunday, and how they were actually acting when they abused the waters and shellfish beds from which they made a living.  They signed a public covenant together – in church – and changed the way they lived and worked in a dramatic fashion.  The entire environmental community of Maryland took notice.

In the Pennsylvania farm country, some of those same fishermen took the time to show their Christian brothers who were farmers that how they fertilized their fields was damaging the bay and hurting the shellfish beds the fishermen depended on.  The farmers determined, before God, that they had to change the way they were farming.  How else could they be said to be loving their neighbors?  And they changed.  [These stories are told in an award winning film documentary, When Heaven Meets Earth.]

In Kenya and East Africa, at the conference I described earlier,  260 church leaders signed a public declaration in March, 2006, declaring that “we believe God calls us to be good stewards of his creation” and calling on all Christians in their region to “begin developing God-centered strategies to educate, disciple, and mobilize the entire church to action.”  A number of churches have since started their own tree nurseries and plans are being proposed for a Kenya-wide tree planting effort every year the week after Easter.  The Church in Kenya will call the nation to celebrate the resurrection by planting God’s trees.

A mobilized church can make an impact.

A spiritual organism and a human organization

I love my Bible.  Not just “the Bible” as a general term, but the particular copy of the Bible that is mine.  This copy is getting a bit worn.  The leather is seriously frayed on the back, and my wife is starting to talk about how tattered it looks.  She wants to get me a new one.  She’s right, of course, but I’m not quite ready to retire the one I’ve got.  I’m much attached to this one, though I could find the same words in a nice new one.  The marks on the pages, even the pages that have been torn, remind me of experiences I have had with God while reading this book.

That strange mixture of the divine and human is what the Bible is all about.  On the one hand, it is a very human document.  Written by ordinary people, it was copied by hand for centuries, and accumulated typos and spelling mistakes.  Its thousands of manuscripts and papyri have been the subject of and have stood up under academic research and scrutiny more intense than that given to any other document.

And yet the Bible bears the marks of God’s hand as nothing else that we possess.  It faithfully records history about God’s dealings with humanity, and teaches about God in language that surpasses any other human literature.  Was there ever a poem in any language that could surpass the last half of the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans for eloquence and passion?  Any more universally loved and moving poem than the twenty-third Psalm?  And with all this, for millions of us it is an almost direct connection to God.  Often I start my day with a cup of coffee and this old, tattered Bible. I read passages that grow more familiar as the years go by, and still I discover new truth every time.  I hear the voice of God’s Holy Spirit encouraging, or prodding me or in some other way showing me what I need to know today.  I don’t mark my Bible, but you can still tell which parts have been most meaningful to me over the fifteen years or so that this particular copy has been my mainstay.  And that’s why I hesitate to give it up.  It is a map of a spiritual journey – marking times and ways that God has stepped into my life in a very direct and personal way.

My church is like my Bible, exhibiting the same mix of divine and human.  It is a human institution, existing under a charter granted by the secular authorities of my community and my state.  It has founding and guiding documents that are legal in character and that are not very different from those of other nonprofit organizations.  It has leaders that are very human, and members that are even more so.  It struggles with pragmatic issues like budgets and finances and organizing dozens of volunteers and complaints from the neighbors about cars blocking their driveways.

But my church is not just a nonprofit organization.  Its human elements are all tangled up with spiritual realities.  It is a divine organism as much as a human organization, and there are times when the Spirit is very real as he moves among us while we worship and sing praises together.  I have no question that important actions taken by this church – like buying a new building – have been conducted through the ordinary human medium of taking a vote, but I can believe that that vote was mysteriously guided by the Holy Spirit working through the lives of the people in the room.  The divine element in church life is hard to pin down – it defies analysis – but is nonetheless real for that.  And I suspect you might agree with me, and you might also have laughed and cried at the strange combination of joys and frustrations that come from trying to live with the strange organism/organization that is the church of Jesus Christ.

It is this very hybridness of the church that allows it to bring something to the real problems of the environmental crisis that will be found nowhere else.  The church can deliver spiritual power to practical problems.  The environmental crisis is a confusing tangle of sinful individual human behaviors, sinful corporate behavior, and the ecological realities caused by too many people, too many cars, the proliferation of invasive (nonnative) species and the global effects of climate change – and a whole lot more. It is a scientific problem, an economic problem, a political problem, a security problem, and a moral problem – and a matter of life and death for millions.  But at its root, it is a spiritual problem.  The church – properly understood and functioning in the full power of God – is the only institution or organization available to the human race that can address a problem with this many dimensions.  The church is capable of addressing every issue – repentance from sin, motivation for individual action, courage and influence to change corporate behavior, and the ability to recruit and mobilize millions of people from volunteers to scientists to move into creation and do everything from tree planting to weed removal.

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 6: “Ambassadors of Redemption”.  Order the book here.]

This is part 2 of a three part report on a major Earth Day conference held in Madison WI on April 20-21, 2010.  I am using that conference as  an eavesdropping opportunity:  What is the larger environmental movement discussing today?  Rather than go talk-by-talk, I’ve pulled out four major themes from my pages of notes.  Here are the first two:

[Bios from the speakers referred to below are available here.]

1.  Think local. Act global.

Yes, it’s the familiar bumper sticker saying turned on its head.   An estimated 10 million people celebrated the first Earth Day but this was not an organized campaign.  There was no internet to coordinate events.  There was a small office in Washington DC with a miniscule budget – but the 1500 colleges and 10,000 plus schools essentially organized themselves.

It is true that many of the important accomplishments of Earth Day in the next 10 years – legislation for clean air, clean water, protection of endangered species – came from Washington.   However, the genius of Earth Day appears to be that it tapped grass roots power to move Washington, rather than the other way around.   But the drive to pass legislation came from local people wanting to protect their own places.  Moving a legislative agenda was not the primary motive of the early Earth Day organizers, and more than one speaker reminded us that no one would have been more surprised that Earth Day was still being celebrated 40 years later than Gaylord Nelson himself.

One of the perhaps unexpected effects of this decentralized movement was what Adam Rome, environmental historian from Penn State, called “superb leadership training.”  Thousands of mostly young people had to figure out on their own what to do in their own communities – and the result was not only a tremendously successful national event but also the creation of what Rome calls ‘the first green generation.’

The lesson for the Creation Care movement?  Our success will not come from large events in Washington or even world-wide internet events.  These might be useful as occasional as markers of progress, but the gold is in a thousand congregations and ten thousand youth groups.  When these are converted, the world will follow.

2.  Place matters.

Introducing this conference report I noted that a surprising number of environmental heroes come from Wisconsin.  This is not just local propaganda:  Gaylord Nelson was standing on the shoulders of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and Aldo Leopold, author of Sand County Almanac and the concept of the “land ethic” which became our modern sustainability movement.  Dr. William Cronan reminded us that Nelson also followed Frederick Jackson Turner whose work helped to articulate the importance of the frontier in American history and culture.  Lesser known heroes were  Increase Lapham who warned in the 1830’s of the dangers of deforestation of the great forests of northern Wisconsin, E. A. Birge, who established the science of limnology (the study of lakes), and Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a ‘prophet of organic building and architecture.’  All of these are sons of Wisconsin.

More important than the names is a question that has challenged me since I moved to this state:  Why Wisconsin?  Is there something in the water?

We seem to have three things in Wisconsin that others don’t have:

First, in our “middling landscape” urban, suburban, rural and wilderness are not far from each other.  It is possible even in modern Wisconsin to experience all four of these in a single day.  We live with daily knowledge of the effects of the ice age – the ‘Wisconsin glaciation’ explains every bump in our landscape.   Those who live here, and especially those who grow up here, can’t help but develop a sense of the presence and importance of the countryside.

Second, we have an unusual university.  Unlike many other states where a liberal arts university sits separate from a practical Land Grant college, here the two became one.  The classic liberal arts were taught alongside the new and practical fields of agronomy, forestry and engineering.  This may seem like an obscure connection that only an academic would make – but there are practical implications:  Our resource people and our poets were working together, and that proximity tempered both groups.

And third, we have the “Wisconsin Idea” which states that the university exists to benefit every home in the state.  “The boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of the state.” This mission drove the university to seek to understand and develop  Wisconsin’s natural resources as belonging to the entire population,  and not merely to captains of industry who just happened to arrive before anyone else.

What this boils down to is what is called a strong sense of place.  People here knew and cared about the landscape where they lived.  They learned about and developed an appreciation for the natural world around them.  Environmental concerns grew naturally from that soil.

As Creation Care proponents, this principle like the last points us to the importance of the local even when we need to reach globally.  People will care for what they love, and they will love what they know.  Encouraging local church leaders to get to know their own places so they can communicate that love to their communities is the place to start.

[To be continued...]