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.)

courtesy Thomas Schneider

This is the message we have just sent from Care of Creation to our friends and partners around the world. It’s topic is appropriate to Our Father’s World friends and readers, I think. May you have a truly blessed and deeply meaningful Holy Weekend whereever you are!

“Easter People in a Good Friday world.”

This phrase grabbed the attention of a few people earlier this week – in part, I suppose, because it was heard on NPR. Host Michele Norris was interviewing writer Ann Lamott about Easter. Citing the tension she feels between the world as it should be and the world as it is, Lamott quoted another author, Barbara Johnson: “We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.”

Of course, most of the people around us are actually Good Friday people living in a Good Friday world.

I had a taste what that’s like Thursday morning this week. The setting was perfect – a cafeteria looking out over Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin. The sun was shining for the first time in days, the water perfectly calm with a couple of racing sculls from the University practicing. It would have been a great time to talk about the hope of Easter. But the conversation was dismal – much more fitting for Good Friday, I’m afraid. These are folks who know the environmental situation well. One has been teaching environmental classes – ethics and theology, in fact – since I was a freshman in college. I’ve had many conversations with him over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite this discouraged. He just doesn’t see any hope in the direction things are going today. The other partner in the conversation has read the writing on the wall as she understands it, and has a basement filled with canned food, stocking up for the crash that might be coming, that she thinks is just around the corner.

A bit pessimistic? Yes, but… Make no mistake – the world these folks are living in is real. The threats they were talking about are genuine. Fresh water, climate change, food price crises, peak oil or nuclear disasters – any one of these is sufficient to keep you up at night. As one of my friends said this morning, if you are caught in a food price riot in Egypt, or one of our farmer friends in Kenya suffering the effects of climate change on his tiny farm, for you the crash has already come.

So what does it mean to be an Easter person in this kind of world? Well, the difference is not in the world. We see the same suffering, the same violence, the same disasters. No, the difference is in us: We’ve tasted resurrection power in our lives. The message of the gospel of Jesus has brought us to relationship with God our creator. We were dead in our sins, now we are alive in Jesus and in ways we’ve never experienced before. Caught before in the loneliness of despair, we have now found ourselves members of a new fellowship. Life isn’t all good because of Easter, but it’s different now – we have hope within us, even when navigating a world of despair.

So how do we live? We live on Friday as if it were Easter already. That is what Easter means. Jesus’ resurrection is new life and power and hope breaking in to our present reality. And how exactly do we bring Easter back to Friday?

By living in hope.

‘Faith is confidence in what we hope for’ (Hebrews 11:1).

We do not deny the realities of the world we live in. The problems are real. And humanly speaking, pretty hopeless. But we bring to them the hope that comes from confidence that God is working in the world and in us to bring Easter realities to Good Friday problems.

By living in power. Not the power of the world that always corrupts, but the power of the resurrection, that paradoxically, only comes to those who are willing to die:

“I want to know Christ-yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10-11)

And by living in love. If there is one thing the Good Friday world is lacking, it is love. It should not be surprising that one of the last things Jesus said to his disciples was this:

9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:9-12)

Which reminds me of an amazing line from Wendell Berry:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

Perhaps you think of Care of Creation as an environmental organization. In some sense, yes – we care about and promote restoration and healing of God’s creation and that earns the label ‘environmental’. But we’re about so much more than that. Our goal is that comprehensive, complete “wholeness” Berry speaks of that can only come through “reconciliation and atonement with God.” We’re Easter people – like you, perhaps – trying to bring Easter back into the middle of Good Friday, to do what we can to touch the lives of people and the soil under their feet with both the love of Jesus and the power of his resurrection.

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?’

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.

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

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

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

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

And again,

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

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

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

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

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

Let me explain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pastor Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing MI has posted some comments on how Christians can celebrate Earth Day “better”  over at his blog. This is a response to that post.

While I appreciate Pastor DeYoung’s sincere desire to “build a Christian foundation” (his very good image) under the concept of Earth Day, the ‘bricks’ he is using to build that foundation, most of which were purchased somewhat uncritically from Jay Richard’s Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, could have been baked a little longer.

Here are his ‘bricks’ and my thoughts in response:

1)”We must distinguish between theological principles and prudential judgments.”

This argument has been around for quite a while, and still astounds me.  The idea is that while the Bible is clear that we have to care for God’s creation (at least we agree on this basic premise), taking actions in response to threats to that creation is a “prudential judgment” that ought not to be made.

Really?

Because some actions would be “prudent” we ought not to take them?  Environmental concern is the only area in which I have ever heard Christians argue against prudence.  We wear seatbelts.  That surely is a prudential judgment.  We pay a penalty in the present by purchasing auto, property and life insurance to cover ourselves for hazards that will almost certainly not happen to most of us.  Prudence.  We avoid smoking, and in extremely undemocratic fashion we ban smoking by others so that we and our children won’t have to inhale second-hand smoke.   Why?  Prudence – we would rather not get lung cancer or emphysema.  Most of us would condemn a person who doesn’t buckle up, doesn’t buy insurance and exposes his children to cigarette smoke as reckless, foolhardy and negligent.

But acting to care for God’s creation is wrong because it is a “prudential judgment”?  Please.  This is just silly.

2) “People matter most.”

Well, of course they do.

But people cannot live without a wholesome, healthy, flourishing environment.  One wonders, reading a statement like this, what Pastor DeYoung might have eaten for breakfast the morning he wrote his piece.  One would expect it was plant or animal, and probably both.

It is a simple fact that we are part of God’s animal creation:  We need to eat, drink and breathe to live.  We cannot survive without the plants and animals that support us, the clean water they provide, the air they filter for us.  We can’t even eat breakfast without them.  It is also fact that much of the human suffering in the world is directly tied to environmental degradation.  Haiti is exhibit #1.  Add to that if you care to, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Rwanda, Uganda, Bangla Desh, India, China and the asthma suffering children of America’s inner cities.

The most effective way to love and to care for people is to care for the world in which they live.  This is the premise Care of Creation has been built on.  Perhaps we can paraphrase James here:  Show me how to love people without caring for God’s creation, and I will show you how (better and cheaper) we can love people by caring for God’s creation.

3) “People are producers, not just polluters.”

Again, yes they are.  God gave us dominion over his creation and wonderful creative abilities by which we can work with the stuff of creation and do amazing and wonderful things.  And there is no question that if Jesus tarries and God give us time, it is only by the use of these abilities that we human beings are going to be able to solve the serious problems we have created for ourselves by our abuse of God’s creation.

The problem with the “producers not polluters” principle is that it ignores the problem of sin.  Human beings who are unredeemed sinners are in fact polluters – materially and spiritually.  That’s a theme we repeat often here:  “Environmental problems are sin problems.”  And this idea ignores what I think of as the ‘mathematics of sin’:  More sinners, more sin.  An explosion of people (4 billion of the current 6.8 billion people on earth right now have been born since I was) means, necessarily, an explosion of sin – unless genuine, spirit-led evangelism keeps up.  That is the spiritual reality behind the scientific phenomenon that we call the environmental crisis.

We need to build a better Earth Day.

I agree whole heartedly!  But let’s do it biblically and logically:

1.  Good theology must lead us to reasonable prudence in our lives and in our policies.  The biblical call to mercy argues that we should care about the effects of our consumption on the poor.  Our (biblical, surely) obligations to our own children and grandchildren as well as the rest of the not-yet-born demands that we act selflessly, not selfishly in our use of resources and our management of earth-systems.

2. Love for people must compel us to do all we can to heal and restore the life-giving and life-supporting properties of God’s creation so that there will be clean air, clean water, a healthy climate and food for all.

3. Recognition of the almost infinite capacity for sin and pollution in our own lives and those around us should drive us to repentance and evangelism, as well as to tree planting and watershed clean up.

Great Nurse Shark - (Flickr Creative Commons License)

As you can imagine, my job has me reading a lot of disturbing reports about all aspects of the environmental crisis.  Though I do my best to keep things upbeat here on Our Father’s World and in my presentations, sometimes a story will sneak  up and grab me from behind.

Like this one:

In Canada, scientists said Atlantic cod in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are becoming skinny because they are having more trouble finding reliable sources of small prey like capelin. In Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, striped bass are turning up emaciated because of shrinking supplies of herring and anchovies.

Whales too are having a difficult time finding prey, which researchers say might be affecting their ability and decision to mate. For many endangered whale species, diminished food sources could mean their populations will have trouble recovering.

Seabirds are being particularly hard hit as they choose not to mate because they can’t guarantee food sources, Stiles said, citing the example of puffins in Norway where there was a 64 per cent drop in the number of birds having chicks in one year.

The problem is that as stocks of larger species are depleted, fishermen work their way down the marine food chain and fish smaller prey. Biologists warn that there might be little left in the world’s oceans as fishermen fish out the seas.[CNews]

This is disturbing for any number of reasons.  It’s perhaps one of the most stark reminders of Paul’s words in Romans 8:  “…the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (v. 22)  and calls to mind a passage I ran across in the Prophet Hosea last week:  “Because of this (ie. our sin), the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”  (Hosea 4:3)

But it is also a warning bell – no, it’s a warning siren:  If we are already taking so much out of the sea that even the fish that we leave behind are starving to death, there is no way we can count on this source of food in the future.  Human population projections call for an additional 50% increase from our present 6 billion to around 9 billion before we hopefully level off.  That means 50% more food needs to be found – more than that, actually, because of increased standards of living.  So where’s that additional food coming from, do you suppose?

We know one thing for sure: It’s not coming from the ocean.

[And it's probably not coming from the land either, but that's a post for another day...]

Alan Paton wrote his novel in 1946, published in 1948.  It is set in South Africa.  What is startling about the book is that the first two pages could have been written about Kenya – and could have been written yesterday.

The lessons from today’s reading are painfully clear:  1)Environmental degradation is not a new problem.  Abuse of God’s creation is, apologies to Paton, as old as the hills.   As ancient as human nature.  If you’ll allow me to quote myself in Our Father’s World, ‘environmental problems are sin problems.’

And, 2)Why don’t we learn?  If it was obvious that people were destroying the very land they needed to live on more than 60 years ago, why do we keep acting surprised?  Why do we think we can solve this with more fertilizer or another loan from the World Bank?

Here’s the reading.  (Pick up the book here)

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills.  These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it…

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh.  The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth.  Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man.  They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children.  The men are away, the young men and the girls are away.  The soil cannot keep them any more.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil.  It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof.  It is well-tended, and not too many cattle fee upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil.  Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator.  Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men.  Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil.  But the rich green hills break down.  They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature.  For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs.  Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it.  Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet.  It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men…

Did you read this far?  Then it’s time to close the lap top or turn off the monitor, get yourself outdoors for a bit, and do two things:  If you can see good healthy soil, ground that still has the capacity to ‘keep men’, rejoice and give thanks to God for his mercy.  And at the same time, weep and repent for what we have done to God’s creation, and for those now suffering and dying because ‘the soil cannot keep them any more.’

Our organization, Care of Creation, has staff and projects in Kenya.  Craig Sorley, Care of Creation staff member and Director of Care of Creation-Kenya, our local organization in that country, recently sent us the following report.  Warning:  This is not for the faint of heart.

Right now in Kenya the gov’t has estimated that a full 25% of the population (10 million) is facing major food shortages, with famine looming right around the corner for many.  This is partly due to the poor harvests in 2008 from the election problems and the political unrest that ensued, and partly due to another drought that we”re facing.  You may recall the last major drought was in 2006.To illustrate how drought and declining agricultural productivity is linked to human suffering, I wanted to share briefly the information that Francis gathered recently from a group of older farmers from a community in the Rift Valley just 30 minutes from Brackenhurst.  This is a community just below RVA, where I went to boarding school, and where significant deforestation has taken place on the adjoining escarpment.

Back in 1980, these farmers averaged a maize harvest of 1,350kg per acre.  This year their average was 270kg per acre, only 20% of the 1980 figure.  A similar and even worse picture for beans was reported.  In 1980 they averaged 1,620kg per acre for beans, and this year it was only 45kg, not even 3% of their 1980 average.  Now granted this year has been a dry one, but the reality is that conditions in this area have become progressively drier as the years have passed, and combined with ag land that is simply worn out from overuse, you can understand why we’re seeing declines like this.

Now add to this picture another reality.  The government predicts that 16 years from now (by 2025) Kenya’s population will have grown from its present level of 36 million to 60 million. No further explanation is necessary to clarify the urgency of the task that we face.