Here’s the Christmas letter we sent from Care of Creation to our mailing list recently.  If you would like to be on this list, click here to sign up, and check off any of the different newsletter’s you’d like to  receive (we mail about every six weeks or so).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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On this week of Christmas, I am very pleased to bring you greetings from all of us here at Care of Creation – from me and Susanna, from our staff and volunteers in Madison, from the Sorley family and our project staff in Kenya, and from the Ness family, preparing to launch our Tanzania project early in the new year.

Often at this time of year people ask me if I will be doing any traveling or speaking in December. Invariably my answer is, “No – people don’t want environmental talks during Christmas.”  Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining!  It’s nice to spend time closer to home.

On the other hand, Christmas can be a special time for thinking about God’s relationship to his earthly creation.  I touched on this several years ago in a chapter of my book, Our Father’s World, comparing Jesus’ incarnation with a hypothetical visit of a rock star to my own home:

This is how we need to think of Jesus, the Son of God, coming to earth.  We often think of his humiliation.  It is not a small thing for the all-powerful creator of the universe to adopt the form of a creature, but that is exactly what happened:

[Jesus,] being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross.  [Philippians 2:6-8]

Something else is just as important, though.  When he came down, he raised us up, and all of creation as well.  He lived here, in our house.  When he walked down the street and sat in the shade of a tree, his presence was honoring and exalting the dirt, the grass, the tree, the sky. If my daughter’s idol, the singer, had actually come to our house, the effect would have been purely imaginary.  Whatever fame and reputation this man has is purely ephemeral and is already fading.  He is no more worthy of praise and honor than I am – or than my daughter herself.  Not so with Jesus.  He made the dirt, the grass, the trees and the sky.  When he arrived, everything changed.

In the last chapter we saw creation as a temple – a cosmic worship space where a divine-human relationship can be pursued.  In Jesus we see God himself walking the aisles of that temple, not just standing behind the altar.  This is God as one of us: eating and drinking, laughing and playing, walking and talking, sleeping and working.  Before we heard God say that “it was good”; now we can see God himself enjoying creation.  It must be good, and it must be worth taking care of. [Our Father's World, chapter 3, IVP 2008]

There are a number of reasons we could list for why we do what we do, and you have probably heard many of them:  Tending the Garden was the first task God gave us to do; caring for creation means caring for people – it’s a true ‘pro-life issue’;  God’s redemptive plan culminates in the ‘reconciliation of all things to himself’ (Col 1:15-20).

But I like the Christmas reason as much as any:  Jesus, the Son of God, became part of Creation, and showed by his example and presence here that this is a special place and one to be valued and cared for.

And so, on this occasion when we pause to remember Jesus’ coming to earth as one of us, we thank you for your part in making our mission possible.  And we ask that you join us in recommitting to the great task of caring for this creation until the very day when Jesus returns to ‘make all things new!’

Blessings from our Care of Creation family to yours –

Ed and Susanna Brown;
Craig and Tracy Sorley with our Kenyan staff;
And Erik and Rachel Ness, bound for Tanzania.

Order Our Father’s World from our office or Amazon by clicking here;
send a donation to any of our staff or projects – or ‘buy trees for Kenya’ – by clicking here.

Guest post: Lowell Bliss of Eden Vigil

“Wangari Maathai–Nobel laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement, and sister-in-Christ Jesus–passed away on Sunday, Sept. 25, at the age of 71.  We at Eden Vigil wish her the joy of her resurrection.”

Ed has asked that I post this latest issue of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, something I’m happy to do.  But first let me forward a story from Ed himself.  On Sept. 28, Ed wrote:

Wangari was a good friend of Care of Creation Kenya. . . . She did attend a 2006 God and Creation conference – funny story there:  She had been invited and finally showed up on the last day of the conference.  They had to give her platform time which turned out to be right before my presentation, which was to be the closing talk of the conference.  Well, she took the entire slot (45 minutes) which meant that by the time I got up to talk, it was already past lunchtime…  wouldn’t have worked in the US, but these were Africans – so I just pretended there was no clock in the room and took my entire time as well (and then some, as I recall!).  I had the honor of a future-Nobelist telling me after that she ‘enjoyed my talk very much.’ Of course, at that time we had no idea that she would be winning the Nobel.

 Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, October 2011

Often in this opening paragraph, we offer a Scripture passage or a quotation.  This month, in tribute to Professor Maathai, we refer you to a song, Peter Mayer’s “Holy Now.”  (You can find a nice version of it at YouTube here.)  The songwriter arrives at the conclusion:

So, the challenging thing becomes

Not to look for miracles

But finding where there isn’t one.

Often what we come away with from a song, like how we interpret Wangari Maathai’s Catholic faith or her activist life, is determined by what we listeners and observers bring to it in the first place.  For what do we have eyes to see, or ears to hear?

Wangari Maathai proposes an Easter Monday celebration

Professor Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977.  Its mission, as described, was “to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.”  In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the prize.

While Green Belt’s “Billion Trees Campaign” may be calculated in the number of seedlings planted, Professor Maathai’s legacy may be best understood in her statement: “The planting of trees is the planting of ideas.  By starting with the simple act of planting a tree, we give hope to ourselves and to future generations.”

In 2005, Professor Maathai gave an interview to Mia MacDonald of Beliefnet which was entitled “Heaven Is Green.”  When asked how she had sought to engage religious leaders in environmental activism, she replied:

For the last few years, I have been trying to communicate with leaders of various Christian churches to urge them to bring protection and conservation of the environment into the mainstream of their faith and their teachings. I have been suggesting that Easter Monday could be a very good day for the entire Christendom to plant trees. If we could make that Monday a day of regeneration, … it would be a great celebration of Christ’s resurrection. After all, Christ was crucified on the cross. In a light touch, I always say, somebody had to go into the forest, cut a tree, and chop it up for Jesus to be crucified. What a great celebration of his conquering [death] it would be if we were to plant trees on Easter Monday in thanksgiving. 

Please join us in prayer:

•  For comfort to the family and friends of Professor Maathai who are mourning her death.
•  For the continued success of the Green Belt Movement, now that its founder has passed away.
• For the re-forestation of Kenya.   The country’s forests have dropped below 2% of total area, and as such are exacerbating drought, erosion, and climate change.
• For the Ogiek, the ancestral forest dwellers of the decimated Mau Forest. They live in constant tension
  

  Ogiek men examine a 3D map that they helped create from tribal memories, detailing the landscape of the Mau Forest prior to its decimation.

  with the government and have often been displaced.  Less than 5% of the Ogiek are Christian.  Literacy rates are low, so the Gospel must come in oral forms.

Link: Heaven is Green: An Interview with Wangari Mathaai

Photo of Maathai: Martin Rowe

Photo of Ogiek: Giacomo Rimbald

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.

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.

A new report from the UN a couple of weeks ago shows a glimmer of good news on the deforestation front:

The last decade saw forests being lost or converted at a rate of 13 million hectares per year, compared to 16 million hectares in the 1990s.

However, new forests were being planted to the tune of more than seven million hectares per year; so the net rate of loss since the year 2000 has been 5.2 million hectares per year, compared to 8.3 million in the 1990s.

Keep in mind that this still represents a massive loss of forest every year – just less than it was before.  Given that one has to stop losing before you can start gaining, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Take a look at this interesting chart:

You can see the minor improvement in Africa and South America – but take a look at Asia!  This is largely due to changes in China (more tree planting) and Indonesia (less tree cutting).

Why is this important?

In my observation, almost every country that has serious environmental issues also has a severe deforestation problem.  Healthy forests seem to be the key to environmental health almost anywhere you look:  Forests regulate local climate, including humidity and rainfall patterns.  They hold back water on steep hillsides, helping to prevent floods during rainy seasons and releasing their water gradually during dry seasons to mitigate drought.  Trees are the “loadbearing columns” in the house God has built for us.

Isn’t it interesting that C.S. Lewis used wanton deforestation as a major theme in “The Last Battle”, his final book in the Narnia series…

[Want to help fight deforestation in one small corner of the world?  Click here to help Care of Creation plant trees in Kenya.]

“Old Literature” is an occasional feature that highlights long-forgotten books, articles, speeches or poems that still speak to us today.  As it happens, there’s some new material that also deserves our attention.  Today, Tending to Eden by Scott Sabin, Director of Plant with Purpose (formerly Floresta).

Scott Sabin and I met about 7 years ago at a conference in Kenya.  He tells about that conference in his new book,Tending to Eden that was just released two weeks ago:

Edith and I took several pastors to a conference on creation care in Kenya.  I was one of the presenters, and in the course of my presentation I showed a slide of the devasted forests around Mt Kilimanjaro National Park.  Pastor Lyamuya approached me later and, with an embarassed smile, explained how convicting it was to see the photo from his own community.  “God entrusted it to us to take care of, and we aren’t doing our job.”

He returned home determined to make a difference.  Collaborating with a number of other pastors in the area, he encouraged all the churches to establish tree nurseries.  They required those going through confirmation classes to plant trees as a prerequisite to graduation.  As a result of these initiatives, nearly 500,000 trees have been planted. [page 68]

That conference was significant for many people:  It was sponsored by and was the first major public effort of the Brackenhurst Environmental Programme, the organization that was to become Care of Creation-Kenya two years later, sister organization to Care of Creation Inc. of which I am the Director.  We have known of many results from that first conference, but none of us at Care of Creation knew of these 500,000 trees until I read Scott’s manuscript a couple of months ago.

And that is probably the most encouraging thing about Scott’s book – he’s reminding us explicitly and implicitly that there’s a lot of good stuff happening in the world.  As bad as the environmental crisis is – and Tending to Eden will not let you off the hook on that score – there are people and organizations working, and working together, to make real and effective change happen.

I identify with Scott – we both came into the creation care movement inadvertently and involuntarily.  He joined Plant with Purpose to help respond to poverty by providing development in the Caribbean nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and now well beyond.  God brought him along a path that showed clearly how poverty, development and environmental degradation are inextricably entwined.  I came into the movement a couple of years later from the world of “ministry” – preaching, teaching, evangelism, church planting.  And God showed me just as clearly that the “gospel” is inextricably linked to caring for his world.

Tending to Eden is remarkable as well for speaking to a pressing issue in the world of foreign aid today:  How can we offer help without hurting people?  Scott and Plant With Purpose are offering a model that offers hope and help in a way that is comprehensive, holistic – and successful.

Check out the book here, and Plant With Purpose’s website here. Or find out more about the book here.  It’s worth it.

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.