Guest blog: by Lowell Bliss

As part of our summer vacation this year, we found ourselves at Canada’s Wonderland, a colossal amusement park near Toronto.  My teenage son has discovered roller coasters as a passion, and so we strapped ourselves into the Behemoth, riding up to a height of 230 feet and then plunging down at 77 mph.  The Behemoth cost $26 million to build.  But all day it was like that: we were surrounded by acres of ingenious and costly technologies engineered with the sole purpose to amuse and thrill.

As my old body began to wane in the late afternoon, I plopped down on a park bench and waited out my kids who were on another ride.   A young teenage girl was standing nearby.  Suddenly, I heard her utter a short squeak and I felt something rustling on the ground between my ankles.  I looked down.  A chubby woodchuck wandered out from under my bench.  Behind us was a small wooded lot between paths in the amusement park.  A little stream flowed into a pool there and it was hard to tell whether this patch of nature among the tarmac was original or manufactured.  Nonetheless, it was apparently where the woodchuck lived.  I suspect it was “suppertime,” if that’s what you can call his daily allotment of popcorn and funnel cake.

The woodchuck boldly walked out into the path of the crowd.  At first, people were as unsuspecting and jumpy as those of us at the bench, but soon the crowd, which had been moving from one multi-million dollar thrill ride to another, stopped and formed around the woodchuck.   This little creature had momentarily become the foremost attraction at Canada’s foremost amusement park.  Soon, young men who had apparently been unable to win a kewpie doll for their dates at the carnival games were demonstrating their manly prowess by petting the woodchuck and feeding it by hand.   I cringed.  I wanted to say something harsh to them.

The teenage girl next to me interrupted my self-righteousness.  “What kind of animal is that?” she asked me.

“A woodchuck,” I said.

I was surprised at the tenderness in my answer.  While I wanted to be pedantic with the crowd; with her, I had a longing to teach, in the best sense of that urge.  This was partly a wave of humility, since I was unsure whether there was any difference between a woodchuck and a groundhog and maybe if I should have called it a groundhog instead.  (I’ve subsequently learned that they are two names for the same rodent whose scientific name is Marmota monax.)  But mostly I felt sympathy for her.  Woodchucks might not be the most common of animals, but this girl didn’t know what they were.

“Did you ever hear the rhyme, ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck’?”  I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“That’s it.”

“Cool.”

I told this story last Sunday night when I spoke to a group of docents who volunteer at our local zoo.   I wanted to thank them for their service.  In a world of technological attractions, a simple woodchuck still has the power to draw a crowd.  I told the docents that our world needs animals.  We need zoos.  But as our world moves further and further away from Nature, we also need docents and interpreters.  We need them to share their knowledge about animals.  We need them to share their passion for animals.  We need to be tenderly re-taught about wild things, even to their very names.

And of course, this little event allows me to write another verse to Bob Dylan’s song Man Gave Names to All the Animals:

He saw an animal come from under a bench

It gave respite from the techno-stench

It waddled around with courage and pluck

“Ah, think I’ll call him woodchuck”

(. . . or is that, groundhog?)

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil and the publisher of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.  He is getting too old for roller coasters.

You just never know who you’re going to meet at a conference (or a guest house). This time it was Orlando, Florida – and the person waving across the auditorium turned out to be Mark Morris, a friend and former member of the church I pastored for a time in Pakistan from about 1991 to 1995. He and Cindy were raising three of the cutest little girls… but I digress: We’ve both changed places and jobs numerous times in the last fifteen years and had completely lost track of each other. It was fun catching up personally and professionally. Our ministry at Care of Creation was new to Mark; this is how he described our conversation on his own blog. Enjoy:

Confession time. I’ll just put it all on the table…my actions and lifestyle might just demonstrate that I am complacent about the creation God has stewarded into my hands. It’s ok, because I balance this neglect with a high level of care for the least reached hearing a verbal and living proclamation of the living Lord. I invest myself in seeing churches and individuals traverse cultures in order to spread the saving name of Jesus to the glory of God the Father. So it is simply off my radar to get on the “liberal-minded” green kick of environmentalism. And yes I chew my gum and spit it out the window while driving 65 miles an hour down the highway. I don’t even know how many gazilians of years it will take for my juicy fruit to reprocess back into the environment, if it does at all. I’m obviously sinful and uncaring about God’s creation. So why am I writing in this blog about the Care of Creation?!

The reason? Something happened today as I attended Mission America, a follow up to the Cape Town, Lausanne Conference on World Missions. At the conference today I ran into an old friend and my former pastor who wrote a book and started a ministry on the subject of Care of Creation. The book is Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation.

The book was written by my friend Ed Brown. Ed and his wife are both missionary kids from legendary missionary families who poured out their lives sharing the gospel and making disciples and planting churches in Pakistan. As an MK, Ed literally survived drowning in a Pakistani canal and he grew up to be an Intervarsity student worker. Later Ed became my pastor in Pakistan during the mid 1990′s. Thinking Ed and I would spend our time catching up on the 15 year gap since our last visit, I was surprised that I spent most of the hour extracting the story of Ed’s pilgrimage into this unlikely ministry. After our visit, I came back to my hotel room and in a very brief time read his 200 page Intervarsity Press book from cover to cover.

I’ll use another person’s words to describe my reaction to Ed’s message. One of our speakers today talked about a YWAM ministry in which he mobilizes saved and unsaved college students to action around the cause of human trafficking. In the process of taking action for a cause, this YWAM worker begins the systematic process of sharing the gospel with those students and discipling them as they engage in their action-oriented response to a cause. As he explained his ministry, he said, “I communicated the Gospel through the lens of justice.” That’s a great description of Ed Brown’s ministry called Care of Creation. He and his global missionary staff, communicate the Gospel through the lens of the care of creation.

Today I learned that unlike many other “green” efforts, this is not a Christian facade for a liberal political agenda. Ed Brown’s ministry was actually the brain child of a visionary missionary out of John Piper’s church, Craig Sorley, who serves in Africa.

The vision of Care of Creation is:

Mobilizing the worldwide church toward a God-centered response to the environmental crisis that brings glory to the Creator, advances the cause of Christ and leads to a transformation of the people and the land that sustains them.

The ministry involves educating the North American church and engaging the church in sharing Christ while using environmentally responsible technologies around the world: Farming God’s Way, Planting God’s Trees, and Harvesting God’s Water Responsibly. I’m reminded of some of the excellent agricultural work of the Asian Rural Life Development Center. Ed emphasizes that sound theology is at the heart of sound practice. He articulates that Christ-centered theology, calling for a theology in action.

Many of the innovative, non-traditional churches that I serve, are serious about the care of creation and are looking for resources. Here’s a good one. These churches want to know what you and I are doing as Christians about the environment? So, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll confess that it is absolutely sinful for me to spit my gum out the window. Perhaps I should not even be chewing gum? But I’ll repent and at least stop spitting my chewing gum out the window. Yes this is a ridiculous little example, as if it were the worst thing that I do to the environment. I’ll also take seriously my stewardship of this earth, and like Ed I will bolster my commitment to the communication of the Gospel among the least reached around the world. Is there a place for me in the Care of Creation? After reading Ed’s book I’ll reluctantly admit that I must cease to ignore the issue and I’ll admit that there certainly better be a slot that I fill in this matter of stewardship. What about you?

If you are looking for guidance in how your church can address the issues of Creation Care, I’m sure Ed Brown will be glad to visit with you. He offers weekend seminars and training on the topic and you can simply read the book. Contact Ed Brown at ed@careofcreation.org. The book is an excellent resource for any Christian who wants to grapple with the theological foundations on this topic. It’s also a helpful tool to familiarize yourself with the issues inherent to this discussion. Brown’s book forced me, and perhaps it could you, to stop and listen to the issues, not from a left or right wing political perspective, but from an intelligent, theopraxical, conservative evangelical perspective.

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil and Care of Creation’s partner in environmental missions.  He’s appeared already in these pages as a guest blogger and has now agreed to be a regular contributor. Having spent fourteen years in India and Pakistan, Lowell, his wife Robynn, and three kids now reside in Manhattan, KS.

I know that YouTube is primarily used to apprise ourselves of this week’s media spectacle, but it’s also a wonderful tool for nostalgia.  Every once in a while, sitting at the computer, I announce to my family, “Classic Rock Night!”  The kids groan and the speakers play Creedence Clearwater Revival.   One day I went to YouTube in order to relive my childhood environmentalism.    When the world celebrated its first Earth Day in 1970, I was still in second grade.  YouTube allowed me to revisit the Ad Council PSA familiar to my generation of Saturday morning cartoon watchers.  I typed in “Crying Indian,” the name under which the ad is apparently archived in our collective memory, and watched the old chief paddle his canoe past a riverfront factory.  He beaches it on a littered shore and climbs an embankment alongside an eight-lane highway.   The narrator’s voice is deep and accusatory, “Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. “  We then see a bag of fast-food garbage flung out from a car window.  It splatters the Indian’s moccasins.  “And some people don’t.”    The camera then pans closely to his face and we see the famous tear.  “People start pollution; people can stop it.”

Here now are the comments that appeared under the video on the day that I watched it:

• GENESIS101 (5 days ago)
  • this makes me want a burger now.
• accountabilabuddy1 (2 weeks ago)
  • I hated this psa as a kid. They used to play it all the time in the 70′s. Nealry [sic] ruined Saturday morning cartoons for me!
• Greebrew1 (2 weeks ago)
  • the indian in this commercial is actually sicilian.
• SanLUZARDO (3 weeks ago)
  • They should run this again on Primetime…It will never be out of time.
• Pking2death (1 month ago)
  • The thing about this commercial is that, you can rape our women, you can kill our entire race, you can take our land, but if you litter I’m going to break down and cry.
• patu8010 (1 month ago)
  • So that’s where Simpsons got the idea.
• DexFlames (1 month ago)
  • I lol’d anyway.

If nostalgia is a function of the past and the present somehow mediating through each other, then these comments I suppose are as significant as the replayed video.  Wow!  I never remember wanting to laugh out loud about this Indian’s pain, something I always accepted as real and sincere.   Maybe if I had known he was actually Sicilian.  Back then I don’t think I could have imagined cynicism anymore than I could have imagined cartoons taking a leap from Saturday morning to the Simpson’s primetime slot.   Pking2death’s comment on crying over litter, as compared to Native America’s loss of land, life, and health, does make sense to me, but only because I’ve grown up and seen how complicated justice can be in an adult world.  It makes litter seem silly.  Nonetheless, at some elemental level in me (that convergence of the 8-year-old me and the 48-year-old me), I still consider litter to be part of that injustice.  I still find that Indian’s tear human and sincere—be he now Native American, or Sicilian, or Pakistani, or Maldivian.

The environmentalism of my childhood was simple.   For everything that I may have read in My Weekly Reader about smog in Los Angeles or Lake Erie catching on fire, most of my consciousness could be contained on a poster made with stencils and magic marker: “Don’t be a litterbug.”   Woodsy the Owl’s admonition was a rallying cry for my Cub Scout troop as we picked up garbage in the city park.   Now I try to picture Woodsy before the licensing commission of a coal-fire power plant.  “Give a hoot; don’t pollute,” he says into the bank of microphones.  (I can’t picture it.)  And all of those bags of litter we Cub Scouts picked up, now I’m informed that the landfills are too full to accept them.   We may as well go out for burgers and fries.  It’s a slow but inexorable drift from complexity to cynicism, making the canoe in the commercial a fitting metaphor.

But of course, we can stop.  We can beach the canoe in a sandbar and get out and reflect.   Grief is the first line of defense against all sorts of evils.  Then we can choose.  “Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country.”  Hey, that’s me!  Still now, four decades later.  And then we can choose to keep it simple.  “Give a hoot; don’t pollute” is exactly what industry and government need to hear.  Maybe the rhyme and the whimsy of that slogan is an integral part of the value of creation.  And maybe there is no more glorious activity for a Saturday afternoon than to grab a bag and go out into my neighborhood and pick up litter.   In my next guest blog at Our Father’s World, that will be my topic: picking up litter as a spiritual discipline.  Maybe the planet doesn’t need it, but our souls do.  Maybe two bags of pop cans and candy wrappers mean nothing to the complexities of the environment, but it can mean the world to our childlike faith.

Care of Creation and Eden Vigil are cohosting a Consultation on Environmental Missions in Manhattan KS July 12-16.  A small group of environmental and missions leaders will spend three days together hashing out issues that will help us to establish Environmental Missions as a new category of missions.  You can read the announcement of the event here – and you can contact Robynn Bliss, event registrar, here if you would like to join us.

Meanwhile, Lowell recently wrote the following piece for the Evangelicals for Social Action newsletter, answering the question, What do we mean by “Environmental Missionary”.  Enjoy!

What Is an Environmental Missionary?

Munnu-ji was my best Indian friend. He was my first landlord, renting me a small room off Assi Ghat before I was married. I’m not sure Munnu ever believed on Jesus. He was a man of peace, however, and assisted numerous Christian workers. He died when a mosquito, borne off the polluted waters of the Ganges River basin, bit him. Munnu-ji contracted cerebral malaria.

The basic idea was to combine the environment and missions in a way we don’t think anyone else is doing. On an organizational level, no mission organization in North America is openly both environmental and missional. It’s very similar to medical missions in its approach to the mission field. When you take out the word ‘medical’ and put in the ‘environmental,’ that’s what we are. We want to do practical things where we help people by sharing the Gospel, but we want to serve people and serve the church by helping to heal the land through various means.

Cheez-its that taste medicinal. Metallic cornflakes. Eggo waffles that remind you of “stale straw”.  Meat that calls to mind cardboard or damp dog hair.

If the recent government effort to reduce salt in processed foods is successful, this is what we will have to eat.  Or so says the food industry according to an astonishing front page article in yesterday’s New York Times (free subscr reqd).

Compared to reducing fat and sugar, for which substitute ingredients have been found, eliminating salt and sodium is turning out to be a major challenge for these companies.  Why is that?  It turns out that without salt – lots and lots of salt – we eaters might discover that the stuff that is being sold to us as delicious, tantalizing and even healthy “food” is really nothing of the sort.

It’s a marketing problem.  Without salt to hide the true nature of these products, we might not buy them.   Why not?  It turns out they don’t taste very good:

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

“Salt really changes the way that your tongue will taste the product,” Mr. Kepplinger said. “You make one little change and something that was a complementary flavor now starts to stand out and become objectionable.”

Let me be clear:  I cook, and I use salt in my cooking.  Salt is about as natural a substance as you can find.  There is nothing wrong with salt – in reasonable amounts.  It is a useful seasoning.  It’s an important preservative, going back to Bible times.  Salt was so common that it makes an appearance in Jesus parables and his followers are even told that we are “the salt of the earth“.  Salt is one of the things that you must have for your body to function normally.

On the other hand, we also know that too much salt causes all kinds of problems, most significantly, hypertension or high blood pressure.  Again from the Times article:

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the question here is not “to salt or not to salt”.  It is somewhat simpler than that: We now know from the food companies themselves that without salt their food is not really very good.  This is not a diatribe from a health nut.  The industry itself is pleading with the government:  “Our food is so bad that if we aren’t allowed to load it up with salt, people won’t eat it.  You have to let us keep the salt.  How else can we sell the stuff?”

The question is this:  If the companies themselves think the product is this bad, why are we still buying it?

Instead, get yourself out to that Farmer’s Market this week.  Then come home and cook some real food!

To explore this topic further, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s short book, “In Defense of Food” – available here from Amazon or at your library.

The folks over at crosswalk.com have posted an unusually good summary of my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation.  Most reviews feel as if the reviewer looked at the table of contents and the blurbs on the back cover.  Not so in this case: Whitney Hopler has done such a good summary of the content that I almost wish I’d written it myself.  If you haven’t got the book yet, or have it but haven’t quite got round to reading it (! I know this true of some of my own friends, so don’t feel bad!), her review/summary is below – you could almost read the summary and fake it in a conversation – not that you would, of course.  [Here's how to order from the Care of Creation website., and keep in mind that this is also a very good summary of the kind of content you get in the Our Father's World seminar - booking information is here.]

Our environment — God’s creation — is in deep trouble. From the effects of climate change and the extinction of animal and plant species to the growing shortage of clean air and water, creation is in a crisis more serious than ever before.

But the good news is, there’s no better group of people to help solve the problem than Christians. It’s us — those who love God — whom He has called to take care of the environment He made. And if we’re faithful to that call, He’ll empower us to heal our suffering creation.

God is counting on you. Here’s how you can mobilize your church to care for creation: Recognize the complexity of the problem. The environmental crisis we face is a vast and multi-dimensional issue in which every local problem is caused by or causes problems in other areas of the world. All of God’s creation is connected, and when one part suffers, all of it suffers. There are more people alive on earth now than ever before, and many are living a consumer-oriented lifestyle that’s damaging the environment for us all.

Understand the call to dominion. When God gave humans dominion — charging them with ruling over the planet — He intended that people accomplish His goals (not their own) in creation. God made creation to be one of the primary means by which people could come to know Him. It’s a temple that’s intended as a place to meet God, so it should be respected and cared for. Let your love for God motivate you to value the creation He made. Decide to take care of it as an act of worship to show your love for God.

Look at Christ’s example. Jesus Himself walked the earth and worshipped in the midst of nature. He used the fruit of creation in responsible ways, consuming its resources (like food) whenever necessary and enjoying them fully, but never diminishing or destroying creation’s ability to be fruitful.

Recognize the root of the problem. The core issue that’s caused creation to become broken is sin. But the creation that’s been damaged by our sin can be restored by our redemption. If we seek to restore our relationship to God, then to ourselves, and then to other people, our relationship with the rest of the creation can be restored. Realize that the way you treat creation has an impact on your relationships with God and others. The way you either take care of or neglect God’s creation is a measure of how well God’s redemption either is or isn’t working in your life.

Understand the church’s power to fix the problem. The church is the only organization on earth that can successfully address a crisis with as many dimensions as the environmental crisis. The church can deal with: repentance from sin, motivation for individual action, courage and influence to change corporate behavior, and the ability to recruit and mobilize millions of people to take redemptive action to solve the problem. Since the environmental crisis is an unmatched challenge that’s critically important to tackle, it should be addressed in every aspect of your church’s life.

Worship in ways that foster wonder and awe of God’s creation. Design worship that inspires people to feel passionate about creation and work to help heal it. Sing songs about creation and read Scripture passages that describe it. Make creation visible during your worship services, such as by opening window shades to bring in natural light and featuring fresh plants and flowers in the sanctuary. Schedule some worship services outdoors when possible. Pray for environmental healing, and for the people who are currently suffering because of environmental problems.

Preach and teach about creation. When preaching sermons and teaching Sunday School classes, help people see the connections between how they live and what is happening to the world God loves. Emphasize the comprehensive nature of God’s redemptive plan for the environment, and each person’s part in it.

Encourage the next generation to care for creation. Take children and youth outdoors whenever possible, and when the weather doesn’t permit going outside, bring creation indoors when you can (such as by having some unusual pets visit, setting up an ant farm or aquarium for fish, taking care of plants in the classroom, etc.). Urge your classes to conserve energy (like by turning off lights after leaving a room) and recycle materials you use in class. Use service project time for environmental projects. On missions trips, point out the damage that’s been done to the environment in each place you visit, and how that’s hurting the people you’ve come to serve. Encourage kids who are interested in science to prepare for possible careers in that field so they can help the environment even more.

Respect the environment when building or renovating. Whenever you’re building a new church building or renovating your existing one, make sure your plans are environmentally responsible. Minimize damage to your land and the creatures on it, such as by minimizing artificial landscaping (like lawns) and maximizing natural areas, saving animal habitats, planting gardens, and avoiding the use of chemicals that harm the soil.

Save energy. Conserve energy however you can, such as by updating your heating and air conditioning system to one that’s optimally efficient, using good quality insulation, switching from incandescent lighting to fluorescent lighting, turning office machines like computers off at night, using only environmentally healthy cleaning supplies, and reusing supplies like cups and dishes.

Work for a better environment in the community surrounding your church. Get together with others in your church to go out into your local community and contribute to the health of your part of creation. Do volunteer projects, like clearing and maintaining hiking trails or cleaning trash from stream beds. Collect specialized items for recycling (like cell phones and printer cartridges), use and promote public transportation and carpooling, turn over a part of your church’s property to be used for a community garden, host a farmer’s market, etc. Let non-Christians who also care about the environment see that people who love God also love His creation — that will give you a platform to share the Gospel with them at the right time.

Incorporate creation care into your church’s missions programs. Design missions programs that are theologically sound, scientifically informed, geographically comprehensive, and politically savvy. Learn about the environments in the places your church is serving through missions. Plan how to help the people there whose health is suffering because of environmental issues. Do what you can to help heal their environment as part of your overall service to them.

“Old Literature” is an occasional series pointing to works of the past, sometimes well known, sometimes not, that have embedded in them a clear creation care message.  [Check out previous posts in the series here.] C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books are perfect subjects for this series, and have long been on my mental list.  Before I got to him, though, Dean Ohlman at Wonder of Creation blog did the job for me, with a little Isaac Watts and John Newton thrown in for good measure.  Here is his meditation on Narnia – reposted by permission:

No one knows.

The “official” estimate is 210,000 gallons per day (5,000 barrels).  This is almost certainly way too low.  Some outside experts (non-government and non-oil industry) put the rate at more like 1,050,000 gallons (25,000 barrels).  BP itself has admitted that in a worst-case scenario the rate could be more than double that pessimistic amount, or 2,520,000 gallons (60,000 barrels).

Whatever the amount, it adds up fast.  NPR has designed a Widget that I have installed to the right ———>>>

You can use the slider to adjust the rate and see what the current total would be if it were leaking at that rate.

Again, no one knows.  But what we do know is it isn’t going away.

Lord, forgive us.

[If you are reading this post on FaceBook or on Networked Blogs, you will need to come over to http://ourfathersworld.org to see the widget.]

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.

[Alarmist alert!]

About a month ago we posted a story on frogs quoting a video segment from Planet Earth that I use in my seminars in which we are told “I think we’re facing the loss of half the world’s frogs.”

Had some pushback on that one from people who are struggling with the balance between people and nature.  In this equation, frogs are kind of like insects – it might be nice to keep them around, but what’s really the big deal if we lose them?  This week’s report on endangered primates – our closest natural cousins and the cutest things in the jungle – is more bad news and its hard to think of any excuse for not being upset about this:

Of the world’s 634 primate species, 48 percent are threatened with extinction, according to the report, issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Switzerland-based group calls itself the world’s oldest global environmental organization.

“This report makes for very alarming reading,” said Christoph Schwitzer, an adviser to the group, in a statement. “Support and action to help save these species is vital if we are to avoid losing these wonderful animals forever.”

A handful of primate species count populations in the dozens. For example, there are just 60 to 70 Asian monkeys known as golden headed langurs, found only on an island in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin.

There are fewer than 100 remaining northern sportive lemurs, which live in Madagascar, and around 110 eastern black crested gibbons, found in northeastern Vietnam. [CNN]

Not recommended for bedtime reading, but important none-the-less is the IUCN’s Red List of all endangered species.