via Flicker CC License - click for original

[This is part II of an extended post of observations gleaned during my current visit to Singapore.  See part I here.]

We left off with this statement: “this [Singaporean] miracle is more fragile than it appears.  It’s economic, ecological and political foundations are crumbling.  It would be surprising, to say the least, if the Singapore of 50 or 100 years from now was the same miraculous place it is today.”

Let’s unpack that a bit. Read more »

via Flickr CC License - click for original

My wife Susanna and I are in the middle of a two week visit to Singapore.  This is an unusually long and delightfully leisurely visit compared with most of my overseas trips.  Because our youngest daughter lives and works here, we’ve come to see and experience her world as well as to share the creation care message in two conferences this week – which is why I’ve been able to experience and explore the city in a more relaxed manner than is usually possible.  These are some of my impressions after five days here – anecdotal, to be sure, but still valuable, I think. Read more »

Floods in Kentucky - Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

Care of Creation, my organization, does a lot of work teaching people in Kenya and other East African countries about the dangers of destroying forests.  God gave us trees for good reason:  In terms of hydrology (water cycles), trees are essential.  They are like the columns holding up the roof of a building – lose the trees, the whole system falls apart.  It turns out that something very similar is going on in the Mississippi River watershed of middle America.  We’re a richer country – but it appears that mere wealth can’t stop a flood.  When we human beings carelessly destroy vital parts of the world God gave us to live in, it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re living in a village in Kenya or on a farm in Missouri.

Lost in the blizzard of headlines over the last week – tornadoes, weddings, the death of a terrorist – is the developing  flood situation in the Mississippi River valley.  The few stories that we’ve seen have focused on what one commentator called a solomonic dilemma:  Whether to save a small, struggling riverside city (Cairo, Illinois) or hundreds of thousands of acres of the country’s best farmland in Missouri.  That case has been all the way to the US Supreme Court in the last 48 hours, with the result that last night the Corps blasted two miles of levees at Bird’s Point, just south of Cairo in order to reduce the pressure on that community’s flood defenses.  As of this writing, the river has receded by a foot – the Corps hopes that they’ll see three more feet of decline in the next couple of days. Read more »

Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan? Read more »

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.”

Read more »

The word “ordeal” was what caught my attention first.  It was a news story about the Carnival Splendor, one of the largest cruise ships in the world, disabled off the coast of California early this week.  Ordeal?  Amid all that luxury?  This must be journalistic overstatement.

Little by little, the details started to emerge as the ship was towed back to San Diego, then came a flood of reports yesterday after the ship reached port.  Smoky corridors.  Blocked up toilets.  Stench filled hallways.  Interior rooms with no light or ventilation.  And two hour waits to be served hot dog salad and Spam.  (It is a strange footnote to this entire episode that the only thing the cruise line has disputed is that Spam was served to the passengers.  What’s the big deal about Spam among all of the other hardships?  But I digress…) Read more »