"The kind of food our minds devour will determine the kind of person we become." - John Stott, Your Mind Matters

Thursday, May 27, 2010

For Further Thought: Around the World 18 Times

For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care, by Steven Bouma-Prediger

progress: 98/187

In my last post I wrote about why the world is groaning, without addressing the doubts of some who might disagree as to whether it is in fact groaning at all (except perhaps in some spiritualized sense), believing instead that all or most environmental concern is misguided, misinformed or even maliciously false. I chose not to try and convince any such people, because as I mentioned before, I am not a scientist. I have read the statistics and viewed the charts of many scientists in this book, and I have chosen to believe them as true and not sensationalist, because they make logical sense to me and they jive with my experience of the physical world. I cannot argue with any who disagree with such information, but I hope their disagreement will be based on research and not reactions...it's a temptation against which we all must be on guard.

Having said that, I thought it might be of interest to list some of the statistics that I found most startling in Bouma-Prediger's chapter, entitled "What's Wrong With the World?" I appreciated his use of word-pictures which helped me to visualize the magnitude of the numbers. 

Population/Consumption
  • "A newborn in the US requires twice as much grain and 10 times as much oil as a child born in Brazil or Indonesia - and produces far more pollution. In fact a simple calculation shows that the annual increase in the US population of 2.6 million people puts more pressure on the world's resources than do the 17 million people added in India each year." (Christopher Flavin, quoted on page 43)
  • For a fascinating - and convicting - photographic representation of what families all around the world eat in a month, click here.
Hunger
  • If you lined up all the hungry people in the world, shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch around the world (at the equator) 18.2 times. (43)
Biodiversity
  • While estimates vary, a conservative estimate states that three species per day become extinct. (45)
Deforestation
  • Half of the forests (our carbon-collecting air-cleaners) that once covered the earth are now gone. (47)
Water
  • Approximately 25% of the total human population do not have an adequate supply of drinking water. (49)
  • In California, groundwater overdraft averages 1.6 billion cubic meters per year. (Sandra Postel, quoted on pp. 50-51)
  • In Arizona, water tables have dropped more than 120 meters. (ibid)
  • In North Africa, current water depletion is estimated at 10 billion cubic meters per year. (ibid)
  • In Mexico as well as Gaza and Israel, pumping exceeds natural recharge by more than 50%. (ibid)
  • In India, water tables are falling 20 centimeters annually. (ibid)
  • In Beijing, the water table has fallen 37 meters over the last four decades. (ibid)
  • In Bangkok, overpumping has caused land to subside 5 to 10 centimeters a year for the past two decades. (ibid)
Land
  • The US has annual ratio of 18:1 soil lost to soil formed. Nineteen million acres of rural land was "developed" between 1970 and 1990 and currently every year, 400,000 acres are lost. (52, 54)
Waste
  • Each year the US generates enough solid waste to fill a bumper-to-bumper convoy of garbage trucks that would stretch around the equator almost 8 times. This amounts to 1500 pounds of waste per person per year, or 52 tons in a 70-year lifetime. And this is only 1.5 percent of the total waste generated each year in the US alone! (54)
  • Each year the US throws away (municipal waste only) enough aluminum to rebuild the country's entire commercial airline fleet every three months, and enough disposable diapers, if linked end-to-end, to reach the moon and back seven times.
Energy
  • The US uses approximately 1/4 of the world's available energy.
Air
  • In Sweden all bodies of fresh water are now acidic, with "roughly fifteen thousand of them too sour to support life." (Bill McKibben, quoted on page 57)
  • In the Adirondacks of upstate New York approximately 1/4 of the 2,759 lakes and ponds are now fishless because of acid deposition or have been damaged to the point at which fish populations have been substantially reduced. (58)
Climate
  • The hottest fourteen years on record have occurred in the last two decades.
  • The global mean surface temperature has been steadily rising for at least a century.
  • "Already we are seeing evidence consistent with the predictions of climate change models. More intense heat waves and longer cold spells. Severe droughts and intensive flooding. More destructive storms and less controllable wild fires." (64-65)
 Well, that's probably enough downers for now. For me the challenge is to step back from looking at these statistics as shocking quotes to spice up the next conversation, but to feel the weight of them in my own life, to let the conviction settle into my heart, so that I can take action for change. Consumption is the biggest word that comes to mind - how much I as a North American consume, and to what extent that consumption robs others of even the most basic necessities. As much as I might like to, this is not an issue I can ignore.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Creation Groans: What Have We Done?

For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care, by Steven Bouma-Prediger
progress: 98/187

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning
as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
Romans 8:22

I am really enjoying this book. After so much sensationalism, oversimplification and willful ignorance in the media and popular thought, Bouma-Prediger offers a refreshingly sane review of our current environmental situation, as well as thoughtful explanations of how many Christians have misinterpreted Scripture with regard to ecology, and a humble but passionate plea for a closer, more informed look at what the Bible has to say on the subject.

As I write, an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil have been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico every day for the past five or six weeks, since an oil rig exploded in mid-April. As of May 18th, 46,000 square miles of the Gulf had been closed to fishing because of the spread of this dirty, sticky, toxic mess. Amazingly, some folks in the news have chosen to attack random third parties, defending the corporations and deflecting public sentiment from what should be the obvious response: sorrow at the soiling of our good earth.

 Some of the heaviest oil on land to date is seen along the Louisiana coastline on May 20.

An oil-covered crab crawls past an oil blob that washed ashore on May 22 in Grand Isle, Louisiana.
(photo and caption credits to CNN) 

I think it is this deflecting that disturbs me most. On a CBC news interview last week, callers called in to respond to the Sierra Club's suggestion that the Alberta oilsands are environmentally harmful and therefore new investments should be made in greener technologies. The Sierra representative wasn't even saying that the oilsands should stop, just that new growth should be suspended. Obviously, this struck a chord with the Albertans, so many of whom rely on the oil and gas industry - messy as it is - to put food on their tables. It is completely valid to raise this as a concern in the discussion, but I was surprised how many people simply wanted to shut down the discussion "because the oilsands make good money," as if that in itself were a good enough reason to do anything. I couldn't help thinking about the formula, "We should do ______ because it makes good money." What else would we be willing to plug into such a simplistic statment? Prostitution? Drug-dealing? Abortion? Child labour? Our perspectives on ecology are skewed by many things, not the least of which is money. While a healthy economy is indeed important, we can't separate that from the multitude of interconnected topics that relate to a healthy world at large.

I have puzzled over the highly-politicized nature of the environmental debate, as politicians and the average joes who support them, rather than scientists, make concrete statements about what is or isn't happening with global warming, among other things. When did it become Christian to say that global warming is a hoax? When did it become Liberal to care about environmental issues? Not being a scientist myself, I can only rely on the science of others to sway me one way or the other, but I think any reasonable person should be able to admit that we humans affect our environment- to some degree at least - with our cars and our industries, our chemicals and our sprawl. One fellow who called in to the aforementioned radio show boldly proclaimed that "Ants have made more impact on this planet that humans have!" Meaning no disrepect to ants, I somehow doubt that.

It's a good thing I haven't written in over a month, because that's at least a month's worth of opinions right there. Hopefully I haven't lost any of you yet!

The most intriguing chapter that I've read thus far is the one entitled, "Is Christianity to Blame?" in which Bouma-Prediger explores the multifaceted critique of Christianity as the primary cause of our world's environmental crisis. Though he ably argues against this charge, he emphasizes that Christians do bear part of the burden of responsibility. In his defense, he differentiates between various (misinformed) expressions of Christianity and what the Bible actually has to say on the subject. The expressions of Christianity were familiar to me, and the criticisms of such expressions need to be heard by the church.

The biggest criticism was that God's command in the Garden of Eden for his human creatures to "have dominion" (Gen 1:28) over the earth was tantamount to commanding the exploitation of the natural world for the sole benefit of humans. In the critics' definition, dominion equals domination. Bouma-Prediger challenges this interpretation of dominion, arguing from Psalm 72 as well as Jesus' life that godly dominion is in fact defined by service. Regarding the domination/exploitation view, Wendell Berry writes,

"Such a reading of Genesis 1:28 is contradicted by virtually all the rest of the Bible, as many people by now have pointed out. The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it. If God loves the world, then how might any person of faith be excused for not loving it or justified in destroying it?" (quoted in SBJ, 75)
Another criticism is that Christian eschatology has contributed to the earth's malaise. Many Christians believe that, since the earth is going to be "burned up," there's no need to be overly concerned about the earth of this world, which is passing away. I have encountered this mentality amongst Christians with dismay. Bouma-Prediger discusses 2 Peter 3:10, the primary verse that has been used to support such a view:
"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up." (NASB)
He explains that this is a mistranslation of the Greek word, which means "to be found." The idea, more clearly translated in the ESV as "the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed," carries the idea of purifying judgment rather than utter destruction. Eugene Peterson brings this idea out even more clearly in his paraphrase: "earth and all its works exposed to the scrutiny of Judgment." As I look more closely at the entire chapter of 2 Peter 3, I still have questions about the nature and extent of the fire. However, as the author points out, even if such an interpretation is correct (i.e. the earth will be utterly destroyed), it should not follow that we are not called to be good stewards of it until that time.

The unfortunate truth is that some Christians have used this passage to justify the degradation of God's good creation. How might things change if more Christians understood having dominion over the earth within a Christlike context of service? What of our own luxuries might we sacrifice in deference to our charge to rule the earth in a godly way?

A number of years ago, it occurred to me that if Jesus' post-resurrection body bore the scars of his death, then what if our restored earth also bore the scars of its previous life? The thought has stayed with me, sobering me to the reality that the choices we make in this life will have consequences in the next life.

Though Bouma-Prediger opposes the accusation that Christianity is wholly to blame for the earth's ecological woes, he goes on to explain how Christians are indeed complicit in at least five ways:
  1. The church is captive to modern Western culture, and its patron gods of consumption and wealth
  2. The church has accepted the anthropocentrism of modernity, placing humanity at the center of purpose and meaning in the universe
  3. The church, along with Western culture, has made technology into a god, forgetting that it is good and bad
  4. The church has forgotten creation in light of redemption, even though creation provides the foundation for understanding that redemption
  5. The Western church is prideful, unwilling to learn from other traditions and perspectives
There is much to think about, much to confess. I'm looking forward to reading more of his thoughts on the path forward, on his "vision for creation care," and how I can be a better steward of my beautiful world.

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