A week ago, yesterday was designated as “Earth Day.”
James Washburn’s article in the April 17, 2008 edition of the L.A. Weekly provides some interesting history and background for my thoughts today.
The first Earth Day took place April 22, 1970, thirty eight years ago. In 1970 the world’s human population was just under 3.7 billion. It had taken nearly 2,000 years to plump that number up from a mere 200 million that populated the earth in Bible days. In merely 38 years the 3.7 billion has been inflated by another 3 billion.
In 1970, gas was 34 cents a gallon and few people pondered what the lead in it was doing to the environment, except those in the DuPont board room which had covered up lead’s downside for decades. Our oceans were still teeming with fish, and they weren’t anywhere near full of mercury yet. Delaware-sized chunks of Arctic and Antarctic ice shelf weren’t yet crumbling into the sea.
Back then, the weather extremes, species die-offs and oceanic dead zones of today were still within realms of conjecture between science and science fiction. Some events have come to pass that even the writers of science fiction could not have imagined, such as in 2004, when Australia’s epic drought drove thirst-crazed kangaroos into urban areas where they attacked humans.
In 1970, our dichotomy regarding the earth as both our oyster and our toilet hadn’t taken so obvious a toll on the planet, nothing like what is happening now. But it was enough to get people thinking and organizing. Earth Day was a huge event in which 20 million Americans took part…from teachers taking school children to tide pools to experience touching sea creatures to participants fostering substantive legislative, scientific and academic change.
Earth Day has since gone global, observed in 174 languages. But here at home it has slowly demonstrated our political inertia, particularly over the past seven years of environmental rollback. I don’t believe anything will change until policy changes are made at the Environmental Protection Agency. Since these changes will come about only with direction from the White House, much will depend on what happens in November.
It is ironic that the Agency owes it existence to the first Earth Day. President Nixon, being politically astute, saw how he could bolster falling public support of his administration by giving lip service to what he saw represented by the 20 million people that first Earth Day. By combining various elements of existing cabinet departments, tying a bow around it, and calling it the Environmental Protection Agency, he gave away nothing and gained support from both sides of the Congressional aisle but most importantly outflanked his chief rivals in both political parties for re-election in 1972.
Lobbyists are in charge of agencies that should be policing the lobbyists’ polluting industries. Whistle blowers are fired or shunted into obscurity. Science has been so censored and distorted by the current administration that over 4,000 scientists, including 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences and 48 Nobel Prize winners, issued a 48 page detailed letter condemning these actions.
The question you and I need to ask ourselves is, “What is our role as Christians in the environmental issue?”
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).So begins our Bible. So begins the history of the universe and mankind. Our very life, and that of future generations, depends on our love and care of our planet Earth. We celebrate Earth and our God-appointed task for its care every day.
"It is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (I Corinthians 4:2).Those first photographs from space appeared in the early sixties and changed forever the way we see the earth. For the first time we beheld our planet whole: a blue and white jewel set in the blackness of the universe, lovely beyond imagining but also fragile beyond imagining, - a shimmering dot in the yawning immensity of space. It was no longer the enormous earth that men had struggled to explore and conquer… a mountain here, an ocean there, elsewhere a desert or a forest. Our portrait from space showed us a unity, a little ball, bound together and interconnected in every part.
But the revelation wasn’t new, not really. That view of us from beyond ourselves is God’s view – the picture of the Bible painted long before the camera caught it. God created the earth whole. He made it beautiful. He created Adam, “Earthman,” to tend it in His name.
God said, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28).I developed an interest in bonsai art when I was working for the Los Angeles County Road Department. Over the years, I lost interest in it, but renewed my interest when I went to work for the City of Gardena where they have an annual bonsai festival.
I can still recall the elderly Japanese gardener bending ever so close to this tiny tree that his chin literally stroked the needles of this 200 year old bonsai pine, only eighteen inches high. He then moved to a miniature maple, again lowering his head in what seemed an intimate communion, a relationship between man and the living things in his care. Next he stooped over a small sturdy oak, then a two foot high cedar, product of nearly 300 years of devoted care. What empathy with roots and soil, sap and bark, generation after generation, had gone into the nurturing of those trees!
When I asked him as to whether he was speaking to the trees, the old man with a face seemingly full of age and wisdom as the trees themselves, answered, “No, I do not speak to the trees. I listen to them.” We need to learn the language of God’s creation.
Two weeks ago, I spoke on how Christianity has and should play a role in the environment, sharing several articles on how Christianity has been deemed to be a source of the earth’s degradation. So what is our responsibility as Christians for the future of this earth?
Reading from the Bible, humanity was not created to take advantage of creation, but rather to keep it, nurture it and sustain it: “We were formed in God’s image to represent Him on earth so that all the earth, in turn, could glorify Him better and better.”
The environment is an issue that the Church must not ignore. Intellectually we may know that God gave humanity the job of dressing the earth and keeping it, but how do we accomplish it? How can we even begin to be truly committed to the care and preservation of our earth?
In an attempt to help us answer this question on the environment in its biblical context, let us see what the Bible has to say.
The Bible tells us that we have a Creator God, that He does care about the environment, and shows us what our responsibilities toward nature and family are from His point of view.
The definition of a steward is one who looks after and takes care of the possessions of another. Most Christian authors agree that human beings were put here to be stewards over the physical earth. The concept of stewardship is a most important one. Humanity’s job was - and is - to manage and to take care of what God has given us.
Thus, stewardship, for the Christian, focuses on God’s creation. It encompasses all His gifts, including time, talents, money, earthly opportunities - to name a few. It recognizes responsibility for His world - being proactive in managing the gifts of the Creator.
So, why has it taken us so long to recognize that our physical environment is crumbling faster than the technicians can reassemble it? Why are we more or less content to watch the world God made turn into a chemical swamp? Perhaps it’s because we think the problem is too big for us to deal with and that we can’t do anything about it, or even want to be bothered. All stewards must account to his principal; as such, we, you and I, will be judged by what we do with what God has given us.
The environment is an ethical and spiritual issue that should motivate us to prayer, meditation and action. Ecological problems are real and we’re not going to make them go away by consistently ignoring them. They won’t and can’t fix themselves if we continue to contribute to the problem rather than the solution. Christians must be active and involved.
World crises and problems that command our immediate attention will come and they will go, but acid rain, salinization, pollution of our water ways and the extinction of species will quietly continue.
People in nearby communities have taken heed. Young people have taken it upon themselves to clean up our beaches and flood control channels and help restore them to their God intended natural states. They have scheduled regular programs to remove trash that has been dumped or brought down from upstream storm drains. The trash you see at the street corners eventually ends up in the ocean by way of streams like the Los Angeles River even though its concrete walls make it difficult to think of it as a waterway. The hundreds of tons of trash and rubbish these volunteers remove enable God to rehabilitate this and other water courses and save His environment
On a larger scale, our elected officials must enact legislation to protect our environment and not allow corporate America to put the dollar sign in front of their eyes.
Global warming is causing an ever increasing rate of irreversible polar ice caps recession, raising the water level of the oceans and threatening the habitat for numerous animals such as the polar bear, fox and wolf, and the food chain for the creatures of the sea.
In the April 20th edition of the Los Angeles Times, this headline appears: “A global warming calamity is building in the Himalayas.” Here are some excerpts from that article.
“PUNAKHA, BHUTAN – High in the Himalayas, above this peaceful valley where farmers till a patchwork of emerald green fields, an icy lake fed by melting glaciers waits to become a ‘tsunami from the sky.’The article goes on to say, “Because of Earth’s rising temperatures, at least 25 glacial lakes in Bhutan are at risk of overflowing and dumping their contents into the narrow valleys where much of the country’s population lives.”
“This lake is swollen dangerously past normal levels, thanks to the glacial warming that is causing the glaciers to retreat at record speed. But no one knows when the tipping point will come and the lake can take no more, bursting its banks and sending torrents of water crashing into the valley below.
“Such floods from above have hit Punakha before, most recently in 1994, a calamity that killed about two dozen people and wiped out livelihoods and homes without warning. But scientists say a new flood would unleash more than twice as much water as before and be far more catastrophic.”
It is a long article and addresses other matters affected by the climatic changes such as agriculture and disease. It concludes with the following statement.
“Despite Bhutan’s records as one of the world’s most environmentally vigilant nations, it has no choice but to confront and plan for problems incurred by the actions of others, …‘There is a sense of helplessness,’ said Doley Tshering of the United Nations Development Program, ‘but at the same time, you can’t sit back and do nothing about it.’”Our nation with its insatiable appetite for fossil fuels is the world’s largest contributor to this problem of global warming. A total of 174 nations including all of Europe have affirmed the Kyoto Protocol designed to reduce the generation of carbon dioxide and other gases that create the greenhouse effect causing global warming. President Bush has refused to ratify this Protocol negotiated over a period of almost ten years, ignoring the report by his Environmental Protection Agency and advice from the National Academy of Science as to the major cause of global warming. As a country professing to be “one nation under God,” the President’s action does not bear a good witness to the world.
You and I, as Christians, are called to keep God’s creation, nurture it and sustain it. We are formed in God’s image to represent Him on earth so that all the earth, in turn could glorify Him better and better.
References:
L.A. Weekly, April 17, 2008, James Washburn, “Headin’ for the Tar Pits, One and All”;
L.A. Times, April 20, 2008, Henry Chu; P/T; DG 0422/23/2490;
042397, 042298, 042199, 042804, 042705. 042606.
