Tag: Global warming

4 reasons why every Christian should be a tree-hugging environmentalist

I didn’t have much time for Earth Day growing up. That kind of thing was for tree-hugging, left-wing hippie types who couldn’t tell the difference between creation and its creator. I was a Christian. I believed the world was going to burn someday, and I would be evacuated along with the faithful few to a disembodied realm. In the meantime, I needn’t worry about what my consumption was doing to the planet.

It turns out that was a pretty terrible way to read the biblical story. Here are four reasons why I’ve come to believe that being a tree-hugging, climate-change-fighting environmentalist is a vital part of every Christian’s calling…

1. Because our story starts in a garden. (And it ends in a city with the ultimate urban garden.)

The phrase “as God originally intended” gets thrown around a lot, often to contrast the creation story with some hot-button social issue like gender equality or same-sex marriage.

But if the first story in the Bible shows creation “as God originally intended,” then the real shame is that more of us aren’t gardeners.

In the Bible, location matters. The biblical narrative is covered in the soil from which it sprung. And the very first story — the creation story — is set in a garden.

It’s not a wild, uninhabited space, untouched by humans. It’s cultivated, shaped, and tended carefully. It turns out that groundskeeper is humanity’s first occupation. But to be a gardener is to work with the land, not to ride roughshod over it.

To be sure, the biblical drama doesn’t end in a garden. It ends in a city, the new Jerusalem of Revelation 21-22, Yet this city looks nothing like the industrial cities of the American Rust Belt. In fact, two of the city’s most prominent features harken back to the original garden: a crystal-clear river flowing along the main thoroughfare and a great tree bearing life-giving fruit.

The calling of every Christian is to bring a little bit of heaven to earth where we can now. Caring for planet’s natural resources is a great way to do just that.

2. Because the disciples weren’t Jesus’ only companions.

A couple years ago, my priest pointed out a commonly overlooked feature of Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record Jesus’ temptation in the desert, but only Mark mentions that Jesus “was with the wild animals.”

Given the other narrative features — a harsh environment, the devil for company — it’s understandable to interpret the presence of wild animals as yet another a foreboding element, another threat to Jesus’ well-being. But it’s not. The wild animals are mentioned in the same breath as the angels who attended Jesus. Mark depicts Jesus dwelling in harmony with the animals. He is, after all, the one who made them.

The wilderness narrative points to the whole-earth implications of the gospel Jesus came to announce. Jesus did not come simply to “save souls.” He came to rescue all of creation. As my priest once said, “There is no getting right with the world without getting right with God. But there is also no getting right with God without getting right with the world.”

3. Because this world IS our home; we are NOT “just passing through.”

Left Behind’s fanciful depiction of people being raptured right out of this world (and out of their clothes) made for more than just bad filmmaking; it made for some pretty bad eschatology, too. And bad eschatology has consequences.

The idea that God will dispose of this world and evacuate the faithful to a disembodied spiritual realm is a relatively recent innovation, thought up by Christians who had largely detached themselves from the world already. But this is not the story the Bible tells. In fact, this view is a modern incarnation of one of the earliest heresies to confront the church.

Gnosticism taught that the material world is bad, that everything physical will perish and only spirit will endure. Whole books of the Bible (such as 1 John) were written against Gnosticism, yet its influence is still felt. Just read this post on 8 Gnostic myths that pervade the modern evangelical church.

One of these 8 myths: the material world isn’t important. This was the explanation I heard as a kid whenever the environment came up. The world was just going to get worse and worse, we reasoned, until God finally destroyed it. Our heavenly, disembodied home awaited.

Again: that’s not the story Scripture tells. The Bible ends with God coming to earth, not with a few lucky souls escaping this world. If this world matters enough to God that he would come back to save it, then it should matter to us too.

4. Because when you damage the earth, you damage God’s dwelling place.

Our failure to care for the planet is part of a larger failure to understand our true place in creation.

There are not one but two creation stories in Genesis. The first follows a deliberate pattern; elements of the story are introduced in increasing order of importance. What happens on day five is more important than what happens on day four (and so on). At the end of Genesis 1, God summons humanity into existence — the apex of creation.

Except, that’s not where the first creation story ends. The first story actually continues into the first few verses of chapter 2, which depict the final “day” of creation. (If you ever needed a reason to ditch chapter and verse divisions in your Bible, this is it. The very first chapter break in Scripture obscures the natural literary flow.)

If the first creation story progresses in order of importance, then the events of day 7 are the culmination, not those of day 6. In other words, God’s act of resting on the seventh day is the high point, not the creation of humanity on day 6. We are not the apex of the story. It’s not about us. We are not all that.

Why does it matter that the story ends with God resting? Because in ancient Near Eastern literature (like Genesis), deities didn’t just rest anywhere. Deities rested in temples. In most cases, deities rested in temples built for them; but in Genesis, God does the building himself. The whole world is his temple, and at the end of the first creation story, he takes up residence in his creation.

This world — with is rolling meadows and nuclear power plants, its billowing seas and floating garbage patches the size of Texas — is God’s dwelling place. “The earth is the Lord’s,” as it says in Psalm 24. Heaven is God’s throne and the earth is his footstool, as it says near the end of Isaiah.

Human sin broke the connection between God and his earthly dwelling, but the rest of the story is about God coming home. In the gospels, God incarnates himself in human flesh and makes “his dwelling among us,” just as he did in Genesis. And at renewal of all things, heaven comes down to earth, and a voice cries out, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people!”

The earth is not ours to use as we see fit. It’s not ours to exploit. The earth is not first and foremost our dwelling place. It’s God’s. When he invites the first humans to “subdue” the earth, it’s really an invitation to tend it on his behalf. We are caretakers, tenets, stewards. Not owners.

So this Earth Day, a good question for Christians to ask is: when God comes home, will he be happy with how we’ve cared for it?

Change we need to believe in

It’s over 100 degrees outside my home in Michigan today.

Yet another heat wave in a year that’s seen three or four already — the first of which came in March. (Yes, March.) That one decimated Michigan’s cherry and apple crops. This one is baking roughly two-thirds of the country.

Last month, there were the Colorado wildfires, brought on by a severe drought affecting 98 percent of the state. In fact, according to the latest report from the National Drought Mitigation Center, 56 percent of the continental U.S. is experiencing some form of drought right now. That’s the highest measure since they started keeping track twelve years ago.

The month before that, we achieved yet another milestone: May 2012 was the 327th consecutive month with global temperatures above the 20th-century average. That’s 27-plus years of higher-than-normal temperatures.

We don’t have to wonder what global warming will look like anymore. We are seeing it now. And it’s unfolding more or less as climatologists have predicted for years.

Of course, it’s tempting to think back to the last severe cold snap or blizzard and dismiss such talk as alarmist. It would be comforting to see every record-breaking low temperature as proof that every heat wave is just another part of the cycle.

Come January, those of us in northern states will be muttering about how we could do with a little global warming right now.

There’s just one problem.

According to Kevin Tremberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, record lows aren’t keeping pace with the skyrocketing number of record highs.

In the 1950s, America experienced a fairly equal number of record-setting highs and lows. By the 2000s, we were setting two record high temperatures for every one record low.

So far this year, we’ve set ten record highs for every record low.

Natural variability does not account for the imbalance. In the same way, none of the culprits suggested by climate skeptics — El Niño, volcanic ash, solar activity, etc. — can satisfactorily explain the long-term increase in global temperatures.

In fact, some of these alternative suspects should’ve taken us in the opposite direction. The last 20 years of solar activity ought to have had a cooling effect, if anything. Which means the sun actually blunted the impact of all our greenhouse gas emissions.

We no longer have the luxury of skepticism. The earth is warming. We are causing it.

The science of global warming has been established for over a hundred years. Anyone can observe the basic principles of the greenhouse gas effect by leaving their car outside on a hot day, with the windows rolled up. (Won’t be too hard to do that in Michigan today.)

Yet there remains a reluctance to trust what nearly all climatologists are telling us, particularly among Christians like myself.

The church has long had an uneasy relationship with science, fearing that it will erode faith. But more often than not, the problem isn’t that science is hostile toward faith. It’s that some of us in the church have picked fights that aren’t worth fighting. Just ask Galileo. Or Copernicus.

And even if you won’t take the scientists’ word for it, listen to the scriptures.

The earth is the Lord’s. It is not ours to do with as we please. We are caretakers and tenants, not its owners. According to some scholars, the Genesis story goes even further, depicting the earth as God’s temple — a temple he is coming back to occupy once more.

We owe it to the God we serve — not to mention the future generations who will have to carve a home out of this rock — to treat it with care. Climate change is polluting God’s temple. We can no longer afford to stick our heads in the increasingly hot sand.

_______________________

Related: For one of the best summaries of climate change and answers to common objections, see “Responses to Questions & Objections on Climate Change,” published by Climate Works Australia. SkepticalScience.com is another helpful resource.

What’s the worst that could happen? (A cost-benefit analysis of climate change)

[Note: This is a followup to an earlier post on why I believe every Christian should care about the environment.]

The earth is God’s temple. A growing number of evangelicals accept the importance of “creation care.” So why don’t more of us care about climate change? According to one survey, only a third of Christians say climate change prevention is an important part of our responsibility to steward the earth (though a majority say it’s important for other reasons).

Put another way: Why are Christians, particularly evangelicals, more skeptical about climate change than the general population?

Humanitarian organizations like World Vision (my former employer) see climate change as one of the biggest threats to the poor and vulnerable in the developing world. Even the US military, hardly a haven for liberal thought, recognizes climate change as the most significant threat to our national security.

So why do we who are Christian have such a hard time seeing what they see?

For those who remain skeptical about the causes and implications of climate change, I’d like to pose a pair of questions that Rich Stearns shared with employees of World Vision when I was there:

1. What’s the worst that could happen if we respond aggressively to climate change, only to learn in hindsight that our concerns were overblown?

The answer: Collectively, we might wind up a few hundred billion dollars poorer. That’s the equivalent of 1-2% of ONE YEAR’S global GDP.

Some of that would be money well spent — even if climate change turned out to be more of a whimper than a roar. For example, with a finite supply fossil fuels (no matter how much we “drill, baby, drill”), do any of us really believe we shouldn’t invest in alternative energy sources?

2. What’s the worst that could happen if we do nothing, only to learn that human-induced climate change and its effects are real — and every bit as serious as we’ve been told?

Let’s start by putting it in crass economic terms. Failing to rein in greenhouse gases could cost up to 20% of global GDP. (And you thought the last recession was bad.)

More important is the human impact. No surprise, it’s the desperately poor — those who have contributed the least to climate change — who stand to suffer the most. In fact, they’re already feeling the effects of climate change. From the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts in parts of Africa, to rising sea levels already threatening to overwhelm an entire nation.

Two decades of progress combating extreme poverty could be wiped out if we fail address climate change.

That’s our choice: Spend a few hundred billion dollars now or lose trillions later — and jeopardize millions of lives.

Still, many doubt the science behind climate change, even though the underlying principle, the greenhouse effect, has been a proven scientific fact for well over a hundred years. But why? What’s the motivation for all this skepticism?

Could it be that those of us in the top 2% simply don’t want to give up the standard of living to which we’ve grown accustomed? Could it be that we’re happy to go on using the earth as we see fit and leave the mess for someone else to clean up?

As Christians, we will have a hard time reconciling this attitude with the biblical reality that the earth is not ours — that it is not first and foremost our dwelling, but God’s.

What will we say when the time comes to give an account for how we’ve tended God’s temple?

Fast food continent

Recently, I saw this ad—one of several from the Acton Institute, a conservative think tank that advocates, among other things, the use of free market economics to help fight poverty.

I respect the Acton Institute. I think they have several good ideas about fighting poverty. Some of their other ads advocate things like microloans for the poor and access to global markets for developing countries so they can trade their goods freely.

But in the case of this particular ad, there’s another perspective worth considering. What if 30 grams of fat is not, in fact, good for the world’s poor? What if the Big Mac represents the kind of consumerism that can hurt the poor by damaging their environment?

Consider this example from Matthew Sleeth’s book Serve God, Save the Planet (which I blogged about last month):

To obtain billions of hamburger patties for a few cents each, America’s fast-food restaurants buy much of their meat from Central and South American farmers. These farmers clear-cut forests, often starting a cattle-raising process that can be sustained for only a few short years. The loss of rain forests in South America means that the clouds they once made no longer blow across the Atlantic to drop their water on Africa. As a result, the Sahara grows by thousands of acres a year. What is the bottom line for Africans? More starvation. And the bottom line for Americans? Cheap burgers and growing waistlines.

South American rain forests generate the clouds that deposit rain on African farmlands. As these life-giving forests disappear, children starve.

Incidentally, those working in places like East Africa confirm that the frequency and severity of droughts has increased significantly. Unfortunately, most of the mainstream media is too obsessed with the latest drunken celebrity incarceration story to cover the plight of the rural African farmer.

Meanwhile, these farmers report more and more difficulty as their climate changes for the worse. The Sahara is pushing southward, and the rains that once fell with some measure of predictability are becoming scarce.

In a world where children starve so I can scarf down a $4.00 value meal (one that will probably shorten my life span as well), can we really argue that unbridled consumerism is good in all its forms? Adam Smith, the father of free market economics, envisioned an invisible hand—the idea that a person who is free to pursue their own economic well-being will unwittingly contribute to the common good.

But what happens when consumerism reaches epic proportions? What happens when our appetite for more stuff—including things which, like the Big Mac, have no redeeming value—grows out of control? What happens when we embrace capitalism without restraint, without accountability, and without responsibility for those who are impacted by the choices we make?

Is it possible that we’ve bound the invisible hand? That the connection between self-interest and the common good has been broken by our unrestrained (and unrecognized) greed?

Is it possible that our choice of what and where to eat is really a choice of whether or not we will love our neighbors (including those who live on the other side of the planet)?

It may be that fast food is not only hazardous to our health. It may be that our addiction to fast food is hazardous to Africa’s health.

Serve God, Save the Planet

I just finished reading a book called Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth.

Sleeth is a medical doctor. He had a nice home on the New England coast at one point. According to his publisher’s synopsis, Sleeth was living the American dream…

Until he became convinced that the growing number of chronic illnesses he was treating had something to do with the air people were breathing…

The water they were drinking….

The chemicals their bodies were absorbing from a host of sources…

He came to believe the sharp increase he was seeing in cancer among children and young people might have something to do with the environment we live in and the toxins we’re exposed to.

So, following his grandmother’s axiom that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Sleeth made it his life mission to call others to more responsible stewardship of the environment. Before he began preaching to others, though, he and his family took stock of their own lives and reduced their environmental impact wherever and however possible.

This is not your stereotypical environmentalist book. Sleeth is an evangelical in every sense of the word. His main audience is the church. His passion is to demonstrate for those already dedicated to God how environmental stewardship is an essential element of the Christian life.

Serve God, Save the Planet is one of the most important books I’ve read in the past year. I finished it in about a day. Then I immediately started bugging my wife to read it. (Incidentally, she read it about as quickly as I did and liked it just as much.) This is one of those books that inspired us start contemplating the changes we would make to our own lives as a result of reading it.

What I found most intriguing about Sleeth’s book is that it’s not really about the environment. It’s about life in its entirety. Like any good doctor, Sleeth takes a holistic approach to the issue. He does not stop at the symptoms but presses deeper, until he uncovers the root cause of the problem. In this case, the main culprit is consumerism—our insatiable desire for more and more stuff, even (and often) at the expense of those who have little to begin with. That, Sleeth contends, is the root cause of the environmental quandary we now find ourselves in.

Plenty of parents will find themselves nodding in agreement as Sleeth describes the impact of our society’s TV addition, for example—even if their main concern is not the environmental impact of all that television watching. Televisions are, according to Sleeth, the third largest users of electricity in our homes today. So in addition to converting our minds to mush and exploiting our appetite for the latest high-tech gadget/equity loan/sports car/hair replacement therapy, the amount of TV we watch has a direct impact on our environment.

Sleeth does an excellent job deconstructing common evangelical arguments against the prioritization of environmental issues. He does an even better job building a thoroughly biblical case for environmental stewardship and connecting the environment to other issues, like global poverty (more on that in another post soon).

In short, I can’t recommend Serve God, Save the Planet highly enough, and I can’t praise my former employer, Zondervan, highly enough for publishing the paperback edition (which, not incidentally, was published on 100% recycled paper).

I don’t feel like I can do justice to a book this good using my own words, so I thought I would share some of my favorite excerpts , in the hopes that you’ll pick up a copy and read the whole book for yourself…

On the theological significance of our “dominion” over creation (see Genesis 1:28)…

Dominion [or subduing, depending on your translation] comes from a Hebrew term meaning “higher on the root of a plant.” Dominion does not mean ownership or even unrestricted use. Implied in our dominion is our dependency on everything under us. Cut the root out from under a plant and the fruit above it will perish, despite its superior position.

On the relationship between consumerism and environmentalism…

Being pro-stewardship is not a case of valuing forests more than people; rather, it means valuing human possessions less, and God’s world more.

On the mechanistic way we sometimes view God’s creation…

We say that trees exist to make oxygen, or to give shade, or to be made into paper, and we assign them no further mystery. In other words, nature has purpose and value only insofar as it fulfills our material needs. Our worldview is so mechanistic that we ask questions like, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?”The Bible answers this question: If a tree stands in the middle of the forest and is never seen by a human, it has meaning to God. The tree is there to glorify God and to give God pleasure. And yes, if the tree topples over one day, it does make a sound and God hears it. This biblical view is at odds with the industrial worldview, but I find it comforting.

A compelling (and disturbing) example of the relationship between environmental degradation and catastrophic “natural” disasters…

In October 2004, the Indian subcontinent was flooded by a deadly tidal wave. Such events happen and will continue to happen, but one of the reasons for the record number of fatalities in this case was not the wave but the fact that all the mangrove trees along the shoreline, which normally holds back the waves, had been cut down to make way for the white sandy beaches so loved by tourists.

On the relationship between the environment, consumerism, and global poverty (which Sleeth has seen firsthand during medical missionary trips to Central America)…

How does refraining from buying a teak chair for your deck constitute mission work? … Tides of rural farmers in Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia are forced to abandon lands they have worked for generations and flood the cities. They flee the mountains because their homes are being destroyed. As the demand for deck chairs, plywood underlayment, disposable chopsticks, and teak furniture grows, the trees in the third world are cut down. Poor families often do not own the land they have worked. They have no say and make no profit from the cutting of trees. Yet cutting down the forests around them changes their world. The topsoil washes away. The streams dry up. The trees God planted to hold the land in place are gone, so when a hurricane comes, the hillsides simply collapse and wash away.

On the amount we spend on health care each year (largely treating symptoms while ignoring the larger problem, Sleeth argues) and what we get for our investment…

Rounded to the nearest hundred dollar, every man, woman, and child spends $5,000 on health care annually. A woman’s life expectancy in the United States today is seventy-nine years. In comparison, Mexico spends about $500 a person on health care, and a woman’s life expectancy there is seventy-six years. That’s $400,000 in total lifetime expenditures for the American versus $38,000 for the average Mexican woman—a bundle of money for only three more years of life. Compared to a vast portion of the world’s people, Mexico has a posh health-care budget. Virtually no country in all of Africa has a budget of $100 per capita for annual health care. Americans spend more on dog and cat health care than Africans spend on human health care.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t miss this book.

Wal-Mart goes green

Maybe you’ve seen the latest advertising blitz from Wal-Mart. No yellow smiley faces, bouncing around, slashing prices wherever they go. No soccer moms telling us how Wal-Mart helps them live the good life on a budget—by selling Levi Strauss jeans for under $20 a pair.

Instead, their latest ad campaign features ordinary-looking people against an ordinary backdrop, telling us things like:

If every Wal-Mart shopper, all 180 million of us, bought just one compact fluorescent bulb, it would reduce emissions the same as taking one million cars off the road.

If every Wal-Mart shopper bought just one pair of organic pajama pants, we could stop over a million pounds of pesticide from going into the earth.

If every Wal-Mart shopper bought just one compact laundry detergent, we’d reduce packaging waste by over 50 million pounds.

On the whole, I’m not a fan of Wal-Mart. In the last two-plus years, I’ve set foot in a Wal-Mart store just twice. Once because a friend talked me into going and once because my wife and I were given a Wal-Mart gift card. Each time I walked out, vowing never to return.

So at first I was skeptical. I thought this was just another slick marketing campaign (the ads are some of the best Wal-Mart has ever made), but hardly anything new. These days, corporations are tripping over themselves in the race to go green. A GE commercial promoting sustainable development is playing in the background as I type. Even garbage giant Waste Management has TV spots telling us how eco-friendly they are.

And another thing… this would not be the first time Wal-Mart has tried to reinvent itself, only to abandon the effort and hope no one notices. When I was a kid, Wal-Mart was the place to buy products “made in the U.S.A.” They wanted us to believe they were a true American company, selling goods made by hardworking Americans.

So much for that idea.

This morning I read “The Green Machine,” an article published by Fortune Magazine on Wal-Mart’s campaign to go green. I could hardly believe the following quote came from Wal-Mart’s CEO, Lee Scott:

To me, there can’t be anything good about putting all these chemicals in the air. There can’t be anything good about the smog you see in cities. There can’t be anything good about putting chemicals in these rivers in Third World countries so that somebody can buy an item for less money in a developed country. Those things are just inherently wrong, whether you are an environmentalist or not.

The article went on to describe how Wal-Mart is changing the way they do business, in order to lessen their ecological footprint. Eliminating excessive packaging, reducing the amount of fuel consumed by their massive truck fleet, installing energy-efficient lighting in their stores, etc.

Lee Scott explained to Wal-Mart employees that cutting the amount of packaging that winds up in Wal-Mart’s trash bins each day is just common sense:

Think about it. If we throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice—once to get it, once to have it taken away. What if we reverse that? What if our suppliers send us less, and everything they send us has value as a recycled product? No waste, and we get paid instead.

OK, so Wal-Mart’s campaign to go green is about saving money—at least as much as (if not more than) it’s about saving the earth. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. The market economy could be harnessed to help, not hurt, the environment.

For example, the environmental movement, like Wal-Mart, has reinvented itself over the years. The usual stereotype—that environmentalists are nature-worshiping, placard-waving, tree-hugging hippies—is increasingly irrelevant. More and more environmentalists are getting in touch with their entrepreneurial side. As a result, more and more executives are recognizing that caring for the earth makes good business sense.

Sometimes governments need to regulate our impact on the earth. The Clean Air Act of 1990 decreased air pollution in the United States—without hurting the U.S. economy over the long run.

But increasingly, as consumers, we have a new option. We have the opportunity to vote with our dollars, demanding products that are created and delivered in sustainable, ecologically responsible ways. (On a side note, we also have the opportunity to demand that people in the developing world who make these products are compensated fairly.) When we voice our demand, even Wal-Mart listens.

Only time will tell whether Wal-Mart’s green reinvention is for real. Will they truly go green for the long haul? We’ll see.

But it’s a start. And for all that’s wrong with our consumerist, “more-is-more” society, the flip side is that we have more eco-friendly purchasing options than ever before. Let’s take advantage of them. The more we do so, the more corporate giants like Wal-Mart will realize the value of going green.

In the end, Lee Scott is right. Whatever you think about global warming, environmental regulation, and the like, there can’t be anything good about putting all these chemicals in the air. There can’t be anything good about polluting the water supply in developing countries just so those of us in the rich world can save a few bucks on blue jeans.

Dobson and global warming (part 2)

Earlier this month, Newsweek wrote about Dr. Dobson’s call for Richard Cizik to resign from the NAE over his comments on global warming. Then Tom Minnery, a senior vp at Focus on the Family, responded. (You’ll have to scroll down a bit to get to Minnery’s letter to the editor.)

And Christianity Today’s weblog weighed in last week as well. Their post is well worth reading.

James Dobson and global warming (updated)

Recently, James Dobson accused Richard Cizik (vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals) of trying to shift emphasis “away from the great moral issues of our time” and engaging in a “dangerous and divisive” conversation.

The reason? Cizik recently called on evangelicals to articulate a public theology of creation care.

In an open letter to the NAE, Dr. Dobson and several others called on Cizik to resign, saying that his “disturbing views seem to be contributing to the growing confusion about the very term ‘evangelical.'”

But caring for the earth is not the exclusive domain of tree-huggers and pantheists. Environmental issues are not just for one political party or ideology. Cizik, a self-described “pro-Bush conservative,” is proof.

Whatever one believes about global warming—and I believe it’s real—one thing is clear: creation care is important to God.

It’s so important to God, in fact, that it was one of the very first commands he gave us: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Genesis 1:28, TNIV)

To subdue the earth is to harness its natural resources for our benefit—but it is to do so in ways that are responsible and sustainable.

One of the distinctives of ancient Jewish thought was the idea that humans ought to work with the land, not against it. You can see it in Jewish architecture. Its humble simplicity is a stark contrast to the mountain-leveling construction projects of the Greeks and the Romans.

In fact, creation care is part of the reason we are here: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15, TNIV).

Creation care (or environmentalism or whatever you choose to call it) is about stewardship. It’s about realizing that we are made from the same stuff that the earth is—that we are connected to the earth because we’re all made by the same creator.

It’s about realizing that how you treat something reflects how you truly feel about its creator.

Let me illustrate. Several years ago, I was at my grandmother’s house when I found a drawer, tucked away on the third floor, crammed with papers. My grandmother had kept every letter, every card, every picture I had sent her when I was little.

Some of the letters and drawings were pretty comical. (Apparently, when I was five, I though grandmothers appreciated pictures of things like dinosaurs pooping.)

Why did she keep all those drawings (even the pooping t-rex)? She cherished them because she cherished the person who made them.

The same is true for us and God’s creation. Our success or failure to care for what God has entrusted to us will reveal how we really feel about the one who made this world.

Sincere Christians will debate the best ways to care for our environment, to go about obeying the spirit of Genesis 1:28—but the point is that we need to be having the conversation. Christians ought to be wrestling with sustainability and climate change. We need to acknowledge that if creation care is important to God, then it is, in fact, “one of the great moral issues of our day.”

[Update: Click here to read Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action. You can also view the list of signatories to this statement.]