The following essay was written by Chris Baroody, a student in my Honors course on global warming, and is used with his permission. I hope he publishes and/or posts his own writing someday. He would label himself as a Christian, rather than a Christian agnostic.
“The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (Revelation 11:18)
Early European Christians saw the wild as a place where dangerous beasts roamed and witches held black masses; likewise, if nature did not yield resources it was considered “waste.” This antipathy towards nature has persisted for so long that even today it has permeated through the American psyche. Now, in America, a movement of Christian anti-environmentalists lays complicit in the face of surging ecological decay and threatens to prevent any significant measures to counteract it. Yet these anti-environmental Christians ignore key scripture in the Bible that warns against the reckless abuse of nature and contradicts the popular notion that nature belongs to man to ruin and disregard as his whim may dictate.
In the past 200 years our species has felled over half of the world’s tropical rain forests. Between 1960 and 1990, 1.7 million square miles of rain forest, an area approximately the size of the United States, have been clear cut. Each year a further 2 percent falls, extinguishing all life therein. Roughly half of the world's biodiversity exists in the tropical rain-forests, with many species endemic to only a few isolated acres. We will never know how many miracle cures or unique and intricate life forms have been lost to clear cutting. To a believer, such disregard for the sanctity of creation should be akin to blasphemy, and yet, for many professing Christians, it is not.
In all areas of life wastefulness and myopia are condemned as wickedness; yet when applied to treatment of the environment, many Christians see them as just and natural attitudes to take, attitudes even mandated by scripture; to these Christians, men alone possess nature and it is for them to exert whatever will they may upon, no matter how rapacious the will or how savage the exertion.
Yet far from being ordained by God, the Bible specifically warns against such attitudes. As Psalm 50:7-12 explains, “Every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it." Not only does nature belong to God rather than man, God knows nature intimately and cares for it; even creatures maligned for their predatory natures : “The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures,” (Psalm 104-10-28). It is ironic that only 50 years ago nearly a half a million lions lived in Africa. Now there are as few as 16,000, a decline of more than 95 percent wrought solely by the hands of men.
Close to 800 species have gone extinct in only the last 400 years, and almost 16,000 are threatened with extinction. This is well beyond the background rate of extinction, and is comparable to the "great extinction" events of the fossil record, although at a faster rate, and for no natural cause. By 2100, one half of the species on Earth will likely have gone extinct and we alone hold the blame.
Thanks, Chris. The rest of Chris’s essay will appear in the next entry of this blog.
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