Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

The point that is of interest to readers of this religion blog is that farming is not just a business. It is a stewardship. That is, the land (thus the farm) belong to God and we have to take care of it and keep it from dying. Farmers cannot do this alone unless everyone else supports them.

Whatever Happened to Christian Environmentalism?

It still exists. Good luck finding it.

Christian environmentalists today are largely obscured by the loud cacophany of Christian Republicans who worship Donald Trump and his overt hatred of the Earth. Here are a couple of Christian environmentalists who stand out against the polluted tide of toxic religion:

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, who has stood for decades as a voice of Christian conscience.

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, who believes that Christians should take global climate change very very seriously.

 

There are others, but you won’t hear about them. If you do a Google search for Christian environmentalism, one of the first hits on your search will be an article from the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pat Robertson’s platform, one of the major sites for the extreme fundamentalist Republican gospel. They report on one Christian pastor who holds services and wants to “defend God’s creation.” They do not have any arguments to show that he is wrong. But they dismiss all Christian environmentalism with this statement at the end: “the new wave of Christian environmentalists are "God's Greens...waging holy war on behalf of an embattled creation. But, critics ask, is this a truly divine cause -- or the devil's work?” By critics, they mean themselves. A 2017 article in Christianity Today gave loyalty to Donald Trump as one of the main reasons that evangelical Christians have stopped supporting environmentalism. The Cornwall Alliance, a group that sounds British, is actually an American evangelical Christian anti-environmental organization; they call environmentalism “the Green Dragon” which must be slayed.

Things have changed a lot since Loren Wilkinson wrote Earthkeeping in the 90’s. I reviewed it back when it first came out, for the American Scientific Affiliation. I have recently looked at the book again. Wilkinson recently retired from the Faculty of Regent College, a Christian institution in Vancouver, an institute and a city that American evangelicals consider ungodly.

Wilkinson said some things that would get him lynched by American evangelicals today. Good thing that he is Canadian, I guess. Among his assertions were the following:

• We need to have fewer kids, because of the Earth’s population explosion. Evangelicals, in contrast, often champion the Quiverfull approach: God said in Genesis 1 that Adam and Eve should have as many kids as possible and “fill the Earth.” They ignore the fact that we have already filled the Earth and that it is now time for us to do something else. God also told Adam and Eve to make clothes for themselves out of animal skins. Does this commandment also apply to us?
• Christians should honor God’s gift of the Earth by honoring the minerals of the Earth, by recycling them, giving them new life, instead of wasting them. God’s natural world recycles everything; so should we.
• If in fact Earth operates as an integrated system (the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis), Wilkinson considered this to be evidence of God. In contrast, most evangelicals consider Gaia to be paganism.
• The Creator gave independence to creation, and it therefore has its own rights. God never said or intended for the creation to be raw materials for humans to plunder. The Fall of Adam (which evangelicals blame on Eve, and on women in general) created a division between each person and all others, humankind and the Earth, and even divisions within each person—a division Jesus wants to heal.
• Noah’s Ark was a very clear example of God wanting to save at least part of his creation from the destruction of the Flood which God intended as a punishment for human sin. God might have said, I don’t care, Noah, if you don’t like all these species; I command you to give them refuge. The Ark was in complete contradiction to the Tower of Babel, which was the symbol of mankind glorifying itself.
• Humans have dominion over the Earth, but Biblical dominion means for the dominator to bless the dominated. How can this be? A good king is supposed to bless the people, just as Jesus, whom Christians consider to be the ruler of the universe, blesses us. He even went so far as to say that humans should be saviors of Creation just as Jesus is the savior of humans.
• We humans are meant to be stewards of creation, not conquerors. There is no single way that a steward should take care of whatever is in his or her charge. For example, to be stewards of creation does not mean that every bit of natural landscape must be kept intact. Human existence would then be impossible. But it does mean that humans should try as hard as possible to take care of the Creation, and think of creative ways of doing so. In contrast, evangelicals are by and large satisfied with us destroying the Creation.
• Wilkinson said that Christians must study ecology so that they know how to be effective stewards. Not only that, but Christians should participate in protests to save the Earth.

One can always hope that Christians such as Wallis and Hayhoe can turn the tide within the evangelical community. But I, for one, am not anticipating that this will happen soon, within my lifetime, or ever.

Why I Gave Nothing to the Beggar at the Corner

I always feel guilty passing up the beggars on the street corners. Don’t you? My inclination is to jump out of my car, cause a traffic jam or crash, and run over and give the guy a wad of money. But I never do, and it is only partly because I do not want to cause a traffic snarl. It is partly because I wonder how many of them are actually homeless and poor. I saw one using a SmartPhone. I have not allowed myself the expense of getting one of these. But that is not an important reason either.

My major reason is that I am the steward of limited resources for a few years on Earth. As circumstances have turned out, I have two houses: one in the town where we raised my daughter and my wife works, the other in the town where I work, 160 miles away. That’s a lot of bi-weekly commuting. I drive a small car. I also take trips, largely at my own expense, to scientific meetings to share my research results and learn from other scientists. My wife works half time. Keeping up two houses on 1 ½ incomes is not easy. My daughter’s college education, to the repayment of which she is contributing, was also expensive (and well used). To pay down debts and mortgages, I deny myself many pleasures that most people consider ordinary. We hardly ever eat out. I am extremely frugal. When my air conditioning went out, I chose to swelter in 105 degree heat (91 inside my house) rather than to immediately get a new unit. My wife and I are the kind of people who are not helping the economic recovery very much: our idea of a good time is to stay home and read library books or watch library videos. While we are not suffering the way homeless people are, I can in good conscience say that I am living as frugally as my circumstances reasonably permit. You probably are too (if you are the kind of person who would even bother to read this essay). My lifestyle frugally (did I say that already?) supports my writing as well as my academic work, and to cut back would hamper my writing, on which I spend most of my spare time. I think I owe my talents to the world. I am not spending very much on my own pleasure. And I am trying to save up a little bit in case our rich rulers turn America into a nation of a few very rich and a massive underclass, of which I will be a part.

So, sorry, guy, my money is spoken for, after very careful consideration. Maybe later.