Billy Stormfield's Visit to Hell, a novel by Stan Rice, part two. Noah the Environmentalist

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

 

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

Fundamentalists do not necessarily believe that all environmentalists will go to hell. But certainly any “greenies” who would want to spend a lot of money to save endangered species are damned in the eyes of their God.

One of those was Noah. He built an ark (probably subcontracted the work out) that was big enough to hold all of the animal species in the world. The ark was not quite as big as you might suppose, since when the Old Testament was written most of the world, and its biodiversity, was unknown. (See Stan Rice’s article on this subject for Skeptical Inquirer). But the dimensions described in Genesis were huge and required a lot of wood to build. No explanation is given in the Bible for how so much wood could be obtained or who would pay for it.

However you look at it, the ark was probably the biggest financial undertaking the world had ever known and, relative to the poor economy of the ancient world, it might still rank number one in human history by that measure. It certainly cost more than any modern environmental expenditure. A waste of the resources that God has given to His servants? No wonder Noah ended up in hell.

Many of the animal species were economically important. But most of them were not. I can imagine Noah’s wife saying, “Why are you bringing all those snakes?” Maybe Noah was wondering also. But God did not say, just bring the species that you like. So you don’t like skunks? God told Noah to bring them anyway.

As usual, Mark Twain took this further than anyone else. In Twain’s writing, the ark was safely on its way when it had to turn around and pick up a species that had been left behind: the smallpox virus. How can you reconstruct a post-Flood world without smallpox?

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.

Yet Another Earth Day

Every April 22 since 1970, we have had a worldwide Earth Day celebration. Back in the early days, there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for it, but today it goes almost unnoticed in most places.

To a certain extent my view is influenced by the fact that back in 1970 I was just having my environmental awakening. I began to learn about nature, its details and its big picture, and about environmental problems such as pollution and the population explosion. In 1971, I gave the junior high graduation speech, “The Overcrowded Spaceship Earth.” It was actually not a cliché back then. Today, after a career as a scientific and environmental educator, author, and scientist, I have lost much of my enthusiasm, largely because I am now old and tired.

I was also enthusiastic about ecological issues when I was younger because I was a passionate Christian. God made the world, and He expected me to help take care of it. One way to show Him respect was to respect and love His creation.

But there seems to be less enthusiasm even in the younger people around me for environmental issues. This has occurred for bad reasons, but also for a good one.

• Bad reason: People have become overwhelmed by how many challenges there are just to get by from one day to the next. If you expect people to “get involved” with something other than mere survival, they may not have much time and energy left, especially if they have to work two jobs just to pay rent. On most days, here in Tulsa, there is a fatal shooting. At the end of the day, I breathe a sigh of relief: I didn’t get shot today.
• Bad reason: People today are overwhelmed with currents of selfishness. Marketers have convinced them that every moment of every day they should experience intense pleasure and that no task should be difficult. To a greater extent now than in the past people don’t care—sometimes because they are overwhelmed, and sometimes because they don’t want to.
• Good reason: Some of our problems are ecological being solved. The average fuel efficiency of vehicles is improving, because people aren’t stupid: most of them don’t want to waste gasoline. People actually want electric and other zero-emission vehicles. People are using less water per activity because they want to save water. People don’t want to live in toxic environments, and they will buy goods and services that are less toxic. Even the population explosion is cooling off a bit because people, especially women, don’t want to have a huge number of kids who are all sick and starving. A lot of people want to recycle.

Another change that has occurred is that the most common conservative Christian view now is not to take care of God’s good green Earth but to help destroy it. The more Christian you are, the more likely you are to have a big pickup truck, for example. True Christians, from the conservative view, means people who have guns, not people who recycle. Hiking in the woods is for wimps, they think. And why not? God is going to destroy it all anyway, and take His True Followers to a Heaven filled with endless barbecue roasts and truck racing. What about Christians who do care about God’s Earth? You cannot see or hear them in the blasting din of Televangelist Churches. The answer to the question below, should Christians go green, is usually no.

The general attitude of people—a little bit more openness to environmental responsibility—probably would not have occurred without the environmental activism of earlier decades. I am glad to see these changes. Even in my extremely right-wing neighborhood, I see that most houses have a blue recycling bin in addition to the gray trash bin. But will these changes, which are sometimes minimal, be enough to save Earth from catastrophe?

Each year, most of us produce less carbon than we did in the past for similar activities. But each year we fall short of the carbon reduction targets that we know are absolutely necessary to avoid ecological crisis. If the Earth survives long enough for a history of Earth Day to be written, it might be entitled, One Step Forward and Two Steps Back.

Get Out the Monkey Wrenches?

I spent three years teaching at a Christian college near New York City. I wish I could get that time back, but it is gone forever. (Then I went off and taught another three years at a different Christian college. I finally learned my lesson and went secular for the rest of my career.) The college in New York claimed to be Christian but it was at least at that time just a front for the Republican Party. While I was there, it was quietly Republican. Years after I left, it projected an image of extreme right-wing doctrine.

While on the biology faculty at the small college near New York, I taught environmentalism. I did this partly because it was the only honest thing to do, especially among people who supposedly believed that God created the Earth and everything that is in it. Also, I was not the only faculty member doing so. Of us four biologists, none of us taught that God wanted humans to grab whatever they desire from the natural world and leave it bleeding, battered, and gasping as it awaited the Second Coming.

But most of the students at that college were not at all receptive to environmentalism. I think it was because they had never been allowed to think about it as they grew up. Imagine my surprise when, one day, I was in the computer lab writing something (few faculty had office computers), when the student assistant was telling the Learning Resources director all about this wonderful group he had just found out about, and which he admired greatly: Greenpeace. He admired their strong defense of the Earth and their willingness to take decisive, some might say extreme, actions. If Greenpeace is right about human abuse of God’s Earth, then mildness is not an appropriate response. Despite the repressive fundamentalism of that college, the students occasionally thought for themselves.

Another group besides Greenpeace that takes actions that some consider extreme is Earth First!

What I used to think about extremist environmental actions was that they were doomed to failure. The civil authorities would just sweep the protestors away and everything would go back to business as usual. Indeed, it was possible that their antics would turn people otherwise receptive to environmental views against the entire movement.

And this is exactly what Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, used to believe, as he describes in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. He worked with and for conservation organizations that took what they considered a more practical approach to environmental issues. Groups such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and many others would meet with leaders of government and industry and try to convince them that sound environmental policy was profitable for everyone. This seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Only it didn’t work out that way very often. Foreman describes his experiences with the extreme right wing Sagebrush Rebellion ranchers who wanted to take federal grazing land away from the taxpayers and keep it for themselves. The Sagebrush people created violent confrontations, and they considered mainstream environmental organizations to be their enemies.

The conciliatory approach wasn’t working very well. If you are part of a conciliatory environmentalist group, the right-wing extremists hate you as much as if you were a radical. So, for all the difference it makes, you might as well be part of a radical environmentalist group. They will hate you, but they would hate you no matter what. And this is still the case today.

This is why Foreman and others started Earth First! Back when he worked with mainstream organizations, he “was told to be rational, not emotional…I would lose credibility if I let my emotions show…But, damn it, I am an animal. A living being of flesh and blood, storm and fury. The oceans of the Earth course through my veins, the winds of the sky fill my lungs…I am alive! I am not…a cog in the industrial world…When a chainsaw slices into the heartwood of a two-thousand-year-old Coast Redwood, it’s slicing into my guts…” He and a few others decided, let the rage flow.

It seemed hopeless that anyone would pay attention to them. But when they staged a protest on Glen Canyon Dam, not destructive but very, very visible, they got in trouble but also got worldwide attention. Today, Earth First! associate organizations are found in many countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic (which did not even exist when Earth First! was founded), France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia (which also did not yet exist), Spain, the UK, as well as the US.

One of the inspirations of the group was Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. This was a fictional organization that carried out pranks against corporations and governments. The name comes from “throwing a monkey wrench into the works,” a wrench useful in manual labor but which, when thrown into the workings of a machine, can cause the whole mechanism to lock up. Nobody gets killed, but a lot of damage results. Foreman writes on page 23, “A monkey wrench thrown into the gears of the machine may not stop it. But it might delay it, make it cost more. And if feels good to put it there.”

Yes, I have to keep my emotions in their proper place when I do scientific research. But I am not just a scientist. I am also a passionate lover of the Earth. My role is not to stage protests, but to write, mostly books, but also blog essays like this one. I have retired from the academic world and feel too tired to participate in monkey wrench protests. But I am glad Earth First! is still at work, a counterbalance to the greenwashing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing] of corporations that just pretend to be environmentally sound.

I suppose it is appropriate that I post this essay on midterm election day. In this election, environmental issues are mostly ignored.

An Unlikely Place to Find a Nature Worshiper

I discovered a surprising book in my vast library recently: My Wilderness, East to Katahdin, by a certain William O. Douglas. Many of us think of the modern era of environmental awareness as having begun with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. But My Wilderness, published in 1961, has some of the same ideas, though in a less organized form. Rachel Carson organized the concepts into a powerful argument and provided all of the scientific references, but William O. Douglas and probably many others had thought of them earlier. To read more about these specific concepts, see the essay for this same date on my science blog.

Douglas was a man who hiked all over the continent. He writes of backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming; Zion National Park in Utah; Maroon Bells in Colorado; Baboquivari along the Arizona-Sonora border; Quetico Provincial Park in Canada; The Smoky Mountains; the Everglades; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Washington, D. C.; and the White Mountains, Allagash, and Mt. Katahdin in the northeast United States. He was no stranger to the challenges of survival in the wild. The descriptions in this book are sometimes evocative and help you to feel like you are actually present in a place you will probably never visit. But, although I have no doubt that he saw all of these organisms, his descriptions were usually lists of plants and animals that sound like he copied them out of a guidebook. There were quite a few books of this sort published about the same time, such as The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson, The Near Woods by Millard Davis, and One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar. Douglas’s book is highly disorganized, except for each chapter being about his experience in one particular place.

What makes this book unique is the person who wrote it. Who was he? Do the black robes in this portrait give you a hint?

William O. Douglas was, throughout nearly all of the time during which he took the hikes he describes, a Supreme Court justice. He still holds the record of serving the longest on the Supreme Court, almost 37 years, from 1939 to 1975. Aside from Teddy Roosevelt shooting big animals and mistaking it for a love of nature, we have never had—and almost certainly will never again have—a prominent politician who had or will have such a passionate and thorough knowledge of the natural world. Today, with the new “conservative” (vs. conservationist) takeover, it seems that the less you know about science and nature, the more qualified you are for any office, particularly positions in which you are supervising government conservation and scientific activities. But even the few remaining liberals in government seem to think that the Earth is just a stage on which the human drama takes place. Douglas was most famous for writing the “Rights of Rocks” statement. In the Sierra Club v. Morton suit regarding the commercial development of Mineral King, just south of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Douglas wrote, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” That is, trees should be able to sue for their own preservation. Can you imagine any Supreme Court justice, or any other prominent politician, saying anything like this today?

But the main point for this essay in this blog is that Douglas considered Nature to be a holy place. No wonder the right-wing fundamentalists hated and still hate him. Bob Dole and Gerald Ford both wanted to see him removed from office. Thousands of books are published with the theme that nature is holy, and millions of people believe it, but none of them in such a prominent position as the one Douglas held. Just read these words: “If we make conservation a national cause we can raise generations who will learn that the earth itself is sacred. Once a person breaks through to the level where love of beauty is the ideal, he will worship the rocks and plains that are America. Then he will look on a tuft of grass with awe. For it has the secret of chlorophyll that man hardly comprehends” (page 32). Nearly every modern conventional Christian would consider Douglas to be a pagan for saying such things. Yet his view is the only one that can allow us to survive into the future.

Why Do Some Creationists Hate God’s Creation?

I know I have written about this topic previously, but I have a new story to relate to you about it.

There is a certain state senator in Oklahoma, whose name some of you know but which I will not here publish, who is infamous for being an extreme creationist. (He represents me in the state senate.) Every year he introduces legislation that supposedly protects the rights of creationist students, rights that are already protected. He insists on a top-down, big-government solution to a nonexistent problem, something you would not expect from a Republican. He gets little support even from fellow Republicans.

But it appears that he has open disdain for God’s creation, if that is what nature is.

One of our best undergraduate students presented a poster at the state capitol during a research symposium. State representatives and senators were free to roam around and see the exciting scientific research being done by undergraduates in Oklahoma. Our student’s poster was about stream reclamation and the reduction of water pollution. She won a prize for the quality of her work.

The state senator referred to above was one of the ones who went around looking at the posters. He asked the student whether her research was directly related to human health. She indicated that it was indirectly related to human health, through the promotion of environmental quality. The senator derisively wondered who would possibly fund scientific research that was not directly related to human health. The student indicated that it was sponsored, in part, by a federal grant. The senator responded that wasting money was typical of the federal government.

This senator openly sneered at one of the best undergrad students at the university in his own district. And he did so by openly stating that anything having to do with the natural world was not worth studying. He was openly dismissive of both science education and God’s creation.

This is not always the way Republicans behave. Our local state representative, also a Republican, visited with the student and was respectful of the quality of the work.

I suspect that, for this senator, creationism is merely a political tool. When he campaigns, he can say that he is defending God against the evil worshippers of Satan, which apparently includes many or most of his fellow Republicans who do not support his extremism. This senator apparently thinks that God was stupid for having created anything in the world other than humans and those things that humans directly use. God created many species that we not only do not use but do not even know; what kind of stupid God would have created all these species without asking this senator’s permission first? Or, more likely, this senator doesn’t really believe in God at all and just uses God as a political tool.

I could respect environmentalist creationists. I’m still waiting to find one.

Can Any of Us Really Be Safe?

In the previous entry, I wrote about the reservoir of rage in rural Oklahoma against anyone who stands for the teaching of evolution, teaching about global warming or any other environmental issue, or racial equality. And I correctly indicated that this rage is found in only a small percentage of the people.

But a small percentage can ignite a mass wave of hysteria. The examples I cited last time, especially the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, are famous. And even if they do not ignite hysteria, a small number of people can wreak havoc if they have and use guns, which, as I mentioned, the Confederacy of rural Oklahoma certainly does, though they have so far chosen not to use them. And, as any of the numerous recent shootings indicate, all it takes is one person.

Yes, all it takes is one person. My example is the man, Steve Raucci, who carried out 62 acts of vandalism, including terrorist acts (setting explosives on people’s cars and trying to burn down their houses), in Schenectady, NY. Ira Glass tells his story on the “Petty Tyrant” episode of This American Life.  Even  though the police and most of the people who were repeatedly victimized knew who was carrying out these terrorist acts, the police could not even get a warrant, not even to search the man’s office at a public middle school (an office that belonged to the taxpayers), until someone secretly recorded a nearly complete confession from the terrorist. Until that complete confession was placed in evidence, the people who worked at Mt. Pleasant Middle School were helpless, unless they had their own guns, which were not permitted at work. Raucci even had a bomb in his office, ready to use. His gripes were personal, not political or religious; imagine what he would have done if he thought himself an agent of God!

This is why I do not want to openly pursue, other than this blog and on Facebook, the story of the rural Oklahoma armed Confederacy. I will not campaign against it where I live. If any Confederates should decide to take violent action against me, there is virtually nothing I could do to stop them. They could spray-paint my house, or try to burn it down, they could put bombs on my car, and law enforcement would be unable to stop them. (And perhaps, based on my observations, some law enforcement agencies would not try.) Steve Raucci did all of these things to his victims, without law enforcement being able to even investigate him other than to record anecdotal observations. I strongly believe Campus Security officers where I work are doing and will do whatever they can to investigate some instances of crimes already committed against faculty on our campus, but their powers are limited.

So, I have chosen to tell you all about the rural Oklahoma Confederacy and the potential dangers it poses, but I am not going to start any actions against it, even speaking out in public, except in these blog and Facebook outlets. I feel like a Syrian unable to say anything bad about Assad, or a Russian unable to say anything bad about Putin. I merely point out that the same situation exists in America, though it is not enforced by the government as it is in Syria and Russia.

Of course, the NRA would say that I could get lots of guns and have them ready to hand at any time and wherever I am. This is in fact what one NRA spokesman said regarding the Charleston church shootings: if the people in church all had guns, they could have stopped the shooter. He was seriously suggesting that people take their guns to church. I cannot have guns at my workplace, a university. I am certain that our enrollments, already low, would drop disastrously if the Oklahoma state government instituted (as has been proposed) a policy for professors to have firearms in class. Students would, rightly, fear for their safety in such an environment. And as for my home or on my person at other times? I’m not saying whether I am armed or not. But I am certain that such a defense is, or would be, imperfect.

As I wrote before, rural Oklahoma crawls with people who are angry and delusional enough that they could, if they chose, use guns against people who disagree with them about evolution, global warming, environmental issues in general, or racial equality. So far, they have chosen to not do so. And we cannot really protect ourselves against them. The story of Steve Raucci proves this.

I also published this essay on my evolution blog.

The Real Creation Model

Most people, including most readers of this blog, think that creationism is the belief that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago.

But that is only part of the creationist creed. There is another part, which they do not openly proclaim, but which they believe.

We all know there is a political correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmentalism. I merely maintain that is correlation is real, not accidental. There is a reason for it.

The full statement of the creation model is that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago for us to use up now.

Creationists believe that the Earth will come to an end soon, so we might as well go ahead and use up all the natural resources, like coal and fish and trees, as fast as we can. Why preserve them, only to have them burned up in Armageddon? Why preserve them, only to leave them behind in the Rapture and let damned sinners have them? Why have a livable Earth in 2100, if the end of the world will already have occurred?

A creationist said to me, several decades ago, that the basis of his belief was time. (That’s funny; I would have expected it to be God.) We know that Jesus is coming soon, he said, therefore just as the future is short so must the past be short. I thought this was rather strange, but now it makes perfect sense.

So when you look at the full statement of creationism, their opposition to both evolution and environmentalism makes perfect sense.

If you are, or know, an environmentalist creationist, all I can say is, glad to hear it. And I could have a respectful conversation with such a person. But this is clearly the exception to the rule. If anything, conservative creationists probably hate environmentalist creationists even worse than they hate evolutionists. An environmentalist creationist is embracing a burden of frustration.

The political correlation between anti-evolutionism and anti-environmentalism is real, not accidental. I believe the reason is that creationists think God made the Earth for us to use up right now. If you have a different explanation, please feel free to post a comment. If your argument makes sense, I would be glad to acknowledge it.

Christianity and the Environment, Part 1

Christian responses to the environment can be roughly classified on the basis of what a person considers the environment to be: creation, or nature. The first considers the environment and all of its living and nonliving components to be the product of a deity that has made humankind separate from it in some way, while the second considers the environment to be the source of humankind (“nature” comes from the Latin for “birth”). First, in this installment, let us consider the approach that considers the environment to be creation.

The major monotheistic religions of the world (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) believe that a single, all-powerful deity created the world and made humans the rulers of it. Moreover, these religions base their beliefs upon scriptures written long before people even imagined the questions of environmental ethics. Until the last few centuries, humans quite rightly viewed the Earth as unconquerable and usually dangerous. The Earth could take care of itself. Modern adherents of these religions therefore turn to their pre-ecological scriptures and pick out passages that were not written for the purpose of answering such questions and try to base systems of environmental ethics upon them, concluding that the environment is expendable.

Because of the importance of the Judeo-Christian Bible in the history of western culture, historian Lynn White, Jr. wrote in 1967 that Christianity, guided by the first chapter of Genesis, had been in the forefront of a largely successful attempt to conquer the created world. It is beyond dispute that, according to this chapter, God gives humans the command to conquer and subdue the Earth and have dominion over it. The words clearly refer to the kind of conquest that kings exercised over vanquished nations. White did not, however, say that Christianity should be rejected, but that Christians should use Saint Francis of Assisi, a medieval Italian monk who considered the Sun, Moon, wind, fire, and all creatures to be his brothers and sisters, as the model of ethical behavior rather than the Bible.

Not surprisingly, many Christians became defensive and claimed that White had misinterpreted the first chapter of Genesis. Since 1967, Christian writers have found many passages in the Bible that paint a very different picture of the creation. Here are a few examples:

• The second chapter of Genesis depicts God as commanding humans to take care of the Earth the way one would care for a garden (the Garden of Eden).
• The third chapter of Genesis depicts expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and a host of environmental problems (“cursed is the ground…thorns and thistles it shall bring forth”) as consequences of sin.
• The sixth chapter of Genesis describes Noah, whose family was to be the sole survivors of a worldwide flood. God old Noah to build an ark big enough for a pair of each species of terrestrial animal, presumably even those that Noah did not especially care about.
• The Ten Commandments included a prohibition against work on one day of the week, called the sabbath. The result of this commandment, according to conservative Jewish scholars, is the deliberate interruption of the momentum of acquisition—to desist, once a week, from using other people (and the Earth) as a source of profit.
• The Old Testament law included some commandments that dealt directly with the Earth. Most famous is the Sabbath of the Fields, in which agricultural fields were supposed to be left fallow every seventh year.
• In the book of Job, God addresses Job from a whirlwind, and describes a vast unknowable and unconquerable world of creatures, from large ones such as Behemoth and Leviathan to humble ones such as donkeys and conies. The message is clear that the purposes of these creatures have absolutely nothing to do with humans. The fact that these creatures are untamed was a perfectly acceptable part of God’s order of the world.
• Many passages in the psalms and prophets describe the beauty of creation entirely apart from any benefit it may confer on humans. A passage from the prophet Isaiah describes trees reclaiming wasteland and restoring its water resources, and claims that this process, which would now be called ecological, was the work of God.
• Jesus frequently used symbolism from the creation, from wildflowers to sparrows, in his parables—frequently things that would be noticed only by people who stopped to carefully observe them.

Ecology-minded Christians, who focus attention on these passages, claim that God has given humans the responsibility to be stewards, or caretakers, of the Earth, rather than its conquerors. This is an important concept, even though the terms steward and caretaker do not appear in the Bible in connection with the Earth.

This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.

Christianity and the Environment: Guest Essay, Part Two

This is the remainder of Chris Baroody’s essay, the first portion of which I posted previously, used with permission.

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth (Genesis 1:28).

Many Christians denigrate environmentalism, citing the above scripture as justification, yet they ignore the second command give: we have indeed dominated, yet we have been exceedingly loath to replenish. Furthermore, many Christians claim as something of a self-evident truth that God will not allow nature to fail us. And yet the Bible clearly states that wicked men bring desolation to the land:

“How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered? Because those who live in it are wicked, the animals and birds have perished. Moreover, the people are saying, 'He will not see what happens to us'”( Jeremiah 12:4).

How much more so then now in the wake of technology and Global Warming?

Many Christians hold that environmentalists, in claiming that nature holds spiritual value, merely perpetrate a new form of paganism; however, many of these same Christians have adopted a doctrine that holds the free market and pursuit of wealth as sacred and vigorously attacking environmental regulations that in anyway impede the pursuit of wealth. However, in the time of Christ, the spirit of wealth went by the name of Mammon, and Christ warned that one could not serve both God and Mammon. John Milton, author of the epic Christian poem Paradise Lost, wrote the following of Mammon: “Men...by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands, Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth for Treasure better hid.

To shrug off one’s responsibility to the world which provides all natural resources, from lumber and coal to complex pharmaceuticals, epitomizes the most dangerous form of arrogance, neglect, and greed. Yet service to Mammon demands the dereliction of responsibility. Just As the Pharisees once fooled themselves into believing that they served God when they served themselves and their own selfish pursuits, a great many Christians today have been led into sanctifying the speciously alluring doctrine of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. John Milton also wrote: “Hypocrisy [is] the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone.” Often the sin of hypocrisy is invisible to one’s own eyes. When Christians justify environmental irresponsibility as a God given right, the specter of hypocrisy thrives.

My thanks again to Chris Baroody, author of the above essay (in two entries).

A Christian View of Creation

There are many Christians today who view the natural world as God’s glorious creation, worthy of protection from human plundering. Unfortunately, this view seems rare in Oklahoma. I want to tell you a story about a much more common view in my home state.

I recently got a water heater installed, and I had to listen to the two plumbers preaching at me during the installation. It was a lecture, not a discussion; they frequently prefaced their statements with “I don’t know what other people think, but here’s what I think.” Then they would tell me Biblical things that may or may not actually be in the Bible.

Somehow we got to talking about trees, particularly the largest ones such as the giant sequoia trees in California. One of them told me exactly what would go through his mind as he stood at the base of a giant sequoia. He said that his mind would be calculating the number of board feet of timber in the tree and how much he could sell it for. That, to him, was the major inspiration stirred in his heart by the tree. Many other Christians have thought that large trees were wonderful expressions of God’s greatness. But not so for Oklahoma fundamentalists.

I could have told him something of practical value: not just how awe-inspiring sequoia trees are, but how much financial benefit that living trees provide for us. As I have often said in my blog and website entries, trees put oxygen in the air, remove carbon from the air, prevent floods and mudslides, build up the soil and allow water to percolate into the soil. That’s just a start. I’ve written a whole book, Green Planet, about it. Of course I did not say this to him, because he had proceeded on with a story about how fast he could cut down a big sycamore tree like the one in my back yard, and then went on to tell me how much God hated Obama’s health care plan.

And then he was done. At least he did not charge me extra for the time he spent preaching at me.