Remember when you lived with your parents? You probably had a room of your own; where you slept at night and did your homework after school. It was a place where you could go to read books, hang posters on the wall and play your music —but not too loud! It was your space, and you called it “my room”.
It wasn’t really your room. If you had looked at the deed to the house, you wouldn’t have found your name anywhere. The deed would probably have been in your father’s name, or possibly your mother and father. In any case, it was never really your room. Like the rest of the house, it belonged to your father. You were allowed to use it while you lived in your father’s house, on the understanding that you would keep it reasonably neat and tidy.
This beautiful world that we live in belongs to Our Father in Heaven. When He gave us dominion over the earth and all that is in it, He was not giving us a gift to do with as we please; he was giving us a place to make our home, on the understanding that we would look after it, keep it in good order for our children and grandchildren. In essence, to have dominion over the world means to be responsible for it.
Thousands of years ago, keeping the world in good order was not such a pressing issue, but as numbers of people have increased, so have the pressures on the world. Today, the most pressing issue is global warming caused by the build-up of greenhouse gasses. Most experts believe we are already within two degrees of the temperature at which there will be serious consequences, and like all problems, the longer we wait before acting, the worse it will get and the more drastic the remedies.
While global warming is a serious problem and should not be ignored, I think we are now in danger of falling into a serious error. As belief in the God of the bible recedes, secular beliefs begin to dominate until ‘The Environment’ becomes a new secular faith with its own apocalypse (Global Warming) trumpeted by the new apocalyptic prophets especially Our Lady of The Greenhouse Greta Thunberg. We are told in increasingly hysterical terms that the world will burn unless we repent of our evil ways and turn to the true faith of environmentalism.
What is wrong with looking after the environment? Nothing as far as it goes, but the environmentalists would like to put nature over man, and that is not what God intended.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Genesis1:28
God gave man dominion over the world. Everything in the bible points to this: in the book of Genesis, God creates the natural world first, then He creates man. When he looks at everything he has created, he says it is very good. The creation of man is the culmination of God’s work and after creating man, He rests.
Dennis Prager explores this theme in his commentary on the Book of Genesis (the Rational Bible series). God destroys the world by a flood, except for a selection of animals saved by Noah in his ark. Why, Dennis asks, did God destroy so many animals? The animals had done nothing wrong, and God could presumably have sent a plague that would wipe out humanity but leave the animals unaffected. But God created the world for man, and without man, the animals would have no purpose.
Too many environmentalists believe that the world would be far better if there were fewer people on it. Many have a figure in mind of the maximum capacity of the earth, some put it at one billion, some less. The world is currently home to 8.2 billion people. Next time someone says the world has too many people, ask them what the number should be and over what period it must decline. In most cases, reducing world population by the numbers they specify over the kinds of timeframes they suggest could not be achieved simply by limiting birth rates. It would require the killing of large numbers of people. Ask them who should be the ones to go — not them or people like them I’ll bet. Many of the measures suggested by environmentalists would result in the immiseration of millions if not billions of people for very little gain. They can say these things because they see man as no better than any other animal, like yeast in a flask of broth or an uncontrolled mass of worms. Man, so they say, will reproduce uncontrollably, devouring and defiling the world, then one another until there is nothing left.
That is not what God says in the book of genesis. He says, “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.” Back in 1980, biologist Paul Ehrlich made a bet with economist Julian Simons. Simons bet Ehrlich that, contrary to accepted wisdom, commodities would become more rather than less abundant as the world’s population increased. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and chose a selection of metals he said would become scarcer. Simons was proven correct and has been proven correct every year since. In their excellent book Superabundance, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley show how, almost without exception the earth’s resources have become more, not less abundant as the human population has increased. How is this possible? Because man is not a yeast cell or a worm; we have brains and souls. Unlike animals, we do not have to simply react to changes in our environment, we have the power to change our environment. That is both a great power and a great responsibility.
What might a God centred environmentalism look like.
We are stewards of nature, and will one day be called to account for how we have taken care of this world God allows us to live in. With global warming, as with most global problems, it’s easy to think that they are the responsibility of governments, or scientists, or faceless multinational corporations. God will not call us to account for what governments and corporations have done to the world, as with everything else, he will ask “What have you done?” He will not be impressed at being told “I marched in the street, I glued myself to a road, I threw soup on a painting.” All of that is trying to make the environment someone else’s problem. Similarly, He won’t be impressed by donations to Greenpeace, that’s just a modern form of buying indulgences.
Governments and corporations have their share of blame and responsibility, but in fact most global warming is caused by ordinary people like you and I going about our daily business. That sounds daunting, but if you and I cause much of global warming, that also means that there is something we can do about it.
We use our cars for everything these days, often with only one person in the car. When you next get into your car, have a look at the dashboard. Below the regular mileage indicator, you should see a second, trip-meter with a button that resets it to zero. Set your trip-meter to zero and see how many kilometres you clock up this week. Next week, see if you can reduce it. If the place you want to go is close, try walking or cycling instead of driving. If you know someone who will be going to the same place (to church for example) and they are on your way, offer to give them a ride —maybe take it in turns. Rather than making a special trip to the supermarket, go there on the way home from something else like work or church, and try to keep the supermarket trips to one every one or two weeks.
Of course, you do need to be sensible about this. I don’t want everyone to become hermits and never go out. I certainly don’t want anyone to have a heart attack after walking five kilometres in the blistering sun with a big bag of groceries in each hand. Sometimes you will have to drive, but we can all be more efficient about it.
Another thing to consider is waste; especially food waste. Food waste is a massive and massively under-rated problem. If food waste were a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gas. When you waste food, not only are you sending food matter to landfill where it creates methane, you are also wasting all of the carbon that was emitted in growing, processing, storing, packaging and transporting the food.
How do you reduce your food waste? Firstly, resist the temptation of those two-for-one deals, unless what you buy is non-perishable like canned goods or pasta. It is no saving to buy two loves of bread if you throw most of one away because it’s stale or mouldy. If you can’t get to the end of a 5kg bag of potatoes before they sprout, then buy them loose, only as much as you need until the next shop. Some food producers are starting an initiative to sell more fruit and veges that are not ‘supermarket quality’ and by buying these, you will help the producers to reduce waste. After all, if you grew misshapen carrots in your own garden, you’d eat them —wouldn’t you?
Remember that ‘best before’ is not the same as ‘use by’. Never buy a food with a use by date unless you are sure you will use it, but many products are still reasonably good to eat some time after their best before dates. And when you do find yourself throwing spoiled food away, take note of what it is and buy less next time.
God will call us to account for our stewardship of the earth, but He will also call us to account for how we treat our neighbour. Can we put humanity above nature and still preserve nature? The answer, as it happens, is yes. It is no accident that the environmental movement arose in rich, developed nations. When you have four children looking up at you, and you are wondering what on earth you will give them to eat tomorrow, reducing your carbon footprint is item number 427 on your list of concerns. I have heard people in my old church talk about having people in African villages put empty PET bottles into the roof of their shack to give them extra light, or to provide solar lights so they can read at night. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I ask, “would you like to live that way?” The people of the so-called developing world have as much right to a modern lifestyle as we do, and we have no right to deny them. We have seen our own countries develop and become prosperous, and as we have prospered, we have had leisure and resources to care for the environment. If you want to improve environmental conditions in Africa and Asia, then allow those nations to develop. Help them, not by ‘Aid’ which more often than not simply empowers corrupt dictators, but through trade which encourages home grown industry. There will be a transition through fossil fuels to clean energy in Africa and Asia, but despite all the doomsaying we have time. The world will not end in twelve years.
God told us to fill the earth. The earth probably is close to full now, but almost all recent population projections suggest that world population will peak somewhere around ten billion. There is a very real danger that the population will crash thereafter, not because of environmental catastrophe but because too many people today are choosing not to have children, often in a misguided attempt to save nature or to spare future generations from suffering an environmental apocalypse. We must heed God’s second injunction “Be fruitful and increase.”
This world given to us by our heavenly father as a place to live and entrusted to our care, just as our earthly father once gave us a room to call our own. Philosopher and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is famous for saying “Clean your room before you try to save the world”.
I say they are the same thing.
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