On having dirty hands: Clean Up Australia Day

Sermon preached at St Matthew's Anglican, West Pennant Hills
On 1st March 2015, St Matt's held a joint service for all congregations after many parishioners had spent the morning cleaning up local parks and streets as part of Clean Up Australia Day.

Scripture readings: Psalm 104 and Romans 8.18-27.

When I was growing up not far from here, I had zero interest in my parents’ garden. For me, it was too much hard work - tending, watering, weeding - for too little payoff. With the impatience and selfishness of youth, I expected my efforts to result in immediate tangible personal benefits.

But now, I have a garden of my own: citrus trees, a blueberry bush, passionfruit vine, basil, tomatoes, zucchini, silver beet, basil, kale, leeks, capsicum, various herbs (including basil), a compost bin, a couple of worm-farms, some basil and a beehive. I love it! And I'm trying to inculcate an interest and appreciation in my two little kids that I never managed to gain until I was almost 30.

Some things take time to recognise. The patience, attentiveness, humility and willingness to get my hands dirty that I spurned as a youth are now things I cherish and seek to foster in myself, ever mindful of how fragile my grasp on them is.

Soil is now something I have learned to love. The opening chapters of the Bible speak poetically of humans being fashioned out of the soil. Indeed, even the name ‘Adam is a Hebrew pun, being the male form of the female word ‘adamah: soil, dirt, ground. ‘Adam from ‘adamah. The pun even (kind of) words in English: we are humans from the humus, a slightly unusual word for topsoil.* We are creatures of the dirt, relying on dirt for almost every mouthful of food.
*Technically, the dark organic matter in it.

And so I’ve come to love my worm-farms and compost: watching dirt form in front of my eyes. Seeing my food-scraps return again into the nourishing foundation of life from which they came.

But my garden in Paddington is apparently built on a rubbish dump. It seems like every time I dig, I come across broken glass, plastic, old bits of metal. My two year delightedly finds bits of glass and comes running excitedly to show me and I am caught between anxiety that he’s going to cut himself and pride that he is learning to cherish the soil and wants to keep it free of rubbish.

I often find myself wondering: what were they thinking, these people who apparently smashed their bottles into the soil and dumped random bits of plastic? Were they neighbours chucking things over the fence? Was it a former resident who was particularly careless? Was it the result of some long forgotten landscaping that brought in rubbish from elsewhere?

When we moved in, the house hadn’t been lived in for almost 12 months, and the backyard was overgrown. Gradually, as the garden has taken shape, we’ve been cleaning up the mess. And it feels good to be part of setting things right, even if it is in a small, very localised way. This little patch of dirt from which I’ve removed a few dozen bits of glass and plastic, is now cleaner and healthier than it was before.

And I bet some of you have had something of a similar experience this morning: taking a small patch of land and improving it, removing rubbish, cleaning it up, making it a little bit more healthy, more right, less polluted. Maybe you’ve wondered at those who dumped stuff – whether out of carelessness, apathy or haste. Maybe you’ve even got a little angry – it can feel good to be fixing something, and when you don’t know who was responsible for breaking it, it is easy to indulge in a little self-righteous harrumphing.

It also feels good to be working with others, doing something useful as a team, making the local area a little better for everyone. This is an act of service, an act of commitment to a place, an act that affirms that as creatures of the soil, it is right and fitting that we seek to take care of our little patch of it, even trying to clean up the mess that others have made. Both gardening as well as cleaning up the land, are very human acts – they are a kind of work that affirms our connection to the humus.

And when we turn to our passages this morning, we see that they are not just human acts, affirming our creatureliness, they are also, in an important sense, God-like acts. Cleaning things up out of care for others is to be a bit like God.

Our first reading, Psalm 104, is a wonderful poem celebrating the creative and caring concern God has for all of creation. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is here revealed as being the creator and sustainer of all creatures, great and small. God’s care extends not just to humans, but to the great family of life, the community of all creation. Written long before modern ecological science or the development of the concept of biodiversity, nonetheless, this psalm celebrates the diversity and abundance of the more-than-human earth. The psalmist notices the various habitats of animals, both domestic and wild, the times and seasons of their existence, and asserts in faith that Yahweh is the source and provider of all life, feeding and watering birds of the air, beasts of the land and even the monsters of the deep that so fascinated and frightened the inhabitants of the ancient near east.

And the striking thing is, there is no hint here that God’s care is exclusively or even primarily for humans; this psalm does not give us a human-centred view that assumes everything really belongs to us and exists to be used in our projects. No, God cares for humans in their labouring during the day, but the same land is then the abode of wild beasts at night that are also in divine care. God causes grass to grow for the cattle, but God also feeds the wild lions, the wild donkeys, the creeping things innumerable that scuttle under the waves. These animals were not only outside of the human economy, but at least in the case of wild lions, actively a hindrance to it. God’s providential care embraces even creatures that make life more difficult for people.*
*This point, and the language of the community of creation, is indebted to Richard Bauckham's Ecology and the Bible: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. Highly recommended.

Now, within this community of creation we do have a particular human vocation, a weighty responsibility placed upon us to reflect the image of God, to show forth God’s own caring concern for other creatures, to manage and steward the land in such a way that the blessing multiplies and grows. We are indeed invited to be gardeners. But Psalm 104 keeps us from getting too cocky, too ambitious, too self-obsessed in this task. We are to reflect and participate in God’s loving authority, which is always directed to the good of the other. Yet this authority is to be exercised as creatures. We are not demigods, halfway between God and the rest of creation, we don’t float six inches above the ground. We are pedestrian creatures, creatures of the dirt and to dust we will return. Fundamentally, we belong with all the other creatures, under the care of God, and if we are then invited to join in that task of caring protecting, it is precisely as creatures. We care for the soil as those who are deeply dependent upon it.

And this is a good reminder to us on Clean Up Australia day. It is so easy, especially in a modern industrial society, to act as though we are above or outside of the rest of life on the planet, rather than intimately connected to it in a vast web of life. Getting our hands dirty today hopefully did some local good, helped make a little part of the world somewhat better. But as we look at our dirty hands, this can also re-ground us as creatures of the soil and we can remember again our dependence upon crops growing, rain falling, soil remaining healthy, biodiversity remaining robust, pollutants being minimised, climate being stable. We have never before in history been so powerful, never before had such amazing technological wonders; but never before have we had such a massive, and largely detrimental, effect upon the habitability of the planet as a whole. There isn’t time this morning to recite the familiar litany of statistics, but they are indeed dire. I’ll just pick one: that as best as we can calculate, the number of wild vertebrates living on the planet has declined by about one third during my lifetime. There are all kinds of factors contributing to this: habitat destruction, hunting, overfishing, climate change, but our stewardship is failing if we are squeezing out these creatures, who are also dear to the one who created us.

And so there is a darker side to today. Our second passage hints at this. In Romans 8, the apostle Paul paints a vivid picture of creation groaning, as though in childbirth, in great pain, in bondage to decay.

If you have the passage in front of you, you’ll notice that there are actually three things groaning. First, there is creation itself, waiting with eager longing, yearning for the day when the current conditions of frustration and decay are no more. Just pause there for a moment and notice the content of Christian hope in Paul’s vision: “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God”. The creation itself: this is not a salvation that is purely for humans. We are not to be whisked off a dying planet away to a heavenly realm somewhere else. The creation itself is groaning, yearning, hoping. The creation itself is to participate in God’s great renewal, of which the resurrection of Jesus was the first taste. The Christian hope embraces earth as well as heaven – which ought to be no surprise to those of us who regularly pray for God’s will to be done "on earth as it is in heaven".

The second thing groaning is “we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for […] the redemption of our bodies”. Again, the Christian hope is bodily – we hope for a bodily resurrection, just like Jesus'. But more than this, groaning is a normal, healthy part of the Christian life. Paul is no triumphalist, who thinks that discipleship consists of ever-greater thrills and bliss. No, we follow a crucified messiah and our fundamental experience is of frustration, which is the necessary precondition for hope, for who hopes for what is already present, already manifest? Groaning is spiritual – not grumbling, mind you – but groaning, a deep yearning desire for all that is wrong to be set to rights. And that deep desire is inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, since it is those who have tasted the first fruits of that Spirit who groan. There is way in which being a Christian ought to lead us to being less content, less satisfied, less ready to make our peace with a broken world as though such brokenness is acceptable.

But if we keep reading our passage, we find that not only is creation groaning, not only are we groaning, but the Spirit also groans. In verse 26, where the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words, it’s the same Greek word Paul used earlier for our groaning: this discontented yearning for the renewal of all things, this deep desire for the resurrection of Jesus to be expanded and applied to all creation, extends into the heart of God. God too groans.

We are again, therefore, invited to be godly. If Psalm 104 helped us to be a little like God in caring for a community of life that extends beyond human projects, Romans 8 teaches us to be a little like God in yearning for the renewal of all things. These two passages give us a way of looking at the world in which the rest of creation is not merely a backdrop to an exclusively human drama. We discover wider horizons as we come to see ourselves as creatures in a community of life, as sharing with all life a fundamental dependence upon God’s provision and interdependence with other creatures. And we are invited to see ourselves as sharing with all creation a fundamental frustration, a desire for our brokenness to be healed, our pollution cleaned up, a desire grounded in God’s own desire that all things be made new in Christ.

Because the pollution degrading our lives isn’t just the rubbish dumped in a local park, it isn't even just the rubbish we’re collectively dumping into the oceans and atmosphere, largely out of sight and not as easily cleaned up with a pair of gloves and some elbow grease, pollution that is altering the very chemistry of the air and water, changing the climate, acidifying the oceans. Even more than these, the pollution degrading our lives is also the rubbish we allow into our hearts when we place ourselves at the centre of our own lives, when we live as though we were something other than creatures in a vast web of life, when we pretend that salvation doesn’t include the rest of creation. All this needs to be cleaned up too.

And so in the context of these passages, our efforts today become far more than just being good citizens, or kind neighbours, or taking pride in our local area, or seeking to make some amends for times we may have trashed the place. In the grace of God, they can become a little taste of the Psalmist’s vision of true creaturehood, a little taste of Paul’s Spirit-filled discontentment with disorder. In God’s hands, our efforts today can become another step on a journey into following Jesus with our whole lives, a journey that may break our fingernails, that may break our hearts, but which is the only path towards true joy.

Solidarity is more fundamental than stewardship

Two young fish were swimming along when they came across an older fish swimming the other way. “Isn’t the water lovely today?” the older one remarked. The youngsters nodded politely and kept swimming. When the old-timer was out of earshot, one fish turned to the other and whispered, “what’s water?”

Some things are so close to us that we can’t see them, so normal that most of the time they are effectively invisible. Often, it is only when the normal goes wrong that it comes suddenly into focus. This was certainly true for me a few years ago when I received some life-threatening health news. Suddenly, the good health that I had taken for granted jumped into focus. By being threatened, what had always been true suddenly became visible to me. I had been swimming in the water of good health without really noticing how much of a blessing it can be.

One of the realities as necessary and ubiquitous to us as water is to fish, yet which is so obvious we rarely consider it, is our relationship of utter dependence upon the proper functioning of the rest of creation. Every breath we take and every mouthful of food and every sip of water relies on a complex web of relations. The fusion of hydrogen atoms in the heart of the sun radiates energy at the right wavelengths and amplitude to reach us in a form that can drive photosynthesis and the water cycle, having first been filtered of dangerous frequencies by stratospheric ozone. This solar energy strikes the surface of the planet and heads back towards space as long-wave radiation; on the way, some of is trapped by asymmetrical trace gases, ensuring that our planet is not a frozen ball, but that most of it contains liquid water – water that is everywhere in motion and necessary for plants to produce the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat – water that is prevented from stagnating by the tug of the moon, the spin of the earth and the warmth of the sun, and which can be carried on the winds so that life-giving rain falls even far from the ocean – water that flows and carves rocks, gradually smoothing the pebbles I threw as a child into Ladies Well, and which carries nutrients out into the oceans, where they are needed by the microscopic phytoplankton that not only supply half the world’s atmospheric oxygen but which also form the basis of the marine food chain.

And on it goes. In any direction we look, we quickly discover that we are very much part of this creation, that we are tied in myriad uncountable ways to the planet on which we find ourselves. Our shelter, clothing and everything we use to make life more comfortable and liveable are derived from what we find around and under us. Indeed, all the atoms that we are and use, from our eyes to our iPhones, all are the scattered debris of long dead stars, reformed and refashioned over countless millennia into the complex structures we recognise today. We are, quite literally, star dust.

Perhaps we may sometimes think of ourselves as so clever as to have risen above non-human creation. We think of ourselves as masters, as being in control, as having outgrown our dependence upon the fickleness of nature. Yet even at the peak of our technical knowhow, even at the best of our rocket science, when we put a human being on the surface of another world, we are thrown once more upon our utter dependence upon and participation in the created world. For go and ask any astronaut: they are more aware than most of us just how precious and vital simple things like oxygen, water and somewhere to put our bodily waste truly are.

So when we approach the concept through which most evangelicals focus their understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation – that is, the concept of stewardship – we must come to it mindful that it is a secondary concept. It only makes sense when placed within a broader framework, a wider vision of humanity’s relationship to the rest of creation that emphasises our membership of a whole community of creation. Our primary relationship to other creatures is as fellow creatures together, recipients of all that we are and need and can be from the hand of a generous Creator. Whatever else we may go on to say about the place of humanity within creation does not override this fundamental interdependence and solidarity we share with our co-creatures. We do not approach the rest of creation as though we exist prior to and outside of or above it. If we read the creation accounts, we see that God proclaimed creation “good” six times even before humanity enters the scene. There is no hint that the rest of creation was made simply for humans to use. Indeed, such a view is idolatrous, as numerous places in scripture make it clear that if creation has a purpose beyond itself, it exists for God rather than for us. Thus, other creatures have their own relationship to God that is prior to and more important than their subsequent relationship to humanity. And we share with them this fundamental origin in God and orientation to God. No account of human stewardship truly makes sense until we grasp this.

Psalm 148 takes this reality and places it in the context of worship. As we listen to the Psalmist’s praise of the Creator, notice how most of the psalm takes the form of invitations to all the other creatures to join in a universal chorus of praise. The picture is of a massive and diverse choir, all singing in harmony: the angels (who after all are creatures too), the sun, moon and stars, the waters, the weather, the trees, the animals and, finally, the humans. This picture is an excellent antidote to two mistaken approaches: the first, adopted by some extreme environmentalists, is to treat nature as itself divine. The scriptures affirm that through the created order we do indeed catch all kinds of glimpses of God, but we’re most in tune with the universe when we join with it in praising our Creator. The second mistake, and one that is far more common in our society and amongst our churches, lies not in overstating the importance of creation, but in understating it, taking it for granted, treating it as though it is mere raw materials to be mastered by our technology and used for our projects without consideration of any broader context. By the way, humans are not the only creatures to use other creatures. In making use of other creatures, we are not exercising our particularly human role but are merely being creaturely. And scripture places clear limits on the ways that human may use other creatures, especially other living beings. We look at creation and see only resources for our economies, failing to see that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. But once we really get the reality that other creatures are our co-worshippers, then we can no longer worship creation nor treat it like dirt.

We shouldn’t even treat dirt like dirt, since from dirt we came and to dirt we will return. The first man ‘Adam was made from the dirt ‘adamah, in Hebrew. ‘Adam from ‘adamah – it’s a Hebrew pun. It works in English too; the word “human” has the same root as the word “humus”, soil, dirt. The human from the humus. It’s the same root as the beautiful word “humility”. Being properly humble, being close to the dirt, not thinking of ourselves as demi-gods or outside of creation, but rather seeing ourselves as dependent upon and bound together with the rest of creation is central to what it means to be properly human.

Every second of every day

Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second. But we're doing our best to mitigate this problem by removing 9-10,000 tonnes of fish from the ocean every hour. And, of course, by dumping 62,500 tonnes of heat-trapping emissions into the earth's atmosphere every minute. The radiative forcing of the carbon dioxide human activities have put in the atmosphere is the equivalent of adding the energy of more than ten Hiroshima bombs every second.

Climate Central: Extreme events related to climate change threaten three US nuclear facilities.

Guardian: UK oil and gas rigs creating spills at least once a week in 2009 and 2010. Remember, the UK claims to have some of the world's highest standards in regulation of off-shore drilling safety. Now take these operations into freezing Arctic waters, where microbes won't be so quick to deal with spills as there were in the tropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and where extreme conditions prevent the kind of response available there. Arctic drilling is doubly suicidal: It brings new risks to relatively untouched ecosystems and ensures more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere for thousands of years. And the only reason these waters are opening up to this exploitation is the decline of the sea ice caused by the combustion of fossil fuels in the first place.

Grist: In the worst drought in Texas history, 13.5 billion gallons of water used for fracking. Fracking is the controversial process used to exploit reserves of shale gas, a fossil fuel touted in some circles as a cleaner alternative and as a silver bullet solution to US energy security, but which is worse than coal or conventional oil when gas leaks are included (since natural gas is a very potent greenhouse gas and degrades over time into more carbon dioxide), has been associated with the poisoning of groundwater, and which may well prove commercially unviable much faster than expected according to a recent NYT report (while Stoneleigh offers an even bleaker outlook).

Independent: The plight of the big cats. According to Dereck and Beverly Joubert, leading big cat conservationists, "There were 450,000 lions when we were born and now there are only 20,000 worldwide. [...] Leopards have declined from 700,000 to 50,000, cheetahs from 45,000 to 12,000 and tigers are down from 50,000 to just 3,000."

CP: Food prices hover at historic highs.

IPS: Rising temperatures melting away food security. The impacts of climate change on food production are not limited to heat stress on crops (which may suppress global yields by 5-10% per degree of warming), but also include disruptions to precipitation patterns (i.e. floods and droughts), inundation (or salination) by rising sea levels, loss of glacial melt water (a critical factor, according to this article), increased erosion and shifting distribution of pests and invasive species.

Yale360: Wasting phosphate. "It takes one ton of phosphate to produce every 130 tons of grain, which is why the world mines about 170 million tons of phosphate rock every year to ship around the world and keep soils fertile. [...] We could hit “peak phosphorus” production by around 2030. [...] Presently, there simply are no substitutes for phosphorus."

Reuters: As CO2 levels rise, land becomes less able to curb warming, claims new study in Nature.

Mongabay: The unexpected effects of removing top predators. Another new Nature paper claims that "The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature".

Energy Bulletin: Dilithium crystals and tomorrow's energy needs.
Image by CAC.

The Age of Stupid

Today I went to a screening of The Age of Stupid, which was being shown as part of the Cineco Film Festival, a series of free ecological films showing around Edinburgh between September and November.


The Age of Stupid investigates the contradictions and myopia of our present age from the viewpoint of an archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) living in a remote Arctic refuge storing what could be salvaged of the world's cultural treasures, looking back from the year 2055 at decades of catastrophic climate change and using a glorified iPad to create a documentary warning for extraterrestrials. It doesn't sound like a format that will fly, and the film opens with apocalyptic images of London underwater, the Swiss Alps without snow, Las Vegas being covered by sand dunes and Sydney's CBD consumed in a towering inferno, further confirming my expectations that the film would consist largely of terrifying crystal ball gazing, showing an unfolding series of disasters that would lead to Postlethwaite's archivist on his lonely refuge. Instead, the 2055 viewpoint is a mere framing device to allow a pastiche of archival documentary and news footage from prior to 2009, along with original interviews following six or seven figures from around the world. The period between 2009 and 2055 is left largely blank and we are confronted directly with the stupidity of our own age.

The archivist narrator begins with this question:

"The amazing thing is we had a chance to avert this. The conditions we are experiencing now were actually caused by our behaviour in the period leading up to 2015. In other words, we could have saved ourselves. We could have saved ourselves, but we didn't. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

And that is the focus of the film: the inability of our present society to join the dots between fighting climate change and wanting cheap flights, or hating wind farms. It is a moving and at times darkly amusing film, but the apocalyptic framing which grabs your attention also proves somewhat distracting, since the full devastating effects of climate change are left largely unstated. There is a brief discussion with Mark Lynas (author of the widely-read Six Degrees) and a couple of other hints (passing references to food riots, for instance), but the shape of the threat that could conceivably lead to the archivist's world is largely unspoken. Perhaps this was for the sake of time, or perhaps to avoid the charge of fear-mongering, though I think that a rational discussion of the genuine threats identified in the scientific literature is far more responsible (even if initially more terrifying) than a few apocalyptic images and a heavy dose of post-apocalyptic regret.

Once again, the film was stronger on the diagnosis of the problem than on offering plausible paths to how we might indeed "save ourselves", or (what might now be more realistic) offering healthy ways of salvaging what we can from a disaster that is now unavoidable, but whose effects can still be significantly reduced.

That said, I would still recommend the film as worth seeing. One particular highlight was the brief and clear explanation of contraction and convergence, which is a serious suggestion for how it is possible to slash global emissions while allowing developing nations to get out of stupid poverty. Of course, this means developing nations cutting their emissions even faster in order to leave some room for the global poor to meet their basic needs. This option is not politically viable, especially in the places where per capita emissions would need to fall the fastest (US, Australia, Canada and parts of the Middle East), but it is the most equitable of all the options on the table and has received support from a number of nations, including the UK.

Also coming up as part of the Cineco film festival are two more films that look very interesting. The first is called Our Daily Bread and consists almost purely of footage of contemporary industrial agricultural processes with commentary or soundtrack beyond environmental noises recorded with the footage, allowing the viewer to form her own opinions. It is screening at 6pm on the 12th November.

The second is called Dirt! and traces one of the major ecological challenges that doesn't receive much attention: the soil beneath our feet (and all too often, beneath our concrete too). In the last one hundred years, in different ways we have squandered about a third of all fertile topsoil on the planet. It is screening at 6pm on 17th November (Martin Hall, New College) and will include a panel discussion with local religious leaders. Here is the trailer.

And then there were 306...

NOAA: “August 2010 was the 306th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.” Any day the temperatures for September will be in. It's a safe bet to expect they will make it 307.

The most commonly cited target in international climate negotiations is that we ought to limit warming to an average of 2°C. However, that may already be too high.

How to shrink a city: this will become an increasing issue in many parts of the world due to likely demographic and economic changes of the next few decades.

Peak oil and healthcare, a UK perspective.

Terminological clarification: irreversible vs unstoppable.

Hot Topic: On giving up non-essential flying.

The health benefit of more ambitious emissions targets. If Europe raised its sights from 20% to 30% emissions cuts by 2020, then it could be saving an extra €30 billion per year in health costs. This saving alone would account for a significant portion of the estimated €46 billion p.a. the higher target would require.

Twenty-two percent of the world's plant species are threatened with extinction and another thirty-three percent have an unknown status. The main culprit? Land use changes associated with agriculture.

Rivers in peril worldwide: study in Nature claims that eighty percent of the world's population (nearly 5.5 billion people) lives in an area where rivers are seriously threatened. "[S]ome of the highest threat levels in the world are in the United States and Europe." See also here a graphic of the threat distribution.

Oceans acidifying much faster than ever before in Earth's history.

Soil degradation, erosion and desertification continues in many places around the world, reducing the amount of arable land.

On average, every single man, woman and child on the planet is US$28,000 in debt.

Speaking of money, a new study has estimated that the cost of vanishing rainforest each year is approximately US$5 trillion (with a "t". i.e. US$5,000,000,000,000).

However, the real issue is that each of these crises are not isolated, but are all converging on similar time scales.

Link love

John wonders whether it might not be better to start a sermon with application.

Failure to understand Black Swans leads to fallacious thinking (Black Swans are the low probability, high impact events that are excluded by most forecasting models).

"12 million hectares of arable land – roughly the size of Greece or Nepal, enough to harvest 20 million tonnes of grain and feed six million people per annum – are lost to desertification each year."

Painting your roof white to cool the planet. Crazy? Not entirely.

Jason ponders forgiveness and eucharist with Williams and loneliness and prayer with Stringfellow.

Sisyphus revisited.

The Jordan river is too polluted for baptisms. The Nile isn't looking so great either.

Climate science in 1979.

Ecological and resource crises facing industrial civilisation

Some threats to life as we know itSince my research involves responses to the perception of threats to life as we currently know it, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of some the serious ecological and resource difficulties that have resulted from the spectacular success of industrialism. This is not an exhaustive catalogue (I'd appreciate further suggestions), nor an attempt to rank the various issues, many of which are deeply interconnected. Some of these issues are more pressing than others.

• Climate change: including global warming, precipitation shifts (floods, droughts and shifting agricultural patterns), sea level rise, intensification of extreme weather events, cryosphere shrinkage, and more, including the subsequent risk of various geoengineering attempts (like this one by Bill Gates).

• Fresh water use (aquifer depletion, equity of access, water-borne diseases, local water stress, etc.). Thirty-six US States are predicted to have water shortages by 2015 and rainy London is building a desalination plant.

• Peak oil (and perhaps further off, peak gas and coal): the end of cheap energy. Note that warnings are coming from more and more credible/mainstream sources.

• Biodiversity loss (including extinction, functional extinction, decline in ecosystem complexity and resiliance and loss in genetic diversity within species)

• Destruction of natural habitats (especially forests, wetlands and coral reefs)

• Desertification

• Soil degradation (erosion, depletion and salinisation)

• Ocean acidification

• Fisheries decline and collapse

• Phytoplankton decline

• Toxic pollution: plastics, heavy metals, hormones and other chemicals in the soils, air, oceans, aquifers, rivers and lakes

• Alteration of the nitrogen cycle (with many consequences, including marine hypoxia - "dead zones")

• Invasive species

• Increasing human share of global photosynthetic capacity (primary production), which is also in modest decline

• Radioactive waste

• Pollinator decline

• Peak phosphorus (and a number of other minerals, though phosphorus seems to be the most pressing and crucial)

• Stratospheric ozone depletion and tropospheric ozone pollution

• Antibiotic-resistant microbes (a.k.a. "superbugs")

Are there any here which you hadn't heard of? Any that I've missed? Part of the point of this list is to stress that climate change is but one of many threats, though it is a multiplier of a number of these problems (water access, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, ocean acidification and so on). The root cause of most of them is the combination of global population growth coupled with growth in per capita ecological footprint, though it is particularly the consumption patterns of the developed world over the last six decades that bear the lion's share of the blame.

For a partial list of some arresting statistics, try this post.

Serving the soil for the glory of God

1. God as creator has absolute sovereignty over the environment. We must use it only in accordance with His will; and we shall answer, collectively as well as individually, for all our decisions in this area.

2. Theologically, the primary function of the Creation is to serve as a revelation of God. To spoil the Creation is to disable it from performing this function.

3. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition there is an intimate link between man and the soil. He is taken from the ground; his food is derived from it; he is command to till and to keep it; and he returns to it. This implies a psychological as well as theological bond. Although such facts should not be used to endorse naked territorialism, they do raise the consideration that rape of the environment is rape of the community itself.

4. The precise responsibility of man to his environment is defined very precisely in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

4.1 Man has to 'keep' it (Genesis 2.15). This is not simply an insistence on conservation. It designates man as guardian and protector of the ground.

4.2 Man is the servant of the ground (Genesis 2.15). This is the usual meaning of the Hebrew word popularly rendered to us as to till. Christian theology has largely failed to recognise this emphasis. Any insistence on the more widely perceived notion of man's dominion (Genesis 1.28) must be balanced by the less familiar but equally important concept of man as servant. [...]

6. Man's relationship with his environment has been disrupted by the Fall. One primary symptom of this is that he is always tempted to allow economic considerations to override ecological ones.

- Donald Macleod, excerpt of testimony to Harris superquarry public inquiry,
quoted in Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul (London: Aurum, 2001), 233-34.

This is a brief example of a theological case for our responsibility towards the earth as God's good creation. It is not attempting to be exhaustive and was for a particular polemical purpose, but I thought I'd post it as an example. Thoughts?
Image by Celia Carroll.

Calvin the Greenie

"The earth was given to man, with this condition, that he should occupy himself in its cultivation... The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, on the condition that, being content with the frugal and moderate use of them, we should take care of what shall remain. Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence, but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it, or even better cultivated. Let him so feed on its fruits, that he neither dissipates it by luxury, nor permits it to be marred or ruined by neglect. Moreover, that this economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things which God has given us to enjoy, may flourish among us; let everyone regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved."

- John Calvin on Genesis 2.15 in Commentary on Genesis (1554).

The earth was given to us. And, at the same time, we were given to the earth, to till it and keep it.

A recent study found that one quarter of the earth's arable land has been degraded through soil erosion, salinisation, desertification or nutrient exhaustion.

Would Jesus vote green? VI

Sorrow
Once we move beyond systematic denial of environmental destruction, we reach the second common response: sorrow.

Upon coming to accept (at least some of) these claims as true, we are filled with sadness. It is sad that human action (and inaction) continue to cause so much destruction and senseless waste. This is a natural and right response, since we’re really losing things of that are of great value. In particular, I find the rate of extinction very sad, because while most other forms of environmental damage are reversible, (sometimes only in the very long term), with the extinction of a species, once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

It is not only the animals and plants that suffer from our environmental irresponsibility. Humans suffer too, especially those too poor to move and too marginalised to have a significant political voice. Poisoned rivers, degraded soil, more frequent and more severe extreme weather patterns – these and more cause incalculable human suffering too. This is far more serious than not being able to water your garden or having to pay a little more for electricity.

Sorrow at what is lost and sorrow at what it costs those least able to afford it – this response resonates with a deeply Christian way of viewing the world. We only grieve the loss of what is valuable. Fundamental to Christianity’s take on the environment is that the world God made was good, very good. Grief is the natural correlate of love, when the object of love is harmed or threatened.

And our sadness also accords with a second basic Christian belief: there is something deeply wrong with God’s world. The beauty is marred. There are cracks in the abundant diversity. The health of the planet is threatened by a global disease.

The Apostle Paul teaches that to follow Christ, to be filled with his Spirit, is to grieve over the plight of creation, to groan in shared pain, to be discontent with the fractures in the world. Following Christ is not a recipe for a mindlessly happy escapism; we follow the one called the man of sorrows.

Yet grief alone is insufficient, not least because despite our best – or perhaps our worst, or simply our mediocre – efforts, despite pollution, soil degradation, climate change, the squandering of finite resources, mass extinction, despite all this, the world remains a good gift from God, filled with delight and things worth celebrating. Unless we take the time to stop, notice, enjoy and give thanks for all that surrounds us, we lose the very reason to grieve because we lose sight of the goodness of this gift.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII.

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
&#160&#160&#160 It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
&#160&#160&#160 It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
&#160&#160&#160 And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
&#160&#160&#160 And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;
&#160&#160&#160 There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
&#160&#160&#160 Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
&#160&#160&#160 World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877, published 1895

This poem captures a number of important theological insights. The first four lines are filled with wonder at God's creation, and the grandeur of God revealed there. Yet already by line four is a puzzled recognition that not all see it.

The next four lines are very pessimistic about humanity's effects on nature. With good reason, yet not as good as the reasons for such feelings today. There is more to be said about this relationship (and Hopkins has much more to say in other poems), but I think this captures an important moment in reflection. The marks humanity leaves on the world are often more shameful than glorious.

After the turn at the end of line 8, the sonnet shifts focus to the future. Despite the worst humanity can do, our powers of ultimate destruction are curtailed. Even if we bring blackest night, that could not dim the regenerative power of God's hovering Holy Spirit. This final confession has been criticised as letting us off the hook, since God can and will fix whatever problems we create. What do you think: does the promise of universal restoration (Acts 3.21) undermine our motivation to care for creation?
Ten points for naming the country in the pic.