"By leaves we live"

Ice sheets: A new study confirms with greater accuracy than ever before that world's major ice sheets are melting at an accelerating rate. This is why sea level rise is happening 60% faster than was expected in the most recent IPCC report.

Coal boom: 1200 new coal plants planned. Three quarters of the new plants are to be located in China and India. A breakdown of the countries is available here. Though India's expansion plans need to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

Extinction is forever: Tim Flannery reflects on the challenges facing Australian biodiversity and suggests that the current approach isn't working. With a reply from David Bowman. Perhaps how do we triage conservation priorities?

Coal seam gas: Recent measurements (yet to be peer reviewed) suggest coal seam gas production may have significant "fugitive emissions" of methane that render the claims of the gas industry to be somewhat less bad for the climate questionable. Some have suggested that natural gas is methadone to coal's heroin.

Fracking: Stories from the front line in the US. In the UK, academics have just advised the government that it is "categorically clear" that pursuing a shale gas dominated energy strategy is incompatible with legislated UK climate targets. But it looks like they are going to do it anyway.

Big cats, small space: Only 25% of the original African savannah remains undeveloped, leaving less and less room for the iconic megafauna that call it home. Lion numbers are plummeting and they may soon be listed as endangered.

IPCC: The IPCC has been repeatedly wrong on climate change, frequently underestimating the rate and impacts of change.
Note that the first link makes an embarrassingly obvious mistake in its opening claim, confusing carbon with carbon dioxide and so getting the numbers hopelessly muddled.

Trees: All around the world, ancient trees are dying at an alarming rate.

Don't breathe too deeply, and other stories

Air pollution: 97% of EU citizens are exposed to levels of tropospheric ozone above WHO recommended limits. "On average, air pollution is cutting human lives [in Europe] by roughly eight months and by about two years in the worst affected regions". The situation is considerably worse in many parts of the world. The true cost of the public health burden on respiratory function of burning coal in China, for instance, is perhaps as high as 7% of annual GDP, even before climate costs are considered. A 2011 study of the external costs of coal in the US (excluding climate costs) found an annual price tag between 1/3 and 1/2 a trillion dollars.

Climate change is here: Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study. The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather linked to climate change is contributing to deaths from malnutrition, poverty and their associated diseases. Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5m people a year, the report found. That means failing to tackle a fossil fuel based economy will contribute to something like 100 million deaths by the end of next decade.

Warming oceans: warming and acidification will cut the productivity of fisheries in many countries. "About 1 billion people depend on seafood as their main source of protein. But some of those countries most dependent on fishing are expected to lose up to 40% of their fish catch by the middle of the century." Hardest hit will be the Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan. Of course, this is just from carbon-related changes and does not take into account patterns of overfishing, invasive species, pollution, eutrophification, stratification, shifting currents or habitat loss from coral reef degradation. And even the size of fish will shrink in warmer oceans.

Dying trees: Who will speak for the trees? Trees are dying by the millions all around the world due to a wide range of factors. Not just deforestation - which, though it has slowed down a little in Brazil, still continues with increasing rapidity elsewhere - but also due to ground level ozone pollution, infectious diseases (a third of all UK trees face wipeout from a new fungal threat that is expected to wipe out over 90% of Danish Ash trees) and a variety of threats associated with climate change, such as heat stress, invasive species (pine bark beetle) and droughts. For instance, last year's drought in Texas killed over three hundred million trees (or about 6% of all its trees). Heat stress has been linked to widespread tree mortality in scores of studies over the last few years.

Ocean acidification: A basic primer with FAQs, including excellent brief answer to common misconceptions.

Killer cats: How much do cats actually kill? The Oatmeal summarises some recent research. There are hundreds of millions of domestic cats around the world, and tens or hundreds of millions of feral cats. They are taking a big toll on small wildlife.

Australian coal: Australia's carbon price, far from signalling the "death of the coal industry" as claimed repeatedly by the Opposition, has apparently done little to dent the explosive growth of coal exploration in the country. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal, fifth largest extractor of fossil hydrocarbons globally and has the highest per capita domestic carbon emissions in the OECD. Despite setting very modest carbon reduction targets in recent legislation, both government and industry are planning on a doubling of coal exports in the coming decade, representing emissions many times greater than Australia's tiny domestic reductions, which will largely come from international offsets in any case.

Does nature have a price? and other stories

Pricing nature: George Monbiot highlights the myopia of attempting to include "ecosystem services" within mainstream neoliberal economic thought. The initial government report noted that some of the services provided by natural ecosystems "may in fact be infinite in value". You don't say.

Ten Billion: A "play", reviewed here and here, in which noted Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott plays noted Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott. The only set is a recreation of his messy Cambridge office and the drama is Emmott delivering a lecture on our current predicament. describes himself as a "rational pessimist" and lays out the daunting, perhaps impossible, task before us in the coming decades where we face multiple converging crises. He concludes that the only rational way forward is radical cultural change with widespread embrace of lower consumption and fewer children (this is pretty close to what I think, with nuances regarding children), but thinks it is not going to happen (this is also basically what I think, though with all kinds of reasons why it is still worth trying). Given that those who will hear this are those willing to pay through the nose for a night of "theatre" more disturbingly horrifying than any fictional film, it's probably better to avoid reading too much into fact that all performances are sold out. Attempts such as this to piece together the various disparate pieces of information that float around the internet and scientific journals are to be valued. That people come away terrified ought to be entirely unsurprising. What is needed is a moral vision capable of surveying such a situation and finding reasons to throw ourselves "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more".

Australian coal: A victory as one proposed coal plant is shelved.

Hunger games: Coming soon to a future near you. Future heat, drought, food costs and global unrest. I have long been saying that such secondary and tertiary effects of climate change are at least as dangerous as any direct physical effects, though they may not generate headlines that mention climate.

Planetary boundaries: "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere", a recent paper in Nature includes this in its abstract: "Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence."

Solastalgia: The word is a neologism coined by psychologist Glenn Albrecht in 2003 and is gaining some recognition. It refers to nostalgia one feels for a place being lost even while you're still there, a homesickness while you're still at home, but home is becoming less hospitable. In Albrecht's own words, it is "emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment". I think it is a useful concept, even if I'm not convinced by the etymology.

Extreme weather: Extreme heat events experienced in many places in recent years are very, very unlikely to be unrelated to climate change. A new study by James Hansen on the attribution of extreme weather events does not use models, but is a statistical study based on observed changes that argues that the increase in what used to be extreme events (three standard deviations above the 1950-80 average) to now cover something like 10% of the globe's surface at any given time (rather than about 0.1% during 1950-80), is strong evidence that such events are vanishingly unlikely to not be related to climate change.

Overheated economy: Temperature rises correlate with declines in economic indicators and political stability, at least in developing nations. Good thing we're not expecting any discernable pattern in global temperatures over the next few decades and centuries then.

The West in Flames: The US West and Southwest is projected by most climate models to get hotter and drier. This has all kinds of implications, but this article by the author of A Great Aridness summarises the implications for trees and wildfire. It's not pretty.

400ppm CO2: Last time CO2 levels were this high. A study investigating conditions 15 million years ago found that "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8-5.6ºC) higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet (22.9-36.6m) higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland".

Good news, bad news

SMH: The good news is that the US National Intelligence Council thinks "a water-related, state-on-state conflict is unlikely during the next 10 years". The bad news is that after ten years, all bets are off: "as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basi[n?]s will increasingly be used as leverage [...] The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years". Full report here.

CP: March Madness. The recent North American heatwave is breaking a record-breaking number of records. Between the 9th and 19th of March more than 4,000 US heat records were broken, and only something like 113 cold records, a ratio of about 35 to 1 (the average ratio since 2000 in the US is 2.04:1). Some places set March records higher than April records, some had daily low temperatures that broke previous daily highs, and some had old records broken by as much as 17ºC.

HuffPo: 21stC oil will break the bank and the planet.

Asian Development Bank Says Climate Migration Poses Growing Threat: "In a new report, the bank says more than 42 million people in the region were displaced by environmental disasters over the past two years alone. In 2010, it said, more than 30 million people were displaced, some permanently, primarily by devastating floods in Pakistan and China."

NYT: OECD warns of ever-higher greenhouse gases. This is what we're headed towards without a significant change of direction.

CP: Do trees have rights? Revisiting The Lorax.. In a certain sense, they already do, at least under US law.

SEI: Valuing the oceans: "climate change alone could reduce the economic value of key ocean services by up to 2 trillion USD a year by 2100". I'm more than a little sceptical about such attempts to place an economic value on ecological realities, since they obscure the fact that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. The damage we are doing to the oceans is not simply to be measured in missing dollars, but in broken lives, lost species, a weeping Creator.

Wit's End: Tropospheric ozone - blighted trees, breathing difficulties and pernicious corruption of science. The atmospheric pollution you probably haven't heard much about. This is not the "ozone layer" (stratospheric ozone), in which ozone molecules are precious and save our bacon from frying, but surface level ozone, which is an altogether different and nastier beast: "health costs due to global ozone pollution above pre-industrial levels by 2050 will be US$580 billion (year 2000$) and that mortalities from acute exposure will exceed 2 million."

Carbon offsetting: de rigueur or distraction?

A few friends have asked me for advice about voluntary carbon offsetting. Here is an edited and somewhat extended version of what I wrote to one earlier today. I freely admit that my understanding of all the finer points of this field remains somewhat shallow and so I am very open to correction, questions and further discussion (as I am on all my posts).

Voluntary carbon offsetting is the practice of paying money to organisations that seek to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (usually at a set price per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent) as a way of reducing our personal climate impact. Voluntary offsets are somewhat distinct from offsets in compliance carbon schemes (such as national or regional carbon markets). The latter probably require their own discussion at some stage.

Voluntary offsetting is most commonly associated with flying, since modern jet-powered aviation is, per hour, the most climate-destructive activity open to the average citizen of the wealthy world.* I plan on posting some thoughts on the impacts and ethics of flying at some point in the future, though let me say here that I don't think that flying is an unequivocal moral evil never to be permitted under any circumstances. I do think that it represents one of the more difficult questions facing contemporary cultural assumptions and habits, not least because, unlike many other activities, few easily substituted alternatives exist.** It also represents, for those who fly more than once in a blue moon, the most obvious point at which significant carbon reductions can quickly be made.
*It may be surpassed by political careers that attempt to thwart responsible climate action, certain kinds of investment banking, or owning factories that produce extreme greenhouse gases such as HFCs, but such activities are not generally available to most people. The main contender for this title, procreation, is a special case since it involves the creation of a new agent.
**Airships anyone?

Some companies or events also choose to pay for carbon offsetting in order to be able to claim that their activities are "carbon neutral" or "zero carbon". Most corporate claims to phrases such as these will be based at least partially in offsetting, since most human economic activities are associated with a carbon footprint of greater or lesser size.

There is a lot of debate around carbon offsetting, some of it around the relative merits of different kinds of offsetting and some about the ethics of offsetting at all.

The tactics of offsetting: evaluating different schemes
Let us first consider the various kinds of offsetting programmes. It is worth noting at the outset that no options are perfect (indeed, some may be only slightly better than nothing, or even worse than nothing), so it remains the case that the only real way of being carbon neutral is avoiding the carbon-intensive activity in the first place. I don't have specific company recommendations (though am happy to receive recommendations in the comments), but I will offer a few thoughts. There are three basic kinds of offsetting:

• Forestry schemes (i.e. tree-planting): The idea here is simple. Trees are made (mostly) of carbon that has been sucked out of the atmosphere, so as trees grow, they reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations. More trees means less atmospheric carbon. Well-managed forestry also has a host of other benefits, from supporting biodiversity and local employment to regulating and enhancing local rainfall. I would also include various soil management schemes here. In the past, some forestry schemes had very poor planning or oversight, meaning trees were planted in inappropriate conditions and without ongoing management and thus quickly died, representing a worse than useless investment. There is generally better accreditation today (or so I am told, though I'm not any kind of expert on offsetting accreditation), which is good, since any planting scheme needs to put appropriate species in suitable locations, rather than just plonking anything anywhere. Nonetheless, from a climate perspective, the benefits from tree planting are generally deferred for decades and are highly vulnerable to future changes. If the forest is cut down, or dries/dies out due to climate change, then the benefit is lost. So a tonne of carbon stored in a forest (or potentially stored in a forest in a few decades) is not the equivalent of a tonne of carbon left safely underground as unused fossil fuel, though it is still better than a tonne of carbon floating in the atmosphere and upper ocean. Technically, the carbon is not removed from the active carbon cycle, just placed in a slightly slower part of it.

• Development schemes (e.g. supplying renewable energy to developing nations, or supporting energy efficiency programmes): These have many of the same benefits and drawbacks of other forms of international development. While the most popular renewable energy schemes often don't actually reduce current emissions (e.g. building a wind turbine for a settlement without electricity actually adds to short-term emissions), they do represent an investment in improving human flourishing (at least potentially, depending on many other factors) in a way that (hopefully) avoids future emissions (compared to a future in which the same development occurred with fossil fuel power). Probably the best kinds of scheme here focus on long term infrastructure investments with ongoing and self-reinforcing benefits. It is not clear to me that the developed world doesn't owe this kind of assistance to the developing world in any case, and so while voluntary support for good projects is worthwhile, I don't see that it equates in any kind of morally useful way with offsetting one's damaging activities elsewhere.

• Permit retirement: These are probably less well-known than other schemes. The idea is for the offsetting organisation to use your money to purchase emission permits in open compliance markets (like the EU carbon market) and then retire them from use, preventing their use by other polluters and so shrinking the total pool of potential carbon use in that market. Though somewhat more abstract than the other options, the benefits are immediate and measurable - as long as the scheme as a whole is working effectively, which is another very complex question for another day (see here for an accessible animated critique of carbon markets).

In general, I would be very hesitant about schemes offered by airlines themselves, who have a vested interest in picking projects with very low prices in order to bolster the idea that the negative impacts of air travel are small. Many airlines have a poor or mediocre track record on selecting quality offsetting schemes. If you are paying only cents or a couple of dollars per tonne of CO2e abatement, then you may well be supporting something that isn't very effective.

The strategy of offsetting: should we be doing it at all?
Second, and more importantly, lying behind questions concerning the relative pros and cons of various offsetting tactics is a more serious strategic debate about the desirability of offsetting altogether in light of its effects on moral culture. On the one hand, offsetting encourages carbon emitters to become familiar with their footprint and take some kind of financial responsibility for it. Yet on the other hand, given that all offsetting options have drawbacks sufficient to render an offset tonne not equivalent to a tonne not emitted in the first place, then the practice of offsetting represents a potential moral hazard insofar as it hides this reality by implying a climatic and moral equivalence between them.

For me, the key question is this: does supporting a culture of offsetting distract members of wealthy nations from the more important tasks of actually reducing our personal footprint and supporting responsible climate politics internationally and in our own backyard?* While I think that offsetting can do some real good and represents a retrieval ethic (trying to salvage something good out of a harmful situation), offsets come a long way down the priority list and if they become anything other than peripheral to our climate strategy then they risk becoming another distracting tokenism from the real challenges. Offsets are not necessary a token effort if people are also facing the hard questions of reducing their personal footprint and supporting responsible politics. But much of the discourse around offsets treats them as get out of gaol free cards, justifying the activity for which the offsets were sought in the first place.
*By responsible, I mean political discourse and policies that take our scientific and ethical situation seriously. This likely means radical changes to our practices (or incremental changes that work in large increments!) in order to minimise radical changes in our climate and biosphere. I know of no major parties in the Anglosphere that hold positions I would consider responsible on this matter. I don't want radical policies; I want deeply conservative policies that aim to conserve the global climate in a recognisable form for our children and grandchildren.

Some have therefore compared offsets to medieval indulgences: a price paid for a clean conscience, which often functions to justify the acts committed in the first place. If my carbon-guilt can be washed away for a small fee later (or even preemptively), then my carbon-intensive assumptions can continue unchallenged.

In sum, I think that probably the best course of action is to reduce one's own footprint as far and fast as possible, to support responsible climate politics, to support thoughtful international development, and then to "sin" boldly (in Luther's phrase) without supporting a culture of modern day indulgences. Nonetheless, I'm not totally opposed to offsetting by those who do so in good faith, via a reputable and accredited organisation. However, this should be done simply as part of one's charitable giving to worthwhile causes rather than in any attempt to assuage guilt or achieve boastful self-righteousness through "carbon neutrality".

Finally, here are some links to other discussions of carbon offsetting that I've found useful (this list may grow in future, especially if people suggest relevant links in the comments).

• Dark Optimism. Building the moral case against offsets, with cartoons.
• African land grabs and carbon offsets. Stephen Leahy outlines one of the dangers of rich countries relying too much on paying poor countries to offset their emissions.
• Cheat Neutral. A thought-provoking spoof on voluntary offsets. It is worth noting that adultery does not equate directly with carbon emissions, which are a cumulative, rather than absolute, evil.

Not with a bang but with a sustained leak

Real Climate: Why Arctic methane release is bad, not catastrophic. This is a very important post. Many have been deeply worried about the possibility of a so-called "methane gun" in which truly staggering volumes of frozen methane clathrates that sit on and under the ocean floor of the Siberian continental shelf are released in a runaway feedback as the Arctic Ocean warms. Since methane (CH₄) has something like 100 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a twenty year period, it has been hypothesized that a rapid release of large volumes of stored methane could cause a sudden and likely catastrophic surge in global temperatures. A variation or accompaniment to this scenario is the rapid release of methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia. In the linked post, a senior climatologist argues that it is far more likely that methane release will be chronic rather than acute, and given methane's relatively short atmospheric residency (about ten years), this will lead to a dangerous (though not immediately catastrophic) rise then stabilisation of methane levels, supplementing but not overwhelming warming from carbon dioxide. However, since atmospheric methane gradually degrades to carbon dioxide in the presence of oxygen, a slow release would not only give a bump to methane levels but would also see carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. Unlike methane, carbon dioxide is basically forever, with about half of any increase in atmospheric concentration we experience likely to remain for centuries and about a quarter likely to remain for at least ten thousand years. So a relief (of sorts) for us. It's a bit like finding that the Nazis don't, as feared, have a nuclear weapon, but they do have twice as many conventional forces as was thought.

CD: A recent NASA study suggests that climate change may modify 40% the earth's surface from one biome (e.g. forest, savanna, tundra, etc.) to another.

ABC Religion and Ethics: The New Evangelicals: How Christians are rethinking Abortion and Gay marriage. Despite being published by the ABC, this piece (an extract from a new book) has its eyes on the US scene. How applicable are the trends it identifies elsewhere amongst evangelicals?

Guardian: More farmers needed. Feeding seven, eight, nine, ten billion without strip-mining the soil, using the atmosphere as a carbon dump, squeezing out biodiversity, depleting finite fuels or overloading rivers, lakes and oceans with nutrients requires more organic poly-cultural farming, which can often be more productive per unit of land overall than present industrial monocultural farming. However, it is less productive per unit of labour, meaning more people employed (again) in growing food, which probably means higher food prices and a greater share of incomes devoted to food. This in turn may help address obesity, though at the risk of increasing malnutrition associated with poverty. Hence, addressing inequality is also critical.

Peter preaches on the parable of the talents (Matthew 25.14-30). This passage is often used as a key plank in a justification of usury. There are elements in the narrative and context that suggest a very different reading. Peter highlights the key theological question lying behind this hermeneutical issue: which kind of God do we serve?

McKibben: On being hopefully naïve about getting corporate money out of US politics and why being cynical is hopeless.

Guardian: What have trees ever done for us?

NYT: My Guantánamo Nightmare. There are good reasons due process has come to be highly cherished in all civil societies.

Monbiot: The limits of vegetarianism, in which George changes his mind and shifts to ethical semi-vegetarianism. The Conversation publishes an even more provocative piece against ecological vegetarianism, and a very interesting discussion in the comments ensues.

SMH: Energy and water. In the 20thC, global energy use increased thirteen-fold and water use increased nine-fold. The two are related and any future has to consider our water habits, which might be less about having short showers than having cold ones, since energy production is one of the most water-intensive things we do (though conversely, where water is scarce, desalination is one of the most energy-intensive things we do).

Would Jesus vote green? XI

Fear
The final, perhaps the most common, and I suspect the deepest response for many people when encountering the depth and breadth of the various ecological crises is fear. We can feel helpless in the face of forces that appear beyond our understanding, let alone control. If we take seriously some of the possible predicted scenarios the future can seem bleak and hopeless.

What will happen if oceans rise and millions are forced to flee? What happens if sustained drought leaves millions more hungry? What will happen when we pass Peak Oil, the halfway point of oil extraction – where production inevitably drops, prices skyrocket and the world economy goes into massive recession? What will happen to our supply of food when soil degradation meets population expansion? Will there be wars over access to fresh water? What will happen when the last ancient rainforest is destroyed? How will we cope with knowing we pointlessly exterminated hundreds of thousands of species? And perhaps most worrying: when every river is tainted, every sea is overfished, every wind carries toxins, every non-renewable resource is exhausted, every field eroded, every forest is logged – when we reach that stage, who will we have become?

Once more, there is something right about having a healthy concern for the future. These are questions that need honest investigation and expert consideration. Being Christian certainly doesn’t mean I think that God guarantees us individually or a society against self-destruction. It has happened before. Most historians believe that the native inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the Pacific Ocean had a thriving little civilisation until perhaps a hundred years before European discovery. However, in their unthinking growth, they cut down every tree on the island, precipitating a cascade of ecological problems, which in turn decimated their population to a fraction of its original size. There’s no guarantee against self-destruction.
Twelve points for guessing the English town in the picture. Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII.

Will God Keep Gumtrees?

A poem by Andrew Errington

Will God keep gumtrees
When he makes the world again,
Count ironbarks and wattles
Worth enough to mend?
And will I feel the wide warm light,
And hear cicadas hum,
As lazy evenings fall upon
The new Jerusalem?

A childhood here has filled my head
With creek beds, paperbarks,
Red space, and milky stars,
their colours in my heart.
So, I dream smooth stones to skip,
Long grass, and cockies’ shrieking,
Will also line the river’s banks,
And be the nations’ healing.

Perhaps it cannot be.
Groans betray the earth’s hard curse:
Dry land turns to dust and night.
Is our hope brand new day,
When we shall wake to our new life,
New trees drunk on new rain,
And all that’s dying, old and parched,
Will come to memory?

Must I learn to bear this loss,
sad cost of our sad pride,
and watch the country drift away
on hope’s transforming tide?
Or may I, greeting that new world
Far past this old one’s end,
Feel a smile of recognition,
At reunion with a long-absent, much-changed friend?

Andrew has started his own blog, named after this poem, which was the initial post, though he has gone on to discuss discipline and the Lord's supper and to start a series (up to six posts so far) on the New Testament and the Word of God.
Twenty points for the first to correctly name this famous river. Hint: it has not always been flanked by gum trees. Photo by HCS.

He spoke of trees

A guest post by Andrew Errington
When the author of the book of Kings described Solomon’s wisdom, he wrote this:

“God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and largeness of mind like the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt [...]. He [...] uttered three thousand proverbs; and his songs were a thousand and five. He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.”

- 1 Kings 4:29-34.

It was neither his capacity to make difficult political decisions nor his legendary ability to justly judge the disputes that were brought before him that the author mentions to explain his wisdom. Rather, it was the way Solomon spoke of the natural world, especially, it seems, trees.

I find this delightful. I like trees and have done so since I climbed the liquid amber in our front yard, wandered through aging poplars with my Grandfather, and discovered stands of bluegums in a quiet valley.

But more than that, this brief mention is a reminder of something that has been central to Nothing New Under the Sun: the created world is not incidental or unimportant in God’s purposes. We are not being saved from this world of coolabahs and cedar and kangaroos and kingfishers, but for it [ed: and with it!]. So it makes sense that at the heart of Solomon’s wisdom was reflection on God’s good world. He spoke of trees.
Ten points for the country in the pic. No posting this weekend as I will be away. Thanks to Andrew Errington for this post. He is also known as "andrewe" in comments.
UPDATE: Andrew has now started his own blog here.

MLK and the apple tree

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

This quote illustrates a hope in God in the face of disaster that I find quite inspirational. Every small enacted hope requires faith in the God who raises the dead and calls into being the things that are not (Romans 4.17). Such a faith neither desperately clutches at the present out of fear of change and loss, nor does it need to reject the present as irrelevant in the light of impending catastrophe. The good gifts of today can be celebrated without idolatrous hoarding or thankless world-denial. Although Stoic thought (and some forms of Eastern philosophy) would counsel us to minimise our desires to avoid the pain when (as is almost inevitable) they are frustrated, Christian hope is free to love deeply, to mourn keenly, to yearn fearlessly.

Santa

Having been tagged by Elizaphanian, here are my answers to this meme of the silly season.*

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Hot Chocolate. Egg nog has never really made it Australia, though since Christmas means summer and temperatures often in the 30s (=over 90F for those stuck in the past), hot chocolate doesn't make much sense either.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? I thought he outsourced all wrapping to elves.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Neither.

4. Do you hang mistletoe on your house? No. No mistletoe in Austrlia. No house to hang it on.

5. When do you put your decorations up? We don't have decorations. We are so infrequently at home around Christmas that we just freeload on the decorations of others.

6. What is your favorite holiday meal (excluding dessert)? Summer fruits: cherries, plums, bananas and especially passionfruit.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child? Christmas in Scotland while on holidays when I was nine. To a young colonial boy, Christmas in the motherland complete with address by the Queen was a fascinating mix of novelty and deep familiarity.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? Which one? One year when I was probably around 6 or 7 I saw Mum and Dad buy the gifts that ended up coming from Santa. A few years later I learned the truth about St Nicholas. A few years later again I learned the role that Coke played in creating the modern image of Santa. And then a few years later I started thinking about the social and relational function(s) of Santa. Truth is a complicated concept.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Sometimes. We've recently started a tradition of having dinner with a close friend on Christmas eve and this sometimes involves presents. See also #13 below.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree? No tree. See above.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? In Sydney?

12. Can you ice skate? Yes. Took my wife ice skating on one of our first dates.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? Life - received every breath, every day. New life - received on Christmas eve fifteen years ago.

14. What's the most important thing about the Holidays for you? God with us.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? Whatever is available on years when I manage to avoid eating too much before dessert to be able to fit any in.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Gathering for church late on Christmas eve with great expectation and joy.

17. What tops your tree? See above.

18. Which do you prefer: giving or receiving? Receiving. A close call, but we are all fundamentally recipients before we are called to imitate and participate in God's generosity.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song? Hark! The herald angels sing, Joy to the World or O Come, o come, Emmanuel. The last is probably my overall favourite, but you don't hear it as often.

20. Candy Canes! Yuck or yummy? In primary school, they used to function as a currency of popularity at the end of the year as everyone would hand them out to their friends.

21. Favorite Christmas Movie? Are there any good ones? There have sometimes been some good Boxing Day movies, but which studio is so short-sighted as to release a film on Christmas Day?

22. What would you most like to find under your tree this year? My voice back again.

23. Favorite Holiday memory as an adult? Discovering that there are so many delightful members of my extended family (I come from a very large extended family and as a child was always a little intimidated by the sheer numbers at Christmas gatherings).
*During a recent doctor's appointment, I revealed that I have been studying theology and am to work as a Christian minister. From this point on, my doctor was obviously embarrassed every time he made reference to the 'silly season'. As always, it was only afterwards I thought of a response: 'It is indeed silly that we have managed to turn a time with such reason for joy into a season of stress and anxiety.'

The widow's mite (Mark 12.41-44)

An uncomfortable passage

And Jesus sat down opposite the temple treasury and watched the people throwing money into the treasury. Many rich people threw in large sums. And a poor widow came and threw in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has thrown in more than all those who are throwing into the treasury. For they all threw in of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has thrown in everything she had, her entire life." (Mark 12.41-44)

How many times have you heard a sermon extolling generosity based on this passage? If this poor little widow could give her little bit, though it cost her so much, how can we who are so wealthy not be giving more?

Now generosity is crucial and even giving till it hurts can be commendable (2 Cor 8.1-5), but I'm not convinced that this has very much to do with this passage. In fact, I wonder whether it mightn't be to turn the passage almost on its head!

The context of the passage is a section of Mark that begins with Jesus' triumphant arrival in Jerusalem in chapter 11 and which leads into his trial, passion and death. One of the major themes of this section, culminating in the temple veil being torn in two (Mark 15.38), is of a confrontation between Jesus and the Temple in Jerusalem. In particular, chapters 11 and 12 are filled with direct and indirect conflict. Jesus arrives with a bang, but having got to the temple, where we might expect fireworks, he almost dismisses it and goes home (11.1-11). The cursing of the fig tree (11.12-14, 20-24) is an image of the fruitless Temple, facing its own destruction, as is clear from the incident sandwiched in the middle: Jesus' dramatic actions in the Temple which disrupted the regular sacrifice (11.15-19). I suspect that this is more an enacted parable of destruction than a 'cleansing', but that is a discussion for another day. The next day, Jesus is again in the Temple, and there is a showdown with the Temple authorities ('the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders') over the source of his authority (11.27-33). Having evaded their question with one of his own, he then goes on the offensive, telling a biting parable about some tenants, which they correctly understand is about, and against, them (12.1-12). Their counteroffensive is a cunning trap of a question about taxes, which Jesus again uses to turn the tables on them (12.13-17). That Jesus asks them for a coin shows that they carry and use the idolatrous coins that bear the 'image' of a hated pagan deity (the emperor). The puny little 'image' of the emperor, the emperor can keep; but the image of God is to be given to God. The next round comes from the Sadducees and again Jesus emerges victorious while they are shown to be 'quite wrong' (12.18-27). After a brief rapprochement with one scribe, who is starting to get it (12.28-34), Jesus pushes forward the heart of his claim about the superiority of the messiah with a riddle from Psalm 110 (12.35-37). Throughout Mark 11 and 12, Jesus has been at the throat of the temple, revealing the corruption, impending judgment and subsequent obsolescence of the temple regime.

And so we come to our passage: not just Mark 12.41-44, but 12.38-44 since verses 38-40 are crucial for understanding the widow:

And in his teaching he said, "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation."

When Jesus immediately then goes to watch what happens at the temple treasury (v.41), we have been prepared to see this for what it is: an illustration of how the scribes who run the temple are devouring the house of a widow, all she had to live on, indeed literally, 'her entire life'. Whether or not this was a 'freewill' offering or a compulsory payment, this temple system has eaten another widow. She has not just given until it hurts, but the temple has taken away her very life. There is no criticism of the widow, but neither is there simple commendation of her as an example of generosity. She is an innocent bystander, a casualty of the temple, pointlessly sacrificed by the very scribes who will soon go on to devour Jesus' life too.

Is it any wonder that having seen this heartwrenching scene of oppression, Jesus immediately lauches into his most furious and sustained attack on the temple, openly predicting its very destruction:

And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!" 2And Jesus said to him, "Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."

Even Homer hugs trees now

Check it out. (H/T Matheson)

I particularly liked this:
I would enjoy watching dazed stockbrokers and ad men clawing at the dirt for edible roots. I'd remind them that they'd been warned of their folly, right here on the BBC website.