Environmental Stewardship
Reverend Billy and the Church of Earthalujah! has pulled it off again, this time in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
The reasons for raising doubts about the human causes of global warming, explains Skeptical Science's John Cook, are often political rather than scientific.
The fossil fuel industry is the main impediment to real change. Why? Because they are making money. Exxon made more money in 2009 than any company in the history of money.
Benedictine women in Wisconsin are practicing new (and ancient) ways to save the earth, starting with the home front.
Image via Govorov Evgeny/Shutterstock.com
To effectively communicate the truth about this contentious issue, we have to start by understanding others' perspectives.
At Sojourners, we have always been advocates of principled nonviolence. (Our founder called it "loving your enemy.") But all too often, conventional wisdom has seen nonviolence as passivity, even in the face of injustice.
Whether Christians do right by the environment depends on whether we can see the Earth as a megastore where we can 'shop' for whatever we want -- or as a garden that needs careful tending.
The April issue of Sojourners magazine takes on climate change denial. One challenge is that the truth is hard to face -- but, as scientist Sasha Adkins describes from personal experience, one strategy is to draw inspiration from the comforts of home.
The question that I am most often asked when I talk about my Ph.D. research on the impacts of pollution has nothing to do with my methodology or my data. It is, "How do you live with this knowledge? Where do you find your hope?" It's a good question. My research results on the impact of plastics on human health and the environment are often quite demoralizing to hear. More than once when I am presenting them, an audience member has literally started to cry.
I took a year off from my environmental studies program to search for the answer to that very question, to find hope -- but this time, instead of turning to peer-reviewed journals for answers, I turned to my cats. I asked them if they would be willing to try living without fossil-fuel heat for the winter.
My family, while I was growing up, was not much for spring breaks. As other families we know flitted about preparing for palm trees and sand, my sister and I would pout and lament to my mother that we had the worst lives on the planet because we were not going to Florida. My Mom (and I now love her for this) really didn’t care. Her basic attitude was that we had more than enough adventure in our lives so suck it up and stop whining. Call another friend who stayed home and get out of the house.
With all the angst about the economy, the deficit, and a looming government shut-down, I'm still concerned that we're treating symptoms rather than diagnosing the underlying disease.
I know something about this. I spent a week in the hospital last year having loads of tests done -- blood work, heart scans, stress tests, and sonograms. I was discharged without a diagnosis, merely with hopes that by treating the symptoms, whatever was wrong would go away. It didn't. It turned out my real problem was a tick-born disease, and once it was diagnosed, a ten-dollar prescription of antibiotics cured me. Without that ten-dollar prescription to treat the real problem, I could have experienced life-long disability.
