It’s Not Easy Being Green

This is a great topic. Often when I bring it up people assume I’m some sort of mother-earth worshipper.

A big point that most environmentalists miss is that God says that *our sin* pollutes and defiles “the land”. So if we are trying to save the spotted owl but ignoring our other sins, its not effective in keeping the land from being polluted. Thus we Christians should be advancing the only effective form of environmental stewardship, which would have to be comprehensive enough to include the effects of sin.

Most people would not pour toxic chemicals into the ground near their well, so the golden rule would seem to contain a general warrant against polluting water and soil that God gave us stewardship over, and will be used by others in the future.

As far as hunting animals to extinction, the dominion mandate seems to be a prima facie prohibition of this. Destroying the garden is not tending it, and destroying creatures is not subduing them. Animals were created for a reason (perhaps even just to give us tribulation – e.g. the mosquito), and we risk many unintended consequences by destryong them. If we killed all the flies and worms, for example, we would find ourselves in quite a stinky refuse heap before long!

I think too many get side-tracked refuting the typical athiestic epistemology of environmentalists, to the point of glossing over our failings in the practical applications of stewardship.