A Photo Essay by Aaron Chang
July 31, 2008
Aaron Chang is a legendary name in the sport of surfing and the craft of photography. With over 100 magazine covers to his credit, Aaron’s work has appeared in a multitude of publications in many genres— from sports, to rock and roll, to fashion. Aaron continues to pioneer the intersection of stunning photographic imagery and evocative clothing design in his apparel company aptly named Aaron Chang. Aaron also maintains a thriving commercial and artistic photography business. This summer Aaron will open a gallery in Solana Beach, California.
For more information on Aaron and his work go to aaronchanggallery.com.
As a professional photographer for the past thirty odd years, I have spent most of my days looking. It is, perhaps simplistically, one of the most important things I do. You can’t shoot what you don’t see and you can’t see what you aren’t looking for. It takes more than vision to make a great photograph; but a great photograph can rarely be made without seeing something new and different—or seeing something ordinary in a new and different way.
For years God presented Himself in the places and people that came into the path of my eye. For years I saw God, but didn’t realize what I was looking at. Now that I see Him, I hope to convey through my images a sense of wonder with the amazing architecture of life. It’s my hope that the images I create inspire viewers to appreciate what surrounds them.
The images in this journal are entirely comprised of what is currently hanging on the walls of my home. They are images that I enjoy and that I have captured throughout my travels. From my home surf break in Del Mar, California to the south island of New Zealand these photos reflect, in a small way, the breadth and scope of my career. When I view this group of photos I give thanks for the incredible experiences I have been privileged to witness and to the glory of God.
Surfer Kevin Johnson in the tube as seen from underwater, Taapuna, Tahiti, French Polynesia - by Aaron Chang
Lion, South Africa - by Aaron Chang
Elephant in Kruger Park, South Africa - by Aaron Chang
Del Mar River Mouth, Del Mar California - by Aaron Chang
Mountain Stream, Milford Sound, New Zealand - by Aaron Chang
Waimea Bay, Oahu, Hawaii - by Aaron Chang
For more information on Aaron and his work go to aaronchanggallery.com.
Beach Vacation, Beach Education
July 30, 2008
Tim Keyes is a Wildlife Biologist with the Georgia Wildlife Resource Division, focusing on nongame birds. He has been involved with wildlife education, research and conservation for the last 15 years.
This post originally appeard in Creation Care Magazine.
My wife accuses me of disliking the beach. I suppose the accusation is fair enough, though I think it is not so much the beach I dislike, but her way of enjoying it. She enjoys the heat, the coconut-scented lotion, bad fiction, and sunburns from “laying out.” Being something of a nature geek, I appreciate the beach on different terms. One of my earliest childhood memories is actually of a beach. It was the rocky coast of Cornwall in southwest England, and I remember exploring the pools left by the receding tides, trapping all sorts of fascinating creatures, flotsam, and jetsam. This spirit of exploration is still what draws me to the beach and coastlines today, and I prefer the beach during a storm or in winter.
Coastlines and beaches exert a powerful draw. There is something about witnessing the seam marking the meeting of land and sea; a humbling element to watching the ocean. Its size, power, and indifference to us are all valuable reminders of our place within the vast creation. Of course, storm watching on the beach heightens this experience. It makes sense that the disciples’ response to Jesus calming the storm was not immediate gratitude, but even greater fear. Who was this man with power over the crashing seas?
If you look closely enough, you’ll see that coastlines and beaches uncover the geologic processes that shape landscapes around us. Rachel Carson wrote: “In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.” A bit poetic perhaps, but from the structure of the sand itself to the landforms around the beach, much can be learned about the forces shaping our planet. Glance down at your feet. Take a handful of sand and look closely at it. Despite their often peaceful surroundings, grains of sand have many origins, all of them violent. These tiny bits of rock, coral, or shell have been abraded, eroded, tumbled, washed, blown and finally deposited where you sit. Jagged pieces have lived a short life, while smooth rounded grains have suffered the longest.
If you find yourself on an Atlantic beach, you are essentially sitting on tiny bits of silica-rich quartz, the most resistant material left from the eroding Appalachian Mountains hundreds of miles inland. The pure white sands of many tropical beaches tend to originate from limestone (itself derived from the dead bodies of shellfish and corals). Darker sands, sometimes found in Hawaii, are derived from eroded volcanic rock.
Study the landscape around you to learn the ancient history of the area. If there are jagged rocks, cliffs, sea stacks, and caves, you are in a primarily erosional environment, where the destructive forces of wind and water are slowly wearing, eroding, and carving down the landscape. If the landscape is mostly flat and sandy, you are in a primarily depositional landscape, where the materials eroded elsewhere accumulate. These differences typically relate to where you sit on a tectonic plate, whether on the leading side (the active margin) or the side being dragged along behind (the passive margin), and whether the land is sinking or rising in relation to sea level.
Even the existence and shape of the eastern sandy beaches is a result of sediment washing downstream from rivers, and then a complex dance of erosion and deposition from waves, storms, tides, and wind. In areas such as the Georgia bight (the concave coastline that stretches from South Carolina to Florida,) the sand, beaches, and coastal islands are shaped primarily by relatively high tides, and are protected from storms by a wide continental shelf just off-shore in the ocean. Such coastal islands are wide and relatively square. Compare the Georgia bight landscapes to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The Outer Banks are shaped by longshore currents and relatively little tide action. When viewed in aerial photos, they resemble a fragile ribbon of sand stretching for more than 100 miles.
Storm watching on the beach not only humbles us in the face of the ocean, but often lets us come as close as we safely can to watching erosion and deposition at work. The other benefit of coastal storms is that they deliver birds within view of the shore that can typically only be found far out to sea. Jaegers, skuas, noddies, phalaropes, and petrels—the names alone exude mystery. Watching these birds skitter and rip inches from the frothing waves is truly a thrilling experience. Many of these birds rarely see land—charting their existence on the open ocean, covering unfathomable distances over a lifetime. Sooty shearwaters, an abundant oceanic species, cover up to 30,000 miles in a year. Albatross likely best them, with single flights to gather food for their chicks reaching upwards of 5,000 miles. In fact, if you are enjoying the beaches of the northwestern U.S. in summer and happen to see a Black-footed Albatross offshore, it is feeding in order to take food back to its chicks on islands in the Hawaiian archipelago. This seemingly bizarre behavior stems from the fact that the predator-free islands Albatross require for nesting are thousands of miles from the rich feeding grounds of the of the Pacific Northwest.
While not really antisocial, if I am going to run into a crowd at a beach, I would rather it be of birds than people. This, in part, explains my preference for beaches in winter. The beach in winter is a time for shorebirds, sea ducks, loons, and gannets. These birds that breed far to our north spend their winter along or just off our shores. Birds like bufflehead, scoter, and loons rise and fall in the swells; gannets plunge dive far offshore; while sanderling, dunlin, and western sandpiper run back and forth with the waves, foraging for invertebrates at the water’s edge. In transit are the magnificent flocks of shorebirds, wheeling and twisting as one, flashing white undersides and dark backs with each turn.
For those attuned to the finer details, there are all sorts of creatures living in the sands as well. Dark cylinders reminiscent of chocolate sprinkles surround the openings of Ghost Shrimp burrows. Crab holes can often be found. The wrack line at the high-tide mark is always worth exploring for washed-up treasures. If you are fortunate enough to visit a rocky beach, the tide pool offers hours of exploration. Creatures such as nudibranchs, limpets, and anemones are stranded and easy to observe. Watch long enough, especially if you stir the water a bit, and you may see the filter-feeding feet of barnacles sweep the water for tiny particles of food.
So, in a quiet moment this summer on the beach, when your novel begins to drag, pick some of that sand from your shoes and contemplate its origin. Look around the beach for evidence of what sort of landscape you are in, and poke around the shore for wildlife, large and small, that share this boundary between land and sea. The beach, while a great place to relax, is also a perfect place to reflect on the scales of creation—from the massive forces of tides, currents, and wind that shape our world, to the miniscule existence of creatures in the sand. We find ourselves somewhere between the two extremes, and stewards of an often disproportionate amount of power over them both.
Touching God In The Waves: Part 2
July 29, 2008
Christian Buckley is a writer, businessman, and lawyer. He is the founder of Covered Images, Inc. and serves on the Board of Directors of Christian Surfers United States (christiansurfers.com) and Kor World Ministries (korministries.com). He holds a Doctorate in Jurisprudence from UCLA and a BA in History from the University of California Irvine. He lives in San Diego with his wife Bridget and two children Maeve and Brendan. He likes dogs, but does not currently own one. You can reach him at Christian@thinkmoretruth.com.
Photography by Aaron Chang.
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. Part 1 appeared yesterday.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1: 19-20 esv)
For me, environmental action is defensible for the Christian not solely because, as described in Genesis 1 and 2, God created the heavens and the earth and entrusted them to Adam (a matter largely pertinent to God and not Adam), but because, as Paul explains in Romans, creation is one of God’s primary tools of self revelation and thereby human regeneration. For this reason, while the sustaining of the world remains a matter securely within God’s sovereign control, it would nonetheless be a horrible indignity if mankind, through our selfish consumption of God’s creation, obscured and destroyed the very same. How sad it would be if God’s creative reflection was soiled such that generations to come were left with a continually degraded source of divine revelation.
At CSUS, we have the privilege of actually doing ministry in and with God’s creation. Our mission is to see Christians who surf move from apathy about lost surfers around them, to awareness that they have been called by God to reach out, to active expressions of that call.
Our primary tool for reaching the two to three million lost surfers in America is in fact God’s creation. Surfers are connected to the ocean and have a particularly dependent relationship with it. We spend the majority of our waking hours considering the waves, tracking tides and swells, and thinking about swell direction and ocean bottom contour. Our job at CSUS is to help surfers see God through that connection and transform their relationship with creation into a relationship with the Creator. It is not hard to explain creative energy to a surfer when he has glided across the face of a perfect six foot wave. It is not hard to explain divine power when he has seen the force of a 25-foot wave breaking on a reef. It is not hard to discuss beauty when he has enjoyed a view of the sunrise from the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Pragmatically speaking, our job gets harder when sewage spills close our beaches, when man-made construction ruins surf breaks, or when anything obscures God’s revelation of himself in the power and majesty of the ocean. We depend on the ocean to do the work that Romans 1:19-20 speaks of—to point a surfer to God.
Matthew Henry, in his commentary on Romans, refers to creation as the “means and helps” mankind is given by God to come to the knowledge of Him. He notes that “The workman is known by his work. The variety, multitude, order, beauty, harmony, different nature, and excellent contrivance of the things that are made, the direction of them to certain ends, and the concurrence of all the parts to the good and beauty of the whole, do abundantly prove a Creator and his eternal power and Godhead.”
Perhaps you have a special connection with creation that has made abundantly clear the eternal power and majesty of the Creator. Maybe it is in the mountains, where you enjoy the still of a freshly fallen snow. It could be in the beauty of a sunrise over a plane of wildflowers, or in the calm morning mist on a lake. Perhaps it is in the movement of a stream or river. Whatever place creation holds in your life, consider the place it holds in the life of an unbeliever and the importance God has placed on it within the meaning
of Romans 1.
My desire in the coming years is to take my children out in the ocean for an evening glass-off; to share the love of God with them as we enjoy that splendid moment when the sun touches the water and transforms it and us. For me, it is worth defending the environment for that moment and the chance for my children to see God’s revelation in it. Maybe I am an environmentalist after all.
Touching God In The Waves: Part 1
July 28, 2008
Christian Buckley is a writer, businessman, and lawyer. He is the founder of Covered Images, Inc. and serves on the Board of Directors of Christian Surfers United States (christiansurfers.com) and Kor World Ministries (korministries.com). He holds a Doctorate in Jurisprudence from UCLA and a BA in History from the University of California Irvine. He lives in San Diego with his wife Bridget and two children Maeve and Brendan. He likes dogs, but does not currently own one. You can reach him at Christian@thinkmoretruth.com.
Photography by Aaron Chang.
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1: 19-20 esv)
A Romans 1 Defense of Environmentalism
As a surfer, some of the most profoundly connective experiences I have had to God have come in the water. For me, the best time to surf is at sunset, often referred to as an “evening glass-off” session in southern California. At sunset during the late summer months, the wind is calmed and the surface of the water is stilled. The waves turn glassy, and as the sun drops beneath the horizon line of the ocean, the water turns mercurial in nature. Over the past twenty or so years, it has been during these evening moments on my board that I have felt enveloped in God’s creative love and power.
It should come as no surprise that, as the Chairman of Christian Surfers United States (CSUS), I am a fan of the ocean and have a general desire to protect and enjoy it. I am a lifetime member of the Surfrider Foundation, and in my younger years I worked as a California State Beach Lifeguard, protecting and educating people in and around the ocean.
It might, however, come as a surprise that I neither really consider myself an environmentalist in the contemporary sense of the word, nor do I fully agree that the Bible, at least in the Old Testament, provides an obvious basis for environmental action by Christians. Spending the past several years both as a businessman and lawyer, I have struggled with the place of social investment of any form in the life of a believer, frequently trying to reconcile massive temporal injustice and suffering with the New Testament’s call for believers to be eternally focused and unencumbered by earthly matters. For that reason, I am perhaps an unexpected and yet apt writer in this setting.
As a Christian, I make social investments. I actually make a lot of them. I think it is important to do so both personally and spiritually, but it is not absolutely important in the same eternal sense that true spiritual regeneration is. It is contextually important. I realize that Christ did create, by his mere existence and doctrinal providence, social change. He did, quite frequently, relieve suffering, feed the hungry, cure the sick, and help children. He actually restored life to the lifeless. However, I also realize that Christ did not set social investment and change as his primary or even consistent agenda. He came to seek and to save the lost. He was born to live perfection and die perfection. He came to provide the sole means to an eternal relationship with God. (See Luke 19:10, John 14:6 and 17:3, Acts 4:12, 2 Cor. 5:21.)
Strangely enough, this is where the case for Christian environmentalism begins for me. For a person to accept Christ as savior, he or she must first become aware of the creator and sustainer God. I believe that for this generation, Romans 1:19-20 describes the purest mechanism for this initial connection: His creation.
In this passage, Paul makes it clear that because God reveals himself to each of us in and through His creation, we are without excuse concerning the knowledge of His existence. When God rested on the seventh day, he left in his creation enduring reflections of his perfection, power, brilliance, and goodness. Stated simply, creation reveals unambiguous markings of God’s creative imprint.
New Generation Bears Witness to Appalachian Destruction
July 25, 2008
To get involved, contact Restoring Eden at www.restoringeden.org or e-mail us at info@restoringeden.com. Peter Illyn is the Executive Director of the ministry Restoring Eden.
Not many students go on Spring Break hoping to get their hearts broken. But when ten students representing seven states and three Christian colleges stood on an Appalachian ridge and stared at the barren remains of a mountaintop dynamited out of existence, their hearts exploded with compassion for everything, and everyone, in the arc of destruction. Yes, this was a six-day trip to blow the lid off an extreme form of coal mining—and find hope in the debris.
In April 2008, Restoring Eden led an educational road trip to West Virginia to study mountain top removal (MTR). Students from Eastern University, Calvin College, and Corban College piled into a van and toured around this historic coal region in order to get a handle on MTR, or “strip mining on steroids,” and its social, political, and economic costs.
From meetings with advocacy groups to homestays with affected residents, students learned the history and process of MTR. Since the 1970s, this devastating method has been exposing coal seams for quick extraction by first completely denuding mountaintops and then blowing them up, layer by layer, often altering the elevation by as much as 800 feet. What remains is shoved into adjacent valleys. Concerned only with short-term profit, the mining process buries streams, destroys forests, and decimates wildlife habitat on the mountains and in the valleys. Loss of vegetation naturally triggers erosion and landslides, contaminating streams with sedimentation and mining waste. Companies must do “remediation,” but it is often riddled with loopholes and does little to truly restore the moonscape it leaves behind.
MTR blasts people too. Residents are forced to deal with everything from muddy brown tap water to the possibility of floods and toxic slurry run-off from often precariously-situated earthen dams. Debris from explosions is also a threat, and lung ailments from asthma to cancer are found in high concentrations in nearby communities. Illnesses among children are particularly pronounced. Proponents of MTR cannot even claim it creates jobs: compared to traditional deep underground mining, jobs have been steadily lost through MTR. In West Virginia alone, the transition from hundreds of miners underground to a small team equipped with a dragline and dump truck has meant 125,000 jobs in 1950 narrowing to 16,000 jobs in 2004. With fewer jobs and greater health risks for the larger community, parts of the region are emptying out and property values are plummeting.
As part of their journey, these students traveled from the hollows of Appalachia to the halls of power in D.C. in an effort to connect coal mining and environmental justice. Lobbying followed over HR 2169, the Clean Water Protection Act, which would halt the dumping of mining waste into waterways, thus restoring the Clean Water Act’s original intent. In addition to policy shifts, students also realized that education of the public is crucial—most people probably don’t know about tragedies such as the 2000 Martin County slurry breach, which according to the EPA was the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Southeast. Another part of the solution is practical lifestyle shifts— energy conservation and research into and increased use of renewable energy sources.
Throughout their tour, the students reflected on Christians’ responsibility in light of this violence—in total, the amount of explosives used during one week of blasting in Appalachia is equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb). One evening they were even able to attend a prayer vigil and scripture reading with local believers on Gauley Mountain.
Herein lies the hope in the heartbreak. Faithful Christians have the opportunity to respond to a biblical mandate to care for people and the earth, and with prayer and participation, help ignite a movement for shalom in this historic and beautiful part of North America.
In The News: Plans Advance for Yucca Mountain
July 24, 2008
The Bush Administration has advanced in its plans for developing a nuclear waste containment site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. On June 3 a license application to begin construction at the site was sent from the Energy Department to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for approval.
The plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste—mostly in the form of used reactor fuel from nuclear power plants—in underground tunnels at the federally-controlled Yucca Mountain was approved by President Bush in 2002. This most recent step in what has been a 20-year-long process of research and investigation begins a three-year review process on the part of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. During its review of the license application, the NRC will prioritize the health, safety, and environmental implications of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, verifying that the repository’s proposed design will ensure human and environmental health and safety for up to a million years.
The nuclear waste that would be placed in the Yucca Mountain facility is currently being stored in smaller, and less stable, repositories scattered throughout the country. The waste must be in a secure repository during the thousands of years it requires for its radiation levels to diminish.
In a press conference, Department of Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said, “We are confident that the NRC’s rigorous review process will validate the Yucca Mountain repository and will provide for the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive waste in a way that protects human health and our environment.”
Critics of the Yucca Mountain repository proposal cite the license application’s failure to include a public radiation exposure standard— an element that the Environmental Protection Agency has yet to provide for the Department of Energy. Senate leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and other politicians from Yucca Mountain’s surrounding region express doubt that the project will provide for citizens’ safety. If the Yucca Mountain repository is approved and constructed—which officials project could happen as early as 2020—it will be the country’s first national repository for spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive waste.
The End of a Way of Life: Climate Change’s Toll on the Gabra
July 23, 2008
Dr. Paul W. Robinson, is the Director of the Human Needs and Global Resources Program at Wheaton College.
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
Thirty years ago, as a young scholar, I conducted fieldwork among the Gabra pastoralists of the Kenya-Ethiopian frontier, where I spent considerable time learning their culture, language, and history. I wanted to learn how they have been able to survive and flourish in one of Africa’s harshest and—from most outside perspectives—most inhospitable environments.
As Gabra elders, both men and women, taught me their traditions, knowledge, and wisdom, I learned that their ability to shepherd their camels, sheep, goats, and cattle over vast, largely waterless, and extremely dry rangelands required an intimate knowledge of vegetation types and locations and wildlife ecology. Herd owners whose environmental and historical knowledge was the deepest and most comprehensive were those who also consistently owned the largest herds of animals, were the most successful and honored, and the most extensively sought out by all for advice and counsel. Those herd owners whose knowledge was less extensive and more superficial were those who regularly struggled and were the most vulnerable in the face of recurrent environmental and management challenges.
For the Gabra, understanding and responding to the challenges and opportunities of resource variability and climatic changeability requires a sophisticated level of whatever predictability might be possible in order to take advantage of water and rangeland resources wherever and whenever they are located. To do this, the Gabra have learned to count, remember, and predict. They count times of the day, the numbers of days in seasons and parts of seasons within the solar year, the days in a solar year, years, climate, and events that cycle according to different criteria. They remember patterns from the past. They predict based on events and cycles they have perceived. For the Gabra, survival is counting, remembering numbers and cycles, and then predicting, anticipating, and responding proactively. To survive and flourish, they must be right.
For the past three decades, I have observed how the Gabra have survived seasons and years of abundance and of scarcity, periods of devastating drought and of plentiful rain. I have followed their responses to the variations in timing, location, and intensity of these seasons and periods. And their understandings and responses have consistently been validated. Those elders who know the “counting,” who understand the environmental signals, and who, because of their knowledge, position their camps and livestock in places either to take advantage of bounty, or to mitigate insufficiency, are those who have continued to succeed and help others succeed. Those elders without this knowledge and wisdom have lost livestock, become impoverished, moved to famine camps, and become dependent on relief.
The last time I visited the Gabra, at the turn of this millennium, I met my aged guide, teacher, and mentor, Yatani Sorale—considered by the Gabra as the sage and prophet of this generation of elders. He said to me: “We no longer see the patterns. They are no more. We are finished. We have reached the end of counting.” Yatani Sorale sat among his peers, his mind increasingly clouded and confused by frameworks that no longer made sense. He died six months later. A way of life is dying as well.
It’s Kairos Time for Climate Change: Time To Act
July 22, 2008
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokeperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
As I sit down to write this column, one thing keeps coming to me over and over: “Now is the time; now is the time.”
In the New Testament the word used for this type of time is “kairos.” It means “right or opportune moment” and can be of indefinite duration. It is contrasted with “chronos,” or chronological time as measured in seconds, days, months, or years. In the New Testament kairos is usually associated with decisive action that brings about deliverance or salvation.
The reason the phrase “Now is the time” kept coming to me over and over is that I was thinking of how to describe our current climate change moment. The world has been plodding along in chronological time on the problem of climate change since around 1988. No more.
Simply put: the problem of climate change has entered kairos time; its kairos moment has arrived. How long will it endure? Until the time of decisive action to bring about deliverance comes—or, more ominously, until the time when the opportunity for decisive action has passed us by. Which will we choose? Because we do have a choice.
We have entered this moment for two reasons. First, if we don’t begin to address climate change in a substantive way soon, we will reach a point of no return. Tipping points and natural feedback loops will create a situation where we cannot stop dramatic and devastating climate change impacts. We don’t want to go there.
Second, the political world here in the U.S. is finally beginning to catch up to the natural world. We must have comprehensive national legislation for our country to contribute to the world’s efforts to solve climate change. Only then will we have the moral authority to help lead the world in overcoming the problem. And lead we must.
As I mentioned in my previous column, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act was an example of just such comprehensive national legislation. The Senate considered the Climate Security Act in the first week of June, but proponents didn’t have enough votes to overcome a Republican filibuster.
This bill wouldn’t have become law this year because the House is not ready to pass it and because the Administration wouldn’t sign it even if it did pass through Congress. But thankfully, the Senate did show serious political progress in keeping up the momentum for passage in 2009. We needed 50 or more Senators to vote Yes, which is in effect what happened. A cloture vote (to end the filibuster) got 48 Yes votes and six absent Senators wrote in to say they would have voted Yes had they been present, meaning 54 Senators would have been ready to move forward. That’s good news.
We need Senators to support provisions in the eventual legislation for protecting the poor in this country and abroad. In the U.S. we want to ensure that low-income and working family households are economically unharmed by any rising energy prices that may result from the bill. We also want to help them have more energy efficient homes that will become a part of the solution. We helped to ensure that such provisions existed in the Climate Security Act, but, as usual, more funding is needed, and the targeting of such funds needs to be more focused on the poor.
As for protecting the poor in other countries, again we have helped to ensure that there were provisions in the bill to address this, specifically the “International Climate Change Adaptation and National Security Program.” This program would help the most vulnerable developing countries adapt to the consequences of climate change via climatesensitive development (e.g. drought resistant crops).
In the future, we need Senators to both protect this program from efforts to eliminate it and to advocate for a doubling of its funding. Given that our country has been the largest contributor to the problem to date, and that the poor in developing countries have done essentially nothing to create the problem, basic fairness compels our country to assist them. It is also in our national security interest to do so. As the Climate Security Act states, “global climate change represents a potentially significant threat multiplier for instability around the world.” This is especially the case in sub- Saharan Africa, from which we currently import more oil than anywhere else in the world. Christian justice and our national security interest demand that we help the poor around the world to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Overcoming climate change has entered kairos time. The time to act is now.
Prayer Guide for Global Warming
July 21, 2008
You may wish to begin your prayer time reflecting on some of the Scriptures which tell of God’s sovereign power over Creation, its role in declaring His glory, our role as stewards and servants, and God’s commands to love Him and love our neighbors. You can find a partial list of those Scriptures at www.creationcare.org/resources/scripture.php.
You may also wish to read the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s statement “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action” (at www.christiansandclimate.org/statement) which gives some background on why Christians should care about climate change.
Dear Lord,
The earth is Yours and we are in Your hands. You are the Creator and the Sustainer of all things, and we acknowledge our own finite understanding, ability, and impact. So we begin our consideration of global warming on our knees in prayer to You who created the planets and the stars, whose eye is on the sparrow, and who cares for each of us as Your children (Col. 1:15-20, I Cor. 10:26, Ps. 24:1, Neh. 9:6).
We pray that You in Your grace would grant us the wisdom to act with prudence and foresight, to protect the earth and Your children for generations to come (Matt. 24:45-46).
We pray for those who are likely to be most hurt by climate change, both now and in the future. God, grant that we might love our neighbors by controlling our global warming pollution and by generously aiding those who will need to adapt to a changing climate (Mark 12:30-31, Luke 6:31, Matt. 25:40, 45).
We pray, as Your Son did, for the unity of those who believe in You (John 17:20-26). We pray that our concern and attention to the issue of climate change would not cause spiritual division in your body, but that You would grant humility and a teachable spirit to all of us (Phil 2:1-11).
We pray, Lord, that in our public and private lives You draw us and all people to Yourself, to will and to work for Your good pleasure and not for the accolades or attention of men. Especially we pray that You guard our hearts against the temptation to self-righteousness, pride, and political power (Deut 8:17-20).
We pray that our engagement on issues of climate change would not be a distraction from sharing the gospel and living out transformed lives of faithful discipleship. Do not allow the current climate debate to divert us from other issues that Christians are compelled to address: the tragedy of abortion, the defense of marriage and strong families, the promotion of religious freedom at home and abroad, and care for the poor and persecuted, the weak and handicapped, the widow, orphan, and prisoner. We pray instead that our faithfulness to Your Word, and its demands on our lives and our culture, would be the wellspring of our action, and that Your Holy Spirit would guide us to lives that wholly reflect Your love for the world (Acts 20:27).
We pray that You would grant us the power to live out our beliefs in our personal lives; that You would cause us to be faithful stewards of Your resources under our care; and that we would always look first to our own responsibility to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with You (Micah 6:8).
We pray for our political leaders, that You would give them courage, insight, and wisdom to work together for the common good. We pray that partisan divisions would not stand in the way of a prudent response to global warming, and that leaders would understand the urgency of the problem and their responsibility as Your servants to do what is good (Romans 12:4).
We pray that You would be glorified in all things.
We pray in the strong name of the one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live (I Cor 8:6).
Amen.
The Added Benefit of Being True: Part 2
July 18, 2008
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. Part 1 appeared yesterday.
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
So it was with my biblical worldview that I entered the hearing room of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee on June 7th as a representative of the Evangelical Climate Initiative to face possibly the greatest global warming denier in the country, Sen. Jim Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, who has called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” During my testimony I flatly stated that “We believe the science is settled, and it is time to focus on solving the problem.” Sen. Inhofe later remarked that “No one with a straight face can say that the science is settled.” (My face was straight when I said it, by the way. I checked the videotape.)
Now Sen. Inhofe is a fellow Christian. But he is in denial about the problem of global warming. He is not the only one.
During my testimony I was joined by three other witnesses who affirmed that global warming was a problem that must be addressed: Bishop Schori, the head of the Episcopal Church; John Carr, representing the Catholic Bishops, and; Rabbi David Saperstein, representing the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.
But we were opposed by three of my evangelical brethren, all invited to testify by Sen. Inhofe. They all denied the human contribution to global warming, saying the science wasn’t settled. It was quite sad, actually, because the science has never been clearer, with the world’s most authoritative body on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently concluding that there is a greater than 90% probability that the warming since 1950 is mainly due to human activities. President Bush has now finally recognized the human contribution. Even ExxonMobil, a key funder of global warming skeptics, now recognizes this and is ready to begin to solve the problem.
Because we are human, all of us are wrong about something – heck, maybe multiple somethings multiple times in a day. My four evangelical brothers at the hearing – Sen. Inhofe and his three witnesses – are wrong about global warming. They’re still in denial. I don’t know why, but they are.
With its realism about the human condition the Bible teaches us not to deny problems, but to face them. The examples of the disciples shows us that even though we make mistakes, even though we fail, the Lord picks us up and dusts us off and sets us on the path of righteousness.
We don’t have to deny hard problems like global warming that will inflict tremendous suffering on the least of these. We may not like knowing what global warming will do. It could tempt us to despair, or to deny. But our hope rests not in ourselves but in our God who turns crucifixions into resurrections. With God’s help we can face anything, including global warming.
