However, just a little research points out the fallacy of this approach. First, climate change is already having a huge impact on people around the world. It is affecting lives today. My Hezekiah attitude (“At least it won’t happen in my lifetime”) was not only selfish, it was misplaced. Furthermore, climate change will have a much greater impact on the poor, whose cause we claim to champion.

In years past, I spent many days on the bridge of a Navy ship, eyes focused on the horizon, watching for bad weather or enemy threats. I remember well the feeling in your stomach when the horizon gets dark with an oncoming squall, or when the barometer begins to drop quickly. You know that soon you will be in the heart of it. That is the feeling I get now, as I look at reports coming in from around the world. We are in for rough weather. But it is our watch, and we must do everything in our power to be prepared.

We continue to debate some of the early symptoms of climate change in North America: drought in the Southeast, dying forests in Canada and Alaska, fires in California, perhaps Hurricane Katrina. As a San Diegan, I was a witness to the enormous evacuation that took place during our recent fire storms. Nearly one million people were evacuated from their homes over the course of the week. It was spectacular, and for most of us, only a minor annoyance. But it occurred in an area of relative wealth and in a country with tremendous resources and the ability to adapt. Imagining a similar scenario in Port au Prince, for example, is horrifying.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, provides us one of the clearest pictures of what the future may look like. Their Fourth Assessment Report, which is available both in its entirety and in summary on their website (www.ipcc.ch), provides a sobering outlook. Eleven of the last 12 years have been the warmest on record, the sea level is rising, and around the world glaciers are in retreat. Extreme weather will become more common. Most frightening is the fact that precipitation patterns are changing, with more drought and more flooding evident. According to the IPCC these changes are very likely (more than 90%) due to human activity.

Furthermore, even if greenhouse gases were stabilized today, warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries.

Rather than an excuse for inactivity, this means that regardless of our ability to offset or reduce our green house gas emissions, it will be absolutely necessary to adapt or prepare for change. Better evacuation procedures and firefighting equipment in San Diego is an example. But as the report points out, ability to adapt is directly related to social and economic development, putting the poor in the most vulnerable position. With our special charge to care for the poor, this is just one of many reasons why Christians should be particularly concerned about climate change.

The report of Working Group II of the IPCC goes into detail on specific impacts of warming. They are unevenly distributed, with the poor unjustly bearing the brunt of the negative affects. Water availability is actually expected to increase in high latitudes, but to decrease by 10-30% in the dry tropics and dry mid-latitudes. In Africa, where access to water is already a critical issue, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to face increased water stress by the year 2020, or barely 12 years from now. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. In other words, those too poor to irrigate their land will face the worst suffering–essentially a death sentence for a huge number of people. In America, where we are often insulated from our environment, it is hard to remember that millions of people around the world are completely reliant on the predictability of rainfall.

Growing seasons will shorten, especially in the tropics, and crop production is predicted to fall in Africa, Latin America, and Central and South Asia. Millions are expected to face severe flooding, especially in the poor and heavily populated mega-deltas of Asia and Africa. Disease and malnutrition are expected to increase, while significant percentages of plant and animal species will face extinction. In short, those of us in the relief and development community will have much more work, but fewer remedies.

Some of the early symptoms are already being felt. Stan Doerr, Executive Director of ECHO, who works with poor farmers around the world, recently told me, “it is clear to anyone working in small-scale agriculture that the rules have all changed.” What has been true for generations is no longer true. Indigenous knowledge that has been built up and treasured since time immemorial is suddenly worthless. One of the most poignant stories of this sort of cultural disaster is included in the sidebar by Dr. Paul Robinson of Wheaton College.

But Dr. Robinson’s is not an isolated story. Indeed there is a veritable chorus of voices coming from those who are more in tune with their environment than we are. Tearfund, an evangelical relief and development agency based in the United Kingdom, has done a good job of collecting these stories from their partners, and shares them in their publication Dried up, drowned out, available on their website (www.tearfund.org) together with a host of other climate change information. Nor has Floresta’s network been silent. We were moved by the testimony of one farmer in Oaxaca who explained that first the droughts became more frequent. He had watched a nearby lake slowly drying over the last ten years. Then bark beetles killed the trees, and finally it was the forest fires that had become a constant threat. Of course in isolation none of these stories is evidence of climate change. But there is an eerie consistency to these accounts from around the world.

A moral response involves both adaptation and mitigation. Global warming is inevitable; climate change cannot be stopped. We must prepare for it, and, most importantly, help the poor and vulnerable to prepare with more resilient crops, better water storage, and stronger social services, such as access to microcredit and healthcare. But our lifestyle choices still have significant impact on the magnitude and rate of climate change, and, in turn, upon the lives of millions of those Jesus calls us to protect.

It is easy to look at this storm brewing and either deny or despair. But we can do neither. It is our watch. And as I was reminded recently, “This is my Father’s world. And though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”

Scott C. Sabin is the executive director of Floresta, a Christian nonprofit organization that reverses deforestation and poverty in the world by transforming the lives of the rural poor (www.floresta.org).

…continued from Part 1

CC: What do you have in common that you might not have realized before?

KEN: It sounds strange to say, me being such a chronic hopelessly religious or spiritual person of the Christian variety, but I feel like I have a worldview, or at least major parts of a worldview, in common with Carl. As an ecologist or conservationist (I’m never quite sure what Carl is, but I know he’s one of those!), Carl is a bit of a zealot—meaning a man with a mission that he passionately pursues. And, like a believer such as myself, his vision has an apocalyptic quality to it—meaning he sees things looming on the horizon that could devastate life as we know it. He even views himself, if I’m not being presumptuous here, as someone who has some important message that more people ought to be listening to and if they did, the world would be a better place. And he’s part of a minority group that wants to convince the world to act differently. So, in a lot of unexpected ways, we see the world through a very similar set of lenses.

CARL: I took from my religion (I’d been raised Catholic) the importance of compassion, concern for the less fortunate, the challenge of loving one’s enemies as a matter of immense practical value, and a deep sense of reverence and awe for the living world and the great universe. I am, in a very real sense, a person with a mission to help save the world—the natural world, creation—from our sins, to put it in those terms. I think Ken and I are similar enough to really understand each other, or at least to be really comfortable as we get to better understand each other. Our interests aren’t identical, but they broadly overlap. The fundamental similarity is that I buy what Jesus was talking about. And Ken sure does. A lot of the practicing “faithful” may believe firmly in God but they don’t seem to have heard Jesus’s message of love, peace and compassion. Ken sure gets it. I think I get it. So in a sense, one can be faithful to the message (or, rather, can strive to live up to the challenge of the message) even without believing in the theology. For me the message—and what we do with the message—is more important than what we believe about the author of the message. Ken believes Jesus is God, but I don’t. That difference is, for me, rather beside the point. The point is whether we take up this immense challenge, and whether we will use it to save the world from ruin. I think Ken and I are both very concerned with the challenge and convinced of the rightness of it; that’s a deep similarity I feel.

CC: What’s the most pointed question or concern that you’ve raised with each other?

KEN: I asked Carl why environmental scientists who tend to view living things as populations weren’t raising more of an alarm about abortion practices in places like India and China, where there is now a gender imbalance introduced into the human population through sex-selected abortions favoring the abortion of female unborn babies. I said that it seems to me that biologists, of all the disciplines, should be alarmed by this and concerned about the perils of messing with mother nature in this way. And that I thought it was something more like political correctness in the worst sense that kept them, as scientists, from speaking out against this practice.

CARL: I don’t question Ken’s beliefs. But I was afraid he would not respect mine, and he quickly dispelled that fear by accepting my views on the problem of suffering. And we’ve been over the hot-button issues that have been so destructive to America—abortion, evolution, homosexuality. It’s part of the trueness of Ken’s compassion that we can talk about these things. Some religious people can be so rigid on these topics that they can’t even talk about them. I think a few religious leaders have used these topics as wedges to drive America apart so as to draw lines, emphasize differences, and win politically. That strikes me as both deeply un-Christian and deeply un-American. Ken realizes the world is complicated, and he’s so secure in his views and his faith that he can talk about these issues. I’m very appreciative of that.

CC: How has your interaction changed your perspectives about human interactions with nature?

KEN: Carl has given me a more global perspective about how the things we do in our ordinary lives impact nature on a global scale. His book about the Albatross helped me see the ocean with new eyes. That image of baby albatross birds choking on plastic toothbrushes that the parents regurgitated into their throats from debris ingested from the ocean—man, that was a worldrocking image! I throw away stuff like that all the time without a thought about where it ends up. And now I see that as a moral issue and myself in need of some moral reforming.

I suppose, like most people, I viewed the ocean as this pristine wilderness unaffected by humans. But now I see the ocean as something we’re treating like a free dumping place. I must say, I was completely ignorant, and my ignorance was of the worst sort because it was completely self-serving and convenient to be ignorant.

CARL: Ken has helped affirm that my view of the human interaction with nature as part of a moral continuum is a valid view. That is of great value to me. It means we science-types can work together with people of faith on matters of nature from a creation perspective. He has helped me see, and also helped affirm, that poverty doesn’t just happen to people. When we impoverish nature, we also impoverish people. And that is a clearly religious concern.

CC: How has your relationship changed how you discuss environmental or religious issues with others?

KEN: It’s given me a little gumption, a little nerve, a little fire in the belly. Unfortunately, evangelical churches in the United States have been a kind of gathering place for people who feel comfortable not caring too much about “environmental concerns” or who view them as the effete concerns of the academic elites who don’t have the normal problems of everyday people so they can afford to be upset about the spotted owls. That can create a social environment where people who do care about the environment get intimidated or put the muzzle on their passion. It can feel like a passion that somehow isn’t a faith-generated passion. It’s more like a hobby than a central concern of faith.

But I find Carl’s passion about the environment to be nothing but sane and reasonable and completely in keeping with my faith. So he’s given me a little backbone on this issue.

CARL: Mainly, because Ken views this as a moral matter, it helps me talk to scientists about the environment not just as a matter of new findings and lines on graphs, not just about trends in animal populations, but as a matter of universal moral concern. Morality is powerful because it’s more conservative than the way most environmentalists approach the issues. Environmentalists ask, “Is this sustainable?” This is a sound question but it’s more open to fudging and abuse and lip-service by people whose real interests lie elsewhere, so it doesn’t get applied well. The moral perspective sets a higher standard, asking, “Is this right, or is it wrong?” That is more difficult to answer in a complex world. But if we’d taken that view all along, we’d have gone slower, and we wouldn’t be facing the dangerous situations we’ve created. Fundamentally, understanding Ken’s views about the morality of our relationship to creation allows me to speak openly about life on planet Earth as a matter of the most basic and most crucial practical as well as moral importance to all people, everywhere. Frankly, I think more people will be able to hear that message.

For more information on forging surprising friendships, visit www.thefriendshipproject.org. To read about the original meeting and the “Urgent Call to Action” click here.

Carl Safina is President of Blue Ocean Institute.

Ken Wilson is Senior Pastor of Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, MI and Regional Overseer of the Great Lakes Region of Vineyard Churches.

Special thanks to Blue Ocean Institute post-doctoral fellow Marah Hardt for conducting the interview.

Pastor Ken Wilson and scientist Carl Safina met in an unexpected way. They’d both agreed to attend a retreat in the longleaf pine woods of South Georgia that brought together evangelical leaders and some of the world’s top scientists. They were responding, in part, to the invitation made by scientist and author E.O. Wilson in his book The Creation, in which he called on conservative Christians and scientists to work together to honor and protect God’s handiwork.

At that meeting, the participants discovered that they had much to agree upon. Months later they released an “Urgent Call to Action,” which stated in part “We clearly share a profound moral obligation and sense of vocation to save the imperiled living world before our damages to it remake it as another kind of planet.”

Though it was the public statement that captured media attention, some of the participants discovered something else at the retreat. They weren’t merely “co-belligerents” uniting to fight a common threat. They liked each other. They had much to learn from each other, but they left as friends, and committed themselves to intentionally strengthen their ties. Wilson, Senior Pastor of Vineyard Church Ann Arbor, and Safina, President of Blue Ocean Institute, learned from and enjoyed their unique friendship so much that they decided to forge “The Friendship Collaborative” to foster more bridge-building between other scientists and people of faith. Their premise is simply what worked for them: the chance to meet face to face and talk about shared beliefs regarding creation and the environment that supports life.

Blue Ocean Institute staffer Marah Hardt conducted the interview for Creation Care magazine. She asked Wilson and Safina to reflect upon the mutual influence and insight sprung from their unexpected friendship.

CC: What have you gotten from each other about your faith and your science that you didn’t get before?

KEN: Carl taught me that love for the natural world could be a mystical experience. I read his book, Song for the Blue Ocean, after working with him in one of the small working groups at the retreat in Georgia where we met. In the book, Carl described experiences with nature that were very much like experiences I’ve had in prayer—mystical experiences that involve a sense of being connected with something greater than yourself in such a way that the ordinary boundaries of the self as a separate entity in the world blur, giving way to intuitive sense. Carl was having these experiences, primarily with the ocean that he loves, and writing about them in a way that built a bridge to my experience as a praying person.

So I credit Carl with being an important part of revealing to me something that is in fact, central to my own faith: understanding reality—the world around us—as a mystical place and as a window through which we can see the real God.

CARL: Science and religion differ mainly in that science demands proof and religion demands faith. That seems like a fundamental difference. But through Ken I’ve come to better understand that science and faith share a desire to know the world, and by so doing, to understand the human role here. That is a fundamental similarity. To me it runs deeper than the theological difference of perspective. In fact, if Ken can come from a theological perspective and I can come from a scientific perspective and we arrive at a similar view of our responsibilities to creation, it speaks powerfully of what we must do. It also speaks powerfully of what we can do together. To me it opens the possibility of saving the planetary world from human destruction. Science cannot save the world. Only a value system that decides that saving the world is important can actually save it. Science can only provide information and predictions. So science and religion need each other here. And Ken has shown me that this can seem a natural, easy, and enjoyable alliance.

CC: What surprised you about each other?

KEN: His intuitive grasp of religion. Carl presented himself to me on first inspection as a no-nonsense New Yorker who perhaps didn’t have a personal interest in religion. He described himself to me as atheist and secular, though he said he prefers the term secular because it’s more about what he’s for than what he doesn’t believe.

I suppose it was my own ignorance of the intentionally secular sensibility that thought of this as a non-religious sensibility. But like I said, I found Carl to be someone I could talk to about religion, knowing that he had an intuitive grasp of the subject. So I think he’s a religious secular guy!

For example, he told me early on that his two heroes were Charles Darwin, for showing us the relatedness of all living things, and Jesus of Nazareth, for his teaching on loving our enemies, which showed us that all human beings are related. It blew me away that he had latched on to the central and distinctive thought of Jesus, and not some side issue that happened to appeal to him. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

CARL: Ken is very welcoming. I was very open with him about the fact that I am secular. When people first meet me, it’s not unusual for them to think I’m religious in the usual sense of equating religious with belief in God. I didn’t want any misunderstanding. But people also often believe that science is the opposite of religion. That’s not at all true. Science and religion are very similar in some ways and very different in others, but they’re not opposing forces. They ask different questions and perform very different roles in society. And many scientists have a strong faith in God. I respectfully explained to Ken that my view on the question of whether God exists had little to do with science and everything to do with the suffering of innocents. Ken really took me by surprise by saying he respected that view. I realized that Ken and I both have bigger fish to fry, so to speak. I realized that after that there were no barriers between me and Ken and that we could really enjoy a very warm friendship and try to maybe accomplish something good together.

This is Part 1 of 2. Part 2 appears here.

For more information on forging surprising friendships, visit www.thefriendshipproject.org. To read about the original meeting and the “Urgent Call to Action” click here.

Carl Safina is President of Blue Ocean Institute.

Ken Wilson is Senior Pastor of Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, MI and Regional Overseer of the Great Lakes Region of Vineyard Churches.

Special thanks to Blue Ocean Institute post-doctoral fellow Marah Hardt for conducting the interview.

Hidden Changes In The Sea

The trouble is, climate change is not the only stress on ocean life. Long before greenhouse gases ever rose to record highs, fishermen—from the big commercial captains to small island locals—were taking fish from the sea. Scientists like me who conduct research on coral reefs have become accustomed to a new undersea loneliness, emptiness on reefs that were formerly filled with sea life. What happened to all the fish? We ate them. And we continue to do so around the globe. When we take out more fish than the fish themselves can replace by reproduction, the number of fish declines. Also, our fishing gear can damage the homes and habitats that produce the fish, or it can catch and kill unwanted species—called “bycatch”—in the process.

Longline fishing fleets set hundreds of miles of line and millions of hooks in the water, targeting tuna but also killing unsuspecting leatherback turtles and albatross. Each year tens of thousands of seabirds drown on these hooks. Large fishing boats drag heavy steel plates and enormous nets along the sea bottom. This flattens into rubble the complex rocky hiding spots, coral reefs, and other places where fish like to live. The nets engulf everything in their path—whether wanted or not. Fishermen discard dead, unwanted species overboard. In some places, shrimp fishermen discard as many as ten pounds of sea life for every pound of shrimp they keep. When we buy the shrimp, we commission the waste. Much of this destruction remains unseen, hidden beneath the mirrored surface of the sea. But we do feel the consequences. Over one billion people rely on fish as their primary or only source of animal protein. The collapse of wild-caught fish and their habitats threatens the health of people across the world, especially in developing countries.

For millennia we have taken from the sea, and given back only our garbage. Rivers carry pesticides and fertilizers from farms into coastal ecosystems, causing increased disease outbreaks, blooms of toxic algae, and dead zones—areas too low in oxygen to support sea life. Ships dump an estimated 6.5 million tons of plastics into the ocean every year. In the northern Pacific, our waste stretches across an area the size of Texas and washes up on remote island atolls. Seabirds, turtles, mammals, and fish are killed by entanglement and choking, or are poisoned by chemicals trapped in the plastic particles. Mercury and other industrial pollutants exhaled through factory chimneys rain down onto the sea, where bacteria absorb the toxins and pass them up the food chain. Animals at the top of the food chain, such as tuna and seals, accumulate the poisons and can become unsafe to eat.

Today, Inuit mothers’ breast milk is so laden with toxins from consuming poisoned marine mammals that it is hazardous to their infants. For communities where marine life is the sole source of protein, damage to marine ecosystems is devastating. When our actions threaten the innocent among us, those actions become morally questionable and require swift change.

Remaining Optimistic

The ocean may be embattled, but it is not defeated. Hope lies in the remarkable capacity of the ocean to restore its abundance and health when given enough space and time. Few extinctions due to human activities have occurred in the ocean, which means the potential for recovery still exists in most circumstances.

Marine reserves are protected areas that limit fishing, mining, drilling, or collecting for aquariums. These areas allow sea life to recover, with some reserves showing an increased number and size of fish after only five years of protection. Some large reserves (bigger than 40 square miles) protected for over 20 years hold 10 times more fish than nearby sites outside of reserves. Despite the proven success of marine reserves, social and political conflicts have limited them to less than one one-hundredth of one percent (<0.01%) of all United States’ waters. Reserves are one of the most powerful and under-used tools for restoring ocean health. Establishing and enforcing new and larger reserves will go a long way toward promoting the recovery of diminished marine life and habitats.

When we alleviate some of the stress of human activities, sea life stands a much better chance of warding off threats to its survival such as disease or climate change. For example, corals located offshore, away from pollution sources, resist disease better than corals living in polluted waters. So if we can clean up pollution, we may be able to reduce disease. In the South Pacific, coral reefs exposed to abnormally high water temperatures all showed signs of illness. However, reefs located in remote islands free from overfishing and pollution recover much more quickly than reefs that suffer multiple stresses.

Positive change can come quickly within oceans. Twenty years ago, officials recommended tetanus shots for sailors who fell into Boston harbor. Now, those waters are safe to swim and fun to fish. On the West Coast, efforts to restore Santa Monica Bay since the 1980s have seen fish numbers increase and sickness among surfers and swimmers decrease. We don’t have to stop all of our marine activities, but we do have to manage those activities wisely. Fishing laws, when based on science and properly enforced, have helped sea life rebound, sometimes in short time periods.

Healthy ecosystems withstand and recover from disturbances—whether oil spills or hurricanes—far better than degraded ones. In the face of climate change, creation’s own natural resilience provides the best defense. There are many ways we can effectively restore this resilience: by creating reserves, supporting effective management, cleaning up land-based pollution, and making educated choices about what seafood we buy. All hope is not lost, but we must make these changes now. Caring for creation, and protecting the life-support systems we depend upon, means that we must care for the ocean that supports us all.

Marah Hardt is a research fellow at Blue Ocean Insitute where she works to share the message of climate change effects on oceans and potential solutions with people around the globe.

Seen from the shore, the ocean looks the same today as it did centuries ago: a vast shimmering silver-blue mirror of sky. This reflective veneer, however, masks an emptier, more polluted, warmer, and chemically changed sea. The collective weight of humanity presses upon the ocean now as never before, as we pull out too many fish and pour in too much garbage, fertilizer, and other pollutants. Our fishing and mining techniques scrape the bottom of the seafloor, raking up sea fans and crushing corals, destroying productive habitat. And by burning fossil fuels we not only raise the temperature of the water but also make it more acidic.

Why does this matter? Because the ocean supports all creation, in the sea and on land, including us. We are not as disconnected from this watery world as we may think. Tied to the shore, we also remain bound to the sea—by our need for food, oxygen, a stable climate, and the countless other life-sustaining services the ocean provides. We should understand something of how the ocean works, why we depend upon a healthy ocean, and why, despite all the damage that has been done, we can still be hopeful.

The Structure and Support of Oceans

We all know that the moon pulls the tides, rhythmically sliding the sea back and forth across the sand. But below the surface, seawater is traveling an epic journey around the globe, driven by the sun and wind, carrying heat and particles across the planet. It begins in the far north Atlantic, where strong winds cool and cause evaporation of the water. This leaves behind colder, saltier surface waters, which are more dense than the warmer, fresher waters below. The colder waters sink and flow south across the seafloor and into the Indian and Pacific oceans. As they travel, these waters warm, eventually rise upwards and after many centuries, flow back into the Atlantic, completing their lap around the globe. This is the giant ocean conveyor belt. It distributes heat from the tropics to the poles and transports nutrients throughout the ocean. Without it, life on earth would be very different. Southern Europe would not have a mild Mediterranean climate, for instance, which would affect growing seasons and crop production.

Winds also drive ocean circulation patterns. Winds blowing offshore (from land to sea) push warm surface waters away from the coast, causing deeper waters, full of nutrients, to rise up and fill the space—a process known as upwelling. The nutrients feed surfacedwelling single-celled algae called phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton comes from the root phyton for plant and plankton for wanderer. Like plants on land, the phytoplankton use nutrients, carbon dioxide and sunlight to make sugars through photosynthesis, creating oxygen as a “waste product.” These tiny algae, many too small to see without the aid of a microscope, produce half of all the oxygen made by plants on the planet. Without them, we wouldn’t have air to breathe. The oceanic food chain starts with phytoplankton— which are prey for bigger plankton—and moves up through fish and mammals. If you have ever dined upon fresh, wild, West Coast salmon, you have feasted upon the products of upwelling ecosystems.

Most of the seafood we eat comes from habitats near the coast—such as seaweed forests formed by giant algae called kelp, which can grow to be 60 feet tall—or from tropical coral reefs. These habitats provide sea life with food, shelter, places to breed, and hiding places for baby fish to grow.

These coastal ecosystems also protect our homes. Wetlands such as salt marshes and mangrove forests have dense root and plant structures that hold onto the soil, preventing erosion and absorbing the force of waves from storms. But since 1900, people have destroyed over 50% of worldwide wetlands for coastal development, timber, and fuel, or to make space for aquaculture farms. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and 2005 Hurricane Katrina reveal the hidden costs, borne mostly by the poor, of wetland loss. In India, villages located behind healthy mangrove forests survived the tsunami; villages without mangroves were washed away by the waves. In the U.S., the loss of coastalmarshes exacerbated flooding damage done to the entire Gulf coast by Hurricane Katrina. Besides food and shoreline protection, people also benefit from the untold number of chemical compounds, many with disease-fighting qualities, found in the ocean. Many marine species still unknown to science could hold potential cures to illnesses such as arthritis, bacterial infections, and cancer.

Biological systems—the living parts of the ocean—supply all these services. But it is the chemical and physical structure of the water that allows life to thrive. Climate change alters the chemical and physical properties of the ocean, and threatens these life support systems on a global scale. Climate Change and the Sea Carbon dioxide, released mostly by the burning of fossil fuels, traps heat in the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the air and ocean. This increase in temperatures causes sea level to rise as warmer water expands and as glaciers melt and release more water into the ocean.

A higher sea level means higher tides and bigger storm waves—both of which cause beaches and cliffs to erode faster, washing away habitats where turtles and seabirds build their nests and people build their homes. Over half of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coast, and many, especially the poor, will be displaced as seawater floods their farms and taints the fresh groundwater supply. For residents of small island nations, such as Palau, these changes are already occurring, and there is no “higher ground” to go to. Warmer temperatures cause sea ice to melt sooner and faster. Marine life, including seals, walrus, polar bears, fish and penguins, depend on sea ice for hunting, birthing, resting, or feeding activities. Less sea ice makes it more difficult to catch a meal or care for their young. The ocean also absorbs carbon dioxide from the air—over one third of that produced since industrialization.

When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it makes the water more acidic (by lowering its pH) and reduces the water’s number of carbonate ions. More carbon dioxide in ocean water leads to more carbon dioxide inside the bodies of marine animals, changing their internal pH. These animals must then spend energy balancing such chemical change, diverting energy away from their normal growth and reproduction. Also, fewer carbonate ions in the ocean water make it harder for corals, mollusks, and shelled plankton to build strong, thick shells and skeletons, which are made from carbonate. If we continue to follow current trends in fossil fuel consumption, scientists predict that oceans will be too acidic for corals and some seaweeds by 2050….

This is Part 1 of a two-part article. Part 2 appears here.

Marah Hardt is a research fellow at Blue Ocean Insitute where she works to share the message of climate change effects on oceans and potential solutions with people around the globe.

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.

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.

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.

Part 2 appears here.