I’ve recently become involved in Renewal: Students Caring for Creation. These are students and recent grads who have a heart and love for all that God has made. The mission of the Renewal network is “to inspire and equip the student generation to lead its communities with justice and compassion in Christ-centered stewardship of all of God’s creation.” It’s a beautiful vision and one that I think will have a tremendous impact in the days ahead.

One of Renewal’s first activities is a Day of Prayer for Creation Care. These students are calling on the entire creation care community to set aside October 29, 2008 as a national day of prayer. They are asking all of us to pray for the church’s stewardship of creation, for our own repentance from callousness towards creation, and for the renewal and wisdom from God to walk boldly in the light of the Lord on this matter. So gather, fellowship,  and worship the Lord Jesus on October 29th and pray for the renewal of all that he has made.

Below is my contribution. You can find out more at

http://www.renewingcreation.org/get-involved/pray/2008-day-of-prayer

Praying for Creation

Father, we come before you as your children. We come to repent for our poor stewardship of creation. Lord we know that in our materialistic age that we abuse all that you have made, particularly your creation. Though you have given us Christ, in this present age we poorly reflect your intent when it comes to creation care.

We confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have neglected your truth, we have turned from your ways, and we have abused your creation. We are truly sorry and humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.

Father help us to have discernment to understand the times that we live in. Give us, and indeed all peoples who call upon the name of your Son Jesus Christ, wisdom to care for what they have been entrusted with. Help us to steward creation in such a way that all might come to know you and glorify your Son.

Lord we ask that you would empower this generation with your spirit to boldly be who you are calling us to be. Help us to lead with your heart for creation. Help your servants, especially our present leadership, to more truly reflect your will in the church.

Father your word says that the Creation eagerly waits with anticipation for the children of God to be revealed. Your word says that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of corruption into the glorious freedom of God’s children. Father your word speaks of the hope, reconciliation, and peace of Jesus Christ for the whole of creation. Lord we long for your scripture to be fulfilled! We long for our own freedom from sin, corruption, and decay. We long to live in such a way that we might walk with you in humility and truth. We long to be instruments of your reconciliation to all creation.

Father may our prayers be added to the groans of creation as we call upon your Son Jesus Christ to be our wisdom and shield of protection. Help our work in creation care to bring us and all peoples closer to you.

Amen.

Alexei Laushkin, a graduate from Claremont McKenna College, works for the Evangelical Environmental Network. He and his wife live in Alexandria, VA.

Extinction

A key word scientists use to describe the biodiversity crisis may surprise you. “Extinction” literally refers to putting out a fire or light, and some of its early uses appear in Christian texts. The 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, for example, petitions Christ to “grant that all sin and vice here may be so extinct” and so extinguish the fire of one’s sin. Other uses of the word are perhaps more familiar. In the King James Bible, an exasperated Job cries, “My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves are ready for me” (17:1), and the Oxford English Dictionary declares “the dodo went extinct.” This last example is what we might recognize. The passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, or any number of other creatures come to mind. But a scientific account of animals and plants cannot by itself describe the significance of extinction. Driving an entire group of creatures to oblivion is more than a biological act: it is the extinguishing of a light kindled by the One whom James refers to as “the Father of lights” (1:17). Extinction is a theological act.

What Is a Species? How Many Are There?

Knowing how many kinds of animals and plants there are on this planet first requires a definition of what a species is. Scientists generally agree that two individuals belong to the same species if their offspring can reproduce themselves. For example, horses and donkeys are different species, so their offspring, mules, are infertile. This does not make counting species easy work, however. Rugged mountains, inaccessible tropical forests, and deep ocean floor communities are little-studied, and they still harbor many unknown creatures. Despite this, a good current estimate is that there are about 10 million kinds of plants and animals. Each year ecologists find and describe astonishing new kinds of birds, frogs, fish, plants, cats, and even monkeys. We read in Genesis 2;19 that God brought creatures to Adam “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” Adam’s work continues today—we are still naming and counting creatures.

Is There an Extinction Crisis?

Geological studies show that species come and species go. What is the expected rate of extinctions due to natural causes? Except for cataclysmic events like the one that killed off the dinosaurs, evidence from ancient marine deposits indicates that about one species in a million disappears every year. Taking this to be a ‘normal’ or background rate of loss, we can then tally extinctions in the last few centuries to assess human impacts. Studies of various organisms (birds, mussels, fish, and plants) show that these groups are now disappearing more than 100 times faster, and in some cases up to 1,000 times faster, than the background rate. Even worse, the number of species currently threatened with extinction far exceeds those recently lost, bringing future extinction estimates to potentially 10,000 times the ‘normal’ rate. How is this happening?

How do Humans Cause Extinction?

The primary human causes of declines in plants and animals are habitat loss and hunting. People are clearing more land, eating more food, and producing more waste than ever before in history. Other significant causes are the introduction of non-native species and diseases, pollution, and climate change. My own research on sea turtles examines how stronger and longer-lasting hurricanes (from warmer oceans) affect sea turtle reproduction. Sea turtles nest on beaches, and their nests are flooded and washed away by heavy rains and storm surges from hurricanes. One might think, “Hurricanes have been around as long as sea turtles, surely the turtles can handle it!” This logic ignores that sea turtle populations have already declined 90% or more in the past centuries, and that the beaches where they nest are fewer and farther between. Active hunting, coastal beach development, and incidental captures in commercial fishing nets brought us to where we are now. Sea turtles are already threatened worldwide without warmer oceans, higher sea levels, and more intense hurricanes. Climate change merely exacerbates their plight.

Dr. Kyle Van Houtan is an ecologist at Emory University. This fall he’s teaching a class in ecology and Christian ethics to students from biology, environmental studies, religion, and divinity. Kyle is a regular contributor to Creation Care. If you have questions for future columns about environmental science or ethics, write to kyle.vanhoutan@gmail.com.

Further reading from the scientific literature:

• J. H. Lawton & R. M. May. 1995. Extinction Rates. Oxford University Press. Oxford, UK.
• N. Myers, R. A. Mittermeier, C. G. Mittermeier, G. A. B. Fonseca & J. Kent. 2000. Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature. 403: 853-858.
• S. L. Pimm. 2004. A Scientist Audits the Earth. Rutgers University Press. New Jersey.
• K. S. Van Houtan & O. L. Bass. 2007. Stormy oceans are associated with declines in sea turtle hatching. Current Biology. 17(15): R590-591.

Related article: Peter Illyn’s “A Covenant with Creation” appeared in the same issue of Creation Care magazine.

A long time ago when our children were young and we lived in Albuquerque, Denis traveled a lot. The reason I mention he traveled a lot is because when he was out of town there was some kind of cosmic balance that shifted and it did nothing to favor me. Thus trips to the ER, little fires in the kitchen, escaped animals, and most annoyingly, the times when our bees swarmed, happened when he was gone and I was left to deal. It was easy to imagine him in El Paso drinking Corona, eating chili rellenos someone else labored to make, and having lively conversations with students and staff about theology and culture while I tried to capture bees from the yard of a neighbor who was calling the police and demanding I be arrested.

It was a time in our lives when we were determined to live simply, become urban farmers, and eat healthy. (I admit tanning rabbit hides in the garage didn’t work. Just five minutes at midday was hot enough to give a lizard heatstroke. My dreams of stitching rabbit hides into mittens, slippers, and rugs perished when the hides rotted with such ferocity the odor would have killed a dung beetle.) In all the books I read no one mentioned any of this would be difficult or dangerous.

Still, there were rewards. Raising honeybees made us admire what they do. That is, if you can call owning two hives “raising bees.” All we did not know didn’t stop us from ordering that first queen and her escorts. When they arrived at the post office, we picked her up in her little wooden box with screened sides and even though we gently placed it in the back seat of our car—in unison 14,000 jostled bees raised their voices about an octave. I began to wonder if simple living wasn’t more like poking a crocodile in the eye and running like crazy.

That began our three-year venture into honey, sticky fingers, and a bad-tempered queen who faithfully passed her personality on to thousands of aggressive children who swarmed in our neighbor’s yard when the hive grew too crowded. We kept on despite the risk—a risk mostly due to keeping the hives on the top of our flat-roofed garage, meaning Jerem & Sember, ages 4 and 2, frequently climbed the ladder to check them out; they could get up there, but had trouble getting down. Eventually I’d notice them gone missing and find them wailing on the roof with little clouds of bees buzzing round their heads (I know. Remove the ladder, but somehow I didn’t think of that.) Anyway, I became very fond of the honeybee. They do things like make you praise orchards and flowers, bake honey buns for your friends and family, and thank God you aren’t required to lay 2,000 eggs a day. I say this even though on honey extraction day every surface in my kitchen and dining room got coated with a sticky amber glue. Not only did the bees find their way back inside to reclaim what we’d stolen from them, the kids industriously helped by licking the countertops and table.

Loving honeybees also makes me wonder about such things as mowing and paving every square inch of habitat I own and the consequences of herbicides and pesticides poured on crops and lawns, and whether in the end it will make any difference to them or us.

Colony Collapse Disorder

This history is one reason I noticed stories that began showing up in the press early this year. It began in the fall of 2006 when honeybees began to mysteriously disappear.

David Hackenberg, one of the first keepers to bring this to the attention of entomologists at Penn State, had just ferried his hives from Pennsylvania to Florida for the winter. He is a commercial beekeeper with thousands of hives that are contracted by farmers to pollinate certain crops. Beekeepers move hives around the country stacked on wooden pallets on flatbed trucks and unloaded by forklifts wherever whatever needs pollination. Annually, 15 billion dollars worth of crops depend on the bee for pollination. For example, California’s almond crop, which is the largest in the world, requires 1.5 million hives to pollinate their orchards. Without 60 billion bees to work the blossoms I wouldn’t be snacking on toasted almonds or spreading almond butter on my toast – the only way Margie can relate to incomprehensible numbers.

When Hackenberg checked his hives last November his bees had vanished. He opened the hives and they were simply gone. It wasn’t like they were lying dead around the entrance, they’d just disappeared, leaving behind eggs, larva, and brood. It was eerie. By the end of winter he’d lost 2,000 hives without explanation. Soon beekeepers all over the U.S. who checked on their hives in late fall and winter were reporting nobody home. No one knew where they went. The epidemic is so widespread it received a name: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Here in Rochester at the Farmer’s Market I met Marvin Schul, a quiet man in a faded seed cap and plaid shirt, who sells honey. His table was lined with plastic honeybears and glass jars full of a light golden honey. “Sweet clover honey is the best; light, flavorful, I love it,” he said. I learned that out of the ten hives he owns, he’d lost nine to CCD. But he’s hopeful; this summer that one hive has produced more honey than he’d thought possible. He smiled and shook his head. He’s waiting for fall to see what happens. No one knows if the collapse will continue. Meantime, many keepers have gone bankrupt and are leaving the business.

No one knows exactly what’s caused this bee pandemic. It could be stress, an unknown virus, pesticides, or a combination of many things. The bees they do find and dissect from infected hives are full of mites and sick with every infection known to beedom. It’s as if their immune system is utterly collapsed and they have a kind of bee AIDS. The phenomenon is so odd and so disturbing that Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist from Columbia University, the researcher who discovered West Nile Virus, has logged into the race with other researchers to find the cause.

We do know that without bees to pollinate crops like apples, pumpkins and blueberries, there would be little or no harvest. It is estimated that one out of every three bites of food we take is because bees exist. Years ago, Albert Einstein made an interesting statement when speaking of the complex interrelatedness of all things on earth: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live.” We can hope Einstein is wrong, but some scientists call bees the canary in the mine shaft. Miners used to take a canary deep into mines, and if it suddenly died because of an undetectable toxic gas, it was the signal to get out fast. In the case of the death of bees it may indicate an earth problem (too big for me to comprehend) we’ve contributed to—from the way we Weed ‘n Feed our lawns to drinking bottled water by the boatload and adding billions of plastic bottles to the environment. (Scientists have found that plastics increase levels of estrogenlike chemicals in the environment which is thought to interfere with the reproduction of insects and animals and is possibly linked to early onset of puberty in young girls.)

Natural pollinators or wild bees have been in trouble for a while now. They play a specific role in the survival of thousands of species of plants. Since the 1990’s researchers have noted 90% of this native population has disappeared. This merely adds another layer to the mysterious fading of other life forms—coral reefs, kelp forests, amphibians, wild flowers, sawfish.

Save The Bees!

I heard someone say that people involved in mercy ministries are annoying. He said it fondly with no disrespect—just an observation that wherever there is trouble there are single-hearted people trying to help. Hang around them for too long and they will convince you to fight Aids in Africa, save the wild salmon in the Columbia River, and stop drinking bottled water. Hearing about one more trouble can make me feel hopeless.

I’ve thought a good deal about what it means to care for creation. How do we not give up when all around us there is misuse and destruction? And, c’mon, what difference will it make if, to store half a cut lemon, I turn it upside down on a little plate instead of grabbing a plastic baggie and adding to the land fill?

There is a Psalm that fiercely attacks my sense of despair over the groaning of creation.

You answer us with awesome deeds of righteousness, O God our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas. (Psalm 65:5)

Wherever the dead zones in the sea exist—did you know that where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico nothing lives anymore in an area as large as the state of New Jersey?—wherever bees die and flowers disappear God is there. I love the phrase, O God, our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas. We know that one day there will be no more suffering for human kind, but we also know God is Savior of all creation, and it will one day be restored to its glorious original state. As Julian of Norwich put it: “All will be well and all manner of things will be well” because God is, even now, in the process of bringing all things under the reign of Jesus.

In the face of disaster, we don’t stop caring for people because recovery seems hopeless. We don’t abandon friends who suffer a terminal disease. We don’t stop telling them to hope in God. In the midst of earthquakes and hurricanes, war and disease, in the midst of things crashing down we touch the person next to us. We offer a cup of coffee, we pray, we haul debris.

Anne Lamott writes about a friend who showed up on her doorstep during a time of great need and announced: “I’m going to clean your bathroom today.” To Anne it was very humbling to have someone else cleaning globs of stuff off her toilet, but she also realized these were the hands of Jesus tending to the most lowly parts of body-life.

In the same way while we wait for Christ’s return and his restoration of all things, we don’t stop caring about his creation. It groans along with us awaiting our redemption, and being faithful in this small square of reality is not crazy or useless. I know it’s not like I’m going to bring the bees back homes or get Conagra to stop factory farming. Even if I’m really, really polite and say please, please, not another big-box store with its acres of black parking lots and thousands upon thousands of lights, no developer is going to listen to me. However, I can do little things. I recycle glass and plastic even if my neighbors don’t. I can feed the birds and leave the wild pollinators alone.

For the past two years we’ve used an organic fertilizer on our lawn. Some kind of corn product thing that works pretty well. This year on our city lot, 150 feet by 50, the earthworms were so prolific a pair of robins raised three batches of babies on our front porch. Finches nested in our hanging plants. A pair of chipping sparrows hopped through the spirea eating insects. The wren sang a deafening song and made a tiny nest of sticks in a birdhouse under the eaves. Goldfinches, mourning doves, nuthatches and woodpeckers come to the feeders. Dozens are crazy about the bath—squabbling and squatting in the middle to splash their wings. They come, despite three major hotels, two restaurants, a gas station, one of the largest privately owned hospitals in the U.S., and a Caribou Coffee Shop (joy) within two blocks of our house.

God, “the hope of the ends of the earth” must agree with me that bumble bees are beautiful insects—right up there with neon-colored damsel flies—they really do buzz and bumble. The weight of their bodies is enough to make flowers sink and sway, so on a windless day you know right where they are by the gentle waving of flower stems here and there in the garden. If you look closely you can see the little balls of pollen they collect in a sac on their hind legs. Yesterday their loads were yellow, today bright orange. They are so busy gathering nectar from catnip and hostas they pay no attention to me. It turns out they have a special gift for pollinating tomatoes – tomato blossoms hold their pollen in tight little chambers where the grains are trapped like salt in a shaker. A bumble bee has to grasp the flower and give it a rapid fire buzz; the intensity of the vibrations shake out the pollen. Honeybees don’t do this. We used to see more bumble bees in our yard but not anymore. So when I noticed one in my backyard today I took her pic though she refused to pose for it.

Margie Haack is co-director of Ransom Fellowship, Rochester, MN (www.ransomfellowship.org) a ministry designed to help Christians apply the truth of Scripture to all of life and culture. She publishes Notes From Toad Hall, a quarterly newsletter encouraging people to love the sacred nature and calling of everyday life. She will accept almost any writing assignment if paid in chocolate, and would almost sell her soul for a pan of batter-fried morel mushrooms.

Resources: “Not-So-Elementary Bee Mystery,” Science News, July 28, 2007. “Stung” by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, Aug. 6, 2007. “The Vanishing” OnEarth Magazine, Summer 2006. “Deadly Interplay of Nature’s System Architecture” by Richard Thomas Gerber, www.intentblog.com/archives/2007/06/deadly_interpla.html.

Related article: Greg Pitchford’s “The Restoration of All Things” appeared in the same issue of Creation Care.

Fifteen years ago I cut my teeth as an environmental activist by building theological support for the protection of species and biological diversity. My story is simple. After 10 years as an evangelical minister, I bought two llamas and went on a 1,000 mile hike up the spine of the Cascade Mountains. During the four months of hiking, I developed a heart-felt relationship with the mountains, the meadows, the groves of trees, the songbirds, and the elk. Day after day, I sensed the praise and worship that Scripture says all parts of creation are offering to God. It was a sacred time.

Extinction Isn’t Stewardship

But it was also a conflicted time.

I came out of my wilderness pilgrimage and into a natural world in crisis. Spotted owls and salmon species in the Pacific Northwest were declared endangered, threatened by extinction due to habitat destruction from clear-cut logging, hydroelectric dams, and overfishing.

After years of warnings from biologists that the logging industry was taking too much of the forest and too many ancient trees, and that there would be serious repercussions for rivers and streams, species, and people, conservationists took legal action. Controversy grew, fueled in part by lawsuits and in part by the pain people had been feeling for some time as mills closed due to over harvesting and economic changes in the global timber market. Effigies were burned; anonymous phone calls were made.

Restoring Eden, the parachurch Christian ministry I now lead, got its start when I wrote a letter to the editor explaining my activism: “I’m a conservative Christian, a farmer and an outfitter. I still get thrilled at seeing a bald eagle fly by, or a salmon swim past, or by looking up at an ancient tree so tall it makes me dizzy. That is what I am standing up for.”

In writing that letter I entered a debate that had been framed with false dichotomies: jobs vs. the environment or man vs. nature. Protecting biodiversity was portrayed as pitting logging communities against fishing communities, rather than as a common sense way to ensure a richness of nature and resources for future generations. As soon as my letter was published in the newspaper, my phone began to ring, and it has never really stopped. Some called to argue with me that since God loves humans more than sparrows, we don’t need to worry about creation. Others called to thank me for speaking out, because in their hearts they knew the earth was “good” and they couldn’t figure out how to open their neighbors’ “eyes of the heart” (Ephesians 1:18) to the love they had for creation.

As a minister, I was speaking out for the interconnectedness of ecosystems and endangered species, but in doing so I also knew I was protecting the fruitfulness of creation upon which all life-including human life-depends. It was a sacred trust.

But in the mid-90’s, not everyone saw protecting biodiversity as a sacred trust. A strong attack on species protection was being launched in Congress. I participated with a group of Christian leaders in a press conference in Portland, Oregon to lend support to the moral call to protect God-ordained biodiversity. And I created a bumper sticker of an ICTHUS fish with a salmon inside. The text was straightforward: “Extinction isn’t stewardship.”

In the Pacific Northwest we had a choice-could short-term economic desires be allowed to unstitch the interconnected strands of ecosystems, species, watersheds, and climates? We were advocating that human-caused unraveling of the web of life is ultimately a foolish and short-sighted choice.

Back in 1996, largely because of the work of evangelical Christians, a group of moderate Republicans voted against gutting the Endangered Species Act, the main U.S. law that protects the integrity of the community of life. At a Washington, D.C. press conference, Christian environmentalist Cal Dewitt, speaking with a live cougar at his side, staked an evangelical stand that protecting species is the current expression of an ancient covenant between God, Noah’s descendents, and every living creature.

This evangelical stand on protecting biological diversity was instrumental in thwarting the immediate attack, but as soon as the press conference ended, the counter-arguments began. Most were based on short-term economic, not biblical, premises: that if someone could profit financially from extracting a natural resource, even if that meant destroying critical habitat and imperiling species, his or her right to make a profit would trump any other arguments based on morality, longer-term economics and sustainability, or the common good.

The case for the economic and utilitarian employ of nature is a legitimate one, but it doesn’t invalidate all other values and moral arguments. If it did, we should sell our sons to the salt mines and our daughters to the brothels. The church has always taught that we can’t serve both God and money.

Scripture’s Word on Biological Diversity

The theology for protecting species is unambiguous: Plants and animals have an inherent right to be fruitful and to thrive as God has commanded them. In Genesis alone, we read that God created the different species and called them good. God blessed them and told them to fill the earth. God protected the different species by bringing them to the Ark. And lastly, God covenanted with Noah and “with all life on earth for all generations to come” (Genesis 9:12).

Historic Christian theology has also taught that ecosystems reveal the wisdom of God and that species sing praises to him. Psalm 24:1 reads, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” Colossians 1:16 says that “all things were created by Him and for Him.” Psalm 145:10 reads, “All you have made will praise you, O Lord; your saints will extol you.” In Genesis 1:31 we read that God saw “ALL that he had made, and it was VERY good.” We’ve just become tone-deaf and heart-blind to the beauty of the world’s songs of praise.

In Matthew 24:45 Jesus asks, “Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom the master has put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time?” When we read this verse through the lens of creation care, instead of declaring that biodiversity and species serve little purpose and have no inherent rights, we read that if creation is a part of the God’s household, humans are called to make sure their biological needs are met. (The phrase “food at the proper time” is also used in Psalm 104 to describe how God provides for wild animals.) What God created, blessed, protected, and covenanted with is not ours to exterminate.

Renaissance and Revitalization: Christians Helping Irreplaceable Species

A new threat has emerged in recent years, imperiling people, plants, and animals: Climate change. Creating rapidly shifting weather patterns, rising temperatures, stressed ecosystems, shifting disease patterns, and loss of key food and shelter, it is predicted to hurt people-especially the poor, young, and elderly-and imperil 20-30 percent of the earth’s species, with 60 percent in danger in some areas.

But there is hopeful news about climate change. A church revival is happening. The church is expanding its understanding of community to one that is large enough to allow plants and animals to be seen as beloved parts of the heart and household of God. Christians recognize something flawed in a concept that justifies driving species to extinction for the sake of profit or because of the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of riches (Matt 13:22). This renaissance shares a greater sense of interconnectedness with nature and recognizes the link between our environmental impact and our moral responsibility. I am not responsible for all contributors to climate change. I am responsible, however, for the car I drive, the light bulbs I buy, the ecosystems I protect, and the conservation laws I support.

This revitalization is most evident in younger Christian leaders. Expect great things from them. They see a biblical mandate to struggle for the common good, and they are not frightened to stand alongside new allies to fight for the things dear to God’s heart.

A few years ago, I met with Congressman Dave Reichert, a Republican and a professing Christian from Washington State. I was asking him to vote for the protection of species. When I gave him one of my “extinction isn’t stewardship” stickers, he looked at it and said, “That’s wrong. We’re not called to be stewards. We’re called to be servants!” With that sense of servanthood, he has ever since been a voice for protecting the diversity and viability of species-a Christian call that is bigger than partisan politics and short-term profiteering. He is part of a new alliance of stewards with the courage and foresight to take a stand.

I am a part of just such a unique new coalition, one interconnected by faith, science, art, and conservation. We are religious leaders, scientists, photographers, and secular environmental groups. We have united around a belief in our moral duty to safeguard imperiled plants and animals threatened by climate change, an understanding that such protection defends systems and species vital for our own well being, and a joy in the wonder of all life.

The result of our coming together is the uplifting photography exhibit and educational campaign Irreplaceable: Wildlife in a Warming World. We have called it Irreplaceable because something that is irreplaceable is too priceless to lose. While we represent different ideologies, beliefs, and histories, we are connected by a similar sense of moral responsibility that, when united, can be a powerful agent for change. See pages 10-14 for some of the stunning Irreplaceable photos and go to www.irreplaceablewild.org for more inspiring images.

God’s Irreplaceable Creation

A recent Southern Baptist document states, “We must care about environmental and climate issues because of our love for God. This is not our world, it is God’s. Therefore, any damage we do to this world is an offense against God Himself. We share God’s concern for the abuse of His creation.”

The Baptists are right. God calls us to a theology of engaged stewardship. When Bible-believing Christians see in Psalm 104:24 that “In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures,” it is easy for them to understand that God cares about ecosystems, living communities of life, and a creation full of wonder, beauty, and interconnectedness.

I thank God for the clear eyes and sharp ears of children, and for the wisdom of nature lovers in the church. These members of the Body still whisper “hush!” and remind us of how to squint our eyes and cup our hands around our ears. They teach us to see the beauty of creation and to hear its songs of life. They will teach us the songs of praise. They will remind us of what is truly irreplaceable.

Peter Illyn is the Executive Director of the ministry Restoring Eden.

Related article: Kyle Van Houtan’s Science Gateway article on Extinction and Its Causes. Science Gateway is a regular feature of Creation Care magazine.

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.