EYCI Beyond the Classroom
June 5, 2008
The following post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
Creation Care Study Program provides students new perspective
Boarding the plane for a semester in Belize with the Creation Care Study Program (CCSP), leaders from the Evangelical Youth Climate Initiative (EYCI) Caroline Brown, Joshua Van Staalduinen, and Bethany Ricks had one goal in mind: To learn as much as they could about God’s creation and how to care for it. They wanted to see, touch, and hear tropical forests, streams and coral reefs and learn how they are impacted by climate change. They wanted to experience first hand how global warming and ecological destruction affects the lives of subsistence farmers and their families in the developing world.
Textbook knowledge wasn’t going to cut it for one more semester. So they packed up their sense of adventure, curiosity, and desire to love and faithfully follow Christ, embarking on a life-changing semester.
Dr. Chris Elisara, CCSP’s executive director, first met these students at the EYCI launch in Washington D.C., but he was very interested to find out what they were learning and how their CCSP Belize experience was further preparing them for leadership. On a recent trip to CCSP Belize, Dr. Elisara had the opportunity to discuss this with them. While it was a little early to definitively answer the question, “What have you learned about how climate change impacts the developing world?”, the subsequent conversation was lively with perceptive insights and ideas. Bethany Ricks, who attends Bethel University, led off with this observation: “Given that Belize’s economy is reliant on tourism—much of it based on the coast and tropical reef—if climate change increases the frequency and intensity of severe weather events like hurricanes, Belize won’t be able to cope with recurrent hurricanes hitting it’s shores. The ecological damage will keep the tourists away, let alone the damage to infrastructure. It will ruin Belize’s tourism industry and economy.” Joshua Van Staalduinen who attends Trinity Christian College, quickly added the comparison: “Unlike wealthy countries such as the U.S., small developing countries like Belize do not have deep pockets and cannot respond to repeated shocks to the economy caused by big, and possibly more frequent hurricanes.”
Caroline Brown from Asbury College provided another angle, noting “it will be the poor subsistence farmers and their families who will suffer the most from severe weather events in Belize, be it hurricanes, or raining when it should be dry, or dry when it should be raining … they survive by living off the land and if they cannot produce a crop they cannot survive.” The students found agreement in these initial thoughts and continued to discuss more wide-ranging observations and analysis.
Then the conversation took a turn. “On the positive side,” pointed out Ricks, “we visited a community that came together and set aside communal land to save habitat for Howler Monkeys, and now the Howlers are thriving.”
“That’s why I’m here,” said Van Staalduinen “to learn how to respond to our ecological challenges, to be a leader and make a difference.” Brown added, “I’m trying to take as much in as I can. I’ve got a lot to learn, especially how environmental degradation impacts people in poor countries, but as our program director encourages us, ‘I’m squeezing the sponge.’ I’m grasping this opportunity with two hands and squeezing every ounce of learning I can out of it.”
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