Coming Up: Following Christ 2008 Conference
November 6, 2008
Many people don’t realize that Intervarsity’s Following Christ 2008conference –coming up on December 27-31 in Chicago–is for just about everyone! You don’t have to be in an InterVarsity group, you just have to be active in or care about the world of the university and professions. Registration is happening now for this incredibly exciting conference.
The theme of the conference for 2008 is Human Flourishing–”what it truly is, what’s wrong when it’s absent, and how God is calling us to both model and multiply it.” The conference website has a great essay on the theme of human flourishing. Plenary speakers
include Anglican Bisoph N.T. Wright, Andy Crouch (author of the new book Culture Making), Francis Collins (former director of the Human Genome Project), Anne C. Bailey (historian of the African slave trade), and others.
Rusty Pritchard, editor of Creation Care magazine and National Outreach Director for the Evangelical Environmental Network, will lead the conference’s “God’s Green Kingdom” track, addressing the connections between theology, environment, and human societies. The track will also feature Steven Bouma-Prediger, one of the world’s leading scholars of theology, ethics, and the environment, and Scott Sabin, the executive director of Floresta, an evangelical development agency focusing on microenterprise and reforestation.
The conference’s other multi-disciplinary tracks include “The Promise of Shalom” and
“Doubting Jesus,” plus a host of tracks centered on more specific disciplines and professions. You can go ahead and download the 1.8 Mb conference brochure here
or visit the conference website for more information.
Climate Change: Making Poverty Permanent?
September 2, 2008
Despite working in the field of creation care for over fifteen years, I had, until recently, been marginally aware of the implications of climate change. Floresta’s work with reforestation kept me focused, and I rationalized that whether climate change was real or not, it wouldn’t change what we were doing. We would still help the rural poor to fight deforestation and poverty. There was no need to focus on something as controversial as climate change. After all, I had donors to placate.
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. Read more
Christian Environmentalism: Debunking The Myths
May 9, 2008
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).
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
When I first got involved at the interface of Christian development work and the Christian environmental movement fifteen years ago, voices were few and the audience skeptical. Thankfully, that is rapidly changing. There is a ground-swell of Christians who see care for creation as a vital part of their walk with Christ. However, as I talk to people, I still hear three common myths, which I will address in turn.
MYTH 1: ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN WILL CAUSE YOU TO WORSHIP THE CREATION INSTEAD OF THE CREATOR.
I have always found this puzzling. Wilderness and nature have the opposite effect on me. My involvement has taught me about the incredible intricacy and complexity of God’s creation, reminding me of His attributes and my own humble place. “What is man that you are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4). It is probably no accident that so many of us became Christians while at camp, where, as we learned of God’s love for us, we could look up and see that “the Heavens declare the glory of God.” (Ps. 19:1). Or where, as we sat in humility, like Job, somewhere inside us a voice asked “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” (Job 38:4). For centuries, creation has been understood to be part of God’s general revelation, something that He called good, and which according to Paul, provides enough evidence of Him to leave us without excuse.
Indeed, I have never met a Christian who was tempted to worship creation. Instead I have met many Christian biologists and ecologists who have helped me to rediscover awe, wonder and mystery in creation, and to see the signature of the Creator in unexpected places. Far from straying from the Bible, one of the things that surprised me was how much these scientists used scripture and relied on it in their understanding of our role in taking care of the earth.
MYTH 2: YOU CAN’T CARE ABOUT BOTH PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT.
At Floresta, it was our concern for the poor and hungry that led us inevitably towards caring for their environment. In our affluence, Americans have often been shielded from the consequences of our environmental decisions. If water is scarce or contaminated we can pay to pipe it across the country and purify it. If soil is degraded we can pay for fertilizers and amendments. The cost of seafood goes up, but you can still find your favorite delicacy. Because we are buffered from direct feedback, we tend to forget that
the environment is our life-support system.
But the poor immediately feel the effects of environmental degradation, whether through drought induced by climate change, chronic diarrhea due to contaminated water, malaria epidemics exacerbated by deforestation, or myriad other examples. Any response to the needs of poor people that hopes to be sustainable must consider the environment. Conversely, in the developing world, any sustainable conservation effort must consider the needs of the poor. I hope to be exploring this relationship between poverty and the environment more deeply in future issues of this magazine. People and creation are part of the same system, and intimately connected
MYTH 3: DEEP DOWN THIS IS ALL ABOUT A POLITICAL AGENDA.
There are policy issues with immense bearing on the health of creation, which I believe that we should take very seriously. However, much of what is going on around the globe transcends politics, or defies easy political classification. For example, environmentalism is often depicted as being against private property. Yet at Floresta we have found ourselves advocating for property rights. Poor farmers who have the right to use wood and products from trees they plant will be much more likely to plant and care for them in the first place. Similarly poor farmers are more effective stewards of land that they are assured of being able to use in the future. But in other situations, government protection might make most sense.
The idea that stewardship and conservation are part of a liberal agenda seems ludicrous in much of the developing world. I remember the shock on our Dominican director’s face when I first tried to explain the suspicion with which many of our American donors regarded the environmental aspects of our work. The issues just don’t line up the same in Latin America of Africa. Being free of the political baggage that we carry here in the US, many of our brothers and sisters of in the developing world are way ahead of us in their understanding of stewardship. Americans who are not ready to change votes or party affiliations can still be good stewards and creation care advocates. There are dozens of lifestyle choices that have nothing to do with politics. All of us can live more simply, drive less, recycle, buy food locally, etc. In our churches we can bring attention to the scriptural basis for stewardship—many Bible studies exist. We can encourage our churches and workplaces to reduce their own consumption and waste. And we can support organizations like A Rocha, Care of Creation, Marah International, or Floresta, which balance the focus on politics by working directly in endangered or vulnerable corners of creation.
God has called all of us to be stewards of the earth and in so doing to love our neighbors. There is a place for all of us to respond to Him.
Don’t Write Off Tree Planting
April 24, 2008
A lot of attention, not all of it complimentary, has been given to the trend for celebrities and others to plant trees to offset their “carbon footprint.” While some congratulate this effort, others have likened it to the infamous practice of buying indulgences to offset your sins. All agree that it is, at best, a partial solution to climate change.
But the effort should not be so quickly discounted. Fighting climate change is only a small part of the story. There are many other good reasons to plant trees, especially in the tropics. Floresta, the ministry which I direct, began planting trees nearly twenty five years ago, when we realized that deforestation was a major contributor to rural poverty in poor countries. The link between trees and poverty may seem obscure at first, but there is a remarkable connection between the two. Though largely hidden from our sight and consciousness, farmers working at or near the subsistence level still make up a huge proportion of the world’s population. Many of them, working with crude hand tools, eke their living from rocky hillsides, while walking for hours to get water and firewood. Among the poorest of the poor, they lag in almost every area of human development. Their soil and their water are their only assets, the only things they have on which to build a life.
And their soil and water are dependent upon the health of their watershed—upon the forests upstream and the trees in their communities. Trees are vital for preventing soil erosion, and can even help to build the soil by fixing nitrogen, bringing buried nutrients to the surface and by contributing leaf litter and other organic matter to the soil. Where the trees have been stripped from the hillsides, massive soil erosion follows, robbing the poor farmer of one of her most valuable possessions.
Water, availability and quality are also dependent on the health of the forest. Absence of trees results in a decrease in the local rainfall. This is magnified by the fact that when the rain does fall, there is little to stop it from immediately running off before it is able to soak into the ground. Where the soil is protected by a canopy of trees to break the fall of precipitation, leaf litter to slow runoff, and roots to increase soil permeability, water is able to infiltrate and replenish local aquifers. On the other hand, on uncovered soil, water can simply be the engine for erosion and downstream flashfloods. If the water does not soak in, the water table will drop and the local environment will become drier. This is one of the contributing factors to desertification and the increasing incidence of drought in many places. The farmers of many countries can point to rivers that were once reliable sources of water but which today flow only during heavy rains—and at those times, flood higher than ever in the past. These farmers often spend hours a day simply carrying water to and from their homes. Where the land has been stripped of trees a desert is soon created. But it is a reversible process!
The trees also act as a filter. Studies have shown a direct correlation between the absence of forest cover and the presence of E. coli and other contaminants. This especially impacts the rural poor who cannot afford to have water piped into the home or to buy bottled water to drink. Instead family members, especially women, often walk hours to fetch water and additional hours to collect the firewood necessary to purify water by boiling it.
Moreover, as firewood becomes scarcer and its collection costs more time and money, people are less likely to boil their water or even adequately cook their food, increasing health risk and contributing to the downward cycle of desperation. Families who already have no safety net are forced to take greater risks with their well being. There is also a direct correlation between deforestation and a number of infectious diseases. Recent studies show a direct link between malaria and deforestation, and in some locations it has been shown to be one of the most important variables in the incidence of leishmaniasis and hookworm.
Ultimately, deforestation is one of the root causes of rural emigration, as people leave the unproductive countryside in hope of a job in the overcrowded cities, or perhaps in the United States. One of the reasons that we began planting trees and working with poor farmers in the state of Oaxaca ten years ago was the realization that much of our immigration problem in Southern California is rooted in declining opportunities in the mountains of Oaxaca—a state that has been referred to as the most eroded spot on earth.
But as we have happily found, this situation can be reversed. Land can become productive again. At Floresta we have seen rivers and streams restored, and farm productivity dramatically increase. Families, split by lack of opportunity and illegal immigration, are thrilled by the opportunity to stay together. God’s plan of redemption and restoration can be graphically demonstrated as we work together with the poor to reclaim degraded lands.
So don’t discount planting trees. By all means let’s make the big lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions. But let’s plant trees too. And as you plant trees to offset what you can’t change, make sure you that the organization you are working with is doing more than merely sticking trees in the ground. By finding an organization that is working in collaboration with the poor to plant trees and restore degraded lands, your tree planting can do much more than assuage your guilt. It can literally give sustenance and health to God’s precious children.
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).
