472 Global Warming, Part 5
“Clothman, tell me if this isn’t weird,” my friend Tiger said, “if I buy organic milk, I can’t recycle the jug because it is packaged in a non-recyclable container. But if I buy the non-organic milk I can recycle the jug.”
Doing the right thing isn’t always easy.
Pioneers introduced knapweed from Eurasia because it produced great honey only to discover it was a noxious weed that overpowers every other plant near it. Biologists imported gall flies to control knapweed but that caused deer mice populations to escalate because they feed on the gall fly larva. Deer mice carry the hantavirus so more deer mice has resulted in increased cases of hantavirus in humans which is fatal in about one out of three cases – a high price for good honey.
Every action creates a reaction.
My interest in global warming is rooted in my dual passions for the environment and social justice. The Bible says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). Not surprisingly, God often admonishes us to put social justice and creation care at the top of our agendas. That sounds simple enough – right? Wrong.
My global warming research revealed that championing social justice will actually exasperate our problems with creation.
Consider these staggering statistics. Some 2 billion people worldwide live in poverty housing. More than 850 million people in the world go hungry. Half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. Some 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to water.
These are not mere numbers; they represent women and men, boys and girls like you and I in most every way. My heart literally aches at the injustice that is indiscriminately spread across the world. There is no escape (nor do I want one) from the responsibility every affluent person and organization in the world carries to help eradicate this massive suffering and poverty.
But, here’s the kicker. There would be a colossal impact upon the world’s resources and ecosystem if fair and reasonable power, housing, food, water and transportation were suddenly being provided to an additional two billion people.
We are seeing an example of this with the emerging economies of China and India. China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. It has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years and every week to 10 days adds another coal-fired power plant that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas. India is expected to add about 200 such plants in the next few years. The Kyoto treaty greenhouse-gas cuts will be swamped.
Global warming and social justice? Global warming or social justice? Which is it? Must we abandon social justice in order to achieve creation care?
When faced with a perplexing dilemma Jesus’ friends were without a clue of how to proceed. Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).
So the answer really is quite simple, we must to pursue both social justice and creation care with total gusto and trust that in the process of doing the right thing God will provide solutions that are beyond what we can think or imagine right now.
Who knows, maybe someday we’ll be able to have our organic milk and recycle the container too.
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