Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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Can one be an evangelical, for example, and a good environmentalist?
Having known many who are both, I can say that the
answer is “yes.” But reconciling religious doctrine at the extreme
with the goals of conservation requires some heroic intellectual
acrobatics. On one side, belief that the end times are near tends
to make extreme fundamentalists careless stewards of our forests,
soils, wildlife, air, water, seas, and climate. It is a great deal easier to
be concerned about conserving the Creation if one assumes that:
(a) Earth is God’s handiwork; (b) we are called to be good stewards
of it and pass it on undiminished; and (c) humankind will be
around for a while to enjoy nature and perhaps even be uplifted
by it. Fundamentalists’ belief in the end times, in other words, has
the paradoxical effect of justifying behavior that brings on the end
times, but of a sort with no authentic Biblical basis. The destruction
of the Creation because of hard-heartedness and indifference
to life is a sin against God and a crime against humanity. Further,
careless talk about the imminence of Armageddon suggests a
darker fascination with death, militarization, and violence discordant
with the ideas of loving one’s neighbor and the blessedness
of the peacemakers.
Environmentalists, too, are in a quandary. For decades they have
documented in great detail the decline of one life form or another
and the destruction of ecosystems, but they are often tongue-tied
on the deeper questions about the causes and forces driving the
destruction of nature and climate change. They talk, instead, about
changing economic policy, enforcing laws and regulations, adopting
better technology, and improving science education, assuming
that no further improvement of mind and spirit is necessary.
Economist Herman Daly once said, “Affl icted with an infi nite
itch, modern man is scratching in the wrong place” (Valuing the
Earth, 1996, p. 155). Until we do, however, the deeper motivations
and the deeper causes of our ecological problems will elude us,
and so, too, will the broad public support necessary to address
them. Without a clearer understanding of why people seek the