Reconnect With the Earth

This is an article from World Vision, “Reconnect with the Earth”, by Peter Harris, an ordained minister and environmentalist.  He is president and founder of A Rocha (www.arocha.org), an international conservation organization working to show God's love for all creation.  He is the author of Under the Bright Wings (Regent Publishing):

Ecology is simply the study of how organisms interact with one another and with their non-living environment. In essence, it is the study of connection in nature. Today, however, we live in a time of great disconnection.  For example, companies often conceal how the contents of their products were made, which makes our purchasing choices seem void of consequences.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that the consumptive lifestyle choices of those of us in the Western world have tremendous environmental consequences. This includes unprecedented climate change and the serious loss of diversity among plant and animal species. These, in turn, have dire implications for the world's poor who depend most directly on healthy ecosystems for their well-being. Indeed, if we take caring for our global neighbours seriously, we need to reconsider how our lifestyles impact theirs.

The Old Testament prophets were remarkably ahead of their time in bearing witness to our destructive impact on the environment even 3,000 years ago. Hosea takes us in one unflinching leap from social evils to environmental catastrophe:  “Hear the word of the Lord… There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery… Because of this the land mourns … the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying” (Hosea 43-3 NIV). Isaiah wrote: “The earth dries up and withers. The world wastes away and withers. The great leaders of the earth waste away” (Isaiah 24:4 GWT).

The connection between human choices, environmental distress and the suffering of the poor have never been more apparent. The fundamental injustice of climate change is that the poor suffer the worst from its effects, yet they contribute far less than the rich to the carbon emissions that are driving the process.

The droughts of sub-Saharan Africa and the floods of Bangladesh and Mozambique, for example, are disrupting planting seasons and harvesting. It is not surprising then that the United Nations estimates that by 2010, environmental refugees (those displaced because of the environmental degredation) will outnumber refugees from conflict.

In light of such sober realities, what we need is a renewed resolve to work for a sustainable future. This is a time of tremendous opportunity. We can begin with a commitment to reconnect to our human choices to their consequences around the world. We can each start this process by taking small and big steps to live more lightly on the Earth, with the moral conviction that these steps are not only good for the planet itself, but also for its inhabitants.

A friend of mine recently took the radical step of downsizing from his North American “McMansion” to a home with the square footage of his former garage. For those with the will to change, resources abound with tips on how to mitigate one's environmental “footprint” by either reducing one's daily consumption or making greener consumer choices.

In the final analysis, our choices do matter. Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, rightly states, “Everything has to do with something else, and if you follow it far enough, it has to do with you and God.”