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Faith and Environmental Stewardship
By John Shellito
Feb. 7, 2008
Faith to me is an expectation of things hoped for. It is a belief that the
world can and should be a place where everyone can be appreciated as someone
who is infinitely beautiful and who was made in the image of God, with a soul
and also with free will to sin and deviate from God’s path. I believe everyone
is equal in the eyes of God, and beyond being equal, everyone is immensely
cherished. You don’t even have to do anything to be loved by God. God loves
everyone.
I believe that Jesus sought to reach out to the destitute, the powerless,
and the excluded, and although he used some strong words in his ministry (as we
have seen today) he did so out of a desire to see people change their attitude
towards those who are poor and powerless.
I believe part of my responsibility as a Christian is in loving others as
Christ loved and gave himself for me. This includes not only those who are
suffering now, but also those who might be suffering 100 years from now. I find
myself motivated and inspired every time I pray to the Lord to bring “thy
kingdom come” and make “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”
I believe that Jesus’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” means we
are not only commanded to love ourselves, to evade pitfalls such as fear,
self-hatred, and self-pity, but we are also commanded to love others, all
others, regardless of nationality, physical appearance, age, or race. Whether
we pass by them when we are on the road or if we purchase something that they
grew, our neighbors are those with whom we interact.
I believe that many of the problems in today’s world stem from the fact that
we are increasingly separated from the people who grow our food, or make our
clothes. Advertisements are highly effective in convincing us that we are
inadequate and incomplete if we do not continually buy more. This perpetual
scarcity and competition for status means that we are able to enter into
violent economic relationships with others, as we lose sight of the people who
produced our food, clothing, and cars. Structural violence is a vivid term used
to describe the reality that our economic system can keep people in essentially
permanent positions of hunger and hopelessness.
I believe in preventative measures, and as much as I find responding to
human need gratifying, I believe our eventual environmental solution has to be
proactive and systematic. There are many people who voluntarily choose a
lifestyle that has a small environmental impact, and as much as I admire them,
their effort will be in vain if everyone does not work together to change our
energy infrastructure and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.
I believe climate change is a collective action problem. Human ingenuity can
overcome countless obstacles, but once a species is gone or once sea levels
have risen, we can never go back. The changes are irreversible. We are playing
with a system that is bigger than ourselves and largely beyond our control.
I find immense personal gratification in helping others directly. This
happens most noticeably when others are in dire need. However, for me it is
even more rewarding when I can address the root cause of the suffering and find
a systematic solution. The best systematic solution I can see to global warming
is to decrease carbon emissions through collective action and lobbying to
invest more money in clean energy. If I am only responding to those who cry out
after the damage is done, I remain a victim of global circumstances, rather
than being proactive in preventing future suffering.
Returning to my beliefs, I believe that Jesus’s command to “love thy
neighbor as thyself” means we are not only commanded to love ourselves, to
evade pitfalls such as fear, self-hatred, and self-pity, but we are also
commanded to love others, all others, regardless of nationality, physical
appearance, age, or race. Whether we pass by them when we are on the road or if
we buy something that they have grown, our neighbors are those with whom we
interact.
The violent oppression of our current economic system can lead to a myth
that environmentalism as a “rich man’s problem”, something I care about because
I can afford to go on hikes and because I want to continue to enjoy God’s
creation. I would like to clarify that this is not about the aesthetics of a
mountain view—this is about people being able to feed, clothe, and educate
their children 50 and 100 years from now. I’m not struggling on a day to day
basis to meet my basic needs. I don’t even have children yet. But if I do, I
hope I can give them a letter apologizing for the fact that I did not do more
to prevent environmental loss now, because I believe it will have a
catastrophic effect on their generation as well as mine. Preventing climate
change is an issue of social justice as well as insurance against possible
catastrophe.
Although I believe that our current CO2 emissions levels will raise ocean
levels by as much as 20 feet in the next 30 years, no one can know for sure
until it either happens or does not, and if it ever happens, we will only know
for sure when it is too late. The seashore will be gone and millions of
livelihoods will be lost as ecosystems and agricultural fields are flooded.
For me, this is a matter of believing that we are at risk, and taking action
to manage the risks associated with climate change, because we only have one
earth. If we make a mistake, we cannot start over again on another planet.
Halting the rapid rise in global temperatures is the only way I can see to
decrease our collective chances of debilitating loss.
The most tragic part of this possible scenario is what could happen outside
the U.S. Catastrophe is always much worse for those who are scraping by on the
margin, who already feel the sharp pain of hunger every day, and who would have
nothing to fall back on if a flood or drought destroyed their land and crops.
The thought of this kind of disaster reminds me of the widespread suffering
portrayed in the Grapes of Wrath and experienced in the Gulf coast after
Katrina. In the midst of massive suffering, conventional mechanisms for social
welfare became overwhelmed and broke down, leaving individuals to face brutal
hardship alone. This situation is one that I hope to avoid by offsetting carbon
emissions and working for clean energy legislation, but still, my own sin of
not doing more to fight climate change now could lead to increased suffering on
the part of those who are already struggling daily to survive, and who would be
unable to deal with catastrophe if it did arrive.
A good friend of mine went to Ghana to teach English. While he was there,
the elders of the town reported that in the last 10 years, the weather has
become more erratic than it ever has been before.
This brings us to the reading, Luke 12, 42-48: Are we working to keep
our global household in order? Or, are we drinking and making merry while we
still can? Are we abusing future generations by leaving them without adequate
natural resources? Are we bullying the people who make our goods in sweatshops,
who are (in effect) our modern menservents? Above all, are we being good
stewards of God’s creation?
Jesus lived in a world where people could not have a global environmental
impact. Everything was local. Unfortunately, it seems that advances in
industrial technology have given us the power to irreversibly defile the earth
on a scale never witnessed before.
The speed with which our world moves today is disorienting. Instead of
following a donkey into Jerusalem with palms, we are riding a motorcycle at
full throttle with our iPod blasting, while we watch billboard advertisements
that are artfully designed to make us feel incomplete without buying something
for ourselves or for those whom we love.
I grew up in a fluffy and largely materialistic town. For a while after my
first reading of the “Summary for Decision Makers” portion of the Millenium
Ecosystem Assessment for my environmental economics course, I felt a certain
amount of frustration at my parents for leaving me a world that is already in
the process of being irreversibly destroyed. Economics professors describe
market failures leading to pollution as “externalities”, but the problems still
remain: over 60% of the earths natural resources are being used unsustainably.
In some ways, I felt angry at my parents— if they professed to love me, why
didn’t they do something about this sooner, or at least tell me that it was
happening?
Of course, I now understand how much my parents (along with most other
members of society today) are in the process of being absolutely blindsided by
the colossal and yet deceptively slow changes going on. My parents worked hard
to give me opportunities for education, but could they have really known that
the U.S. might be capable of pouring enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
to melt Greenland and destroy all ocean beaches and all oceanfront property in
one summer?
Climate change is a systematic problem that needs a systematic solution. The
prices of all goods needs to reflect their long term environmental cost, most
noticeably in terms of carbon emissions, but also with respect to use of
irreplaceable natural resources.
The solution I see is that individuals, churches, and other organizations
need to offset their carbon emissions and encourage others to do the same until
carbon neutrality is phased into law for all goods. We need to talk to the EPA
about regulating carbon-offset companies so that offset money is used to
implement projects that would not happen without the provided funding. I
believe the U.S.’s current discount rate of 7% for natural resources
undervalues the future worth of environmental assets and thus unfairly reduces
the welfare of future generations. I believe we need to preserve natural
resources existing now with a discount rate equal to the risk-neutral,
inflation-adjusted rate of real GDP growth per capita, at around 1%. The U.S.
also needs to also ensure that all imported goods are certified by outside
agencies as “carbon-neutral” and “fair trade”. This could also be accomplished
by levying a tariff on environmentally irresponsible goods so that their price
tag reflects their true social and environmental cost. The revenues from the
tariff could go towards preservation of natural resources abroad or investment
in more clean energy infrastructure.
My hope is that carbon neutrality will provide appropriate incentives for
people to change their consumption habits. If people are equally happy spending
$20 on a haircut as they are spending $20 on a hat, requiring carbon neutrality
would mean that the hats would become more expensive as their environmental
cost is incorporated into their price tag. Thus through the market system,
people would naturally shift to a more environmentally responsible lifestyle as
they consume more haircuts and fewer hats.
I have a confession to make before we end. I didn’t offset the 45,000 miles
I put on my father’s 1990 Camry until very recently. Perhaps it took some
thinking on the topic before I realized the necessity of action. Climatic
catastrophe represents a massive risk to all of humanity. Companies will not
solve the problem unless there is a market for socially responsible goods.
Destitute individuals living on the margin will not solve the problem because
they cannot afford to stand up for their natural environment: even when they
are surrounded by natural beauty, they often need to meet the immediate needs
of their family. Part of the challenge is that the people best equipped to
address the problem of global warming are also those who are probably least
affected by it—smart and motivated individuals living in the developed world.
Because U.S. consumers have the knowledge and the power to enact change, we are
the ones responsible for initiating it. Until I can help enact systematic
change, (instead of simply offsetting my own driving habits), I am left with my
own complicity in global warming: I am not being a good steward. I am bullying
the rest of the world. I am drinking and making merry while the household of
the earth falls apart. I stand before you as a sinner, who needs God’s
forgiveness and God’s love in order to change directions and do the challenging
work of loving future generations as well as this one. And I thank you for
being here with me.
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