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.
