Christian Environmentalism: The Jungle and the Garden
The Church of Gaia
| August 19, 2006
| Tim
Christians, in my experience, generally care about the environment.
Like everyone, we want clean water and air. Fewer of us smoke. Personally, I'm grateful for National Parks and greenspace. When hiking, I take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints. Not infrequently, I pick up trash I find in public and throw it away. It causes me pain to see identical rows of houses put up, and I'm actually angry when I see hundred-year-old trees ripped down.
At this point in my life, for what it's worth, I probably have a smaller ecological footprint than 90% of the people who accuse Christians of not being environmentalist enough. I drive a car which gets nearly 30mpg. I've volunteered for the Sierra Club. I sometimes line-dry my clothes. I hand-wash dishes. I conserve water. When feasible, I try to live near the place I work. I used to scrupulously sort my recyclables until I learned that they simply tossed them all into the same garbage truck. And I once spent hours trying to find a place that would recycle my brown glass bottles. (Finally, someone reminded me they're not worth recycling because they're made out of silica -- sand, basicly -- one of the world's most plentiful substances. Duh! Well, I tried, anyway.)
Most Christians I know aren't that different from myself, and many are even more pro-environment than I am. At worst, Christians just fit into the pattern and behavior of the general culture around them. And for what it's worth, right now, a large group of evangelical leaders have signed onto a pro-environmentalist platform.
So where do people get the idea that Christians are anti-environmentalist?
For one, there are people (on the left) who go around spreading lies. For example, Bill Moyers used faked quotes (he has apologized now) to imply that Christians believed they should pollute to bring Jesus back. (I kid you not.) And I've even had comments on this blog which have echoed that absurd idea: this means some are indeed drinking that kool-aid.
(For those of you who are not Christians, the idea is stupid because Jesus said even he wasn't privy to the exact schedule of his return: only his father in heaven knew the day and the hour, which apparently had been set already. And polluting is never even mentioned in the bible, much less linked with the idea of somehow "bringing Jesus back".)
But, even without such lies, the core problem is that we Christians don't approach the environment the same way "the world" does. We have an altogether different outlook, one which is apparently not conducive to certain agendas.
Listening to those who call themselves "environmentalists", one often gets the impression they believe earth would be better off without humanity. Why, we're a cancer on planet earth! We're growing out of control! Earth would be better off if there were NO human influence at all: a vast, untamed jungle.
In contrast, in the book of Genesis, God creates the earth and puts Adam -- the word simply means "man" and was a common noun, not a specific name -- into a garden. Not a jungle, but a garden.
What is a garden?
A garden is a place where natural beauty lives and is enhanced by a guiding intelligence, a place where variety exists to serve and please the mind of a higher, controlling power. It's not a place of ecological devastation, but rather it's place where nature is nurtured, cultivated, and ordered.
Now the LORD God planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed... The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2)
Man was put in charge of this ordered collection of nature. Again, his role wasn't to trash or defoliate the place, but to keep it beautiful and balanced. In the Christian view, on earth, nature wasn't desiged to live separate from man, nor man separate from nature; instead, man's purpose was to keep things ordered and balanced.
Indeed, here is God's directive to man:
Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. (Genesis 1:28)
The key word here is "subdue", which means to bring into service of another purpose. Man is not to destroy or pollute nature, but man is to bring rational order to the place, to make it tamer, more pleasant. Today, "rule over" is often taken as a negative term, but it doesn't mean that at all: When God "ruled over" earth, he planted a garden.
That's our example: a garden is nature, subdued.
(But hey, some root for hurricanes.)
So the problem is that the secular and Christian view of the environment are at odds with each other. Both want to preserve nature and natural beauty, but beyond that, they have completely different values.
One has an ideal vision of earth covered by a vast, untamed jungle covering the earth, with very few or no human beings, living in primitive circumstances. The other believes that God created earth to serve higher purposes: specifically that God, being loving, created sentient beings as objects of generosity, and that earth serves as a home for such creatures.
In contrast, "greens" want people to stop from reproducing, or even depopulate the planet. They have spread all kinds of dishonest stories to make people agree with them: we're running out of food; overpopulation is killing Africa; primitive societies are happier, greener and cleaner; DDT devastates the environment.
Yet these are all false statements. DDT did not devastate the environment, but its total absence has killed millions upon millions. Africa is not overpopulated, but has a relatively low population density [1] -- her problems stem from bad government, not overpopulation. We're not running out of food: to the contrary, food production has been increasing faster than population [2] and modern people have more food per person than at any time in human history. Primitive societies are warlike, not peaceful, and have a huge per-person ecological footprint. (Who do you think is deforesting the Amazon? City dwellers?)
Moreover, as societies reach a high level of civilization, population growth appears to self-limit, requiring no coercive measures at all: US population is roughly level, while Europe's population is declining rapidly. Germans may be an endangered species in a few decades.
Christians certainly don't believe the world is perfect: we're not here to defend the status quo. But we believe the core problem is immorality ("sin"), not a lack of government. Look at the killing in Darfur: is it an 'environmental' catastrophe? No: once again, government is killing its own citizens, as governmens seem awfully fond of doing. Yet every crisis environmentalists propose has only one answer: more and more government. Lacking belief in God, they demand a human-stand-in, even if it has a horrifying track record.
So the upshot of this is that Christians don't usually pay lip-service to the various causes by which leftist judge a person's morality and worth. For example, I won't give money to Greenpeace because they use it primarily for political causes which I believe are basicly anti-human: banning insecticides which save African lives, convincing starving people not to eat donated American grains because it was genetically improved; stopping vitamin-deficient people around the world from growing vitamin-enriched 'golden rice' which has the potential to save millions of lives.
But hey, that's not a big deal: most of our critics don't do much about the environment either. But they do vote for left-leaning candidates. (Which is all you have to do to prove you truly care.)
So let me leave you with this image: The world wasn't created as some vast, unpopulated and overgrown jungle, swarming with parasites and mosquitos, to be seen and enjoyed only by anacondas and deer. God loves nature, but God also created man for a purpose, and earth is our home, our garden. Let's keep it beautiful, clean, and well-managed, but remember that it, too, serves a higher purpose.
[1] African population density: According to this source, African has about 25.9 humans/sq. km. Using this list, that would put Africa, as a whole, in the bottom one-quarter of lowest population density regions of the world.
While I agree with your general point both with regard to theistic environmentalism and the problems with groups like Greenpeace, I'm not so sure about your sub points, particularly in regards to DDT.
For starters, mosquitos have a shorter generational cycle than humans, and produce more offspring per generation.
So they're going to develop resistance to insecticides very very quickly. (They've even been shown to develop behavioral adaptations in just a few generations.) We discontinued DDT just as resistance was starting to develop, and if we hadn't we likely would have seen a dramatic
decrease in benefits for DDT and no real reduction in harm caused.
DDT accumulates in fat. And it has a tendency to bioaccumulate and move up the food chain, and to stick around for a long time. It's hard to calculate the exact harm of insecticides to a population because diseases like cancer don't have a single characteristic cause like malaria does.
CHRONIC TOXICITY
DDT has caused chronic effects on the nervous system, liver, kidneys,and immune systems in experimental animals (3, 4). Effects on the nervous system observed in test animals include: tremors in rats at doses of 16-32 mg/kg/day over 26 weeks; tremors in mice at doses of 6.5-13mg/kg/day over 80-140 weeks; changes in cellular chemistry in the central nervous system of monkeys at doses of 10 mg/kg/day over 100 days, and loss of equilibrium in monkeys at doses of 50 mg/kg/day for up to 6 months (3).
from E X T O X N E T
More effective and environmentally friendly methods target specific breeding places rather than arial spraying (typically, still water isolated from large bodies of water. Tires, bird baths, etc. rather than huge lakes and swamps which typically contain dragonfly larvae and other creatures that eat mosquitos. )
Personally, I've always wondered; since only female mosquitos bite, would it be possible instead of killing mosquitos, to alter the population by releasing genetically modified males? The intent is not be to kill mosquitos so much as keep them from biting people, after all. And if you take that approach there's less selective pressure working against you. Some mosquitos consume nectar rather than blood, for instance (and can't digest blood.) If you could flood a mosquito population with those genes, maybe you could wean mosquitos off blood permanently, with no need for repeated spraying?
As far as food production increasing faster than population; that's true. But there are a few issues. Hybrid crops require an influx of new DNA from wild-type organisms every few years to prevent insects from adapting to the crops. The genetic diversity through distance present in the wild is replaced by diversity-over-time for a homogenous crop. So maintaining current production requires protection of those places which supply new wild type genes for us to work with. Without this, modern agriculture would collapse. It's kind of a free-rider problem since the nations which export the germ plasm for new crops usually don't benefit much economically from this, and have little incentive to preserve this resource that the world benefits from.
While I'm not fundamentally against genetic modification of foods in the same way that I'm not fundamentally against driving a car, I'm concerned about the rate of change these foods undergo, in the same way that I'd be concerned about a car driving too fast. People tend to avoid foods that they're allergic to. With genetically modified foods, this becomes more difficult because you don't know what's in your tomato. Systems for detecting potential problems tend to be inadequate; for example, IIRC Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans weren't tested with roundup applied to them, as they would be if used by farmers.
The 'golden rice' which produces beta carotene seems more or less like a publicity stunt for the sake of promoting genetically modified foods.
The target market for a genetically modified tomato is the farmer who grows the food first and the supermarkets which purchase it second. Consumers come in last in this reckoning. The trend often doesn't lead to healthier food, regardless of whether the produce is developed conventionally or using more modern methods. For example; Since juice orange growers tend to get paid according to the sugar content of their oranges, they focus on developing high-sugar oranges. One grocery got into an argument with its supplier because the furanocoumarin levels in the celery caused their workers to break out in rashes from handling it.
I'm not saying that government intervention is the answer. but these are things to consider and look out for.
And once again, I've totally gone off on a tangent from the main point of your article. Sorry about that.
Regarding African overpopulation; I haven't studied this area much, but over-population is a relative term. If we in N. America tried to live using 18th century farming techniques, we'd quickly find our population unsustainable, and we'd destroy the land. Overpopulation may just be the flip side of living on land which has not been made sufficiently productive through good maintenance, technology, elimination of corruption etc. to the point that the productive capacity of the land is reduced and the current population can't be sustained.
The Sahara desert is expanding, decreasing the carrying capacity of the surrounding area. Some have speculated that the expansion is due to overfarming of fragile area near the edge of the desert. source
source
If this is true then from this point of view those parts of Africa would be 'overpopulated' since the present population could not live sustainably on them. Or the land may be "under-maintained" which is a different view of the same thing.
You may be right about Africa being underpopulated. I'm just saying that population density, by itself, is not proof of that.
Perhaps they need to garden more?
I enjoy your comments dearly, Ryan, but I'm also troubled that they're often so utterly self-refuting.
First, regarding DDT: We're supposed to believe that as it was banned, mosquitos were developing resistence. Cite, please?
Second, even if we're charitable and grant you that: So what? Bacteria are currently developing resistence to antibiotics. Should we then abandon them also? Try to apply your logic again to this example, Ryan, and you'll note it's fallacious.
Third, just a clarification: I'm not advocating the vast overspraying of the 1960s and 1970s which your argument seems to assume. I'm not even arguing for the targeted spaying you suggest (though perhaps that would be helpful too). I'm advocating selective small-dose usages on surfaces (shown to last for years), rather than ineffective mosquito-net solutions.
Fourth, regarding DDT safety: You cite data showing it could have toxic effects. Let's assume that's true for the moment. But where is the evidence that the supposed "hard to calculate" harm of, say, "cancer" outweighs the numbers killed by malaria? (See more below.) Otherwise, your case here seems to be more argumentation through vague, poorly-researched fear than fact.
Fifth, did you even read the section you cited? I'm not an expert, but the dosages they used there sound tremendous: feeding a monkey 10 mg per day over 100 days? I have to remember to take a horse-pill-sized multivitamin daily to get an equivalent amount of B-12 in my system daily.
Sixth, I charge you with selective quoting for omitting significant disproof of harm to humans in the source you cited, and for omitting evidence agreeing with my previous criticism. Specifically:
Dose levels at which effects were observed in test animals are very much higher than those which may be typically encountered by humans... Analysis of U. S. market basket surveys showed... a daily intake of approximately 0.00003 mg/kg/day.
Oh my. 0.00003 mg/kg/day, which would mean about 0.0027 at the peak, worst oversprayed period in the 1960s.
Why, that's only, lesse... just a bit under 30 thousand times as much -- and millions of times much as we'd get today, if we brought it back correctly -- as the amount required in dogs to produce the "main effect" the article seems concerned about.
And here's the omitted evidence regarding human toxicity in meaningful doses:
Acute effects likely in humans due to low to moderate exposure may include nausea, diarrhea, increased liver enzyme activity, irritation... While adults appear to tolerate moderate to high ingested doses of up to 280 mg/kg, a case of fatal poisoning was seen in a child who ingested one ounce of a 5% DDT:kerosene solution.
That's quite a high dosage. And let's remember not to feed our young children raw DDT, mixed with kerosene, eh?
Adverse effects on the liver, kidney and immune system due to DDT exposure have not been demonstrated in humans in any of the studies which have been conducted to date... The evidence for mutagenicity and genotoxicity is contradictory... The evidence regarding the carcinogenicity of DDT is equivocal... The available epidemiological evidence regarding DDT's carcinogenicity in humans, when taken as a whole, does not suggest that DDT and its metabolites are carcinogenic in humans at likely dose levels... Acute [i.e. massive] human exposure data and animal studies reveal that DDT can affect the nervous system, liver, kidney...
In other words, studies haven't shown clear, meaningful, repeatable evidence of human toxicity under normal or "likely" usage.
Why do you do this? Was your point supposed to be that DDT was harmful? If so, then you've certainly cited passages misleadingly -- intentionally or not. And if not, then why cite something that, out of context, certainly gives the opposite impression to the careless reader?
You seemed to imply that the main DDT risk was cancer -- yet even the source you cited clearly says otherwise:
The available epidemiological evidence regarding DDT's carcinogenicity in humans, when taken as a whole, does not suggest that DDT and its metabolites are carcinogenic in humans at likely dose levels. In several epimiological studies, no significant associations were seen between DDT exposure and disease, but in one other study, a weak association was observed. In this latter study, which found a significant association between long-term, high DDT exposures and pancreatic cancers in chemical workers, there were questions raised as to the reliability of the medical records of a large proportion of the cancer cases.
And even if DDT was carcinogenic, the question would only be regarding "long-term, high DDT exposures... in chemical workers" -- not the kind of risks to the millions of consumers your argument must imply, if it is to counterweigh similar risks from malaria, as you suggest.
I apologize: I'd honestly like to get to more of your comments (which look interesting, and like I might agree with them more, BTW), but apparently those first four paragraphs were all I could get to in the allotted time.
I enjoy your comments dearly, Ryan
I enjoy your blog dearly. Reading it beats the heck out of getting productive work done. And I do appreciate your thoroughness very much.
First, regarding DDT: We're supposed to believe that as it was banned, mosquitos were developing resistence. Cite, please?
On the Mechanisms of DDT and Permethrin resistance in Aedes Aegypti. One day old females from Thailand were exposed to 4% DDT impregnated papers
for 30 minutes in WHO standard exposure tubes. These mosquitos had
source
An. culicifacies and An. subpictus in Sri Lanka "highly resistant to DDT"
Frankly, I'd be pretty shocked if we didn't see resistance where DDT had been used for a few decades. (Though there are a number of studies showing that DDT remains very effective in Africa.)
I do apologize, though. I see now that you only took issue with use of DDT in places like Africa where massive death from malaria would make it compelling. (as opposed to America, where zero cases of malaria were acquired within the country from wild mosquitos in 2004)
source
Third, just a clarification: I'm not advocating the vast overspraying of the 1960s and 1970s which your argument seems to assume.
I'm advocating selective small-dose usages on surfaces (shown to last for years)
Okay, that makes more sense.
Fourth, regarding DDT safety: You cite data showing it could have toxic effects. Let's assume that's true for the moment. But where is the evidence that the supposed "hard to calculate" harm of, say, "cancer" outweighs the numbers killed by malaria?
In Africa, where mosquitos are still suceptible and where risk of death is very high, I agree, DDT use makes sense as benefits outweight harms.
which would mean about 0.0027 at the peak, worst oversprayed period in the 1960s.
What do you mean? A quick search suggests that the peak was in 1958. source
After 1959, DDT usage in the U.S. declined greatly, dropping from a peak of approximately 80 million pounds in that year to just under 12 million pounds in the early 1970s.
source
Am I missing somthing?
Regarding animals; I've heard this complaint from a lot from people who look at studies which show rats being fed 100 times as much of a compound as a human would normally be exposed to. The reason this is done is because humans have very long lifespans, and you can't really see what happens to a mouse when it's exposed to a chemical agent over time for 60 years. So you use higher doses and shorter time periods to get an indication of whether the chemical might be harmful. Your body can only repair DNA damage so quickly, and the repair mechanism is imperfect. So you get synergistic effects from exposure to multiple DNA-damaging chemicals in certain cases.
Here's a study demonstrating decreased mental capacity in 15 year olds correlating with DDT levels in their mother's milk, controlled for socioeconomic status.
source
More recent studies of damage at the cellular level from DDE, a metabolite of DDT.
DDT causes cellular DNA damage
Sixth, I charge you with selective quoting for omitting significant disproof of harm to humans in the source you cited, and for omitting evidence agreeing with my previous criticism. Specifically:...does not suggest that DDT and its metabolites are carcinogenic in humans at likely dose levels....
Well, 'likely dose levels' in a country like the United States where the chemical has been "banned" (though still used under some circumstances) are going to be pretty low, and not relevant to conditions in a country where the chemical is actively used. I also assumed dose levels would increase as resistance increases if the chemical was used over a long period. And long term use of DDT tends to result in accumulation because it bioaccumulates and moves up the food chain.
I'll admit that with a little research DDT doesn't seem to accumulate in the brain as much as I expected a fat soluable compound to do. And that it's fairly in line or safer than some other pesticides when I expected modern pesticides to be much safer. (some, like BT toxin, are far safer to the point of being consumable and decomposing rapidly but have to be applied to breeding locations.)
Brilliant post. Generally speaking the social and Christian conservatives have allowed themselves to be falsely labeled as hostile to nature.
But isn't that the secular humanist game? Deny any legitimacy to those with whom you disagree by falsely attacking their motives?
Interesting. Even Greenpeace is doing an aboutface.
Spokesmen for Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), activist environmental groups that have led the effort to ban worldwide use of the pesticide DDT, have admitted to the New York Times that DDT may be necessary and desirable after all.
"South Africa was right to use DDT," said WWF spokesperson Richard Liroff. "If the alternatives to DDT aren't working, as they weren't in South Africa, geez, you've got to use it. In South Africa it prevented tens of thousands of malaria cases and saved lots of lives."
Greenpeace spokesperson Rick Hind agreed. "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it."
source
regarding DDT resistance in mosquitos, my "less than" sign in "less than 1% mortality" seems to have been interpreted as part of an HTML tag and caused some problems. The text should have read;
One day old females from Thailand were exposed to 4% DDT impregnated papers
for 30 minutes in WHO standard exposure tubes. These mosquitos had less than 1% mortality
An. culicifacies and An. subpictus in Sri Lanka "highly resistant to DDT"
NIH research
I'm not an expert, but the dosages they used there sound tremendous: feeding a monkey 10 mg per day over 100 days? I have to remember to take a horse-pill-sized multivitamin daily to get an equivalent amount of B-12 in my system daily.
Okay, we could use a standard of refernce;
one m&m = ~860 mg
So the monkey was given 10 mg/kg of body weight daily and assuming an average weight of about 10 kilos bodyweight for the monkey that's about 100 mg per day or a little less than an eigth of an m&m per day.
The horse pill you take is probably mostly filler, btw.
Though you've already addressed my main concerns by clarifying that you only wanted very targeted use of DDT in areas where malaria is a major problem.
A slightly more accurate calculation, and apologies for the earlier one ( The # of m&ms per pound was from a science experiment. This source is probably more reliable)
candyfavorites.com
450 M&Ms per pound
2.2 lbs per Kg
990 M&Ms per Kg
.001 kg = 1 m&m
1010 mg = 1 m&m
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While I agree with your general point both with regard to theistic environmentalism and the problems with groups like Greenpeace, I'm not so sure about your sub points, particularly in regards to DDT.
For starters, mosquitos have a shorter generational cycle than humans, and produce more offspring per generation.
So they're going to develop resistance to insecticides very very quickly. (They've even been shown to develop behavioral adaptations in just a few generations.) We discontinued DDT just as resistance was starting to develop, and if we hadn't we likely would have seen a dramatic
decrease in benefits for DDT and no real reduction in harm caused.
DDT accumulates in fat. And it has a tendency to bioaccumulate and move up the food chain, and to stick around for a long time. It's hard to calculate the exact harm of insecticides to a population because diseases like cancer don't have a single characteristic cause like malaria does.
CHRONIC TOXICITY
DDT has caused chronic effects on the nervous system, liver, kidneys,and immune systems in experimental animals (3, 4). Effects on the nervous system observed in test animals include: tremors in rats at doses of 16-32 mg/kg/day over 26 weeks; tremors in mice at doses of 6.5-13mg/kg/day over 80-140 weeks; changes in cellular chemistry in the central nervous system of monkeys at doses of 10 mg/kg/day over 100 days, and loss of equilibrium in monkeys at doses of 50 mg/kg/day for up to 6 months (3).
from E X T O X N E T
More effective and environmentally friendly methods target specific breeding places rather than arial spraying (typically, still water isolated from large bodies of water. Tires, bird baths, etc. rather than huge lakes and swamps which typically contain dragonfly larvae and other creatures that eat mosquitos. )
Personally, I've always wondered; since only female mosquitos bite, would it be possible instead of killing mosquitos, to alter the population by releasing genetically modified males? The intent is not be to kill mosquitos so much as keep them from biting people, after all. And if you take that approach there's less selective pressure working against you. Some mosquitos consume nectar rather than blood, for instance (and can't digest blood.) If you could flood a mosquito population with those genes, maybe you could wean mosquitos off blood permanently, with no need for repeated spraying?
As far as food production increasing faster than population; that's true. But there are a few issues. Hybrid crops require an influx of new DNA from wild-type organisms every few years to prevent insects from adapting to the crops. The genetic diversity through distance present in the wild is replaced by diversity-over-time for a homogenous crop. So maintaining current production requires protection of those places which supply new wild type genes for us to work with. Without this, modern agriculture would collapse. It's kind of a free-rider problem since the nations which export the germ plasm for new crops usually don't benefit much economically from this, and have little incentive to preserve this resource that the world benefits from.
While I'm not fundamentally against genetic modification of foods in the same way that I'm not fundamentally against driving a car, I'm concerned about the rate of change these foods undergo, in the same way that I'd be concerned about a car driving too fast. People tend to avoid foods that they're allergic to. With genetically modified foods, this becomes more difficult because you don't know what's in your tomato. Systems for detecting potential problems tend to be inadequate; for example, IIRC Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans weren't tested with roundup applied to them, as they would be if used by farmers.
The 'golden rice' which produces beta carotene seems more or less like a publicity stunt for the sake of promoting genetically modified foods.
The target market for a genetically modified tomato is the farmer who grows the food first and the supermarkets which purchase it second. Consumers come in last in this reckoning. The trend often doesn't lead to healthier food, regardless of whether the produce is developed conventionally or using more modern methods. For example; Since juice orange growers tend to get paid according to the sugar content of their oranges, they focus on developing high-sugar oranges. One grocery got into an argument with its supplier because the furanocoumarin levels in the celery caused their workers to break out in rashes from handling it.
I'm not saying that government intervention is the answer. but these are things to consider and look out for.
And once again, I've totally gone off on a tangent from the main point of your article. Sorry about that.
Posted by: Ryan on August 19, 2006 08:18 PM