It's Earth-Day...quit clubbing your seal and hug a tree

from Foxnews

"WASHINGTON — Parishioners won't find styrofoam at Towson Presbyterian Church, but they will notice shade-grown coffee, an ink cartridge-for-paper exchange and a recycling program led by the nursery school.

This weekend, the church will focus on God's creation for "Earth Day Sunday," a special service many churches now celebrate in conjunction with the secular Earth Day.
Earth Day Sunday is just one part of a faith-based green movement gathering steam in Maryland and churches nationwide, where Protestant churches try to dispel the idea that environmental protection is a leftist activity antithetical to Christian ideology.

The environment has historically taken a back seat to common faith initiatives like the fight against poverty or hunger, local church leaders and experts said. But now, congregations increasingly see a connection between care for God's creation and social issues."
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Whoopee for Earthday! As one of the only environmental engineers I know, I feel the need to comment.

I can't say I remember the part in the gospels or the epistles about the environment. I'll have to go back and check the more obscure sections of the Old Testament one more time, but I'm pretty sure there's not much there about saving the rocks, the trees, and yes, especially the whales. Not that I'm saying that we, Christians, shouldn't be recycling, conserving, and doing our duty to keep our waters pristine and our air breatheable. What I am saying though is that as Christians, any mandate we have to preserve our environment proceeds from mankind's sovereignty over this Earth. In Genesis, God gave Adam charge over all of creation, it was Adam's to eat of the fruit of the Garden, and it was to him the task of naming the animals (whichever spiritual meaning that may have). We keep the Earth clean and in good working order, not because the rocks, trees, and....llamas have any particular "rights" in the human sense, but because in fact we OWN this planet.

I'd consider myself as someone concerned with the environment, but definitely not an 'environmentalist.' Environmentalism, as defined by it's lobbyists and political action groups, advances the cause of nature before all other causes. In this line of thinking we are prevented from opening up the ANWR, and from fully developing our nuclear power resources (incidentally the cleanest most efficient source of power available). We are indeed capable today of reconciling a conservationist impulse with the impulse to preserve our economic progress. However, an abstract ideal that we should be preserving the herds of caribou and elk for "our children and our children's children" will simply result in imposing an artificial scarcity on us today and in the near future. This Earth is not just Biblically, but obviously by inspection, a human dominion. If we owe it to anyone, we owe it to ourselves to keep things in good working order, but land and resources are indeed ours for the use and betterment of that wonderful thing we call....civilization.