Evangelical Environmental Network offers perspective on ethanol issue
- Feb 4, 2008
Lowell (Rusty) Pritchard Jr., Ph.D., is national outreach director for the Evangelical Environmental Network. Learn more about the network at www.creationcare.org.
Q: First, let’s address the basic question: Should we as American Christians care about the ethanol issue, or is it an issue better left to the science community?
A: A great theologian once urged Christian pastors to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
I think God is calling Christians to pay attention to what’s going on in the world and to be a voice for wisdom, prudence and justice in public policy.
Clearly there are scientific dimensions to the ethanol issue, but there is a moral dimension to the issue as well. God gave the command to be good stewards of creation to all people. We need to manage His creation so that it can be productive and healthy.
When we look at ethanol production, we have to compare it with our current sources of liquid fuels, and compared to oil production it looks pretty good.
Burning biomass only emits carbon dioxide that was absorbed in the plant’s lifetime, so it’s carbon neutral. It can be a lifeline to rural economies.
Alabama has a lot of forests, but lots of paper mills are leaving. Many of Alabama’s commercial forests would benefit from thinning (trees would grow better and wildlife would benefit), but with no market for low-diameter timber, forest owners have little incentive to thin.
Ethanol from wood is a great use for that material and would make management of forests more effective.
For Southern states like Alabama that don’t have a lot of wind potential, it may be the most effective alternative energy.
Q: When we, as Christians, consider ethanol and other environmental issues, what kinds of questions should we be asking ourselves?
A: I think the biggest question for us is: What does God say in the Bible about these kinds of issues? Jesus summarized all the law and the prophets by saying we must love God completely, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
We first of all acknowledge that God is the Creator who made this world with a purpose — to bring glory to its Creator.
We don’t own the earth; we are tenants, and we manage it for the landlord. So we ask: What would bring the most glory to God, who said that His creation was very good?
Second, we ask: How can we love our neighbors as ourselves? Taking responsibility for the impacts of our pollution on our neighbors’ lives is one way. Making sure people have clean water and a secure way of making a living is another way.
Q: Part of the draw of ethanol is that it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. For us as Christians, is this a positive, negative or neither?
A: I think it’s very positive. American Christians have historically been in the forefront of the issue of international religious persecution, and when you look at the despotic regimes that produce much of the world’s oil, you see places where Christians are mercilessly persecuted, where human rights are not respected, where states sponsor terrorism, and where democratic freedoms are little known.
We’ve got to begin to see a connection between how we fuel our cars and how Christians are treated in far off places.
Our current dependence on foreign oil probably limits the United States’ ability to speak out about those abuses. Growing our own fuel would take away that conflict of interest.
In addition, our dependence on foreign oil makes our own economy extremely sensitive to the price, which is controlled by nations who don’t necessarily value our security.
Ethanol is great from a security perspective. It’s home-grown, and what’s more, it can be local. Alabamians could consume energy produced within the borders of their own state, from a resource nearly immune to the disruptions of terror attacks and to the vicissitudes of the international energy market.
Q: Why should we invest energy in concerns like ethanol and care for the creation when we could use that same energy for evangelism or ministry to the poor?
A: I left an academic career to work on creation care issues full-time because of my passion for evangelism and ministry to the poor.
My family is involved in planting a church in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Atlanta.
We work with kids who need Jesus, but who also breathe some of the most polluted air in Georgia. To love them and their families, our church sees creation care as part of our ministry of sharing the good news.
Evangelism has to include teaching new Christians to love the things God loves, including His handiwork. And it means teaching them to care for other people, to love their neighbors as themselves. That includes having compassion on those hit by environmental problems like pollution.
If you asked me what the number one issue facing the poor today was, it would be an environmental one.
Over 1 billion people on the planet lack safe, clean drinking water. Even more lack adequate sanitation to protect that drinking water.
Every year, lack of clean water kills as many people, many of them children suffering from diarrheal diseases, as the Southeast Asian tsunami did.
If you asked me what will be the number one issue facing the poor by the end of this century, that would be an environmental one too. Climate change caused by greenhouse gas pollution is not so much an environmental as a relief and development issue.
The World Health Organization estimates that by 2030 the risk of developing diarrhea in some regions will be up 10 percent because of climate change. Rain-fed agriculture in Africa may see food yields down by 50 percent by 2050 because of shifting rainfall patterns. Globally, between 1 and 2 billion people could be facing water scarcity in the next century.
Climate change is pushing poor people deeper into poverty, and the very people Christians are trying to reach and to help through donations to missions agencies and disaster relief efforts. Economic development projects are the ones who will be hit the hardest by the impacts of global warming.
This article is reprinted from the January 10, 2008, issue of The Alabama Baptist, the newspaper of the Alabama Baptist State Convention.
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