This isn't your mother's environmentalism.
Footage of polar bears on shrinking glaciers and hummingbirds in sparse rainforests used to have a prominent place in films about the need to “go green.” But now some Christian environmentalists are engaging believers with a new message: Humans actually suffer the most when economic exploitation afflicts the environment.
Fostering sustainable development is just as much a human-rights issue as an environmental issue, they say. Many economic advances aren't at all mutually exclusive with environmental protection, they insist.
These Christian environmentalists say human industry and environmental stewardship actually should go hand-in-hand. Rusty Pritch-ard, the national director of outreach for the Evangelical Environmental Net-work, says Christians play an important role in leading the charge because “so many other groups focus on God's creation but forget people.”
An economist based in Atlanta, Pritchard said he views the environment primarily as a sustainer of human needs. Managing it responsibly inevi-tably leads to economic gain, he said.
“There's a huge overlap between environmental stewardship and economic stewardship,” Pritch-ard said. “When you think about it, God created the world so that we depend on it for our material existence. That includes the natural environment and all the stuff that we build from the natural environment. He allows us to make a living from it, and when we take care of it well, we prosper.”
Many researchers say that when people profit at the expense of the environment, the heaviest burden falls on those least able to cope—the poor.
Diseases like cholera, malaria and AIDS have environmental components to them, Pritchard said. Over-fishing hurts families in the Pacific Northwest who depend on fish for their livelihood. Particles released into the air by bitumen factories and chemical plants in Mexico City cause asthma and lung disease in children. And chemical waste dumped into rivers and buried in the ground contaminates entire watersheds.
“More or less people could be hurt depending on how we handle the climate system. We do things right, and fewer people are going to be harmed,” Pritchard said. “We can really decrease the amount of impending human suffering if we start to manage our resources well. It's going to be a huge task, but I think God in his grace wants us to do it.”
Christians—with their faith-based moral conscience and biblical mandate for compassion—should be at the forefront of sustainable development, some ethicists say.
But many have been slow to accept that message. Some religious conservatives have feared creation care would somehow align them with the New Age movement. And for years, political and social conservatives resisted jumping on the environmental bandwagon out of concern that economic stability and blue-collar industry would suffer in the name of saving some obscure bird or fish.
Last year, the Interfaith Steward-ship Alliance—recently renamed the Cornwall Alli-ance for the Stewardship of Creation—issued a lengthy paper on the subject titled “A Call to Truth, Pru-dence and Protec-tion of the Poor: An Evangelical Re-sponse to Global Warming.”
“Because energy is an essential component in almost all economic production, reducing its use and driving up its costs will slow economic development, reduce overall productivity and increase costs of all goods, including the food, clothing, shelter and other goods most essential to the poor,” the document said.
And some academics who view global warming with skepticism insist the industrial West wants to protect itself against an unproven threat without regard for the impact it could have on developing nations.
“It is by burning fossil fuels that the West has gotten rich and redressed the mass structural poverty which had been the fate of its masses for millennia,” wrote Deepak Lai, professor of international development studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, in an article published by the Heartland Institute.
“The same opportunity is now available to the developing countries. But the Greens in the West, in serving their dubious cause of halting global warming, want to deny the same means for the developing world's poor to climb out of poverty.”
Truth to tell, some environmental initiatives have hurt some industries. Logging corporations in the Pacific Northwest vehemently have opposed establishing off-limit zones that would protect endangered spotted owls—business leaders say the reduction in logging will hurt families dependent on the industry for survival.
But just because a particular industry may suffer in the name of creation care doesn't mean human rights should take a back seat, some experts say. The abolition of slavery ended an enormous network of industry, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been done, said Gordon Aeschliman, the president of Target Earth.
More recently, the closure of coal and vermiculite mines—revenue sources that supported entire towns—saved countless workers and their children from developing lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis.
“My first guiding thought as a Christian is, ‘Am I pursuing economic development as a form of personal wealth development in a way that harms other human beings?'” Aeschliman said. He leads his Arizona-based Christian organization to buy endangered land, reforest ravaged terrain, and provide food and shelter for locals in 15 countries.
“If the way we develop our economic wealth hurts the environment in a way that harms people, we've already broken a moral law, in (my) opinion.”
Plus, economic development is not a single idea—some types of it are healthy and others aren't, Aeschliman said. For example, Christians don't support the prostitution industry because it morally bankrupts people, but capitalism that exploits the environment morally bankrupts people as well, he said.
Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland Church in Longwood, Fla., believes further distinction should be made between capitalism and “super-capitalism.”
Hunter, an early and strong advocate for environmental issues, pointed out that major companies have gone green in recent years and made huge profits. That's capitalism, he says, and it's definitely compatible with fostering economic wealth while valuing human rights.
But what about developing countries like China and India? Should they be forced to establish green initiatives while undergoing an Industrial Revolution—so-called “super-capitalism”—of their own?
No, even though it's a lot tougher for them than for wealthier countries, Hunter said.
“The global competitive advantage is becoming more and more difficult,” he said. “And so what is happening is that industry is trying everything it can do to get the best product for the cheapest price. China has almost no environmental policy. They don't want to temper down their economic growth, so they are making things at a high cost to the environment, a high cost to human rights.”
Leaders in such countries will have to choose whether they'll focus solely on economic growth or human rights, Hunter said.
“The question the church has is a very different question from the question secular society has,” Aeschliman said. “Christians have to ask the question, ‘Does how I make my money matter?' We consume one-third of the world's resources and produce one-third of the world's trash … and we have to say, ‘If that's what economic development does, maybe it's immoral.'”
An appropriate approach for wealthy countries concerned about global pollution is to work with developing nations, not against them, Hunter said.
“First of all, we can't just let China … put in one electrical plant per week,” Hunter said. “It's just too high a cost to the world. It affects the health of the world. On the other hand, I think there can be a trade in technologies that helps them leapfrog parts of the Industrial Revolution.”
Pritchard agreed. It is up to wealthy nations to develop technologies that reduce the industry-induced problems in the first place, he said.
“The American enterprise system is integrated enough to provide … the necessary transitions in the developing world.”
In general, people of faith should strive to live simple lives unencumbered by consumerism, waste and excessive wealth, Christian environmentalists say. Jesus himself lived simply, and God created a world that can support all his creation—if it's managed correctly, Aeschliman said.
“God didn't make it so all people could live in a luxury liner,” he said. Environmental exploitation “is a naive idea that doesn't recognize that when we harm the earth, we harm the poor.”