The Earth is the Lord's

Smog season and kids

Atlanta's smog season started May 1, and runs through September 30. That means weather conditions are more likely to create unhealthy air out of the pollution that comes from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. Smog requires pollution, heat, and sunlight to form. That's a recipe for asthma attacks and asthma development in children, the elderly, and people with chronic heart and lung diseases.

It's worth it to be smart about being outdoors in smog season. My friend Rebecca Watts Hull runs a cool program called Mothers and Other for Clean Air (www.mothersandothersforcleanair.org). She and her organization are reaching out to families, child care providers, summer camps, schools and churches to help them learn about the proper precautions to take to protect children against pollution.

Children have are especially sensitive to air pollution, because their little lungs are still developing, and they breathe much more air per body weight than adults, and they also spend more time outside (which is usually a good thing). But you should pay attention to Smog Alert days, especially Orange or Red ones, and adjust your behavior (like limiting outdoor time at certain times of day).

Our church's 8-week summer day camp in inner-city Atlanta is moving outdoor recreation time from the afternoons (which are more likely to have toxic air) to mornings (before smog has a chance to form). Even then, on some days all activity will have to be indoors.

The way we build our city (requiring Atlantans to collectively drive the distance to the sun and halfway back every day) and power our homes and businesses (with antiquated, dirty coal-fired generating plants) has side effects on our most vulnerable and precious family members. Taking personal, protective action is one thing. What can we do as Christians to create a culture whose economy respects life and safeguards health?

Check out Mothers and Others (www.mothersandothersforcleanair.org), or email Rebecca to get involved (rwattshull@gaconservancy.org). You can get Rebecca's "Smog Season Safety Tips" at http://georgiaconservancy.org/mothersandothers/Smog%20May%2008.pdf. And if you live in Atlanta, you can sign up for emailed smog alerts, sent a day in advance based on weather and pollution predictions, by going to the Clean Air Campaign's website http://www.cleanaircampaign.com/tools/sign_up_form. If you don't live in Atlanta, you can still find out smog alert information in your area by going to the EPA's site http://www.airnow.gov.

Florida Baptist Witness on Climate

After Southern Baptists (some, not all) announced their commitment to preach and teach about creation care and climate change (www.baptistcreationcare.org), Baptist Press called to do an interview for "balanced" story on climate change. Of course, a balanced story on climate change science would have only the barest mention of the tiny minority of global warming deniers. Nevertheless, their story did a fair job of representing the views of consensus science. Here's the link to the Florida Baptist Witness version of the story in the May 8 online edition.

Conservative solutions to global warming

My colleague Alexei Laushkin alerted me to a Slate interview with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is a small government conservative, and he's not afraid of science, so he understands the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming. He's not in favor of mandatory caps on carbon dioxide. As an economist, I disagree: I think some sort of policy to give a price to carbon pollution is necessary to get us where we need to be on greenhouse gas pollution.

But a price on carbon is not sufficient--there need to be positive policies in place to stimulate the right kind of investment, and that's where Gingrich's perspective is especially helpful. He talks about introducing policies that will allow the entrepreneurial free market system put its energies into finding technological innovations that will create the new energy economy. He discusses them at length in his book "Contract with the Earth". 

Gingrich would pay for these incentives with tax dollars--essentially diverting wealth from every taxpayer into the pockets of corporations to incentivize the necessary inventions. I think either a cap-and-trade system with auctioned permits or a carbon tax are better public policy, and the revenues from those policies could accomplish what Gingrich proposes.

Check out the left/right ad in which Gingrich appears with Nancy Pelosi to promote climate solutions. They disagree on the policies, but agree on the science and the urgency behind solving anthropogenic global warming. 

A Perfect Storm Hits World Food Supply

Throughout the developing world, food riots are occurring. Corn (maize) prices are 50% higher than they were at the beginning of 2007, wheat prices are almost double, and rice prices have nearly trebled. American feel a little of this pinch, but poor people in the developing world are most affected.

Josette Sheeran of the UN’s World Food Programme was quoted in The Economist newsmagazine  on the impact of food prices increases in poor countries:

“For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.”

For perspective, consider that one billion of the world’s people live on less than a dollar a day, and another one and a half billion live on between one and two dollars a day. That’s almost half the worlds population affected by the problem.

Location, location, location: Residential choices and Creation Care

By Rusty and Joanna Pritchard

Worth a listen: Last week NPR’s Morning Edition aired a pair of stories by Elizabeth Shogren, one about a family that moved out to the Atlanta suburbs, and one about a family that moved intown to a “new urban” development. It’s part of their Climate Connections series. Both stories are about parents trying to do their best by their families, making decisions under lots of constraints. Neither of them created the environment they inhabit; they’re just trying to do their best to live in it.

An Environmentalism for Us All

What Rebecca Solnit is arguing in her excellent Orion Magazine article this month is that environmentalists have become the caricature the right paints of them. They often really are a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

And, Solnit adds: they hate country music, without actually knowing country music. [To a southerner like me, that's a lot more unforgiveable than a penchant for four-dollar cups of coffee.] Liberal elites don't much like poor white people, or their music.

Solnit isn't addressing issues of faith, but I know many folks who have often felt similarly despised by the left for their evangelical beliefs.

Such elite, exclusivist attitudes have weakened the environmental movement. It might even be time to get beyond the idea of an "environmental" movement and to think more broadly about family, economics, class, race, simplicity, and justice than the title "environmental" allows.

Spend some time with the article--it's free on the Orion Magazine website, but I'll tell you, there is no more valuable use of forest resources than the print version of Orion, and this issue is still on the bookstore shelves. You have permission to buy the dead-tree version, just keep it or pass it on.

 

Evangelicals now the “go-to” community on climate change

At Rev. Joel Hunter’s Northland Church near Orlando last Thursday, faith leaders called for urgent attention to creation care, climate change, and protection of the poor. Hunter called the meeting to rally the evangelical community in Central Florida, and wound up with a crowd from more than a dozen states and the District of Columbia. He took the opportunity to apologize to environmentalists for the tardiness of the evangelical movement to take up the creation care mantle.

Others noted the recent advances in evangelical engagement on issues like global warming. Richard Cizik, of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the keynote speakers, was quoted in the Orlando Sentinel as saying "Evangelicals have become the go-to religious community on climate change….The political center of gravity has unmistakably shifted on this issue."

The day-long Creation Care Conference featured other keynote speakers Cal DeWitt of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Tri Robinson of the Boise Vineyard, and Catholic Bishop Thomas Wenski of the Diocese of Orlando. An interfaith dialogue between Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders established connections in how each of the faith traditions addressed creation care.

I was there, doing a workshop on Connecting Families to Creation Care (based largely on our family's experience in inner-city Atlanta and on Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods). We also launched the Deepgreen website and t-shirts and hats (sure-fire ways to build a movement).

Accounts of the conference appeared at Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronicle, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, the Christian Post, and numerous blog sites.

Pollution, virtue and second-hand smoke

Second-hand smoke is a nuisance for non-smokers. When you smoke, you get the enjoyment of the nicotine and you get some health risks too. Other people, third parties, get only costs and no benefits, including your wife, kids, dog, the servers at your favorite pub, etc. Everyone knows now not to smoke around kids. Kids deserve better. Those that do it are despicable sociopaths, and people will let them know. Social pressures are brought to bear.

Pollution is the same kind of problem, but on a larger scale.

Dallas Morning News on new evangelicals

There was a story in the Dallas Morning News about "new evangelicals" about the wider range of issues they are addressing. It makes me think that maybe the monicker "evangelical" will not continue to be wholly corrupted by unChristian connotations. Check out the article and the link to the Beliefnet dialogue it describes.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/national/stories/012408dnpolevangelicals.2b6d111.html

Fear Not!

A Different Shade of Green
(originally published in PRISM magazine, Jan/Feb 08)

Fear is a powerful motivator. If you can inspire fear, you can get people to do almost anything. (If you can also inspire loathing, you can get them to do anything.)

Evangelicals and environmentalists have a good deal in common. Fear, accompanied by an apocalyptic vision, is a standard tool in their toolboxes. Anyone watching those computer-animated maps of coastal cities flooding in An Inconvenient Truth knows that Al Gore may have a richer end-times imagination than Tim LaHaye. Enviros long ago mastered the knack of making you fear for your life, your health, and your family--and then giving you just enough information about environmental injustice for the poor to take the edge off your self-interested attitudes.

New evangelicals and creation care

I spoke this morning at a press conference in South Carolina, on the front steps of the Statehouse, about the emerging voice for creation care among evangelicals. Here is a draft of those remarks:

I'm concerned that young people and people of faith don’t get disconnected from the political process just because they often fail to see their values reflected in that process. Younger evangelicals in particular are often frustrated with what they see as partisan bickering and deadlock, and they are equally frustrated with what the media portrays as a narrow evangelical political agenda. Evangelicals dislike being pigeonholed as single-issue voters in any political party’s back pocket. They would prefer that candidates reflect their values rather than the other way around.