Environmental Stewardship in a Christian Worldview:

Pollution (air, water, land,...) — Christian Views
 

 
I.O.U. — This page will be developed more fully later, maybe in mid-2014,
with summaries about energy topics, and links to:
• the best pages & audios/videos we can find on the internet, plus a few off-the-web books, films, etc;
• pages written by members of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) for our website & journal & conferences.

It will offer information and links for these topics:

• pollution of our water, air, and land
• thermal pollution & radioactive pollution
• other results of human activity with negative impacts on our quality of life:  sound pollution (in our ears), chemicals (in our food), electromagnetic radiation (in the air);  what is typically called conservation, such as loss of natural scenery & opportunities for natural recreation, loss of species (or ecosystems)

      For example, this is about water pollution, quality of life, and Christian worldview:
• At the annual meeting of ASA in 2000, "The second plenary speaker...was Susan Drake Emmerich, a Christian anthropologist who became involved in Tangier Island, a closed island subculture...in the Chesapeake Bay with a population of about eight hundred people.  Susan spoke of the way in which she was able to become accepted by the Tangier fishing community.  The watermen would indiscriminately pollute the bay with trash and oil.  Susan convinced them to enter into a covenant to preserve the bay by changing their waste disposal habits.  She did this by appealing to their already-established beliefs, connecting in their minds their faith in Jesus (their Pilot on the water) with their caring for his creation." (from the ASA Newsletter)  You can learn more about this fascinating story in her own words [oops, link is broken, but I'll try to find this page again] and from NOAA Coastal Services.

• This page will contain a summary-overview for each topic, plus links to selected web resources (ranging from introductory to comprehensive), and it will link to a specialty page for each topic.
 

 
      A REQUEST FOR HELP
      In order to find high-quality pages at each level for many topics, I (the editor of ASA's website for Whole-Person Education) will need help, and hopefully much of the creative work — in deciding what to do and how, and then finding and selecting high-quality resources — can be done by those who are more expert than myself, who know more about each topic-area, and also know "who is doing what" and who has written good pages about it.
      When searching for content-pages, the key is SELECTIVITY.  With a search engine and a few minutes, it's easy to find lots of pages.  It's much more difficult to find the best pages (at all levels, from introductory to in-depth) but this is the goal.  We want to recommend only high-quality pages, so users can learn quickly and well, and they won't be overwhelmed with too many choices.   {more about selectivity}   {if you have helpful ideas, please contact me, Craig Rusbult, craig@asa3.org}
      You can see a preliminary structure of topics in this links-page, and each of the others.  But each structure is tentative, and it will be modified during the process of developing the website.  If you want to see parts of the overall website that are more fully developed, check Thinking Skills or (on a larger scale) Creation Questions.
 

Copyright © 2008