VOLUME 35 NUMBER 3
JUNE/JULY 1993
GREENING
"CARING FOR CREATION" will
be the focus of the 1993 ASA
ANNUAL MEETING at SEATTLE
PACIFIC UNIVERSITY, AUGUST 610. Vice-President At Gore may be
too busy to attend, but plenty of
others who care about God's creation will be there. Today the
11
greening" of America extends from
elected officials to whole industries,
from individual Christians to whole
denominations. Are we seeing a
"bandwagon" effect? To some extent, maybe, but commitment to
environmental stewardship is clearly
growing.
A variety of topics will be
treated at Seattle, as usual. Yet at
this writing (on Earth Day, April
24), we're convinced that the opportunity to hear keynoter Calvin
DeWitt and other speakers deal
with complex environmental questions from an evangelical viewpoint
will make the 1993 ANNUAL
MEETING a highly significant gathering.
Each week, from both scientific
and industrial points of view, major
stories in Chemical & Engineering
News weigh environmental protection against economic return. We
may disagree on strategy or tactics,
but a recent poll shows that most
Christians now rate "caring for Creation" as a high-priority spiritual
issue. "How Christian Is the Green
Agenda?" was Christianity Today's
11 Jan 1993 cover story; its author,
Regent College's Loren Wilkinson,
keynoted ASA's 1983 Annual Meeting.
CT has continued to keep environmental concerns before its readers:
"Greening the Third World" (5 Apr
1993) by Randy Frame. featured
such Christian organizations as
World Vision; Servants in Faith &
Technology (SIFAT, based in Lineville, Alabama); NACCE's Green
Cross; and Educational Concerns for
Hunger Organization (ECHO, of
North Fort Myers, Florida).
CT made it clear that ECHO director Martin Price "puts people
first," helping the world's peasant
farmers as well as the environment
which directly sustains them. CT
quoted Messiah College biologist Joseph Sheldon, "a leading evangelical environmentalist," as saying that
the World Bank is "increasingly linking its loans to environmentally
sound projects" to maintain sustainable economics. Joe is Program
Chair for our 1993 ANNUAL
MEETING. Don't miss it.
Stories on ECHO, NACCE,
SEFAT, and World Vision have appeared in this Newsletter before.
We've just heard of the Christian
Environmental Association (CEA), a
new evangelical outfit intent on encouraging stewardship of God's creation. On June 24-30, CEA is
holding a "National Student
Leaders' Retreat on the Environment" at Hidden Lakes reserve in
California's Sierra Nevada mountains. The idea is to get 30 livewire Christian students together to
11
plot ways to become environmental
activists on campuses and in
churches." Leading the retreat are sociologist Tony Campolo of Eastern
College, biologist Jeff Schloss of
Westmont College, social-justice activist Gordon Aeschliman, and Sierra
environmentalist Suzanne Munro.
(Contact: Gordon Aeschliman, P.O.
Box 25, Colfax, WA 99111; let.
509-397-3529.)
MAKING NEWS
ASA member Francis Collins
of the U. of Michigan was described in our Apr/May issue as
closing in on a gene for familial
breast cancer. A story by Chris Anderson, "Genome Shortcut Leads to
Problems" (Science, 19 Mar 1993),
reported a setback for researchers
who've used large copies of human
DNA cloned in yeast.
Collins, described as "one of the
most sophisticated gene mappers,"
found that when his team tried to
use the extra-large yeast artificial
chromosome ("mega-YAC") chunks
in the region of chromosome 17
where the gene is suspected to reside, up to 80% of the material turned out to be "chimeric" DNA
unrelated to the human chromosome. Work with bacterial artificial
chromosome chunks cloned in E.