Re: Resource conservation and Christ's return

The question raised about conservation versus consumption is an
important one and is more than 30 years old, both in the church and in
the world in general. It was generally couched in terms of population
growth and whether people should limit the number of children they had.
The usual Biblical justification for continued consumption without
conservation and for having many children is not the imminent second
coming of Christ but Genesis 1:26-31, which you have all read many times
before, but maybe not from this perspective.

Then God said, 銑et us make humankind in our image, according to our
likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals
of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the
earth.?27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he
created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them, and
God said to them, 腺e fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and
subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds
of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.?

29 God said, 全ee, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is
upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit;
you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to
every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth,
everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant
for food.?And it was so.

31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

The standard argument that I am familiar with is that God gave humans
control over the entire earth and urged them to multiply and subdue the
earth. God would never let us reach the point where having many
children or consuming all the resources available to humans would be
detrimental to human growth and development. Hence we need not be
concerned about conservation or birth control.

Conservation did not really come on the scene for the general populace
in a substantial fashion until the 1970痴. One of the most influential
books on resource limitations was funded by the Club of Rome and
researched by scientists at MIT. It is called, Limits to Growth, by
Donnela Meadows and remains influential today. Eventually two groups of
people called the Cornucopians (optimists who feel that the more people
the better) and the Malthusians (those who feel that our resources will
be limited at some point, which will cause hardships on a growing
population) came to define the opposing viewpoints of the world on the
use of natural resources.

One of the most well known Cornucopians was Julian Simon, an economist
at the University of Maryland who died about 5 years ago. He was a
strong critic of those who claimed there were limitations on natural
resources and he has a large following yet today. In the journal
Science in 1980 he wrote the following:

Incredible as it may seem at first, the term 'finite' is not only
inappropriate but is downright misleading in the context of natural
resources....Even the total weight of the earth is not a theoretical
limit to the amount of copper that might be available to earthlings in
the future. Only the total weight of the universe ?if that term has a
useful meaning here ?would be such a theoretical limit. In summary,
because we find new lodes, invent better production methods, and
discover new substitutes, the ultimate constraint upon our capacity to
enjoy unlimited raw materials at acceptable prices is knowledge. And the
source of knowledge is the human mind. Ultimately, then, the key
constraint is human imagination and the exercise of human skills.
Hence an increase of human beings constitutes an addition to the crucial
stock of resources, along with causing additional consumption of
resources.

There also was a famous bet between Simon and Paul Ehrlich in the 1980痴
where Simon gave the Ehrlich the choice of any 5 natural resources out
of a list of 10 (if I remember right) and bet that most would be be
cheaper in ten years than they were at the present. Ehrlich took him up
on the bet (an amount based on the value of these resources moved above
or below an initial price of $1000) and Ehrlich lost more than $500.
Every resource on the list decreased in price over that 10 year span.
Hence many people use the fact that the Malthusians have often been
wrong about coming supply crunches as justification that we don稚 have to
worry about such things even today.

About 10 years ago Christianity Today devoted most of an issue to the
question of human population growth, presenting many views across the
spectrum. More recently a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lonborg, wrote a
book called The Skeptic Environmentalist which argues that most claims
of decreasing resources, global warming, pollution, etc. are all
misguided. This caused and is causing a great deal of controversy in the
scientific community because many people find his arguments quite
persuasive. Some time ago Scientific American made it their business to
publish a rebuttal to Lonberg, which you can read at their site. In
short, there is considerable disagreement about the danger or lack
thereof in consuming our natural resources as fast as we like.

My take is that those who think we should conserve instead of consume
are in a minority. The majority view is that consumption drives our
economic growth which is good for all according to many economists, and
we will always find cheap substitutes for scarce resources as the price
rises and drives new technologies.

A quote from George W. Bush in 2002 (that I have not verified)
 展e need an energy bill that encourages consumption.?

If you wish to see a well-referenced enormous web site that supports
this Cornucopian viewpoint and advocates as much consumption as possible
go to

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html

set up by John McCarthy, a retired Stanford computer scientist. (Who do
you believe? A Stanford professor at the end of a career on a subject
different from his area of expertise, or a bevy of experts writing in
their own field?)

This is an extremely important question. If you have been reading some
of posts over the last three weeks you know I think that natural gas in
North America or oil in the world in general will make us painfully
aware within the next 10-15 years that natural resources are indeed
finite and cannot be easily replaced.

>>> Roger Olson <rogero@saintjoe.edu> 12/16/03 15:16 PM >>>
Folks,

I don't know whether this topic has been discussed before on this forum,

but I'd like to see what the experts have to say about it. My good
friend and colleague is a herpetologist who is especially interested in
the preservation of wetland ecosystems. The "frog forum" to which he
belongs had the following excerpt posted (see following message). The
basic question for me is how we as believers and scientists reconcile
the doctrine of the imminent corporeal return of Christ with the idea of

environmental conservation for the long term?

I know the "stewardship of creation" concept is most often given as the
justification for conservation behaviors, but many of the more
fundamentalist Christian groups dismiss such behavior as ridiculous if
the physical Earth will only be around a few more decades. It seems to
me that this is closely related to the YEC/OE question, and can be as
nasty a condundrum as explaining Original Sin or the origin of the
God-conscious soul.

Thanks in advance for your participation. I hope this is an appropriate

topic for our forum. If this has been discussed in depth before, please

refer to the appropriate archives.

Roger

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: No turtles?
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:47:30 -0600
From: Mark Bailey <mbailey@conservationsoutheast.com>
Reply-To: mbailey@conservationsoutheast.com
To: PARC@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

Another factor influencing a person's worldview and attitude toward
long-term conservation issues is whether he/she believes the "end times"
(Armageddon, the Rapture, etc.) are upon us. People who fully expect
the
world's imminent destruction will likely fail to see the point in
conserving
"non-essential" resources such as frogs and turtles.

A pre-millennium Newsweek poll conducted in 1999 reported, "A
significant
44% of the population thinks that Jesus Christ will likely return to
Earth
during the first half of the next century [that's now THIS century]. One
in
five (22%) says Christ will definitely return, a view held by 40% of
African
Americans and more than one-third of white evangelical Protestants."

This is certainly not the forum to debate religious beliefs, but we need
to
be cognizant of (and also sensitive to) the beliefs of a large chunk of
society, and what they mean to conservation. A great many people in the
United States have this worldview (including members of this listserve
and
many of our most influential policymakers). While, as James Stuart
said,
some creationists are indeed conservationists because they want to save
and
protect the diversity of "God's creation," I suspect a larger percentage
of
fundamentalists are not particularly concerned about the environmental
mess
that future generations may have to deal with.

Mark Bailey

Senior Biologist
Conservation Southeast Inc.
2040 Old Federal Road
Shorter AL 36075
Received on Tue Dec 16 22:44:01 2003