What is the status of creation today? How are we faring as stewards of God’s world? As people entrusted with the care of God’s creation, we need to ask these questions, and they are not easy to answer. Answering this question has become part of my professional work, and to the best of my ability I have done a computer search of 700,000 titles of articles on the environment. I have pruned this collection down to those written in the scientific, refereed literature and have organized these into major topics that I call “Seven Degradations of Creation” (p30).

SEVEN DEGRADATIONS OF CREATION (pp31-37)

 
1. Alteration of Earth’s Energy Exchange

It’s becoming clearer that instead of seeing creation as “a beautiful book … to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity” (Belgic Confession, Art. 2; see Rom. 1:20), many people in our culture in the past couple of generations – including Christians – have tended to shift toward thinking of creation as a “bag of resources” to be used. I remember when I first realized this shift from “book” to “bag.” I thought of a library – and how instead of looking at it as a place to learn, people shifted toward seeing it as a collection of things to burn. Natural resources could be gathered and counted, stacked and stored in orderly rows and neat facilities, and then marketed and sold to make money, grow economies, and provide energy not just to meet our needs or to aid us in our work and learning but to feed our insatiable appetites for more … and more … and more. Often we have done this just to feed our egos or to gain a sense of status. One example of this shift became painfully apparent to me decades later as I stood with a visitor on the great Waubesa Marsh admiring a V-shaped flock of swans flying overhead. My visitor asked, “How many pounds would that big one there dress out at?”

Global Warming. What does all this have to do with our atmosphere? It has to do with our changing the composition of the atmosphere by our grand-scale burning of great deposits of carbon, sequestered beneath us as coal, peat, and oil. It also has to do with carbon being released as carbon dioxide from burning forests and with the opening of carbon-rich soils to the atmosphere for the purposes of agribusiness. Because of these practices, carbon dioxide is increasing every year in our atmosphere – at an increasingly dangerous rate.

As a people, as a culture, and even more as a catalyst in today’s worldwide economy, we have overlooked the lessons of the great carbon deposits that have helped make the earth more habitable for ages and ages. And our rapid consumption of these deposits as fuels for our way of life is much like bringing library books as fuel instead of reading them for the lessons they can teach.

In distant times past, over eons and eons, great carbon deposits formed because green plants took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making the earth more continually habitable for living, breathing creatures. Plants breathed in carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere and converted it into carbon-based solids that were deposited in peatlands and coal formations. Coral reefs took shape as the carbon-based remains of coral animals formed great deposits of petroleum – “rock oil,” named from the root words petra (“rock”) and oleum (“oil).

Today, however, we are burning these deposits – returning their carbon to the atmosphere at thousands of times the rate it took for them to be stored. Recently we have discovered the need to sequester the carbon dioxide produced by our burning of coal, peat, and oil – and most of us are curiously ignorant of the fact that this sequestering had already been accomplished by the wetland and coral life of the earth.

Now we find it surprising that earth’s capacity to retain heat is increasing and that global temperatures are rising. But this should not surprise us. In chapter 1 we admired God’s provision of the atmosphere with its mix of gases that control the energy “deposits and withdrawals” of our planet. As we increase the volume of carbon dioxide, which functions as a “doorkeeper gas” or “greenhouse gas,” the atmosphere is holding in more heat – making the earth a hotter “greenhouse.” The result is a warming of the globe.

Earth’s temperature has been rising slowly over centuries as evidenced by melting snow caps, receding glaciers, and a slowly rising sea level. But today this rise is accelerating, with consequences not only for earth’s temperature but also for the distribution of temperature across the planet. This brings about changes in patterns of rainfall and drought, including an increased capacity of the atmosphere to hold water, and ironically a few places in the world now have cooler temperatures than before.

            Depletion of the Ozone Shield. Earth’s ozone shield, as we noted in chapter 1, absorbs much of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, protecting life from damage to DNA. Ozone destruction has been under way, however, because of human abuses of creation – particularly through the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that until recently were widely used as refrigerants, fire extinguisher ingredients, hair-spray propellants, and more. Destruction of the ozone shield – now being addressed but in need of careful monitoring – results in a more ultraviolet light reaching the earth. Ultraviolet rays kill microscopic creatures on the earth and cause skin cancer in people and animals. Thankfully many policy makers and business executives today have recognized this serious problem, and in an agreement called the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer they have begun implementing a program for protecting the ozone shield and are meeting with success.
 

What once was the tallgrass prairie is what we now call the corn belt. In much of this region today two bushels of topsoil are lost for every bushel of corn produced.

            Pesticides and herbicides, made available after military chemists developed “peaceful” uses of biocides after World War II, made it possible to plant corn, or any crop, year after year on the same land. Crop rotation – from corn to soybeans to alfalfa hay – and pasturing and fallowing were abandoned. Farmers became “free” to plant the same crop year after year – and often were urged to do so by chemical manufacturers and their salespeople. Farm animals could now be kept in feedlots and confinements that allowed for intensified used of the land. Topsoil lost by resulting wind and water erosion could be compensated for by increasing fertilizer inputs. As a result, soil life has been devastated.

            Earthworms no longer inhabit most farmland. The microscopic life of the soil has been severely altered. Birds no longer inhabit former fencerows and hedgerows that once separated fields. Most of the land never rests. Many of the habitats of prairie, grassland, forest, and field creatures have become chemical deserts. Even many domestic creatures are deprived of both a pasture and a pastor.

            As we consider this degradation, we might reflect on the meaning of this verse from the Bible: “When you enter the land I am gong to give you,” says the Lord, “the land itself must observe a sabbath to the Lord” (Lev. 25:2). God warned Moses that if the people did not obey this law, the land would be laid waste. After the land had become a desert, the people would be driven away. Then the land would have the rest it did not have while the people lived on it (Lev. 26:14-17, 32-25).
 

In our day, 70,000 different chemicals are being used in commercial quantities, most of them brand-new to the creation, with about 1,000 more being added each year. Many and perhaps most of these are part of the environment in which we and other organisms live. Yet these are materials that living organisms have not had experience with in the past. Unlike chemicals made by organisms and the earth, some of these chemicals leave living things defenseless. Some are even specifically designed to destroy life: biocides, pesticides, herbicides, avicides, and fungicides. Other materials pose additional problems for living things. For example, oil spills destroy life and habitats and devastate human livelihoods on shores and seas. Mercury from smokestacks rains down on the earth and its creatures.

            Every item in our homes, offices, churches, and industries is a reworked part of creation. Every product we make, each housing commercial development we build, every road we travel alters creation. While knowing this full well, we often neglect to recognize the immense changes that we billions of people bring to the earth. We remove parts of the creation, make products and by-products, and produce discards and wastes.

            Consider Styrofoam cups as an example. We move oil by ship from Saudi Arabia to chemical plants. There the oil is transformed into monomers, which are then transported to factories that mold them into styrofoam cups. These cups are distributed to stores, where we buy them for use in our homes, schools, and churches. After using them once, we discard them into wastebaskets, move them to trash containers, and truck them to landfills. As the cups slowly decompose, their remains liquefy to form leachate, which is either drained off and processed by a sewage plant or leaks into groundwater that may next contaminate springs and wells. As styrofoam decomposes, it also produces carbon dioxide, methane, and other materials that add to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

            Ours is mainly a flow-through economy. It taps creation’s wealth at one point and discards by-products and wastes at another. Nature’s economy is cyclical; ecosystems sustain themselves by cycling materials. Our economy threatens creation’s economy. We interfere with nature’s cycles on a grand scale as we “trash” its creatures, pollute its waters, and mow down its forests and prairies.

            As we consider this degradation, we should thoughtfully reflect on this passage from Ezekiel: “Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?” (Ezek. 34:18).
 

Since 1850 people have converted 2.2 billion acres of natural lands for human uses (8.9 million square km, an area slightly smaller than China’s total land area of 9.2 million square km). Compare this with earth’s 16 billion acres that support some kind of vegetation (a nearly equal area consists of ice, snow, and rock) and a current world cropland of 3.6 billion acres. The conversion of land goes by different names, depending on what is done: it may be called deforestation (of forests), drainage or “reclamation” (of wetlands), irrigation (of arid and semi-arid ecosystems), or opening (of grasslands and prairies). The greatest land conversion under way today is tropical deforestation, which removes about 25 million acres of primary forest each year – an area the size of the state of Indiana.

            The immensity of this destruction illustrates humanity’s power to alter the face of he earth. Why do we continue with tropical deforestation? Largely because we are able to – and because it allows us to enjoy inexpensive products like cheap plywood, bathroom tissue, and packaging for all kinds of things from orange juice to fast-food hamburger meals. All this comes at the cost of destroying the long-term sustainability of soils, forest creatures, and resident people.

            In the United States and Canada, woodlots and the habitats they provide are replaced with parking lots, buildings, and additions to homes, offices, and churches. Of the 400 million acres of cropland used for agriculture in the United States, about 3 million acres are converted to urban uses every year. In Canada and the U.S., fields for grazing and crops no longer are “carved” from forests, they replace the forests. And housing developments are replacing some of the best cropland.

            The Bible speaks to this particular degradation when it says, “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land” (Isa. 5:8).
 

5. Species Extinctions

There are some 10,000 known bird species, of which one goes extinct each year. (One scientist calls this vanishing of whole species “the death of birth.”) Research on habitat destruction predicts that by the end of this century as many as 10 species of birds will go extinct each year. If action is not taken to preserve birds, 12 percent of all known bird species will be extinct by the year 2099. In sizing up the status of creation, a worldwide coordinated effort by scientists produced the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, stating that if needed action is not taken, 23 percent of mammals, 25 percent of conifers (pines, spruces, and their relatives), and 32 percent of amphibians will be threatened with extinction during this century.

            Sylvia Earle, a scientist who leads Conservation International’s Global Marine Division, adds the following comment on worldwide industrial fishing: “With 70 percent of the world’s coastal fish stocks overexploited or collapsed and 90 percent of the biggest fish wiped out, we have turned to the deep oceans in our increasingly relentless and destructive pursuit of the dwindling supply of seafood.” One indication of this is that for our Friday-night fish fries (popular in some regions), the fish no longer come from Cape Cod but from Iceland.

            While we have given names to most species of plants and animals in North America and Europe, we have not accomplished that in the tropics. Named or not, however, many of those species appear in our stores, lumber yards, offices, boats, and homes in the form of cheap plywood, furniture, wallets, and shoes. Children around the world are paid pennies to bring in skins of once-living creatures that soon are manufactured into fashion items.

            We add to this species destruction when we destroy natural habitats by expanding our homes and churches and eliminating woodlots or wetlands. Even butterflies, once so common in the everyday life of city and country, are losing hold as their habitats are destroyed, their food plants are killed by herbicides, and they themselves are killed by “broad-spectrum” pesticides.

            Some ecologists now urge us to plant butterfly gardens as natural “arks” for preserving these creatures. Others urge preservation of remaining woodlots and prairies as natural “arks” in response to what has become a “deluge of people.” Even now, some churchyards in England, because they remain largely undisturbed by real-estate development, are the sole remaining habitats for some creatures.

            A Scripture verse to ponder as we consider these losses is Genesis 6:19, in which the Lord says to Noah: “You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.”
 

A major feature of earth’s dynamic weather, ocean, and river systems is their life-sustaining transport and distribution of materials around the globe. Of the thousands of chemical substances people have created. Hundreds have been injected into the atmosphere, discharged into rivers and oceans, and leaked into groundwater by means of “disposal” systems and by pollution from our vehicles, homes, chemical agriculture, and industry. Some have joined global circulations, with substances like DDT showing up in Antarctic penguins and biocides appearing in a remote lake on Lake Superior’s Isle Royale. Cancer has become pervasive in some herring gull populations. Chemical and oil spills kill creation’s life on a massive scale. Globally circulating toxins disrupt ecosystems, and hormone-mimicking chemicals create reproductive disorders and affect normal development in animals and people.

            In the interaction between creation’s economy and ours, we face a planetary challenge: the consequences of what some call “the rape of the earth.” No longer are local environments affected only by local polluters. Global toxification affects all life: all creatures, great and small; all people, rich and poor.

            We need to reflect on the words of Jeremiah 2:7 as we consider what we have done to God’s creation: “I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce,” says the Lord; “but you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable.”
 

Among the most severe reductions of creation’s richness is degradation and extinction of cultures that have lived peaceably and sustainably on the land for centuries. Many Amish and Mennonite farming communities, for example, operate under severe pressure from increasing land taxes and encroaching urban development. In many cases these pressures compel them to abandon their farms. In the tropics, longstanding cultures living cooperatively with the forest are being wiped off the land by force, death, and legal procedures devised to deprive them of their traditional lands. As these people are run off or extinguished, so is their rich heritage of unwritten knowledge. Successful ways of living in harmony with the land are forgotten, names of otherwise undescribed forest creatures are lost, and information on the uses of a wide array of tropical species for human food, fiber, and medicine is wasted.

            Agriculture is being displaced by agribusiness. Seeds of wide variety of plants suited to small farms and gardens are displaced by new strains suited to mechanized planting and harvesting – strains uniform in color, size, and time of ripening. An aggressive economy, seeking to maximize immediate return at the expense of long-term sustainability, is sweeping the globe. The meek people of the earth are displaced by labor-saving technology; the powerless are pushed to the margins of the land or into cities. Disconnected from land that could sustain them, they are driven into joblessness and poverty. In the name of conducting “good” business and making “sound” investments, power brokers deprive powerless people of the ability to take care of themselves and the creation.

            God’s Word says, “Do not take advantage of each other…. The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land” (Lev. 25:17, 23). The Bible also says that the land must be returned to the poor and meek (Lev. 25:28). The Lord observes that “even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord” (Jer. 8:7).

RESULTS: BIOGEOGRAPHIC AND TROPHIC RESTRUCTURING OF THE BIOSPHERE (p38)

What are the big words in this subheading all about? Well, at about the turn of the century a colleague of mine, Professor Steve Bouma-Prediger, asked me to prepare a paper for the Christian Scholar’s Review on the topic “Just What Is the Status of the Creation?” He gave me about three years to study the question before publishing the paper in 2003. My work already had produced what I have written in the preceding pages, but I was surprised by what I found further, even though discovery about the environment and what we human beings are doing to it are a continuing part of my vocation. Here is what I concluded in that extensive paper:

Our species, in contrast with every other, affects biospheric dynamics on a grand and pervasive scale. In our day we find, remarkably, that we have become a principal geological force. We find ourselves to have significantly restructured the biosphere both biogeographically and trophically. Climate change now pushes plant and animal ranges 3.8 miles pole-ward each decade, nearly one-third of the earth’s arable land has been lost to erosion, biodiversity is seriously threatened by habitat destruction and toxification, and overexploitation has brought collapse of the world’s major fisheries and an adverse restructuring of ocean food webs. Earth is now under human domination.

CHOOSING LIFE (pp38-39)

Creation’s garden abundantly yields blessed fruits, sustainably supporting us and all life in its God-declared goodness. But we descendants of the first Adam have made the choice to extract more and yet more at the expense of destroying creation’s protective provisions and blessed fruitfulness. Before this human onslaught fall the earth’s creatures. Some have their populations severely diminished, while others are wiped off the face of the Creator’s canvas. We often find ourselves among those who have chosen to trash the great gallery of earth’s Maker, replacing it with our own creations. These new creations claim to be “for the greatest good” and “bigger than life,” surpassing creation itself. Under this arrogant assault on the fabric of the biosphere “the earth dries up and withers….The earth is defiled by its people” (Isa. 24:4-5).

            Since the beginning of creation, we human beings have been making choices. Early on, we chose to know good and evil. In the past several centuries many have chosen to redefine the long-recognized vices of avarice and greed as virtues. We have come to believe that “looking out for number one” means getting more and more for ourselves. Self-interest, we now profess, is what brings the greatest good. Choices made for the creation, for the Creator, have been usurped by choices made for me and “the economy.” Our world today professes, “Seek first a job (money, success), and all other things will be yours as well” (compare to Matt. 6:33). The biblical view, by contrast, calls us to find our “vocation” in God’s creation.

            God says through Moses, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life…” (Deut. 30:19-20).

            While we are expected to enjoy God’s creation and its fruitfulness, we are not granted license to destroy the earth. While human beings are expected to be fruitful, so is the rest of creation: “God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth and across the vault of the sky.’ …God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.’ … ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.’ And it was so” (Gen. 1:20-24). Our expansion may not be at the expense of the fruitfulness of the rest of creation.