A Path Toward Awareness

I have written previously about the first scientific article that made a significant impact on my environmental awareness–Easter’s End (Jared Diamond, Discover, 1 Aug 1995).

This past week I was reminded of what I believe was my first encounter with Christian enviro stewardship. It was 10 years later when Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis was published in 2005 (Movement 7 — Good). We pick up the story as he is speaking of the creation narrative (p. 158):

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation, commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it. The words he gives are words of loving service and thoughtful use. From day one (which is really day six), they are in intimate relationship and interaction with their environment. They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God as made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence.

This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.

And until that last sentence makes perfect sense, we haven’t fully grasped what it means to be human and live in God’s world. Everyone is an environmentalist. We cannot live independently of the world God has placed us in. We are intimately connected. By God.

It goes on. Check it out.

And what was the first teaching you heard or read on Christian ecological conservation, on creation care?