CONSERVATION

>	In many developing countries, the basics of sufficient and pure water and food, along with clothing, shelter, transportation, health care, communication, and so forth, still remain elusive for many people. (more)
>	Tragically, people with a strong environmental consciousness who live predominantly in Western countries sometimes seek to impose their own environmental sensibilities on people still struggling to survive.  (more)
>	Some environmentalists, especially those in the “Deep Ecology” movement, divinize the earth and insist on “biological egalitarianism,” the equal value and rights of all life forms, in the mistaken notion that this will raise human respect for the earth. (more)
>	Economic development is a good to be sought not as an end in itself but as a means toward genuine human benefit.(more)
>	It is not only competition in free economies that encourages better stewardship of natural resources, it is also the incentive people have to protect property in which they have a financial stake.(more)
>	We should not be surprised to find that air, water, and solid waste pollution emissions and concentrations have been falling across the board in advanced economies around the world for the last thirty to forty years.(more)
>	Many people still fear population growth because they believe it leads to overpopulation. When asked what they mean by overpopulation, they usually speak of crowding and poverty.(more)
>	Global warming is the biggest of all environmental dangers at present, maintain many environmentalists. Ironically, the great fear thirty years ago was of global cooling.(more)

COMMENTARY ON A BIBLICAL VIEW ON ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

In the last three centuries, life expectancy in advanced economies has risen from about thirty years to nearly eighty. Cures have been found to once-fatal diseases, and some diseases have been eliminated entirely. Famine, which once occurred, on average, seven times per century in Western Europe and lasted a cumulative ten years per century, is now unheard of there. While the average Western European family in A.D. 1700 lived in a hovel with little or no furniture, no change of clothing, and barely enough food to sustain a few hours’ agricultural labor per day¹ –and, of course, they also lacked electricity, plumbing, water and sewage treatment, and all the appliances we often take for granted–today the average family lives in a well-built home with all those amenities, along with enough food to make obesity, not hunger, the most common nutritional problem even among the “poor.”²  Such advances in the West have been the fruits of freedom, knowledge, and hard work–all resting substantially on the foundation of biblical Christianity’s worldview and ethic of service to God and neighbor.³  These advances have also given rise to a laudable expansion in people’s focus on the need for environmental stewardship. For as people come to feel more secure about their basic needs, they begin to allocate more of their scarce time, energy, and resources to attaining formerly less urgent ends. Consequently, the movement for environmental protection has grown as Western wealth has grown, giving rise to a strong environmental consciousness and to protective environmental legislation.

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