CREATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

CREATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The Bible starts with the powerful proclamation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). We proclaim this truth every time we recite the opening words of the Apostles’ Creed:

“I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.”

This must be our starting point for any discussion of creation and the environment. Creation reveals God as “the heavens proclaim his righteousness and all peoples see his glory” (Ps 97:6; see also Rom 1:20).

As Creator, God is both distant from his creation and in an ongoing relationship with it. Understanding this helps us to avoid two errors. The first is pantheism, which sees God everywhere and in everything. Pantheism confuses the Creator with creation. The other is dualism, which sees God as having no continuing relationship with created life. But the Bible teaches that although God is transcendent, and thus apart from the world, he is still immanent, that is, intimately involved in the real world he has created. Psalm 104.5 affirms that he is the one who has “set the earth on its foundations”. Paul states that “all things” are created by God in Christ, who continues to hold “all things … together” (Col 1:16-17).

Human beings are given a special place in God’s creation because we are made in his image. Unfortunately, we Christians have sometimes been only too happy to assert this while forgetting that with privilege comes responsibility. We have sometimes used God’s command to Adam and Eve to “rule” or “have dominion” over the earth (Gen 1:26) to legitimise arrogant exploitation of nature. Critics claim that such emphases have resulted in an anthropocentric (humancentred) attitude. No wonder some Westerners have been leaning towards Hinduism and Buddhism, which they see as more biocentric (nature-centred) and therefore ecologically sensitive.

But we should be neither anthropocentric nor biocentric; we should be theocentric, acknowledging that the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) has assigned us the responsibility of caring for his creation. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Ps 24:1). We are only caretakers. This relation between humanity and God’s earth is something that must be central to our environmental concern. Jeremiah underlines God’s ownership:

“With my great power and outstretched arm I made the earth and its people and the animals that are on it, and I give it to anyone I please” (Jer 27:5).

The other Christian teaching we must never forget when thinking about the environment is the adverse effects of the fall. We cannot simply celebrate God’s glorious creation and ignore the fact that creation has been affected by human sin. But the fall has not totally obliterated the goodness ascribed to creation by God. And, the fall does not give us any right to dismiss the present world and creation as evil and remain apart from it while we await a future renewal. We need to work to counter the environmental degradation caused by human sinfulness.

We must do our part, but must also recognise that God has planned the final restoration of this fallen creation. In Romans 8:20- 21, the Apostle Paul refers to creation being liberated from its bondage to decay. This is generally understood as a promised reversal of the curse that creation was subjected to as a consequence of human sin (Gen 3:17-19). In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John foresees “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1).

In working to restore the environment, we need to recognise that God has not given us a haphazard assembly of organic and inorganic matter, natural energy and resources. Creation consists of ecosystems that are intricately woven together in interdependent cycles. The survival of all of creation depends on protecting these interdependent relationships.

We are called to be stewards, protecting this intricately planned world God has entrusted to us. Even more, we are called to be “responsible stewards” (Gen 2:15; Matt 25:20-21; 1 Cor 4:2; 1 Pet 4:10). Responsible stewardship demonstrated through God’s love will result in practical actions to promote sustainable living as well as right attitudes towards the environment. As Bible-believing Christians, we are called to care for creation in order to protect, conserve and bring healing to our wounded world.

Green Theology: Why Try to Preserve Biodiversity?

Why Try to Preserve Biodiversity?

Every day there are millions of interactions in nature that are essential for a healthy, functioning planet. Losing even a small species can have massive impacts on ecosystems and on humans. Environmentalists who advocate conservation, seeking to persuade others of its importance, tend to accumulate a variety of arguments, some of which may appeal to some people, others to others. This is a reasonable strategy in view of the fact that widespread support is necessary if the earth’s biodiversity is to be preserved to any significant extent. But perhaps the impression is too often given that most people are only going to be convinced by appeals to self-interested pragmatism, whereas these environmentalists themselves owe their passion for preserving biodiversity to other kinds of consideration.

There are, of course, many reasons why much of the natural world is useful to us. There are also good arguments to the effect that there are probably many benefits to us of which we are as yet unaware. Since a third of prescription medicines have been produced from chemical compounds found in plants and fungi, especially those of the tropical forests, it is more than likely that many of the thousands of species unique to very small areas of habitat in the rainforests – those that are disappearing daily before they can be discovered – will prove of pharmaceutical value in time, provided they survive.

However, the most recent trend in argument for conserving biodiversity is prompted by the recognition that it is economists who really run the world. One has the impression that for many environmentalists this is a sad recognition, born of disappointment. For some environmental scientists admitting that it is not scientists who rule the world is a bitter pill to swallow. Others are disillusioned idealists who have transformed themselves into hard-nosed players in the capitalist global marketplace.

In any case, we hear increasingly the slogan that people only value what they can put a monetary value on. It has spawned the extraordinarily ambitious attempt to evaluate the benefits of the biosphere, in other words to put a market price on what are called ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services are the direct and indirect services provided by ecosystems. Take, for example, the humble dung beetle, whose services to humanity we probably do not often think about. Dung beetles are invaluable to cattle-farming. ‘They prevent fouling of forage, promote dung decomposition into useful plant fertilizer, and reduce the populations of pests and flies.’ According to my source the ‘value of this service amounts to $US 380 million annually at 2006 prices’.[1] But in many cases it is not just the contribution of one species that counts, but the services of whole ecosystems. Forests soak up a lot of the CO₂ we emit. They remove pollutants from the atmosphere. Vegetation and soil biodiversity reduce flooding and release clean drinking water. Released in October 2010, the UN’s report known as TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) calculated that the real cost of damaging nature is at least ten times greater than the cost of maintaining the ecosystem as it is so that we can reap the associated benefits.

For example, setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas across the world would cost US$45 billion a year globally, but the benefits of preservation within these zones would be worth US$4–5 trillion a year. This report trumps the Stern report which did the same thing for climate change. TEEB claims that the financial case for preserving biodiversity is even stronger than the financial case for tackling climate change.

There are problems with such calculations (even if we could really suppose that they are more than wild guesses). Although they seek to play economists at their own game, for them to make any difference within the free market requires a revolution in the ways humans – not to say corporations – think about and do business. According to another report only two of the world’s hundred biggest companies believe that declining biodiversity is a strategic threat to their businesses.There is also a question about what kinds of biodiversity would benefit from taking these reckonings seriously as the basis for conservation. Consider the flagship endangered species, those that easily engage many people’s concerns.

Would it make any significant difference to the ecosystem services if the Yangtse river dolphin, the giant panda or the tiger disappeared? Even if one threw the profits of tourism into the calculations, would the monetary value of the ecosystem services be appreciably affected?

It is sometimes pointed out that these species, at least, have ‘existence value’ for many people. In other words, people just feel good about knowing such creatures exist, even if they never see them. What this really means is that people recognize intrinsic value in these creatures.

They recognize that it is good that such creatures exist, much as the Genesis creation account does. But the prevalent discourse that requires everything to be put into terms of human benefit and interest states this in the form of a value for people – existence value. It is somehow good for us that such creatures exist. As an attempted appeal to self-interest this seriously distorts the fact that people are actually recognizing some objective good, something that is good in itself and for its own sake, whether any of us feel good about it or not.

Here the believer has a big advantage, because the world of Genesis 1, for example, is not a human-centred world in which everything has to be justified as somehow in the interests of humans, but a God-centred world in which everything created has value for God. God’s appreciation of the natural world and all its members as good bestows intrinsic value on his creatures. That is also where human worth comes from.

I do not mean that believing that God values other creatures leads us to recognize value that we would otherwise, if we did not believe that about God, not recognize at all. I think, on the contrary, that people do recognize intrinsic good in other creatures, especially when it so to speak overtakes us, jolts us out of our more familiar egocentric attitude to the world – when, for example, the beauty of a landscape strikes and absorbs us, when the majesty of a tiger enthralls us, even when the cuteness of a giant panda charms us, when we marvel at the

intricate design of the smallest and ugliest of insects seen under a microscope.

For whereas many of us most of the time are not particularly entranced by the majority of the members of ecosystems – the

bugs and the microbes, the algae and the molluscs – they all have their admirers and inspire passionate interest in the scientists who specialize in them. What belief in God and God’s valuing of all his creatures can do for us is to draw us out of the egocentric perspectives that so often prevent us from attending to the manifold worth of other creatures.

Attending to God should enable us to attend more to his creatures and vice versa. As creatures of God the creatures are literally priceless and we degrade them by setting a price on them. Compare how we think of other humans. In a commercial world we may set some sort of price on the services other people perform for us but we do not set a price on the existence of other people. The economic arguments for conserving biodiversity, even if we decide they are needed in a world controlled by economists, are nevertheless regrettable and misleading because they reinforce the human-centred illusion that everything else has value only if we think it has value for us and marginalize the real intuitions of intrinsic worth that all of us actually have. It would be better to foster such intuitions and to use them to challenge the world-view of the economists.

There is a more adequate way to think about the so-called ecosystem services. It is not just that the natural world does a lot of things for us, but that we ourselves belong to the natural world. We depend on the intricate web of planetary life just as other creatures do. Because we have spread ourselves so widely and developed such complex and demanding ways of life we are even more intimately interconnected with everything else than most creatures are. We are even more dependent on the health of the whole biosphere than many other creatures are. Destroying any more of the biosphere than we have done already will not just cost us a lot, as though it were just a matter of financial profit and loss. We shall impoverish human life in

the process of impoverishing the planet.

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[1] Ken Thompson, Do We Need Pandas? The Uncomfortable Truth about Biodiversity (Dartington, Devon: Green Books, 2010), p. 59.

Green Theology: CREATION DOMINION THEOLOGY

CREATION DOMINION THEOLOGY

Humans have ‘dominion’ (caring responsibility) for other living creatures

The idea of dominion, an enormously influential idea historically and variously interpreted over the centuries, is what more than anything else has tempted people who knew the text to forget their own creatureliness, to set themselves over the rest of creation as though they did not belong to it but could do as they wished with it, even remake it to their own design.

But this is only possible if we take it out of its biblical context –, when we have learned a great many other things from the Bible about the relationship of humans to other creatures.

Dominion is a role within creation, not over it. Other creatures are first and foremost our fellow-creatures, and only when we appreciate them as such can we properly exercise the distinctive role that the Genesis creation narrative gives us in relation to other creatures. It is not the only way we relate to other creatures, but it is a distinctive one.

There is no need here to labour the point that the dominion should be understood as a role of caring responsibility, not exploitation, because this is now widely agreed. The point I do wish to labour is that it is a responsibility for fellow-creatures. Since Genesis depicts it as a kind of royal function, the rule of a king over others, it is worth recalling the only passage in the law of Moses that refers to the role of the king in Israel (Deut. 17:14–20). There it is emphasized that the king is one among his brothers and sisters, his fellow-Israelites, and should not forget it, should not accumulate wealth or arms or indulge in any of the ways kings usually exalt themselves above their subjects.

Only if they remember their fundamental solidarity with their people will kings be able to rule truly for the benefit of their people. Similarly, only when humans remember their fundamental solidarity with their fellow-creatures will they be able to exercise their distinctive authority within creation for the benefit of other creatures.

Finally, in our present context it is very well worth pondering the fact that the most obvious example Genesis itself provides of the exercise of the dominion is Noah’s preservation of all the species of earth in the ark.

Dominion begins from appreciating God’s valuation of his creation

A significant aspect of the Genesis 1 six-day creation account is that before we humans read of our responsibility for other living creatures we are taken through a narrative of creation that stresses God’s delight in each stage of his work. We are invited to share God’s appreciation of his creation before we learn of our distinctive role within it.

It follows, surely, that our approach to exercising dominion should be rooted in that fundamental appreciation of the created world as God has made it. We may then be less inclined to spoil it in our attempts to reshape it.

Dominion is to be exercised in letting be just as much as in intervention

Over the centuries people got used to thinking of the human dominion over other creatures as activity. It got to the point in the modern period where the human task came to be conceived as constant, ongoing activity to transform the world into one that would suit us much better than the natural world does. The result is that in fact there is little if any part of the planet that has not been to some extent affected by human activity, and we have all too slowly woken up to the fact that there is a lot we would really like to preserve as it is, because the natural world has value that does not require our constant interference to improve it.

In this situation it is vital that we re-conceive the Genesis dominion as a matter of letting creation be, at least as much as it is a matter of intervention. In fact, this aspect is really rather clear in Scripture itself if we consider those parts of the law of Moses that prescribe Israel’s ways of relating to the land of Israel and its other living creatures. We should recall the sabbatical institutions – the weekly Sabbath, when no work was to be done, even by domestic animals, and the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee, when the land was to be left fallow and not farmed.

In the Sabbatical Year, fields, vineyards and orchards were to be left to rest, the produce not gathered, so that ‘the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat’ (Exod. 23:11; cf. Lev. 25:7). Even within the cultivated part of the land of Israel, wild animals are expected to be able to live. We could see this as a kind of symbol of respect for wild nature, reminding both ancient Israel and ourselves that dominion includes letting nature be itself.

Green Theology: To fill and to subdue the earth

Humans to fill and to subdue the earth (land), but not at the expense of other creatures.

This point of discussion is one of the famous passage about the role of humans in creation in Genesis 1, where God says to the newly created human pair: ‘Be 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’ (Gen. 1:28).

The two had to cooperate in order to complete the task of filling the world. God made Adam and Eve differently physically so they couldn't finish the mission on their own. Similarly, in order to have a large number of children, both would need to cooperate on an emotional, spiritual, relational, and societal level. Both a mother and a father were necessary for the creation and upbringing of children in God's perfect plan. Even though single parenting is widespread nowadays, the situation is frequently difficult and calls for assistance from friends and family.

It's crucial to remember that God's instruction to procreate and multiply is typically seen as a personal directive to the heads of the human race (Adam and Eve, as well as Noah and his wife). God would permit some couples to be infertile without requiring everyone to "fill the earth" or have as many children as possible. God calls some people to stay childless and unmarried, while others are incapable of producing children (1 Corinthians 7:8).

God not only gave Adam and Eve the ability to populate the planet, but also to work and conquer it. The definition of "subdue" in the original Hebrew is "to make subordinate, dependent, or subservient." The concept of subduing the earth is actively controlling it with physical force or effort, cultivating it to make it fruitful and life-sustaining rather than destroying it.

The Lord made everything for us, but it is our responsibility to manage it. He wanted us to endeavour to keep chaotic situations from ruining the planet and making it worthless. In order to support themselves and serve the Lord, Adam and Eve had to make use of God's creation. "The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15) is how God assigned us the duty of caretakers in addition to the privilege.

Humans are endowed with "every see bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it" by God. 

You will be able to eat them (Genesis 1:29).  In the Garden of Eden, people were vegetarians, but after Noah's day, God expanded their diet to include animals (Genesis 9:3).

One of the main purposes for which humans were created was to serve as God's representatives throughout the globe and to reign over everything in His name. This was demonstrated when the Lord commanded Adam and Eve to fill the land and tame it (Psalm 8:6; 115:16). In order for us to represent God on earth, we were created in His image. And in order for us to have a connection with Him, we were created to be like Him. God loved having a personal relationship with us and wanted to bless us with His wonderful creation from the beginning.

It is not often well enough noticed that this command refers to two rather different matters. It refers first to the relationship of humans to the earth, secondly to their relationship to other living creatures. The latter is the dominion, and we will come to it under the next heading. Having dominion over other living creatures is not the same thing as subduing the earth.

‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’ Humans are not alone in being told to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill. The fish are to multiply and fill the sea, the birds are to multiply on earth (1:22), and although the text is not explicit we must assume that the creatures of the land are also to be fruitful and multiply. Only humans are told to fill the earth and to subdue the earth – and in their case the two activities go closely together. Only by means of agriculture were humans able to fill the earth, to live in at least a large proportion of the available land space. To subdue the earth is to take possession and to work the soil in order to make it yield more food for humans than it would otherwise do.

But what about all the other land animals? Are humans to fill the earth at their expense? Are humans supposed to supplant them? God’s words to the humans continue in this way:

See, 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. 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. (Gen. 1:29–30)

Why does God tell humans that he has given every plant for food for the other living creatures? Why doesn’t he say this to the animals themselves? It is not because they cannot understand him, for in verse 22 he has already spoken to the sea creatures and the birds. Surely it is because humans need to know this. They need to know that the produce of the earth is not intended to feed them alone, but also all the living species of the earth. 

Humans are not to fill the earth and subdue it to the extent of leaving no room and no sustenance for the other creatures who share the earth with them. God has given them too the right to live from the soil. So the human right to make use of the earth, to live from it, is far from unlimited. It must respect the rights of other creatures. Once again, we come up against the biblical fact that we are one creature among others, and that that is how God intended it to be.

 

Green Theology: SOLOMON AS NATURALIST

SOLOMON AS NATURALIST

According to 1 Kings 4:33, King Solomon was a well-known naturalist with a broad understanding of botany and biology, including animals, birds, reptiles, fish, and flora ranging from hyssop to Lebanese cedars. As an early scientist, his knowledge was based on firsthand observation and research of the natural world.

Among Solomon's primary characteristics as a naturalist are:

Botanist and Zoologist: He was a zoologist who classified fish, animals, birds, and reptiles as well as a dendrologist (specialist in trees).

Scientific Research: His research went beyond theory to include in-depth observations of the ancient Near East's flora and fauna, categorising everything from the tiny hyssop growing in walls to the massive cedars of Lebanon.

Nature Wisdom: Solomon's capacity to "speak" about nature suggests a thorough comprehension of ecological systems. His work, which predates Hellenistic botany, is occasionally recognised as an early forerunner of scientific sciences.

Scope of Knowledge: He lectured about these topics in addition to simply observing them, probably imparting information about their traits and possible therapeutic applications.

The Basis of Wisdom: His exploration of God's works through nature is characterised as a crucial part of his divinely bestowed wisdom.

King Solomon is the Bible’s pre-eminent example of wisdom. In the biblical narrative God gives Solomon his exceptional wisdom (1 Kgs. 3:3–14), and if Solomon’s wisdom failed him when it came to ruling his subjects and assembling his harem, it was signally expressed in other ways that made him an international reputation and brought even the queen of Sheba from the proverbially wise East to test Solomon’s wisdom and marvel at it (1 Kgs. 4:29–34; 10:1–13).

The passage in 1 Kings that concerns us now is this:

God gave Solomon very great wisdom, discernment, and breadth of understanding as vast as the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than anyone else, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, children of Mahol; his fame spread throughout all the surrounding nations.

He composed three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He would speak of trees, from the cedar that is in the Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish. People came from all the nations to hear the wisdom of Solomon; they came from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom. (1 Kgs. 4:29–34) Evidently much of Solomon’s wisdom concerned natural history. He was interested in flora as well as fauna. In the Bible’s capacious understanding of wisdom, these things evidently have a positive and important place.

Green Theology: ADAM AS THE FIRST TAXONOMIST

ADAM AS THE FIRST TAXONOMIST

In Genesis 1 the birds and the animals are created before humanity, but in Genesis 2 it is the other way around – a sure sign that these accounts are not to be read literally. In Genesis 2, as the story goes, God sees that Adam, still the only living creature in God’s world, needs a partner. It is not good for him to be alone.

So, first, God creates every species of animal and every species of bird and brings them to Adam for him to give them names. He does so, but none of them is found suitable to be Adam’s partner (2:18–20). Then God takes one of Adam’s ribs and out of it produces the woman, whom Adam also names. But this time he really has a partner: ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ (2:23) – a partner of the same species. Clearly the animals in the story function partly as a foil to Eve.

Their unsuitability to be partners for Adam highlights the fact that only a creature corresponding as closely to him as Eve does can be a suitable partner.

We need not, of course, suppose that God had to try out all the animals on Adam, before realizing that it would need another kind of act of creation to make a creature who would really meet the need. Nor should we suppose that the female human being was an afterthought, created only when it became clear that the male could not manage by himself. These are just features of the way the story makes its point.

While the animals can evidently be no substitute for the very special relationship of man and woman, we need not suppose that they cannot be companions of humans in any way at all. Clearly that is not the case. But what the story says positively about the animals is that Adam gives them names. This has sometimes been understood as an act of authority, an exercise of the dominion over other creatures that God gave to humans in Genesis 1:28.

But the idea that in the Hebrew Bible naming expresses authority is actually not at all well evidenced,[1] and we should not miss the implication that if Adam’s naming of the animals is an assertion of authority over them, so must be his naming of Eve.

Adam is not in this story ruling the animals; he is recognizing them as fellow-creatures and giving them a place in his mental construction of the world. We do not give names to other species so that we can exercise power over them, but in order to recognize their place in the natural world. Adam is the first taxonomist. He appreciates the diversity of the creatures. He recognizes their diversity and writes it into his vision of the world by giving each species its own name.

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[1] See George W. Ramsey, ‘Is Name-Giving an Act of Domination in Genesis 2:23 and Elsewhere?’ CBQ 50 (1988): pp. 24–35.

Green Theology: The various creatures have specific habitats

Psalm 104 is the equivalent within the book of Psalms to the first chapter of Genesis within the Pentateuch. It is the psalm of creation, and we might even call it the ecological psalm. I have already mentioned it because like Genesis 1 it celebrates the immense diversity of creation, and makes that a subject of praise to God. But there is another prominent feature of it.

As it ranges over the various categories of living creatures – mentioning each time the general category, such as wild animals or birds of the air, but then giving specific examples of each – it depicts for each a specific habitat that God has provided for each species: fir trees for storks to nest in, rocks for the rock badgers, forests for the lions, and so forth. There is even an allocation of the hours of the day: the night for the wild animals of the forest to hunt, the daylight hours for humans to do their work. All the various creatures have their place in God’s carefully designed whole, and humans have a place among others. In this observation of habitat there is also a recognition of interdependence.

The psalmist does not mean that trees were created only for birds to nest in, but he does see that some creatures depend on others for life. There is here at least a first step in the direction of recognizing what are now called ecosystems. We cannot consider each species independently of others, because they are so often  bound up together in a delicate web of interdependence. Preservation of species requires, as we now know, preservation of the ecosystems within which they live.

Human kinship with other creatures

All too often in the history of Christian thought and in the history of western thought humans have been elevated above the natural world as though we did not really belong to it. We have tried to relate to other creatures as demi-gods rather than as fellow-creatures, and the results have been in many cases catastrophic. But this is not a biblical view. Humans are distinctive among the creatures, but the creation narratives also make quite clear our kinship with other creatures.

Genesis 1 makes the point by placing the creation of humans not on a separate day, but on the day devoted to the creation of land animals. Being land animals themselves, humans do not get a day to themselves. Genesis 2 depicts our kinship with the other creatures of earth more vividly and emphatically. God creates Adam out of the dust of the earth. As so often in the Hebrew Bible an ontological relationship is signified by a play on words. Adam is not really a name, but an ordinary word for human being, and Genesis 2:7 says that God formed the human being (’adam) from the dust of the earth (’adamah), just as he then also formed every animal and bird from the earth (2:19).

We are earthy creatures, we belong to the earth, and we belong with the other creatures of earth. True, Adam only lives because God takes his earthy form and breathes the breath of life into him, but this too is the breath of life we share with all other living creatures (cf. 6:17; 7:15,22).

Had we paid sufficient attention to this, we could not have come to regard the earth and its creatures as dispensable, as though we did not really belong to it. Once we recover the sense of our kinship to all other creatures, we cannot be indifferent to the fate of other creatures on earth.

Humans and other creatures are fellow-creatures in the community of the earth

The notion of a community of creation is worth highlighting as a useful model for thinking about our place in creation. The term itself does not come from Scripture, but, like many of the terms we use to talk about what the Bible teaches, it encapsulates a way of thinking we do find in Scripture. Perhaps one of its most potent expressions in the Old Testament is in Genesis 9.

After the flood, in which Noah has preserved every species of land animal and bird, God makes a covenant with (as he puts it, speaking to Noah) ‘you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark’ (Gen 9:9–10). He later calls it a covenant between God and ‘all flesh that is on the earth’ (9:16). The other creatures are partners to the covenant, along with humans.

In this respect this covenant is unique among the biblical covenants, but the content of the covenant explains why it is. In this covenant God promises all earth’s creatures that he will never again destroy the earth and its creatures in a deluge. The covenant secures the earth as a reliable living space for all the creatures of earth. So all the creatures of the earth are interested parties. The earth is their common home. With them we form the community to which God has given the earth for our common home. We have no right to evict other members of the community from the home God has given us all to share.

Genesis has no illusions about this community. After the flood it remains a community within which conflict and violence constantly break out. These evils for which the flood was a judgment are not eradicated but they are restrained. A price is put on the lives of living creatures (9:2–6). All is not sweetness and light, but God nevertheless does not surrender the intention that his creatures should share the earth he has given them. The covenant is his first step towards the renewal and perfecting of the community of his earthly creatures.

Biodiversity and Conservation of Species in the Old Testament 

The Old Testament recognizes Biodiversity

The Old Testament writers were well aware of biodiversity. This is most obviously the case in the very first chapter of the Bible, the account of the creation of the world in six days. It is a very formulaic account, with key phrases repeated over and over. One such phrase is: ‘of every kind’ or ‘according to their kind’. We hear of fruit trees of every kind, seed-bearing plants of every kind, sea creatures of every kind, birds of every kind, wild animals of every kind, domestic animals of every kind, creeping things (i.e. reptiles and insects) of every kind. In  all the phrase occurs ten times, scattered across the accounts of the third, the fifth and the sixth days of creation (Gen. 1:11,12,21,24,25). To say that this passage recognizes biodiversity is an understatement. It celebrates biodiversity. It paints a picture of a world teeming with many, many different forms of life. Another formula that occurs in the  accounts of the fifth and sixth days is the statement that ‘God blessed them’ (1:22,28).

God’s blessing is his gift of fecundity. He enables the creatures to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. Not only diversity but also abundance belongs to the Creator’s will for his creation.

All the English translations of Genesis 1 seem to use the word ‘kind’ (creatures ‘of every kind’ or ‘according to their kinds’), but we could justifiably translate the Hebrew word (min) as species. In the Hebrew Bible this word is only used for kinds of plants or animals, not for kinds of any other things. That is how we use the word species in English. In the story of Noah we can see that the writers did have the concept of species in at least rudimentary form. In the case of animals, at least, they knew that it takes a male and a female of a particular species to reproduce that species. For each species to survive, there have to be two of everything, one of each gender.

Not all ancient people were quite so clear about that. This does not mean that ancient Israelites could distinguish species with the accuracy we can today, and they certainly had no idea of the vast numbers of species we now know to exist. But they did know that if you breed a horse and a donkey, you get a mule, which is infertile, and so they did not approve of mules.

Cross-breeding of species seemed to violate the fundamental distinctions that made for diversity in God’s creation and so was forbidden by the law of Moses (Lev. 19:19). The sheer, abundant variety of the creatures is also celebrated in the great creation psalm, Psalm 104. When the psalmist has described some of the creatures of the land, he breaks into praise:

O LORD, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures. (v. 24)

Then he moves on to the sea:

Yonder is the sea, great and wide,

creeping things innumerable are there,

living things both small and great. (v. 25)

The Israelites were not very familiar with the sea. They were not a seafaring people. They thought of the sea as a peculiarly dangerous place for humans. But they knew that it was teeming with living creatures, strange and wonderful, far more than they could count or catalogue.

Most likely in those days the eastern Mediterranean was much more abundantly full of life than it is now. For the psalmist, this sheer diversity is part of what makes God’s creation so admirable and amazing. The diversity of creation manifests the wisdom of the Creator.

For the Old Testament writers it is natural to connect the two.

God delights in biodiversity

Another refrain that runs through the six-day creation story in

Genesis 1 is: ‘God saw that it was good.’ At the end of his work of creation on each day, God looks at his work, is satisfied with it, admires it, pronounces it good. At the end of the sixth day, he ‘saw . . . that . . . it was very good’. The whole is greater than the parts. It all belongs together and the finished whole is not just good, but very good. Still, every part of creation, just in itself, is good. It has value for God.

We can enliven the language a bit. ‘God saw that it was good’ means: he was delighted with it. And among the things that delighted him must be, because it is such a prominent feature of the account, the sheer, abundant variety of creatures.

God’s delight in the diverse reality of his creatures also appears in the book of Job. When God finally answers Job’s complaints, what he does is take Job on a panoramic tour of God’s creation – not a physical tour, but a tour in the imagination, as the great poetry of these chapters evokes one after another the wonders of the natural world.

The intention is to evoke Job’s awe and to put Job in his place, as it were. Having taken Job in imagination through the cosmos, God homes in on the animal creation and describes ten specific creatures – all animals or birds. They are the lion, the raven, the mountain goat, the deer, the wild ass, the wild ox, the sand grouse (usually translated as ostrich),[1] the warhorse, the hawk and the vulture. These particular ten are selected largely because of their magnificent wildness. They are to

remind Job that the world does not revolve around him, that it is full of creatures with whom he has nothing to do and whom he could not dream of controlling. Yet God delights in them, and the poetry conveys his delight. Take, for example, the vulture.

God says to Job:

Is it at your command that the vulture mounts up

and makes her nest on high?

She lives on the rock and makes her home

in the fastness of the rocky crag.

From there she spies the prey;

her eyes see it from far away.

Her young ones suck up blood;

and where the slain are, there she is. (Job 39:27–30)

The vulture, with its blood-sucking chicks, is not perhaps a bird for whom most of us have instinctively warm feelings. But the poetry works rather like a David Attenborough wild-life documentary. We are moved by the wondrous otherness of the creatures. None of us would want to control such a creature. Its wildness delights us, and we can sense God’s own delight in it. In all their wildness and diversity, God is proud of these creatures.

These ten animals and birds are among the jewels in the crown of creation. They are the sort of charismatic creatures few people would want to go extinct. It is easy to raise support for the conservation of creatures like these – like the panda, the tiger, the polar bear, or the great white shark. And with creatures like these, it is easy to appeal to something more than narrow utility to humans. People simply feel that it is good that such creatures exist, even if they never encounter them themselves. People have a gut-feeling sense of what a loss it would be to the creation if such magnificent creatures went extinct.

Of course, the vast majority of the millions of species that may be in danger of extinction do not have such an appeal. To most of us one species of beetle looks much like a hundred others. We have even less appreciation for molluscs, fungi, very small plants and micro-organisms, and to care about their preservation we need arguments that go beyond the cuddliness of the panda or the magnificence of the tiger. But all of these very humble members of the community of creation ave some who appreciate them, some people who enthusiastically

devote their lives to studying them. Entomologists, really can sense something of God’s delight in every single species of beetle.

 All creatures live to glorify God

A biblical theme that has been undeservedly neglected by Christians in the modern period is the idea that the whole creation worships God. This is, so to speak, the corollary of God’s delight in his whole creation. He responds to them with delight and they respond to him with praise and celebration. Not that in most cases they have words to do so, or even the sort of consciousness that can intentionally focus on their Creator, but simply by being themselves, being and doing what God created them to be and do, they bring glory to God.

In that sense we should see the other creatures as fellow-worshippers with us of the Creator who made us all. Psalm 148 is far from the only, but it is the fullest biblical passage on this theme.

It calls on all the creatures, from the angels in heaven, through all the different categories of creatures, to praise the Lord. Long before people are mentioned, it gives us a picture of creation as a great choir engaged in singing God’s praises, a choir we are then invited to join. By praising God through all they are and do, the other creatures help us to praise him too, not only with our lips but in our lives. We who so easily fail to praise God, whether in words or in life, are helped and encouraged to do so by all the ceaseless worship of the rest of creation.

In the ancient world many people worshipped other creatures – heavenly bodies, trees, even animals. The Bible redirects that praise. All the creatures are creatures, created by God, not gods who should be worshipped. On the contrary, the creatures themselves worship God, and our proper response to them is to join in their praise of God.

From divinities to be worshipped they become fellow-worshippers of the only true God. Many Christians have been suspicious of green attitudes to the world because they fear some sort of pantheism. The Bible, they point out, has de-divinized the creation. True, and has not desacralized creation. As creatures who belong to God their creator, the non-human creatures are not divine but they are sacred to God. If we gave more attention to the creatures as our fellow-worshippers, we would not be so prone to instrumentalize them, to regard them as having value only if we can make use of them for our own needs and desires.

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[1] Arthur Walker-Jones, ‘The So-Called Ostrich in the God Speeches of the Book of Job (Job 39, 13–18)’, Bib 86 (2005): pp. 494–510, that the reference is more probably to the sand grouse.

Biodiversity – a Biblical-Theological Perspective Living in an Age of Mass Extinction

In a recent book Heather Rogers describes a scene in Indonesia (now the world’s third largest emitter of carbon dioxide, after China and the USA):

Imagine millions of acres of dense rain forest teeming with the world’s most diverse flora and fauna. A crew armed with chain saws and bulldozers forges a narrow path through the trees. The workers begin to rip away and flatten the forest, as wildlife, including endangered species such as orangutans, flee for their lives. Abulldozer shoves innumerable splintered trees into tangled piles that stretch for miles, and crews set them alight. Ferocious fires blast through what was once a dynamic web of life, leaving behind a carbon dioxide-filled haze and a silent, charred wasteland. After the forest has been erased it’s almost impossible to imagine what was done there.[1]

These huge clearances are to make way for oil palm plantations, which are grown partly to be used as vegetable oil in all sorts of processed food, but also to a considerable extent to produce biofuels, the allegedly green fuels that it was hoped would cut the level of carbon dioxide emissions from cars. In fact, burning the forests releases massive amounts of CO2 and the palm oil plantations themselves cannot absorb nearly as much CO₂ as the rain forests they replace.

Deforestation globally accounts for 20 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, Indonesia aims, despite its formally strict environmental regulations, to expand the acreage it devotes to oil palm plantations from its current 16 million acres to almost 26 million by 2015.[2] (Brazil, on the other hand, has had some success in reducing the rate of deforestation in the Amazon.) The Indonesian story goes to show the complexity of the predicament the world is in. What seemed like a good way of slowing climate change without having to reduce automobile use in the USA (and other parts of the affluent West) turns out to exacerbate perhaps the most effective way in which human beings are currently destroying the world’s biodiversity – and without even reducing CO2 emissions.

In most people’s environmental awareness the ongoing process of mass extinction of species has been overshadowed recently by climate change – or else simply absorbed into climate change. It is true that climate change will magnify the processes of extinction that are already underway, but those processes have a momentum of their own. There was, of course, a green movement and much public concern about the environment long before climate change entered our radar. There was already much to be concerned about, and while too many people are still sceptical about climate change, there is no denying the destruction of the rainforests or the worldwide decline of amphibians, the emptying of life from the over-fished areas of the oceans or the very worrying decline of bees. Understandable though a focus on climate change may be, the loss of biodiversity for other reasons merits our attention.

The statistics of biodiversity are staggering. About 1.8 million species have been described, classified and named. But the number of unknown species is undoubtedly much higher than that. Scientists can only make informed guesses, but the guesses range from ten million to a hundred million. A vast number of these are insects and micro-organisms – without which the rest of the community of living things would disintegrate. Globally there are biodiversity hotspots, many in the tropics or on islands, where the concentration of biodiversity is astonishing, but it is remarkable enough in many other places. Previously unknown species are turning up all the time, at the rate of more than three hundred a day. Many, of course, are the insects and micro-organisms, but there are plants and animals too, even large ones. In 2008 a massive palm tree, eighteen metres in height, one of the largest flowering plants on the planet, previously unknown to science, was discovered in Madagascar. More than four hundred new species of mammal have been described since 1993, and they include twenty-five new species of primate discovered as recently as the last decade. Asingle expedition to north Vietnam in 2002 discovered more than a hundred new plant species. New species still appear even in the United Kingdom. Increasingly, it seems, known species are being found actually to consist of two distinct species, as in the case of the British pipistrelle bat, which was recognized to comprise two species only in the 1990s. The ocean floors, 70 per cent of the surface of the planet, are undoubtedly rich in undiscovered species of astonishingly different kinds from anything we otherwise know.

Of course, a great many species are disappearing from the world before they have even been discovered. One small piece of tropical forest might contain thousands of species limited to that area. Who knows what industrial trawling of the ocean floors must have destroyed forever? One reaction to such considerations is to point out that extinction of species is a natural part of the history of life on earth.

Species have always gone extinct and new species evolve. While this is true, the scale is incomparable. What the scientists call the background rate of extinction – the normal rate at which species go extinct outside abnormal periods of mass extinction – is one species per million per year. The current rate is estimated to be at least a thousand species per million a year. The current rate is at least a thousand times the normal. To replace those extinct species with new ones would take nature thousands, probably millions of years. As one source puts it, ‘The extinction outputs far exceed the speciation inputs, and Earth is becoming biologically impoverished because of it.’[3]

We are living through an age of mass extinction, the sixth in the history of life on earth. The last such extinction, the fifth, occurred 65,000 years ago, when the dinosaurs, after dominating the earth for 150 million years, died out, mainly, it is now thought, through the effects of an asteroid hitting the earth. In the sixth mass extinction, humans are the asteroid.

This process of anthropogenic mass extinction is not of recent origin. It seems to have begun many thousands of years ago as humans spread across the earth. Before they arrived there were megafauna in most places – the big animals (weighing ten kilograms or more), such as now survive only in Africa and tropical Asia. There were, for exampole, the big flightless birds (nine or ten feet tall) of New Zealand and Australia, the elephant birds of Madagascar, tortoises the size of cars, woolly mammoths, gigantic deer, giant ground sloths, twenty-three feet long lizards, and in the oceans the sea-cow – I mention only a few of those that are easily described or have names other than Latin ones.

There were many more. Whether the megafauna went extinct mostly because humans hunted them is debated. There are at least three other suggested explanations (including the possibility that humans successfully competed with them for the same resources). But there is a common pattern: the megafauna of an area of the globe go extinct soon after humans first settle there. As one scholar puts it: ‘Direct human responsibility for these ancient extinctions . . . has not been conclusively proved, but we have been repeatedly found at the scene of the crime holstering a smoking gun.’[4] These were animals with no natural predators until humans arrived, therefore easily hunted, and with a slow birth rate that made it hard for the species to recover from losses.

In the case of New Zealand, the phenomenon happened as late as the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, because the islands had no human inhabitants until the Maoris arrived, a few hundred settlers who soon butchered some 160,000 moas.

It is not perhaps appropriate to pass moral judgment on our ancestors, who lived, after all, before agriculture made hunting less vital to survival. But don’t we feel the loss of the megafauna? Aren’t we thrilled to hear about them, like the fabulous beasts in the medieval bestiaries? Medieval people thought they could find the griffons, the unicorns and the dragons if they travelled far enough; we know that the elephant birds, the giant koalas and the ground sloths are gone forever. Small children are fascinated by dinosaurs, but for most adults the age of the dinosaurs seems alien. We humans would not belong in it, but the megafauna lived in our world and we miss them.

Let’s look at the scene in Genesis 2 where God brings the animals to Adam for him to give names to them, for him to recognize them as fellow-members of his world, and I see not just the familiar species, but also the ten-foot high moas, the giant kangaroos and the huge lumbering beasts whose proper names, given to them once by their human predators, we have forgotten.

Nostalgia for the megafauna has a more practical effect in the contemporary world. It is the surviving megafauna that most people most want to save from extinction. The flagship species, everybody’s favourite endangered species, are mostly big ones: the giant panda, the mountain gorilla, the tiger, the bald eagle, the humpback whale, and others. We love them now that we have lost most of them.

The megafauna were not the only casualties of human colonization.

Across the Pacific islands where the Polynesians settled, half the species of birds vanished, especially the flightless ones that didn’t

know they needed to fly until humans arrived. ‘Homo sapiens, serial killer of the biosphere,’ biologist Edward O. Wilson calls us.[5] Modern Europeans and Americans continued the process by bringing technology to bear. The invention of steam-powered trawlers in Victorian Britain began the deadly trawling of our seas that has turned habitats once teeming with life into oceanic deserts. But the engine of the mass extinction now occurring all around us is, of course, destruction or pollution of habitat.

Humanity today is on a rampage of changing natural habitats dramatically: cutting them down, plowing them up, overgrazing them, paving them over, damming and diverting water, flooding or draining areas, spraying them with pesticides and acid rain, pouring oil into them, changing their climates, exposing them to increased ultraviolet radiation, and on and on.[6]

It is important to remember that living creatures belong to ecosystems, delicately balanced communities of life. If we wish to preserve biodiversity we shall not get far by saving individual species, even if some can be transplanted elsewhere, with unpredictable results as the history of invasive species shows. Preserving ecosystems has to be the priority, and it is at least moderately good news that the Nagoya protocol, agreed in October 2010 by 103 nations, sets targets of increasing protected land across the world from the present 12 per cent to 17 per cent and protected oceans from the present 1 per cent to 10 per cent.

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[1] Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy is Undermining the Environmental Revolution (London: Verso, 2010), p. 2.

[2] Rogers, Green Gone Wrong, pp. 99–100.

[3] P.R. Ehrlich and A.H. Ehrlich, ‘The Value of Biodiversity’, in Biodiversity and Conservation, vol. 1: History, Background and Concepts (ed. Richard J. Ladle; London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 609–89, here p. 683.

[4] Jonathan Silvertown, Fragile Web: What Next for Nature? (London: Natural History Museum, 2010), p. 167.

[5] Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (London: Abacus, 2003), p. 94.

[6] Ehrlich and Ehrlich, ‘The Value’, p. 683.