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CONTENTS
[Sustainable_Communities]
Alarming News from a UK Scientific Conference
Called
to Stewardship
A
Christian View of the Environment - Dr. Ray Bholin
Christian
Environmentalism - Dr. Ray Bholin
Christians
& The Environment
Christians
& the Environment - articles, and here
Christians
Care for Creation
Land:
A Call to Stewardship
LEARNING
TO LOVE GOD's CREATION - by Audrey Martin
Our
Environment - (Brethren Witness)
Soil
& Water Stewardship Essay
Stewardship
of the Environment - Some Possible Roles for Christian Artists
The
Bible on Environmental Conservation - a 21st Century Perspective
The
Christian Challenge of Caring for the Earth
The
Environment - Why Should Christians Care?
EVENTS:
-----------------------------
A ROCHA International - an international conservation organization working to care for God's world
A
ROCHA Canada - situated
near White Rock, BC and HERE
Christian
Ecology Link - UK
Evangelical
Environmental Network
AU SABLE INSTITUTE TRAINS MISSIONARIES/WORKERS
-- Au Sable Institute
of Environmental Studies under Cal DeWitt started the Christian
Environmental Stewardship movement and now has a network of 59
participating Christian colleges throughout North America. They are now
designing courses particularly for agricultural and development workers
such as 'Tropical Agriculture and Missions', 'Ecological Agriculture'
and 'Global Development and Sustainability'. Courses are offered in
January (12/31-1/20); May (5/14-6/3); and in two summer terms(6/5-7/9 &
7/17-8/16). You can take them at three North American sites (Michigan,
Washington, Florida) and two overseas locations (India & Kenya), and
you can get credit through any of the 59 participating colleges. See
http://www.ausable.org or call 1-800-315-2836
(North America) or +1-
231-587-8686 or write to <missioncourses@ausable.org>.
SEE A MODEL EFFORT FOR MISSION & THE ENVIRONMENT
-- "Care of
Creation", a non-profit whose first project is in Kenya in partnership
with the International Mission Board, SBC entity. Web:
http://www.careofcreation.org/home.cfm
In Kenya, the person who is heading up that project is an MK named
Craig. His hope is to empower believers and churches to have a positive
impact on the environment and to use the project as a springboard for
reaching some unreached people groups with the gospel. Check it out and
see if you can replicate his efforts.
CONTENTS
NEWSLETTER:
---------------------
The
Third Day - The Third Day is a quarterly newsletter published by the Brethren
Witness office to highlight environmental stewardship from a Christian perspective.
Contributing writers include members of the Environmental Working Group, as
well as folks from around the denomination with expertise or interest in the
subject of care for creation. (Free)
RESOURCES:
--------------------
Creation
Care Magazine
Eco-Justice
Ministries
Effective
Environmental Choices for Congregations
Effective
Environmental Choices for Individuals
Environmental
Education
FOOD
FOR THE FUTURE - Powerpoint Presentations
Food
for the Future - Tips and Tools to help you get started
Teaching
Stewardship Through Chemistry
CONTENTS
------------------------
Regent College - Vancouver - Training in Environmentalism
ENVIRONMENTAL COURSES DESIGNED FOR
MISSIONARIES -- Au Sable
Institute of Environmental Studies under Cal DeWitt started the
Christian Environmental Stewardship movement and now has a network of
59 participating Christian colleges throughout North America. They are
offering courses for agricultural and development workers such as
'Tropical Agriculture and Missions', 'Ecological Agriculture' and
'Global Development and Sustainability'. Courses are offered in May
(5/14-6/3); and in two summer terms(6/5-7/9 & 7/17-8/16). You can take
them at three North American sites (Michigan, Washington, Florida) and
two overseas locations (India & Kenya), and you can get credit through
any of the 59 participating colleges. See
http:www.ausable.org
or call 1-800-315-2836 (North America) or +1-231-587-8686 or write to
missioncourses@ausable.org
(thanks Brigada!)
* * *
AQUAPONICS COURSE -- Training available
re
aquaponics, which involves combining aquaculture and hydroponics for
mutual benefit. These ecologically sound, highly productive systems are
ideal for food production in almost any part of the world and can be
used as a "helps ministry". For more information, visit:
http//www.aquacultureinternational.org
or email: cwjohnson@graham.main.nc.us
. Aquaculture International is a nonprofit organization that
honors Jesus Christ as Lord.
-----Original
Message-----
From: sustainable_communities-bounces@global-community.org [mailto:sustainable_communities-bounces@global-community.org]
On Behalf Of Gwendolyn Hallsmith
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 6:22 AM
To: Sustainable_communities@global-community.org
Subject: [Sustainable_Communities] Alarming News from a UK Scientific Conference
This just in from Herbie Giradet in the UK:
"I was sent a copy of a VERY sobering article written by The Independent's
Environment Editor Mike McCarthy dated 12-2-05. I thought it might interest
you, particularly the last few lines. I have cut the introductory first half
of this article which did not deal with C02."
Slouching towards disaster
The Independent
February 12, 2005
...Last week the British Government held an international conference, at the
headquarters of the UK Met Office in Exeter, on climate change. It was called
personally by Tony Blair, who is making the problem of global warming one
of the central policies of his simultaneous leadership in 2005 of both the
G8 group of rich nations and of the European Union. Its purpose was to update
policy makers everywhere on climate change science, which is rapidly moving.
General appraisals of it are carried out by the IPCC, which has produced three
assessment reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001. The third assessment report (known
as TAR) is chapter and verse on what the international community of climate
scientists think is happening now, and likely to happen in the future, with
global warming.
The most important conclusion of TAR was that he earths average surface temperature
was likely to warm by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade between now and
2100, depending on how human societies controlled their emissions of carbon
dioxide, the waste gas from industry and transport which is retaining more
and more of the suns heat in the atmosphere.
These are enormous rises (even at the lower end) and they are expected to
have similarly enormous impacts, ranging from the widespread failure of agriculture
and many more extreme weather events from droughts to flooding, to sea-level
rise around the world. The fourth IPCC assessment is not due until 2007, and
so last weeks conference was in the nature of a mid-term report about where
the science has got to. &
(My colleagues and I) were taken aback. The opening day brought disclosure
of two major new threats to the world. The first concerned Antarctica, with
a warning from the British Antarctic Survey (the body whose scientists discovered
the ozone hole) that, perhaps because of rising temperatures, the vast ice
sheet covering the western side of the continent may be starting to break
up. Were it to collapse into the sea, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise
global sea levels by more than 16 feet. Goodbye London; goodbye Bangladesh.
Only four years ago the IPCC TAR said it was safe for probably 1,000 years,
certainly until the end of this century; last week Professor Chris Rapley,
the BAS director, said that judgement would now have to be revised.
The second alert concerned an issue many of the scientists present were only
dimly aware of: the acidification of the oceans. The billions of tonnes of
carbon dioxide human society is producing are not only causing the climate
to change. When they dissolve in seawater they are combining with it, in a
simple chemical reaction, to produce carbonic acid. But the worlds seas are
alkaline, and have been for many millions of years, and it is in this environment
that thousands of species of small marine, organisms at the bottom of the
food web, from plankton to shellfish, have evolved. They will not be able
to live in an acid sea. The point about these two disclosures is that they
were not based on predictions of future events by supercomputer models of
the global climate, which is the origin of most scare stories - to use the
term neutrally - about global warming. They were based on actual observation,
in the real world, of things that are happening now.
But there were plenty of predictions as well at the conference, and they were
grimmer than ever. For example, there was the most pessimistic assessment
yet of global warming causing collapse of the Gulf Stream which perversely
would bring a new ice age to Europe. A group of American scientists calculated
that in the absence of major action to control emissions, the chance of this
happening was now greater than 50 per cent.
And there was an assessment that the ice-sheet covering Greenland may start
to melt - which would cause global sea levels to rise by 20 feet with a
temperature rise of only 1.5 degrees C. above pre-industrial levels. We are
already 0.7 above pre-industrial levels; we are well on the way.
Perhaps the most vivid of a plethora of pessimistic papers was a review of
studies on which ecosystems and species would be hit by which temperature
rises. It was a long, dire litany of disappearances as the mercury moves up
the worlds thermometer:
Queenslands highland tropical forests very soon; at a one degree rise South
Africas unique fynbos flora and the rest of the Arctic sea ice; between one
and two degrees the trout in the rivers of the Rockies; between two and three
degrees the alpine flowers of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the broadleaved
forests of China, and the rainforests of the Amazon. One after another they
will go, the special places of the earth, the glories of creation.
The overwhelming impression given by the conference, a meeting of entirely
sober scientists with hardly a campaigning environmentalist in sight, was
that these things will happen. Firstly, there was a strong sense that climate
change was proceeding much more quickly than had been anticipated. The report
of the conference steering committee said: "Compared with the TAR"
only four years ago, remember - "there is greater clarity and reduced
uncertainty about the impacts of climate change across a wide range of systems,
sectors and societies. In many cases the risks are more serious than previously
thought." Secondly, big temperature rises are already "built into
the system", as Margaret Beckett, the UK. Environment Secretary, acknowledged,
because there is a time lag between the CO2 going into the atmosphere and
the subsequent rise in temperatures. Even if all emissions were stopped dead
tomorrow all over the world, enough CO; is up there to cause a further rise,
according to a paper circulating at the conference (Hansen et al, 2005), of
0.6 degrees C.
But - and this is the third point - the emissions are by no means going to
stop tomorrow. Under the Kyoto protocol, abandoned by the United States, the
worlds biggest CO; emitter, the industrialised countries are struggling to
cut their emissions back to merely 5 per cent below 1990 levels; controlling
climate change would require a cut of perhaps 60 per cent.
Yet, as the conference chairman, Dennis Tirpak, head of the climate change
programme of the OECD, reminded delegates, the 2004 World Energy Outlook of
the International Energy Agency calculates that the next 25 years global emissions
of CO2 are likely to increase by 62 per cent, mainly from the developing world,
as the Chinese and the Indians rush to build coal-fired power stations to
service their exploding economies. The necessary cuts are a fantasy.
When it was all over (Guardian environment Correspondent) Paul Brown and I
travelled back from Exeter to London by train, working out what it meant,
working towards the inescapable conclusion. I have written at such length
to try to put that conclusion into some sort of context. It was the inevitability
of what was going to happen, I think, that for the first time struck us with
real force: that whatever flapping, floundering efforts humankind eventually
makes to try to stop it all, the great ice sheets will melt, the seas will
turn acid, and the land will burn. By the time we reached London we knew what
the conclusion was. I said: "The earth is finished." Paul said:
"It is, yes." We both shook our heads and gave that half-laugh that
is sparked by incredulity. So many environmental scare stories, over the years;
I never dreamed of such a one as this.
And what will our children make of our generation, who let this planet, so
lovingly created, go to waste?
______________________________________
Gwendolyn Hallsmith, Executive Director
Global Community Initiatives
12 Parkside Drive
Montpelier, VT 05602
802-223-1190 phone
802-223-8660 fax
ghs@global-community.org
www.global-community.org