In our eagerness to prosper, we have ravaged what was good.
Using more than what was needed, taking everything we could.
We have changed the gentle order you intended for the earth.
Now we humbly ask the wisdom to be part of its re-birth.
-Cathy Yost, Prayer For Creation, 2001
Who so hath his mind on taking, hath it no more on what he taketh.
-Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live
in.
-Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet, 1971
It
strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that
people die of want in a world of surplus.
-Bob Geldof
We face a fundamental question which can be described as both ethical and ecological.
How can accelerated development be prevented from turning against man? How can one prevent
disasters that destroy the environment and threaten all forms of life, and how can the
negative consequences that have already occurred be remedied?
-Pope John Paul II, Speech to the European Bureau for the Environment,
L'Osservatore Romano, 26 Jun 1996
Before
it's too late, we need to make courageous choices that will recreate
a strong alliance between man and Earth. We need a decisive 'yes' to
care for creation and a strong commitment to reverse those trends
that risk making the situation of decay irreversible.
-Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger),
cited in
Nicole Winfield, “Pope Urges Young to Care for Planet,”
Associated
Press, 2 Sep 07
There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise
could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.
-Malcolm X (1925-1965), Autobiography, 1964
We have probed
the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried
things in it.... That does not fit my definition of a good tenant.
If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been
evicted long ago.
-California
Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird (1936-1999)
Government
cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of
soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes
to the need for slum clearance and schools.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), 32nd President of the
United States
And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone,
thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool
upon it, thou hast polluted it.
-Exodus
20:25, Hebrew Bible
It is doubtful that the dissection of living animals and plants could be done by those
who believe them to be holy. A pantheist would not view trees as so many board feet in the
manner a Christian would. A pantheist would be less likely to measure the number of acre
feet coming over a waterfall than his Christian descendent, centuries later who had become
a scientist. That which is sacred would be handled with a certain reverence.
-Wes Jackson, "Meeting the Expectations of the Land,"
Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987
The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a
reverence for the life-giving earth.
-Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis 1963
The
first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the
selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we
wise up.
-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002
There
must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human
product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here,
and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why.
Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that
we dare not enter or possess.
-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder,
2002
We
can be confident that action which is in accord with a few basic
beliefs cannot be wrong and can at least testify to the values we
will need to cultivate. These are the beliefs that the human race is
a family that has inherited a place on the earth in common, that its
members have an obligation to work toward sharing it so that none is
deprived of the elementary needs for life, and that all have a
responsibility to leave it undegraded for those who follow.
-Gilbert F. White, "Stewardship of the Earth,"
Geography,
Resources, and Environment: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White,
Volume 1 1986
It would
be rash to conclude that, on balance, the environment of the globe as a whole is
either deteriorating or improving, or that the survival of the societies we know
depends upon filling a simple set of prescriptions. It is all too complex and
dynamic, whether it involves managing greenhouse gases or Nile snails…The
future condition of the globe's interlocking natural and social systems depends
more on human behavior than on the further investigation of natural processes,
however desirable that may be.
-Gilbert F. White, "Greenhouse Gases, Nile Snails, and Human Choice,"
Perspectives
on Behavioral Science: The Colorado
Lectures,
ed. Richard Jessor, 1991
Both
group effort and individual testimony flow from conviction as to the role of
people on earth. In stewardship of the common heritage, a few simple beliefs
recur: that all are indeed members of the same human family, that all share in
responsibility for the others, that each is capable of responding directly to
divine guidance. To seek to translate these into practical action with regard to
soil or petroleum or the fish of the sea is not necessarily to do what is
directly effective in changing society; it is to testify to a way that is
harmonious with one's fellows and with a healthy earth.
-Gilbert F. White, "Stewardship of the
Earth,"
Geography,
Resources, and Environment: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White. Volume 1
1986
The
issue of world environment has a special kind of urgency... The issue is one
of rich peoples and poor peoples, of the growing gap between the two, and of the
rich fouling their own nests.
-Gilbert F. White, Commencement Address, Earlham
College, January 20, 1969.
Geography, Resources, and Environment: Selected
Writings of Gilbert F. White, Volume 1 1986
We are told that when Jehovah created the
world, he saw that it was good. What would he say now?
-George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
But it is important to realize we are all trapped in mental constructs, and so we
separate ourselves from reality; the whole world loses its aliveness-or, rather, we lose
our ability to sense that aliveness, the sacredness of nature. When we approach nature
through the conceptualizing mind, we see a forest as a commodity, a concept. We no longer
see it for what it truly is, but for what we want to use it as. It is reduced. This is how
it becomes possible for humans to destroy the planet without realizing what they are
doing.
-Eckhart Tolle, “Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness,”
interview in The Sun, July 2002
Wealth and riches, that is, an estate above what sufficeth our real occasions and
necessities, is in no other sense a 'blessing' than as it is an opportunity put into our
hands, by the providence of God, of doing more good.
-John Tillotson (1630-1694)
We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a
"person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
-Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), 1967
And the desire
to own property, to take for ourselves things which in no way belong
to us, does not stop short at the sun. The air is already bought and
sold as a commodity, by health resorts. And what of water? Or
waterpower? Why should the earth be parceled out into private hands?
Is it any different from the sun? No; the earth belongs to the
people who live on it. God intended it for them, but it has been
taken over by private individuals. Privare means to steal.
Thus private property is stolen property - property stolen from God
and from humankind!
-Eberhard
Arnold (1883-1935),
From Private Property to Community, 1929
The
world does not belong to us. It belongs to God and to our children.
Whether we like it or not, we are all global citizens, and as such,
we must be responsible stewards with respect to the world’s
resources. Of course, the greatest resource of any nation is its
people. Let us seek to live in peace and harmony with everyone. In
the end only that will bring true happiness.
-Johann Christoph Arnold
Our
time on earth and our energy, intelligence, opportunities,
relationships, and resources are all gifts from God that he has
entrusted to our care and management. We are stewards of whatever God gives us. This concept of stewardship begins with the recognition
that God is the owner of everything and everyone on earth.
The Bible says, “The world and all that is in it
belong to the Lord; the earth and all who live on it are his.”
We never actually own anything during our brief stay on
earth. God just loans
the earth to us while we’re here. It was God’s property before you arrived, and God will
loan it to someone else after you die.
-Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life,
2002
Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with
monstrous machines.
-Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Man and His Symbols, 1964
I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our
approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of
survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead
of skeptically and dictatorially.
-E. B. White (1899-1985)
Our
destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid
economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most
horrid blasphemy. It is
flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth
beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
-Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,”
Sex,
Economy, Freedom & Community, 1992
We
have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a
consequence have debased work until it is only fit to be escaped
from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn,
debased by them. Out of
this contempt for arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person,
and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of
work. If we began by
making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the
world. We have taken
the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned
them into jimcrack “labor-saving devices.” We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to
carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of
decently ourselves.
-Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America,”
The Unsettling of America
1977
Decision making is not make by those who are affected by those decisions, people who
live on the land, but corporations, with an interest which is entirely different than that
of the land, and the people, or the women of the land. This brings forth a fundamental
question. What gives these corporations like CONOCO, SHELL, EXXON, DIASHAWA, ITT, RIO
TINTO ZINC, and the WORLD BANK a right which supercedes or is superior to my human right
to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us
as women? What law gives that right to them? Not any law of the Creator or of Mother
Earth. Is that right contained within their wealth that which is historically acquired
immorally, unethically, through colonialism, imperialism, and paid for with the lives of
millions of people, or species of plants and entire ecosystems? They should have no such
right, that right of self determination, and to determine our destiny, and that of our
future generations.
-Winona LaDuke,
statement at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women,
Bejing, China, August 31, 1995
Distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.
-William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear, Act IV, sc. 3
Each year—in the fields, commercial kitchens, markets, stores, and
restaurants—millions of pounds of food go to waste... We need to find ways to get
this food into the mouths of the hungry and not into the mouth of the dumpster.
-Dan Glickman, former Secretary U.S. Department of Agriculture,
"Help Feed the Hungry,"
USDA Brochure
In the United States, we not only produce an abundance of food, we waste an enormous
amount of it. More than one quarter of America's food, or about 96 billion pounds of food
a year, goes to waste--in fields, commercial kitchens, manufacturing plants, markets,
schools, and restaurants. While not all of this excess food is edible, much of it is and
could be going to those who need it. Food waste is not only unfortunate in terms of the
lost opportunity to feed hungry Americans but also in terms of the negative effects on our
environment. The nation spends an estimated $1 billion a year to dispose of excess food.
That is a waste of both food and money, however not all food is appropriate for human
consumption. Livestock farmers use some excess as animal feed. Renderers and other
businesses recycle many forms of excess food into other products. Food scraps can be
composted to create a valuable fertilizer. A food waste reduction hierarchy--feeding
people first, then animals, then recycling, then composting--serves to show how productive
use can be made of much of the excess food that is currently contributing to leachate and
methane formation in landfills.
-Carol Browner, former Administrator of U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency
& Dan Glickman, former Secretary of U.S. Department of Agriculture,
"Waste Not, Want
Not:
Feeding the Hungry and Reducing Solid Waste Through Food Recovery,"
22 Dec 99
Up to one-fifth of America's food goes to waste each year, an estimated 130 pounds of
food per person. The annual value of this lost food is estimated at around $31 billion.
Roughly 49 million people could be fed by those lost resources, more than twice the number
of people in the world who die of starvation each year.
-U.S. Dept. of Agriculture brochure, "A Citizen's Guide to Food
Recovery," 1999
The Federal Government has a responsibility to manage wisely those public lands and
forests under its jurisdiction necessary in the interest of the public as a whole.
Important values exist in these lands for forest and mineral products, grazing, fish and
wildlife, and for recreation. Moreover, it is imperative to the welfare of thousands of
communities and millions of acres of irrigated land that such lands be managed to protect
the water supply and water quality which come from them. In the utilization of these
lands, the people are entitled to expect that their timber, minerals, streams and water
supply, wildlife and recreational values should be safeguarded, improved and made
available not only for this but for future generations.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) 34th President of the United States,
Special Message to the Congress, 31 July 53
The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer
through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world:
- a world to bruise ourselves against;
- a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned;
- a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot;
- a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted.
All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if
we act well.
-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
Remarks at a reception at the White House, 29 Mar 68
Our stewardship of the Earth is brief. We owe it to those who follow to keep that in
perspective, to be responsible passengers along the way.
-George Bush, 41st President of the United States,
Speech at Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 13 June, 1989
We
continually make decisions in private which affect the commonweal,
as the ecologists (to take but one example) have shown us. When I keep my house warmer than it needs to be, I consume
fuel which might help someone else keep warm, or keep a job. When the food I eat is high on the protein chain I contribute
to a maldistribution of protein around the world. When I teach my children to be primarily concerned with
private gain, I diminish the ranks of public leadership in the
rising generation. In
all of these areas I have a choice—to lead a private life which
recognizes or ignores public need. There is no way for the public to flourish when most people
live private life for its own sake.
-Parker Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 1994
The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because
He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has
never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His
gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it. If God loves the
world, then how might any person of faith be excused for not loving it or justified in
destroying it?
-Wendell Berry, "God and Country," What Are People For?
1990
The
message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption
must end. If we continue
to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to
spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be
drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.
-Richard
Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, 1981
Man has sought to take from the natural world not only that which is necessary for his
stability and survival, but often seeks to satisfy his perceived and ultimately false
psychological needs, such as his need for self-display, luxuries and the like. Twenty
percent of humanity consumes eighty percent of the world's wealth and is accountable for
an equal percentage of the world's ecological catastrophes. One cannot characterize this
situation as "just" and what is more, this injustice has had a direct impact on
the ecology of the environment. However, it is plain that this numerical minority of
financially powerful people is not the only cause for the ecological ruin of our planet.
Every person ruled by instinctual fears attempts to exploit and loot nature. Consider the
willful scorching of the earth, over-fishing, wasteful hunting, excessive and dangerous
recycling of resources, and other similar "injustices" against the ways of
nature share in the responsibility for this ecological spiraling down.
-Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the Orthodox
Church
speech at "Environment
and Justice" Seminar on Halki, 25 June 1997
Though
men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of
the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the
right or the need to do so.
-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
In Scripture, the issues of peace and justice are inextricably bound together with the
health of the people and the land. The institution of the weekly sabbath day, the
sabbatical year, and the year of jubilee are calls for people, land, and animals to rest.
This is not only practical and health promoting; it is also a concrete reminder that we do
not "own" land, animals, or other people. They are God's; we are stewards for a
season.
-Sharon Gallagher, "The Whole Gospel and the Broken World"
from The Best Preaching on Earth, 1996
Nature does require her times of preservation.
-William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Henry VIII, Act III, sc. 2
When the deer goes, so will we, as when the river dries. When all that is here is gone,
like the trees, mountains and even gold, so will the people vanish. For these we cry not
for us, but for our children; not with tears but with blood. What will the outsiders do?
Teach us the ways of our forefathers or strip us of the very last remnants of our life?
-Douglas Morata, the oldest man in barangay Lusod, Luzon, Philippines,
1988
interview with visiting research team from the U.N. Development Program Global
Environmental Facility
Our teachings are that you take what you need and you leave the rest. I tell my kids
all the time that, by and large, someone has to get poor for someone to get rich. There
are a few people who didn't appropriate someone else's wealth. That broader valuation of
ecosystem destruction and the recognition that these things belong to somebody is a really
important part of considering how we curb our own behavior. The Lockean assumption that if
we put our labor to it then it becomes our own is totally fallacious. We have to figure
out how to leave things alone, and build an economic system that's not built on a linear
model, but instead on a cyclical model, because that's the natural world - it's cyclical
and not linear. That is going to take a lot of transformation.
-Winona LaDuke,
"Native Struggles
for Land and Life; An Interview with Winona LaDuke,"
Multinational Monitor, December 1999
The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully
until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking
for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he
eats is land.
-Chiksika, elder brother of Tecumseh, to Tecumseh 19 March 1779
quoted in Tecumseh, Son of Pucksinwah: The Shawnee War Chief,
Historical
Collections of Ohio: Know Your Ohio
In the eyes of God, the one who rules is the one who serves. So humans are called to
rule and subdue the creation by serving it. In fact, the Hebrew phrase of Genesis 2:15,
normally translated "till and keep," could be as accurately rendered "serve
and preserve."
-Fred Van Dyke, David Mahan, Joseph Sheldon, & Raymond Brand
in Redeeming Creation, 1996
I think the work in front of us is the first work task given our forbearers, which is
to care for the garden. Now because it's the first thing commanded, maybe it's the first
thing forgotten. But it is the first admonition and it is absolutely unequivocal. It is
part of right livelihood.
-Wes Jackson interviewed in Fugitive Faith, ed. Benjamin Webb,
1998
"You have established the earth and it continues. All things stand this day
according to your directions. For all things are your servants" (Ps. 119:91). God
himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it
and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life.
-Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 1998
The service we render to others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth.
It is obvious that man is himself a traveler; that the purpose of this world is not
"to have and to hold" but "to give and serve." There can be no other
meaning.
-Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell (1865-1940)
He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to
be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it
in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever,
generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the
earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked
was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of has face for bread.
-William Faulkner (1897-1962)
No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in
the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as
that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant,
and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century
as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is
allowed to go unchallenged.
-John Muir (1838-1914), Steep Trails, 1918
The
belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is
probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep
roots in the past and is almost universal.
-Rene J. Dubos (1901-1982), The Wooing of the Earth,
1980
Again, in the
mode of arrogant control, there is only one voice that gets
heard—the so-called voice of progress and profits. The one voice that is always drowned out in our cultural
cacophony—until it screams at us through ecological disasters—is
the voice of creation. It
takes a certain meekness and receptivity to hear that voice.
-Brian Walsh
& Sylvia C. Keesmaat,
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, 2004
Christians, of all people, should not be destroyers. We should treat nature with an
overwhelming respect. We may cut down a tree to build a house, or to make a fire to keep
the family warm. But we should not cut down the tree just to cut down the tree. We may, if
necessary, bark the cork tree in order to have the use of the bark. But what we should not
do is to bark the tree simply for the sake of doing so, and let it dry and stand there a
dead skeleton in the wind. To do so is not to treat the tree with integrity. We have the
right to rid our houses of ants; but what we have no right to do is to forget to honor the
ant as God made it, out in the place where God made the ant to be. When we meet the ant on
the sidewalk, we step over him. He is a creature, like ourselves; not made in the image of
God, it is true, but equal with man as far as creation is concerned. The ant and the man
are both creatures.
-Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984)
Pollution and the Death of Man, 1970
Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't?
What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?
-Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), The Madwoman of Chaillot, act
1
Beginning with one's physical body, each of these circles of stewardship is an
environment, linked to all others by the same ecological law. If the planet's
environmental problems seem too large to encompass, one may begin to practice stewardship
upon the ecology of one's body, confident in the knowledge that what is healthy for our
bodies is healthy for our families, and do on to the circle of the planet as a whole.
Equally, what is harmful for our bodies is harmful in each of the other circles of
stewardship.
-Vincent Rossi, EcoStewards Journal, Summer 1999
God never gives dominion to any creature which has not received his image. His image is
love. Other things belong to God; but God is love. No creature that has not love will be
allowed to have a permanent empire. The Father of mercy will not put the reigns of
government into a hand that has no heart. Dominion is a very solemn thing; it may oppress,
crush, destroy. The Father must have a guarantee for its gentleness. What guarantee can
there be but his image -- the possession of a nature tender as the Divine? Ye who torture
the beast of the field, have you considered the ground of your authority? Have you
pondered why it is that God has given you the dominion? It is because he meant to give you
His image ere you began to reign.
-George Matheson (1842-1902), Searchings in the Silence
Some recent occurrences such as the BSE disaster and even perhaps - dare I mention it -
the present severe weather conditions in our country are, I have no doubt, the
consequences of mankind's arrogant disregard of the delicate balance of nature. We have to
find a way of ensuring that our remarkable and seemingly beneficial advances in technology
do not just become the agents of our own destruction. There is no doubt that we live in an
age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of
advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.
-Prince Charles of Wales, speech at Millennium Festival of Medicine in
London,
quoted in "Storms,
Disease our fault says Prince Charles"
Environmental News Network, 7 Nov 00
...there is a hard core of wilderness need in everyone, a core that makes its spiritual
values a basic human necessity. There is no hiding it....Unless we can preserve places
where the endless spiritual needs of man can be fulfilled and nourished, we will destroy
our culture and ourselves.
-Sigurd F. Olson, author & conservationist (1899-1982)
Irresponsible spending is the scandal of Christian America, in the face of the world's
need. The American standard of living has risen to unprecedented heights, although a large
portion of the world exists on a sub-human level. Philanthropy, as we practice it, is not
enough --- although the word philanthropy actually means brotherhood. Our stewardship of
God's goods requires that we administer in God's name -- that is, with full awareness that
the world is His and that His love is directed toward us no more fully than toward every
man.
-Rachel Henderlite, A Call to Faith, 1955
Give some thought to the proposition that we may be selfishly appropriating for our own
use what God ordained for His own worship. In other words, when our life-style leads to
destroying the environment, we are raising havoc with what God created to worship Him.
Furthermore, consider that as one of its most important purposes, stewardship of creation
should sustain nature's worshiping capacity. The more I reflect on Scriptures and the more
I sense how God thrills to the adoration He receives from all that He has created, the
more I realize He has given us the awesome responsibility of caring for His creation so
that it can go on praising Him until the end of time.
-Tony Campolo
How To Rescue the Earth Without Worshiping Nature, 1992
The
absolute desire of 'having more' encourages the selfishness that
destroys communal bonds among the children of God. It does so
because the idolatry of riches prevents the majority from sharing
the goods that the Creator has made for all, and in the
all-possessing minority it produces an exaggerated pleasure in these
goods.
-Oscar Romero (1917-1980), "The Church's Mission Amid
the National Crisis,"
The Violence of Love, 6 Aug
1979
One cannot use with impunity the different categories of beings - animals, plants, the
natural elements - simply as one wishes, according to economic needs. One must take into
account the nature of each being and its mutual connection in an ordered system, which is
the cosmos.
-Pope John Paul II excerpts from public statements
compiled by the Christian Society of the Green Cross, 1996
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the
world.
-John Muir (1838-1914)
Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping
cranes in higher esteem than people. It is up to science to spread the understanding that
the choice is not between wild places or people, it is between a rich or an impoverished
existence for Man.
-Thomas E. Lovejoy, quoted in Balancing on the Brink of Extinction,
ed. Kathryn A. Kohm 1991 *
Across the continent, on the shores of small tributaries, in the shadows of sacred
mountains, on the vast expanse of the prairies, or in the safety of the woods, prayers are
being repeated, as they have for thousands of years, and common people with uncommon
courage and the whispers of their ancestors in their ears continue their struggles to
protect the land and water and trees on which their very existence is based. And like
small tributaries joining together to form a mighty river, their force and power grows.
This river will not be dammed.
-Winona LaDuke, "Like Tributaries to a River"
And yet it must be said, in all truth, that this question of man's responsibility to
the rest of creation cannot be defined by simply expressing our respect for all of nature.
There is a tension at the center of the biblical tradition, embedded in the very story of
creation itself, over the question of power and stewardship. The world was created because
God willed it, but why did He will it? Judaism has maintained, in all of its versions,
that this world is the arena that God created for man, half beast and half angel; to prove
that he could be a moral being…man was given dominion over nature, but he was
commanded to behave towards the rest of creation with justice and compassion. Man lives,
always, in tension between his power and the limits set by his conscience.
-Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Vice-President of World Jewish Congress,
The Jewish Declaration on Nature, Assisi, Italy 1986
For the Muslim, mankind's role on Earth is that of khalifa, viceregent or trustee of
God. We are God's stewards and agents on Earth. We are not masters of this Earth; it does
not belong to us to do what we wish. It belongs to God and He has entrusted us with its
safekeeping. Our function as viceregents, khalifa of God, is only to oversee the trust.
The khalifa is answerable for his/her actions, for the way in which he/she uses or abuses
the trust of God.
-Dr. Abdullah Omar Nasseef, Secretary General of Muslim World League,
The Muslim Declaration on Nature, Assisi, Italy 1986
When we talk about global crisis, or a crisis of humanity, we cannot blame a few
politicians, a few fanatics, or a few troublemakers. The whole of humanity has a
responsibility because it is our business, human business. I call this a sense of
universal responsibility. That is a crucial point.
-the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso
from address to the Global Survival Conference, Oxford 1988
In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great
neighborhood of creation.
-Wendell Berry, The Gift of the Good Land, 1981
Environmental rape is a fact of our national life only because it more profitable than
responsible stewardship of earth's limited resources.
-Channing E. Phillips, Congregationalist minister from his speech
"Unity"
delivered at the first Earth Day rally in Washington, D.C., 22 Apr 70
There is …a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as
artifical and as mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on
condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.
-Philip Sherrard (1923-1995), The Rape of Man and Nature, 1987
God made humans the stewards or overseers in charge of protecting and preserving God's
property. God's directions for the environmental protection of Eden are the same
directions for the protection of any locale that humankind may call home -- Africa, Asia,
Europe, the Americas, and everywhere that people live. Human responsibility and
accountability to God are neither altered nor canceled by a person's religion or
irreligion, politics, race, social status, or any other condition. To deny this
responsibility is an act of rebellion against God; to destroy creation wantonly is to sin
against God, against our neighbors, and against the generations that follow us.
-Bishop George D. McKinney, Jr., "This Is My Father's World"
from The Best Preaching on Earth, edited by Stan L. LeQuire, 1996
We
can only live the changes we wish to see: we cannot think our way to
humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of
that which we desire to create. We must break the obsolete social
and economic systems that divide the world between the
over-privileged and the under-privileged. Each of us, whether
government leader or protester, business executive or worker,
professor or student, share a common guilt. We have failed…through
our lack of responsible awareness…and thus added to suffering
around the world. All
of us are cripples—some physically, some mentally, some
emotionally. We must, therefore, strive cooperatively to create a
new world. There is no time left for destruction, for hatred, for
anger. We must build, in hope and joy and celebration.
-Ivan Illich (1926-2002), Celebrations of Awareness,
1971
We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand.
-James Watt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior 1981-83
Priestly stewardship suggests that creation is not just for us, that it has purpose
independent of the uses we can make of it. All of creation - human and nonhuman alike -
exists ultimately for God and to the praise of God. Significantly, God in Genesis 1
pronounces the rest of creation "good" before humanity is created. The psalmist
and the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel can speak of mountains, trees, sun, and
moon praising God. Unlike an office complex or gymnasium, which have no value if people do
not inhabit them, creation can glorify and bring God delight apart from human presence.
-Rodney Clapp, "Why the Devil Takes Visa," Christianity
Today, Oct 96
…these are the two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment:
money and time—or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an
immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to
do what we really should do as God’s children?
-Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984), Pollution and the Death
of Man, 1970
Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our
problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is
irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of
elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals
all over the world is not something that "just happens" because there are more
of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost
wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God.
-Winkie Pratney, Healing the Land, 1993
We do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do
not have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and
mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary
crisis is really our own depravity writ large.
-Philip Sherrard (1923-1995), poet-laureat of Great Britain
Introduction of Human Image, World Image: The Death and Resurrection
of Sacred
Cosmology, 1994
It is not right for us to destroy the world God has given us. He has created
everything; as the Bible says, "The God who made the world and everything in it is
the Lord of heaven' (Acts 17:24). To drive to extinction something He has created is
wrong, for He has a purpose for everything… We Christians have a responsibility to
take the lead in caring for the earth.
–Rev. Billy Graham quoted in Religion and Forests, Spring
2000
Since
all share a basic need to be unafraid, inclusive security is always
local yet global in its reach. Inclusive
security acknowledges our mutual dependence on the health of God’s
creation for our own well-being, in contrast to the environmental
degradation perpetrated by militarism.
-Pamela Leach, “Gadfly Citizenship,” from At Peace and
Unafraid,
ed. Duane K. Friesen & Gerald
W. Schlabach
, 2005
For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh
year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food
from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and
your olive grove.
-Exodus 23:10-11 from the New International Version of the Bible
Exodus 23 also reveals an ethical component to the Fourth Commandment. "Let the
land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and
the wild animals may eat what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive
grove" (Exodus 23:11). There is to be a balance among the earth, the poor, and the
animals. There is an ethical obligation not to overharvest the land for ourselves but to
let it rest so that other creatures, both human and nonhuman, can enjoy it as well. The
law gives us a balanced view of how to live on the earth. The earth needs rest, too.
-Earl F. Palmer, "The Balanced Life" 1993
from The Best Preaching on Earth, edited by Stan L. LeQuire, 1996
Feasting
on the earth is not our sin… The pitfall comes as we eat in isolation from the needs of
the poor.
-Ken Sehested
I want to think I deserve what I get. I don't want to consider how vastly I am overly
rewarded. I don't want to consider the injustices around me. I don't want any encounters
with the disenfranchised. I want to say it's not my fault. But it is, it's yours and mine,
and ours. We'd better figure out ways to spread some equity around if we want to go on
living in a society that is at least semi-functional. It's a fundamental responsibility,
to ourselves.
-William Kittredge
The idea that we should obey nature's laws and live harmoniously with her as good
husbanders and stewards of her gifts is old. And I believe that until fairly recently our
destructions of nature were more or less unwitting—the by-products, so to speak, of
our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately
rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.
-Wendell Berry, "A Practical Harmony," What Are People For?
1990
Who
ever saw his old clothes, -- his old coat, actually worn out,
resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of
charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be
bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do
with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new
clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Economy,” Walden,
1854
I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that
the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to
our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual
sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language
of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.
-E.F. (Ernst Friedrich) Schumacher (1911–1977), Small is
Beautiful, 1973
Such
prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence
of rapidly spending the planet’s irreplaceable capital.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement
and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States
and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their
natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for
the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource
of wilderness.
-U.S. 88th Congress, Wilderness Act, 3 Sep 64
When you are harvesting your crops and forget to bring in a bundle of grain from your
field, don't go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. Then the
LORD your God will bless you in all you do. When you beat the olives from your olive
trees, don't go over the boughs twice. Leave some of the olives for the foreigners,
orphans, and widows. This also applies to the grapes in your vineyard. Do not glean the
vines after they are picked, but leave any remaining grapes for the foreigners, orphans,
and widows.
-Deuteronomy 24:19-21 from the New Living Translation of the Bible
A billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a
single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of
biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest
cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300
million years ago in its march toward greater diversity -- all these "losses"
and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its
immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."
-Leonard Sweet, SoulTsunami, 1999
The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We
cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future
generations.
-Pope John Paul II, Homily in Monterey, California, Sept '87 *
Why does God bless us with abundance? So we can have enough to live on and then use the
rest for all manner of good works that alleviate spiritual and physical misery. Enough for
us; abundance for others.
-John Piper, Desiring God, 1989
Humans, in service to God, have special roles on behalf of the whole of creation. Made
in the image of God, we are called to care for the earth as God cares for the earth. God's
command to have dominion and subdue the earth is not a license to dominate and exploit.
Human dominion, a special responsibility, should reflect God's way of ruling as a shepherd
king who takes the form of a servant, wearing a crown of thorns.
-the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America,
from the 1993 Social Statement on Caring for Creation
The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human
arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do
you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you
make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the
blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin
cells a minute? We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness,
because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many
parts...a system which is far more complex than we can fully imagine. The idea that we are
consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.
-Lynn Margulis, biologist quoted by Jonathan White in
Taking on Water: Conversations About Nature and Creativity, 1994
Almighty God, whose loving hand has given us all that we possess; grant us grace that
we may honor You with our substance, and remembering the account which we must one day
give, may be faithful stewards of Your bounty; through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.
-The Book of Common Prayer
There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called
him in and asked him, `What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management,
because you cannot be manager any longer.' … Whoever can be trusted with very little
can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be
dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who
will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's
property, who will give you property of your own?
–Jesus quoted by the apostle Luke in Luke 14:1-2,10-12
from the New International Version of the Bible
