Preserving God’s “Very Good” Earth

In 1989, says Sen. Albert Gore (D.-Tenn.), his life changed in a fundamental way. The senator and his wife, Tipper, watched helplessly as their son, Albert III, was hit by a car in a stadium parking lot. His limp body showed neither breath nor pulse. Miraculously, the boy recovered. But the senator’s outlook was permanently altered.

Albert Gore had just lost a presidential campaign, had just turned 40, and had witnessed his son’s near death. He felt vulnerable. As a result, he writes in Earth in the Balance, he became “increasingly impatient with the status quo, … with the lazy assumption that we can always muddle through.”

Senator Gore is well known in the halls of Congress as a leader in science and technology. In 1978, for example, he organized the first congressional hearings on toxic waste. Perhaps now his midlife boldness has combined with his Southern Baptist faith to produce a devotion to the environmental cause. Indeed, while environmentalism may be fashionable among academics and journalists, it is hardly a proven vote getter. Gore confesses, “I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously.”

Some readers of Gore’s book might wish he had been more cautious in his statements about religion and environmental concern. Is he just too sanguine about world religions? Is he too quick to believe the rosy picture some activists have painted of ancient paganism? Or is this experienced politician merely saluting all religions rather than appearing to treat his own with special favor?

CT editors David Neff and Kim Lawton spoke with Gore in his Washington office a few months before he became a vice-presidential candidate. In that context, he focused explicitly on the meaning of his Christian faith for earthkeeping.

What motivates you in your work on environmental issues?

The foundation of all of my work on the environment is my faith in Jesus Christ and my conviction that the purpose of life is indeed as I learned in Baptist Sunday school so many years ago: to glorify God. Heaping contempt upon God’s creation is inconsistent with the duty to live one’s life in a way that glorifies God. Destroying that which God has pronounced pleasing and good is an act with implications for one’s attitude toward the Creator.

In three of the four Gospels we see the parable of the unfaithful servant, where the master leaves on a journey and tells his servant to care for the house. The master says, “If, while I’m gone, vandals come and ransack this house or thieves come and steal my belongings, it will not be a sufficient excuse if you tell me you were asleep.” There are many ways of sleeping. Christ speaks of those who have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear. And he commands us, in this context, to watch.

We are now witnessing, in our lifetime, environmental vandalism on a global scale. If we are witness to the destruction of the earth’s ecological integrity, it will not be a sufficient excuse for us to say we were asleep.

How can we prevent being paralyzed by the avalanche of bad news about the environment?

If we break through the barrier of denial and become aware of the problems, there is a second, even more formidable barrier called despair. Many who awaken to the danger and to the enormity of this sin against God’s creation are paralyzed into inaction by a sense that a problem as large as this one is not susceptible to a solution.

Yet our God is a God of miracles. As children of God, we have a capacity for change that far exceeds our human imagination. And I am one who believes that the Spirit is moving very strongly in this post-cold war world, with the Berlin Wall torn down and statues of Lenin shattered by free men and women. If we choose to heal our relationship to God’s creation, we have the ability to do just that.

You use the word stewardship in talking about our relationship with the earth. What does that mean for our responsibility?

We are given dominion over the earth, and we are required to be good stewards of it. But in our pride, we have confused dominion with domination and stewardship with exploitation.

We have been, in my opinion, spiritually seduced by the fantastic power of science and technology with which we can exploit the earth evermore ferociously. In fact, we have seen our power so magnified that the basic relationship between humankind and the earth’s environment has been transformed. The population explosion (which is now adding the equivalent of one China’s worth of people every ten years) and the technological revolution, together with this careless willingness to exploit the earth, have created an unprecedented situation where our activity has imperiled our environmental systems.

As an analogy, consider warfare. Wars have been with us since the beginning of civilization, but in this century, the scientific and technological revolution gave us nuclear weapons. That one new technology so magnified the power with which war can be waged as to transform the consequences of all-out warfare between superpowers. Such a war is now unthinkable. Albert Einstein said, after Hiroshima, everything has changed except our way of thinking. In fact, our way of thinking did begin to change. The cold war, at least on one level, has been an effort to re-evaluate the viability of all-out warfare as a way of settling a great conflict.

In the same way, these new technologies for exploiting the earth (like chlorofluorocarbons, to take only one tiny example) have, when all are put together, transformed the consequences of all-out exploitation. Yet, while we have wrestled with a change in our thinking about all-out warfare, we have barely begun to re-evaluate the proper relationship between development and environmental stewardship.

Because of this new relationship, however, being a good steward now requires us to take into account the consequences of what we are doing every day. All of the oil-well fires in Kuwait set by Sadam Hussein, on the worst day of those fires, were responsible for less than 1 percent of what the rest of the world will put into the global atmosphere today and every day.

How do you respond to critics who charge that the evidence for ecological disaster is exaggerated or even wrong?

The consensus in the world scientific community is that politicians are kidding themselves if they believe we are not accountable for what we’re doing. I represent 100,000 tobacco farms in Tennessee, and I’m sensitive to the economic concerns. But I held my sister’s hand when she breathed her last breath and died of lung cancer. When I hear a spokesman for a tobacco company say that we don’t yet have enough evidence to link smoking with lung cancer, I feel impatient.

Our civilization has the equivalent of a ten-pack-a-day habit. And we don’t want to change. We want to continue surrendering to the passions of the moment and assume that greed in the present, at the expense of the future, is somehow virtuous—when, in fact, it’s an unethical way of placing the burden of our desires on future generations.

Ecological catastrophes are now unfolding in the world with increasing frequency. Last week a record number of dead dolphins washed up on the beaches near Corpus Christi. One week earlier dead seals were washing up on the beaches of the East Coast. In both cases, the verdict from scientists was that levels of pollution have now reached a point where the animals’ immune systems are overtaxed and, as a result, are less resistant to viruses.

A garbage crisis looms in every state of the union. The daily oil spills around the world add up each week to a far larger amount of oil than that spilled by the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska. One-and-a-half acres of rain forest are burned every second—one Tennessee’s worth every year.

When I see these tragedies reported, I see a pattern. An alcoholic who has a series of drunk-driving accidents will often attempt to explain each one of them as an isolated misfortune. The road was slippery that day; the truck pulled out in front of him that evening. But those who love that person will say, please, look at the pattern in your life.

These ecological catastrophes I’ve mentioned are symptoms of a deeper spiritual crisis in our relationship to God’s creation and to God.

You mentioned population problems earlier. Many prolife Christians worry that population-stabilization programs end up endorsing abortion as a form of birth control.

Abortion has nothing to do with a morally correct program of population stabilization. There has been an unfortunate tendency by both advocates and opponents of international population stabilization to oversimplify this issue into an argument about birth control. Actually, we know what works to stabilize population, and birth control is only a part of it.

We have to create three conditions which, when simultaneously present in a country, can stabilize population. The first is an adequate availability of safe birth control on a voluntary basis. But the second and third are even more important.

The second condition is high child-survival rates. What does this have to do with population? If you save more lives, won’t that increase population? No. As an African leader said 30 years ago, the most powerful contraceptive in the world is the confidence by parents that their children will survive. Wherever there is a high likelihood of children dying in their early years, family sizes skyrocket in order to give parents the confidence that at least some of their children will survive into adulthood to take care of them in their old age.

Ethiopia, for example, has one of the lowest child-survival rates in the world but one of the fastest population-growth rates in the world. The state of Kerala in southwestern India, by contrast, has a superb child-survival rate and zero-population growth.

The Distraction Industry

An excerpt

“With the future so open to doubt, we routinely choose to indulge our own generation at the expense of all who will follow. We enshrine the self as the unit of ethical account, separate and distinct not just from the natural world but even from a sense of obligation to others—not just others in future generations, but increasingly even to others in the same generation; and not just those in distant lands, but increasingly even in our own communities. We do this not because we don’t care but because we don’t really live in our lives. We are monumentally distracted by a pervasive technological culture that appears to have a life of its own, one that insists on our full attention, continually seducing us and pulling us away from the opportunity to experience directly the true meaning of our own lives.

How can we shake loose this distraction? How can we direct our attention to more important matters when our attention has become a commodity to be bought and sold? Whenever a new source of human interest and desire is found, prospectors flock to stake their claim. Using every available tool—newspapers, movies, television, magazines, billboards, blimps, buttons, designer labels, junk faxes—they assault our attention from every side. Advertisers strip-mine it; politicians covet it; pollsters measure it; terrorists steal it as a weapon of war. As the amounts close to the surface are exhausted, the search for fresh supplies leads onto primal paths that run deep into our being … and a rich vein of primal fears and passions that are also now exploited as raw material in the prospectors of attention fragment our experience of the world, carry away the spoils, and then, in an ultimate irony, accuse us of having short attention spans.”

—From Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, by Senator Al Gore (Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

But a third condition also has to be present: high levels of literacy and education, especially among women. Women then feel that they can participate in the decision about family size and whether and when to use birth control.

Where all three of these conditions are present simultaneously for at least a generation, population stabilizes, always. Where one of the three is missing, population almost never stabilizes.

Now, it is worth asking why so many who support the work of missionaries to raise child-survival rates and literacy and education levels, who care about better standards of living for those who have less, and who care about spreading the gospel, are reluctant to even talk about the issue of population for fear of giving offense.

I believe that a relatively small minority who teach that contraception is morally wrong have made the acceptance of their view a condition for maintaining harmony within the larger prolife movement. As a result, many sincere and dedicated prolife advocates who believe in their hearts that one way to prevent abortions would be to make safe birth control more readily available for those who want it, choose not to act on that impulse out of a political fear of upsetting the apple cart within the prolife movement.

I believe millions of abortions take place that might have been prevented by wider use of birth control by those for whom the use of birth control does not pose a moral challenge. But their option has been denied by a different religious view. And while I respect that view, I question whether it should serve as the proximate cause for preventing these sensible goals, which the vast majority within the prolife movement feel in their hearts are desirable.

What are your hopes and predictions about how the country will respond to the environmental crisis?

I feel deeply about that and pray that those with a deep faith who count themselves as political conservatives will join this effort to save the earth’s environment. Also, I hope they reject the view, which I believe to be a self-interested view, that there is no serious problem and that we should do nothing. There is a suspicion on the part of some ideological conservatives in the political world that the global environmental crisis is a hoax pushed forward as an excuse to expand the role of government.

Ironically, most environmentalists who have thought deeply about this question blame government for the crisis more than any other institution. They also point out that the worst environmental devastation has taken place in those areas where economic, political, and religious freedoms have been suppressed. So I fervently hope that there will be an awakening. It sounds trite, but one essential premise of conservatism is to protect important values when they’re at risk.

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