Richard Cizik: Climate Change and the 'Burn-it-all-Downers"

Written by Rev. Richard Cizik. This article first appeared in the Washington Post On-Faith blog on May 21, 2013. Content reproduced by permission of the author.

Rev. Richard Cizik. OdysseyNetworks

Pastor Mark Driscoll, who ministers in Seattle, told a Catalyst gathering a few days ago that “I know who made the environment and he’s coming back and going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV.” No joke. That’s what he said. Actually, Driscoll says it was all just a joke.

A lot of people didn’t get the humor. Maybe it was because last week scientists declared that CO2 levels had reached 400 parts per million (ppm), and 350.org released their film, “Do the Math” on the crisis of climate change.

Reputable scientists in this impressive film say “civilization is in jeopardy.” [Disclaimer: I am in the film saying oil companies should be held liable.]

Researchers at Columbia University, in a study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, estimate deaths linked to warming climate may rise by some 20 percent by the 2020s, 90 percent or more 70 years hence.

Adverse health effects from rising temperatures will hit major cities, like New York and other urban areas, especially hard.

“Heat events are one of the greatest hazards faced by urban populations around the globe,” said coauthor of the study Radley Horton, a climate scientist at the Earth Institute’s Center for Climate Systems Research.

How Americans view these events is strikingly dissimilar, however.

According to Public Religion Research Institute, nearly two-thirds (65%) of white evangelical Protestants believe that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of what the Bible calls the end times. By contrast, more than six in 10 (63%) of Americans say the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of global climate change. Only half (50%) of white evangelical Protestants agree that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of global climate change, less than that of Catholics (60%) and religiously unaffiliated Americans (69%). In other words, there’s a big disconnect between how a lot of evangelical Protestants view the links between natural disasters and climate change and how most Americans see it. The consequence of this is all too apparent politically.

Nevertheless, Pastor Driscoll got some push-back and tried to respond: “For the record, I really like this planet. God did a good job making this planet. We should take good care of this planet until he comes back to make a new earth, like the Bible says he will.” Pastor Driscoll went on to say that his family’s green activities would make a “hippy happy,” which struck quite a few people as ridicule and got him into more trouble. But I’ll take the pastor at his word.

Needless to say, the current political polarization over the environment and climate change has got to change if we are to ever slow the impacts of climate change and the escalating number of deaths already occurring. Evangelicals can be a source of societal healing and political action if they understand their Bible correctly. Alas, we evangelicals (I count myself among this tribe) are still way behind the moral curve.

When I was speaking in chapel at a few years ago at Harden Simmons University, deep in the heart of Texas, a student walked to the main aisle in the middle of the chapel and shouted as loud as he could, “This [creation care] doesn’t matter, Jesus is coming back!”

My audience went instantly quiet, waiting to hear how I would respond.

“Let me answer that question,” I said, as if he’d asked one, and went on to cite God’s command to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” Can you pollute your neighbor’s water, air, and land, and still say you love God? Of course not.

Those who subscribe to the “God-will-burn-it-all-down school” pop up everywhere. At a family wedding, an in-law asserted his knowledge of scripture, “Don’t you know it’s all going to be burned up?, citing as evidence 2 Peter 3:10: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud voice, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.”

The best translation of this passage (Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 12, Frank Gaebelein, General Editor) is “everything in it will be laid bare.” It could mean all human products will be destroyed or it could mean that all that man does will be known in the judgment. (I Corinthians 3: 13-15).

This is where some knowledge of Greek comes in handy. The word for “fire” in the Scriptures is a multivalent symbol and can mean both extinguished and refined, and the latter usage [Peter 3:10] is the best interpretation. The earth will be “refined,” not utterly destroyed. Besides, if God was going to destroy the earth as was insinuated by the “burn it downers,” why would the Apostle John in Revelation 11:18 write that there will be a time “for destroying the destroyers of the earth”?

God, it seems, will hold polluters responsible. The grandfather of the creation care movement, Dr. Cal DeWitt, at the University of Wisconsin, once told me that he had asked Dr. Billy Graham about Revelation 11:18, but the greatest evangelist of the 20th century, possibly of all time, admitted he was unfamiliar with the verse, and replied, “I should preach on it some time.” Maybe his son, Franklin Graham, can be persuaded to do so.

A kind of environmental skepticism is associated with the Left Behind series that taught a secret rapture of believers from this world prior to a final bloody battle between good and evil known as Armageddon. Dr. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the book, a well-known conservative, nonetheless claimed no such warrant for apathy was justified.

Evangelicals, aided by good scholarship and biblical hermeneutics, are rejecting pre-millennial pessimism, which holds that the earth is going to hell in a hand basket, and there’s nothing we can do about it. One of America’s premier pre-millennial dispensational theologians, Dr. Charles Ryrie of Dallas Theological Seminary, author of the Ryrie Study Bible, told me over lunch at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida that he believes “we need to care for this earth,” much as he said he cares for his human body by daily exercise.

About the general principle of creation care, Ryrie was very clear: “The Bible affirms that we must care for the earth as stewards.” That prestigious seminary, moreover, is leading the way in greening its facilities, as is another similar theological institution, BIOLA, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which is now a liberal arts college with secular academic credentials.

You can even find a Green Bible in most Christian bookstores. There are so many “green” verses that call us to environmental stewardship, much like the red-letter Bible which put in red the verses uttered by Jesus, that any faithful Christian would have to be blind not to pay attention.

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly true about the skeptics. Larry Schweiger, head of the National Wildlife Federation, says you have to engage in “willful blindness” not to see what’s happening to Planet Earth. Turning a blind eye, so easily done just a few years ago, is no longer apparently tolerated even in conservative evangelical circles. And, Pastor Driscoll, it’s not about joining the “happy hippie” crowd. It’s about joining the most significant new recruits to the environmental movement — faithful Christians. No joke.

The Rev. Richard Cizik served for 10 years as vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals. He has been an advocate for bringing evangelicals and scientists together on climate change issues.

Follow @John_Elwood

Cooking Without Fire

About ten days ago, a massive mudslide swept away three little Kenyan girls in the small town of Kijabe. We arrived in Kijabe only a few days after the flood, to find scores of local people cutting up fallen trees, carting away mud and clearing roadways.

We reported on the Kijabe mudslide a few days ago. Recall that in one month alone, Kijabe has received more rain than its annual average over the last three decades. On the night of the disaster, 5.5 inches more fell in less than two hours. The saturated soils simply could not absorb the torrent, and they gave way in a lethal wall of clay-red African mud.

Kijabe forests couldn't keep mud from swamping the town

It happens that Kijabe is home to one of the best medical centers in East Africa, the AIC Kijabe Hospital. The hospital treats more than 150,000 patients every year, who wind their way up or down the Rift Valley escarpment to Kijabe, perched midway between the clouds and the valley floor. But the narrow roads were rendered impassable by the mudslide, and the hospital’s water source was also cut, its collection tanks now sitting idle and empty.

You may recall our lament at the cruel impact of climate change on this key lifeline for so many vulnerable Kenyans.  But assessing the impact of climate change can be tricky business. Usually climate disruption creates the background condition on which more proximate ills take their toll. The Darfur genocide, for example, may have been predictable by anyone looking seriously at the desertification of the African Sahel, driving migration of largely Islamic nomadic pastoralists in search of water and grasslands into largely Christian farming communities. But the news outlets mainly brought us images of President Omar Al-Bashir’s hordes sweeping down on helpless villagers. What caused the Darfur tragedy? Climate disruption? Ethnic hatred? Or a genocidal ruler? Of course, it’s a false choice.

I’m beginning to see Kijabe’s current predicament that way too. Sure, floods like these have never happened before, and the story of extreme weather is being repeated all over Kenya. But two men on the ground are showing us another story too. Craig Sorley and Jeff Davis live and work in Kijabe, and spend countless hours trying to defend the hillside forests from illegal cutting for the charcoal trade. From a distance, these forests look healthy, but venture inside, and you see a wounded landscape, with many tree stumps and abundant signs of charcoal pits – the handiwork of illegal poachers. It is this depleted forest that released the torrent of mud that wreaked havoc on the town below last week.

Sorley & Davis after Kijabe's mudslide: Was it the rain, or deforestation?

Craig and Jeff do some old-fashioned law enforcement to protect this corner of the creation, tracking down poachers and hauling them before the local magistrates.  But you might be surprised at some of the simpler, sensible things they do to erode the demand for the illegal cutting that now threatens their town. One of my favorites is a simple contraption that you can make at home to cut your own energy use. It’s called the “fireless cooker.”

Davis' fireless cooker

The fireless cooker is little more than a wicker basket, sized to accommodate a cooking pot. The basket is lined with a thickly insulated quilt, and the top is covered with a round pillow, sized to fit inside the basket lid. That’s it. Nothing more. Now, you bring your beans, your rice, your potatoes or stew to a boil on the stove in a lidded cook pot with only short handles, and then plop it into the fireless cooker for the rest of the cooking time. Come back in thirty minutes, and the rice is cooked. Come back in a few hours, and your beans are ready.

It turns out that today’s Kenyan fireless cookers are nothing new. Your great-great grandma knew about these things. She might have called them “hay boxes” – named for their ability to deliver hot food to field workers racing to bring in the hay while the weather held. Others were used by westward travelers who couldn’t take the time to look for firewood at the noon meal.

Our friends in Kijabe swear by it today. So yesterday, I decided to test the idea. I boiled a pot of dried beans in a large saucepan on the stove, and then turned the fire off. In a larger pan, I lined the bottom with a few dish towels, and set the saucepan inside. I then wrapped the whole thing with a small throw-blanket. A couple hours later, I came back to check my “fireless beans.” Completely cooked!

Other styles of cookers; same result

So, Craig and Jeff, I’m planning on joining up by making a real fireless cooker of our own. Who knows, maybe one of our readers will launch a cottage industry to save people millions in energy costs, and spare the earth higher greenhouse gas pollution in the bargain. But in Kijabe, it is one of many sensible initiatives that are coming together to save a threatened forest, and protect the lives of vulnerable Kenyans and forest creatures.

I’d bet you’ve come up with practical ways to care for God’s injured world on your own. Why not share them with us, so we can pass on the good news?

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.

J. Elwood

More images from Kijabe

Jeff Davis, forest-keeper in spare time

AIC Kijabe Hospital's water tanks: disabled & empty

 

Cooking pot fits nicely inside Davis' fireless cooker

Sorley with one of many replanted saplings

Kijabe people clearing debris from mudslide

Follow @John_Elwood

Give Us This Day Our Daily Toilet

Kibera. The biggest slum in Kenya. Second biggest in all of Africa.

From all over Kenya, they pour into this place, a sprawling community in southeast Nairobi, home to as many as one million living souls. Many come here from family farm plots that have become too small from subdivision; others are driven off the land by failing rains, extreme floods and erratic seasonal patterns; some are the victims of soil depletion from unsustainable farming practices. Whatever the reason, they are here looking for a better life.

Kibera: Last stop in Kenya's urban migration

A better life? It’s hard for me to imagine what a worse life might look like. An uncountable throng in a continuous stream up and down muddy alleys, paths and narrow clay-red streets; unbroken ranks of tin and mud shacks crowding against each other and squeezing into serpentine pathways; vendors selling plastic sandals, maize, charcoal or other essentials at virtually every hut; open cooking fires everywhere; trash mixed with mud and sewage underfoot; and the air above choked with acrid smoke.

And what am I doing here? I’m the only mzungu in sight among thousands and thousands of residents going about their daily routines – my alien skin and gray hair a neon presence amidst an ocean of beautiful African humanity. I am accompanied by Rahab Mbochi, an irrepressibly cheerful spirit, who finds friends at virtually every turn in the winding alleys of mud and waste. And by David Quest, another Kenyan working with a waste-management NGO.  And – of supreme importance – by Jeshua, our giant local guide and keeper, a guarantor of safety for a helpless outsider like me.

Tin and trash: the constants of life in Kibera

Think of the names: Rahab, the redeemed harlot whose progeny includes the one called Savior by Christians; David, the man after God’s heart; Jeshua, the real name of Jesus of Nazareth; and even John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. All winding our way into the heart of the largest – and perhaps foulest – slum in East Africa. Rahab confidently strides out in front. The stranger makes sure he stays within reach of Jeshua.

Did I mention what I’m doing here? Primarily, to visit Peepoople. That’s Pee-poop-le. Pee, as in pee. Poop, you know. Add the last syllable, and I imagine you’ve got something like this:  “The people who have devised a way to help deal with all this filth you live in.”  And it’s brilliant. Let me explain.

Kibera has no sewage disposal system. The huts have no toilets; the roads have no drains. Imagine a city of maybe a million tightly-packed people, all looking desperately for somewhere to go. Of course, they do go. People use a small tin bucket, and dispose of the waste outside, where it finds its way into the grayish-brown rivulets that trickle down every path and alleyway. This isn’t just where we’re walking; this is where the children play. Admittedly, there are a few toilet stations here and there, but they cost five shillings – about six cents U.S. – and money is oh-so-scarce here.

Children and sewage don't mix

And – if you’ve resisted the impulse to stop reading in disgust – there’s another thing: At night, it’s unsafe to step out of the hut. So the waste is collected in plastic bags which get hurled into the black sky – Kibera’s infamous “flying toilets.”

America’s attention was riveted a couple of months ago by the ordeal of a stricken cruise ship whose passengers had to make it a week or so without working toilets. I’m afraid Kibera is like a thousand of those ships, with no port anywhere in sight.

And that’s where Peepoople comes in. They have developed an ingenious solution. It’s a waterproof single-use bag made of a compostable organic material, with a bit of granulated urea inside. The bag – a PeePoo bag – is placed like a liner inside a small plastic pail, which together form a sanitary toilet. After use, the bag is tied off in a tight seal enclosing everything, including soiled tissue, and the urea goes to work destroying the pathogens by which human waste spreads so much disease. The used bags are returned to collection centers, where they are composted to provide fertile garden soils and to grow trees.

PeePoo bag ready to return for composting

And for most of Kibera’s people, the cost isn’t overwhelming. The Peepoo bag costs two shillings. But upon return to the collection station, the user gets a one-shilling refund.  So the overall cost per use is just a little more than a U.S. penny. In the bargain, streams of sewage are reduced, potentially lethal pathogens are destroyed, and fertile soils are developed for local gardens.

Now, solutions to vexing problems are seldom as simple as they sometimes sound. Peepoople is in its infancy. Adoption rates are still low in Kibera. There are five or six collection stations, and Kibera needs hundreds. Composting and pathogen testing is ongoing, before Kenyan authorities will permit compost use in sensitive areas.

But Kibera today is a picture of much of the world tomorrow. We know that climate disruptions are driving a tsunami of human migration, as farming systems stagger under the burden of unseen challenges like today’s extreme weather events. Whether in Karachi, Johannesburg, Dhaka, Bangkok or Los Angeles, cities will have to deal with an influx of migrants struggling to survive and unable to afford basic services like clean, safe sewage systems.

Peepoople's Rahab Mbochi, with Japheth

Hats off to Peepoople, to Rahab, to Jeshua, and to the thousands of Kiberans working to provide basic human services where none exist today. If you’d like to learn more about Peepoople, take a look here. And if you’re ever in the neighborhood of Good Hand Farm, and feeling really adventurous, I’ve bought fifty Peepoo bags, and would be glad to share one with you. If you bring it back after use, it’ll only set you back one Kenyan shilling.

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.

J. Elwood 

Follow @John_Elwood

We’re Disrupting Creation? How Do You Know?

We creation care advocates, we’re pretty sure of ourselves, aren’t we? Let’s face it. We’ve listened to the National Academy of Sciences. We’ve read the research on global changes. We know all the “parts-per-million” data. We’ve seen the melting glaciers, and the shrinking ice cover. We know about sea levels, ocean acidification, and runaway species extinctions.

But let’s face it: most people out there aren’t nearly as alarmed as we’re pretty sure they ought to be. After all, some say, scientists have been wrong before, no?

Then we talk to field workers on the ground, as we did yesterday in Nairobi. World Renew leaders in Kenya told us story after story of escalating climate shocks and related human suffering. It’s pretty credible stuff, and deeply alarming. But still, NGOs are in the crisis business, aren’t they? Maybe they’re dressing things up a bit for the visitors from North America?

So today, we got a totally different perspective, and I hope you’ll stick around to hear it. We took a long, muddy bus ride to one of the 300 churches in the Mount Kenya South Diocese of the Anglican Church here. Where I come from, Anglican churches are all granite and stained glass. This one, home to a rural Kikuyu congregation, let the daylight shine in through plastic panels in a rusted tin roof. It was pretty humble, to my Western eyes. But I thought it was a perfectly lovely place.

More lovely still, however, were the 17 Kikuyu women who run farms in the Diocese, and who had put their busy farm lives on hold to teach a few North Americans about the new challenges they face – trying to raise food in a broken climate system.  Adorned in brilliant dresses and head scarves of every color, they told us their stories.  We promised them we’d tell them again back home. Here are a few, based on my scribbled notes:

• Isabelle: There used to be two planting seasons in the year. One was longer, and we called it the “lablab bean season.” The other was shorter, and it was  called the “millet season.” But now, we don’t have any planting seasons. We only plant when we see the rain. We used to be sure of the harvest, but not anymore. You plant, but you don’t have a harvest.
• Sarah: Last year, we planted, but we never harvested – except for a few beans and potatoes. We are confused. Water is a problem for us.
• Grace Dodo: We used to fill a granary plus more stored outside. Now, we can’t even fill the granary. The rains have changed, and the soil has been depleted.
• Eleanor: Pests and diseases have increased. I’m not very old, but spider mites were never here before. When the spider mites come, we don’t get a crop. The pests force us to sell crops earlier than before.
• Another woman: We always talk to each other about the rain. You can’t depend on the short rain anymore. Thank God for the technology.

The technology? That’s right. These women aren’t just taking what this harsh new world is dishing out. Others will tell this story better than I – but with the help of World Renew, Care of Creation, and others, the farmers are adopting “Farming God’s Way” – what we’d call conservation agriculture. They mix crops together in the same plot, heavily mulch their fields with leaves and branches to conserve moisture and suppress weeds, plant with minimal disturbance to the soil, add manure and wood ash to enrich the soil, plant under-crops to enhance fertility, and maintain trees to shade crops from excess heat. Some have bought into Farming God’s Way entirely, and others are testing plots side-by-side to see for themselves.

They’re remarkably resourceful people, and they’re doing everything possible to feed their families. But the changing climate is making it awfully hard.

And there’s another irony: Here in this tin-roofed country church, the topic of climate change isn’t even slightly controversial. It’s not a debate. It’s staring them in the face everywhere. It’s a fact. But almost every one among our company of Westerners knows that in our churches back home, you talk this way at your own risk.

But now, we’re talking. We promised these Kenyan women that we would. And maybe you’ll find a way to join the conversation? Maybe an African family farmer is what Jesus would call “my neighbor?” Things are changing, and to us, it’s clear that we’re deeply involved.

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.

J. Elwood

Follow @John_Elwood

Climate Change in Kenya: It Didn’t Used to Be This Way

We enjoyed generous hospitality this morning from the staff of World Renew in Nairobi, an NGO affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church. At their offices this morning, we listened to leading authorities on agriculture, forest management, food security, development and disaster relief tell us the new reality of life in Kenya: Things are changing, and mostly not for the better.

I’m traveling with new friends from Canada, the U.S. and Uganda who share a deep commitment to caring for God’s creation. Some of us focus our efforts on the ravages of human-induced climate change. But our Kenyan friends are dealing with the facts on the ground, serving the victims of drought, flooding and soil degradation. They’re not fighting for a cause; they’re fighting for people.

The stories they tell all have a common theme: The systems people once relied upon to sustain their communities are increasingly unreliable. Droughts are increasing in frequency; so are floods, such as the ones ravaging Kenyan crops at present; and increasingly degraded soils are undermining the ability of farmers to rebound after severe weather shocks.  The result is increasing hunger, poverty and insecurity.

“Climate events are forcing us to fundamentally rethink how we work,” said Jacqueline Koster, World Renew’s director of disaster response for large swaths of the African continent.

For my part, I’m looking for the data: Prove to me that extreme weather is worse now than it once was; show me the data beyond any dispute. It happens that there is good data, but it only goes back a few decades – not long enough to persuade the most skeptical observers. But skeptics should have heard what we heard today from these experts on the ground. Here are some examples:

• World Renew program consultant Stephan Lutz traced the trajectory of East African drought over the last forty years. There was one major drought in the mid-1970s that captured the world’s attention. Another came along a decade later. In the 90’s the pace increased to two. Two more hit in the 2000’s. And already, there have been two more crippling droughts since 2010, only 3 years into the new decade. Today, Lutz speaks of nearly “perpetual drought” conditions. It didn’t used to be this way.
• World Renew formerly viewed its development work in terms of periodic interventions to help communities recover from occasional setbacks on the road to greater stability. But Koster doesn't talk that way anymore. Climate shocks come so frequently that she speaks instead of helping communities to “build resiliency” in light of the inevitably frequent climate shocks. It didn’t used to be this way.
• Disaster Response Manager Chris Shiundu told us that farm planning has become much more difficult. Kenyans recall that in the past, on Christmas, they would feast; the following day, they would eat the leftovers; and the next day they would plant crops. You could count on the rains within a day or two. Now, no one knows when the rains will come, and planters must watch and wait for erratic rains.
• Team leader Davis Omanyo put the routine planting date at February 15 in another region, now abandoned because of erratic rains. And he reported that many farmers must purchase twice the normal amount of seed, so that the crop can be replanted after erratic rains cause the first planting to fail. You used to be able to plan your farming calendar. No more.
• And while drought conditions have taken their toll on food production, Shiundu told us that excess moisture from erratic rains has also caused maize (field corn) to rot on the stalk, resulting in the total loss of crops in some regions.
• Project Manager Geoffrey manages disaster relief in Mbeere district, where the maize and cowpea harvests have been reduced by 70% this year due to flooding from extremely heavy rains, and the arrival of a pest caterpillar never known before in that region. “People who are 70 years old tell us that this never happened before in their lives,” said Geoffrey, “nor in the prior generation.”

For those of us from carbon-heavy North America, these accounts prompt some serious soul-searching. We know what our greenhouse gases are doing to the climate in general, global terms. We know it’s driving extreme weather, melting ice caps, raising sea levels and acidifying the oceans. Now we’re listening to our fellow Christians tell us of the impact on God’s beloved in Kenya.

Thank you for your accounts Chris, Davis and Geoffrey. Thank you Jacqueline, Stephan and your many co-workers. We will do our best in the coming weeks to tell your story to our fellow North Americans, and especially those in our churches. At a minimum, we are one body with those who suffer in the harsh new world faced by many Kenyans today. And if our life patterns back home are responsible for suffering in this distant land, we will do everything we can to bring about the changes you deserve.

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.

J. Elwood

Follow @John_Elwood