Liberated Carbon song

Wonders of creation: Portuguese Man o War

As an aspiring ecotheologian I spend a fair time worrying about the state of the planet, global warming, species loss, etc. It occurred to me recently that I don't spend enough time thinking about and enjoying the very thing I want to see looked after. This is the first in a series of blog entries featuring photos I've taken of things that have caught my eye.

Over Christmas 2011 my family and I stayed in the sleep village of Loch Sport, located along the 90 Mile Beach in the Lakes District of Gippsland (map here). I found a few of these Portuguese Man o War on the beach.

The Portuguese Man o War is also known as the Blue Bottle for obvious reasons. They are named Portuguese Man o War because the gas filled bladder looks like the sail of the ship of the same name. A Portuguese Man o War is not jelly fish but a member of the Siphonophorae order, a colonial animal consisting of different zooids or polyps which cannot exist independently.

The four polyps are the gas bladder (pneumatophore), the tentacles (which can reach up to 50 metres in length), the digestive organs and the reproductive organs. Note that the Portuguese Man o War is a carnivore, the tentacles are covered in venom-filled nematocysts which paralyse prey before muscles in the tentacles draw the prey up to the digestive organs. One of these tentacles is shown in the picture above and they can still contain venom even after the Man O War has died and is washed up on the beach, so avoid contact. While rarely fatal to humans, they are (apparently) very painful, and I was sure that myself, son and dog avoided them. In Australia there are more than 10,000 reported stings each year!

Their range is typically more equatorward than where I found these, preferring warmer waters. With no means of propulsion, the Man O War is at the mercy of wind and waves, so perhaps the warm current along the east coast of Australia moved them southward before becoming beached where I found them.


Further reading
National Geographic
Jellyfish sting statistics
Siphonophores.org

Katherine Hayhoe on her book

Katherine Hayhoe talks about being a climate scientist and a Christian and about the book she wrote with her husband, an Evangelical pastor. Book review to appear in Zadok Perspectives next year.

She's Alive... Beautiful... Finite... Hurting... Worth Dying for.

I found this quite interesting and moving. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. A couple of things for the theologically sensitive. Theologian and ethicist Michael Northcott claims that some in the early church referred to 'mother earth' so it isn't necessarily pagan. Secondly, it is true that people poach in order to make ends meet, and that the income from poaching is often greater than they can earn any other way, yet killing other humans to protect this trade crosses a line that should not be crossed.

The frustrations of an eco-prophet/eco-missiologist

I sometimes struggle to define myself. Words are slippery things, labels doubly so. One might argue they don't matter. I'm a meteorologist and educationalist in business hours, outside I don't quite have the bits of paper for a label. My undergraduate theology comes from a currently unrecognised institution so I have a Scholar in Theology Certificate but it is everything a BTh is. Time and money means I haven't started my MTh thesis yet. To a close friend of mine this would mean I can't really call myself a theologian, but I think and write theologically, so who knows.

My deep interest in environment/creation care, its missional and apologetic role, to say nothing of the need for urgent action. So am I an eco-prophet, an ecotheologian or eco-missiologist? A green prophet? I dunno for sure. One for certain is I am frustrated.

On one side I keep meeting sceptics within the church, those who latch on to every Andrew Bolt rant, or claim the IPCC is part of the new world order, or bemoan it isn't run by Christians. There are those who deny, don't know or don't care, those for who evangelism is all that there is. As I noted on Facebook today, "dualism - a disease that infects much of the modern church, making real mission impossible". Yet many are so dualistic without even realising it, looking past our createdness, or earthy-ness and creaturely-ness; that we are saved with and not from creation.


And then there are green activists I am trying to dialogue with. Of late I've been following Ecological Internet on Facebook and Twitter. Most recently there has been a stream of anti-religious bile, and its been hard to ignore. Now I am well aware the church has been tardy in the extreme, damaging and distracting in caring for creation (or environmentalism but I'm not going to enter into the debate language raises right now), but this person is totally unaccepting of 'greener traditions' either in the past (Celts) or now (A Rocha, Ethos Environment, Au Sable, Catholic Earth Care to name a few). Too little too late is the cry, despite most of the destruction being wrought by godless capitalism (well money as God) and atheism (look at former USSR for example).


So on one side I am godless because I dare to raise warnings about what we are doing to creation because it isn't the business of the church and I'm courting paganism and on the other side I am abused for superstitious beliefs and almost denied the role as an ally in the fight against evil in the world.


So whatever label I apply, frustration must be the first. A frustrated eco-prophet. I guess that is the lot of any prophet.

Seven billion and its impacts

Dr Jeffrey Sachs talks about the impacts of human population and its risks.


The 7 Billion Challenge from Earth Institute on Vimeo.

Deep Future

I can't say too much as I am reviewing this book for Zadok Perspectives, the quarterly of the Zadok Institute, but I wanted to plug it here as I think it is an interesting and important book: Deep Future, by Curt Stager. It is published in Australia by my good friends at Scribe.

When you read IPCC reports, they deal with what scientist Tim Lenton calls the political timescale, events involving our grandchildren. All of the scenarios and reports look out to about 100 years or the end of the 21st century. But what about beyond that? By considering paleoclimate and the physical processes that govern the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stager is able to show humans will effect the climate for tens of thousands of years, effectively avoiding an ice ages for half a millennia, turning the seas acidic and so on. It's interesting to pursue the scenarios well out into the future and consider the problem of global cooling and retreating sea levels will have on harbour towns.

For a Christian of course, the whole issue of when the resurrection occurs and how the creation will be redeemed (Rm 8:19-25) comes in to play. Yet a) given we don't know when this will happen and b) the long timescale throws the impacts of what we are doing into even sharper relief I think it is an important book.

It is also well referenced from the scientific literature, and I'd used it already in my teaching.