Quote of the day: 15 February 2013

The peace of nature and the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity. Thomas de Quincey.

Quote for the day: 14 February 2013

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life becomes extinct, the climate's ruined and the law grows poorer and uglier every day. - Anton Chekhov.

Subversive gardening

I recently read an article where there are places in the United States where gardening is illegal. People are not allowed to grow their own food! We live in an age where many people in the world starve while others drown in processed food that is slowly killing them - and it's cheaper to eat it than fresh food. It seems to me that gardening can now be seen as a subversive act. Apart from being illegal, how might growing your own food be subversive?

Firstly, without pesticides, agribusiness, etc we are protesting against so called efficiency. True enough to feed the world we can't rely upon old methods - the world is too big for that. However, efficiency is not the only or primary factor in what it means to flourish as a human. In a world of fast food, slow food grown from scratch is a protest against machine like efficiency that relegates human feelings and other aesthetic aspects of food production as secondary.

I'd add here that shopping at farmer's markets is still a good way of achieving this.

Secondly, storing seeds from previous generations of food protests against business control of food itself. Taking seeds from pumpkins and growing them rather than buying the seed recognizes the reality of natural cycles in a world where many protect themselves from the seasons, indeed as global warming changes the seasons.

Thirdly, growing food forms an attitude of gratitude as we learn that we are in a relationship with the earth - care and tend it and it provides us with a bounty in an almost miraculous way.

Lastly (though I am sure there's more), it's a protest against the idea that all joys are technologically mediated (yes the irony, I'm blogging). Nothing is simpler in a sense than hands in soil rather than hands on remotes or keyboards.

So garden for the joy, the satisfaction, garden where you are in ground or pots, in protest and thankfulness.

The Evangelical Environment

Late last year, I and three others (two of whom I work with from time to time on various environment related projects) on Sunday Nights with John Cleary on a program entitled The Evangelical Environment. There is a podcast available.

I'll let readers decide how useful it was, but the program was motivated by exit polls from the US presidential elections and the low priority given to environmental issues by Evangelicals in those polls. One of the participants was from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), which I think it would be fair to say don't usually focus on such issues because they fear the Greens and some of their policies. Much of our time was spent on this. A lot of the time was spent on discussing climate change - but of course the problems are broader than this. Enjoy.

Tim Flannery's Quarterly Essay

I've just finished Tim Flannery's Quarterly Essay on the management or rather mismanagement of biodiversity in Australia. I just want to briefly summarise his argument (made in characteristic fashion with the odd swear word and powerful invective)

1. Setting aside areas is not enough unless they are properly managed. We have nature reserves with animals going extinct
2. Conservative governments by in large are cutting funding to conservation projects and eschew the word biodiversity.
3. Nowhere appears safe and anything short of World Heritage areas can be mined if it suits the government of the day
4. Some key wins can be made by organized private citizens in protecting biodiversity and keeping governments accountable when they don't even follow their own rules.
5. Government/private partnerships may be a useful way forward
6. Management is necessary because Aborigines were responsible for the extinction of large marsupial herbivores that kept vegetation down and greatly reduced the risk of hot, widespread destructive fires, but then they themselves became intimate parts of the ecosystem by their fire practices. An absence of this since Europeans have arrived has seen an increase in destructive fires and other impacts, such as lack of herbivore control by predators and too much growth of some vegetation types. Where such control has been introduced, species thrive

The essay is not all bad news, though while it is realistic about the present threat of extinction, there does appear to be useful ways forward if governments have ears to hear.

Basic videos on climate change science

The National Research Council is pleased to present a video that explains how scientists have arrived at the current state of knowledge about recent climate change and its causes. The video is broken into 7 parts and can be found here

Forget Jesus? Life, death and meaning in the cosmos

This picture and quote from Lawrence Krauss is taken from the Pantheism group on Facebook. I wouldn't pretend to fully understand Pantheism (ancient or modern) but in general it is an attempt to see nature as in some sense sacred and understand ourselves as connected to the rest of existence.

The above quote is nothing new; Carl Sagan was saying this sort of thing ages ago. Life depends on death (like it or not), be it of stars recycling the very material in our bodies (above quote), or the process of evolution (apologies to my Christian friends who don't believe in it) or at the very least making room for species and individuals alive now.

In this sense we can see we are connected to the rest of reality. Of course, the writer of Genesis 1 could also see that, all animals are living creatures (nephesh), with animals and humans created on the same day. There are of course multiple threads about creation running through the Old Testament; both humans as being simply a part of creation (Psalm 104) and humans as being God's image and priests serving in the creation-temple. One doesn't need to be an atheist or a pantheist.

Of course the aside of Krauss that we can "forget Jesus" is not derived from his science at all, and is representative of the new atheism. One can hold both that death and change is a part of the natural fabric of reality (even if it is to be in some sense overcome eschatologically) and that Jesus' death is significant for human existence and cosmologically - it is just that science cannot inform the later and Krauss oversteps the mark.