Going green for God

Before I start I'd like to apologize for my absence over the past few days, I have a partially good reason, honest! On Thursday I was suddenly informed that there was a GreenTech exabition coming to the city, GreenTech is one of my passions and since I am in theory the representative for my company in the ME (not quite sure what happened there, it's gone very silent) I had to drop everything, prepare my portfolio and rush over for what was a truly enlightening two days. However, one of those foreign delegates must have been carrying a nasty foreign bug and after spending Sunday traveling up and down the various bus and train lines trying to deliver a sick cat that I had rescued to a new home (a story for another time), I scummed to what can only be called 'MEGA FLU VERSION 194705' and have spent the whole of Monday in bed. Still, I'm alive and ready to blog, so let's go...

As I said above, one of my passions is GreenTech so I thought I'd write a little about that in the context of faith. GreenTech (Green Technology), also known as EnviroTech (Enviromental Technology) or CleanTech (Clean Technology) is the application of the environmental science to conserve the natural environment and resources, and to curb the negative impacts of human involvement in the world. Sustainable development is the core of environmental technologies. In other words, GreenTech is about living on this planet and not destroying it in the process.

So how is this relevant to faith? Well, for starters we humans have been gifted this earth, it is a wonderful creation and to mess it up is a sin, a huge one. Adam, the first man, was told to name the animals of this planet and, more importantly, given the duty to look after them and the earth that they, and we, live on. 

On all counts we are failing these duties and God is clearly not happy about it. Is it just me, or have there been more hurricanes, typhoons, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and so on recently? Many scientists say that all these events can be connected to how humans are messing up the earth and I agree. Clearly, God designed this earth so that when we humans started to ignore His message about looking after the planet, the planet would strike back. Recently the UN opened it's latest biodiversity convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Japan, where the Japanese environment minister revealed to the world that we may have got only 10 years to stop wreaking our home before it becomes irreversible and the Earth sets about wiping us all out over the coming generations*. I believe that, so what do we do about it? Clearly we can't expect the UN to do all that much about it, while the UN has it's many strengths it has dissolved into little more than a talking shop these days, as someone pointed out on a post below, it's human rights commission apparently praised Iran recently. Once again, it's going to be up to us, the inhabitants of this Earth and the ones whom God has entrusted His creation to. We can't rely on our 'leaders', we are going to have to do this ourselves.

How do we do this? Well, that is something I will come back to in later posts, but for now I just want you to think, think about your duties to God and His creation and, once again, think of how to work together to solve it. I know I say it a lot, but we have the tools and the power to solve this, do we want to?

Peace

Jack

* The Environment Minister argued that; "All life on Earth exists thanks to the benefits from biodiversity in the forms of fertile soil, clear water and clean air ....We are now close to a 'tipping point' - that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity." In other words, the Earth is a complex interdependent machine of different species that complement each other and through the existence of one species, other species can live and visa versa. His argument is that if humans keep doing what we do and kill off species then we will wreck this 'machine' by killing of species then the Earth will cease working as it does now, parts of the 'machine' will have been irreversibly destroyed. The implications of this are huge, this 'machine' is our life support, if it stops functioning or starts behaving erratically, as it is starting to do now, then we really are dead.