Spring 2003

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From the Publisher's Desk by Jim Ball
A Safe, Healthy Summer
Treasures on Earth... And Consequences of Greed - Where is your heart? by David Gushee and Glenn Stassen
George Washington Carver, A Radical Christian by Dorothy Boorse
Oil & Hydrogen - EEN's position by Jim Ball
Word for Wilderness Around the World by Bonnie Gisel
Holmes Rolston III: Environmental Ethicist
Learn to Serve, Serve to Learn by Fred Wiechman

From the Publisher's Desk

Jim Ball

Friends,

As I review the content of this issue of Creation Care, the words that came to me were, "learn ... be open to learn." Can we truly be open to learn something new? I'm talking about taking a lesson deep within us so that it transforms us.

That's hard.

It rarely happens.

I guess the first step, and maybe the hardest, is simply to be open. This issue of Creation Care presents you with many opportunities to be open to learn something transformative.

Can we really be open to learning something from the example of George Washington Carver? Or from the life and work of Holmes Rolston?

Can we be open to reading the Scriptures with new eyes, as have Glen Stassen and Dave Gushee?

Can we be open to the lessons that the wild can teach us? Can we be open to sharing those with the world, as Bonnie Gisel suggests?

Can we be open to creating new ways to educate our children and maybe allow a little child to lead us in how to do this?

When reading this issue, be open to what lessons or suggestions for how to learn that you may find.

Blessings,

Jim Ball

A Safe, Healthy Summer

Summer is a special time. For most of us, this season means more time spent outdoors, more activities, and children home from school. During this season, some additional care is needed to keep our families healthy. Most of these tips will not be new to you. However, it's important to practice them regularly and consistently. And make sure to teach children these tips. They will then teach them to their own children when the time comes, and you will be a part of God's blessing to future generations.

God has made a beautiful creation that provides spiritual restoration and joy. If you have children, take time to take them outdoors this summer. You don't have to be an outdoors expert for your child to learn about the outdoors from you.You can just share your own enjoyment of the trees, blue sky, and the birds whatever it is that you enjoy. Have your children share what they enjoy too. When you return home, in your family prayer time you can thank God that He gave us the beautiful outdoors to enjoy.You can thank God for his creation and its goodness, and pray that your family helps keep it healthy for people and God's other creatures too. Grill and picnic safely.

Outdoor grilling tips

Be sure to cook food to the proper temperature. Use a thermometer (remember to wash the thermometer before reinserting to check the temperature again). Always cook food completely all at once (don't "par-cook" and finish later).

145 F - Beef, lamb, veal steaks and roasts cooked medium rare.
160 F - Hamburger, roasts cooked medium, meatloaf, pork, veal, lamb, porkchops, ribs, roasts, egg dishes.
165 F - Ground turkey and chicken.
170 F - Chicken and turkey breasts.
180 F - Chicken and turkey whole bird, legs, thighs, and wings, duck and goose.
Fish should be opaque (not at all clear) and should flake easily with a forkWhen removing foods off the grill, put them on a clean plate. Don't put cooked food on a platter that held raw meat. Serve hot, grilled foods immediately.

Wash your hands, utensils, and equipment before and after cooking.

When ozone (smog) begins to rise, outdoor grilling should be limited. (See your localTV weather forecast.)

Marinate raw meat, fish, and poultry in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Don't re-use the marinade unless you boil it.

Pre-heat the coals on your grill for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the coals are lightly coated with ash.

Refrigerate any leftovers promptly in the refrigerator or cooler. A full cooler will stay cold longer than one partially filled, so pack plenty of extra ice or freezer packs.

Picnic Tips

Try to plan just the right amount of foods to take on the picnic. This will eliminate the worry of storage and safety of leftovers.

Choose your picnic menu carefully. Foodborne diseases prefer foods high in protein and moisture. These foods include milk products, eggs, poultry, meats, fish, shellfish, cream pies, custards, and potato salads.

Take-out foods from a restaurant such as fried chicken, hot dogs, or burgers should be eaten within two hours of purchase or be cooled below 45°F and reheated to 140°F before serving.

If you can't keep foods at the proper temperature to prevent bacterial growth, consider canned, preserved, or dehydrated foods, and fresh fruit and vegetables.

Do not place your cooler in the trunk-- instead place it inside the air- conditioned car. Find a shady area under a tree for your cooler once you have arrived at your picnic destination.

Keep the lid closed and avoid repeated openings. Refill ice as needed.

When serving picnic foods, place them on a clean tablecloth spread on the picnic table or ground.After the meal, put leftovers back in the ice chest immediately. If you're not sure food has stayed out at unsafe temperatures for too long, be safe: throw it away. Do not take a chance on eating foods that might make you sick.

Place leftover foods in the cooler soon after grilling or serving. Any left outside for more than an hour should be discarded. If there is still ice in the cooler when you get home, the leftovers should be safe to eat.

Protect yourself and your children from the sun

About 80 percent of a person's lifetime exposure to the sun occurs before the age of 18. Unfortunately, human activities have thinned the ozone layer and let even more harmful ultraviolet rays penetrate the atmosphere. Here are suggestions to help you and your family avoid developing skin cancer from exposure to the sun.

In general, the less skin exposed to the sun the better. Have you and your children and loved ones wear clothes that block ultraviolet rays. If possible, wear hats, long pants, and long sleeve shirts.

The American Academy of Dermatology recommends the following concerning the use of sunscreens:

Wear a broad-spectrum sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 15.
Use sunscreens every day if you are going to be in the sun for more than 20 minutes.
Apply sunscreens to dry skin 15 to 30 minutes before going outdoors.
When applying sunscreen, pay particular attention to the face, ears, hands and arms, and generously coat the skin that is not covered by clothing.
One ounce of sunscreen, enough to fill a shot glass, is considered the amount needed to cover the exposed areas of the body completely.
Reapply sunscreens every two hours or immediately after swimming or strenuous activity.
Don't use sunscreen on children younger than 6 months.When you bring your infant outside, keep her in the shade, and don't stay out for too long.

Remember that 10 am to 4 pm is when the sun's radiation is most intense.You may want to limit your sun exposure during this time. Limit outdoor exertion when ground-level ozone, i.e., smog, is high.

Local broadcast and newspaper air quality alerts generally correspond to federal ozone standards. Make sure to check your local air quality alerts when you and your family are planning to spend time outdoors, and follow their instructions. Also, when smog begins to rise, fires, outdoor grilling and individual auto use should be restricted.

Too much smog can make your eyes smart, can reduce your lung capacity and, in extreme cases, can make it hard to breathe.Too much ozone at ground level can make even a very fit person, an athlete-in-training, sick. People with existing lung diseases such as asthma are particularly vulner able to the respiratory effects of ozone.

Animals also suffer. Studies demonstrate how ozone exposure injures their lung cells and causes unusual changes in lung tissue.

Do your part to reduce outdoor air pollution. Take public transportation. Drive energy efficient vehicles, keep them tuned up, and inflate your tires to the proper level.Walk or bike if possible. Use an electric lawn mower. Make your home energy efficient. Purchase compact fluorescent light bulbs. Choose renewable energy from your electric company if it is available in your area. Support public policies to reduce outdoor air pollution.

Minimize the amount of bug spray that you use on your family

Use natural bug repellents, like oil of citronella and rosemary.You can make your own low-toxic bug sprays with these by boiling them in water, then pouring the solution into a spray bottle. (FYI, oil of citronella is also found in the product Skin So Soft.)

Most bug sprays contain DEET, a toxic chemical. Any spray with more than 10% DEET is not recommended. Keep the spray on clothing. Never apply it to the face or hands. Long sleeves and pants are great protection against insects.

Take preventive measures to avoid ticks

Lyme disease bacteria are transmitted to humans by the bite of infected deer ticks, also known as black-legged ticks. Avoid tick habitats.

Editor's Note:This article was adapted from a longer one available in the "Special Topics" section of our website, www.healthyfamiliesnow.org.

Treasures on Earth... And Consequences of Greed - Where is your heart?

David Gushee and Glenn Stassen

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also... Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Are you not of more value that they? ...Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.... But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? ... Seek first God's kingdom and God's righ teousness, and all these things shall be yours as well (Mt 6:19-33).

A hundred years ago nature was still resilient and forgiving.

A generation ago, we grew up thinking of nature as the woods, a seashore, or a park where we might go for a walk or camp out.

The threat was that we might leave the beauty of nature dirty with paper, garbage, or tin cans, or might leave some hot ashes that could start a fire. So Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Smoky Bear taught us an ethic of cleaning up after ourselves and putting out sparks.

Now the threat has reached a drastic new level.

Our earth is no longer resilient and forgiving, but weakening and receding, like a dying person.

Industry is a powerful and all-consuming engine that is eating up the whole earth like a strip-mining machine and killing off species by the thousands. It is no longer "nature" out there and us as "visitors" for a day or two.

Because of the power of our machines, we are now the largest part of nature, and we are dependent for our health on what we are destroying.

Our machines and our industry are the main forces that consume, pollute, and destroy what God has given us.

It is not nature out there and us here, but us as part of creation, and the rest of creation on which we depend for human life.

Unfortunately our spiritual reality is that we are tempted to practice denial of facts that demand repentance and change.

And the inertia of perception means that we are slow to perceive the meaning of trends. We assume, unconsciously, that things will continue mostly as they were before.

The reality, however, is that things can't continue.

In the text above Jesus focuses our perception on two factors:

1. God cares. Jesus makes absolutely clear that God cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and that we are placed in the midst of this community of God's caring. Many of Jesus' parables point to God's caring for the growth of seeds, for the fields, for the gift of rain and sunshine to all persons.

Just as Jesus' teaching on divorce said God's covenant in Genesis estab- lished the norm, so his parables treat God's creating and caring for us and the rest of creation as the norm for our awareness of God's present reign.

God has created us in a limited community, the earth; and God continues to care for that community.

It is not us over against nature or the environment; we are part of God's created community of the earth, and we are dependent on this earth community for our lives, just as it is now dependent on us for its life.

2. Greed does not work. Again, Jesus makes it absolutely clear that investing our money in wealth that we hoard, and serving wealth (mammon), create a powerful vicious cycle.

Where our money is invested shapes how our hearts are tuned. And how our hearts are tuned shapes how we see (Mt 6:21-23).

Therefore, it is crucial to put our treasures in God's reign and God's justice. In Mt 6:22-23, the sound eye is the generous eye, and the unsound eye is the greedy eye.

If we put our treasures in greed and shape our incentives so that greed for ever more treasures is rewarded, then our loyalties and our perceiving will focus on greed, and we will consume exponentially more each year in a limited earth that is a one-time gift from God.

Jesus says that if we try to serve both God and greed, we will hate the one and love the other.

The way we have been destroying the creation at breakneck speed constitutes firm evidence that we love short-term wealth and hate God's care for the creation.

Sherlock Holmes solved a murder mystery by noticing that at the time of the crime, the family dog did not bark. It clued him that the murderer was not a stranger, but a member of the family.

In our case the perpetrator of the crime is not a stranger, but a member of the family of creation. We humans are not something apart from God's creation, but are a fellow creature. God created us that way, and God created the non-renewable resources of nature like oil, natural gas and chromium as a one-time gift.

We could share them so future generations will have some, or steal them for one huge binge by the present generation. And our family dog--economics--does not bark.

The earth functions organically, steadily working to heal and renew what gets disturbed.

But the industrial system functions consumptively, not building healing or renewal into its equations or its practices.

The industrial system is growing with exponential speed, and the mismatch is like a massive cancer metastasized throughout the organic body of someone who thought life would go on for many more years but suddenly learns that the growth within does not match that expectation.

The industrial economy consumes what will not grow back and pollutes in ways that destroy while ignoring the organic functioning of the Earth. The incentives are wrong. Jesus focuses us realistically on how we shape our economic incentives: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be" (Mt 6:21).

The complex inter-wovenness of our ecological crisis with the economics of the "hydrocarbon society" and the massive concentration of power in huge transnational corporations hovering above the laws of any one nation, lead to several temptations.

The first temptation is to despair that anything can be done.

While it may be too late to avoid all consequences of our ecological degradation of the last two centuries, it is not too late to minimize consequences that cannot be wholly avoided.

Despair demonstrates lack of faith in God, and is a convenient way to shirk responsibility for correcting the systemic evils that have brought us to this crisis.

Another temptation is to trust in a miraculous "techno-fix," a massive technological breakthrough that will miraculously solve all of our ecological troubles without any changes in current patterns of production, consumption, and conservation.

While research into new technologies has a necessary role, especially research into alternate energy sources that decrease our reliance on oil and coal and which are far more ecologically sustainable, any long-term solutions to the ecological crisis will require massive changes in the global economy:

The so-called "FirstWorld" must change to simpler lifestyles that consume far less energy and that share the world's resources in a more just manner.

We must learn to "live simply that others may simply live."

How can we have our treasure and our hearts in the right place? Think imaginatively.

How can we take a step of commitment, a step of repentance, a step of discipleship that participates in God's caring for the creation?

Steven Bouma-Prediger says we can cultivate the virtues of respect and receptivity, self-restraint and frugality, humility and honesty, benevolence (mercy) and love and justice (For the Beauty of the Earth, 137-165).

These nicely resemble virtues in the beatitudes. We cultivate those Christian virtues by our regular practices and our investments.

One step is for the church to preach and teach, and practice what it preaches.

A church will be much more persuasive if it practices what it teaches.

Lead the church to take energy conservation measures and talk about them in sermons, Sunday School classes and small groups. When your church conserves, it can also teach members to do similarly at home.

We know a church that had a Vacation Bible School each year for adults as well as children in which one of the week-long workshops was a practical class in energy-saving, taught with concrete, practical projects.

Participants actually implemented the practices in their homes. It was fun.And it saved them a lot of money for gasoline, heating, and electricity.

By living where you are within walking or bicycling distance from your work or school, or near a bus route, and buying a high-mileage car if you buy one, you can cut your gasoline bill to a quarter of what it was. It saves a lot of time--you can read on the bus or train, and it is hard to do that while driving on the freeway!

By turning down your thermostat a few degrees in daytime and more at night or when you go out, and closing drapes or shades when it is cold outside, you can cut your heating bill in half.

Cooking, baking, or air conditioning use far more electricity than lights or computers.

By not preheating your oven, and turning it off a few minutes before the baking is finished, and by turning on air conditioning only when you really need it, and turning off lights and computers when you are not using them, you can cut your electricity bill in half.

We have done these things.

How about naming a car-pooling committee for church? When one of us was a teenager, he was co-leader of the church youth fellowship. He organized car pooling to come to the meetings.

It created the expectation you would come, since someone had agreed in advance to pick you up. It created the practice of calling potential members and visitors to see if they would like a ride, thus making them feel wanted.

It created group belonging and fellowship together, plus a witness to participating in God's caring for the creation.

The group grew 400 percent. Why not organize something like this for everyone in the church who might be interested?

If you got a committee to work on it, through adult Sunday School classes, and other small groups, the classes and groups and the church would grow.

This is the theme we learn from Jesus: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

Jesus was a realist. Jesus did not teach an idealistic ethic in which the point is to have good ideals while maintaining the same economic incentives and investments.

We need to change where our money is invested, and what the financial incentives are for practicing modesty, conservation, and generosity. This suggests an approach to the care of creation that differs from much that one reads. In the church Bible School class, we learned how to save gasoline, heating, air-conditioning, and electricity, and we calculated how much money we were saving, with which we could do better things, including giving to kingdom causes.

We lined up our economic incentives with our ecological ethics.

As Jesus predicted, our hearts followed our financial practices, and so did our perceiving.

Editor's Note: Glen Stassen is Professor of Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. David Gushee is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University. This article was adapted with permission from Chapter 21 of their new book, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, available from InterVarsity Press.

George Washington Carver, A Radical Christian

Dorothy Boorse

Picture yourself in the woods by a small pool.

Imagine you hear chorus frogs sounding like a person running their finger up and down the teeth of a comb.

You hear wood frogs calling like gabbling ducks.

What are the frogs you imagined doing? They are seeking mates.

Ultimately, of course, they are glorifying God the Creator. God created every frog, every leaf, every teeming hibernating pile of rattlesnakes, all moths and crows and cranes and earthworms to bring glory to Him.

What do we see today in God's creation?

We see tremendous environmental degradation and declines in biodiversity worldwide.

Amphibians, reptiles, birds, plants, are in decline. There are only 300 right whales left in the world. All of the red wolves in the world are in captivity.

They await a time when some combination of captive breeding techniques and special habitat protection may give them a chance to howl again in the wild song that brings glory to the Lord.

Poor people suffer from environmental degradation as well. They are more likely to be exposed to hazardous wastes, to have untreated sewage, and to suffer as forests and fertile fields are stripped of trees and soil.

In the Bible, God calls us to a radical departure from the culture around us.

Three scriptural examples of God's call include the Sabbath, tithing, and the principle of gleaning. Many Christians are raised learning to obey the Sabbath from the time they learn the Ten Commandments.

In addition to one day of rest in seven, the spirit of the Sabbath was best illustrated in the year of Jubilee.

In this year, every 50 years, slaves were freed, land was returned to its historic owners, debts were forgiven, and land was given extra rest to recuperate.

Many Christians are also familiar with the principle of tithe. This was God's provision for the Levites who did not have their own land and for the poor and provided feasts for rejoicing The principle of gleaning may be less familiar to us today, because most of us are not farmers and because crops are rarely hand harvested.

This principle can be extended from the fields into other areas of life however. In the story of Boaz and Ruth we see that the Jews were commanded not to harvest everything they could but to leave some for the poor to harvest themselves.

Notice that we do not take all that we can and then later give to the poor. The principle of gleaning keeps us from gaining everything at the start. In this way, it may be the most radical of the three ideas.

One person who illustrated a radical obedience to God at odds with our culture was George Washington Carver.

Carver was born in 1864 to slave parents in Diamond Grove, Missouri. After his parents had died, his mother's former owners raised both George and his brother Jim.

George was never strong as a child but bright and interested by everything. He collected rocks, flowers, bits of this and that.

He went on to work his way through high school as a farmhand, and eventually attended Iowa State College.

There he was asked to remain as a graduate student and got his master's degree.

Then he became the first African American faculty member at Iowa State.

From there he was tapped by Booker T. Washington to go to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama where he worked for the rest of his life as a scientist, becoming the first African American to head a USDA agricultural experiment station.

Carver created movable schools, bringing agricultural wisdom to isolated poor farmers.

He fought for crop rotation and a change in the agricultural practices of cotton growing that were destroying southern soils.

He invented hundreds of things including more than 300 consumer and industrial products from the peanut, cowpea, and sweet potato, and a new type of cotton called Carver's hybrid.

In spite of his great personal abilities, Carver lived a life radically different from the world.

For example, Carver never patented his inventions, claiming, "God gave them to me, how can I sell them to someone else?"

When he was offered money to work for Henry Ford and for Thomas Edison, he did not accept, saying, "If I took that money, I might forget my people."

His love of others crossed color boundaries at a time when the country was terribly divided.

People cared for him across those boundaries as well.

Finally, in 1940, Carver donated all of his life savings to found the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee Institute for research in natural science.

George Washington Carter represents a man of principle.

When you put these principles all together--Sabbath, tithing, gleaning--you have a picture of the Jubilee.

As Christians it is our job to be stewards of God's creation, and to be on the forefront of efforts to heal the earth.

This creation, like our chorus of frogs, sings glory to the Lord God, but its voice is muted by the groans of an earth cursed by human sin.

Just as in the past, Christians like GeorgeWashington Carver led a push to heal the poor farmers and their land harmed by years of depletion and misuse, so today we are to be people of principle, rectifying wrongs of our day.

Then we will, like conductors of an orchestra, protect all members of our glorious chorus.

Dorothy Boorse is Assistant Professor of Biology at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass.

Oil & Hydrogen - EEN's position

Jim Ball

Our country is increasingly dependent on foreign oil from unstable regions.This poses a serious threat to our national and economic security. The Second GulfWar is a stark reminder of our dependence. Part of the reason the Administration was concerned about Saddam Hussein is that no one wanted him to have undue influence over the oil supplies of his neighbors. Our transportation choices are the major cause of our oil dependence. According to the Department of Energy (DOE) two-thirds of the 20 million barrels of oil Americans use each day is used for transportation. In his State of the Union address, President Bush pointed to hydrogen as a possible solution for the long term but offered nothing to reduce our dependenceand pollution over the next decade.

Half of the oil we use is imported--the highest level in U.S. history. This dependence is projected to grow to 64 percent by 2020. Up to 75 percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Middle East and controlled by the members of the OPEC oil cartel. Oil price spikes from 1979-91 cost the U.S. economy about $4 trillion, and the economy went into a recession after each major price shock. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the U.S. spends $20-40 billion a year to defend Middle Eastern oil resources. This amount has increased significantly with the huge price of invading Iraq.

Oil fuels our transportation economy, but it does so at a significant cost in human health and global warming impacts, as we have highlighted in past issues of Creation Care and on our websites.

Thus, for reasons related to peace, justice, and creation care, reducing our oil dependence is an ethical issue and demands bold leadership.

President Bush's proposal announced in his State of the Union address to increase hydrogen fuel cell research is a needed show of leadership in the area of transportation. Unfortunately, the Administration's inadequate current proposal on raising fuel economy standards and its defense of tax credits for large sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are not.

Let's look at the good news first.

The new five-year initiative announced in the State of the Union is called FreedomFUEL. It will be combined with a current program called FreedomCAR. President Bush proposes $1.7 billion in funding for both over the next five years, with $720 million of new money not redirected from other programs. The DOE estimates that these initiatives could reduce our oil dependence by more than 11 million barrels per day--the amount we currently import. We will all have to wait and see whether the Administration will fight to ensure that thenecessary funding levels will be achieved each year in order to reach this goal.

What's the big deal about hydrogen? It has the highest energy content per unit of weight of any known fuel. When powering a fuel cell, its only waste is pure water. Fuel cells have actually been around since the 19th century. They produce electricity through a chemical process in which hydrogen atoms are forced through a specially designed membrane that peels off one of its electrons to create the electricity that drives the motor.

So what's the problem? Hydrogen (H2) is rarely found alone in nature. It must be produced by using another fuel source. If that source is solar or wind, you essentially have emission-free energy. If you use gasoline, natural gas, or some other fossil fuel, you will still have some pollution--but less, given that fuel cells are 2-3 times more efficient than today's internal combustion engines.

The Administration's FreedomCAR program is a partnership with the big three automakers (GM, Ford, DaimlerChrysler) to advance high-technology research on the production of practical, affordable hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that American consumers will want to buy and drive. The new FreedomFUEL proposal would develop technologies for hydrogen production and distribution infrastructure. Currently, hydrogen is four times as expensive to produce as gasoline (when produced from its most affordable source, natural gas). FreedomFUEL seeks to lower that cost enough to make fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) cost-competitive with conventional gasoline-powered vehicles by 2010.

These are good steps, but even stronger leadership comes from Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND). "We need a new, bold initiative--in the spirit of the Apollo moon-landing project--this time focused on breaking our country's dependence on Middle East Oil," Dorgan said. "We need to make the commitment to do this and then focus the resources to get the job done. Moving to a hydrogen based future for transportation will be good for our economy, our energy future, and our environment." His plan would invest $6.5 billion over 10 years, and is in keeping with the size of the problem.

Now for the bad news.

The earliest FCVs will become available to the average consumer is about a decade away. What is our country to do in the meantime to reduce both oil dependence and transportation pollution? Not much, if the Administration has its way.

Over the next 10-15 years, fuel economy standards for all vehicles need to be improved, especially for SUVs. The Administration's current proposal is for SUVs and light trucks to have their fuel economy increased by half a gallon a year for three years for a 1.5 miles per gallon increase.

We believe fuel economy for SUVs and light trucks should be raised half a mile per year for 15 years, not just three. This 7.5-mpg increase would be significant. It would represent strong leadership.

What about tax deductions for the largest SUVs, those weighing 6,000 pounds or more? Back in the 1980s, when these deductions were added to the tax code, they might have made some sense. They were intended for trucks needed by farmers and on worksites. The mammoth SUVs were not yet in existence.

Now such vehicles as the Hummer, the Lincoln Navigator, and the Toyota Land Cruiser can claim the deduction. But that's not all. According to the New York Times, the Administration's economic plan would increase these deductions by 50 percent or more. A Hummer with a base sticker price of over $100,000 would be eligible for more than $87,000 in deductions for about $33,500 in savings. So taxpayers are subsidizing Hummer drivers and increasing oil dependence, air pollution, and global warming all at once.

That our government would provide incentives for such large SUVs in our current situation is bad enough. But to double them? When questioned about this, the Administration's spokesman was unabashed--the deduction would be a potent economic stimulant.

Government policy should not encourage the purchase of such vehicles; it should discourage them by adding a gas-guzzler fee that is then given as a rebate to those who purchase fuel-efficient vehicles (called a "feebate").

The Administration's forward-thinking leadership on hydrogen cannot be a substitute for reducing our oil dependence and transportation pollution today. We can do both.

Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, which publishes Creation Care magazine.

Word for Wilderness Around the World

Bonnie Gisel

LeConte Memorial Lodge, the second oldest building inYosemite National Park (built in 1903-1904), serves as the Sierra Club's home in YosemiteValley and is essentially a field station for environmental education.

During the 2002 season, MaySeptember, more than 12,000 people from around the world (children and adults, students and seniors) visited LeConte Memorial Lodge where they were greeted by the curator and volunteers.

Exhibits, a nature and environmental studies library, and a children's corner grace the Lodge.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, programs in the study of nature, lectures on environmental history, and music, poetry, and storytelling oriented toward nature and wilderness themes, and slide shows depicting travels along the Sierra are provided to the public free of charge. Day and evening nature walks are also available to families.

Guided by the LeConte Memorial Lodge Committee, the Outings Department of the Sierra Club, and the Curator, LeConte Memorial Lodge has stepped up its efforts to provide new programming and to reach an audience beyond Yosemite Valley.

The heart-felt purpose is to share ideas about caring about nature and wild places.

During the 2002 Season, the Wilderness Quilt Project resulted in the painting of 630 quilt squares--memories ofYosemite National Park created by children and adults, who visited the lodge.

These quilt squares will be exhibited in LeConte Memorial Lodge during the centennial year in 2004. This project (based, in part, on the sketches John Muir drew as he traveled) will result in a children's book to be published by the University of Utah Press in 2004. A "Nature Journal" project was also inaugurated during the 2002 season--again inspired by John Muir, who kept journals throughout his adult life.

It is from Muir's journals and their words about wilderness that he composed letters to friends, articles, and eventually 10 wilderness discovery books that have and continue to encourage the worldwide preservation of wild places.The "Nature Journal" offers an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of John Muir, recording experiences in nature and wilderness, providing an opportunity to grow closer to nature and all its amenities. Over five-hundred nature journals were distributed at LeConte Memorial Lodge during the 2002 season.

A new program, Words for Wilderness Around the World, will become a focal point of activity at LeConte Memorial Lodge over the next three years, 2003-2005.

This effort has been inspired by the writings of John Muir, nature's protector and first president of the Sierra Club; the deeds of Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in NewYork City and who authored The Preliminary Report on Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove (1865); and the scientific knowledge of Joseph LeConte, geologist, physician, professor, and founding member of the Sierra Club. It is our hope that Words for Wilderness Around the World will grow beyond the Lodge and Yosemite Valley and encourage the support of individuals and organizations around the world.

The purpose of Words for Wilderness Around the World is to follow the lead and to further the work of LeConte, Olmsted, and Muir, to strive to continue to recognize the need to preserve nature and wilderness and the biodiversity of the Earth, and to acknowledge and address our ever-growing need for environmental understanding and ecological consciousness.

Words forWilderness Around the World will invite visitors to LeConte Memorial Lodge and people from around the Earth to write 50 words on recycled paper (3" x 11") or to submit electronically, their thoughts and experiences about the following: nature, wilderness, and wildlife; the landscape of home; stories about natural places; protecting wilderness and biodiversity; the challenges of life in the 21st Century; clean water; global population; human rights and the environment; and concerns about global warming.

These themes are a point of departure. Individuals may write about a personal relationship with nature or about environmental challenges faced by families or friends, organizations, agencies, local communities, their nation, or the global community. Sources of inspiration such as biblical passages, devotional thoughts and prayers, and the words of naturalists and nature writers may be included. Poetry and drawings (3" x 11") are also welcome.

Words for Wilderness Around the World will be collected.

Each piece of paper and each electronic submission becomes a link in a necklace of words that will circle the globe. The idea for the necklace of words grew from the work of Frederick Law Olmsted who believed that parks are opportunities to weave together parcels of green space--living necklaces--healthful places where people could rest and recreate.

He sought to link the United States together, park to park, in one green corridor.

From the door of LeConte Memorial Lodge, located inYosemiteValley, in Yosemite National Park, a necklace of words--green words--will grow around the world embracing awareness, caring, and thoughtfulness about landscapes and ecology, about plants and creatures, sharing our stories about the world shared with the rest of God's Creation.

Our course around the world will follow John Muir's travels out from Yosemite National Park where his own preservationist ideas took form and multiplied.

At LeConte Lodge, a map of the path the necklace will take and the progress ofWords forWilderness Around theWorld--as the necklace grows--will be on display.

The Words for Wilderness Around theWorld website will also include a progress report.

In the spirit of Muir, LeConte, and Olmsted--who believed in the University of the Wilderness--that in nature are important lessons about the world in which we live and that this experience and knowledge may be shared with others--LeConte Memorial Lodge reaches out to you, readers of Creation Care magazine--as partners in the global community--to help us create Words for Wilderness Around the World.

For information about LeConte Memorial Lodge,Words for Wilderness Around the World, the Wilderness Quilt Project, and the Nature Journal see: http://www.sierraclub.org/education/leconte/ and http://www.sierraclub.org/education/leconte/words_for_wilderness.asp.

Bonnie Gisel, Ph.D., is the Curator of LeConte Memorial Lodge,Yosemite National Park and a Scholar-in-Residence at the University of California, Berkeley. She may be reached at bjgisel@yahoo.com.

Holmes Rolston III: Environmental Ethicist

Holmes Rolston III, an ordained Presbyterian minister and Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, has been named the 2003 Templeton Prize laureate.

The prize, valued at more than $1 million, was announced at a news conference in NewYork City.

Rolston, also University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State, is one of the world's leading advocates for protecting the earth's biodiversity and ecology in recognition of the intrinsic value of creation.

In philosophical circles, he is widely known as the "father of environmental ethics." In theological circles, he is known for his concept of a sacred, prolific, yet "cruciform" creation.

For 30 years Rolston has articulated a creation care perspective that looks beyond humans to include the fundamental value and goodness of plants, animals, species, and ecosystems as core issues of theological and scientific concern.

His 1986 book, Science and Religion--A Critical Study and his 1987 Environmental Ethics have been widely hailed for rejecting anthropocentrism in ethical and philosophical analysis.

TheTempleton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, founded in 1972 by Sir John Templeton as the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is the world's largest monetary annual award given to an individual.

The Duke of Edinburgh will award the prize to Rolston in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 7.

Rolston, 70, initially achieved wide recognition with a 1975 article, "Is There an Ecological Ethic" in Ethics, the first article in a major philosophical journal that challenged the then widespread idea that nature was value-free and that all values stem from a human perspective.

The rest of creation, Rolston contended, contains intrinsic values independently of humans and deserves to be treated as such out of respect for and love of creation. In 1979, he co-founded Environmental Ethics, which continues to be the leading journal in the field.

Rolston's work has been reviewed, cited in and translated into 18 languages. His several hundred university lectures include the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, as well as invitations to Harvard,Yale, Georgetown,Vanderbilt, Yale Law School, Rutgers, Notre Dame, Oxford, the University of Manchester, and many others. Rolston has lectured in Europe, Australia, South America, China, India and Japan.

Holmes Rolston III was born in Rockridge Baths,Va. in 1932 to Mary Winifred Long and Holmes Rolston II, a Presbyterian pastor.

His family moved to Charlotte, N.C., and then to Richmond,Va., where his father became editor-in-chief of the Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church in the UnitedStates.

In a home rich in Christian teaching and writing, and surrounded by the natural wonder of the ShenandoahValley countryside, Rolston's childhood laid the foundation for a life that would challenge the longstanding orthodoxy on the relationship of religion and nature and open new frontiers for understanding values in creation.

Rolston was educated at Davidson College, near Charlotte, with a degree in physics and mathematics.

His theological education was at Union Seminary in Virginia and he studied philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned a doctorate. at the University of Edinburgh, where his advisor was Thomas F. Torrance, the 1978 Templeton Prize winner.

His outlook has often left him as an outsider among his peers. His first efforts to introduce an environmental ethics were rejected by mainstream philosophical journals.

Rolston recalls how he reacted in shock when he received his invitation to deliver the world-famous Gifford Lectures in 1997-98, because, as a Rocky Mountain westerner, he could barely get attention from what he calls "the Eastern establishment," much less from the celebrated theologians of Britain and Europe.

The manuscript at the heart of his lectures had been turned down by prominent publishers. It was then published as Genes, Genesis and God by Cambridge University Press in 1999, and has since received acclaim as a monumental work.

Rolston has won admirers in some unlikely places.While most philosophers would proudly include in their curriculum vitae that they had been invited to deliver an address at the World Congress of Philosophy, as Rolston was in 1998, he is equally proud of his 1999 invitation to give a distinguished lecture to theYellowstone National Park Scientific Conference on the conservation of wild nature.

He has said he thinks it is as important to publish in the Journal of Forestry as in Ethics.

"I am much encouraged to get a sympathetic hearing, often from those I might first have taken to be religion's cultured despisers," he said.

In his remarks at the announcement, Rolston cast the Earth's environmental needs in terms of justice.

"Our planetary crisis is one of spiritual information: not so much sustainable development, certainly not escalating consumption, but using the Earth with justice and charity.

"Science cannot take us there, religion perhaps can. After we learn altruism for each other, we need to become altruists toward our fellow creatures. We must encounter nature with grace, with an Earth ethics, because our ultimate Environment is God--in whom we live, move, and have our being."

Rolston intends to use his prize to endow a chair in science and religion at Davidson.

"Half a century ago at Davidson," he recalled, "my professors there gave me a head start on combining science and Christian faith with intellectual integrity, and I hope that young minds a half century hence can still have the same opportunity."

Rolston, who has been married since 1956 to the former JaneWilson, a Christian educator, lives in Fort Collins, Colo. They have two children.

Learn to Serve, Serve to Learn

Fred Wiechman

It is probably safe to say that at some point during our formal schooling years we asked the question, "Why do I need to learn this?"

Perhaps some of us asked it frequently and had interesting learning experiences to follow...with our principal. The frustration felt was not due to what we were learning, but perhaps our inability to see any connection to the real world. At times we felt like education was funneling information into our heads in pieces without any way to see a meaningful whole.We traveled from Math to English to Physical Education to Science o Music to History to Art to Bible (in Christian schools), learning things about each subject in isolation with little time spent to put it together.

Has the "how" we teach really changed that much? Can caring for God's creation help students learn better?

Dale Parnell, author of Contextual Teaching Works, has observed that much of the educational reform in the past twenty-five years has focused on the "shape of the bucket" rather than on what we put into it.

With all the efforts on things like accountability, standards, benchmarks, and testing, the typical classroom still seems to be dominated by teacher talk, a focus on "covering material" (without much regard to application), rewarding the one right answer, and, above all, keeping the learner passive during much of the process. Parnell concludes that contextual learning can provide teaching and learning strategies that focus on meaningful context and real-world applications, thus putting knowledge to work.

Most educators would agree that this is the goal of education, but in many classrooms it seems that goal is in the future somewhere, not necessarily the goal of the day. Most of the focus seems to be on the "perimeter" of education, not on the "area" within. It seems that little focus has been given to the way instruction is conceptualized, organized, and delivered. Much focus is placed on the curriculum, scope and sequence, and little on the learner. The question is, "What is at the center of the bull's eye, the curriculum or the learner?"

Perhaps when students are off task, educators should look less at the student and more at the task. Think for a minute of how you learn best. Isn't it when we see meaning and a real use for it?

Conceptual learning helps the learner see how and what they are learning can be used in an authentic manner. Research has shown that children learn by "doing." It seems ironic that most in-school experiences consist mostly of manipulating abstract symbols and information, whereas learning outside of school is done in a specific context that has personal meaning to the individual.

So how can we teach creation care in a specific context that has personal meaning to our students?

The sixth grade students at Lakeland Christian School have had an opportunity to experience a form of contextual learning during its Creation Care Week. This is a week set aside to emphasize earth stewardship and the care of God's creation. A service learning opportunity in our sixth grade has provided a chance to learn about and participate in a habitat restoration project on the school grounds.

The focus of the restoration project has been in removing invasive and exotic plants from a wetland on the school grounds we are restoring with aquatic native plants and trees. Prior to the restoration day, the students received instruction in the importance of watersheds, wetlands, and native plants to the ecosystem. During Creation CareWeek, speakers from our water management district and the City of Lakeland provide information specifically related to Florida and Lakeland's water resources.

This background information makes sense to the students as they observe the site before, during, and after planting the aquatic plants and trees in our micro-watershed on campus.The "service" provided by the students is having the experience of improving the school and its environment.

The motto for this project is, "One person, one plant can make a difference." Our hope is that this experience will leave an imprint in the minds of the students that stewardship of God's creation requires knowledge, understanding,AND positive action on their part. Perhaps they will be reminded of that each day as they walk by the area they restored and think, "I did that ... I made a difference!"

Fred Wiechmann is Elementary Principal at Lakeland Christian School in Lakeland, Fla., and is a Contributing Editor to Creation Care magazine.

Recently, he received an award for his efforts in water resource education by the Southwest FloridaWater Management District at their annual Water Conservation Conference.

The school received funding from the water district for the retention ditch projects mentioned in this article.

Lakeland Christian also won first place in the Florida Native Plant Society's Landscape Award Program, Schoolyard Division, for 2003.