Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Culture Wars

Soak up the Sun

by Clay Staggs

We return again today to a perennial favorite on this blog - the battle between wacko environmentalists and the rest of us. Be warned: this one is ridiculous even by the already-low standards of the debate on this issue.

We humans have now been accused of being too greedy for the sun’s resources, and using a disproportionate share of them. Truly, I am not making this up. Read it all here.

Now, the first thing anybody reading this is going to wonder is how any one thing on the face of the earth takes more of the sun’s resources than any other thing. Ah, well, you see, they’re talking about that great biological storehouse of solar energy - plants. We apparently are guilty of using more plant resources than any other species on earth.

Folks, I couldn’t dream up quotes like this:

An agriculture professor at the University of Melbourne, Snow Barlow, said … humans were taking up too much of an important natural resource. “Here we are, just one species on the earth, and we’re grabbing a quarter of the renewable resources … we’re probably being a bit greedy.”

Now, I’ll drop the sarcasm for a minute to actually point out what should be blazingly obvious to everyone. There are a considerable number of those “renewable resources” that are only renewed by HUMAN ACTIVITY. To read this article, you’d think that corn, wheat, soybeans, etc., just magically spring forth from the ground, and rapacious humans descend on them like locusts, leaving nothing for the subsistence of the myriad innocent (and totally not greedy) species.

That’s just coming at it from a non-Christian perspective. As Christians, we understand that the reason that it is good and proper for us to plant and harvest crops, use trees for wood, etc., is because a) God has given the Earth to us so that we can exercise dominion over and be stewards of it, b) the earth is made for man, not man for the Earth, and c) we worship the Creator, not the creation.

So, all of this is really dumb, and probably not worth the pixels I’m devoting to it. However, if there’s a substantial part of the environmentalist movement that buys into this, consider this line from the article:

[T]he increased use of biofuels - such as ethanol and canola - should be viewed cautiously, given the potential for further pressure on ecosystems.

How’s that going to be for an internecine environmentalist feud? The plant-huggers vs. the alternative fuels crowd. It ought to at least be entertaining to watch. Get the popcorn. Oh, wait….