It was one of the first times I’d ever spoken on creation care. The talk went well, but afterwards someone came up, fuming. He worked for a major Christian relief and development charity and was incensed that I’d talked about the need for nature conservation. ‘People must come first!’, he said, ‘especially the poor. Humans, not rhinos and pangolins, are made in God’s image. It’s simply a rich western luxury to care about the environment when there’s so much poverty in the world.’
I can’t remember how I replied then, but afterwards I reflected deeply on these views. Why was this Christian, who cared so deeply about poverty, so upset? After all, it was my biblical passion about global injustice and poverty that first got me thinking about environmental issues. What I realised is that there’s a dualistic ‘either-or’ mentality running very deep in some Christians: ‘Either we care for the poor, or we care for the planet.’ It also leads to, ‘Either we do evangelism, or we do environmentalism’, and ‘Either we grow the economy, or we grow trees.’ All of these are false dichotomies, as ridiculous as saying ‘Either we breathe, or we eat.’ Both are vital for life, and so is caring about poverty and about creation.
An integrated response
We are in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Basics like food and heating have rocketed in price, and many are genuinely struggling to make ends meet. Some say we should therefore shelve ‘unaffordable’ environmental priorities, including moving away from fossil fuels, urban low emission zones, and church net zero targets. What biblical wisdom can we shed on these very topical issues?
First, a biblical worldview is an integrated worldview. God made an interdependent creation, where people, animals, forests and the land flourish, or die, together. To separate humanity as if our welfare can be looked at separately from the ecosystems God placed us in will not benefit either in the long run. In A Rocha International (arocha.org), we face practical dilemmas where subsistence farmers may destroy wildlife and forests out of desperate poverty, but they and we both know this isn’t a long-term solution. Just as God asked Noah to build an ark to rescue both people and every other living species, so God wants us to find ways that both people and nature thrive together. In the long term, stable flourishing ecosystems are the only way for humans to also flourish. In our highly developed western economies, the real injustices are huge oil companies making massive profits and then reducing their environmental commitments, or powerful supermarkets squeezing struggling farmers even harder but not passing on savings to customers.
