What Population Control Reveals about Unbiblical Approaches to Environmentalism

James Tonkowich

 

The following address by IRD President James Tonkowich was delivered on March 2, 2007, at a gathering of the Cornwall Alliance (formerly the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance).

The big news around our house is that our son, Jon, is getting married this summer.  The wedding is in the bride's hometown just outside Yosemite Valley in California.  So along with a wedding, there'll be a bit of hiking and fly fishing in that remarkable natural place.  In fact we joked that given the options, we think we can probably squeeze in attending the actual wedding.

Yosemite Valley.  The backcountry.  Isn't that the way the world should be?  After all, the biblical story begins in a garden—fresh, newly created, uncluttered, natural, a pristine wilderness. 

Then came the breaking of God's law—the Fall. 

"In the final analysis, the Bible is not a story of restoration, it is a story of re-creation," said IRD President James Tonkowich. (Photo courtesy David Rothbard)

"Cursed is the ground because of you," said God. "Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field.   By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return"  (Gn 3:17b-19).

Driven out of Eden, the story of humanity and of our relationship with God on this cursed ground seems as though it should end up back in the Garden.  All the trash cleaned up and the marvelous, all-natural freshness of Eden restored.  The Earth picked clean of human encroachment.

It's tempting to think about it that way.  In fact recently National Association of Evangelicals Vice President for Government Affairs, Richard Cizik told Newsweek that he feels that God is saying "with my help, you can restore Eden."   The thought is tempting, the sound-bite attractive, but biblically it's pure nonsense.

In the final analysis, the Bible is not a story of restoration.  It's a story of re-creation.  "Behold," says God in Revelation 21, "I'm making everything new."  Eden will never be restored.  That was never the intent.  Instead something better will happen:  all things will be made new—re-created with an unexpected twist.  The grand story that began in a garden ends in a city.  This final city, the New Jerusalem, descends out of the New Heavens to its place on the New Earth.  It's a perfect city, but it's a city. 

Let's think about this for a moment. What is a city?  First, a city is an artifact—or, more accurately, a whole complex of artifacts.  Cities are not created out of nothing nor do they grow out of the ground.  Cities are shaped from the stuff of creation.  Walls, doors, windows, paving stones, foundations fashioned out of stone and wood and metal. 

The Bible values humans as makers who take the raw materials of creation—stone, trees, mineral ores—and create.  In fact, the creation is incomplete without human activity shaping it.  Even in Eden, God called humans to tend the Garden and rule Earth's creatures.  There was no call to maintain an unpopulated wilderness area.  The Bible sees human beings, human procreation, and human industry as positive goods.  We improve what we are given.  We build cities.

Second, a city is a habitation for people—people who belong on the Earth.  "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth."

This, as it turns out, is in contrast with much if not most environmentalist thinking.

For example, last year, the Texas Academy of Science named ecology professor Eric Pianka of the University of Texas its "Distinguished Texas Scientist" for 2006.  In his acceptance speech Pianka said the only hope for Earth is the death of 90 percent of its human inhabitants.  His remarks were greeted by what one observer called, "loud, vigorous, and enthusiastic applause" by people who presumably think they're part of the 10 percent. 

Pianka's remarks are consistent with a long history of environmentalist thinking that sees humans simply as consumers and polluters, thinking that leads many to insist that population control—including widespread abortion on demand—is integral to any environmental agenda.

• "Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape, " said John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.
• "[W]e have no problem in principle" said Geophilus, spokesman for Gaia Liberation Front," with the humans reducing their numbers by killing one another. It's an excellent way of making the humans extinct."
• And John Davis, editor of the journal Earth First! commented that "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."

Now logically, you can care for the environment without supporting population control. But for many environmentalists—including some evangelicals—climate control (and creation care in general) is inextricably linked to population control.  After all since people use up natural resources, release carbon dioxide, and otherwise pollute the environment, fewer people means less harm to the environment. So, to save the Earth, we have to reduce the human population.  And that thinking is creeping into the church.

For example, the foundational document of the Evangelical Environmental Network states that environmental "degradations are signs that we are pressing against the finite limits God has set for creation. With continued population growth, these degradations will become more severe."

Karen Coshof who produced the film The Great Warming—a film enthusiastically endorsed by evangelical leaders—said after the film's release, "Population is the underlying problem—the catalyst for the whole thing, but we didn't get into that in the film.  That is the underlying problem—too many people—all in competition for the same resource."

One evangelical leader told an audience at the World Bank, "We need to confront population control and we can—we're not Roman Catholics after all—but it's too hot to handle now." 

By contrast, a Christian view is that Earth was shaped by a benevolent Creator to be the habitat that sustains and enriches human life even as humans sustain and enrich the Earth through human creativity and human industry.

Is there sin that destroys the environment?  Of course.  There's sin in everything, but the way to control sin—environmental sin, sexual sin, economic sin—is not to reduce the population of sinners, but find ways to empower people, these bearers of God's image, to shape creation for the common good.

While there is nothing necessarily wrong with the "thoughtful procreation of children," the notion of some fixed "carrying capacity" of the entire Earth is highly speculative.  And realize that large portions of the Earth's surface are uninhabited, most inhabitants are not using the best technologies available, and there's no reason to assume that technological innovations have suddenly come to a halt.  The problem is not population. It's how to create just, peaceful, educated societies in which people can use and develop technologies to meet their needs.  And if the truth be told, population growth slows in more technologically advanced societies. So even if we wanted to slow population growth, the most humane way to do that would be to seek greater economic growth for the poor.

An ethical environmental policy must elevate human beings, lifting them from poverty and pollution.  Writing in the Winter 2006 Wilson Quarterly, Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who says he once held "left-wing Greenpeace views," wrote:

…if we are smart, our main contribution to the global environment 30 years from now will be to have helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, sickness, and malnutrition while giving them a chance to compete in our markets.  This will make a richer developing world, whose people will clean up the air and water, replant forests, and go green.  (p 40)

For Christians, stewardship of God's creation is non-negotiable.  Environmental issues deserve a well-informed and thoroughly Christian response that avoids the dangerous misanthropy of modern environmentalist ideology—one that, by contrast, promotes a culture of life, affirming that humans are valuable, worthy, and indespensible in God plan for this good Earth.