Serve God, Save the Planet (Part II)

My lovely wife recently finished this book and wrote out her resulting thoughts, and this reminded me that I never wrote the Part II of my review that would logically follow my Part I (uh, duh). So, in contrast to Part I which was mostly transcribed statistics, I’m going to throw out some more intangible thoughts that I’ve been rolling around as a result of this book lately.

Just to clarify, I never want to come across as claiming to be an expert in these matters. That’s certainly not the case (which is a notion that you should feel comfortable applying to pretty much anything I write about on this blog!:-). While I often enjoy getting into the science and tedious details of some of these complicated issues, I’m very certain that I’m only getting a glimpse of the larger realities, and thus I feel most comfortable simply talking about these matters from my perspective as a regular guy with a family in America who’s trying to pursue Jesus.

And it’s at this level of interaction where the author, J. Matthew Sleeth, connected with me. I don’t think everything he writes in this book is gold-plated truth or wisdom. But the framework that he proposes ideas within is what resonated with me. Instead of touting from a soapbox about how the sky is falling and that there’s a toasty place in hell for all of us who are contributing to the problems, Sleeth speaks plainly to our humanity... to the systemic mindsets that are manifested in problems of our physical world. Let me give you an example:

“The content mind is one of the greatest obstacles to a rich spiritual life. The content mind is a proud mind. It has nothing to learn; it has an answer to everything and no more questions to ask” (62).

The motivation of the book is not to persuade readers to be “treehuggers.” Rather, Sleeth is challenging all of us to strive for a proper sense-of-self... to view our actions within a global reality... to live radically and counter-culturally because this is what Jesus incited his followers to do. And when this is done, it just may end up looking treehugger-y... and it can be transforming & divinely beautiful.

While I’ve read some reviews from other folks who felt that Sleeth comes across as judgmental and preachy, I didn’t get that sense. While he does speak about some very specific lifestyle issues (e.g., electricity use, parenting, food, Sabbath observance, consumerism, etc.), I never perceived his statements as black-and-white declarations. I just took them as really challenging observations/propositions on his part. The fact that I felt stung a few times points only to my personal conviction, not a superiority complex of Sleeth. And that’s because, above all, he speaks to the condition of our hearts:

“It is not our possessions or our homes that will keep us out of heaven, but our unwillingness to set them aside in service of the Lord” (142).

So, yes, I highly recommend the book because it really stirs up some motivation to actually make some changes in my lifestyle (rather than just stirring up a bunch of head-nods and thoughtful “hmmms…”)

Hmmm.

Enough on that.

(I was now going to transition to talking about a film I recently viewed, but this is long enough... so come back in a couple days and I’ll post my film thoughts then. Thanks for reading!)

*Photo Credit: Forestgladesiwander

Serve God, Save the Planet (Part I)

Tara recently got me reading a book that we picked up for her birthday titled, Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth, MD. You may recall back in this post where I began describing some of our journey towards intentionally respecting the earth that God so amazingly created. Seeing that today is Blog Action Day, I thought I'd pass on some ecological/lifestyle stats from Sleeth's book that jumped out at me. I've decided not to comment on them much at this point because they paint a fascinating & jolting picture all in their own right:

• Rate of forest destruction worldwide = 1 acre per second


• Number of species going extinct = more than 100 per day


• The U.S. uses more natural resources than any country in history

• In the next ten years, 20 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer (1 out of every 15)

• Currently, more than 700 man-made toxins can be found in human tissues

• If every household changed its five most used light bulbs to compact fluorescents, the country could take 21 coal-fired power plants off-line tomorrow
• "This would keep one trillion pounds of poisonous gases and soot out of the air we breathe and would have the same beneficial impact as taking eight million cars off the road" (Sleeth 66).
  

• Approximately 64,000 Americans die annually as a result of soot in the air

• One power plant in Massachusetts was alone found to cause 1,200 ER visits, 3,000 asthma attacks, 110 deaths annually

• The average American watches 1,700 hours of television annually
• The average school-age child attends 900 hours of classes a year

• By the time a typical American reaches age 71, they will have spent a solid 10 waking years in front of a TV

• There are 300 million television sets in America, which consume five times more energy than is produced by all the geothermal, biomass, solar, & wind sources in the U.S. combined

• Ten times more energy, water, & grain is needed to produce a pound of beef or pork than to produce a pound of milk or cheese

• The loss of rain forests in South America means that the clouds they once made no longer blow across the Atlantic to drop their water on Africa
• As a result the Sahara grows by thousands of acres per year

• Nearly a billion people live in chronic hunger

• Every 10 days, a quarter of a million people die from starvation (25,000 every day)

• Haiti's forests have been cut down and shipped to the U.S. As a result, Haiti has lost 90% of its topsoil

• In America, junk mail fills 340,000 garbage trucks per year all bound for landfills
• 4 out of 5 pieces of junk mail aren't recycled

• About 70% of U.S. electricity is generated by fossil fuels, 20% nuclear, 9% hydropower
• Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and methane combine for the remaining 1%
• We have been developing these alternative sources for three decades

This is a lot to take in at once, but my goal in relaying this info is to drive at a major theme: an element of interconnectedness defines these statistics. Nearly ALL of us in America play a role in the problems, and ALL of us have the option sitting right in front of us to play a role in the solutions...


*Note: While I haven't taken the time to research and provide cited references, I have a reasonably high degree of confidence in validity of each of the above statistics. Of course, I'm completely willing to be persuaded otherwise if contradictory data is out there... but I haven't seen any.