From Dean Ohlman on April 21, 2011

Below are some significant thoughts for followers of Christ to consider on Earth Day (Friday, April 22, 2011).

Jesus Christ

Sermon on the Mount (1st century)

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. (Matthew 6:19-20, 24)

Alexis deToqueville

Democracy in America (1840)

The greater part of the men who constitute [democratic] nations are extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical gratification. As they are always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing it. To minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. . . .

I dread, and I confess it, lest they should at last so entirely give way to a cowardly love of present enjoyment, as to lose sight of the interests of their future selves and of those of their descendants; and to prefer to glide along the easy current of life, rather than to make, when it is necessary, a strong and sudden effort to a higher purpose.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2)

T. S. Eliot

The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of soil erosion—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale. . . , for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. . . .

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live on this planet

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

From Under the Rubble (1981)

After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity—here is the true Christian definition of freedom: Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others! Once understood and adopted, this principle diverts us—as individuals, in all forms of human associations, societies, and nations—from outward to inward development, thereby giving us greater spiritual depth. The turn toward inward development, the triumph of inwardness over outwardness, if it ever happens, will be a great turning point in the history of mankind. . . .

The concept of unlimited freedom is closely connected in its origin with the concept of “infinite progress,” which we now recognize as false. Progress in this sense is impossible on our earth with its limited surface area and resources. We shall in any case inevitably have to stop jostling each other and show self restraint: with the population rapidly soaring, . . . earth herself will shortly force us to do so. It would be spiritually so much more valuable, and psychologically so much easier, to adopt the principle of self-limitation—and to achieve it through prudent self-restriction.

Francis Schaeffer

Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology (1970)

The hippies are right in their desire to be close to nature, even walking in bare feet in order to feel it. But they have no sufficient philosophy, so it drifts into pantheism and soon becomes ugly. But Christians, who should understand the creation principle, have a reason for respecting nature, and when they do, it results in benefits to man.

Let us be clear: it is not just a pragmatic attitude; there is a basis for it. We treat it with respect because God made it. When an orthodox, evangelical Christian mistreats or is insensible to nature, at that point he is more wrong than the hippie who has no real basis for his feeling for nature and yet senses that man and nature should have a relationship beyond that of spoiler and spoiled. You may, or may not, want to walk barefoot to feel close to nature, but as a Christian what relationship have you thought of and practiced toward nature as your fellow creature, over the last ten years?