Evangelical/Climate
Scientist Honored by TIME magazine
TIME, in its "100 Most Influential People" issue of May
5 and 12, raised up evangelical Christian and Texas Tech University
climatologist Katharine Hayhoe as a "pioneer."
The book by Hayhoe, "A Climate for Change: Global Warming
Facts for Faith-Based Decisions", co-authored by her husband, a
pastor, makes an effort to correct the disinformation (misguided views) on
climate science some religious people have.
She advocates a transition to cleaner renewable energy sources.
"Because climate change disproportionately affects the poor
and vulnerable, the very people Christians are called to care for and
love," she has said, responding to "climate change is not
inconsistent with Christian values."
"When I look at the information we get from the planet,"
she has said, "I look at it as God's creation...telling us that it is
running a fever." And as her husband might add, thermometers are
neither Republican nor Democrat.
Hayhoe is also featured in the recently-released series
"Years of Living Dangerously," on the Showtime network.
"It's hard to be a good steward of the planet if you don't
accept the hard science behind what's harming it, and it can be just as hard to
take action to protect our world if you don't love it as the rare gift it
is. For many people that implies a creator," said TIME profiler and
Showtime interviewer of Hayhoe, Don Cheadle.
"It's Our World: World Environment Day, June 5"
The World Environment Day is the principal way that the United
Nations uses yearly to encourage worldwide awareness and action for the
environment.
This year the theme for the June 5th event is "Raise Your
Voice, Not the Sea Level" in an effort to mark the survival threat of
rising sea levels, due to climate change, to Small Island Developing States
(SIDS).
The
web site http://www.unep.org/wed provides A-Z steps one can take; related links;
blogs; articles; supporters and messages; activities; regional features; youth
voices; multi-media (posters, banners, videos, music, podcasts, logos); past
yearly themes, etc.
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Thanks for the thoughts and info. I didn't know of June 5th day. One way I've started to keep learning and gleaning things for my on-going work is to write down/capture in writing some significant pieces on earth-keeping that have caught my eye in the previous week. I've got to figure a good way to file/keep these references and resources for on-going work.....but this way they are at least captured by week. I thought I'd share one from this past week. See below. See blog at greengracepostings.blogspot.com for more.
ReplyDelete“A goal of the collaboration between Dow and the Nature Conservancy is to create software that helps a company assess its natural resources so that they can be compared with man-made assets. What is a swarm of wild bees worth? One way to answer this question is to determine the coast of pollinating a crop with managed honeybees. To assess the value of a clean river to a soda bottler, you could tabulate the price of purifying a gallon of polluted water. The assumption is that if you want companies to care about nature you must put a price tag on it. Otherwise, as one Nature Conservancy economist told me, “it implicitly gets a value of zero.” The idea is not new: for two decades New York City has been buying up land in its watershed or paying property owner to stop polluting, because the cost is lower than building the purification plants that it would otherwise need. But the Dow collaboration extends this principle much further. They key piece of software, still under development is the Ecosystem Services Identification and Inventory program, which will make it easy for engineers – ideally, in the field, with a tablet – to enter data about a company’s natural resources. The Nature Conservancy plans to make the software publicly available.”
Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014.