June 2022 Creation Corner Column
The Rights of Nature Movement
"Learn to Love Our Planet the Way God Does" is a description of a new book, A Christian's Guide to Planet Earth: Why It Matters and How To Care For It, by Betsy Painter.
God has a covenant with his creation; what is our covenant with God's creation? The Green Bible (2008) helps us understand the Bible's powerful message for the earth, and we can look to the secular rights of nature movement to discern how we might try to express our responsibility, as God's agents, to care for the integrity of God's creation.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is one example of such an effort. Founded by Thomas Linzey (full disclosure, my acquaintance with him dates to the 1990s), a recent article by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker of April 18, 2022, "Testing the Waters: Should the natural world have rights?" is an interesting overview of CELDF's history and attempts to fulfill its mission.
Also noted therein is a law review article and book profiling the efforts of Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing?---Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects".
Worth mentioning too is the recent special issue on the environment published by The Progressive magazine of April/May 2022, wherein one finds the "Vox Populist" column by Jim Hightower, "Protecting the Rights of Nature", that surveys worldwide enactment of enforceable Rights of Nature provisions.
As Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) notes in his June 2022 "Deep Economy" column article, "The Greatest Dereliction of Duty", in Sojourners magazine, we've "...long known that we needed to do something about climate change---after all, the Arctic is melting, which seems like the kind of sign that doesn't require much interpretation."
Further, as the McKibben article "pull-quote" emphasizes, "We must take evil seriously when it arises, not putting it off in the hope that someone else will take it on."
One example of climate change deniers and doubters is profiled in a new PBS Frontline docuseries, "The Power of Big Oil".
Finally, as the motivating description of reasons for reading the new book by Martin Puchner, Literature for a Changing Planet, puts it: "Why we must learn to tell new new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe."
That sentence expresses, in my estimation, what the purpose of Lutherans Restoring Creation is.
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