The environmental-evangelical movement

For Eco-Evangelicals, Questions About the Future | John E. Senior and John Wihbey | Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media | February 3, 2009

This article came out a while ago, but it's a topic I find really interesting. In many ways, it makes me hopeful that more and more people, especially young folks, are aware of the environmental consequences of our actions. The thing that really struck me was this part:

• "Some evangelicals she [Candis Callison, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] has studied, for example, are motivated by concerns that the world’s poor likely would be dramatically affected by global warming. So it’s the biblical “moral call” to help the dispossessed, Callison said, that remains important."

Whenever people ask me if I think that we're doomed because of climate change, my answer is similar to one that I've heard my adviser give. Wealthy countries and wealthy people in general will probably find ways to adapt or escape from high risk areas. It's the poorer countries and poorer people who will suffer the most from the effects of climate change because they don't have the resources or power to relocate or bioengineer their way out. Well, if this idea motivates people one wouldn't normally expect to do something about climate change, I'm all for spreading the message.