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From Serve God, Save the Planet:

Imagine meeting God and answering the question, "What did you do with your time on earth?" You are handed a time sheet that details the seconds and decades of this precious gift called life. What will you say you have done? In a world full of trees, mountains, oceans, birds, people in need and people to love, did you spend ten years watching the news, sitcoms, ball games and reality shows on a cathode-ray tube?

Or as I like to ask, "How much money do you pay the cable company so you can sit in your own living room?" More:

The three hundred million TV sets in the United State consume a lot of energy - five times more than is produced by all the geothermal, biomass, solar and wind sources in the United States. They take energy and materials to manufacture. They are difficult to get rid of and to recycle. They convince us to buy things we don’t need...Television separates us from our Creator while killing his creation.

-D

Watching the first couple shows of Season 2 this evening. The captain of the Steve Irwin puts all hands into danger by driving the ship - not rated for ice - into an ice flow. More danger as he plays chicken with Japanese whaling ships.

Pirates, heros or eco-terrorists? Entertainment or propaganda? Should green Christians approve?

 Since Moby Dick emblematizes God, Ahab's vengeful quest has a predictable terminus: The whale destroys Ahab and all his crew--except Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale. Pious readers sometimes construe the whale's triumph as an exemplum on the folly of sacrilege. For Melville, the whale's rough-and-tumble retaliation was another instance of God-bullying.

The 2009 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators is on the street. Here are some bits you won't find in the NY Times:

• Growing evidence that tropical rainforests may now be expanding faster than they are being cut down, though more data are needed to determine the nature and extent of reforestation trends.

• The world’s most severe environmental problems, as ranked by the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross Switzerland, are overwhelmingly problems of poverty in developing nations.

• Stratospheric ozone, the “good” kind of ozone—akin to “good” cholesterol in blood—appears to have reversed its long-term decline and is now increasing over the United States. The level of ozonedestroying chemical compounds in the atmosphere declined 12 percent from 1995 through 2006.

• Water quality monitoring efforts are picking up steam, though it will still be several more years before we have enough data to draw a clear picture of water quality trends on a national basis. However

— The U.S. Geological Survey sampling of drinking water drawn from surface waters in 17 areas around the continental United States found very low (nonhazardous) or no presence of 258 different man-made chemicals.

— Long-term monitoring of Lake Tahoe on the California–Nevada border has detected an improving trend in the clarity of the lake’s water over the last seven years, reversing decades of slow decline.

• The health of U.S. ocean fisheries has improved substantially over the last few years, according to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service’s “Fish Stock Sustainability Index.”

• Flat or declining global average temperatures in 2008 have ignited new controversy over climate change. The data show that 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, and there has been no discernible warming for the last decade, after two decades of steady warming between 1978 and 1998.

• Public opinion data on advertising and marketing suggest growing public weariness with “green” messages in general and messages on global warming in particular. In recent polls, 58 percent of Americans declined to identify themselves as environmentalists; 78 percent so identified themselves as recently as 1991.

And a few tables:

Russell Moore reviews Disney's Earth and has this great insight:

The Earth producers told Newsweek they tried to defang the most disturbing parts of the film, but, well, that's the way nature is, red in tooth and claw.

That's why I, as a Christian, am thrilled to see both sides of the dilemma for Disney. It is human to acknowledge both the beauty and the horror of the reigning natural order. It is is human to cringe in the face of its cruelty and to sit in openmouthed awe at its glory.

The Scriptures tell us both. The creation is frustrated since the primeval insurrection. Human rule has been overturned, supplanted with a rule by the craftiest of the beasts (Gen. 3:1). Since the dragon is himself a predator (indeed a murderer) he has no interest in exercising benevolent dominion over the beasts. Fallen humanity, reflecting its snake-god, has become animal-like, captive to instinct and appetites. We acknowledge the beasts but only to emulate them and to worship them (Rom. 1).

The Creator, therefore, subjects the creation to a "futility" under which the creation groans "the revealing of the sons of God" (Rom. 8:19). But even this is subjected "in hope" (Rom. 8:20). God gives humanity, after the flood, the flesh of the beasts for food, but he does so by simultaneously putting the "fear of you and the dread of you" (Gen. 9:2) within the instinctual center of the animals. This is to show that animals are not mere fodder for humans, to be harvested simply like grain. The fear of man in animals is to signify that the image-bearer is now, in some sense, a twisted interloper in this order. It also gives the animals, as my fellow Mississippian Jerry Clower might put it, "a sporting chance" in the arena of hunter and hunted.

The sense of sadness at the starvation of an elephant or the mutilation of an antelope is not simply the sentimentality of post-Bambi American culture, although, to be sure, some of it is. We're supposed to feel a certain kinship with the animals. That's why the bloody sacrifice of birds and bulls and lambs among our ancestors could correspond with what was to happen at the Place of the Skull.

Being reminded of the wildness of the wild kingdom can be a helpful reminder to followers of Jesus. This universe is not the way its intended to be. It is bloody, violent, and often chaotic. We do not, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, yet see all things under the feet of humanity. But, "we see him who was for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death" (Heb. 2:9).

Earth is G-rated. Earth is not.

AWR Hawkins takes on Hollywood greenwashing, both right and left.