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Sometimes We Need to be Forced to do the Right Thing

So, I had to mention the elephant in the room. Corona virus. It's actually being talked about a lot, so not really the elephant in the room, but anyway.

One good thing that might come out of this enforced isolation, house-arrest, and stay-cation madness we're going through (not to mention the lack of loo roll), is that we are being forced how to teach online, work from home, and stay away from planes and airports. When we're over the hump of corona virus and our governments let us travel again, I wonder if we'll have learnt our lesson? We're in a global ecological crisis. It's no good just planting more trees to offset carbon emissions. We need to stop flying, and stop travelling long distances by train/car too. The more we can work out how to do things online, the better, as far as I can see. It's hard. It means extra work, and learning how to use all kinds of new computer programs, but in the end it might just pay off.

In Greta Thunberg's language, we need to stop behaving like children and learn to act like grown-ups.

It's probably too late for the glaciers and low-lying islands on the Pacific, but let's do all we can to minimise carbon emissions.

Below this picture (which I got from Pixabay, no attribution required), is a blog I wrote previously on creation care, focusing on the Aral Sea disaster...


Creation Care

You may have heard of the Aral sea disaster. This was caused by the Soviet scientists, who ran a canal from the Amu Derya, which is one of two rivers feeding the Aral sea. This canal, the Karakum canal, was routed into Turkmenistan so they could do cotton farming. It has caused all kinds of environmental issues in both Karakalpakstan (which is part of Uzbekistan), and Turkmenistan. In Karakalpakstan the water is very salty. Some workers have used reverse osmosis filters to take the salt out of the water, but these are very expensive. Local people just boil the water, which compounds the issue, as it kills bacteria, but the salt content if anything increases, as does the proportion of any other impurities. Water filters, likewise, fail to take out the salt, as it is in solution. The other issue is that the ground water is full of pesticides.

We believe that the Bible teaches that humans were given authority over and care over creation (see Genesis 1-2). This means that we are responsible for these kind of environmental issues. The fact that there will be a future 'new creation' should not cause us to give up on these issues, as this new creation might be a renewed old creation, rather than something completely different (no pun intended).


Pic from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
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