Chuck Currie: Poor Stewardship: Why the West is Burning
The American West is on fire this summer, literally. While wild fires are a normal occurrence in nature, there is no doubt that the fires being fought today (costing lives and resources) are bigger and more dangerous because of climate change.
For people of faith, this is a crisis that calls into question our obligation to be good stewards of God's creation.
Climate change deniers will question whether or not climate change is to blame for this season's wild fires. The Washington Times said in an recent editorial that while it is "tempting for the environmental extremists" to blame explosive wild fires on climate change, the real culprit is "human carelessness" by those who leave "campfires unattended, careless burning of debris and discarded cigarette butts."
There is some truth here. Human activity can start and make fire - which is why Oregon has this summer banned all campfires.
Still, Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told Congress what the real problem was in testimony delivered in 2011, as reported by The New York Times:
"Throughout the country, we're seeing longer fire seasons, and we're seeing snowpacks that, on average, are disappearing a little earlier every spring," he said, as well as devastating droughts. As a result, fire seasons have lengthened by more than 30 days, on average.
"Our scientists believe this is due to a change in climate," said Tidwell.
More recent studies back Tidwell's assertion:
The length of wildfire seasons across the globe and the burnable areas of Earth's surface have drastically increased in the past three decades due to climate change, according to a groundbreaking new study supported by years of research from the U.S. Forest Service's Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory.
In a paper published Tuesday in the international journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers concluded that from 1979 to 2013, fire weather seasons have lengthened across 18.39 million square miles of Earth's vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7 percent increase in the global average fire season length. The global burnable area affected by long fire seasons has doubled in that time, and from 1996 until 2013 there has been a 53.4 percent increase in the frequency of long fire seasons.
Pope Francis is just the latest religious leader to call on humanity to accept responsibility for climate change:
A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.
Mainline Christians and evangelical Christians have argued for the need to fight climate change. So have Jews and Muslims.
President Obama has put forth a strong proposal to fight climate change but in direct opposition to science-based proposals to combat climate change are the deniers who argue the sun is just getting warmer or that warming isn't happening at all. We face a wall of denial that seems as difficult to penetrate as the denial of drug addicts who swear they do not have a problem while sticking a needle into their arm. Instead of heroin their drug of choice is coal, or the money that lines the pockets of their Super PACS as they run for office.
Most Americans believe in climate change, according to Pew Research, but see it as a low priority. This leaves room for governments not to act when it is critical that we take steps now.
"We have interpreted the 'dominion' granted to humankind as giving us raw power to exploit and abuse the rest of creation, rather than as requiring mature responsibility of us to show respect and loving care for creation," wrote The Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr. in his book Whose Gospel? "Like rebellious adolescents, we have been inclined to see the gifts of God as ours to use as we choose."
As a United Church of Christ minister, professor, and as a father, I grieve for the world the next generation will inherit. We are running out of time to make a difference.
Follow Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie on Twitter:www.twitter.com/RevChuckCurrie