We spent the Thanksgiving weekend in Montana with my mother; it was the first time that I had been "home" for Thanksgiving in over twenty years. On Saturday, we found a new place to hike right on the edge of Billings: Four Dances Natural Area, administered by the BLM. It preserves 765 acres (310 ha) …
Category: Environment
For the Beauty of the Earth
Last year I ran a series of posts with quotes from For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care by Steven Bouma-Prediger. This book develops a Biblical view of creation care that is neither Earth-centered nor man-centered, but God-centered. Because I have new readers of The GeoChristian, I periodically recycle previous …
Need vs. greed
The world has enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed. -- Mahatma Gandhi Grace and Peace
The future ice age
Irregardless of what we do to the planet now, the long-term climate prospect for sometime a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of years in the future is cold: Earth may face freeze worse than Ice Age. This is nothing new to geologists, recognizing that Earth is presently in a short interglacial period …
Compassionate environmentalism vs. plunder the Earth
This item was originally posted in November 2007. I have added it to my blog recycling program. Because I have new readers of The GeoChristian, I will occasionally go back and re-use some of my favorite blog entries. There is a growing awareness among Evangelicals of the importance of environmental issues. There are good Biblical arguments for …
Continue reading Compassionate environmentalism vs. plunder the Earth
Good conservative quotes on the environment
I've been involved in a discussion over at Cranach about the battle for the soul of the conservative movement: Conservative civil war. I threw in a few quotes from noted conservatives to point out that there is nothing conservative about allowing pollution and degradation of the Earth. "While I am a great believer in the …
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Wendell Berry
Rod Dreher is author of the Crunchy Con (granola conservatism) blog and an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News, and he wrote in the name of Wendell Berry on his ballot for president of the United States. A week before, he wrote a column about Wendell Berry in his newspaper: Wendell Berry's Time is …
The Green Bible
The Green Bible from HarperOne. NRSV. Green letter edition. Soy-based inks on recycled paper. $19.77 on Amazon.com. Amazon's description: "The Green Bible will equip and encourage you to see God's vision for creation and help you engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. This first Bible of its kind includes inspirational essays from …
Nature on canvas
Before there was color landscape photography, there was painting. One of the great landscape artists was Albert Bierstadt, whose Valley of the Yosemite is currently featured on a 42-cent stamp: The Art Renewal Center advertises itself as the internet's largest online art museum, and has hundreds of high-resolution Bierstadt paintings (as well as thousands of …
The Environmental Case for John McCain
The attacks against John McCain by some environmental groups (such as the Sierra Club) are unfair. McCain has a well-integrated energy and environmental policy, that reflects his years of environmental leadership, not only in the Republican Party, but in the senate as a whole. From Republicans for Environmental Protection: The Environmental Case for John McCain …
Ice-free Arctic
I was watching CNN today (not something I normally do; I was standing in a line at the post office) and the story was about record melting of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The prediction was that the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer within five years. And I was reading Geology.com News …
Clean coal
The phrase "clean coal" came up in all three presidential debates. So what is clean coal? The Christian Science Monitor has a brief article describing the concept. The concern now, of course, isn't just that burning coal releases acid-rain causing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, or that burning coal is a major source of mercury …
More Pickens
Pickens plan video -- a plan to use natural gas for transportation, wind power for electricity generation, and to reduce the U.S. expenditures for imported petroleum by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. HT: Geology News Grace and Peace
Granite tables and countertops
McDonalds restaurants in Romania are superior to McDonalds in the U.S.A. The food is better, the service is better, they ask which Happy Meal toy your child wants, and... the tables are made out of beautiful SOLID GRANITE! If it weren't for "Super Size Me," these tables would be enough to make any geologist eat …
Green elephants
In my previous post, I explained that I was born a Republican. If you know me at all, you know that I am also a strong advocate for the environment. I like clean air, clean water, biodiversity, sustainability, alternative energy sources, simple life styles, and wild places. Is "environmentalist Republican" an oxymoron? By no means! …
Good oak
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, …
Natural gas-powered cars
Geology News recently pointed to two articles about using natural gas (CNG -- compressed natural gas) to power cars: Toyota Looks to Embrace Natural-Gas Hybrid Cars Chesapeake Energy Corporation Unveils National Campaign to Encourage Switch From Foreign Oil to American Natural Gas in U.S. Transportation Sector -- From Chesapeake Energy, includes a video Some advantages …
Out with mpg?
In Europe, gas mileage is expressed in liters per 100 km. Growing up with miles per gallon (mpg), this was a double assault on my abilities to convert units, and it never made sense to me. RealClimate has a post on the case for going to the same concept in the United States: The mpg …
Just when I said something nice about PETA…
Last week I said something nice about PETA: Sometimes PETA is right. But now they're back to wackiness, as reported in Yahoo news:Mama's milk ice cream cone, anyone? The PETA proposal came in a letter to the makers of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, suggesting that they use human milk, rather than cow's milk, in …
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Futurology
I always find books and articles about the future to be fascinating. Here are some quotes from Futurologist Richard Watson's 2050 vision: goodbye Belgium, hello brain transplants in the Telegraph. [T]he environment will remain vitally important, but climate change won't be the only game in town - the approach of peak oil, peak coal, peak …
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