According to the Anglican Journal, we haven’t been doing enough to look after the insect population – or, as I expect it will soon be called, the Insect Community.
Since there 900,000 varieties of insect representing 80 percent of the world’s species and around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual insects currently roaming the planet, it seems to me that they are managing quite well without our help.
In fact, there are too many insects by far; insectophobia be damned, it’s time stock up on Raid and indulge in a little insect cleansing.
The Anglican Communion’s fifth mark of mission urges us to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth and all its forms. This is an issue that greatly concerns Dr. Stephen Scharper, an associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Environment, department of the study of religion and department of anthropology.
In his promotion of planetary stewardship, the Connecticut-born expert in ecological theology often goes back to U.S. marine biologist Rachel Carson and her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring. “This was a turning point in the environmental movement,” he says. Carson challenged the modern world’s domineering approach to nature and humankind’s need to control everything in it, especially insects, with increasingly potent chemicals.
‘This was a question of worldview as much as a question of science and data,” says Scharper. “What Carson helped people see was that this world view was at odds with the growing ecological understanding of integration and webs of relationships…” In other words, we must respect even with the creepers and crawlers of the earth.
[…]
Scharper, however, sees Carson’s wakeup call as an invitation to the Christian imagination and community to embrace this worldview of integration with creation and a refusal to adopt a view of control and capitalistic exploitation. “The invitation is to reflect on a larger Christian worldview that embraces creation in a radical relationship,” he says.
Live with them! They were here before humans, and they will be here long after us.
Cockroaches can survive nuclear blasts better than humans.
Who is responsible for all the malaria deaths in Africa? The one’s we are all being asked to supply mosquito nets to combat? Joni Mitchell, of course, asking to ban DDT, in her song, Big Yellow Taxi. I have read that the dangers of DDT were completely overstated, and if it were allowed to be used, the infestations that cause malaria would be quite under control. Silent Spring caused the same kind of apocalyptic panic among the gullible that “global warming” (or climate change, seeing as how the earth is not really warming as they say it is) is causing today.
And just think how many malaria mosquito nets can be supplied to those suffering people for every bird-eating, tax-subsidised wind turbine the greenies force us to build. About 500,000 malaria nets EACH.
All because wind trubines are white, tall, slender and spin gracefully. In other words, they are pretty, like a ballerina..
Greenie people are gross.
From Wikipedia:
“Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources.”
From Dictionary.com:
“The position and duties of a steward, a person who acts as the surrogate of another or others, especially by managing property, financial affairs, an estate, etc.”
So why is it that some people seem to be convinced that stewardship is the same as environmentalism? Managing of resources includes making use of resources for the benefit of people. It does not mean “protecting” the environmnet to the point of hurting people, and certainly does not mean trying to pretend that we do not exist by “minimizing our carbon footprint”.