Guest Column: Tiny Forests

Ethics

According to Cara Buckley with The New York Times, a growing number of “tiny forests” are appearing across urban areas in the U.S.  

In addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, reducing water runoff, and providing homes for wildlife, “[T]iny forests can help lower temperatures in places where pavement, buildings and concrete surfaces absorb and retain heat from the sun.”  

The concept was pioneered by Japanese ecologist Akira Miyawaki and suggests that people are the best stewards of nature. What the world needs is not some return to vast, unspoiled “wilderness” by massively reducing the human population, as so many suggest. Instead, we need more of this: creating space for people to use their ingenuity, resources, and innovation to increase creation’s fruitfulness. 

Our screens and concrete jungles disconnect us from God’s creation, while bad ideas about “nature” and the environment treat humans as its biggest problem. But humans were created to care for the rest of creation. In fact, only humans can.

Copyright 2023 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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Human Extinction?

Ethics, ,
John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview

In a recent essay, Oxford Professor Roger Crisp toyed with the idea that human extinction may not be a bad thing after all. With so much suffering on Earth, he argues, if NASA were to locate a massive asteroid hurtling towards our planet, we would be justified in letting it obliterate us.  

“I am not claiming that extinction would be good;” Crisp clarified, “only that, since it might be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date.”  

This is an Oxford philosopher of ethics, but he’s wrestling with an idea that long ago left the ivory tower.  

 Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute put it this way: “With our supposedly best minds suggesting that human extinction could be desirable, is it any wonder that so many of our young people seem to be despairing?”  

When God is taken out of the moral picture, reason evaporates, as does the rest of our moral logic. Someone tell Bruce Willis and the rest of his team from Armageddon, the mission is off.

Copyright 2022 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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