One of the most important verses in the Bible for our understanding of humanity’s role on the earth is Genesis 1:28: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

Like most words in most languages, the Hebrew word there translated “earth,” ’erets, has a variety of meanings, depending on its context. Brown, Driver, and Briggs’s Hebrew Lexicon, a standard in the field, lists these: (1) the whole earth, i.e., the planet; (2) the earth as opposite to the heaven or sky, i.e., the planet’s surface, whether land or ocean; (3) a land, as in a country, territory, district, or region; (4) a piece of ground; (5) ground, that is, the surface of ground, soil; (6) some distance; (7) in late Hebrew, lands as countries.

The context of Genesis 1:28—namely, verses 1–27—strongly suggests that earth here means the whole earth, the planet, whether land or water or atmosphere.

If that’s so, then the command to “subdue it,” that is, to subdue the earth, is comprehensive. God mandates that humanity is to subdue the whole planet and to rule (have dominion) over everything living in it—whether in the seas, in the air, or on the land.

Most Christians are pretty comfortable with the idea that we should subdue the land on which we live. They don’t object to farming or industry. Most also are comfortable with subduing at least some of the planet’s water—streams, rivers, and lakes—by building dams, irrigation systems, water purification systems, etc. They also don’t seem to object to the idea of subduing oceans, though that doesn’t seem to come to mind very much.

But many become quite uncomfortable with the idea that humanity should subdue the atmosphere itself. Indeed, one of the more common objections some make to the idea of manmade global warming is the incredulous question, “Do you really think we have the capacity to control the weather (or the climate)? Isn’t that arrogant?”

Yet go back far enough in history, and the idea that we could control much land to make it suitable for farming, or much water flow for irrigation or electricity generation, also would have seemed arrogant to many people. Yet today those are common activities.

These thoughts arose as I read “The right dose of geoengineering could reduce climate change risks,” in the March 19, 2020, Science Daily. The article’s summary says, “Injecting the right dose of sulphur dioxide into Earth’s upper atmosphere to thicken the layer of light reflecting aerosol particles artificially could reduce the effects of climate change overall, exacerbating change in only a small fraction of places, according to new research.”

Now, I don’t happen to think that human-induced climate change needs to be reduced. Indeed, I think there is considerable risk in whatever steps we might take to reduce warming or induce cooling. That’s because we never know when various natural cycles will bring on a new period of cooling, and cooling is far more dangerous than warming.

But I do think that if we are going to try to reduce warming, this method might be far preferable to drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels—which provide over 80 percent of the world’s primary energy that is so crucial to human wellbeing. Why? Because that would rob people all over the world of the abundant, affordable, reliable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.

What do you think?

Featured photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash.