Many Christian environmentalists fail to fully appreciate how the Bible connects environmental degradation not to how many trees we cut down or to over population but to how we treat our neighbors (Jer 12:4; 23:10; Hos 4:3). In other words, while contemporary Christian environmentalists focus on the MPG of the car you are driving or whether you are avoiding beef, a Biblical environmentalist would ask, “How are you treating your neighbor?”. So is the Biblical perspective just the result of people who had an over-active imagination about the connection between personal moral choices and the environment? Or could there be a relationship between the moral life and environmental impacts?

Interestingly, research done by Yu and Liu (E. Yu and J. Liu. 2007. Environmental Impacts of Divorce. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(51):20629-20634) provides some evidence that indeed there could be a connection. They observed that the environmental decline around a national park was tied to the divorce rate not the population rate. It appears that divorce is not only a major moral tragedy but an environmental one as well. Divorce leads to greater consumption of resources because now instead of two people living in one building and sharing items, we now have two people living in two buildings each with their own set of items, thereby almost doubling their environmental footprint. How much could America save if divorce didn’t exist? Well, one estimate noted that the U.S. would have saved 7 billion dollars in electricity and almost 4 billion dollars in water in 2005 alone (Conservation Magazine 9:1 p.37).

Perhaps if people just followed the commands of Scripture our environment would be better off not just socially but environmentally as well.