Trying to Save the Planet
from the People Who Are Trying to Save the Planet

Two scenes from my toddlerhood in Calcutta, India, have flashed in my mind thousands of times over the last 60-plus years. The first was of a beautiful tree with a red-flowered vine hanging from its branches. The second was of the emaciated bodies of people who had died overnight of starvation and disease.

I saw the tree and its vine as my aia, or nurse, led me by the hand through the courtyard of the building housing my family’s apartment while my father worked with the U.S. State Department. I stepped over the bodies as she led me block after block to the home of an Indian family who cared for me through the day while my mother was paralyzed for six months. Ever since I became a Christian in middle school, the first image has reminded me of the beauties of God’s creation. The second, of the horrors of poverty.

Caring for the Planet & the World’s Poor

After spending much of the first two decades of my Christian life in personal evangelism and apologetics, I found myself led into work that addresses both creation stewardship and the conquest of poverty, along with the gospel.

My two books, Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity (1988) and Prospects for Growth: a Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (1990), opened doors for me, initially, to speak at churches and conferences on poverty and the environment, and later, to teach, first at Covenant College and then at Knox Theological Seminary.

In 1999, some thirty scholars and I worked together to produce “The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship,” issued the next year with over 1,500 endorsements from religious leaders, scientists, and economists, and later signed by many thousands. Then, in 2005, I founded the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Over the years, Cornwall Alliance scholars have developed ideas about environmental protection and about how mainstream environmentalism actually posses a significant threat to the world’s poor, despite environmentalists’ frequent warnings that environmental abuse harms the poor more than anyone else.

Cornwall’s thinking on environmental protection rests on the idea that the bottom-line measurement of environmental quality is human health and well-being, coupled with the understanding that a clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good and that wealthier people can afford more costly goods than poorer people can. (Hence, one looks for the dirtiest parts of a city in the poorer areas—not because the poor don’t care about cleanliness, safety, and beauty, but because they can’t afford them as much as the rich.) The number-one aim of environmental protection, then, should be human thriving, though this doesn’t mean jettisoning or even ignoring the health and well-being of the rest of creation. Those matters, too, can and should be pursued.

Another idea the Cornwall Alliance weaves into environmental protection is the economic reality that life is full of tradeoffs. Hence, for example the proper answer to the questions, “How clean is clean enough?” or “How safe is safe enough?” or “How beautiful is beautiful enough?” is not “As clean or as safe or as beautiful as possible,” but “As clean, safe, or beautiful as we can make it before the cost of making it cleaner, safer, or more beautiful exceeds the value of the added cleanliness, safety, or beauty.” (If you doubt this, just ask yourself: Why don’t you spend all your time sanitizing your house? Clearly, because the cost would exceed the benefits. Could it be cleaner? Yes. Should it be? Not if making it so costs more than the benefits.)

It’s not that no other living things matter, but that human beings—alone created in the image of God—are the most important, and that their God-given vocation to subdue and rule nature (Genesis 1:28) is going to be practiced one way or the other, for good or for ill. We should want to practice that rule—what the Bible calls dominion—for good, not ill.

Granted that a clean, healthful, and beautiful environment is a costly good, and that wealthier people can afford it more than poorer people, it becomes clear that economic development—lifting not just isolated individuals or groups but whole societies out of poverty and into prosperity—is essential to environmental protection. This principle finds confirmation in environmental transition, or what environmentalists call the “environmental Kuznets curve.”

The Kuznets curve describes the phenomenon that although pollution emissions rise during early industrialization, the life-enhancing effects of industrialization outweigh the risks, as demonstrated by rising life expectancy. And then, as societies reach various levels of prosperity, they begin to apply more of their wealth to reducing emissions. Consequently, emissions rise early in industrialization then peak (at different levels for different pollutants and in light of changing technologies and differing political/social orders), and finally decline, resulting in a less polluted environment than before industrialization.

None of this is automatic, of course, and the environmental transition happens much more surely in some societies than in others—and in some, it might never happen because of poor governance structures, as the sad environmental history of socialist and communist nations demonstrates, something I discuss in my booklet Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?

Well-Meaning but Harmful Policies

Unfortunately, much of the environmental movement promotes—in the name of protecting nature—policies that harm the world’s poorest. How? Generally, by failing to prioritize human life over other life, by failing to recognize that prosperity promotes environmental quality, and by failing to recognize that there are tradeoffs such that a single-minded pursuit of pollution emission reduction can depress the production of food, clothing, shelter, and other goods necessary for human thriving.

Examples could be multiplied, but one is particularly apropos today: when fears of human-induced climate change, deemed to be an “existential threat,” lead many to insist on replacing hydrocarbon energy (coal, oil, and natural gas) with “carbon-free” energy sources like wind and solar. Ignore for now the fact that wind and solar are far from “carbon-free” sources, since hydrocarbons are indispensable for their production and for back-up when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Focus instead simply on the fact that after accounting for government subsidies and tax breaks, their cost to end-users is much higher than that of hydrocarbons. This harms the poor, by depriving them of abundant, affordable, and reliable energy, which is indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty.

The Religion Factor

All of this points to the importance of sociopolitical factors to environmental protection as well as economic development. And fundamental to that is religion, particularly, as sociologist Christopher Dawson and Indian Christian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi have demonstrated, the Biblical/Christian social order. To put it simply, people’s understanding and use of God’s world will conform to His intentions more or less relative to their knowledge of Him and His self-revelation through creation (natural revelation) and, especially, Scripture (special revelation).

This is why the gospel of Christ, by which sinful men can be reconciled to the holy God through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross, is central to both environmental stewardship and economic development. This is the core thought of the Cornwall Alliance.

The Cornwall Alliance, then, is a network of Evangelical Christian scholars dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about three concepts together:

Biblical earth stewardship—or what the Cornwall Alliance, drawing on Genesis 1:28, calls “godly dominion”: enhancing the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors (addressing the Dominion Mandate and the Two Great Commandments).

Economic development for the world’s poor—through these indispensable conditions: private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, the rule of law, and the availability and use of reliable, affordable, and abundant energy.

The gospel of Jesus Christ—that sinners can be reconciled to God by faith in Christ’s sacrifice for their sins—together with the worldview, theology, and ethics that come with it.

A briefer way to put it is that we at the Cornwall Alliance are “trying to save the planet from the people who are saving the planet!” That’s because so many environmental organizations and leaders construct their ideas on an unbiblical worldview, using faulty science and economics, and so promote policies that are of little benefit to the natural world and are harmful to people, especially the world’s poorest.

A New Cold War

The Cornwall Alliance lists nearly seventy scholars—theologians, scientists, economists, and others—among its advisors, academic fellows, and contributing writers. Through articles published in dozens of venues; frequent guest appearances on talk shows; its own website (cornwallalliance.org), Facebook page, and YouTube channel; talks at churches, schools, and conferences; a weekly podcast; and social media engagement, the Cornwall Alliance reaches a broad audience of Christians and non-Christians alike.

Because much of the environmental movement embraces socialism and global governance to replace capitalism and sovereign nations—recipes for poverty and tyranny—we sometimes compare what we’re doing with fighting “Cold War II.”

In Cold War II, the threats to liberty and justice don’t come so much from foreign nations—though those remain. Instead, they’re right inside America—and every nation. They come from the elite leaders of the Green movement, which threatens, ironically, to rob America of its productive capacity in the name of saving the planet. They come from the professors and teachers who fill students’ minds with environmentalist propaganda. They come from the liberal, mainstream media, which trumpets the bad news, regardless of its falsehood, because “Bad news is good news, good news is no news” (because bad news gets eyeballs, and eyeballs get advertising revenue). And they come from politicians bent on spending trillions of dollars taxed from citizens in a vain attempt to curb “global warming,” which poses far less risk than the poverty their policies will impose on billions of people.

Environmentalism’s tendency to prolong poverty or drive people back into it is ironic. Why? Because, with a clean, healthy, beautiful environment being a costly good, and wealthier people being better able to afford costly goods, prolonging poverty means harming the environment.

The truth is that lifting billions out of poverty and practicing sound environmental stewardship are not opposed to each other but are allied. Helping millions understand that is a key element of our message.

This article first appeared in Salvo 61.