The Cornwall Alliance’s mission is “to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ” by educating “the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Jesus Christ, with Christian worldview, theology, and ethics that come with it.”

Because excessive fears of global warming/climate change underlie demands for policies that would slow, stop, or reverse the conquest of poverty for billions of people, and such fears have dominated environmental activism for over two decades, we’ve focused a great deal of our work on that subject. You’ve grown accustomed to that, and that’s one reason why many of you support us financially and in prayer.

Lately, though—particularly if you’ve followed us on Facebook or our Stewards Blog, or me on my own Facebook page, you’ll have seen that we’ve given a great deal of attention to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and government actions to curb its spread.

Does that mean we’re straying from our mission? Not at all. We’re addressing that with care for the same reason we do global warming/climate change: policies to curb it can trap billions in poverty, with the high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it, and push millions into it.

Repeatedly throughout human history, as new viruses or bacteria have come and gone, epidemics or pandemics of infectious diseases have been among the greatest threat to human life and health. The bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” is estimated to have killed a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages. The Spanish influenza of 1918 killed about 50 million worldwide.

Infectious diseases are an element of our natural environment, and how we respond to them is a matter of environmental stewardship. They can of course have dramatic direct effects on human health. But both the diseases themselves and measures to combat them can also cripple our economies. And since wealth makes people less vulnerable to disease, that means the diseases can also reduce human health and accelerate deaths indirectly through economic downturns.

By all estimates, COVID-19 is among the greatest environmental threats to human wellbeing of our time—certainly greater than manmade global warming. While some efforts to curtail the virus’s spread are eminently sensible (frequent sanitizing of hands and commonly touched surfaces, quarantining infected people, isolating high-risk people like the elderly and those with heart or lung disease or immunodeficiency, and generally avoiding large, dense gatherings) and cost little, others (like nation- state- or city-wide lockdowns, forcing millions of businesses to close their doors and most people, including the uninfected, to stay at home) are extremely costly.

I’ve been studying this problem intensely, and I think the more extreme policies could very easily cause more deaths than the virus itself. We believe loving our neighbors means, among other things, doing our part as citizens to persuade our neighbors and governing officials to confront this pandemic with sensible policies that really enhance human health and wellbeing and to avoid those that undermine them.

That’s why I’ve given so much attention to the Coronavirus pandemic. But I assure you, we’re not going to abandon the other issues, in fact we have some new articles in the works on just those issues that I can’t wait to share with you.

Thank you for your prayers and your continued financial support during this critical time.

I recently talked about the issue of more extreme policies hurting the economy and those among us who lose their livelihoods in a Facebook Live. The transcript from that video can be read here. Join us every Tuesday at 5:00 pm ET for our new Facebook Live series “From the Stacks” (a reference to my home library of over 5,000 books, down from about 6,200 before we moved a couple of years ago).

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.