Blog Action Day: Care of Creation

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year's topic is climate change. Now, I wouldn't call myself a greenie by any mannner of means: I have only really discovered recycling in the last couple of years (we're now much in the way of this, but I'm still slightly grumpy about how the recycling seems to spread over the kitchen..!). However, my particular slant on care of creation is rooted deep in something I do understand very well: God's requirement that we care for the world we love and that has been entrusted to us. I am not a creationist in the sense that I am quite comfortable with evolution, but looking at the amazing world we live in I also know that whatever process was employed, it was guided by the wisdom and creativeness of God. And this amazing, wonderful, beautiful world was given to our hand to care for, to look after, and to preserve both for ourselves and for others. I'm also a safety professional and think about how what we do influences people's safety at work and home.

I am trying to think about how what I do, how I live my life, influences other lives - and that isn't only about how I interact with people. It's about how what I do changes other people. I had a really interesting insight into this the other day. I've been working with the waste industry in New Zealand as part of my work, and I suddenly became very conscious of how my waste affects the work, safety, and job of those people that collect it. It has changed the way I fill our waste bins, and reinforced why I use a green wheelie bin (they are collected by an automatic arm into a side-loading compacting collection truck, and require no manual handling by the operator).

There has also been a really interesting study released by the city councils showing where hazardous materials have caused contamination in the soil: one of the sites has recently been opened up for building, it was a market garden for over 50 years and is contaminated by toxins and organophosphates, if not worse. We haven't really taken a long view of hazardous materials, and we haven't really thought through the risks or taken seriously our responsibility to take care of creation.