Pollution

Pollution is an old word for “uncleanness” that has taken on grim new meanings in the modern world. The word occurs frequently in the Old Testament to translate words for ritual or moral defilement, often associated with idolatry. In modern usage the word rarely refers to explicit moral failing but almost always to the defilement of the natural world—air, water, soil—through the careless disposal of wastes from human civilization. This is the meaning of pollution with which we are most concerned here. But ultimately the moral and environmental dimensions of pollution must be considered together.

Natural Waste

To understand environmental pollution, it is helpful to consider the way created life on earth normally disposes of “waste products.” All living things produce wastes: plants give off oxygen; animals, carbon dioxide; feces, urine and dead bodies are likewise waste and in some cases, in the wrong places, “pollution.” But the created world is organized in such a way that one creature’s waste is another creature’s necessity (see Ecology). “Pollution” exists temporarily only on a small scale. When considered as a whole, the totality of living and nonliving processes “recycles” individual waste products so there is no real pollution. A compost pile is a small example of the recycling capabilities of the whole planet. Lines from an eloquent poem by Walt Whitman called “This Compost” express very well the way the earth normally deals with “pollution.” Asking “how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?” since it is “work’d over and over with sour dead,” Whitman concludes:

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

On the planetary level, in the earth God created and recognized as “very good,” there is no real pollution. Pollution as we know it today is a uniquely human, and modern, problem. It has come about because of our ability to create materials that the earth cannot accept and recycle through the processes built into the creation. Unlike the rest of the created world, we human beings, especially in the last half-century, have developed an economy and a technology that do not depend on natural cycles but that regard the earth as an inexhaustible stockpile of resources and an unfillable sink for our waste. Since the earth is neither inexhaustible nor unfillable, pollution has become more and more of a reality.

Unnatural Waste

On one level, therefore, pollution is a symptom of a much larger problem: the tendency of our increasingly technologized and urban civilization to ignore the constraints placed on us by our creatureliness. We throw things “away”—in landfills, oceans, rivers and the air—as though we could ignore the limits of the planet. Pollution is not simply a matter of garbage or litter: it is a symptom of a fundamental flaw in the nature of modern societies. The long-range consequences of forgetting our creatureliness are rapidly becoming more evident.

Specifically, we have created over seventy thousand new chemical combinations with which living things are unable to cope. The vast majority of these have not been tested for their effects on life. (The rule for new chemicals seems to be “innocent until proven guilty.”) Increases in cancer among humans and rapid decline in the numbers and vitality of many other living things are probably associated with this sudden increase in materials that cannot naturally be “recycled”—though, as manufacturers are quick to point out, absolute proof of damaging effects is hard to come by.

Perhaps more serious are the ways in which various forms of pollution seem to be affecting the operation of the whole planet. There is little doubt by now that our release into the atmosphere of a number of chlorine-based compounds is resulting in the destruction of the ozone layer, a marvelous provision of the Creator for protecting the earth’s surface from harmful radiation. In the same way, the rapid release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, from the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests, is almost certain to bring about global warming and other major climatic changes at a rate far faster than living systems can easily adapt to.

Christian Stewardship

What ought a Christian’s response be to this polluted, and polluting, civilization? We can respond on two levels. Most obviously, and immediately, we need to do all we can on the personal level to bring our use of materials into line with created cycles. As creatures in God’s image, with a unique responsibility to the Creator for creation, we need to stop treating creation as though it were a great dump for our garbage, and the way to begin is to minimize what we ourselves throw “away.” The popular formula “reduce/reuse/recycle” is good advice. But important as recycling is, it should always be a last resort. It is far better to not use (or reuse) polluting materials at all. So perhaps the formula ought to be preceded by another imperative: refuse. We need to refuse, whenever possible, to buy things that cannot be gracefully, harmlessly taken up and reused in the cycles of creation. Every Christian’s goal ought to be the elimination of “throwaway” garbage.

But it is very difficult to refuse such things when the whole society assumes “throw away” policies. So just as important as these individual changes of habit is the hard work of bringing our whole culture to a place where pollution is unacceptable. Is such a thing possible? Or is an unpolluted world only an eschatological dream? If it is possible, it will be through individuals bringing righteousness to bear on such vast forces as the free market and the nature of our technology.

» See also: Creation

» See also: Ecology

» See also: Need

» See also: Stewardship

» See also: Technology

References and Resources

L. Brown, State of the World (New York: Norton, 1984); Earthworks Group, Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth (New York: Andrews and McNeel, 1991); P. Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: Harper, 1993); L. Wilkinson and M. R. Wilkinson, Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Vine Books, 1992).

—Loren Wilkinson