Did you know we are in the middle of a bee crisis? Bees buzz around my spring flowers just as they always have.
But bees are in trouble, and so are we.
While paging through my local nursery’s booklet looking for new bushes to plant, I came across troubling news. This nursery is part of a national “bee friendly” plants movement to help stabilize the drastic decline in bee populations recover before it’s too late.
If bees aren’t around to pollinate them, plants we depend on for food will die. Human food supplies are at risk.
In fact, up to one million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction, with devastating implications for human survival, according to a United Nations report released Monday.
“The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk.”
Unlike reports of a single species extinction, this massive report (three years of research by 150 authors from 50 nations) specifically focuses on the impact on human life from biodiversity degradation.
“The decline in biodiversity is eroding the foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
Here are some additional shockers (read the article and find your own):
“A bug massacre is looming — 40 percent of all known species face extinction, including beetles, flies, moths, butterflies and bees, the result of habitat loss and pesticides, according to a recent study.”
“Coral reefs lost to warming and acidifying oceans, for example, could cause a collapse in commercial and indigenous fisheries, affecting billions of coastal residents who rely on seafood for protein.”
“At sea, a third of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels in 2015. “Sixty percent were maximally sustainably fished,” meaning they were being pushed to the verge of collapse.”
And one more, for penguin-lovers everywhere:
“In Antarctica, the second-largest group of emperor penguins, the tallest of all penguins, has not produced offspring for three years, assuring a catastrophic drop in their numbers.”
Why Care About Bees?
While teaching theology at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (EGST), I dramatized a truth about biblical creation that many students never forgot. As I began my lecture, I carried a bag of dirt around the class and gave a handful to every student.
Then, as they sat uncomfortably contemplating their dirt, I slowly read Genesis 2:7:
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Hebrew word translated “man” here is adam. It actually stands for all human beings, men and women. It is derived from another word in the verse, adamah, which literally means dust. In other words, just as the text says: adam originates in adamah, human beings come from dust. “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). (Later, adam will become a proper name: Adam.)
Eugene Peterson is his masterful book Christ Plays in a Ten Thousand Places summarizes it well:
“Creation is not something apart from us; it is part of us and we are part of it. When the land is violated, when animals are exploited and abused, when the streams are polluted, that is the stuff of our personal creation that is desecrated.
We don’t own this place and se we can’t do with it whatever we wish. We are this place…”
This was a difficult truth for many students, and many of us, to swallow. Why is it so difficult?
Most of us now think of ourselves as above or outside creation. The natural world is to be mined, drilled, farmed, harvested, controlled for our ever-increasing benefit. We can exploit it at will, because it is nothing to us. The natural world is here to serve us humans, the pinnacles of God’s creation.
False theologies justify this dismissal of creation. For example, we are just “traveling through this world on the way to heaven,” so don’t worry about the “earthly realm.”
More than bad theology, this is the essence of original sin itself!
What is the origin of human sin? It is “wanting to be like God” (Gen. 3:5). Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes the Genesis 3 texts about original sin this way:
“They all deal with the problem of human autonomy and the ways in which such autonomy leads to alienation and death, for self and for others.”
Autonomy comes from two Greek words, autos (self) and nomos (law). Autonomy is becoming a law unto one’s self, always wanting to be #1, get our own way. This was Adam and Eve’s root sin—they wanted to answer to no one. They believed Satan’s lie that they could become gods themselves, co-equals with their Creator.
Human autonomy today says we can become a “law unto ourselves” regarding creation. But the truth is we cannot. We are part of the same creation as the rarest, most endangered species—and if we neglect creation, we ourselves might become the next endangered species.
Ho-hum. More propaganda from the radical, left-wing environmental movement, right?
No, my own biblical worldview is diametrically opposed to left-wing environmentalism. The best example of that is the movie Avatar, which happens to be the highest grossing film of all time.
Avatar posits the world as a living organism—this is pantheism, where nature itself becomes God. I believe in monotheism, a Creator God entirely separate from the created order, who continues to be intimately involved in it.
God’s first command to human beings is beyond dispute:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Gen. 2:15)
Eugene Peterson describes this command or calling this way:
“The verb “keep” [shamar] has the sense of “taking good care of it.” “Conserve” is an appropriate translation in the context; we keep watch with an eye to maintaining and preserving. Conservation of the place in which we live is the first work assignment that occurs in our Scriptures.”
God Calls All of Us to be Conservationists.
Before anyone was liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, they were—and still are—adamah (dust). We are PART of creation, not lords over it. We serve the Lord of creation by caring for his creation. Our biblical hope is newly resurrected physical bodies in a new creation, not disembodied souls in heaven.
Of course, we can continue to think and act is if we are separate from creation. Declaring ourselves to be autonomous, remember, is what we humans do best! We’ve been doing since the Garden of Eden.
Or, we can embrace our God-given calling in decisions we make every day. These decisions have more impact on human life on our planet than we realize.
We are Conservationists not because we follow any ideology, but simply because we are human beings created in God’s image. God cares for every bee. We should too.
