Environment

Below is a copy of a brief talk I gave on Sunday about what I am going to be doing in Dunedin. It was thrown together at 1 in the morning and only gives a brief synopsis of my view of the relationship between Christianity and Environmentalism, but here it is anyway.

As some of you may be aware I am leaving for Dunedin in the very near future; in fact next weekend. This is because just over a year after graduating from Canterbury I have finally got a job as a Chemical and Process Engineer, well to be precise an Environmental Engineer, with a Dunedin based consultancy company called Waste Solutions Ltd which is a subsidiary of Duffill Watts & King. Some of you may have seen Campbell Live a couple of weeks back in which they looked at PPCS Timaru dumping their waste straight into a local bay and the Gisbourne City dumping its untreated municipal sewerage directly into the sea. An Environmental Engineer is the person who is brought in by these companies or cities to examine the waste, the location, and what is required in order to get a resource consent and then recommends the best possible solution to the problem. The Environmental Engineer can be involved right from the modelling of the problem through to actually building the treatment plant.

In spite of the fact that in moving to Dunedin I shall have to leave everything and everyone I know and love I am excited about this opportunity. Ever since I did a paper on Pollution Control in 2^nd pro or third year at Uni I have loved the field of waste treatment. Living in New Zealand I have found it very easy to appreciate and love the beauty of creation, thanks in part to my parents taking me camping every summer. And yet humans haven't had a very good track record of keeping this or any country pristine, we pump pollutants into the water. I remember watching the news just before I graduated and I saw a piece about this city in Russia in which the death rate was higher than the birth rate. This was because the amount of pollution that processing plants were pumping into the air. I don't know about you but I find this absolutely shocking and I began to pray that God would put me into a position where I would be able to use my skills to help in these sort of situations.

Going to Bible College last year gave me an insight into God's heart for the world. Not the world as in its inhabitants, but the earth itself. The very first chapter of the Bible tells us that God created this world and saw that each part of it was ' good' and that the whole of creation was very good. This in fact is one of the central points in the whole of that creation narrative. Looking further into the first chapter of the Bible we find God blessing humanity and telling them to subdue the earth. This subduing is not to rule over and abuse as this passage has on occasion been used to justify. Rather it speaks of a subduing to care and look after, as some have put it, to be stewards of the earth. Finally, throughout the Bible people point to creation as a witness to the glory of God, Psalm 19 especially:

Psalm 19:1-6 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. ² Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. ³ There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. ⁴ Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, ⁵ which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. ⁶ It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.

The chorus of the song Blown Away by a New Zealand band Magnify captures it for me,

I take a step outside
And I open my eyes and find
That I can't take a breath
Without You being on my mind
There's nothing that I can do
There's nothing that I can say
I've fallen flat on my face
And I've been blown away

I want to keep this witness alive for future generations.