pollution Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

November 12, 2024November 11, 2024

Trashing God’s Creation

The Bible tells us that God created our planet to be a beautiful place and gave humans the responsibility to take care of it. However, we see today that humans are trashing God’s creation.

Several times in my life, I have had the privilege of being in an area where no human activity had ever been present. From the underwater gardens in the Galapagos Islands to isolated regions of Alaska, the beauty of the natural world has astounded me. In Australia, I was allowed to be in places where the nearest human city was hundreds of miles away, and the beauty was breathtaking. Canoeing in Canada’s Quetico wilderness was another place where I saw incredible beauty. Numerous trips to the bottom of the Grand Canyon allowed me to see an unspoiled natural environment.

Finding unspoiled places today has become increasingly difficult. Human greed, selfishness, and materialism have led to trashing much of our planet. Many people have sensed this loss, including those who may not see it as God’s creation but cannot deny the destruction of the natural world. One organization is the Ocean Conservancy, which is involved in global cleanup. One of their programs is the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), which uses volunteers to pick up trash worldwide.

In 2023, ICC volunteers collected 1,947,483 cigarette butts, 1,358,870 plastic beverage bottles, 853,086 plastic bottle caps, 762,803 food wrappers, 563,390 plastic grocery bags, and a variety of trash, adding up to 14.3 million items. The issue of trashing God’s creation has gotten more attention since scientists discovered that microplastics contaminate all oceans and even show up in the human bloodstream. Medical research shows that these tiny plastic particles combine with chemicals to produce cancer, birth defects, brain damage, infertility, and various other health issues.

We see skeptics blaming God for these illnesses and problems when the root of much of the pain and suffering is humans trashing God’s creation. Christians cannot assume that this problem is unrelated to their faith. We need to be leaders in caring for God’s creation just as we must lead in helping our world understand Christ’s wisdom as He tells us how to live and how to treat each other.

— John N. Clayton © 2024
Reference: The Ocean Conservancy in their Splash newsletter for Winter 2024

April 6, 2021April 5, 2021

Fight For Clean Air

When I graduated from college, I was invited to a classmate’s wedding in Gary, Indiana. At the reception, I saw a silver serving dish enclosed in a plastic bag. To be helpful, I removed it from the bag when the serving line started. I was reprimanded for doing so because the silver dish began turning black in less than an hour. The problem was that a steel mill upwind from the house was putting hydrogen sulfide into the air. It was an early introduction to the fight for clean air.

With my background in chemistry, I knew that sulfur has economic value. I asked a local businessman why the factory had not installed a scrubber to remove and sell the valuable element. He told me that if the steel company was required to add the scrubber, it would move out of the area because of the cost. The company did nothing even when it was subjected to a daily fine. Local people tolerated the air pollution because of job security and the economic consequences of enforcing clean air requirements.

The April 2021 issue of National Geographic carries an article titled “The Fight for Clean Air.” The subtitle is “The Deadly Cost of Dirty Air.” It begins with these words:

Dirty air affects nearly all of the body’s essential systems. It may cause about 20% of all deaths from strokes and coronary disease, triggering heart attacks and arrhythmias, congestive heart failure and high blood pressure. It’s linked to lung, bladder, colon, kidney and stomach cancers and to childhood leukemia. It harms kids’ cognitive development and raises older people’s risk of contracting dementia or dying from Parkinson’s disease. It’s been linked to diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, decreased fertility, miscarriage, mood disorders, sleep apnea…”

That is only the beginning of the article. As you read through the list, ask yourself how many of these problems have affected you or those you love? How many people have blamed God for things that are on that list? The article documents the numbers and claims that air pollution causes seven million premature deaths a year.

Greed and selfishness lead to the construction of factories that put massive amounts of waste materials into the air while avoiding the investment needed to clean the air. People with money move away from the area with polluted air leaving the poor and disadvantaged to breathe the pollutants. This creates a separation between the rich and the poor, spilling over into the racial issues of our day.

The Bible teaches us to be concerned about the well-being of everyone. The pain and suffering that air pollution brings is not the “will of God.” It violates the principles taught by Jesus Christ. We support the fight for clean air on our planet.

February 10, 2021February 9, 2021

What Color Is Your River?

In my lifetime I have spent a lot of time on rivers. Living in Canada, I became acquainted with beautiful blue water with a clarity that allowed you to see the river’s bottom even at 20 feet. When my family moved to Bloomington, Indiana, I became involved with the White River, which was anything but white or blue. What color is your river?

In our 12 trips down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, I saw changes in the water from time to time. The river was sometimes brown and other times crystal blue depending on how much upstream water was being released from the Glen Canyon Dam. I now live on the Saint Joseph River in southern Michigan. I have read the notes of the first explorers who came through this area in which they tell of being able to see the bottom of the river through 20 feet of water. Now you can only see about a foot down. There has been a massive change in Americas’ rivers through the years.

In 1984, Satellites started taking pictures of rivers in the United States. Over 230,000 images have been taken and analyzed by the University of Pittsburgh, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University. The data shows that only five percent of Americas’ rivers are still blue. Twenty-eight percent are green, which in most cases is caused by algae. The remainder are yellow, with 11,629 miles of rivers having become distinctly greener since 1984.

As rivers change from blue to yellow to green, what can live in the rivers also changes. In the Saint Joseph River, where we live in Michigan, the kind of fish that live in the river today are far different from the native trout seen by the early settlers of this area. Today the river has large numbers of suckers and carp. There are some bass and panfish, and we do have salmon from Lake Michigan migrating up the river to spawn. Transplanted fish like walleye are popular, but the whole ecological makeup has changed.

What color is your river? More important is the question of what is causing the rivers to change color? The causes, according to the studies, are farm fertilizer runoff, dams, sewage, and global warming, which has raised the temperature so that cold-water fish cannot live in the river. This is more than the loss of recreational use of waterways. Numerous diseases, including cancer, are related to what is in the water we drink, bathe in, and provide to our animals.

The question of what color is your river leads to asking what you can do about it. Christians need to be vocal in encouraging our culture to initiate significant efforts to turn our waterways blue again. It is interesting that in Revelation 22:1-2, when the inspired writer wanted to portray some of the properties of heaven to mortal humans, he describes “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal.” In ancient times, when people wanted to worship and get away from the hassle of human activity, they went to a river. (See Acts 16:13.) Today most of our rivers are not that attractive.

Data from Associated Press article by Seth Borenstein, January 9, 2021.

June 16, 2020June 15, 2020

God Is Not the Enemy Giving Us Alzheimer’s

One question we hear from a wide range of people is, “Why did God do this to me?” My answer to that statement is always the same, “God didn’t do it to you!!” James 1:13 says, “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God. God cannot be tempted with evil, and He does not tempt any man.” James speaks of moral temptation, but the principle laid down is true in a wide variety of areas. James says it is our own lust that causes us to sin, which ultimately leads to death. The fact is that every bad thing that happens to us came from someone’s lust. It may be a lust for money, for power, or for dominance. But it is not because God chose to give us something bad. God is not the enemy.

One of the most frustrating examples is mental problems, especially dementia and Alzheimer’s. What can be more painful than having your own mother or spouse not know who you are? It is especially difficult when a disease like Alzheimer’s happens to some people and not to others. I recently stood next to a woman whose mother didn’t know her. That mother was an elder’s wife. She had blessed countless others and had been a teacher of children both in Bible classes and in the public schools.

In the same room was a foul-mouthed, abusive woman who spent much of her life in prison. She was busily writing a legal defense of why her current conviction on selling porn pictures of children should be thrown out of court. She was the same age and yet was very capable and mentally alert. I engaged her in an academic discussion of why quantum theory didn’t invalidate Genesis, and she knew her subject.

“Where is God?” my friend asked as we left the facility. My response was that He was with her mother because even though her physical body was with us, in my opinion, her spiritual self was not. God is not the enemy.

The fact remains that we need to understand why scenarios like this one happen. A recent study of 131,000 people in London, England, aged 50-79, showed that high exposure to nitrogen dioxide, a common pollutant in cities, more than doubled the incidence of Alzheimer’s. Also, exposure to particulate matter from traffic, even in small levels, increased the incidence rate of Alzheimer’s. High concentrations more than doubled it.

More and more studies of irresponsible disposal of chemicals in rivers, lakes, and oceans is causing the worst of human diseases. The London study also showed that ozone reduced the incidence rate of Alzheimer’s. Ozone is part of the structure of the atmosphere which reduces the amount of ultraviolet light from the Sun reaching Earth’s surface. Most of us will remember the problem of the atmosphere’s ozone hole a few years ago, which endangered life on the planet. It was caused by manufactured chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). That led to a worldwide ban on CFC production in 1987.

I am reminded of the old statement in the Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly. Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” We reap what we sow. It may be by our own actions, but for many of us, the pain is from the greed and selfishness of others – but it isn’t from God. God is not the enemy.

Data from Scientific American, May 2020, page 45.

August 31, 2019August 28, 2019

God’s Environmental Solutions

With a growing human population, environmental toxins, the warming of our planet, and the shortages of potable water, we recognize that Earth is under stress. News reports tell of people dying because of ecological problems. It is essential to understand that all of this pain, death, and turmoil are unnecessary. When God created planet Earth, He built into it many self-correcting tools for survival. If you name a major problem that threatens the long term existence of humans, I believe there is a built-in device that can correct the problem. God designed the Earth to withstand even the abuse that selfishness, ignorance, and greed have brought upon it. Here are a few examples of God’s environmental solutions:

Carbon dioxide and global warming. Several greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, but the main one is carbon dioxide. Not only do animals exhale carbon dioxide, but fires produce it, so human-caused fires are a contributor. God beautifully designed planet Earth with tools to contain carbon dioxide. Plants take it out of the air and release oxygen as a product of photosynthesis. This system is highly efficient as a single tree can take care of the carbon produced by one human. Plants in the ocean do the same thing. Human deforestation of both the land and the sea thwarts the system God put in place to sustain life on Earth. God’s environmental solutions are there if we will use them.

Water. Oceans cover roughly 3/4ths of Earth’s surface, but water shortages plague a significant percentage of the world’s population. The obvious problem is that because of minerals in the water, ocean water cannot be consumed directly by humans or most animals or plants. But the 50-quadrillion tons of minerals in the oceans, including 4.5 billion tons of uranium, have 14,000 industrial uses. God’s environmental solutions not only provide enough water for every living thing on the planet but also a wealth of minerals to sustain an advanced society.

Toxins. In the past five years, science has discovered that a Chinese brake fern (Pteris vittata) can survive on arsenic. Arsenic is a significant pollutant poisoning millions of people in the world, causing skin lesions, cancer, and other illnesses. Finding a plant that removes arsenic from the environment is a significant breakthrough. Over the past several years, we have mentioned other plants that provide environmental cleansing. Scientists have found bacteria that eat plastics and others that consume crude oil. These are more of God’s environmental solutions to tackle the plastic trash and oil spills in the ocean.

We need to allocate research funding to learn more about God’s environmental solutions to counter ecological problems. God has given us resources to repair the damage we have done to the environment. Maybe the problems we see around us will bring us to accept what God has provided and have the heart to think beyond our own selfish interests.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

Reference: Scientific American, September 2019, page 18.

February 19, 2019February 18, 2019

BP Oil Spill Becomes Non-Newsworthy

Most of us know about the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster because the media promoted it as “the largest ever.” We saw the pictures of the oil slicks, and the horrible images of sea birds and shore animals coated with oil. We saw the frantic attempts of workers trying to save them. We all pay attention until the media decides that the BP oil spill becomes non-newsworthy.

Once the pictures quit coming, and the stories about the consequences and causes of the explosion and the oil seeps quit making the front page, we stopped paying attention to this catastrophic event. The truth is that nothing has really changed. The location of the oil platform that caused the terrible leakage is 12 miles off the Louisiana coast. Since 2004 between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been leaking from the platform. Hurricanes tend to increase the leakage, and oil slicks continue to create havoc all along the coast.

The Washington Post says that no effort is being made to cap the many leaking wells. Every year that they are not capped, over 180,000 barrels of oil leak into the ocean killing marine life and birds. What will be the ultimate effect of all this? The harvesting of seafood in the area around the wells is significantly reduced, and these effects are seen all over the Gulf of Mexico. The tourist industry has been affected as beaches are closed and the pollution curtails fishing. Multiple studies are looking to see what diseases may be caused or accelerated by the oil.

As the BP oil spill becomes non-newsworthy, we don’t hear about it. Reporting on it isn’t attractive to the media because it no longer sells. But as oil spills, plastic materials, and organic waste cause pollution to our bodies of water resulting in human pain and suffering, we need to let our fellow earthlings know what is going on and that God is not to blame.

Data from The Week, November 2, 2018, page 16.