Decisions are bad. Decisions are really bad. That’s what the comedic economist that lectured in the link Mark previously posted said. Looking at the issue of technology in view of the environment it’s hard to disagree. Anything we put onto the eco system that wasn’t there before is an imposed cost on the environment.
My roommate watches Survivor Man sometimes on the Discovery Channel. This one episode has this guy surviving on only the land in the Everglades but truly he’s not surviving on only the land because he can find foreign objects amongst the land like a spring mechanism in which he twists to make a lure (he also blows some bubble gum and hooks it on some line using the gum as a floating bobber to catch fish). The point is that there is littering even in the most isolated regions. We manage to reach all of these places with our random stuff.
There is a lot more random stuff just lying around. The advances of technology however are a marvel. We can identify illness and treat or cure people. We can trade information at ultra fast rates and see each other from all around the world in a short period of time. We live in a terrific era. The cost of planes, trains, automobiles, cell phones, computers, medical diagnostic equipment, and medicine is the print we make on the environment. (There are other costs we impose but we will focus specifically on the environment.) Are we to forsake and curse these advances because they have some effect on the environment? Even the Amish ride on trains.
We need to find our individual cost and benefit curves. At what point do we say to ourselves the cost of me having this or taking this trip is greater than the benefit I receive from it? Say, like a lighting fixture that we leave on all the time. Most people probably think less in terms of stewardship and more in terms of “Ouch. That utility bill really hurt last month,” but it does the trick. We leave less of an imprint.
A group of people at the FSU Wesley Foundation returned recently from a mission trip to Guatemala. While there for over a week, someone I know came back to a large load of items they needed to move into their new room and told me about how you think that you need certain things but you realize that you don’t need all of the things that you thought you did. It’s a gut reaction when you see people that have little and you realize that you could also live on very little too if you made a concerted effort to try. We are entrusted to be good stewards of all the land, animals, and especially the people. Jesus said that there were no greater things than loving God and loving our neighbors. This is where your definition of who is our neighbor comes into play. Do we see squirrels and rabbits as our neighbors?
Maybe not, but, everyone’s favorite garden statue, St. Francis references an idea that how we treat animals, with compassion and pity, will also be the way that we approach our fellow man. So, let’s realize that we are stewards. There is nothing inherently wrong with technology. Like most things that aren’t given to moderation it can run wild and monopolize our mindset about the way things have to be, but a trip to some other country without very much reminds us that we don’t need all the stuff that we plug in to our walls or that we can get on a bus sometime.
In lieu of pedaling power into our house from a bicycle that’s linked to a generator of sorts maybe we should look more at solar power and other such methods of power generation. Google Inc. is devoting a lot of time and money to alternative energy and making it cost efficient for use. I think that is a beautiful thing but mostly I feel lukewarm about this issue. Still, it's like anything else. If you have a sense that this is something you should care about and you're like me where you feel lukewarm ask God to put a burden on you about it. Ask the Lord to show you how he wants deal with it. As a side note, I just remembered Captain Planet and it made me smile.
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