Bitter and burnt-out is a wonderful way to gain a new outlook on life.
Cover Story
Jarrett Kerbel 11-01-1994
"Peace is our Profession" proclaims the billboard at the gate of the Air Force base where I was born in 1966.
Darrell Armstrong 11-01-1994
When I first heard the phrase "Generation X," I thought it was in reference to a new generation of black youth who were moved to thought, dialogue, and action...
Jessica Brown 11-01-1994
Sometimes I feel as though I do not have time for God. In some ways, this is the legacy that has been passed on to my generation.
Shane Helmer 11-01-1994
This radical Jesus, this social gospel, this promise of liberation are always and forever in the back of my mind.
Jeremy Lloyd 11-01-1994
Permeated by its own brand of consumerism, church-ianity force-feeds me a conditional message, requiring my allegiance to authority and beliefs, and masks it all as "faith."
Jennifer Parker 11-01-1994
I grew up in rural Mississippi, a black girl who lived "out in the booneys," fairly isolated from peers outside school.
Laura Zylstra-Garth, Todd Zylstra-Garth 11-01-1994
To be a married couple in our 20s and Christian means exploring options and making choices for our future together. One of these choices is a commitment to intentional community.
Patty King 11-01-1994
On a cold, piney evening last November on the Day of the Dead, residents of the Guatemalan town of Santiago were holding a night-long vigil in the town cemetery.
Carol H. Gauntlett 11-01-1994
We all need, even crave, a way to make sense of our lives and to bring unity to our daily existence.
Ivy George 8-01-1994
My people are tired of development, they just want to live" was a sentiment expressed by Mexican author Gustavo Esteva in his remarks at a conference of the Society for International Development in 1985. Today as we are surrounded by the propaganda of prosperity, it is exceedingly difficult to ponder the exhaustion and exasperation contained in that statement. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed expanded investment in countries that have relaxed foreign investment restrictions. The friendly logos of Western corporations are seen all over the world from neon-lit billboards to cars, from electronic items to television programs. In Eastern Europe, Marx is out and Ronald McDonald is in, and in Maoist China, Russian prostitutes are available for services.
The size of the global village is shrinking, the middle classes everywhere are swelling their ranks, the course of capitalism is secure and the "free" market has triumphed once and for all. That the gods of the West have won is the gospel of globalism. While this appears to be the surface
picture in the popular press, there are nagging realities that continue to beleaguer the prosperous world—the ecological crisis and the population "problem." The two issues are closely related; I will take up the subject of population and consider how it fits in the global context.
What of the population question? What is so problematic about human population that we have to "control" it? Is talk of "population control" a semantic subterfuge for control of poor people, women, and other "inferior" peoples (frequently those of color)?
Alan Thein Durning 8-01-1994
The American middle class, more than any other group, defines and embodies the contemporary international vision of the "good life." Yet the way this class of people lives is among the world’s premier environmental problems, and may be the most difficult to solve.
Only population growth rivals high consumption as a cause of ecological decline, and at least population growth is now viewed as a problem by many governments and citizens of the world. Consumption, in contrast, is almost universally seen as good—indeed, increasing it is the primary goal of national economic policy. The consumption levels of the past two decades are the highest achieved by any civilization in human history. They manifest the full flowering of a new form of human society: the consumer society.
This new manner of living was born in the United States, and the words of an American best capture its spirit. In the age of U.S. affluence that began after World War II, retailing analyst Victor Lebow declared: "Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption....We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate." Most citizens of Western nations have responded to Lebow’s call, and the rest of the world appears intent on following.
The gaping divide in material consumption between the fortunate and unfortunate stands out starkly in their impacts on the natural world. The soaring consumption lines that track the rise of the consumer society are, from another perspective, surging indicators of environmental harm. The consumer society’s exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust, poison, or unalterably disfigure forests, soils, water, and air. We, its members, are responsible for a disproportionate share of all the global environmental challenges facing humanity.
Susan Power Bratton 8-01-1994
Since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in the mid-1960s, the continued growth of the human population worldwide has been a major environmental and economic development issue. Every basic environmental science textbook has a chapter on the subject, as do most introductory volumes on environmental ethics. The literature on contemporary changes in human demography is now massive, and numerous academic institutes, environmental and women’s organizations, and international agencies wrestle with population topics.
The Christian voice on population, however, has been very limited and has largely rejected the importance of growing human numbers. With the exception of a handful of environmental and women’s advocates, most Christians have either had little to say or they have spoken out against international family planning programs.
Since Christians from affluent nations tend to limit their concern for sanctity of life to contesting abortion, they are poorly informed about the relationship of human demography (the structure of human populations) to such problems as child mortality and environmental degradation. If we stop thinking about what happens to the child after his mother decides to carry him to term, we miss the question of whether he will survive to adulthood and what his quality of life will be like if he does.
We also need to recognize that in the United States and Europe a majority of Christians have medical services easily available, and can obtain family planning information from a personal physician. In contrast, in many regions with high population growth rates, maternal care is poor and what services there are may be crowded and understaffed. A woman who is not in good health and has a new baby is at a much-elevated risk for a problem pregnancy if she conceives again within the next year or two.
Modou Ngie 8-01-1994
As an African living in the United States, I have often been called upon to explain the so-called paradox of societies not having enough food yet increasing their population at an alarming rate.
The questions seem so simple and demand simple solutions. Why the slash-and-burn farming tactics when the forests they destroy are so vital? Why kill animals on the verge of extinction? The answers to these questions would be as simple as the answer that would explain to a homeless person why another person needs a ranch in Wyoming or a condo in Palm Beach when he or she already lives in a penthouse in New York.
The indigenous people who are on the front lines of this struggle between the environment and scarce resources have never had to look at the global picture. Yet they are being called upon to understand and sacrifice for causes that are so abstract and distant.
Having lived most of my life in a tiny developing nation, I have seen firsthand how my people's relationship with land and the environment has changed. We lived just below the desert but in a vegetation zone that has always been capable of sustaining abundant life.
My people for thousands of years have lived on the savannah plains nestled between the rivers Senegal, Gambia, and Cassamance. These rivers all flow west from the Futa Jallon Highlands in Guinea into the Atlantic Ocean. They have never been dry, and the land around them has always been lush and green. Even during the dry season, when no rains came, people still thrived. They never felt that their resources were being depleted or that the land could not sustain them. Unfortunately things have changed since the advent of colonialism.
Catherine Meeks 8-01-1994
Racism is a significant factor in how environmental issues are dealt with. The attitude Americans have toward people of color and people in developing countries often gets mixed in with whether we think a particular environmental problem is something that even ought to be addressed. It is rooted in the attitude that certain people are not valuable.
The view in the developed world often doesn't take the affected people into consideration. It starts with the questions, What is to our benefit? and, How are we impacted by whatever is happening somewhere?—rather than the question, How are the native people being impacted?
As Americans moved through history seeking to "subdueö nature and to have "dominion" over creatures deemed "lesser than human", white people often forgot that people of color were not included in whatever it was that God was giving human beings dominion over. It was forgotten, or maybe it was never learned, that using what one needs from the environment to help sustain life is very different than striving to control and dominate the environment.
The idea of dominion and domination of people of color has become quite the norm in many instances. Westerners historically have had the idea that, as a technologically advanced place, we can use any other place on the globe for our benefit. For instance, Europeans bring their waste and dispose of it in Gambia, out in the bush—and the people who live there have no idea what is going on. If people are not seen as valuable, then we don't have to value whatever environmental problems confront them as people.