A Genesis 1 Report Card | Sojourners

A Genesis 1 Report Card

Let’s take a look at how things are going.
Illustration of a seal, a penguin, and a polar bear on top of a melting glacier with a polluted city skyline in the background.
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EVERY ORGANIZATION NEEDS a mission statement and, as people of the Book, we might start with the first page to find ours. There’s some new data available, so let’s take a look at how things are going.

On a positive note, there’s the “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” part. Which is going great! It’s never been better! We’re at 8.2 billion people now, and we’re headed for 10 billion people by 2060. We’re adding 71 million people every year. And we’ve got the subduing part under control too—a recent report showed that 95 percent of the land surface of the earth (not including Antarctica) had been altered by humans. But we’re making “progress” in Antarctica too: Just this year, scientists found that a warmer Southern Ocean—heated by our consumption of fossil fuels—was undercutting the most important glacier on the planet. So, check this one off the list—it’s possible that this is the only sentence in the entire Bible we’ve managed to make good on.

Of course, sometimes that superior performance gets in the way of other tasks also identified as important on the first page of Genesis.

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