David Laubach - Stewardship Of The Earth

At Thursday’s lunch, Vice President Al Gore—who described himself as a recovering politician—spoke to an audience of 2500, weaving a biblical mandate to care for the earth with sobering images and statistics about global warming and its consequences for future generations. He began with the voice of Col. Frank Borman from Apollo 8 reading from Genesis 1, while showing the earth as seen from the moon’s orbit. Shrinking ice caps, disappearing glaciers, the melting of the Himalayan ice fields and the potential loss of fresh water for 40% of the earth’s population became real with photos and scientific evidence.

Ignoring current alarms sounded by scientists and the trumpet warnings of nature is comparable to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930’s, Gore said. He explained how warmer oceans produce more hurricanes, and warmer air produces both floods and drought. Katrina, Rita and the devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are related to global warming as well as poor land management and usage. The Darfur disaster can be connected to the disappearance of water supplies and tribal people’s subsequent migrations to places that produce conflict.

Gore was critical of America’s unwillingness to ratify the Kyoto environmental accords when we are the largest contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere both by volume and per capita. Still, he shared hope that this nation, which has tackled other great challenges, can and will face this environmental crisis. He concluded with this quotation from Luke 12:54-57:

Whenever you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, “A shower is coming;” and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, “There will be hot weather;” and there is. Hypocrites, you can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that you cannot discern this time? Yes, and why, even of yourselves, do you not judge what is right?