Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action
GLT
by J. Matthew Sleeth.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Good but not Great, August 11, 2008
By Tim Challies (Oakville, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
Though I've gone on record as a skeptic of global warming and of the
catastrophic man-made climate change that is so much in the news
today, this certainly does not indicate that I care nothing for the
environment. If anything, the reading I've done on the subject of
global warming, while failing to convince me, has reinforced in my
mind the importance of caring for the planet God has given us. I have
become interested in a Christian response to environmental issues and
decided to read a couple of books on the subject. One that was
recommended to me is Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth.
Not too long ago, Sleeth was rising through the ranks as chief of the
medical staff at a prominent hospital on the East coast. He began to
see more and more of his patients suffering from illnesses such as
cancer, asthma and other chronic diseases. He began to suspect that
there were environmental issues involved. Somehow the earth and those
who live on it are in trouble of their own making, he concluded.
Sleeth eventually quit his hospital job to focus on writing and
speaking about environmental issues, seeking to do so from a
distinctly Christian point-of-view. He sold his large home and moved
his family into a much smaller one; he evaluated his family's
lifestyle and found ways of drastically reducing their environmental
impact. And then he wrote this book.
"Serve God, Save the Planet asks the following questions: How can I
live a more godly, equitable, and meaningful life? How can I help
people today and in the future? How can I be less materialistic? How
can I live a more charitable life? What would happen if I led a slower-
paced existence? What is the spiritual prescription for depression,
anxiety, and anger? How can I become a better steward of nature?" It
is a book meant to guide Christians as they first think through the
issues and then begin to take action. He feels that Christians, with
their understanding of the origins of the world and with their
knowledge of its Creator, are uniquely able to lead the task of
creation care.
Through the book's sixteen chapters, Sleeth deals topically with areas
related to creation care. He looks at our society's fixation with
"stuff," at the food we eat (and its origins) and at the homes we live
in. He is occasionally overstated ("Nothing is worse for the
environment than a broken family") but usually measured and
deliberate.
The book is not without its weaknesses. One weakness is that Sleeth is
better at suggesting easy solutions than working through the
implications of the tough ones. For example, he states that the
world's population is growing too quickly to be sustainable (and
provides an excellent and understandable metaphor for this). But when
it comes to a solution for this issue, all he can suggest is this:
"Ethically designed and distributed birth control is an essential
remedy if humanity is to survive its own success." That is easy to
say, but the ramifications are massive. Do we allow wealthy Westerns
to continue to procreate while forcing birth control upon impoverished
Africans? How do we convince so many billions of people to go along
with this plan? What if one massive people group (Muslims, for
example) refuse to play along? It's an easy solution to propose but
one that is nearly impossible to successfully implement. A second
weakness, is that Sleeth seems to have "drunk the Kool-Aid." He
accepts man-made global warming as a given and blindly accepts the
usual solutions. For example, he stresses the need to recycle, but
does not wrestle with the fact that recycling is often as big a
polluter as simply throwing items in the trash. Consider, for example,
that recycled paper needs to be heavily bleached to remove inks and
that this bleach is fed into lakes and rivers. And consider that the
material to be recycled has to be trucked to recycling centers and
trucked to a factory and so on. All of these actions create, rather
than prevent, pollution. Recycling is not the "golden key" he makes it
out to be. Such difficult issues make no appearance in this volume.
Those complaints aside, the book is good and helpful in many ways.
Sleeth offers some good thoughts on environmental issues and does so
in a readable, compelling way. His anecdotes, drawn from a long career
in medicine, add human interest to what has the potential to be a
rather dry topic. Though not a big-picture, philosophical look at the
issues, Sleeth's volume is worth the read for its practical value. The
book's appendices are valuable guides to reducing energy consumption
and reducing waste.
Having said all of this, I do intend to keep reading to look for a
more satisfying book and one that can more fully ground creation care
in the Word of God. To this end, I am turning to Pollution and the
Death of Man by Francis Schaeffer. I suspect he will fill in some of
the gaps missing from Serve God, Save the Planet (while doubtlessly
missing out on some of the practical value of Sleeth's volume).