Beloved Creation...

This is an excellent piece by guest blogger Erin Manning, on Creative Minority Report. Her words describe perfectly the balance between the responsibility of caring for the beautiful gift of Creation, and the rabid distaste of all things human that many environmentalists are preaching.
Of course we appreciate the things that God has created for us, and we want to take the best possible care of them, but those things are not God and we cannot love them. They are material.

I can't put it any where near as well as this writer...I have posted an excerpt, but the whole article is well worth taking the time to read...

Enjoy!

The Primacy of Humanity

The problem with both views of the environment, the commercial/exploitative view on the one hand, and the "man is a disease on the planet that ought to be (mostly) eradicated!" view on the other, is that each one contains at its core a fundamental misunderstanding about the proper place of humanity in the universe. The mainstream environmentalist view puts man as no more or less important than any other living creature on Earth; he is a purely material being whose control of the planet over less-sentient creatures is a kind of oppression that can only be ended when man himself agrees to become less numerous and thus less dominant over the other forms of life on the planet. But the commercial/exploitative view also sees man, and everything else, as materialistic--it sees man as the ultimate Darwinian survivor, whose fitness means that his tendency to exploit the material world for his own profit and gain is inherently justified.

In order to have a properly balanced view of nature and the environment, and of the duties of Christian stewardship of the planet, though, we have to be aware that man is not merely a material being, and that creation itself is not the result of a random accumulation of matter, but the work (however He chose to accomplish it) of a Divine Creator. Since creation is His work and reflects His glory, we are not free to exploit and destroy whatever we choose. But since humanity is His utmost creation, created in His image and likeness, we are also not free to elevate nature, animals, plants, and the like over the right of human beings to live and to survive. The intrinsic right to life of every human being takes precedence over lesser environmental concerns; people must come first in the hierarchy of creation.