From the Daily Episcopalian today:
By George Clifford
Wednesday, April 22, is Earth Day. Began in 1969, Earth Day was instituted to call attention to the global environmental crisis. In the intervening forty years, awareness has grown. Embarrassingly, much of the Church has remained indifferent while environmental problems have worsened, often taking a back seat to other, purportedly more urgent issues.
Today, the economic crisis cries for center stage. However, the economic crisis and environmental crisis intertwine inseparably with one another, as theologian Sallie McFague emphasized in her 2001 book, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril. McFague describes two worldviews, the neo-classical economic and the ecological economic, first explaining the connection and then suggesting theologically responsible responses.
The neo-classical economic worldview emerged from market-based capitalism guided by the invisible hand of self-interest, which Adam Smith first outlined in the eighteenth century. Theoretically, independent, acquisitive individuals eventually work out, albeit unintentionally, a society’s optimal production and consumption solutions to the benefit of all. McFague helpfully observes that this worldview focuses on monetary gains as its sole aim, excluding the values of the fair distribution of profits from the earth’s resources and global sustainability.
For the world’s entire population to enjoy a Western, middle class standard of living, we would require the resources of four more earth-type, earth-size planets. ...Read it all HERE
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