If we read the Bible...we are apt to discover several things about which modern Christian organizations have kept remarkably quiet or to which they have paid little attention.

We will discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein."

In biblical terms, the "landowner" is the guest and steward of God: "The land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me."

We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve but all of it: "All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made."

We will discover that God found the world, as he made it, to be good, that He made it for His pleasure, and that He continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and curruption by us.

We will discover that the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God. "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, and they are created." Creation is thus God's presence in creatures.

We will discover that for these reasons our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them. We have no entitlement from the Bible to exterminate or permanently destroy or hold in contempt anything on the earth or in the heavens above it or in the waters beneath it. We have the right to use what we need but no more, which is why the Bible forbids usury and great accumulations of property.

How can modern Christianity have so solemnly folded its hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed?

Excerpts from Wendell Berry: Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community