Loving Our Global Neighbor - Podcast with Katharine Hayhoe

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, where she is director of the Climate Science Center. She is the CEO of the consulting firm ATMOS Research and Consulting, helping organizations plan for ways that climate change might impact their industries. She was named in Time magazine's 2014 100 most influential people in the world list.   
 
Her book, A Climate for change: global warming facts for faith-based decisions, looks at the science and misconceptions around global warming. (you can watch her presentation of the book at Cornell University where she gives the Beggs Lecture on Science, Spirituality and Society in October 2012. The Q&A time is really worth your time.)
 
In 2012 she was named by Christianity today as one of 50 women to watch and named one of Foreign policy's 100 leading global thinkers   
 
Through various avenues, such as her PBS show, "Global Weirding", she helps people see how the changing climate affects them and what they can actually do about it.  
 
And as a Christian, she deeply cares about the ways that climate change impact the world, the poor, the unreached, and the ways that we try to share good news in a world where the environment itself is crying out for salvation.

Steven Spicer and Paul Dzubinski host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. Below is the full text of talk that Dr. Katharine Hayhoe gave at the Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission conference.

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Introduction: Isolated and Insulated
 
I am going to build on the conversations that we've already had this morning to talk more in-depth specifically about how understanding what's happening to our planet relates to loving our global neighbor. Who is our neighbor today? If we live in North America, our neighbor often looks like this. It might be somebody that you wave to out the window of your car as you drive along. But increasingly, we have lost the sense of who our neighbors really are. The sense of who our neighbors are has been fostered by the fact that on hot nights, instead of sitting on our front-porch where we can see everybody walk by, we instead turn up the air conditioning. In our backyards we erect enormous fences. And while this looks like a very peaceful landscape, the whole point there is to not have to see or talk to anyone else. Our cars even isolate us from mundane tasks like walking the dog. Yes. And so increasingly, we are losing our sense of what our neighbors are, let alone how to love them.
 
Our modern-day lifestyle hasn't only isolated us from people. Our modern-day lifestyle is also isolating us from this planet on which we live. When disaster strikes, rather than being conscious of the risks of living on this planet, and conscious of the risks that others face together with us, instead when disaster strikes, we have home insurance. If that fails we have FEMA, and if that fails, the National Guard will arrive. If they don't arrive, we can raise heck until they do. So we've been increasingly insulated from the types of impacts that we still do experience. I live in the reddest state on this map, and this is not a map of politics, this is a map of the number of states that have had billion-plus-dollar weather and climate disasters since 1980. In Texas we are already at 99 of those.
 
So what does it mean to love our global neighbor in an era where we hardly even know what our actual neighbor looks like, or what their needs are, and we don't even really understand what our own needs are, living on this planet anymore? We have started to think that our needs might be the latest piece of technology rather than being sure that we're safe and that we have enough food to feed our families. If you look around the world, there are many different poverty indices. This is an index that is actually based on lights, so it covers the whole world to see how many people live in how many places, and what's the density of light in that location. If we look around the world, we know that the vast majority of people in the world live in places where they have not lost that connection to the world in which they live and where they are not only aware of,  but they're actually extremely at risk from, the types of disasters that we're insulated by from insurance, from federal organizations, and from the National Guard.
 
When I was nine-years-old, our family packed up and moved down to Colombia, in South America. And as probably just about everybody here has personally experienced, when you have a friend whose house you are staying at, and that house is made of bamboo or mud or tied cardboard boxes, and the bathroom is a two-sided wall, kind of out on the path. The wall is just to give a bit of privacy and  all there is, is a half tin can there that you sort of aim at, or hope other people do. When you have friends who are well-off so that they can afford brick homes, but the only place they can build those brick homes is on the side of the mountain, then we understand in a much more vivid and visceral way—when we actually have lived in these places and have experienced this life—we understand what it really looks like when danger hits. We understand that a landslide, which might be devastating here, could kill thousands and tens of thousands of people if it happens there. We understand that the military might show up to carry the corpses away but they're not going to help you rebuild your house. And there's no insurance agent waiting to hand you a big fat check after it's been destroyed.

Climate Science and Faith: Caring for God’s Gift of Physical Life
 
Now I recognize as a climate scientist, I get asked all the time, "Do you believe in global warming?" because we are told that this whole creation care climate change thing is a fake religion. It is an earth worshipping religion where we are worshiping the created rather than the Creator, and every true believer knows that we will reject the false prophets who come with convincing arguments, because we believe in the one true God. This is what we're told. And so when people say, "Do you believe in global warming?" I say, "No, I don't believe in global warming. In believe in God. I believe that God sent his son to be born as a small human child on this planet. I believe that that son grew, and eventually died to give us spiritual life." The purpose of God's son coming to this planet was to make us alive. We have become dead in Adam, dead in our sins and Jesus came to give us life, spiritual life. So, the smallest child in Sunday school, if you ask them what is God's greatest gift—if they've been to at least one year of Sunday school—they should know how to answer right. What is God's greatest gift, and what is also the answer to every question you teacher ever asks you in Sunday school? Jesus or God, right? But we are not often asked, and we don't often consider what might be the second or third or fourth, greatest gift that  God has given us, because God has blessed us with so many rich gifts.
 
Is it possible that God's second greatest gift, after giving us spiritual life, was to give us physical life? Because we are not designed to float in cold  and empty space. We are designed with physical bodies, and the Bible talks quite a bit about how the physical is important, we are designed with physical bodies that are ideally suited to life on this amazing unique planet that we have. And this planet was a gift from God to us and it came with the request for responsibility over the planet. Stewardship over the planet. Taking care of this planet. In fact, in Genesis it says, "God said, 'Let us make human beings in our image reflecting our nature,'" and I learned this in Sunday school, but what no one ever said, was that there was a “so what”. Why were we made in God's image? I always assumed it was for company, or companionship, or some other type of reason like that. But the Bible, as so often happens, actually answers the question. And it says, "So that they can be responsible." We are made in God's image so that we are capable of being responsible for every living thing that moves on the face of the earth. And it goes on, of course, throughout the New Testament, to talk about the concept of responsibility, of trust, of being faithful to that trust, of using the gifts we received to serve others, and being faithful stewards. So this is where the concept of stewardship or creation care comes from.
 
Imagine if you had dominion over this farm, if you have dominion over a company, if you had dominion over a region, or country and you run it into the ground, and you extract every last cent that you can, and you leave it a smoking ruin, what would that dominion look like? What would that responsibility look like?  And what would that communicate regarding your opinion of the person who left you that farm or that company or that region or that country? This is where the idea, again, of creation care or stewardship comes from.
 
Today we live in a world where our population is growing exponentially. This is the global population just since Christ's life and death. We have changed from a world that was dominated by species other than humans, to a world where there are pushing seven-and-a-half billion of us. So it becomes even more urgent not to only consider what we often view as creation, which is the non-human aspect of creation, but to consider all of creation, which of course includes us humans because we're created beings, when we look at the concept of care or stewardship. If someone who has worldly means sees a brother or sister in need and refuses them compassion, how can the love of God remain in us? We are to be recognized, to be identified, by our love for others. So when we see situations unfolding around the globe, when we see situations unfolding where people don't have safe places to live, where they live in places where disease is running rampant, when there's hunger, and there's poverty, and there's injustice. When we see this, our heart cries out to respond. Who of us, if somebody who we know and love, (and who do you know and love more than your own children?) if someone asked for bread, who would give them a stone? And in the Bible again, it talks very eloquently about physical needs and about meeting people's physical needs.
 
So today there's much greater awareness of the fact that when people have a physical need it also needs to be met. We cannot go to somebody who is hungry and say, "Bless you. Let me fulfill your spiritual needs." They are hungry; they need food first. We cannot go to somebody who is sick because they do not have clean water to drink and say, “Bless you. Let me give you a version of the Bible that you can understand.” Now not that that  isn't good, it absolutely is, but they are sick. They need help. We can't go to people who are living in places where there dying of things that nobody should be dying of in 2018 and say, "Oh we are here to distribute Bibles but we're not here to actually help with the problems that are killing your children." We know already, that is not who we are. And that is what missions in 2018 is all about, is meeting the needs of people where they are at.

Development and the Problem of Fossil Fuels
 
But today there's more to it than just recognizing that there are physical and spiritual needs. Today there are what the U.S. Military actually calls “threat multipliers.” There are exacerbating factors that are actually increasing the needs that face people today. There are factors that are actually acting to increase hunger, to enhance poverty, leading to more polluted water, more polluted air, more refugee crises. What are these threat multipliers? We have to understand them in order to be effective in today's world.
 
One of the biggest threat multipliers is ironically the very thing that has made us so numerous today. We often picture the world as this perfect untouched pristine globe. But, in reality, I think a much better way to picture the world is not by taking a photograph of it during the day (imagine you're up in the International Space Station), it's to look at the way the world looks at night. This is an actual photograph of the world at night, of course it is a composite because it's not always dark everywhere, right? But this shows you where people live who have electricity. And we can even zoom in even further on the United States, and you can see where we are right here today, you can see individual cities, you can see regions, you can even see the interstate highways connecting the cities. What you can also see is the reason why we have such bounty today. If you're good at geography, if you look up at the Dakotas, you will see up in the Dakotas—and for those who aren't, I'll show you where that is—you will see a blob that is not a very large city. If you've been there you know there aren't extremely large cities. What we're seeing is the lights of thousands of fracking wells where they flare off the extra gas. And reliance on fossil fuels is one of the main reasons why our population has grown so exponentially.
 
Because when did our population start to take off? It started to take off when we were able to mechanize our tasks. So instead of  spending the entire day collecting food, or the entire day walking ten miles to the well to get water and walking back, and instead of having to go to bed when the sun set and rising when the sun rose, instead we have been able to revolutionize our entire way of being thanks to these resources. Initially coal, and natural gas, and oil. The industrial revolution brought us enormous benefits. Imagine what life is like without a refrigerator. How much of your time is devoted to going and getting food every single day? Imagine your life without light. How much of your time would be devoted to trying to get enough light to do your tasks? Imagine life, especially North America, without vehicles. Imagine life especially without the medical advances that have happened since the industrial revolution. I think I for one would have died a long-time ago if it weren't for this.
 
So when we look around the world and we see that there's about a billion people who live in what they call energy poverty today, who don't have electricity, who  don't have access to power. When we look at people, we have to recognize that we have profited, we have benefited enormously, from getting our energy from all of those resources under the ground, digging  it up and burning it. So we say naturally—and this is one of those popular arguments in Christian circles, you may have heard this—we say well naturally if there's such a problem, and these people don't have access to all the resources we do,  what's the best thing we can do? They need access to the same resources. So there are entire websites, entire books, entire movies, entire videos, entire organizations, set up around the moral case of providing fossil fuels to poor people who need them. There are three problems with that.
 
Problem number one: they don't have them. This is coal, but if you look at oil and gas—and I did this myself because I could not find anybody who had done this—if you look at where the known resources are in the world, they aren't in the places where people aren't using them. We have benefited from actually having access to natural resources. So, when we say to people, "You need fossil fuels too" because that is the way that we reached our current standard of living, we're saying to them, "Let us," the countries that are already wealthy, "sell you  our fossil fuels and make you even further indebted to us. Let us encourage you to do things the way we did it three hundred years ago." It's like saying to people, "Oh, you are not at this stage yet, where you can handle the cell phone. You could get a party-line telephone, that would be acceptable." How patronizing is that? How colonialist is that? How arrogant and how ignorant is that? The reality is that the world is changing very quickly and the poorest countries that are poor, in part, because they don't have the abundance of resources that made us rich. They do have an abundance of other resources that are coming online today, here in the U.S. and  California and Texas where I live, and around the world, that will never run out on us. Renewable ways to get energy. People need energy, but it does not have to be the same way we've always gotten it. Now, there are a few countries in this area who do have resources, but when they have those resources they generally do not benefit the average person in the country. These are headlines from just the last few months looking at what's going on with terrible corruption scandals in Brazil, in Nigeria, in Venezuela. And who is suffering? The people who are poorest and most vulnerable are the ones who are suffering while the rich get even richer.
 
So the number one reason why, first reason I should say, why fossil fuels are not the answer for poor countries, is they don't actually have them in abundance. So the model that we've been using for three hundred years is not a model we can take and superimpose on other countries around the world because it just doesn't work. And that is a huge challenge for development because of course we like to do things the way we did them, right? Thinking outside the box, thinking of new and different ways to do it,  that's not what we are quite as comfortable with. So this is a huge challenge for us because to do it as we did it no longer works. It encourages colonialism. It encourages national debt. It continues to impoverish people even further.
 
What's the second reason why this is not the future? The second reason is that the extraction and the use of fossil fuels leaves behind a devastating footprint. This is what it looks like when you cut the top off a mountain. Why does that matter? It matters because, for example, what they're doing in West Virginia is poisoning the water ways. And what is happening as a result of that? Heavy metals and poisonous and dangerous chemicals are leaching into the water. And what are they doing? They are affecting people. Those of you familiar with the Evangelical Environmental Network, know that they talk about climate change and they talk about fossil fuel use and pollution, as a pro-life issue. It affects unborn babies.  It affects fetal development It affects children. It affects adults. It affects seniors. Pro-life doesn't stop at birth. Pro-life continues until we die. And, we care about pollution because it affects every aspect of God's creation, which includes us.
 
Not only that, it's not just the extraction that's the problem, and I could go on and on about what this looks like in Nigeria. I could talk about what this looks like in Venezuela. I could talk about what it looks like in Brazil. I could talk about the terrible oil spills. I could talk about the pollution of ecosystems and natural habitats that actually provided for people's welfare before they were damaged. I could talk about that, but that isn't the whole story, there's more. When we burn this stuff, when we burn coal and gas and oil, it produces a lot of air pollution. Now this is a number you might not have heard. It is a stunning number. Five million people die around the world every year from air pollution. Let me break that down. About two-and-a-half  die from burning fossil fuels, and about two-and-a-half die from cooking inside without proper ventilation because they don't have access to clean cook stoves. In the United States, two hundred thousand  people die every year from air pollution, mostly from burning fossil fuels and those people, where do they live? As you might guess, they live in neighborhoods where they can't afford to live anywhere better. So not just extraction, but also burning these fuels, increases the gap between the haves and have-nots. And these are just a few recent headlines looking at the issue of pollution in general. One in six deaths around the entire world is linked to pollution, is linked to something that we are doing to God's creation, that then comes right back to bite us in the rear, but the rear it bites is generally not the rear that actually caused it, if you know what I mean. One of the most profound issues with this is that it is unjust. The people who have the resources to produce the most pollution, have the resources to protect ourselves from that pollution. It kills, just to put it into perspective, three times more people than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, combined. And, no surprise, who bears the brunt of it. So reason number two why we can't do things the way we did them ourselves is because the burden of extracting and using these resources again falls disproportionately on the poor. And that brings us to reason number three.
 
Reason number three is not what you can actually see in this picture. What you're seeing in this picture is simply steam coming out of the smoke stacks. What you cannot see are the invisible heat-trapping gases that are released when we burn coal and gas and oil. Our planet has this amazing natural blanket. It's made up of carbon dioxide,  methane and water vapor. The sun's energy shines down and goes right through that blanket as if it were a window.  It hits the earth and the earth warms up. The earth gives off heat energy. But just like a blanket traps our body heat on a cold night, in the same way, this amazing natural blanket  traps the earth's heat, keeping our planet at almost sixty degrees Fahrenheit, at about thirty degrees Celsius, warmer than it would be otherwise. The problem is we are adding more of these heat trapping gasses to the atmosphere and we are in essence, wrapping an extra blanket around our planet. What would happen if you're sleeping at night and somebody snuck in, like my grandma used to do, and put an extra blanket over you? You'll start to sweat because you didn't need that blanket. That's what's happening to our planet. Our planet is running a fever. A fever that is a direct result of this extra blanket that we are wrapping around our planet.  

What about Natural Cycles?
 
Now, from year to year, earth's temperature goes up and down, up and down, that's weather, but over climate time scales of twenty to thirty years it's going up and up and up and up. We don't have to look at thermometers or scientific instruments to know the planet’s warming; all we have to do is open our eyes to what God's creation is telling us, often in our own backyards. We can look at how what used to be permanently frozen ground up in the Artic, is thawing and crumbling. We can look at how plants and trees are blooming weeks and weeks earlier in the year. We can look at how invasive species, like fire ants that were introduced to North America, are spreading Northward because, as our winters warm, they can establish colonies further and further North. And we can look at how sea levels are rising and how glaciers are melting. If we look around the entire world and God's creation do you  know how many independent lines of evidence there are that the world is warming? It's probably a few more then you thought.
 
Science can also tell us that we know that climate has changed in the past. Changes in energy from the sun, natural cycles. But science can also tell us that when we look at each of these natural reasons they have an alibi this time. When we look at energy from the sun our earth's temperature is going up. But energy from the sun, though it is increasing a little bit at the beginning of the century, it's going down now, not up. Can't be the sun. When we look at natural cycles over the course of human civilization on this planet there are no large natural cycles. And according to the ice age cycles we should be heading into the next ice age, not coming out of one. When we look at this planet, when we look at the history of us here on this planet, we can see that something funky started to happen just a couple hundred years ago, which is coincidental with what? When we started to dig massive amounts of coal and gas and oil out of the ground and burn it. Today the natural suspects have an alibi. It isn't natural. For the first time, it really is us.

Why Care about Climate Change
 
But then people might say, "Yeah, but, it's just about the polar  bear, right?" And to be honest, I mean, how many people here—you all travel very widely—how many people here, have seen a polar bear in the wild with their own eyes? Yes, two. Three. Three people. Yes. If this is the number one reason why we care about a changing climate you could give them the whole Northwest Territories. You could have a seal breeding  plant. There are many easier ways to keep polar bears alive if this is the only reason we care that the planet is warming. No, the reason why  I care that the planet is warming—and I told this to Polar Bears International, and they actually asked me to go visit  the polar bears with them—I said, "Well, the reason I care, is because it affects people. I care about a changing climate because it exacerbates the risk that we face today." And Polar Bears International said, "We study the polar bear because after the polar bear, we're next." I said, "Yes. That makes sense."
 
Why do we care about a changing climate? We care about it because it exacerbates the risks that we already know devastate people today. Rolling a double six is like that terrible hurricane or that drought that led to famine. Or that incredible heat wave or flood. What climate change is doing, is that it is sneaking in when we're not looking and is taking another one of those numbers and changing into a six, too. So all of a sudden the chances of rolling that double six went up. What do these double sixes look like in terms of their impact on us? They look like heat waves that are now killing thousands of people. They look like wildfires which always happen naturally but now they're burning larger and greater areas. They look like hurricanes, which are just a part of life in the Gulf of Mexico and typhoons that are just part of life in the South Pacific, but they're getting stronger because they get all their energy from warm ocean water, and the oceans are warming. They look like heavy rainfall, which is increasing around the world because warmer air holds more water vapor. And so the warmer it gets, the more water vapor there is up there for a storm to sweep up and dump on us. And this affects us. The floods, and the droughts, and the heat waves that we are seeing, the increases and heavy precipitation, they affect us whether we live in Southeast Asia or North America. The droughts have a profound impact on us whether we live in Texas or Syria. The stronger coastal storms and the thawing permafrost affects us whether we live in the Artic or whether we live on Long Island. And the heat waves affect us whether we live in Australia or Paris or Chicago or India. But the bottom line is this: if we look at a global map of who is most vulnerable to  a changing climate, this is what it looks like. So we don't just care about a changing climate because it exacerbates the risks that we face today. We care about it because it disproportionally affects the very people who we know, their physical needs are not being met today already.
 
And yet those physical needs are being exacerbated. Their suffering is being exacerbated today. And so today saying, "Oh, well I focus on hunger. My issue is hunger." or "I'm focusing on malaria." Or, "I'm focusing on providing water to this region." Or, "Helping them with sustainable agricultural practices." We can pour all of our  effort, and all of our money, and all of our time—we can send all of our students and all of our church members on mission trips, we can pray for them every week—but it's like pouring our money, and our effort, and our time, and our prayers, and our hope, into a bucket with a hole at the bottom, and the hole is climate change, and the hole is getting bigger and bigger. It is a threat multiplier. It is exacerbating the risks that people already face today, and that they're already suffering from today.

Empowered to Respond
 
So what does the response look like? One of my colleagues, John Holden, a scientist, said this. He said, “At this point we have three choices. We can reduce the impact we our having on our planet by figuring out different ways to get our energy and encouraging other people to use those ways. We can prepare for very different conditions. Or”, and this is very unusual word for scientists to say, but it’s a very familiar word to us, “we can suffer.” We are going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.
 
So how do we respond to this challenge? The Bible give us a litmus test. If we respond with fear to the messages that we are being bombarded with, that fear is not from God. God is not giving us a spirit of fear. And I love this because so much of what the input received these days is just fearful isn't it? The media thrives on fear. We react out of fear. Politics is all about fear. Fear doesn't come from God. What does come from God? God has given us three things. He has given us  a spirit of power. What does that mean? If you are empowered it means you have the power to act, right? So He has given us the ability to act. When you're afraid, how do you react? You might run really quickly. You have to run faster than the person beside you in order to escape from the bear. But long-term, we tend to freeze. Fear paralyzes us.
 
If we are empowered, we can act. If we love, we can have compassion on others. And if we have a sound mind, we can make good decisions. So, to put together a couple of other verses, not to take these out of context, but I think the context bears this out. Who are we? We are people who  the love of God has been poured out into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit, who was given to us. Why? So that Christ can dwell in our hearts through faith and that we, being rooted and grounded in love, like a plant, may do, each of us if we have purposed in our heart, not grudgingly or under compulsion. Now I know this verse is usually used to talk about what? Money, right? But, if you haven't learned this yet, I'm going to tell you this right now. There's something that is far more valuable than money, and that is time. What we choose to do with the seconds and minutes and hours and days we have on this planet, is our most valuable resource that we have that  God has given us.
 
So my question is, what can we do with our lives, with our time, that makes a difference? I love this though because it's not prescriptive. It's not saying this is the one thing everybody should or must do. What is the image for us? The image for us, is a body. One person is a kidney. Another person is a toe. Somebody else is a brain cell in the memory part. Each of us is a different part of the body and each of us has a different way that we can respond. It isn't a case of, here's the 10 Commandments of how to act. No, we've actually been set free to live out God's love to others in a way that expresses God and expresses our unique identity and characteristics. It goes into this further in Corinthians where it talks about how God's ministries are carried out everywhere. They all come from the same spirit. God is behind everything, but everybody has something different to do. We all have a different role to play. So, when we're confronted with these threat multipliers, when we are confronted with things that are making things worse, when we're confronted with these holes in the bucket that we have dedicated our entire life to try to fill, how can we respond? We can respond with love from the new heart that God has given us, but our response looks different depending on who we are, what our particular gifts are and skills, and what God has called us to do, where we are planted.

Talk about It!
 
One of the most important first baby steps on this journey though—and I do not know where this journey will take any of you, and I would love to hear about that—one of the first steps on this journey though, is a very simple step. It  is so simple that it almost sounds ridiculous. But, is the simple step of actually talking about it. Because did you know, across the United States, at least this is just for United States, three-quarters of people in the United States do not even hear somebody else talking about this more than once or twice a year? Why would anybody care it if you don't ever hear anybody talking about it, right? We talk about the things that we care most about. So that is why talking about this is so important.
 
What can we say? I'll give you a couple of examples. We can acknowledge that it is a real problem and it is affecting real people today in ways that matter. We can talk about our heart, and our compassion, and our care for people. We can actually engage in product projects to help people prepare, whether it's fog nets that trap water, which is needed more now than ever as temperature goes up water becomes less and less available. People are working to end energy poverty in ways that actually work. Seven hundred million of the over billion people who do not have access to energy, live in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are no power grids in Sub-Saharan Africa. But suggesting that people build a power grid is like suggesting they build a telephone grid. Nobody needs a telephone grid anymore of wires connecting poles. In fact telephone poles will be obsolete soon. We can do this in ways that actually matter and that will actually last because when you look at who has the most solar energy, it's pretty much exactly the opposite of who has most fossil fuels.
 
We can talk about how we can encourage each other to personal action. Climate Caretakers is the brainchild of several people here. And it is a way to build a community of believers who act together from the heart, convinced that we are called to make a difference in this world. In One Action, you get an email every month, one action, could be actually doing something,  another action can be praying for something, engaging all of who we are. There are churches who have decided that they're going to do an energy audit to save money, and then the money that they save they're going to actually add to their missions budget or to their urban ministry budget. There are churches that offer their roof as a solar panel garden to their community because it's a lot cheaper to buy into a big solar panel than to pay for your own on your roof. What a witness to their local neighbors that the church actually cares about their well-being and wants to help them get electricity that is under their own control and is actually rapidly becoming much cheaper. We can work together like Houghton College did, putting up the biggest solar panel array in all of New York State, putting to shame many big-state schools. Our organizations are internalizing this message too. It isn't that you need a special department to deal with this. No, it pervades everything that we do if we look at issues of justice like Micah Challenge does. If we look at restoring ecosystems like A Rocha does. If we look at engaging Evangelicals on speaking out about what we truly believe in who we are like Young Evangelicals for Climate Action does.
 
It is an integral part of who we are. It is not an extra add-in, plug-in piece. Because the bottom line is this: caring about God's creation, which includes the people and all the other living things that are already being affected by climate change today, it is a genuine expression of our faith. Is a faithful acceptance of our responsibility. And, most of all, it is a true expression of God's love. I'm going to close with words from one of my favorite Scientist, who is not a believer, but she captured this connection. Jane Goodall, after decades spent working with chimps, working in the field of science, after decades she said this, just recently, she said, "I've learned that it's only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony, that we can achieve our full potential." How much more can we do this when we're working with the new heart the God is given us, to love His creation, to love His people, and to care for those who are suffering around the world. Thank you.