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Finding balance between heating our homes and preserving Earth

by Shantha Ready Alonso, executive director, Creation Justice Ministries - 09/09/15 6:46 PM ET

I was disappointed by the inflammatory language chosen by Kathleen Sgamma in her Aug. 28 Congress Blog post, “Regulatory obsession means war on oil and gas.” Suggesting our government is undertaking an “ideological regulatory war” is misleading and impoverishes civil discourse about some of the most important sustainability and justice issues we face today.

I hear often from Christian faith communities in my organization’s membership about their integrated needs. What is “ideological” is to draw a false dichotomy between the need to provide for your family and the need to be healthy. Most communities understand our shared responsibility to find a balance between needing to heat our homes today while also doing our best to preserve our common home — God’s earth — tomorrow. Furthermore, it is shameful to waste God’s gift of methane. It is a finite resource that oil and gas companies can and must do a better job of stewarding, rather than allowing it to wastefully waft into the air.

{mosads}Lastly, Sgamma’s claim that methane and carbon are natural and harmless requires clarification. We know human activities have created imbalance in the concentration of these elements in the atmosphere, and this imbalance is accelerating dangerous climate change. Many faith communities are actively engaged in relief and development work, and we are already seeing the devastation of climate change on our food systems, our coastline communities and our public health.

I urge Sgamma to turn down the heat on the combative rhetoric. Instead, let’s collaborate to turn down the heat on God’s earth.

From Shantha Ready Alonso, executive director, Creation Justice Ministries, Washington, D.C.

Are we really alone in the universe?

It’s time to find out whether there are other forms of life in the universe. Sending a space probe on a large-scale international quest to look for signs of advanced civilizations should be pursued now. We owe it to ourselves to commit the time and resources to mount such an effort.

In the last few years, astronomers have discovered thousands of stars beyond our solar system. And it appears that most stars have a planetary system. Many of them have a planet similar to the size of our own. There are likely billions of Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. And astrophysicists like Stephen Hawking of Great Britain and Neil deGrasse Tyson of the United States say that probably means there’s life out there somewhere.

Today we have the tools — and know-how — to conduct a search far into the cosmos. Such an ambitious mission can’t be done by government alone, but it can’t be done without leadership and funding from government. In a call to action, 30 prominent people — mainly astrophysicists and others with international reputations like the American astronaut Mark Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov and Nobel Prize Laureate James Watson — co-signed a letter to the world’s leaders to move in search of opportunity. Just as the Kennedy administration actively nurtured the first space missions, the idea now is to mount a multinational cosmic probe to seek other forms of life.

In their letter, scientists advocating a large-scale international space effort maintain that the biggest questions of our existence are at stake. “Are we the Universe’s only child — our thoughts its only thoughts? Or do we have cosmic siblings — an interstellar family of intelligence?”

That’s something to think about. Given the diversity of life on Earth, one might expect diversity among extraterrestrial beings. Let’s find out. It’s time.

From William H. Miller, professor emeritus, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Mo.