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Environmental Missions Prayer Digest
November/December 2010 |
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Greetings!
Merry Christmas from our family to you and yours. We're taking a cue from N.T. Wright this year and actually highlighting Easter in our climactic sense of a celebratory year. Nonetheless, the hope of resurrection was present right there in the first breath that the Christ child drew. We love Christmas!
Are you praying for the climate negotiations being conducted right now in Cancun? If so, how are you praying? We'd love to be instructed by your intercession. Drop us a line.
This year-end issue of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest wants to introduce you to Jim Ball's new book Global Warming and the Risen Lord, but will use a single prayer issue from the book to make that introduction--namely the use of inefficient cook stoves across the Tibetan plateau and the resulting pollution. But first, let's pray for Mongolia. Since real, large-scale efforts to mine Mongolian resources are only now getting underway, maybe we can discover a model for praying about new mining projects, wherever they might be proposed in the world.
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(Inevitably) mining the riches of Mongolia
The environmentally-missions-minded, when they want to pray about mining operations worldwide, are well advised to begin with the words of Job 28 (NLT). Perhaps the first surprise is the level of technical knowledge that already existed in Job's pre-Abrahamic times:
1 "People know where to mine silver
and how to refine gold.
2 They know where to dig iron from the earth
and how to smelt copper from rock.
3 They know how to shine light in the darkness
and explore the farthest regions of the earth
as they search in the dark for ore.
4 They sink a mine shaft into the earth
far from where anyone lives.
They descend on ropes, swinging back and forth.
But, the issue is rarely technical expertise. Job concludes with a startling question:
12 "But do people know where to find wisdom?
Where can they find understanding?
This wisdom, Job goes on to argue, is worth more than gold, silver, onyx, lapis lazuli, crystal, coral, jasper, rubies, or Ethiopian peridot.
The riches underground are as much part of God's great bounty in creation as the God-given ingenuity which humans use to extract them. Furthermore, if any environmental issue has an air of inevitability about it, it is that new mines will almost always be sunk wherever mineral wealth is discovered--this, despite wh atever opposition might mount against them. This air of inevitability is quite evident in the multi-billion dollar mining ventures only just now getting underway in Mongolia's gold, copper, tin, uranium, and coal fields. As Onodelgerekh Ganzorig of the Mongol Environmental Conservation says, "We fought for eight to ten years to stop mining companies, and it doesn't happen. Why? Because it happens with or without you. Because it's what the other half of the people want. It's an economic development concept."
What if we who prayed for environmental missions turned our intercession to Wisdom? As reporter Brian Awehali (see Earth Island Journal link below) concludes from Ganzorig's comments: "The practical question, then, becomes how to have mining operations without losing other important environmental or cultural resources." Wisdom might shut down some operations, but might guarantee that other operations proceed with less human, environmental, and cultural damage.
Please join us in praying:
Awehali summarizes best and worst case scenarios for new mining ventures, particularly where the drive of economic development makes such ventures inevitable. He writes:
"Even in a country with advanced environmental laws and strict enforcement, the very best case scenario for a mine involves an accident-free exploration and extraction phase followed by an aggressive long-term, well-funded reclamation plan that creates some approximation of the natural order that went before."
Gracious Lord, may it be so!
Awehali further writes:
"There is no single worst-case environmental scenario for a mine. It could be staggering levels of water consumption, poisoned watersheds, or toxic silt-choked rivers that asphyxiate fish. It could be gaping open-pit mines and a surrounding dead zone created by any number of toxins leaching into the ground, or areas known in the mining industry as glory holes, where "block-caving" operations, which involve blasting deposits into tunnels dug below, create large areas of permanently unstable earth on the surface.
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Merciful Lord, heaven forbid!
And let's continue to pray for Christ's Church as it continues to grow in Mongolia. May many more Mongolians--nomadic herders, vegetable farmers, precious metal miners, and emerging environmentalists among them-- hear the Good News of Jesus Christ. May rigorous discipleship of new believers plunge the depths of the treasures available in Him.
Link:Earth Island Journal: Under the Eternal Sky: Multinational Mining Hordes Eye Mongolia's Earthly Fortunues
Link: NatGeo Video: Mongolian Mining
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Black carbon particles--"soot"--responsible for warming effect, and for respiratory illnesses
We at Eden Vigil have anticipated the chance to read Jim Ball's new book Global Warming and
 | | See links below for a full review of this new book by Jim Ball. |
the Risen Lord. Jim is the Executive Vice President for Policy and Climate Change at the Evangelical Environmental Network, and few evangelicals have thought as long and as biblically about climate change as he. A new issue emerging in the climate change picture is the effect of black carbon particles ("soot") which can't be classified as a green house gas but can have a substantial warming effect. This is particularly true of the black carbon produced by cooking fires (wood, charcoal, dried cow patties) which subsequently comes to rest on the glaciers of the Himalayas. As Ball writes, "The black carbon particles in the mix are darker than the snow and ice on which they land. This reduces the ability of the ice and snow to reflect back the sun's rays and simultaneously absorbs the heat--a global warming one-two punch."
Of course, long before soot enters the atmosphere, it fills the small kitchens and cooking sheds of families poor enough that charcoal and cow patties are all they can afford to cook on. Breathing such household pollution renders the women and children who work there susceptible to TB and other respiratory diseases, leading to over 400,000 premature deaths, according to Ball.
 | | First Energy's "Oorja" stove is already being produced in India and uses pelletized agri-residue. |
Ball quotes one study that claims that "black carbon emissions could be reduced 70-80% in South Asia and 20%-40% in East Asia by using stoves that don't produce black carbon (e.g., solar or biogas stoves.)" More efficient burning stoves are another solution.
Please join EEN in praying:
- for the successful distribution (sales!) of more efficient stoves throughout Asia and Africa.
- Cook stove distribution could be a wonderful platform for an environmental missions project. Pray that the Lord would raise up missionaries who would take up this opportunity.
- Pray for protection for the women and children who work in small, polluted kitchen spaces.
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What should we pray in 2011?
We are always asking that question of God, not only because we need to publish a new prayer digest next month, but because we want to be praying for that ministry, people group, or issue where God Himself is ready to act. If you would like to suggest a prayer focus, please contact us.
full of hope...by faith!
Robynn Bliss
Eden Vigil
Links: Contact the editors, Eden Vigil website, Donations to Eden Vigil
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