The People of WWF's Global 200

Environmental Missions Prayer Digest
January 2012

Greetings!

Happy New Year!

I'm scheduled for a phone call today or tomorrow with a publisher whose biggest sticking point on my book manuscript seems to be my environmental reflections on people group theory. For a few decades now, the missions community has been profitably engaged in classifying the peoples of the world, with an emphasis on the "unreached," "least-reached," and "unengaged." For however much objective identification we might claim this work to be, there's a whole lot of subjective conceptualizing in our classifications. Exactly what cultural and linguistic factors make up this people group, as compared to that one? What other factors might be important?

There's actually a great deal at stake in people group theory. Sometimes it can uncover a people who have been hidden from the Gospel. We thought we were preaching to everyone, but we were only talking to the larger culture in which this people group had been subsumed and marginalized. People group classifications can help hone our message. But, as in anything, a "hardening of the categories" can also be harmful. In North India for example, our team spent a great deal of energy trying to reach a 19th Century vision of "the Brahmin caste," rather than a 21st Century version of "the emergent middle class."

Beginning in 2002, the World Wildlife Fund adopted an Ecoregion-Based Conservation (ERBC) strategy. They defined an ecoregion as "a large area of land or water that contains a geograph-ically distinct assemblage of natural communities that:

(a) share a large majority of their species and ecological dynamics;

(b) share similar environmental conditions, and;

With the help of the Nature Conservancy and other organizations, they reclassified this world of political boundaries and identified 825 terrestrial, 426 freshwater, and 229 coast and shelf marine ecoregions. From this number, they further identified 238 places which they consider "the most biologically distinct. . . ecoregions of the planet." They call these places the Global 200, and according to the subtitle of their fabulously-beautiful photobook, they are "Places That Must Survive."

Now, employing a definition of environment that understands it additionally as "that which surrounds those we love, those for whom Jesus died," then people can be understood as one of those species that live in, depend on, and alter for better or worse that ecoregion. For example, we could take a people group such as the Indian Bengali Hindu people and define them as we've traditionally done according to nationality/ethnicity/religious bloc. But what if we reconceptualized that group of people as "the people of the Sunderbans Mangrove" (#139 of the WWF Global 200.) What would that suggest for Christian love, evangelism, and church-planting strategy. What would it suggest for prayer?

In 2012. the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest wants to find out. Each month we'll feature a different people group from an unlikely source: the WWF's Global 200. Thank you for joining us for another year of prayer. (Although, if you bow your knee in the Sunderbans, you might sink in the mud. If you close your eyes, you might get eaten by a tiger.)

Link: WWF Global 200
Link: book Global 200: Places That Must Survive, viewable at Amazon.com here (orderable through your local bookstore)

Pray to Jesus for Tiger Protection
The people of the Sunderbans Mangroves (#139)

A necessary component in protecting tigers from people, is to protect people from tigers. The Sunderbans (literally "beautiful forest") constitute 1400 sq. miles of Ganges and Brahmaputra river delta in Bangladesh and India's West Bengal state. Tiger attacks are an established danger, especially for the honey collectors and woodcutters who must venture into the mangrove forest. There's a theory that the salinity of the tidal waters makes this population of tigers particularly aggressive.

Project Tiger employs many methods to deter the creation of man-eaters, and thus retaliation against, and destruction of tigers. They've succeeded in reducing annual casualties in India's Sunderbans tiger reserve from 40 a year to less than ten. One of the more synergistic methods is the use of solar panels which not only electrify villages but also keep tigers from straying into lighted encampments at night.

Villagers in India and Bangladesh, and not just Hindus but Muslims as well, have long sought the protection of the goddess Bon Bibi. Considered the "goddess of the forest," her lila, or drama, (pictured here) results in

the triumph over the demon Dakkhin Rai who appears in the disguise of a tiger. The Christian population of the Sunderbans is infintesimal, particularly on the Bangladeshi side, though there seems to be a sizeable group of Oriya Christians in West Bengal's South Twenty Four Parganas district.

Please join us in prayer:

That many people of the Sunderbans will turn from worshipping Bon Bibi and seek their salvation and protection in Jesus Christ.
That the Church in West Bengal and the Church in Orissa will reach out to this neighboring region, despite the difficult living conditions.
That our sovereign, unsleeping, merciful Lord will protect the honey collectors, woodcutters, fisherman, and farmers from tiger attacks.
For the success of Project Tiger and their many initiatives at many reserves across South Asia.

Link: Project Tiger: Sunderbans Reserve

Link: BBC Documentary Ganges: Sunderbans section posted on YouTube here

Photos: Tiger at Kanha (not Sunderbans): Flikr CC: Ashish Gautamm

Banbibr Puja: Flikr CC: Sayamindu

Watch for the launch of Eden Vigil's AGABUS PROJECT podcast in January 2012.

We look forward to serving your environmental missions prayers in the new year.
PLEASE PASS THIS PRAYER DIGEST ON TO THREE (3) OTHERS.

If you know of any environmental missions projects or prayer requests, please send them our way.

Lowell Bliss
Eden Vigil

Links: Contact the editors, Eden Vigil website, Donations to Eden Vigil