April 21, 2008

Want to green your life in honor of Earth Day on Tuesday? Good luck. There's seemingly no limit to the potential catch-22s of trying to do the right thing by the environment.

For example, could so-called green fuel destroy rainforests and drive up food prices? Are organic vegetables shipped from South America really better than those grown conventionally yet closer to home? What if the making of solar panels would pollute a city in China?

Consumers are far removed from the design, mining, manufacture, packaging, and transportation involved in making goods available for daily life, while a complex global supply chain and lack of labeling can make it impossible to size up the true ecological costs of things. Still, a growing number of choices enable baby steps at the very least, which can add up to collective change.

What's your footprint?

Even though I don't own a car, the world's population would still need the resources of more than three planets if everyone followed my lifestyle, according to the environmental footprint calculator from the Earth Day Network. The group also offers a version for kids.

A number of similar quizzescome from services selling offset programs, which invite you to donate money meant to make up for your carbon emissions, such as by funding clean energy or planting trees. Popular offsetting services include Terrapass, Carbonfund, Native Energy, and Live Neutral. However, offsets are controversial and often mocked.

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April 17, 2008

As 41,000 devout Catholics crowd the new Washington Nationals Stadium this morning for a Holy Mass led by Pope Benedict XVI, animal protection is not likely to be on their minds.  Amid the great questions of war, justice, and life, animals might also appear a humble concern for the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. But the Pope himself has suggested that the issue of animal protection is far from irrelevant to the Catholic faith.

When a German journalist put the issue to the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 2002, he received a surprising answer. The Pontiff-to-be called the issue "very serious," detailing his theological belief that animals are God’s creatures, deserving of merciful treatment by man.    

Ratzinger specifically attacked the practice of factory farming, which affects 10 billion animals in America each year. "Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible," he said.   

Yet the average American church is strangely out of tune with the Pope's sentiment.  American preachers seldom mention animal rights, except as evidence of the excesses of secular radicalism. National polls show an inverse correlation between church attendance and support for animal rights.  Churches celebrate the blessing of the animals on the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, and then largely ignore animal ethics for the rest of the year. 

This is partly because the animal rights movement has proven so uninviting to Christians. Peter Singer, whose 1975 book "Animal Liberation" began the modern movement, is an outspoken atheist and proponent of euthanasia. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ traveling trailer featuring a model of a vegetarian Jesus seated at the last supper with notable vegetarian “disciples” Paul McCartney and Cesar Chavez didn’t make a great impression when it pulled up at the Southern Baptist Convention last June.

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