Sir Paul McCartney, a champion of environmental issues, has often praised Lexus for its commitment to developing hybrid vehicles. To honor the former Beatle and his support, the Japanese car company, who sponsored McCartney’ s tour in 2005, gave him a Lexus LS600H hybrid limo valued at £84,000 (US$163,400). But instead of shipping it to him in a green-friendly manner by boat, the car was sent by air freight. “He’ll be horrified after learning it was delivered by plane,” an unnamed source told the London Telegraph. “Paul has always campaigned for green issues and he can’t understand why anyone would send an enormous car from Japan to Britain on a plane.” The Telegraph reports that, according to the carbon-offsetting firm CO2balance.com, shipping the car by air resulted in a carbon footprint of 38,050 kilograms, while a three-week boat trip would have amounted to just 397 kilograms. Man, it must be a bummer for Sir Paul to “Carry That Weight.”

Recently I walked the back acres of our new land with some of my sons. We have a lot to do. Some hilly fields need to be cut soon, and there are beavers trying to dam our creek. There are a couple of fallen trees, and poison ivy in more places than I’d like. Lots to do. We came to the outer edges of acreage that has been taken over by hedge — twisted trees that spread out over the ground and yield long thorns. I thought about how we might reclaim that land in time, or perhaps forge a walking path through it. I only thought these things, but I noticed my boys beginning to beat down a thorny branch in order to make a path.

It’s wired into us, perhaps, this impetus for dominion over creation. But we don’t define that word very well. A thoughtless woman who gets more air-time than she should — and worse, is taken by millions as a representative of conservatism and Christianity, once said, of mankind and creation:

“God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”

It’s a reprehensible view, yet I wonder sometimes how often we Christians — especially those with a more conservative stripe — fall prey to it, especially if our theology tells us that God will soon whisk us away to a better place. We start treating creation as this broken play-toy that needn’t concern us (so long as it will yield up oil and coal a bit longer). Or we let our political affiliations drive our thinking, such that we dismiss the possibility of global warming, for example, because Al Gore said it’s so.

Even if we don’t give in to these biases, I know I, at least, often think about God’s creation as something for me, to be managed for my well-being. I’ve found Wendell Berry a valuable corrective in that regard:

“It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools.”

That doesn’t mean I should exalt nature over myself, any more than I should exalt myself over nature. But it suggests that dominion means stewardship, which in turn implies that the master will one day return, and he will ask: “How have you treated my creation?”

I don’t know about global warming, and energy sustainability, or any of the other things that virtually none of the talking heads seem to debate honestly. But I do know about my twenty acres. Before he signed the papers, the man selling us the land said he hoped I would be as good a steward as he had tried to be. I told him I would certainly try. And my family and I will, and not just because we want to enjoy the land ourselves. We’ll do it because some day there will be a reckoning, and “Rape the earth” will be judged for the crime that it is.

“For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong” (H.L. Mencken).

Take biofuels, for instance. As a solution to greenhouse emissions and the salvation of the universe, it sounded so good, so noble, so elegant. So Congress jumped on it like a duck on a june-bug and passed a bill last December mandating huge increases of the stuff. It was a political freebie: it made the environmental lobby happy, and conferred eternal job security on the agricultural industry. Farmers would make corn and lawmakers would make hay, and all would be right with the world.

Turns out the bill wasn’t fueled by science so much as popular political winds. The studies touting benefits of growing more corn, soy, and grasses to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and our dependence on fossil fuel neglected to factor land use into the equation. 25% of U.S. corn now goes to make ethanol. Since we still need corn for eating, and for feeding cows to make meat, we need to find the extra land somewhere, and we’re cutting down forests to get it.

When you cut down forests, you’re burning up all that carbon stored in the soil, and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — more than you’re diminishing by using ethanol in your automobile’s tank.

Tim Searchinger of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson school says “For every mile you drive with biofuel, you’re actually doubling greenhouse gas emissions.” Put that in your car and smoke it.

Using the empathetic backdrop of Earth Day, the Department of Transportation yesterday rolled out new car and truck fuel efficiency standards that it says will draw down America’s foreign oil dependence and carbon footprint. But they could also draw blood from already-wounded American auto manufacturers.

The proposed standard—which “improves” upon the one already passed by Congress in December’s Energy Independence and Security Act, of you-must-fade-out-incandescent-light-bulbs fame—would bump up the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, from 27.5 mpg to 35.7 mpg by 2015 for cars and from 23.5 mpg to 28.6 mpg by 2015 for trucks. (Congress nonetheless has to approve these changes, which incidentally still allow, as the current system does, manufacturers to pay a penalty for vehicles that don’t confirm to CAFE standards or to accumulate and apply credits to offset them.)

“All told, the proposal will save nearly 55 billion gallons of fuel and a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions estimated at 521 million metric tons,” Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in a statement. “The plan will save America’s drivers over $100 billion in fuel costs over the lifetime of the vehicles covered by the rule.”

Wall Street Journal business columnist Holman Jenkins isn’t convinced and calls it an “Earth Day hoax” that only suckers would think “amounts to a hill of biofuel soybeans.” Given the complexity of anything that must snake its way past Congress, as any new CAFE standards must by 2009, and given the recurrent fight this has reawakened over who actually has authority to set fuel efficiency standards, it isn’t likely to amount to anything before the current administration leaves, at least.

Critics argue its effects would be disastrous on the manufacturers. “On average, engine efficiencies have advanced by 1.5 percent per year for the last 20 years, with most of that gain going to size and horsepower—as demanded by consumers,” writes Henry Payne at National Review’s Planet Gore blog. “As a result, fuel mileage averages have been flat.” He argues that the industry, by executive-department fiat, would be forced to prize fuel efficiency over the customer. And in order to meet federal standards by 2015, Payne adds, “automakers will have to increase engine efficiencies by 4.6 percent per year”—effectively tripling manufacturers’ current gains at an additional cost of $2,500 to $8,000 per vehicle. (The government’s unsurprisingly more conservative guess is about $1,000, though, as Payne point out, Toyota’s TV ads trumpeting the fuel efficiency of its smallest non-hybrid—the Corolla, which gets only 30.5 mpg—pretty well encapsulates the challenge the mandate presents.)

The refrain is becoming familiar: As more Americans take up the banner of environmental sustainability, the more problematic and double-edged proposed solutions turn out to be, especially in the arena of fuels. Yesterday, ironically, the average price of gas broke $3.50 per gallon, and oil pushed past $120 per barrel. Consequently, 2008 could be the first year since 1991 to record a drop in gas consumption—in some respects, good news—but also leading presidential candidates to contradict themselves by “prattl[ing] on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline,” ex-Reason editor Virginia Postrel writes. The candidates, she says, treat CO2 emissions “as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world . . . reducing carbon dioxide emissions means consuming less energy and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with a tax or indirectly with a cap-and-trade permitting system.”

On this Monday after Earth Day, we can do penance for our weekend sin of not celebrating by reading “The Green Issue” of The New York Times Magazine.  In one piece called “Why Bother?” Michael Pollan talks about all the busy-ness of environmentalism, all the people running hither and yon with great enthusiasm and vigor, all doing something green.  But will it help?  Will toting a canvas bag to the grocery store really help?  Hard to say.  In one part, Pollen reminds us that walking or biking to work, while saving gas and money, may make you hungrier and needier of more calories, which actually grows your carbon footprint.  It’s like telling people that they can help end nuclear proliferation by refusing to rent the film Red Dawn.  Yes, communism has something to do with that film, but the connection is distant and the chain of cause and effect is too thin and unreliable.

But, Pollan says, there is one thing you can do that will be of immediate and tangible benefit, and it’s something we’ve talked about here before: planting a garden.

Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems - the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do - actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself - that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

Aside from the fearmongering of the whole “We’re all going to have to grow our own food in a few years if the Republicans stay in the White House” kind of implications of the above paragraph, I’d have to agree with the positives and pros of planting the garden.  It’s not too late this year, even. 

It seems that most every magazine out there has a special “Green” issue these days, and Time is no exception with its April 21 edition. For only the second time in its history, the magazine has forsaken its familiar red border, this time, of course, replacing it with green. To illustrate its cover headline, “How to Win the War on Global Warming,” Time chose to use Joe Rosenthal’s famous WWII photo of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. But instead of a flag, those brave men are hoisting a tree, which didn’t set well with some Iwo Jima veterans.

“Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,” said Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center. “The Japanese Empire in February of 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history. War analogies should be used sparingly by political advocates of all bents.”

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel defended his magazine’s cover choice yesterday on MSNBC: “[O]ne of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change. It seems to me that this is an issue that is very popular with the voters, makes a lot of sense to them, and a candidate who can actually bundle it up in some grand way and say, ‘Look, we need a national and international Manhattan Project to solve this problem and my candidacy involves that.’ I don’t understand why they don’t do that.”

This particular photo manipulation is hard for Time to defend. I mean, you don’t mess with Marines. Maybe they should’ve used another famous WWII photo, the Life magazine one of the sailor celebrating V-J Day in Times Square with a kiss, but instead of a nurse, he could be laying one on a tree.

The Vatican recently came out with a list of “new sins” for its constituents to avoid: drug use, pollution, economic injustice, and genetic manipulation. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Church’s official that oversees “matters of conscience,” discussed the new categories in the Vatican’s paper, l’Osservatore Romano. (Join the WMB discussion here.)

According to an AP newscast, the Vatican remains concerned about issues such as abortion and pedophilia, but an analyst for the Vatican said people are too obsessed with sex and that there are other, more important sins to take into consideration. Although one critic of the new injunctions thought the Vatican “gets its nose into too many things,” the Catholic Church is not the only religious entity redefining and refining its positions.

The Southern Baptists have also jumped on the “new sin” bandwagon, turning the focus from the more commonly invoked sins to climate change when Southern Baptist leaders drafted a declaration criticizing their denomination for being “too timid” on environmental issues. The leaders seek to change impressions that Southern Baptists are “uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed.”

With 60 percent of Italian Catholics no longer attending confession, this multi-denominational push to recognize a wider set of “sins” may be an effort to retain relevance in light of changing cultural values and scientific progress. The church’s emphasis on premarital sex and abortion arose from the same impulse in the wake the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade.

Providing people with a list of additional things to feel bad about may be even more alienating, though, especially in a culture that increasingly rejects sin itself as a concept. Some Jewish groups have decided to forgo the sticky issue of sin altogether, divesting religious practice of all reference to God, sin and repentance through the uncommon marriage of secular humanism and ancient liturgy.

Although expanding a list of sins and denying sin itself are opposite impulses, both show an evolution of religious practice and prompt questions of how faith can both accommodate culture and transcend it.

If you’re not a subscriber of WORLD — or if you are one and just can’t wait until it arrives in your mailbox — head on over to WORLDMag.com to check out the March 22/29 issue, hot off the server. Here’s just a mere sampling of what you’ll find in this HUGE 100-page issue:

Cover story: Marvin Olasky asks: What is campaign ’08 revealing about American culture? Plus a sidebar on Barack Obama’s church.

Abortion: WoW’s Alisa Harris on how faith is the motivating factor for pro-life volunteers.

Environment: Mark Bergin discusses the double standard in global-warming alarmism.

Military: Former hostage Kurt Muse shares with Lynn Vincent the story of the faith that lit the fire that freed the nation of Panama.

Thoughts: Insightful columns by Joel Belz, Gene Edward Veith, Janie B. Cheaney, Mindy Belz, Andrée Seu, and Marvin Olasky.

For all you non-subscribers out there, we’d love to have you join our family of readers and not miss out on all this magazine has to offer. Click here for more info. (And subscriptions make great gifts!)

After 23 million albums and 15 years of making music, Radiohead is going green. The British rock band recently released a statement saying that plans for their 2008 tour include efforts to “reduce their carbon footprint.” After an evaluation from an eco-consulting group, Radiohead decided to sea freight their gear (saving 47 tons of CO2) and encourage fans to carpool to concerts (reducing around 22% of a concert’s overall CO2 output).

Common reaction to Radiohead’s eco-ethics? The same reaction most green efforts are getting: “Cool.” Recently, however, a few have been brave enough to call this sexy movement something else: “ironic.”

Green is hip, from cradle to grave. Green cemeteries reduce the use of harmful chemicals and non-decomposing caskets are a popular green alternative. Bamboo bicycles use all-natural resources. Green graffiti uses grass to make its mark instead of toxic spray paint. Peanut butter and jelly is hyped as an eco-friendly lunch. The PB and J Campaign says eating one instead of tuna or a burger reduces carbon emission by 2.5 pounds.

It’s no surprise that “ecoanxiety” is growing. Last week the New York Times delved into the lives of 9000-plus EcoMoms with their cold-water laundry, waste-free school lunches, locally-grown dinners, energy-efficient power strips, and even recycled bath water. The women occasionally judge each other for having freshly cut flowers and wall-to-wall carpeting, but one SUV driver said, “It doesn’t fill me with guilt. I think about all the things I’ve done so far.”

Laura McKenna, a political science professor from New Jersey, says the irony of the hip green movement is that the truly green are the “totally unhip.” She says the real environment-lovers are those who wear old clothes, don’t renovate bathrooms, and shop at garage sales. Her advice to the EcoMoms and environmentally anxious graffiti artists: “Stop recycling your San Pellegrino bottles and drink tap water.”

Covers made from synthetic materials are out and specialty papers, fabrics, and other eco-friendly materials are in at Thomas Nelson Inc., as the Bible publisher attempts to go green. “In moving away from oil-based covers we’re not only honoring our customers’ needs, but we’re also honoring our Godly calling to be good stewards of the things He has given to us,” said Wayne Hastings of Thomas Nelson’s Bible group. And for you traditionalists out there, don’t worry; the company will continue to produce leather, bonded leather, and hardcover Bibles.

HT: Tim Challies