Noah Was an Environmentalist

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Shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, I was touring the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward with local environmental justice advocate Margie Eugene-Richard. Convinced that God needed to be reinserted into the environmental debate, Richard had recently graduated from theology school. We were driving that day through a post-apocalyptic landscape of boats dangling in trees and houses smothering cars, and God was clearly on her mind. “Wake up,” she said to an unseen congregation. “As it was in the day of Noah, so shall it be on the day of the Son of Man. Get together.”

Nearly a year after the hurricane struck, many evangelical Christians seem to have heeded Richard’s advice. Or at least started listening to some unlikely prophets. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s global warming opus, has earned rave reviews on the aptly dubbed website Inconvenient Christians. The website is helping build on the work of the Evangelical Environmental Network, a group that has angered some fundamentalists by seeking to broaden the right-wing conception of family values. Some interesting blogs have begun to chronicle this nascent movement, among them, God’s Green Thumb, published by a student at Pontifical University in Rome.

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