How many trees does it take to supply an entire church with bibles?
Well considering the average congregation size is about 75, and you can print about 80,500 pages from one tree, and the average bible is about 1,200 pages, it would take roughly a tree and a fifth to print enough bibles for the average congregation.
If you take the estimate of 350,000 congregations in the US, and do the math, that's twenty-six and a quarter million people going to church every Sunday. How many trees does it take to supply twenty-six and a quarter million people with bibles? Roughly 392 thousand trees.
That's a lot of trees we're cutting down for the sake of worship and study, but environmental protection still isn't on the list of important matters to Christians everywhere. People like Joel Osteen are living in fossil-fuel heaven homes worth millions of dollars, completely ignoring what is happening to our environment. Moral? I guess to a Christian, but not to me.
You see, there is a widespread Christian belief that humans are the most important species in existence; that "man is more valuable than sparrows (Luke 12)." I see the hubris is not new of man; however I don't know what exactly prompted man to think they were so glorious. I personally disagree with the fact that man is the most important species, but we will set that aside for a second. If man is, in fact so important, then why aren't the majority of God-fearing folk fighting to keep our environment safe?
It's not new information that the food chain and environmental equilibrium is extremely fragile. We depend on those beings that may seem like an annoyance to us, like bees. As I'm sure you've heard, honey bees pollinate our crops, so we can grow food to sustain the human population. But in the last few years, these little farmers have seen tremendous colony collapse and they seem to be dying off faster and faster. Why? Because of humans. We're pushing global temperatures higher and higher by continuously pumping carbon into the atmosphere with our near-total dependence on fossil fuels. We are destroying ecosystems with our destructive strip-mining and fracking practices. We don't collectively think it's a big deal, but without critters like bees and earthworms, and without things like clean water, we can't survive. One of my favorite sayings as of late is, "You can't eat money, you can't drink oil."
Yet, here we are, practicing in churches that suck electricity like Big Gulps and we don't think twice about the havoc we are causing by pumping carbon into the air, making the hole in the ozone bigger, causing global temperatures to rise and hit record highs. We're killing ourselves by overindulging ourselves, with the luxury of trucks that spill black smoke on rev and barreling through protected grounds to make way for pipelines that could contaminate the very water that we drink. We're cutting down thousands of trees per year to print new hymn books for our new (tax-exempt) churches and feeding the pockets of the Osteens and the Meyers. Damn, it seems to me that something's got to give if we want to keep living at all.
Even if man is superior, according to Christianity, why isn't saving ourselves taking a front seat? Why aren't we thinking rationally about the consequences of our actions, no matter how distant they may be? I just want to shake everyone saying that these things don't matter, because they do, and we need to wake up and take notice of what we are doing to the world we live in, or we won't be living much longer.
In the tradition of Christianity, I want to remind you of this:
God didn't create man first for a reason; he needed a habitat before he could survive.
