Stewardship Campaigns in a Time of Climate Change

It's been a tough week or two in terms of reports of the future:  declining song bird populations and seas rising faster than we thought and hot blobs of water travelling through the oceans.  And yet down here in South Florida, it's a beautiful morning where it's finally temperate.  I heard more birds this morning than I've heard in a long time.

I thought, it's mornings like this one that lead to climate science deniers.  How can there be fewer birds?  I hear so many of them singing?

And yet, for those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, the signs are here.  Even on this morning with the songs of many birds, the water burbles up through the storm drains and seems up from the ground itself, a reminder of how close we are to sea level.

In a hundred years, my house will probably be underwater--literally.  In fifty years, it's quite possible that the house will be gone.  My floorboards are 2 feet above sea level.  I keep an eye on sea level rise, but can't quite figure out what to do.

This week people have been in New York for a UN Summit on Climate Change--of course, just assembling everyone made a big carbon footprint.  I don't have much hope that those folks will be able to come up with a good plan. 

And yet, I remain stubbornly optimistic about the future, although I do think the next 100 years will be one of the more difficult centuries in human history.

Fall is often the time that churches launch stewardship campaigns.  I suspect that most of them will not focus on the larger stewardship issue:  how will we care for the earth in this time of increasing challenges?