The Patriot Post® · Green Policies Mislead Christians With Creation Care

By Vijay Jayaraj

Over two weeks this summer, fire consumed more than 600 square miles of France and Spain, driving tens of thousands of people from their homes. The photographs are terrible and they are familiar. So is the explanation. Before the ash settled, ministers and press officers reached for the same word: climate.

But the tragic irony is that the very environmental policies, under the guise of climate action and green movement, are inadvertently exacerbating these very disasters, making wildfires more probable and devastating. Here’s why Christians should stop blindly embracing something just because it comes with the tag “green.”

The Science of Wildfire and the Situation in Europe

Fire requires three ingredients: heat, wind, and fuel. Fuel is the one variable human beings control, and Brussels has spent fifteen years passing laws that increase it. Under its Biodiversity Strategy, the European Union has committed member states to placing at least 30% of Europe’s land under legal protection by 2030, with a third of that area held under strict protection.

These targets call for more standing deadwood and denser canopy cover, both treated as marks of ecological health. But a forest managed to store the maximum quantity of biomass is a forest built to burn at maximum intensity. Examination of nearly 15 million hectares of burned forest intersecting almost 11,000 protected areas found that fire severity ran 20 percent higher inside Mediterranean protected areas. In southwestern Europe than elsewhere, and the imbalance is stark. Protected land makes up roughly 38 percent of the forest estate and roughly 55 percent of the area recently burned.

In previous decades, farmers cleared brush before the dry months. Villages burned small patches in cool weather so that large patches would not burn in August. But regulation ended both practices. Farmers wait months for permission to light a controlled burn their grandfathers lit without asking anyone. The scrub advances and the fuel load climbs season after season. Then a wind arrives from the south and Europe blames a carbon dioxide molecule.

In Direct Opposition to Christian Stewardship

For Christians, this debate should cut deeper than policy preference. It asks what it means to steward creation faithfully. The answer is not to baptize every fashionable climate agenda as if it were a biblical command.

Scripture calls us to care for the earth, but stewardship is not the same as sanctifying every regulation stamped with the word “green.” True stewardship is concrete. It asks whether a policy helps families live safely, whether it protects land from destruction, whether it honors the poor, and whether it uses the gifts of creation wisely.

The war on carbon dioxide should trouble you most of all. The gas is plant food. NASA satellites recorded an expansion of global leaf cover equal to twice the area of the continental United States, and researchers attribute about 70 percent of that greening to rising CO2. The molecule your pastor may be calling pollution is measurably making the earth greener and the harvest larger for the hungry.

Even worse, these policies raise energy costs by opposing fossil fuels. They burden the poor first. They romanticize untouched nature while making active care harder. They often reward elite virtue signaling over practical responsibility.

I grew up in India, where the deadliest air was not outdoors but inside the kitchen. Burning firewood, crop waste, and cow dung in unventilated rooms haw killed thousands and perhaps even some of my relatives in the small villages of Southern India. That all changed when families gained access to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). Household air pollution deaths in India fell 64 percent between 1990 and 2019, and the government has handed gas connections to tens of millions of poor households for one plain reason. The fossil fuel works.

Further, often ignored is the fact that the solution for pollution reduction lies not in abandoning fossil fuel energy sources but in advancing their use in more efficient ways. The environmental Kuznets curve illustrates this phenomenon: as economies develop, initial pollution may rise, but with increased wealth and technological advancement, societies gain the capacity and resources to address and reduce pollution effectively. This was demonstrated in Western society, which overcame smog-filled streets from London to Los Angeles.

Christians should be especially alert to the moral confusion at work. Much of the modern green movement rests on a different doctrine of man. It treats human beings as intruders in creation rather than image-bearers responsible before God. It will always lean toward guilt without wisdom. A faithful theology of creation does not ask us to reject prosperity. It asks us to order prosperity rightly.

So, the question is not whether we love the environment. The question is what kind of environmental care actually works. Does it improve soil, forests, air, water, and human life? Or does it satisfy political fashion while leaving landscapes more dangerous and people more miserable?

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, and a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds a M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University and has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.