One study showing that religiosity leads to harmony between science and religion comes from Baylor University, where researcher Aaron Franzen finds that increased frequency of Bible reading is tied to, among other things, improved attitudes toward science. “Respondents were 22 percent less likely to view religion and science as incompatible at each step toward more frequent Bible reading,” according to David Briggs, who reported the Baylor study for Association of Religion Data Archives. (Interestingly, higher rates of Bible reading were also correlated with greater support for social and economic justice, simple lifestyles, humane treatment of criminals, and with lower support for abortion, same-sex unions, the death penalty, and the expansion of the war on terrorism.)

Interesting this week that the Obama administration was derided for giving in to “anti-science” pressure when it blocked over-the-counter access to the “morning after” pill for minors. Those pundits are willfully ignorant about what is science and what is morality, thinking that measurements of a drug’s effectiveness ought somehow to determine whether a minor should be able to access it without adult guidance or parental input. The same goes for claims that opposition to fetal stem cell research is somehow anti-scientific. One can certainly accept that experimenting on human embryos may lead to advances in scientific knowledge, while at the same time affirming that it is entirely immoral to conduct such research.

Creation care opponents have thrown caution to the wind. Emboldened by demagogues like Glenn Beck, they’re not averse to painting as “totalitarians” anyone even slightly concerned about pollution, resource conservation, biodiversity loss, or energy efficiency.

The Washington Times published a piece on May 19, 2011, by creation care critic Cal Beisner purporting to reveal the “hidden dangers” in the National Day of Prayer for Creation Care, which was sponsored by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). Among their “dangerous” prayer requests: reducing mercury pollution that passes from pregnant mothers to their unborn babies.

Aside from being a worthy cause in its own right, the campaign seemed to me to be good apologetics as well. Here were evangelical Christians claiming publicly that God’s call to compassion and wise dominion extends to stopping air pollution that affects our most vulnerable citizens, growing the credibility of the pro-life witness by linking it to more than fighting abortion (the frequency of which, we must all admit, remains our greatest current national travesty), and doing so with smart, well-documented research and policy recommendations. I personally know of formerly pro-choice environmentalists who have changed their positions on abortion because of encountering pro-life evangelical environmental advocates.

But the most visible anti-environmentalists never let concerns about the church’s witness in the world overcome their fundamental desire to fight even the suggestion that democratically elected governments might use their regulatory authority to protect the environment. The libertarian ends consistently trump the means, and evangelism tends to be the first casualty, with regard for truth a close second.

In Beisner’s critique, he constructed two straw-man claims that EEN’s materials didn’t make; and even the way he rebuts the fictitious claims reveals a lot about his commitments.

Beisner said EEN claimed “the main source of mercury pollution is dirty air released by coal-burning power plants” and that international sources are more important. Beisner apparently didn’t read the materials he was criticizing, because they didn’t say what he said they did. Apparently the Washington Times can’t afford fact-checkers. EEN gave a quite detailed explanation on the sources of mercury pollution, and the relative contribution of domestic and international sources, which varies from place to place (they even provided a map).

But the reason Beisner invented that red herring is that he sniffed out an attempt to strengthen regulation on emissions from coal-fired power plants. He challenged a fictitious version of EEN’s claims about sourcing, because he didn’t want to draw attention to their well-researched claims about the economic benefits from regulating mercury emissions (which predict $60-140 billion in total health benefits, or a return of $5-13 for every $1 invested in meeting the regulations).

It wouldn’t be surprising, when we look back from the future, if the costs of limiting mercury went down relative to predictions and the benefits went up. That’s been the case with other environmental regulations as well—something even those opposed to regulations at the time now admit. Since we enacted the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the economy has grown 64 percent while air pollution has gone down 41 percent, a puzzle to those who predict economic collapse in the face of strong environmental regulations.

Beisner goes on to accuse EEN of being a mouthpiece for the environmental lobby, repeating someone else’s suspect talking points about how bad mercury is for fetuses. But he ignored the peer-reviewed scientific literature the EEN documents clearly cite—again, he simply makes stuff up about EEN and its campaign to suit his own rhetorical purposes.

Beisner gives a drastically lower figure for unborn babies afflicted with unsafe levels of mercury in their blood—but he doesn’t say where he got his figures. So it turns out that Beisner committed the vice he (wrongly) accuses EEN of. EEN cited multiple studies that demonstrate not just how many infants are affected by mercury in utero but also to what degree, and (crucially) puts a dollar value on the health benefits of mercury pollution reductions.

I’m sympathetic to the problems of exaggeration and the nuances of weighing costs and benefits. I railed in the past about the irrational fears some parents have about the tiny amounts of mercury in vaccines, when the private and public health benefits from being vaccinated so far outweighs any negligible risk. Atmospheric mercury emissions are a different case—but it’s an empirical question, not an ideological question. Because Beisner is motivated chiefly by a libertarian worldview, he simply assumes that the costs of reducing mercury emissions will outweigh the direct and indirect benefits, when the best evidence shows that the reverse is actually true.

Beisner is certainly a devoted advocate. He is faithful to his ideology and political positions and tireless in their defense. There is indeed a strong case to be made for the free market and for capitalism; environmental policies for a flourishing economy would be much better if they reflected the concerns of economic conservatives. That case is not made stronger, however, by a sloppy critique that runs roughshod over facts or by deafness to reasonable counterarguments.

Beisner cites, without apparent sense of the irony, 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (in reference to prophecies, the readers are told to “test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil”). Free market advocacy and creation care advocacy can be done with care, rigor, and honesty. When the lost world is watching the way we argue, it is a necessity.

A natural resource economist, Rusty Pritchard is the cofounder and president of Flourish (FlourishOnline.org), a national Christian ministry that serves Christians as they grow in environmental stewardship, healthy living, and radical discipleship.

Read for yourself.

It also doesn’t sound very interesting.  The main common features of interfaith gathering are that they are usually very poorly attended, and sometimes pretty dull. Those features are related. There just aren’t that many people out there looking for interfaith events to attend. And running our deeply help beliefs through a filter of what everyone has in common tends to screen out the things that give us a real identity. Interfaith events tend to attract the people who are at the edges of their religious traditions, escaping from the core, who are finding freedom in cosmopolitanism and universalism. But they wind up talking in vague platitudes about actual faith, or grossly misrepresenting their traditions.

All of the interesting things about religions are particular things. What makes me a Christian, rather than a Jew, or a Muslim, or anything else, is that I subscribe to a certain number of particular claims about events that I believe actually occurred in human history. I also believe a lot of particular things about God’s revelation to us. I have in some ways a lot more in common with Muslims who are glad to be Muslim, and who know why they are Muslim, than with Christians who are watering down their faith to find the least common denominators.

The abstract things that I believe in common with some other religions are not what makes me a Christian. But they are the things that make me human.

Our commonalities, if they exist, are found in ancient history, not in where we’re going but in where we’ve been–as a Christian I would say we share the image of God, and we are called as image-bearers to tend and keep what is good in human culture and in the rest of creation. There’s a lot of room to care for the common good. The Bible-believers (like me) point out that our charge to steward creation comes long before the special revelation to Abraham and his descendants. Genesis 1:26-28 points to a common humanity and common responsibility we share with all people, not just our co-religionists. I find it useful to point out that the religions are not climbing the same mountain, only to be surprised to meet each other at the top. Where we can get along and work together is down at the foot of our mountains, not at the summits.

Working for the common good can therefore be more than what Francis Schaeffer called “co-belligerency.” Co-belligerency happens when people who would otherwise despise each other agree to hold their noses and work together on an issue (as when feminists and conservatives work together to fight pornography). They may agree on a particular policy, but got there for very different reasons. Common good issues call us back to the most ancient fundamentals of responsibility to something bigger than ourselves, and in the process reminding ourselves of what it is to be human. Even Christians

True believers in other religions are happy when we acknowledge that there are real differences between us. True believers in a squishy interfaithism are less happy to hear that we don’t think we’re climbing the same mountain to God. Perhaps we should have separate meetings for those who believe in the truth of their traditions and those who don’t.

My ground rules for interfaith events:

(1) I’ll be speaking and interacting as a Christian, though I’ll be nice about it.

(2) I don’t do interfaith worship or prayer services. The more something looks like a worship service, the more it should be particular and not general. I’m happy to visit someone else’s church, temple, or mosque, but I don’t want them to blend it with my tradition.

(3) I won’t try to tell people from other religions what their religions say (or should say). I think it is at best meaningless, and at worst unfuriatingly patronizing, for Christians to tell Muslims that Islam is a religion of peace. It means rather more for a faithful Muslim to say it. I don’t want Unitarians telling me what I should believe about the Eucharist and organic food, or eschatology and environmental action. I’ll look to Christian thinkers to help me with that.

NOTE: There are environmental organizations in many states that go by the name “Interfaith Power and Light”. They do good work, helping houses of worship become more energy efficient. They also organize religious people to advocate for policies that fight global warming. They’re obviously pretty wedded to the name at this point, but the name helps to explain why evangelicals have not flocked to their programs. Oh, and the fact that they believe in that whole global warming thing…

Some of the most cherished words in the environmental movement were never uttered by the Native American chief to whom they are attributed. The famous “Chief Seattle” speech that contains the lines above was made up for a Southern Baptist film project about pollution in 1971 (thanks to Russell Moore for the trivia tip).  The writer, a professor of film named Ted Perry, was under contract to do the script, and he imagined what Chief Seattle might have to say about the environmental problems of the day. The words are moving–so moving that people soon forgot they were invented, and they took on a life of their own.

Conservation writer and activist Andy Kerr has what looks like a fairly complete history of the origins of the speech Chief Seattle never actually made. Snopes.com has a standard copy of the Chief Seattle address.

According to another account of the speech’s origins, Perry’s version was edited to make it more Christian. The version most folks see does contain a fair amount of religious language. It’s more feel-good, pop theology than anything derived from Christian (or Jewish) scriptures (this was done in an era before theological conservatives began to ramp up the quality of Southern Baptist theological reflection). But you see the language cropping up often in environmental writing, and even in scholarly work (!). Al Gore apparently quoted the fake speech in his book Earth in the Balance. You can even find a Chief Seattle quote on the website of the Environmental Protection Agency.

So which is more shocking–(1) that so many people love and adore a fake speech, (2) that in the 1970s Southern Baptists were producing films about pollution, or (3) that environmentalists so often quote a Southern Baptist document?

You can see an example of current Southern Baptist engagement with environmental theology by watching pastor and former SBC president James Merritt preach on the “Theology of Ecology”. Merritt would never have countenanced the dodgy theology of the Chief Seattle speech. He puts Christian environmental thought on a stronger Scriptural footing.

The real Chief Seattle was actually a Catholic, and he did give a speech, but the records are very poor on what he said. The much-published 1971 version has been revealed to be fake repeatedly, starting back in the 1990s,  in publications such as Omni, Newsweek, and the New York Times (which published a front-page article on the myth of the Chief Seattle speech).

In our conversation, Tom raised the question of how computers and our use of them affects our social, spiritual, emotional development. Our use of computers changes us in some pretty fundamental ways. I shared with him a little about things we’ve been posting at Flourish about children, videophilia and nature-deficit-disorder, the roots of (literal) myopia, and Sabbath.

As so often, since that conversation I’ve come across more and more material about the connections between computers, morality, and elemental sociality–

1. At Flourish, my friend Kristyn Komarnicki, editor of PRISM magazine, write about the things she learned when she went on vacation without her laptop. For one thing, she was challenged about the way she worked the rest of the time, preaching to her kids about too much computer time but keeping her laptop open nights and weekends.

2. Another post, a panel interview actually, at Big Questions Online, asks “is the cyber-mob a threat to freedom?” This post has more to do with pathological social organization than with individual moral development, but they are related.

3. Alan Jacobs, who rarely disappoints, asks “why has Internet discourse devolved into a ‘war of every man against every man?’ ” One paragraph describes the strange passions ignited by online debates:

The author and commenters bristled at my critique. I bristled right back. The argument escalated. At one point, I said to myself, “All right, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball” — and I would have cut loose and said exactly what I wanted to say, except that at that moment my hands were shaking too violently for me to type accurately. I looked at my trembling fingers for a moment. Then I closed that browser tab and spent a few minutes removing all …[the related] blogs from my bookmarks and my RSS reader. I stopped reading those blogs and have never looked at them again to this day. I don’t think I’ve ever made a better decision.

Implicit in all of this is the sense that we may not have been created (or that we “didn’t evolve”) to cope with the high-tech, anonymous, hyperconnected, high-energy environments we now have created, so we might be prone to infelicitous side-effects. Kind of like we aren’t well adapted physiologically for automobile domination, given that the leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 1 and 24 is car accidents, and the obesity epidemic is more linked to the decline of walking and rise of automobile transportation than to changes in diet or organized sports.

Taken together, modern technologies quite a lot more mundane than genetic engineering and stem-cell research raise the question of what it means to be truly, fully human. I hope that some of the intellectual heft behind natural theology can eventually be put toward some of these extensions of the “theology of the body.”

As usual, the media have the wrong end of the stick. They should be featuring you and me in their stories, not to get a man-in-the-street perspective, but to berate us as the real culprits.

The blame for the unfolding tragedy, which will affect people as well as animals, economies and ecosystems, resides with all energy users. We are driven to drill in ecologically sensitive areas because people like me and you demand cheap electricity and gasoline. It is at our implicit and anoymous direction that the proximate culprits undertake known risks to the healthy functioning of productive oceans, marshes, and beaches, not to mention the danger posed to oil rig workers (like the 11 workers whose deaths are now barely mentioned by the media).

We don’t chant “drill, baby, drill,” but we might as well.

Such disasters are not “inconceivable,” as BP PLC Chairman Lamar McKay said on Sunday. They are to be expected if we continue using energy the way we have in the past. It is more than conceivable that more drilling in more dangerous places and difficult environments will lead to more accidents. Oil companies are willing to take those risks with their workers’ lives and with other people’s livelihoods. We do more than permit them to do so; we demand that they do so.

In last month’s energy atrocity in the Appalachians, there was a similar unwillingness to admit that we are all culpable, with some notable exceptions. Most attention focused on Massey Energy Company and it larger-than-life, bad-as-he-wants-to-be chief Don Blankenship. As villainous as the CEO appears, he can claim his company is, like the tobacco companies, merely delivering a legal product that people want to use. It’s true. And there were lax federal regulators to share the blame in that tragedy as well.

The side effects of coal use are underground mine disasters, and aboveground ecological disasters, and they are only about as inconceivable as lung cancer and emphysema.

We have permitted those disasters, pretended that they are accidents, and failed to recognize that we actually call them into being through our use of energy. We simply don’t holistic vision of the costly side-effects of our consumption decisions. When we use energy and demand the extraction of fossil fuels on the scale our economy requires, we cannot call these disasters and tragedies accidents.

Even more worrisome is the fatalistic reaction to the big picture. Having learned that the unavoidable costs of cheap energy are certain deaths of coal miners and oil rig workers, the certain catastrophe of mountaintop removal mining, and the certain destruction of oil spills, we too often adopt a faux courage, a resolute acceptance that these side-effects are simply inevitable. We forget that we have choices.

We can choose to develop our energy economy differently. Cleaner, renewable energies are more costly than oil and coal, but only marginally so. Events of the last few months should remind us that there are human and ecologocial costs that aren’t included in the prices of gasoline and electricity. Even nuclear energy is, on average, safer and cleaner. [There are risks, but they have to be compared with the certainties of fossil fuel extraction and use, like the 24,000 excess American deaths caused every year by coal power plant pollution, or the 1 in 6 babies born to mothers with toxic levels of mercury in their bloodstream.]

A recent report shows that the American South, depauperate in some forms of renewable energy, is actually the “Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency,” according to Dr. Marilyn Brown, who helped write the report.

Choices we make at the margin, to conserve or to consume, are incredibly important. Each increment energy we demand drives workers into riskier situations in ever more sensitive ecological areas. In contrast, each increment of energy we save or replace with renewable alternatives reduces the need for workers and creation to undergo these high risks. The payoff, even for small changes, is disproportionate to the costs.

It’s too bad our wake-up call must come in the form of disappearing mountains and expanding oil slicks.

End Dogfighting in Atlanta

In the city, I stood at a press event with a dear brother, Ralph Hawthorne of the Humane Society of the United States, and his colleagues from animal stewardship organizations, to draw attention to an Atlanta program that aims to end dogfighting by helping urban youth train and care for their pit bulls, preparing them for showing instead of fighting. Professional dog-trainer Amber Burckhalter and a team of volunteers work with kids to learn wise animal stewardship, compassion, and responsibility. Weekly classes help young people develop a relationship with their pets, and to learn about the dangers and cruelty associated with dogfighting. There’s a video about the dog-training program online and a CNN newstory about reformed dogfighter Mark Lockhart, who grew up fighting dogs, and who now helps Amber show kids how to treat dogs as friends, not fighters.

Urban ministry folks know that animals are often mistreated in cultures that tolerate cruelty and crime. Ralph Hawthorne, himself an urban minister who has in the past taken on gang violence and drug culture, now also pushes back spiritual darkness by fighting animal cruelty. He works to recruit young people and build neighborhood support and relationships, creating grassroots community while educating about the danger dogfighting poses to that community. He has traveled with former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, connecting the famous football player with young people who need to hear his story of repentance from a life of abusing animals. The stewardship mandate of Genesis surely extends to the pets under our care.

Youth Birding Competition

Immediately after leaving the End Dogfighting Atlanta press conference, I packed the car, my three kids and three of their friends, and headed out for 24 hours of birding (bird-watching and also finding birds by ear). Our team of five friends (plus Beatrice, our 2 year old) has competed for four years running, dashing from one natural area to another from 5 pm Friday to 5 pm Saturday on a day in late April, trying to rack up a long list of Georgia bird species.

The Georgia Youth Birding Competition sponsored by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources program in Non-Game Wildlife, is an amazing assemblage of kids of all ages, their mentors and parents, criss-crossing the state during the spring migration season, when North American birds that overwintered in Latin America are headed back to their nesting grounds up north. The kids spend weeks training and planning their routes and strategies (the winners tend to start on the Georgia coast spotting shorebirds and gulls, then head inland at night to pick up owls and nightjars, get a few winks, and then work their way up the state). Our team mostly stayed near Atlanta and Macon, and saw an impressive 80 species, including a few to add to their “life lists” of birds (full list here), and the winning team in our elementary-school age group saw over one hundred!

Kids, the Creation, and the Creator

Our boys know more Georgia birds, by sight and by song, than they do Pokemon characters or celebrities. (We’re hoping that that fact, combined with violin lessons, will mean we don’t have to worry about them dating until they’re in their twenties.) Their brains are designed to respond to biodiversity by learning it. Romans 1:20 means more when you pay attention to creation. It is, as the writer of the reformed Belgic confession tells us, the first means by which we know God, since the universe “is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.”

God gave humans an amazing ability to relate to animals. Dominion (not domination) and Sabbath appreciation expressed in Genesis 1, relationship (Adam seeing, naming the animals) and responsibility (tending and keeping the garden) in Genesis 2.

You see this in kids, as the image of God bubbles upward and outward. They wonder and delight in creatures, and they have the innate ability to classify and remember them, as Adam did. When kids’ brains are filled with biodiversity instead of corporate-logo-diversity, they have the chance to think God’s thoughts after him. When kids learn to love and train their pit bulldogs, they learn something about wise dominion and stewardship of the Creation. These are all signs of the life of God within them.

N.T. Wright has said that the human condition, holding the image of God, is like being an angled mirror, reflecting, from creation, glory back to the Creator, and reflecting, from God, his wise sovereignty, love, and care for creation. These programs show both those dimensions of the human experience, teaching kids in a modern, violent, and hypercommercial empire something about what it means to be truly human.

My questions distill down to these four (and if anyone can find Bible references on these, let me know    ):

1. Is the climate changing in ways that (do, or will) threaten human flourishing?
2. If it is, are we causing any (substantial) part of that climate change?
3. If we are, could we do anything (substantial) about it?
4. If we could, should we do anything about it? (What would it cost to act? What would it cost to not act?)

As you might expect, a lot of furious debate occurs around Question 4, which is really about economics. Curiously, few people seem to consult economics to get answers. To listen to environmentalists (who are often but not always liberals), you get the idea that it’s just sheer stupidity and greed that has kept us from already implementing ALL their desired policy reforms and environmental regulations, and that we would live in a veritable utopia of economic and social bliss if we undertook climate action now. For many enviros, there’s NO downside to climate action.

To listen to climate action opponents (who are often but not always conservatives), ANY climate action is likely to completely destroy the economy, abolish our cherished freedoms, enshrine a one-world government, and (worst of all) take away our cars. For many of these folks, climate action is very costly with zero benefits.

As with climate science, the likely truth about climate economics is somewhere in the middle.

If you believe (a) the climate is changing, (b) we’re at least partly responsible, and (c) we could do something about it (and those are big IFs for some people), then you’ll find Paul Krugman’s essay in the New York Times Sunday magazine a helpful primer about the economics question (d): “should we do something about climate?”

Krugman provides some very clear background to the field of environmental economics, information that is useful regardless of climate issues. He also shows that climate action would NOT be costless, would NOT be catastrophic. He also reviews some pretty complicated terrain: how should we value immediate costs versus long-term costs?, if we should act, should we do it in a big-bang or ramp up over time?, what should we do if future costs of climate change are uncertain?

In explaining that material, he delivers a not-so-subtle rebuke to the mindless optimists and the fretful pessimists.

Highly recommended.

Note: Krugman is NOT a climate skeptic, but in this piece he isn’t really arguing about climate science (except for some asides). He is describing what economists tend to agree on and disagree on about climate policy if the science were credible. That’s what makes it useful.

As cell phones become ubiquitous in the West, the dangers begin to be revealed. Environmentalists warn us of the dangers of improper disposal of cell phones (see this outstanding primer on the perils of e-waste), and of the dangers to wildlife and aesthetics (visual pollution?) from cell tower construction. Cell towers also cause nearby house prices to decline (though just by a little bit).

Cell phone radiation dangers have long been known, although the higher risk to children is becoming more apparent, and the Environmental Working Group has a great website that ranks currently-sold cell phones in terms of radiation danger. (I used the EWG database in picking out my last cell phone. I also now carry my phone in my pocket less frequently, and don’t keep it between my legs when driving, for what should be obvious reasons.)

A bigger danger than radiation is addiction—these little devices become yet another channel by which we plug into virtual worlds instead of real worlds.

A test for you: Can you take a technology Sabbath? Can you turn off cell phones, televisions, computers, video games for a whole day and find yourself connecting to God and his creation, your family and your neighbors? If we can’t do that once a week, or even once a month, we have to ask ourselves what kind of people we really are? Are we really still fully human, or are we becoming trans-human, combinations of flesh and technology? Do we want that?

Still, on the whole, I’d say cell phones help us do good things better and more efficiently. It would take a lot to make me give mine up.

Cell phones in the developing world

But in the non-Western world, cell phones are also transforming whole economies. Just this month in Scientific American, development expert Jeffrey Sachs writes about the role of mobile technology in fighting poverty. He highlights the usefulness of cell phone for community health workers with only basic training, but who can coordinate with hospitals, fight malaria, check to see if a doctor is available before transporting patients to a hospital, and determine proper courses of treatment by SMS text.

And there are environmental benefits from cell phone technology in developing countries, where mobile technology is making folks whose livelihoods depends directly on creation better off.

Farmers and fishermen are using cell phones to determine where they can get the best prices for their goods, before they transport them or land them in port. This leads to better prices for sellers AND for buyers. That makes a big difference in times of food shortage, since prices are high in famine regions, and sellers in surplus regions can make good money transporting their food to regions of scarcity. More food on the market in famine-stricken areas brings prices down—a classic market-based win-win situation facilitated by cheaper information. One study suggested cell phones already helped lessen impact of the 2005 food crisis in Niger.

Just as health information is available by text, making a database of short and long-term weather forecasts available by cell phone in the developing world will be a key strategy for climate-proofing smallholder agriculture, and helping poor farmers adapt to a changing climate system. Agricultural extension advice by SMS would be similarly helpful.

Conservation efforts are likewise being transformed by mobile technology. In Kenya, farmers are using PTT (Push-to-Talk) technology on mobile devices to alert ranchers when elephants are threatening their crops, reducing conflict making it more likely that elephants and people will be able to coexist on the landscape. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, timber companies are hammering tags with bar codes into legally-felled trees and then uploading their GPS coordinates into a live database, to ensure that tree-felling is done in accordance with environmental laws and with respect to property rights of indigenous people.

With companies like Nokia beginning to churn out very inexpensive handsets, soon mobile technology will be in the reach of the poor, if not yet the poorest of the poor.  Nokia has got a clear mission, and it isn’t to dominate the American smartphone market. Their smartest products are hardware and software tailored to the developing world market.

As Nathan Wyeth, editor of the website nextbillion.net writes, “[Nokia’s] new “1280″ mobile sells for $30 before taxes, and if you live in energy poverty without access to electricity, it’s got apps for that: standby battery life of 22 days, an FM radio receiver, and a flashlight. Also, recognizing that handsets are frequently shared, it’s got capacity for up to five separate address books.” The company tries to keep the total cost of ownership down to get as wide a distribution as possible.

Sachs is hopeful that expert systems, running on inexpensive mobile networks, will “revolutionize rural farm yields, disease control, business networks, rural finance, education systems, and much more. Soon farmers will be able to enter local data for advice on specific soil needs, timing on the planting season, drought and rainfall forecasts, market prices, and logistics.”

Nokia, for example, is already beginning to expand a set of services called Life Tools, that provides Nokia cell phone users in India, and now in Indonesia, access to information about agriculture, including up-to-the-minute prices information and news about 275 different crops.

Wyeth figures the impact of cell phone technology, combined with inexpensive handsets, may be bigger than any other global development strategies currently in place.

And for poor people directly dependent on creation for their survival, that’s a good thing.