“Where no oxen are, the manger is clean,
But much revenue comes by the strength of the ox.”
In Proverbs 14:4, the wise Solomon expressed with simplicity one of the most important principles of creation stewardship: trade-offs are both important and unavoidable in the real world.
That verse came to mind lately while contemplating Michael Abbaté’s interesting book Gardening Eden: How Creation Care Will Change Your Faith, Your Life, and Our World. Abbaté, a landscape architect and urban planner, sensitively discusses a variety of environmental challenges from a Christian perspective. While he often overstates such problems as global warming and species extinction, accepting alarmist claims uncritically and showing little awareness of the scientific controversies involved, he successfully demonstrates that Christians have a responsibility to be good stewards of the planet.
What brought Proverbs 14:4 to mind was not what the book said but its appearance. Aesthetically, it’s a lovely paperback–slightly oversized, with wide external margins in which a leaf pattern surrounds the page numbers, considerable space between lines of text, open word and letter spacing, and a chapter title page followed by a blank page at the start of each of its 13 chapters. Clearly the publisher sought to deliver an aesthetically pleasing and comfortable physical reading experience.
For comparison, Unstoppable Global Warming–Every 1,500 Years, by climate realists Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, is printed in denser type, with less space between lines, with slightly narrower margins. Abbaté’s’s book, then, puts about 41% less text on each page. With the design used for Singer and Avery’s book, and eliminating the blank pages between chapters, it could have been printed on 161 pages instead of 271–saving 41% on trees and the fuel needed to transport the heavier books (not to mention saving consumers’ money).
Why didn’t Abbaté and his publisher use the more ecologically efficient design? Perhaps because they considered the aesthetics worth the extra paper and fuel–and hoped readers would consider it worth the extra money.
Nothing’s wrong with that judgment in principle. But environmentalists should keep that in mind the next time they jump to condemn what they consider an overuse of natural resources.
