Doug Sikkema interviews Dr. Ellen Davis and Dr. Norman Wirzba of Duke University Divinity School about our world, the environmental movement, and how faith relates to it all.
Wirzba considers how idealism doesn't do us any favours:
It's very easy for people to get a rather romantic view of the world. You know, maybe you've read some Walden and you think it would be great to just go live in a hut in the woods, and it's entirely unrealistic. The reality is, is that ecosystems are very complex and the human place in them is very complex, and if you romanticize what you're describing, you're describing it wrongly.
And Davis gets practical about the decisions we need to make:
We need to invoke some of the practices of Christian life: the practice of self-restraint; identifying actually a rule of life for oneself, which many Christians have done over the centuries. How many hours a day is it reasonable to be looking at a screen? ... Cycling, walking, cooking, gardening, eating at home: all of these things require something of us that is more or less difficult and therefore perhaps a practice in certain virtues.