The implications of stewardship and environmental issues are deeply profound. Even if the talk didn’t go into many specifics, it’s great to see environmental responsibility figure prominently in our doctrine. Tending to the earth is a salvific act.
Bishop Caussé’s talk was really good
October 2, 2022 by
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
I think I know how my mom heard this talk. My mother is infamous for her garden. She cares for her garden/yard/property. I will hear about her ward members commenting on it. She also loves going on hikes and nature walks, etc. It’s a big part of her life. I believe that a lot of the motivation for that is what she learns about in the temple (a place she frequents when it’s too dark to be gardening).
But if there’s ever a group of people whom my mom cannot say without venom in her voice, it’s environmentalists. Oh, how she hates environmentalists.
So listening to Bishop Causse’s talk, I was constantly thinking if he would push it to a point that might start to get my mom to soften her view on taking care of the broader earth as a whole, and not just what she has control over. I don’t think that it will. He pushed the subject of environmentalism really well, but not explicitly past the point where we really need to worry about anything greater than our personal responsibility. The talk likely will help keep my mom’s motivation for being a good steward of her stewardship (private property), but I don’t see it changing the negative view that she has of environmentalists, or environmental causes.
I know that I liked the talk.
jader3rd, that reminds me of driving with my 86 year old grandmother a few years ago. She asked me about my job (environmental consulting) and then, in a voice of real horror, asked me if I was an… environmentalist. Somehow she still loves me, even though I sad yes :)
Agreed 100%.
I learned early when I started working environmental issues that there are active environmentalists and environmental activists. The former are more concerned about the stewardship, and the other are too often more concerned about the headlines.
Thinking ahead to the next month when I have to choose sacrament speakers….
You can love and respect the earth and take care of the property you have stewardship over, but also be against anti human climate activists. I agree with God and his prophets that the command to multiply and replenish are still in effect. How much more evidence is needed before the malthusians are finally rejected and regarded as an interesting idea, but bad science.
Mark L, Here to again put words and motives in other people’s mouths! It might help if you didn’t just come and spout your ‘I despise the left’ comments by projecting motives onto people who post here. I mean, those comments might fly in right-wing comment sections to fanfare, but perhaps you could stop with the straw men attacks?
Scratch my head at term malthusian. Google to lede grafs from a 2016 copy of Scientific American: “[…T]he 1798 treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus […] inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus’s observation that populations tend to increase geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16 …), whereas food reserves grow arithmetically (2, 3, 4, 5 …), leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success, the driver of evolution […yet also inspired] policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse [(]“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race” [) …such as …] social Darwinism and eugenics, [that resulted] in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.”
It was good in that environmental stewardship is being addressed, but I was a bit disappointed on how limited in scope it was. It needs to be said that climate change is real and devastating and, even right now innocent people are suffering because of it, and will suffer even more in the near future, and further that it is driven by the greed of the wealthy and powerful.
Personally, I also disagree with the premise that every organism on this planet was put here specifically for the benefit of mankind, but that’s hard-baked into Christianity, especially protestant Christianity in which everything is a monetizable ‘resource’, so it’s expected that any given GA would think like that.
Listening to Bishop Causse tell us of Monet and quote Saint-Exupery brought the thought:
To some are given tales of rednecks getting themselves into trouble in the desert, and to others French culture, that all may be edified and find something to draw them into lending closer attention.
I appreciated his framing of multiple acts of creativity being part and parcel of participating in divine creation, and that child-bearing/rearing, while mentioned, was just one of a multitude of them, and not presented as the Sole Way We Participate In Divine Creation. I’d like to see this expanded on more. Being a productive and influential co-creator with God is far more expansive than we tend to emphasize.