Stewardship

Stewardship
Christians in this world need to take control over Creation and use it in a way that preserves it for future generations. This doesn't mean we need to put plants and animals above humans. We need to find a good balance between being able to provide for our own needs and providing the needs for the world's animals. For instance if people in Brazil need to cut down part of the rain forest to plant farms and feed their growing population we need to let them. Here in America we think of the rain forest as an exotic place that needs to be protected because we don't have any where we live. But to the people like who live there its just normal trees and plants that they see every day. It's like an oak tree or a pine tree to us, nobody cares if we clear a small forest of oak, cedar, and pine trees nobody really cares and just accepts it. It's only when we hear about a place like Brazil clearing a forest we get up in arms and try to stop it. Then we wonder why it is people in places like Brazil and Africa are facing starvation. We need to allow people to develop their country and provide for their people.
With that said we cannot simply allow corrupt governments to destroy the land and strip it of resources for their own gains and not give anything to their citizens like in the article we read for class "The Next Breadbasket" where a Chinese company takes over farming operations in Mozambique taking it away from citizens of that nation. The creation of those farms doesn't help the local populace and is not the correct way to handle the development of farmland.

Dominate Creation
When a farmer has a diary cow they take care of it and feed it keeping it healthy enough to produce the milk they need to make a living but if the cow is sick and their son is sick they don't let their son suffer and die. The farmer always chooses his fellow human beings over his cows. This is the manner in which we should care for the world. We need to understand that caring for our world is vital for it to produce the things we need to survive like food and resources but we should not choose it's health over that of fellow humans.

Take the Cecil the Lion controversy from earlier this year that brought a lot of attention to the hunting and killing of lions in Africa. Much of the argument floating around the internet news sites revolved around the idea that these animals deserved to be protected no matter what the consequences. There was a lot of name calling and threats, mostly "killer" and "rot in Hell", being thrown at the hunter.
It didn't matter that he had no idea he killed a lion with a name, his real crime, or that it was being tracked by the Oxford University or that a bunch of upper middle class Americans would get mad at him. All that mattered was that he did something some people didn't really like. Doesn't matter that most people in Africa didn't really care or thought he had simply removed a common pest. They see lions as potential threats and many villages pay trophy hunters to kill lions who are killing their livestock and taking their livelihoods away. They see lions in the same way we see coyotes that there are so many of them causing so many problems that it doesn't really matter if we kill one or two or three or four who are killing our chickens (or goats). Coyotes in the United States could go extinct and nobody would care, they're not exotic or cool enough for us to care here in the USA. In fact many radical proponents of conservation believe that even the lions who are endangering entire villages should be left alone and those villages should just deal with it.
But we as Christians cannot allow ourselves to be dominated by any part of Creation, including the cool exotic ones we don't see every day. We have to choose the well being of humans over the well being of animals. My brother made the point when this was all happening that "if they came up with a way of feeding every person on the continent of Africa for the rest of time but as a result lions would go extinct, these people would pick the lions."

(The Zimbabwe perspective http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/30/us-zimbabwe-wildlife-lion-idUSKCN0Q41VB2015073)

Character+Food
Most of us know the saying "you are what you eat" which originally referred to the effect that various foods had on your body. Nowadays some people have started using this saying with the intent of attaching a type of morality to the diet people choose. For instance some people (mostly on vindictive internet forums) who are vegetarians, vegans or someone who only eats organic foods feel that they are morally superior to people who eat meat, GMOs, and anything that does not fall into their specific diet. This is a mistake and your choice of food should not factor into how good or bad a person is (unless they eat people). Of course there are some exceptions like if someone hoards all of the food while everyone else is starving or steals everyone else's food and I mean actually does this not this non-issue where the developed world has more than the developing or undeveloped world. We produce most of the food we eat and truth be told it would be incredibly difficult for us to feed people half a world away.