(The lyrics throughout this post are excerpted from the Grateful Dead’s “Throwing Stones.”)

“Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free
Dizzy with eternity.
Paint it with a skin of sky, brush in some clouds and sea
Call it home for you and me.
A peaceful place or so it looks from space
A closer look reveals the human race.
Full of hope, full of grace, is the human face.”

The more radical environmentalists foresee a grim future if drastic action isn’t taken immediately. Icebergs melting. Seas rising. Violently unpredictable weather. Droughts, floods, fires, and famines. Fracking-induced earthquakes and poisoned water. Violence and wars erupting as desperate people try to move to safer territories.

The more radical fundamentalist Christians also foresee grim times in the not-so-distant future, based on their understanding of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament. Among other things, this book predicts hail and fire mingled with blood assaulting the earth, causing one-third of all trees and all grass to be destroyed. A mountain burning with fire slamming into the sea, transforming one-third of all seas into blood. A star falling from heaven, poisoning one-third of all fresh water. Sunlight, moonlight, and starlight diminishing by one-third. Locusts with men’s faces torturing non-believers for five months, after which fire and brimstone kill one-third of all humans. Wars, plagues, a massive earthquake, and stars falling to the earth.

“There’s a fear down here we can’t forget
Hasn’t got a name just yet
Always awake, always around
Singing ashes to ashes all fall down.”

Nearly 20 years ago, I worked on a project to encourage pro-life and pro-choice activists to find common abortion-related goals on which they could comfortably work together to accomplish. Over time, these activists discovered that they could work together on preventing teen pregnancy, promoting adoption, and speaking out against the abusive language and actions that were unnecessarily polarizing the debate — all without changing their beliefs about abortion. Might a similar process encourage radical environmentalists and apocalyptic Christians to work towards finding ways to prevent their predictions from taking place?

While all things are possible, I’m not optimistic, for many fundamentalist Christians — those that think that the Tim LaHaye “Left Behind” series is God-sanctioned instead of lousy science fiction — believe that God will “rapture” them away from non-believers into Heaven prior to the arrival of wars, falling stars, bloody waters, and the like. And if God is behind these calamities, fighting against them is both sinful and fruitless. Environmentalists, by contrast, believe that we have a sacred duty to do what we can to prevent these disasters from taking place.

“Heartless powers try to tell us what to think
If the spirit’s sleeping, then the flesh is ink.
History’s page, it is thusly carved in stone
The future’s here, we are it, we are on our own.”

In the meantime, endless arguments concerning humankind’s role in creating climate change are blocking our efforts to harness our ingenuity to address our relationship with the environment. How might we address the consequences of rising seas and increasingly erratic weather? How might we address the pollution choking China, India, and other countries? How do we find a new balance between our needs and God’s creation?

As Earth spins us away from another Earth Day, let’s remember that we can come together to address the downsides of climate change. Otherwise:

“If the game is lost then we’re all the same
No one left to place or take the blame.
We will leave this place an empty stone”

To hear a recording of “Throwing Stones,” please visit