“When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you? Only the trees that you know are not trees for food you may destroy and cut down, that you may build siegeworks against the city that makes war with you, until it falls.” Deuteronomy 20.19, 20

The violence of war often brings out the worst of men, and not just against one another. Often the creation itself becomes a victim of the savagery of combat.

One of the best-known examples of the wanton destruction of the creation in the name of war occurred during the American Civil War, when General Sherman instructed his army to burn a swath across Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah. Farms and lands were put to the torch. Animals that could not be eaten or used for work were simply destroyed. In order to bring the South to its knees, General Sherman extended the violence and brutality of war against the very creation itself. Prior to that, in an effort to reduce Jackson’s effectiveness, Philip Sheridan burned farms and destroyed farmlands throughout the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

During the Second World War and the Viet Nam War “carpet bombing” of cities and jungles was justified as a military tactic. The wholesale destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was also regarded as being within the framework of just war theory.

My point is not to condemn such tactics but simply to show how war takes its toll, not only on human beings, but on their culture and the creation that sustains them. The Law of God understands how easy it can be for those engaged in war to let violence get out of hand and become something more than just an aspect of military strategy.

Other examples of the violence against creation in the name of human gain could be multiplied: the pollution of local streams and rivers by the discharge of corporate waste; slash and burn policies against pristine jungles and rain forests; strip logging and mountain-top coal extraction; overplanting lands until they become exhausted, overuse of certain fertilizers, carelessness leading to soil erosion in construction practices, the pollution of the atmosphere with excessive carbon-based emissions, and more.

Human beings can become so focused on maximizing material gain or personal convenience that they completely disregard the effects of their covetous practices on the creation. In so doing they compromise neighbor-love and offend against the purposes of God by jeopardizing the fruitfulness of the creation for the generations to come. God loved the world so much that He sent His Son for its redemption, to reconcile it to Himself, deliver it from its groaning, and liberate into the freedom of the sons and daughters of God (Jn. 3.16; Rom. 8.19-21). We fail in loving God as we should when we make war, by any means, against His creation. The Word of God, beginning with the Law of God, reminds us that we have a duty to treat the creation as conservators and developers, and not merely as consumers, and certainly not as exploiters.

T. M. Moore

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