Masters of the World?

A scholar named Lynn White, Jr. back in the 1960s blamed the environmental crisis on followers of the Bible. He based his ideas on the first chapter of Genesis:

Then God said, "Let us make people in our image, to be like ourselves. They will be masters over all life--the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the livestock, wild animals, and small animals."

So God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them. God blessed them and told them, "Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters over the fish and birds and all the animals." (Genesis 1:26-28)

There it is in black and white. The first humans, according to the Bible, were told by God himself to be "masters over all life" and to "subdue" the earth. According to White, Western civilization, fed by grand ideas about conquering the world in the name of God, turned the earth into its playground, ravaging it in the process. Beyond the fact that the same ideas had been proposed by the Zen Bhuddist D.T. Suziki decades before, White's charge is a serious one.

Problem is, it's wrong. While some followers of God may have misunderstood him and used the Bible as an excuse for plundering the world, that was never his intention. God clarified what meant in the next chapter, Genesis 2:15:

The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it.

We think too much of ourselves if we think that God made the world just so he could let us trash it. God is in charge, not humans. So his mandate for us to be masters of our world was simply to be the gardeners and animal keepers, to enhance what was there. Not to abuse it.