Do Not Waste the Creation

"He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster." Proverbs 18:9

"Do rightly, justly, truly, holy, equally to all people in all things ... and there ye are servicable in your generation, laboring in the thing that is good, which doth not spoil, nor destroy, nor waste the creation upon lusts." George Fox, from Mind the Heavenly Treasure, entry for Dec. 4.

"Nor waste the creation upon lusts ..." I don't know that Fox meant creation as earth, but in today's context it sounds like an environmental statement. What would the world be like today if we didn't waste creation upon lusts (or maximizing profits)?

Fox's statement also joins a sense of not wasting creation, or environmentalism, with social justice: "do rightly ... to all people in all things." This same conjoining of environmentalism and social justice happens to be a theme of a wonderful book I'm reading called "Blessed Unrest" by Paul Hawken. Has anybody read it? In the book, (I have only read the intro and part of the first chapter) Hawken, an environmentalist, talks about all the small groups he knows of (he and his cohorts estimate at least a million such groups worldwide) that are working quietly, often unnoticed, to bring about change in the world. It's exciting to think about, and I will blog more about the book later.