Books On Celebrating God and Our Planet (combined!)

Here are some nice books, which are nothing like ‘how to be green’ books. Instead, they focus on the link between stewardship over our planet, and love for God. Combined!

If God Were a Great Big Bear is a beautiful book, to celebrate God and his creations, in the form of nature. Ideal for all reader ages, the book revels in the joy of nature, and the One who made it all.

A rhythmic meditation on the nature of God in the world, this book invites you to imagine God creating each element of nature, especially for the benefit of all creatures and plants that He lovingly made:

If God were a mighty whale, she’d make vast, mysterious oceans, wouldn’t she?

If God were a wiggly worm, he’d make fallen leaves and rotting trees and rich earth, wouldn’t he?

God also made several natural scenes for us to appreciate and look after:

• Rushing streams
• Mountains with caves
• Sun to warm flowers
• Red and orange trees
• Seas full of marine friends!

God is in all of Creation, and in you and me. God made a perfectly balanced interconnected world, not just for humans (to drill oil, fish and pollute) but for all animals and plants to thrive in.

Paul Harbridge is an award-winning children’s book author in Toronto, Canada. Surrounded by beautiful lakes and forests. Illustrator Marta Dorado lives in Pamplona (Spain) where she enjoys exploring nature and the coast.

The Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text

The Book of Nature is a book to gift any Christian who does not see looking after the planet as high priority (think far-right evangelical Christians both here and in the US). Or to Christians (or anyone) who loves the planet, and sees it as a gift from God for us to look after.

For thousands of years, the natural world was our sacred text. By the Middle Ages, the text was given a name. But today when nature is damaged from disasters and human actions, we need again to return Nature as a place of refuge and retreat.

In this book, science and the wisdom of poets is weaved with a gentle spiritual practice, a framework of the Divine work of the Creator. God’s first revelation came to us through ongoing creations:

• The rumblings of the heavens
• The seasonal eruptions of earth
• The invisible pull of migration
• The tide and times of the oceans
• Celestial shiftings

Draw back into nature as a sacred encounter. We need look no further than the Divine to find Nature at its best.

I am attuned to the one who paints the dawn in tourmaline streaks and salts the night sky in chalky, sometimes brilliant flecks. The one who thought to quench the thirst of the migrating butterfly with mists of fog.

And remembered that baby birds might do well to memorise star-stitched tracings far, far above the nursery that is the nest.

Barbara Mahany is a writer whose work has been published in the Chicago Tribune for almost 30 years, mostly on nature, faith and family. She lives in Illinois, USA.

Permission to wonder, get curious and find God in the tiny details of a sprouting garden, a forest glade, birds in flight or the moon. Reminds us that there are different ways to encounter God all around us, beyond Scripture.

Becoming Earth (how our planet came to life)

Becoming Earth is a book for the creationists to read, on the real story of how earth came into being, giving also a major shift on how to save our planet.

Earth is a vast interconnected living system that over billions of years, has transformed a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis, breathing oxygen into our atmosphere and turning rock into fertile soil and creating massive oceans.

This is a book that in the words of Steve Silberman ‘weaves science and history, with the grace of a poet’.

When I was a boy, I thought I could change the weather. On sweltering summer days in suburban California, I would draw a picture of blue rain and march around it on the lawn, splashing it with a potion of hose water and yard trimmings.

As I grew up, so did my understanding of meteorology. I learned how water evaporates from lakes, rivers and oceans.

Rain, I was taught, is an inevitable outcome of atmospheric physics – a gift that we and other creatures passively receive.

And due to long-term atmospheric ripple effects, the Amazon rainforest contributes to rainfall as far away as Canada. A tree growing in Brazil can change the weather in Manitoba.

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times and Scientific America. He lives in Oregon (US). This is his first book.

This wondrous book reveals our living planet for the miracle that it is. Carla Safina

We tend to take our rare jewel of a home planet for granted. In his startlingly beautiful book, the author shows us exactly why we shouldn’t. Deborah Blum

A science writer with a poet’s soul, Ferris is among the few scribes worthy of serving as biographer for the life-encrusted rock we call home. Ben Goldfarb

There are times reading this book, when you feel like you are peering right down into the very heart of our living planet. It is quite simply, a work of genius. Robert Moor