Source: GoErie

As colleagues at Messiah University, we share a core belief that God created our world and that our call as humans is to practice a responsibility to that created order. This idea of creation care teaches that there should be no separation between caring for God’s world and caring for the neighbor whom God asks us to love.

As educators we are active in sustainability efforts on our campus and in the broader community, because we recognize that the science is clear — climate change poses an imminent and dangerous threat to our home.

We see it daily in the news and hear it firsthand from our friends and colleagues out West: Wildfires, driven by record heat and drought, are consuming entire counties in California and parts of the Pacific Northwest and West. In the first nine months of last year alone, the United States had 16 billion-dollar weather disasters, ranging from hurricanes to wildfires, and tragically, hundreds have died this year alone.

Read more: Faith and science mandate a more aggressive plan to address climate change