Witness the release of exotic species into the wild. If they take hold in large numbers they can become a real nuisance, dangerous or destructive. Witness Purple Loosestrife, Zebra Mussels, Cane Toads, Asian Gypsy Moths, and many others.

Witness the rise of large scale, mechanized agriculture. This has led to monocultures of plants and animals with some pretty odd side effects.

It’s that whole concern about unintended consequences thing.

However I think the concern is often taken too far and stems from a philosophical viewpoint that Man is a Destroyer and a plague upon the Earth. You get the feeling that some who complain about mankind playing God, really wish we weren’t here at all. These are the folks who think that everything natural is good, and everything artificial is bad.

Well, lead, mercury and arsenic are natural. Snake and spider venoms are natural. Nettles and thistles are natural, not to mention poison ivy/poison oak and sawgrass. Wasps, hornets and skunks are natural too. I choose not to play with these things no matter how natural they are!

Most of the arguments for things like unregulated genetic engineering, and geoengineering instead of limiting pollution, etc. are also completely unfair – a combination of faits accompli and simple economic might bulldozing quite rational objections. In fact, that pretty much sums up the entire history of the environmental movement.

Unless you want a crude, thuggish principle that corporate technology and engineering have to trump the ecology and all human culture, Chris, I think you’re fantastically off-base there.

My impression is quite different – a lot of opposition to GM indeed comes from the left, but it is by no means exclusively associated with it and it is by no means a left ideology that drives it. The biggest driver of opposition to GM is the mistrust of government, big business and scientists among the public, i.e. the small person “us vs them” / “they’re out to get us” mentality, combined with the extremely sorry state of basic scientific literacy. No matter what the “deficit model” critics say, when you ask people “Why are you opposed to GMO foods” and they answer “Because they have DNA in them”, you know something’s very wrong on a very basic level.

Now a good portion of the mistrust towards big business and government is quite justifiable historically, but deeply rooted anti-intellectualism is also a very big driver of the whole thing, and this is a problem

The widely used word in Christian circles is “stewardship”. This seems to me slightly less loaded with Biblical connotations than William Furr’s discussion at #2, so that it is to some extent an accessible concept both secularly and non-secularly. Stewardship is not a passive endeavor.

Albert Bakker’s introduction at #4 of GOP-ideology is significant. Stewardship comes up against pocketbook, employment, and big-government issues, which in enough people’s minds are not well left to those who are so far most associated with global warming. The environment will have its tipping point, but it appears, amazingly, that we have not yet found this century’s Silent Spring, something to galvanize concerted political action.

I think for religious people the playing for God argument is not really a matter of perceived danger to altering God’s creation or even wreaking havoc on God’s creation but to any perceived danger of endorsing or adopting ideas that are incompatible with God’s theology and the central role therein of the uniqueness of man.

So the first question for christians will be is geoengineering incompatible with christian theology? The second question for Evangelicals will be is it incompatible with GOP-ideology. And the answer to these questions will decide one of two options, either there will be a fierce religious war on geoengineering or their voice will be absent from the debate entirely.