What Would George Washington Carver Say About Coal?
November 4, 2012
The Cornwall Alliance, dedicated to advancing what I’ll call “sane” environmentalism from a Christian perspective, ran this piece I wrote in response to the vilification of fossil fuels, coal in particular. George Washington Carver had been a hero of mine through the years, beginning with the time I read his biography in junior high school. I was particularly struck by how he would pray for insight as he teased riches from the humble materials at hand in Alabama, e.g., peanuts, sweet potatoes, and even the soil, from which he extracted dyes for textiles. Decades later, while traveling through southwest Missouri, I came upon his childhood home in Diamond Grove, now the site of a National Monument run by the National Park Service. There I saw copies of letters from both Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin soliciting his scientific help. And then a few years ago, I was able to visit the Carver museum at Tuskegee University, where he served for decades.
This piece ran in several papers, one of which is based in Dearborn, Michigan, which is special to me. My Tennessee-born dad met my Michigan-born mom while they were both working at the Ford Motor Company naval works in Dearborn in WWII, she as a secretary, he as a chaplain. They were married in the chapel at Dearborn’s Greenfield Village. Then, almost seventy years later, I led a missions team of SBTS students back to Dearborn and adjacent communities, where we made contact with Muslims (both Shia and Sunni) who’d settled, along with many Arab Christians, in the area.