Using a conceptual model consisting of three intersecting spheres of concern (environmental protection, human needs provision, and economic welfare) central to most environmental issues, we map six major Christian traditions of thought. Our purpose is to highlight the complementarities among these diverse responses in order to inform a more holistic Christian environmentalism founded on one or more of the major tenets of each of the six core traditions. Our approach also incorporates major premises of at least the more moderate versions (...) of biocentrism, ecocentrism, and anthropocentrism. We label this holistic approach “cosmocentrism” and use it as the basis for a preliminary description of the notion of “pluralistic stewardship.” We argue that only such holistic environmental perspectives, where societal needs are more directly coupled with environmental protection, and a pluralism of worldviews are acknowledged as potentially contributing to such efforts are capable of successfully addressing the complex issues we face today. We note that, at the international level in particular, Christian thought and secular environmentalism already have been moving in such a direction. (shrink)

This paper explains and offers a criticism of the technical solutions that have been proposed in recent years to address Africa's hunger problems, summarizes selected results of some of these approaches, and suggests a more useful conceptualization of African hunger for policymakers. Hunger is a problem with multifactorial causality. As such, it is not given to solution by the sequence of reductionist approaches that have been applied in recent years. Widespread adoption by African governments of ultimately unsuccessful reductionist conceptualizations of (...) hunger has had much to do with foreign aid dependency, the general absence from central policymaking circles of senior government officials with responsibility for hunger-related policies, and political preference for centralized bureaucracy. The paper concludes with some recommendations for community-based strategies of hunger alleviation. (shrink)