Sin is also people's hubris in believing that they can reorder this world and redefine its purpose to suit their own whims and fancies. The Christian life must be one of conserving wholeness over fragmentation, balance over imbalance, and harmony over disharmony. A Christian must love God's creation and treat it with respect because God created it with love. Dominion, then, does not mean the right to exploit nature. Far from it, say the scholars.
Dominion means stewardship over nature.
The concept of stewardship leads directly to the Biblical notion of covenant. God, then, has a covenant with humanity. Men and women are to act as His stewards on earth, preserving and protecting all of God's creations. This covenant puts human beings in a special relationship to God. The difference, as Francis Schaeffer points out in his book Pollution and the Death of Man , is that human beings are made by God in his image and are given the responsibility to act as stewards over the rest of God's creation.