Such harm deserves condemnation, and ordinarily forethought would recommend quite different uses. But in zeal to condemn such activities, evangelical environmentalists sometimes misapply Scriptures. I brought you into the fruitful land, to eat its fruit and its good things. This means that sometimes environmental devastation is God's judgment on human sins that have nothing to do with poor resource management. Consequently, one important message evangelicals can communicate to help restore the environment may focus not on the scientific questions of ecology but on fidelity to God and His law.
Pragmatic instructions are useful, but they are secondary.
In their understandable resolve to blunt the charge of secular and New Age environmentalists that Christians have used this passage as a license for vicious, careless domination of the earth, they have gone toward the opposite extreme, robbing the passage of all mandate for forceful rule. Properly understood, subduing and ruling the earth should unfold gradually into cultivating and keeping the garden as man progressively transforms earth into garden. The main focus in evangelical environmental writings is on such problems as global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, species loss, and deforestation. All these are extremely large-scale and mostly hypothetical problems that, whatever their actual scale, tend to be of low risk to human beings. Acid rain in particular has been largely debunked as an environmental problem by the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program conducted from the late 1970s through the late 1980s by the Environmental Protection Agency.