NEWS
Noah Alliance Ads and Media Press Release Speakers |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 9, 2006
CONTACT:
Dr. Calvin B. DeWitt, Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists, 608-222-1139
Peter Illyn, Restoring Eden, 360-574-8230
Suellen Lowry, Noah Alliance, 707-826-1948
____________________________________________________________________
Ads Ask “What would Noah do?”
Religious Leaders Launch Campaign to Rescue
Endangered Species Act from Congressional Dismantling
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A multi-faith alliance of religious leaders that includes leading Evangelical Christians as well as Jews and Protestants today launched a national print, radio, and television advertising campaign alerting people of faith to potential dismantling of the Endangered Species Act, America ’s modern-day ark to save God’s creatures.
“As Evangelical Christians in our time, we see a most profound threat to God's creation in the destruction of endangered species and their God-given habitat,” said Calvin DeWitt, environmental professor at the University of Wisconsin and president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists. “We want the public to see the risk we face if Congress weakens the Endangered Species Act.” The Academy includes nearly 70 Evangelical scholars from Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed, and other churches and from 35 Christian colleges and universities in 19 states. Members are Evangelical Christians in the scientific and ethical professional communities.
“The Endangered Species Act is our national ark,” said Peter Illyn, executive director of the national and Washington State-based ministry Restoring Eden. “Americans appreciate that this is a moral issue that transcends politics. God has entrusted us to tend God’s garden, and an intact Endangered Species Act helps us do that.”
"The Endangered Species Act has honored the essential need to preserve biological diversity for the survival of all creation," said Barbara Lerman-Golomb, acting executive director of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), dedicated to protection of creation from generation to generation, and to mobilizing the Jewish community to be stewards of the Earth.
The U.S. House of Representatives last year passed a bill, backed by California Republican Richard Pombo, seriously weakening the Act. The Senate could take up similar legislation as early as this month.
The advertising campaign is being sponsored by the Noah Alliance, a partnership of Evangelical Christians, Protestants, and Jews. The campaign will feature TV spots that run on PAX Television, a n ational television network committed to airing family-friendly programming, and on other cable channels, nationwide; hundreds of radio ads on religious stations in Rhode Island, California, and Washington D.C.; and full-page print ads in selected markets.
The 30-second television spot features images of more than a dozen endangered animals, including the bald eagle, grizzly bear, manatee, and wolf.
“Like Noah, America has built an ark to save them from destruction, from today’s great flood of habitat destruction,” says the narrator. “The Endangered Species Act has rescued dozens of God’s creatures from extinction. But today the Act itself is threatened. Don’t let Congress sink the Endangered Species Act.”
The radio spot calls on people of faith to defend the Act because, “God calls on us to care for all creatures.”
The print ads offer another version of the well-known expression, “What would Jesus do?” by asking, “What would Noah do?”
The Evangelical print ad quotes from a statement of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists: “Turning away from care for God’s creation in order to promote self-interest shifts seeking the kingdom of God out of its appropriate and necessary first place.”
The Jewish version of the ad quotes from last September’s Jewish Statement on Protecting the Endangered Species Act, urging lawmakers “to emulate the forethought, self-restraint and prodigious effort modeled by the biblical Noah – ‘a righteous man…blameless in his age’ (Genesis 6:9).”
The statements were signed by more than 100 people of faith, ethicists, and scientists from around the country.
Copies of the ads can be seen at http://www.noahalliance.org/ads.htm.
####