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Gardens, Rewilding, and the Dominion Mandate

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Gardens. Many people make gardening a major hobby, spending hours in them, weeding, pruning, planting, and doing all sorts of things to gussie them up. The results can be quite impressive. Then some folks do just enough to keep their small patch going.

People who read classic (in this case, old) literature, they have probably noticed gardens being mentioned or even playing significant parts in the stories. If you study on it, you should remember that gardens were in the Bible. The first was Genesis 2:8 when God planted a garden in Eden.

Church garden, RGBStock / Adrian van Leen
Biblical creationists talk about the dominion mandate, which is when God told mankind to subdue and rule over the earth as stewards. That means we take care of it for its benefit, not exploit or run roughshod over it. Environmental extremists have an evolutionary view that makes Earth more important than humanity. One approach is rewilding, which is essentially to just let everything go and have nature take its course. (If stewardship had been practiced, including fire breaks, the California wildfires would not have been so bad. It sounded like rewilding out there.) The garden that God put in Eden was to be kept under control.
Alan Titchmarsh is a well-known gardener and TV personality in the UK. He has recently defended the traditional well managed garden that exists in Britain. This defence was in response to environmental campaigns that seek to rewild many of our gardens, parks, and countryside. Titchmarsh stated in a written representation to the British Parliament’s House of Lords that a carefully kept garden actually attracts more insects, birds, and small mammals than those areas of land that have been set aside for rewilding purposes. In other words, human activity, far from harming the environment, actually increases bio-diversity, and provides food and shelter for many more months of the year.

The article may be short, but it's interesting. Finish reading at "Dominion and the blessing of the garden."