This kind of flexibility is refreshing, but it can seem pretty flakey too.  And one might suspect that Calvin DeWitt is rather overly sanguine, or naive, to suggest that evangelical Christians are not stubbornly set in their ways on various matters, such as the environment.

I recall that during the Monica Maelstrom, Bill Clinton responded to someone questioning his religion that he considered himself a good Baptist.  And he appealed to the old and venerable Baptist tradition of giving supreme value to the individual's conscience in interpreting the Scriptures.  And for that he was slapped by several Baptist ministers, claiming to be gravely offended.  So so much for traditions, and for one's conscience.  (Baptists are not quite the same group as evangelical Christians, but there are important points of correspondence.)

On the story of the Flood, in Genesis 6ss.: I should think that any Christian environmentalist would be terrificly embarrassed to hold that up as an example of biblical environmentalist values.  What in the world is it telling us?: that God needs to destroy every land-living animal on earth, in a horrible death by drowning, save for a single reproductive pair, in order to establish an animal-friendly covenant with the surviving handful of human beings?  And don't some fundamentalist Christians, anti-evolution, anti-deep time, attribute the extinction of the dinosaurs, etc., to that "event"?  I strongly dislike the story of the Flood.

So did Michelangelo.  Notice how his depiction, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is quite anti-biblical, and positively Virgilian: his central concern is to show sympathy for the families of "sinners," about to drown miserably; the Ark of the saved is off in the distance.  And where in the world is God?

I much prefer Psalm 104, with its affectionate reference to a number of animals.  Admittedly the prayer at the end, verse 34, "Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more," is a bit hard to take by such as me, a sinner and a very wicked person.

See also Psalm 147:9, "He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry."  Also, there is a nice brief catalogue of God's creatures in Psalm 148; and a similar but richer, more impressive catalogue in the apocryphal (i.e. in Bibles used by Catholics and Orthodox Christians, but not in those used by Jews and Protestants) hymn known as the Song of the Three Young Men, in Daniel 3.

When one studies the first 9 books of Genesis one learns that man is commanded to care for the earth and the animals.  Also, that very very ground cried out with the shed blood of Abel. Satan wanted at all costs to prevent the Gensis 3:15 resolve, a savior of men, once they had sinned.  Satan's answer was to send fallen angels out to the sons and daughters of the early people to procreate with them and cause great abominations in their flesh.  The list of righteous ones in Genesis may well have been the few who did not fall to this apostacy.  Hence, finally God foretold that He would destroy all this evil to cleanse the earth of this turning away from His perfection and grace, Noah was chosen from those who had remained faithful to God and was instructed to build the Ark.

 "Adam and his Kin" The lost history of their lives and times, by Ruth Beechick, has a good outline of those years.

 E.W Bullinger, in his appendixes to the  "Companion Bible" originally published in 1922, adresses Creation, The Serpent in Genesis 3, and he comments on: the "Sons of God" and their progeny, called Nephilum (translated "giants"), who were monsters of initquity; being superhuman in size and character, had to be destroyed.  This is the one and only object of the flood."  

Dr Henry Morris, in his "Genesis Record" gives a verse by verse commentary on Genesis. He is the founder of the modern Bible Science Movement.  Dr. Morris' book, "The Long War Against God" traces paganism back to the tower of Babel.

 God's original charge to mankind to have dominon over the animals and the earth still stands and I applaud Calvin De Witt as he continues to bring clarity on our responsibilty to creation in the face of confusion and light into the darkness of self centered behavior.
 serenidad