“But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:7-8, NIV
Being “green” is in lately. Green is becoming the new “gold.” According to an April 2010 U.S. Department of Commerce report entitled “Measuring the Green Economy,” green products and services totaled $371 to $571 billion, or 1-2% of the U.S. economy in 2007 and provided 1.8 to 2.4 million jobs. (1) The report also says that the green economy is in a position to grow, but that the majority of jobs that are created during the recovery will still come from production and services outside of the green economy.
I love the natural beauty of our planet. The Bible says that on the sixth day of creation God made Adam and Eve in His own image and told them, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. And they will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.” (Genesis 1: 29-30, NIV) Green plants were created by God to provide food for man and animals, and to produce oxygen (O2), which are critical ingredients for animal aerobic respiration. (2)
Plants are the original solar technology. Most of us know that plants combine energy from the sun with water to produce life-sustaining glucose (sugar) and oxygen (O2), but did you ever learn how plants actually do this? Plants were designed to capture photons (energy) from the sun in a chemical reaction that combines six molecules of carbon dioxide (the gas that plants and animals exhale) with six molecules of water, to produce one molecule of glucose and six molecules of oxygen (6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2). We call this process photosynthesis. Plants have a pigment called chlorophyll that was designed to absorb red-orange and blue-violet light. This pigment reflects the green light, which is the reason that chlorophyll-containing plants are green. The chlorophyll is located in “chemical laboratories” called chloroplasts which is where the glucose and oxygen are produced. Chloroplasts also contain two chemicals called adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and nicotinamide adenosine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP). These chemicals are like rechargeable batteries because they are converted into the higher energy molecules ATP and NADPH (ADP → ATP and NADP→ NADPH). The ATP and NADPH contain stored energy that is used by the plant cells to drive biological processes. (3)
We need plants to survive, and they need us. That is just the way God designed it. Man is the caretaker of the earth. On the other hand, man is greater than the plants because the Bible says that when we start a relationship with Jesus, our bodies become a temple for the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). Our Heavenly Father invented the all of the colors. When He made plant chlorophyll He decided that it would absorb all light except green. So God must love green, shouldn’t we?
(1) For more see: http://www.esa.doc.gov/GreenEconomyReport/
(2) Aerobic respiration is one of the key ways that animal cells make ATP (energy) since God did not give us chlorophyll to make energy from the sun. Aerobic respiration is just photosynthesis in reverse. (C6H12O6 + 6O2 → 6CO2 + 6H2O).
(3) For more see: http://science.nsta.org/enewsletter/2007-05/sc0704_60.pdf
Manna and Coffee 