Like it or not, believe it or not, we are losing something very precious and necessary for life: our environment, the creation around us.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her "On Death and Dying" (1969), taught us that we grieve when we lose something, anything, not just the death of a person - anything. Working with people who were dying or dealing with life-altering diseases, she developed five stages: denial and dying, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These stages do not happen one after the other.

Rather, one goes back and forth among them in no particular order, in a complex process.

Global warming is about grief because we are losing something: the creation that surrounds us.

Genesis 1-3 tells us that God creates a creation as well as creatures. All of creation has the ability to interrelate and interact because at the deepest level God is about relationship, and the creation reflects that. Everything is deeply interrelated.

We and the creation impact one another. Our human activity is bound to affect the world around us. Treating the creation as a "thing," something with no inherent value other than to serve us (which, from a biblical stance, is not true), we simply do not get it.

So, can humans have an effect on what happens to the creation? Of course.

Right now, our rape of the land and air and what lies beneath says we do not know how to live in harmony with the whole of creation. The earth is coughing and belching in apoplexy because it cannot breathe (Romans 8:22).

We have befouled things by putting carbon dioxide and other things into the atmosphere at a record rate.

We are called to be co-creators with God to serve the creation in love as God did in creating it. Our problem is that we are sinners who don't have God's perspective, and we make mistakes, like global warming. That is our sinfulness.

Those who claim there is no global warming are ignoring recent sound scientific findings and are in denial. We are losing something. We deny that at our own peril, and at the peril of our children and grandchildren and generations beyond the world over. Is that the legacy we want to pass on?

Others are bargaining: If we can just have a few more coal-fired power plants or a few more gas-guzzlers or two more oil fields, then we will think about alternatives. That won't work either, though.

I'm at the anger stage. We can do something about it, and those in denial or bargaining are of no help. For me, it's like the news anchor in the movie "Network," who yells from his window, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more." There is global warming; I'm convinced of it. There will be those who will deny or bargain. But can we afford to be wrong?