Earth hogs: when God commanded humans to "fill the earth," our Creator probably didn't mean we should completely overrun it.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD AND nobody pumped his or her own gas, drivers would pull into gas stations and order attendants to "fill 'er up." In Bill McKibben's new book Deep Economy (Times Books, 2007), the bestselling author and Christian environmentalist complains that America has taken this command to extremes. We are the "fill 'er up" society, and it is making us and the planet sick.

With an unshakeable faith in economic growth and an insatiable appetite for ever more stuff, Americans are not just filling up their gas tanks. We are filling up every undeveloped acre of farmland, forest, and prairie with ring after ring of suburban sprawl. We fill up the lanes of every highway, thruway, and parkway with an expanding fleet of single-occupancy vehicles. And when we get home from our congested commute, we fill up every room of the faux mansions dotting our suburban landscape with so much stuff from the local big-box stores that we have to rent storage space for our leftovers. On top of that we fill ourselves with so much fattening fast foods that national epidemics of obesity and diabetes are coursing through our veins.

And though we may be "full of it," we are not fulfilled. Study after study confirms that the "fill 'er up" society is not content, that with all our full houses, garages, and bellies Americans are decidedly less happy than our parents or our European neighbors. We suffer from more depression and experience more anxiety than folks with half the stuff we have. Full as we are, stuffed as we are, we feel empty.

Unfortunately much of the rest of the world is now rushing to "fill 'er up," too, and McKibben and other environmentalists warn us that there's not enough fuel, food, or room on the planet for everyone to be as full as Americans. It would take the resources of five Earths to "fill up" the rest of the world in quite the same way. And running all the stuff we already have is warming the planet, polluting the sky, and creating monstrous weather.

FOR A LONG TIME AMERICAN CHRISTIANS have thought they were entitled to "fill 'er up" because in Genesis 1:28 God commands humans to "fill the earth" and have dominion over the rest of creation. God, we thought, gave us the planet and ordered us to "fill 'er up" with our children and stuff, and to fill ourselves with Earth's bounty.

But Genesis 1:28 ordered humans to fill the earth, not to overcrowd it, and not to choke or cram it with all our stuff. The command to fill the earth does not give us permission to crowd out other creatures or encroach on their habitats, for God also commanded that the birds, fish, and crawling creatures fill the skies, sea, and earth with their young. So when humans are called to fill the earth, God does not mean for them to take more than their fill of the planet's air, land, and sea. Indeed the two verses following Genesis 1:28 instruct humans to eat only their share of creation's bounty and to leave the rest for other creatures to have their fill.

And in Genesis 2 God places humans in Eden "to cultivate and care for it." Rather than filling the earth with our stuff, we gardeners are to help bring all creation to fruition, filling the earth with all God's creatures.

Exodus 16 also teaches us to take only our fill. When God provides the Hebrews in the wilderness with quail and manna, each person and family is provided with enough food. No one has too little or too much, and anyone who attempts to break God's command by taking more than their fair share and hoarding their excess will find their daily bread spoiled and rotten, a fit punishment for those who would take their neighbor's fill of food.

When the wandering Hebrews finally settle in Canaan, God promises there will be no hunger or poverty if everyone remembers to take their fair share of the land and provide all the orphans, widows, and aliens with their fill of food. In the Promised Land nobody is full until everybody has their fill.

And in the gospel accounts of the miracle of the loaves, the disciples fear they cannot feed the thousands who have followed Jesus into the wilderness, but when the huge crowd has all it needs, there are still 12 baskets left over, suggesting that no one took more than their fill. No doubt Jesus ordered the 12 baskets shared with the poor roaming the highways and byways.

THE BIBLICAL COMMAND TO FILL THE EARTH

demands we ensure all people and creatures get their fill of creation's bounty, a lesson we have forgotten in an economy that has no off switch and that professes blind faith in endless growth and acquisition. Far too many of us in America have taken much more than our fill, even as millions of other Americans and billions of other humans are desperately short of what they need. And though being full has not made us happy, we continue to hanker for the lives of those who are even more full of stuff than we are.

The American film Citizen Kane closes with a scene panning the millions of crates, boxes, and piles of Kane's accumulated and forgotten stuff, a universe of clutter littering the cavernous basement of his castle at Xanadu. As Kane, Orson Welles offered us the cinema's most haunting vision of the American dream gone sour, a reminder that you can have too much. Here is all of Kane's hoarded manna spoiling in his warehouses while he dies of loneliness. Like so many of us, the poor fellow just didn't know when to say "enough."

What we need is a new command, like the one we give the waiter asking if we want dessert. "No thanks, I'm full."

By PATRICK McCoRMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.