“Kunnen wij de AARDE beheren?”

That’s the title of a book I bought in 1987. The author is Professor Dr Jan Tinbergen, one of the seven Dutch Nobel Prize winners. He taught Bob Goudzwaard when he studied at the Economic Faculty of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Where Psalm 8:6 expresses our divine assignment: “You have made him ruler over the works of your hands,” Tinbergen wonders whether we are up to that task. The Dutch word ‘behe(e)ren’ has as root the word ‘heer’ which means Lord or Ruler, so the title’s literal translation is: “Are we really capable of being a ruler over the earth?”

My reality check is tempered by the caveat that I am a charter member of the exclusive club of columnists whose motto is “Saepe mendosus, nunquam dubius,” ”Often in Error, never in Doubt”.

A lot has happened since Tinbergen wrote this 170 page book in 1986. Then Global Warming was still a non-issue, while nuclear danger dominated thinking. No wonder peace on earth then was seen as the prerequisite to survival. “If we cannot maintain peace,” Tinbergen concluded, “humanity has signed its own death warrant.”

Now, in 2010, war is universal. While nuclear danger has not faded, on the contrary, far more fatal is the global environmental conflict: humanity against creation, expressed in economic growth at all costs, slaying seas, soil, sanity and especially the future of our children and grandchildren. We now face the ultimate consequences of exponential growth, so aptly expressed by Capitalism as ‘creative destruction’. This ‘faith’ has been so successful that now it is bumping against the Limits of Growth, manifest in ferocious floods in the Far East, droughts and fires in Russia, man-made oil-spills and cancer-rates galore, and heat waves everywhere, all symptoms of Global Warming. Kenneth E. Boulding wrote a few years ago that “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Matters are moving much more immediate. In nature we see the rapid melting of Arctic Sea ice. There the much darker waters absorb more solar radiation, causing more warming, causing more ice to melt, causing more warming…. and even more ominously, causing the tundra to release billions of tons of methane gases, a substance 20 times more lethal than automobile exhausts. Dr James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who studied in the Netherlands and married there, and who is the world’s foremost climate expert, has warned that us – you, me- warming the planet is ‘a recipe for global disaster.’

Deuteronomy 30: 19 comes to mind. As never before, we face a stark choice: life or death, blessings or curses, following the laws inherent in creation, shalom, peace among people, peace with the earth, or total destruction.

Are we capable of managing the earth? Without a complete reversal – metanoia – of our political, economic, religious and personal life we will have to deal with climate upheaval of a scale unprecedented in human history, while simultaneously coping with an economic depression that will make 1930 look like a Golden Age, and WWII a minor inconvenience. The longer we burn fossil fuels, the deeper the climate catastrophe is going to be.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) sees little signs that society takes Global Warming or Peak Oil seriously. Revelation 9:20-21 comes to mind.

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.  … In his hands is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.
Job 12: 7-10.

One of my dear friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of Rene Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” His opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.

Is he right?

Years ago, while on my way to Bancroft for business, I noticed a freshly killed bird on the side on the road and its partner standing next to it as in mourning.

We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. A few months ago a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?

There is a curious passage in Genesis 2, where God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were given the right to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.

At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.

Can our mass-production of animals continue? The on-going disasters in the Gulf of Mexico and the production of Tar-Sand oil are real signs that the easy energy has been used and that EROI or Energy Returned On Investment becomes ever smaller with the result that the fuel price creeps up, and air-and water pollution is growing by leaps and bounds, heralding hard times ahead. Just as heat at the hint of a hand or cool at a computer command, so the days of the raising chickens in cages and cows in crowded quarters will soon become impossible as the oil-clock stands a few seconds before mid-point, meaning that the days of using ten energy calories to produce one food calorie will soon be over. As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the vast expanse of prairies where they belong.

But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.

However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) uses solar power to mow his grass – trying not to cut too soon the many different wild flowers.   

LAMENT FOR PLANET EARTH

Isaiah 24:5-6

The earth is defiled by its people;
they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
and broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
its people must bear their guilt.

Today these words are truer than ever. Just as Chernobyl was a horrendous man-made nuclear disaster so the Gulf of Mexico calamity is a man-made oil disaster of similar magnitude, doing direct damage in days what Global Warming is doing in decades. We, who drive cars, heat houses and use electricity, bear equal responsibility with BP.

“We have broken the everlasting covenant.” In Genesis 9 God made a covenant with us. A covenant is a contract through which two parties pledge troth, just as in a marriage. 1 Samuel 18:3 describes such a procedure. There David and Jonathan take over each other’s possessions, symbolized by exchanging their clothes and weapons. They also mingle blood, by cutting a small incision in their arms and touching these wounds so that the blood flows together, and then, as a sign of this covenant, slightly infect them, so that scars remain. Jesus, head of the New Covenant, did exactly the same when he sealed the covenant with his blood, his wounds still visible on his hands today.

In the Genesis’ covenant God gave everything he had – the entire earth and the heavens – to humanity, on the condition that we give ourselves to God, as in Mark 12:30, “Love the Lord with heart, soul, mind, best expressed in our love for creation. It’s exactly that covenant that we have discarded, and I don’t have to elaborate, as the brokenness of society and nature is all too evident everywhere. It is plain that this Covenant goes far beyond bible reading and Christian school and church attendance.

The saying goes that “The Future belongs to those who prepare for it today,” which is especially true for Christians, because they know their future: the renewed creation. With that in mind, the real challenge facing Christians today is genuinely lamenting the state of planet earth, and attempting to prepare for life in the earthly New Creation. That’s why we have to minimize “sinning against the earth which is now the most dreadful thing,” to quote Nietzsche again, who, when he saw a horse whipped to death by a drunken owner, lost his mind, so affected was he by animal cruelty.

How can we minimize ‘sinning against the earth’, and maximize preparing for eternity? A little detour first. Basically there are three distinct economies: the primary economy, the natural world of soil, seas, and forests; the secondary economy, producing goods and services by our labor; the tertiary economy, the fabrication and exchange of money.

The problem we face is that the natural primary economy has essentially no place in current economic policy. Our capitalistic system assumes that soil, seas, forests will always be there to provide the secondary and tertiary economies with our wants. So the plight of planet earth is ignored, of which the Gulf of Mexico and its wetlands is just its latest casualty.

The Gulf disaster: it makes me cry. This area is incredibly rich in nutrients and diversity, on which in season each day 25 million birds land to replenish their diminished stamina. These coast-land bird refuges are relied on by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbird species, because of their vast marshes and miles and miles of beaches. Imagine: the just born birds being fed with tainted fish or abandoned because their parents have drowned in oily muck: these once life-giving swamps and bogs have now become the Louisiana killing fields.

Raj Patel in his book “The Value of Nothing” writes that we know exactly the price of everything – the tertiary economy – but the value of nothing – we don’t value the water, the air, the soil or the birds. He notes that if we take all these primary economy costs – pollution, transportation, carbon foot print – into consideration, a hamburger should cost $200.00.

“Therefore a curse consumes the earth,” so evident in the Gulf of Mexico, where we just have destroyed the jobs of tens of thousands of fishermen, the lives of millions of birds, and made the waters there useless for Life, so that we can drive that mile to the store in air-conditioned comfort, taking God’s name in vain in the process, oblivious to the plight of Planet Earth.

The best preparation for eternity is first to pray for environmental wisdom, then to think locally and act locally, by buying as much as possible local food and produce and articles from nearby sources. Growing your own is still the best solution: it’s healthier, requires no transportation and freshness is guaranteed: that is new creation economics.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) relocated from suburban St Catharines in 1975 to rural Tweed. His many writings can be found on ‘hielema.ca’.