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.

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.   

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’.

May 4 2010

Does the earth feel pain? Of course, if you believe what the Bible says in Romans 8: 22, where it is recorded that the whole creation has been groaning from pain. It must be screaming now that oil is destroying very vulnerable wetland in the Southern states.

What is the ultimate price we are willing to pay for oil, not only in dollars but especially in natural habitat destruction? The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is just the most recent  The other costs are more hidden: air pollution, asthma, global weirding, so perhaps the latest news that we are approaching PEAK OIL should perhaps be regarded as Good News. The bad news is that the approach of Peak Oil means that the easy stuff is gone which increases the danger of getting out whatever is left.

Who says that we are approaching Peak Oil? The United States Joint Forces Command in a press release a few weeks ago has told the world that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” The report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

Less available energy for the world’s household can be compared to a family suddenly facing job losses or decreasing wages. That would not in itself be a bad thing, if prices would also decline and so purchasing power maintained,  but if the cost of living goes up, that family will experience a double whammy, and may be reduced to sudden poverty, it not worse.

A family needs money to operate, just as oil is needed to keep the world economy going: money can be created out of nothing, that’s why banks are so profitable, but that is not the case with Oil, which is becoming ever more difficult to obtain, while demand goes up, because India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population, have an increasing appetite for energy, which will produce mushrooming prices.

Less oil will actually produce more pollution, because everyone, including China –already using 80 percent coal to generate electricity – will increase the use of much higher polluting coal, especially as electric cars become all the rage.

The recent eruption of that volcano whose name I cannot possibly remember, which stopped airplane traffic dead, is but a pinprick prelude of what is at store when high octane airplane fuel will no longer be plentiful and cheap. It will not disappear, of course, but tripling the cost of the airplane power source will put an effective stop to all but the most necessary air travel. And that will only be a minor nuisance compared to other inconveniences, such as food costs, or even its very availability.

During the past five decades agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. The earth we own has, by and large, lost its natural state and its soil has become a chemical soup laced with pesticides and herbicides – both synthesized from oil – and other chemicals. With the price of nitrogen fertilizers, produced from natural gas, increasing exponentially at the same rate as its carbon-brother oil, and tractors and other farm machinery burning diesel fuel and gasoline, with crops trucked long distances, and food packaged in oil-derived plastic, by the time it has traveled from land to mouth, very few people will be able to afford it.

One hundred years ago 70 percent of the population was rural. Today, 2010, in its US census forms there are so few full-time farmers, that such a category no longer is included in the list of occupations. It can be safely said that with no oil, or only extremely costly fuel, society as we know it, will cease to function.
Jeff Rubin, former economist with the CIBC, in his book, Why Your world is about to get a whole lot Smaller, oil and the end of Globalization, writes that our long-distance food supply, will cease to function and local produce, a 100 feet diet, will become the norm. With a 100 feet diet I mean that you will step outside your door into you garden and eat your own produce. Of course that will not be possible when you live on the 15^th floor of a condo downtown somewhere, so, with high fuel prices, these places might not be your best bet anymore. Jeff Rubin sees 60 cents for a pound of bananas or $4 for a dozen oranges or cheap California lettuce or impossible to eat Mexican tomatoes as a quirk of history, only made possible through the temporary spurt in cheap fuel.

What should we do, in the light of these circumstances?

More about that in a next column.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) has a web site – hielema.ca – on which essays, books, and more than 500 columns are available free of charge.

In Greek drama, Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, was given the gift of prophesy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances, he ordained that her prophecies would not be believed. Today we live in Cassandra times, when the many warnings are simply ignored.

Why are they not heeded? Al Gore’s documentary and book The Inconvenient Truth were well received by the public, but since implementing its recommendations involved measures that would inconvenience peoples’ life styles, they are not acknowledged. The key reason New Orleans was not better protected, was simply optimistic inertia: it will never happen here. The financial meltdown two years ago was predicted by many, but The Market was seen as infallible. Of course the same is the case with the one substance on which we have built our life: not faith in the Infinite God – that too for some- but faith in an infinite supply of oil. Global Warming is an identical story: “we have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up,” writes the 90 year old Dr James Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s climate in crisis and the fate of humanity. Curiously Lovelock, who is not a Christian, starts his book with a quote from Jesus: “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” (Matthew 23:24). A gnat is the tiniest of unclean animals. He refers here to political and environmental measures that are for appearances only but really have no substance. In essence he is saying what Peter writes in 2 Peter 3, where he describes The Day of the Lord, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way – the elements destroyed by fire – you ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of the Lord and speed its coming.” In that sense James Lovelock is a true prophet.

Prophets are unpopular because they question the status quo; prophets are unpopular because people hate change; prophets are unpopular because people are comfortable; prophets are unpopular because politicians avoid controversy at all cost, hate to be bringers of bad news, even though they know better; prophets are unpopular even in the church as it plain from even a cursory reading of the Old Testament prophets, where both the major and minor ones reveal that organized religion in the days before Christ resembled today’s rulers: they want to please everybody. And not much has changed in the after Christ institutions.

The average human thinks that a prophet is a special person who speaks for God or one who foretells the future, at least that’s what my dictionary tells me, but I take issue with that explanation, because it would limit the office of prophet to crackpots, since nobody can predict the future.

Let me go back a more than few years when I was young and attended the Young People Society in my home-city Groningen, where our Sunday-evening meetings were geared to students, and chaired by a university graduate. There some 20 young men, after having attended two church services of at least 90 minutes in duration, debated topics of general Christian interest, introduced by one of the members. There I learned that we as Christians have a three-fold office: that of Prophet, Priest and King. These weekly 2 hour Sunday- evening gatherings in the early and mid 1940’s, shaped my outlook on life.

So I am a Prophet, Priest and King? That’s a core Calvinistic declaration, but one that I don’t hear much about anymore. Perhaps the words of God to Ezekiel (chapter 2: 2-5) apply to today as well: “I am sending you to a rebellious nation that is obstinate and stubborn. And whether they listen or not they will know that a prophet has been among them”.

After this introduction, I better clarify what I perceive as a prophet’s profile. A prophet is a visionary, a seer. In the Bible they were called ‘seers’ not because they could see into the future, but because they could see the truth, could understand the deeper meaning of life and have a holistic view on events, not staring what’s going on in isolation, but grasping the true consequences of the day’s happenings, and the deeper spiritual message of the present moment. A prophet sheds unblinking light on the pain and injustices of the present. By doing so he or she links heeding to hearing and action to understanding.

Thus a prophet is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically foretells what is to come. No, a prophet is first and foremost a believer who refuses to nostalgically wallow in the past, but is convinced that a new present requires new thinking and different approaches.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly dares to look to what is happening ‘out there’ and, as a consequence, fully embraces his or her responsibility for the immense challenges evident in our quickly changing society.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who has the courage to critically look at past decisions, including those involving doctrines, to test them on their relevance for today and tomorrow.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who from his or her perspective on contemporary life dares to look to the future to keep creation viable for our children and grandchildren and also strives for a church in which these young people feel at home.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who by seeing Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation, knows that Christ, as the Son of Man, the Ben-Adam, the Son of the Soil, will return to make all things new. That’s why a prophet, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who now already can visualize what this future will be like and thus can critically evaluate the present in the light of the glorious future that is coming.

If I may be so bold to cast myself in the role that I have described above, and probably be condemned for doing so, what do I see?

Looking back how we have arrived at the circumstances we are in today then I detect that the economic boom that made America in the 20^th century the globe’s largest economy and the envy of the world, can be traced to some fortunate circumstances: where Europe and the rest of the world suffered ruinous wars, North American industrial hinterlands were not only spared destruction, but benefited immensely as producers of war materials and the providers of the black gold in Texas and elsewhere in its territory: the United States at the mid 20^th century produced more petroleum than all the other countries on Earth put together. The oceans of oil on which the US floated to victory in two world wars made it the economic super power of the by-gone era. That domestic oil-flow has now been reduced to a trickle, while global supplies too are shrinking, at exactly the same time when expectations of billions of destitute people are rising, thanks to ubiquitous television.

With the coming of Peak Oil and the first slow slippages in worldwide conventional petroleum production, it is not difficult to predict for those who have ears to hear, eyes to see and minds to embrace, that the big challenge facing today’s industrial societies is managing the end of abundance, rather than the onset of greater wealth for the Rest of the World.

It is foolish to believe otherwise: the brief period of cheap and plentiful energy, now ending, which, for an all too short a period was in itself a exceptional occurrence in historical terms, has been nothing else but a tremendous acceleration of human history- of which the more than tripling of the number of humans in my life time is just one example – so that the Coming of Christ would be sooner.

A realistic look at what’s happening makes plain that the period of unprecedented prosperity, extraordinary extravagance and gigantic growth, is ending, perhaps even suddenly. That means that society has to relearn the lessons of more normal and less unusual times, times where we have the opportunity to again truly and purposely honor creation. That’s what Peter alluded to in 2 Peter 3: 11-12 when he asked us “to live holy and godly lives as we look forward to the Day of God and speed its coming.” In this connection I’d like to draw your attention to a line in the Lord’s Prayer, the one immediately following our request “Your Kingdom Come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is a direct appeal for the speedy coming of The New Creation. The next line which many of us also repeat almost every week is “Give us this day our daily bread.” In the March 25 2010 issue of the London Review of Books, a new book is discussed, A History of Christianity, The first 3000 years. There it says that “The Greek word epiousios, translated as ‘daily’ does not mean ‘daily.’… the most likely learned guess seems to be that it refers to a special bread that will be needed the next day if the kingdom should happen to come overnight.  Professor Dr Herman Ridderbos, in his marvelous work The Coming of the Kingdom, also says that ‘daily’ is most likely incorrect, and leans to “belonging to the coming kingdom.” This, in my totally layman’s opinion, fits in with the preceding line and thus the request to Give us this day our daily bread, could read “Give us the wherewithal to prepare ourselves for the Coming of the Kingdom.”

In June Toronto has the dubious honor to host the G20 meeting, which will, as usual, focus on the economy. You can be assured that these politicians and economists will do everything in their power to enhance economic growth, even though perpetual growth is an impossibility, and when it does happen, as in cancer, it ends in death. Politicians look to yesterday for answer to cope with tomorrow’s problems. Attempt after attempt to cure economic stagnation by expanding access to credit have only generated a series of destructive speculative bubbles and crashes while destroying creation. Efforts to maintain an inflated standard of living in the face of a contracting real economy have only caused mountains of debts. Today’s policy makers are driven by a two-pronged faith commitment: (1) that policies that failed last year will succeed next year, and (2) that the pursuit of ever newer and ever more expensive technological tools will assure an even grander future.

A new course should be taken, based on simple technologies, locally based, more resilient, sustainable and creation friendly, but that will not happen, and so the warnings in the Bible and by the modern-day Cassandras will be ignored. People will go there merry way till the End, when the Lord will come back to rectify the situation once and for all. Be part of that in-Spired restoration process.

April 10 2010

I always have a number of books on the go, from easily- digested detective to philosophical-religious stuff. I sometimes read the latter 3 or 4 times, for the simple reason that I am a slow learner. One of my repeat-reads is The Hidden Face of God, by Dr Richard Elliot Friedman, an expert in Old Testament language but equally at home in the New Testament.

In the book Prof Friedman traces the disappearance of God, and mentions that Jesus Christ always describes Himself as “son of man,” a term that appears in the Hebrew Bible 109 times as ‘ben adam’ which, he writes, simply means ‘human being. It literally says ‘son of the earth’.

Dr Friedman also devotes a lot of space to Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), from which he quotes a very peculiar passage: “To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Nietzsche’s call to “be true to the earth” also had a decisive influence on Bonhoeffer’s spiritual development as well. In his Creation and Fall he writes, “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together. This means that sinning against the earth is the same as sinning against one’s neighbor.

Think about that for a minute: “To sin against the earth is the most dreadful thing!” It reminds me of Psalm 51:4 “O wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin,” and (6) “Against you, you alone have I sinned”.

The passage makes eminent sense to me. We confess that God made the earth. That makes the earth holy. This earth, says Romans 8, is now deeply suffering from the sins we commit against it. Especially we Westerners sin against the earth continuously. I see it as a classical case of ‘lese majesty’, an offense against “The Sovereign Power.”  It is doubly curious that, although a majority of North Americans still believes Global Warming is real, that percentage is falling, with the lowest number among conservative Christians. Global Warming, or perhaps more accurately Global Weirding, is a direct consequence of ‘sinning against the earth.’

If I am correct in my reasoning, then the churches should be in the forefront of advocating measures that stop or at least lessen the dangers of Climate Change and forcefully agitate against pollution, and practice all means of conservation, perhaps even promote house churches to cut back on driving and maintaining a large building used only a few hours per week.

I know I am powerless to make people change their minds about anything, including environmental issues: no level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy cooked up by fanatics like me and governments to tax and control us. I cannot change people’s views. Even Jesus, in spite of all his miracles, was killed because He did not buy into the one thing that people wanted: a Davidic-like Israel and deliverance from the Roman oppressor.

Today I see a striking paradox: now that Jesus is soon to establish His earthly Kingdom, the New Creation, for which we pray every time we recite “Thy Kingdom Come,” the overwhelming belief in the larger church is that Heaven is our destination, and not this earth. To believe otherwise would entail treating this earth as God’s domain, and an admission that we effectively co-own this earth. That would rob us of our temporary easy life, made possible by abundant fuel supplies, now on the verge to disappear.

Yes, Peak Oil peeks around the corner. New studies show that peak oil is due in 2014. Kuwaiti scientists have updated oil predictions previously based on the famous Hubbert model, which had correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil reserves would peak within 20 years. The new multi-cycle Hubbert Model, used by the Kuwaiti scientists evaluated oil production trends of 47 major oil-producing countries, showing how many countries have already hit their peak including Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Russia, Norway, the U.K., China, Iran, and Indonesia. Another report was published last month by the UK Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security. Britain of course will have parliamentary elections in May and the authors noted that the next government is likely to be dealing with declining oil production, to start by 2014. Peak oil, by the way, is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.

In future columns I will try to picture what life would be like with an ever shrinking oil supply.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) had a successful maple-syrup season: a lot of work, but the result was sweet. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’

Poems are made by fools like me

But only God can make a tree.

I go to a movie perhaps once a year, so, when I saw Avatar my amateurish reaction was one of appreciation. I sympathized with these humanoids, who, with the help of animals, went to great length to protect their tree habitat from being destroyed by ruthless operators.

I may be entirely wrong but I thought I noticed some biblical themes: these creatures loved creation, which I think, is the best way, perhaps the only way, to express our love for God. It’s always been a mystery to me how church-goers claim to love their neighbours, yet have no qualms to despoil the soil, air and water on which their wellbeing depends.  At the film’s very end there was a statement that “very few chose to join them”, which made me think of Jesus’ words, “Many are called but few are chosen.”

The entire movie reminded me of The Tree of Life, a recurrent theme in the Bible which starts with The Tree of Life and the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, and ends with the Tree of Life, in Revelation 22:2 with a curious annotation “The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.” This suggests to me that trees have miraculous powers, perhaps beyond our understanding. It is well-known that patients who can see trees, recover faster than those who look out on a life- less scenery. Somehow experiencing God’s living world around us makes us live better and longer. Deuteronomy 20 warns us not to kill off trees, even when it might give us an advantage in war.

John the Baptizer compares trees to people. In Matthew 3:10 he says that “every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire.” Psalm 92: 12 tells us that “The righteous will flourish like a palm tree; they will grow like the cedar of Lebanon”, now all gone, of course.

In the very centre of Scripture is Jesus who died on a Tree. I think it is noteworthy that His blood and flesh was first pounded into a tree before His body-fluids ebbed away into the earth. We tend to limit Jesus’ redemptive act to us, humans alone, but Jesus’ death was necessary to redeem the entire world, including trees, perhaps the most abused single species in creation.

Trees are firmly rooted in the earth from which they derive their food and minerals. They stretch out their branches to heaven as in prayer, a sure sign that this world has been created by God. In Psalm 1 God compared his children to trees, because we too are firmly rooted in the earth.

What is so unique about trees that the Bible begins and ends with them? In many ways trees are like the earth itself. A strange thing about trees is that during its life nearly all of it is dead wood. As a tree grows, it has only a thin skin of living tissue underneath its bark. The wood inside is dead, as is the bark that protects its delicate tissue. More than 97 percent of the tree is dead before it is cut down. In that way a tree is very much like the earth itself. Around the circumference of the earth, on its surface, is also a thin skin of living matter, of which both the trees and we human beings are part. All rocks beneath is and the air above us are dead.

In the same way the earth on which we live, is like the tree. The earth too is a living, breathing organism, now choking on acid rain, running a fever on Global Warming, and angry, very angry, witness the earthquakes and the ever more violent storms. Romans 8 describes the earth as groaning with pain. Only when we perceive the earth as a living entity, can we become aware that we cannot treat it as cruelly as the contract soldiers did in Avatar and much of our industrial system. The earth is alive, because God is alive. If we treat the earth as if it were dead, then essentially we say “God is dead. He has no relevance for me.”

We all know that trees are our lungs: they take the CO2 from the air and breathe out pure oxygen, the very chemical on which our life depends: it requires the oxygen produced by 4500 trees to keep one person in the West alive.

Trees: regard them as your neighbours, love them the same way you love yourself, your family and your friends, hug them and pray for their continuous healthy state.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) lives on 50 acres off mostly trees, adjacent to thousands of acres of crown land. Google ‘hielema.ca’ for more writings.

February  2010

In front of me, on my messy desk, I have a pile of books – let’s see,1, 2, there are 14 of them – all having one theme in common: Christian Stewardship. The writers are from the diverse crannies and crevices of the church: Roman Catholic- Father Thomas Berry; Lutheran – Larry L. Rasmussen; Christian Reformed – Calvin College sponsored; United Church of Canada, Presbyterian, and so on. One of the writers is Tony Campolo, who titles his book: ”How to rescue the Earth without worshiping Nature.”

You know by now that I am quite the opinionated old man, so it may come as no surprise to you that, in my, at times, not so humble opinion, all these men, and one woman, Sally McFague, no two, Aileen van Beilen worked on the Calvin project, miss the point. Dr Campolo’s book title already suggests that we can be the victor in fighting pollution. So no wonder that he writes that “with some help from St Francis and Teilhard de Chardin, we just might make it.” Make what? Learn to live so that Jesus does not have to return to’ make all things new?” In his concluding remarks he writes that “The environment has an awesome resilience if we just give it a chance.” Granted he wrote these lines 20 years ago. Maybe today he has a different view.

In EARTHKEEPING, Christian Stewardship of Natural Resources, ( also an ancient book) all by people of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship with such writers as Calvin De Witt, Loren Wilkinson, Aileen Van Beilen and others, I detect a similar optimism. Here is what these good people conclude: “Yet Christians have the power in Christ to redeem the human character from its perversity and lead it into a new life in which stewardship, husbandry, and nurturing vulnerability is ‘natural’….. Only then can we hope to become good and just stewards of the creation which God has placed under our care”. Don’t we believe in ‘original sin’ anymore? This sounds very much like Teilhard de Chardin, a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest and also a geologist, and taught that humanity is in a continuous process of evolution toward a perfect spiritual state. His writings were later banned by the Vatican.

I wonder “Do the Calvin people mean that all of earth-dwellers will become One Hundred Percent Green- Christians? Or do I read this wrong? Since this was written I have often heard Calvin De Witt speak, and have questioned him closely, as recently as two years ago at a conference at the University of Minnesota. He still leaves the impression that human action can safeguard the future.

So how does a Roman Catholic Priest view all this? Father Thomas Berry has written The Dream of the Earth, a book of which Dr Donald B.Conroy, President of the North American Conference on Religion and Ecology, says that “This volume is quite possibly one of the most important books of the twentieth century”. In some ways Berry reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote in his essay Creation and Fall: “In my entire being, in my creatureliness, I belong completely to this world….God, brother and sister and the earth belong together,” except that with Berry God is not included.  Berry and Campolo openly base their optimism on Teilhard de Chardin who has had a tremendous impact on many people, including the former PM Paul Martin, even though the Roman Catholic Church declared him a heretic.

Some of my other books are: Caring for Creation; The Earth is the Lord’s; Project Earth, Preserving the World God created; Cherish the Earth: The environment and Scripture; Earth Community, Earth Ethics; God as Nature sees God; Cherish the Earth; Life Abundant; God is Green. They all offer good tips how to live as Christians, but strikingly, none point explicitly to the New Earth under a New Heaven, so vividly described in Revelation 21. Campolo hints at it, but, it seems to me that the Heaven thing is still uppermost in peoples’ mind.

No wonder: I too was spoon-fed on heaven. Already in Kindergarten I sang “Sluit U aan, Sluit U aan, wie mee wil naar de hemel gaan,”  “Get in line, Get in line, then follow the ‘to heaven’ sign.”

What I miss in all these books is “The Kingdom” concept.

Only two writers make this the centre of their thinking. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Gestapo days before the end of World War II, in his “Thy Kingdom Come,” wrote that “The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead……and to the power of God in the new Creation.” I find that theme also in Dr J.H. Bavinck, who said, “The Bible shows on every page that the meaning of creation is focused on the one overriding theme: that creation is dominated by one marvelous motif, the motif of the Kingdom of God…It is in the End Time, in the Great Day that is coming, that Yahweh will reveal His kingly-powers when He will forever banish all influences which have had such destructive and ruinous effects on His beloved world.” To me this means that “Where there is no Kingdom vision, the people perish.”

Bert Hielema lives in a solar passive house, with 10 active solar panels. See http://hielema.ca/blog. Comments to bert@hielema.ca.

During the last week of last year, when we harbored and fed 22 of our children and grandchildren for a couple of days, I still found time to read in Gone with the Wind, that famous book by Margaret Mitchell. It took me well into the New Year to finish all 1024 pages and I could not help comparing it with today’s circumstances.

The story starts describing the picture-perfect opulence Scarlett O’Hara and the Southern landowners enjoyed prior to that terrible war between the Northern States and the South, which lasted from 1861-1865, and was won by the Industrial north.

That conflict destroyed the idyllic life of the plantation owners who relied on the services of hundreds of ‘blackies’ doing the cotton-picking work while the white elite partied. Of course the macho young men there were eager to go to war and teach the North a lesson in manners, life style and warfare.

Today our way of life resembles the pre-civic war Southern luxurious conditions thanks to the hundreds of energy slaves we employ 24/7, a situation too good to last. Just as the defeat of the Confederation of Southern States created a situation not unlike Zimbabwe today – chaos without the expertise of the white farmers, and millions of blacks helpless without guidance – so we too, the rich of the world, dependent on the energy provided by the black gold contained in oil and natural gas, will be unable to cope when our sources of slavery, energy derived from Oil, will have disappeared, and Climate Change and declining fuel supplies will make life as we know it, impossible.

Oil and war are two sides of the same coin. Our current ‘oil-war’ is not a conflict between North and South, between industry and agriculture, is not the rich West against the poor rest. No, our struggle is a much more total and truly global crusade. We all, almost without exception, are soldiers fighting in World War III: everybody in the world battling creation, the utmost unholy war, a war we can never win.

The decade from 2000 through 2009 has been 10 years with triple and double zeros in their numbers. These zeros were also evident in zero gains in the stock market, in wages, in job growth but with unprecedented advances in climate-related incidents and terrorists acts.

I was at the UN climate conference in The Hague in 2000 where nothing was resolved. Last month we witnessed the latest Climate Conference in Copenhagen where again, nothing was resolved.

CC stands for a number of things: It also stands for Climate Change, Carbon Credit and Copenhagen Cop-out, where the mighty of the world tried to do the impossible: pursuing a political solution to a physical phenomenon: they might as well have attempted to repeal the Law of Gravity by a majority vote.

Climate Change is a planetary problem that has now gone beyond the human will to remedy. Climate Change simply comes from too much CO2, Carbon Dioxide, in the atmosphere. Every time we turn the ignition key in our so adored automobile, we increase Green House Gases just a tad and heat up the air just a tiny bit more. Already in 1896 Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, and one of the first Nobel Prize winners, explained in the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine: “we are evaporating our coal mines into the air…Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.”

That was 114 years ago. Nothing much has changed. Still more than 50 percent of all electricity is generated by coal. The Copenhagen Cop-out reminds me of The Gadarene Swine Rule Theologian Douglas Wilson has coined, which goes as follows: “Just because a group is in formation, it doesn’t mean they know where they are going.”  This rule, based on Matthew 8:32, tells us that an immense herd of pigs rushed down a steep bank and drowned. In a similar fashion our world too is rushing head over heels into a Climate Change Catastrophe.

Already 2000 years ago Paul wrote that “the Lust for money is the root of all evil.” The Copenhagen Cop-out tells me that, thanks to our lust for money, we can kiss goodbye Africa, kiss goodbye south Asia, places where we send our missionaries. I wonder what their message is. Our lust for money means that we can kiss goodbye to glaciers and coral reefs and rainforests.

We Christians are traveling to an everlasting re-new-ed earth under a re-new-ed heaven, both ‘zero emissions’ zones. Our fight – see Ephesians 6: 12 – is against the powers of this dark world- which condones Global Warming – is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens, which directly refer to Climate Change.

If we want to be part of that Resurrection life and enjoy Life Everlasting- as we confess in the Apostles’ Creed – we Christians face an enormous challenge. Our new CC, our Cosmic Challenge, is to consciously live so, that our transition to that Zero Emission Life – which ought to be today’s mission of the Church – is smooth.

Bert Hielema lives in Rural Tweed, Ontario. His blog is http://hielema.ca/blog. He can be reached at bert@hielema.ca.