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’.