Co-owning the Earth January 6 2010
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 https://www.hielema.ca/. He can be reached at bert@hielema.ca.