June 2 2013
What moves me to write my columns? (part 2)
Since I cannot buy all the new books that booksellers have trouble selling, I read a lot of reviews just in case there’s one that will entice me to hand over my credit card and add one more volume to my already overflowing library. In the Globe and Mail of May 25 I read about a possible acquisition: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How humans will survive a Mass Extinction. She – Annalee Newitz, a San Francisco-based science journalist – believes that a mass extinction is inevitable and considers moving to another planet –“we need a long-term plan to get humanity off Earth “. She also writes: “My point is that regardless whether humans are responsible for the sixth mass extinction on Earth, it is going to happen.” Writes the reviewer “The real solution to climate change is not terraforming the moons of Saturn or turning the skies white with miniscule mirrors. The real solution to climate change is both blindingly obvious and currently, politically impossible: an immediate and complete transition away from a carbon economy.” He concludes: “we rather live in fantasy than begin the difficult work of saving ourselves from ourselves.”
No, not a book I’d buy.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that we are carboholics. Just as alcoholics create a lot of problems for themselves and their families, carboholics cause truly frightening fallacies for everybody: groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, plenty of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity. Did I mention climate change? It is becoming more obvious every day that our lifestyle leads to a dead end, also financially as in an oil-based world the cheap and easily accessible crude is quickly disappearing. That’s why we are employing ever more dangerous and destructive technologies such as hydro-fracturing, deep-water drilling, mountain-top removal, and tar sands extraction to get at the remaining hydrocarbons. No wonder the voices are becoming louder and louder: we are approaching the end of life as we know it: mass extinction.
We more and more hear talk about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing the planet beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists in the prestigious journal Nature warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.” That means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.”
We are in real trouble. Living in the country-side as I do might stave off the worst for a few weeks, but there is no long-term escape from the dislocations that will come with such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no permanent escape for anybody. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it’s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.
In short, we live in apocalyptic times.
Apocalypse
The heading of this column, of the previous one and of my next June 9 column is, was and will be: What moves me to write my columns?
I know that I have been very critical of church and society. I had one person cancel my column for that reason. Yes, I am controversial. Sorry. Not really. I am convinced that from here on in matters will only get worse. The Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the New Testament gives some indications of what is in store for us. Given the situation today and the potential for enormous disasters, the scenes depicted in that Bible book look all too real. Both terms ‘Revelation’ and ‘Apocalypse’ are synonymous in their original meaning; “Revelation” from the Latin ‘revelo= unveil, uncover, lay bare’ and “Apocalypse” from Greek also meaning a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity.
Revelation is all around us. There are too many signs to ignore. Thomas L. Friedman, columnist of the New York Times visited Syria a few weeks ago and relates how he met three men: two had 10 children, one had 16. There is no or little education opportunity for them as the schools are reduced to rubble. The water level is approaching zero; the soil totally depleted. With robots now doing the menial work, software eliminating much of the brainwork, the only future there is fighting and facing a glorious death. Welcome to a suicidal world.
In 1959 one of my clients was dying of lung cancer. Even in his last days, when he could not swallow food, he still smoked. Then and there I – then a pack a day man – vowed to quit smoking. I took up running and I still do that. We, citizens of the world, are that addicted person: we are unable to shake that carbon habit and it will kill us as surely as that middle-age man. To quit smoking is extremely hard. It took me a few months to completely rid myself of these cigarettes and for years I dreamed about it. The world will not even attempt to change: given our total dependence on carbon fuels it has become impossible, making demise a certainty.
That’s why we somewhere, somehow must start thinking apocalyptically, must acquire first and foremost a deepening of our understanding of the world, seeing through the falsehoods of the people in power. In our advertisement-soaked society, saturated incessantly with marketing ploys, it is difficult to see through the phoniness of it all and come to some sort of clarity about the nature of the evil forces at work in our day and age. That’s why an understanding of revelation is more crucial than ever.
Thinking apocalyptically, living ‘revelation’, will force us to squarely face the curses that come with the concentration of wealth and power and the inevitability of collapse. Imagining the future gives us the opportunity to gauge our role in these systems, and pray for forgiveness. Our prayers are heard when we ourselves change our thinking and actions. More about that next week. The Syria situation, referred to above, is just one small instance of the harshness of the human assault on God’s creation. Thomas Homer-Dixon has discovered that pollution of the earth also results in mind pollution. No wonder we and the earth are one. Increasingly we see that suffering and strife within the human race points to apocalyptic thinking – revealing the true human mind- as the only explanation of what is happening in the world and to those who live there. We increasingly are discovering that people are bad, that systems are failing and that the status quo can easily tip into chaos. Thinking apocalyptically, realizing that mass extinction is on the horizon, is a step in the right direction and will give us no answers but will help us to identify new directions. The shift from the prophetic to the apocalyptic can tell us that hope in the effectiveness of existing systems is futile and we must start thinking in dramatically new ways. By thinking of ‘Apocalypse’ as the end of the old we can start the beginning of something new. The word ‘metanoia’ (the Greek word for ‘conversion’ actually taking a totally different direction) comes to mind. It’s not ‘rapture’ but a ‘rupture’ drastic enough to change life.
Additional Apocalyptic Affirmation
Mass extinction is the topic du jour. The May 23d issue of the London Review of Books deals with three books relevant to the matter at hand: (1) The Carbon Crunch: How We’re getting Climate Change Wrong- and How to Fix it; (2) Earthmasters: the Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering; and (3) The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places we Live. The reviewer concludes: “We’ll muddle through……but only if we slow climate change to a rate that we can adapt to. If we don’t we may indeed be doomed.”
It is all but certain that ‘we are doomed,’ which requires apocalyptic anticipation.
Dr. Robert Jensen cites Fred Guterl, the executive editor of Scientific American, who wrote The Fate of the Specie. In it he does not shy away from a blunt discussion of the challenges humans face. He writes: “There’s no going back on our reliance on computers and high-tech medicine, agriculture, power generation, and so forth without causing vast human suffering—unless you want to contemplate reducing the world population by many billions of people. We have climbed out on a technological limb, and turning back is a disturbing option. We are dependent on our technology, yet our technology now presents the seeds of our own destruction. It’s a dilemma. I don’t pretend to have a way out. We should start by being aware of the problem.”
James Lovelock, a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose work led to the detection of the widespread presence CFCs in the atmosphere, is also quite forthright in his assessment. He is most famous for his “Gaia hypothesis” that understands both the living and non-living parts of the earth as a complex system that can be thought of as a single organism. In the foreword to The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, I read that “we are dangerously ignorant of our own ignorance.” He starts his book with a text (KJV) from Matthew 23:24 “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” A gnat is the smallest of insects. It makes me think how many people violently agitate against gay-marriage – affecting a fraction of 1 percent of the population –while 50 percent of Americans deny Climate Change – that will damage everybody’s wellbeing. A typical quote: “Our future is like that of the passengers of a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.”
I write my columns to alert people to face reality. Most people will completely ignore it; others will ridicule it; some will admit that there is a case to be made and leave it at that. A few, a very few, will take it seriously. What we are doing to the planet is lethal for all. To borrow from one of 20th century America’s most honest writers, James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
The Bible talks about The State of the World as well. Let me quote a passage from J. H. Bavinck’s book The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming soon to be published by Eerdmans.
“It needs no argument that this sundering of creational harmony has had the most ominous results. We can well imagine that the rupturing of the kingdom automatically entailed a host of disastrous consequences. “Cursed is the ground because of you” (Gen. 3:17). The apostle Paul elaborated on this when he wrote, “For the creation was subject to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it” (Rom. 8:20). Indeed a curse came over the world when creation was subjected to damnation. Once sin affected just one portion of that beautifully holistic order, it infected its totality, ruined the entire realm. Now its melodious consonance is no longer a living reality. God himself surrendered his world to the powers of vanity, allowed it to be subject to destruction. God himself took this fateful step because we, humans, we wanted to be kings, because we refused to live in a world, even in God’s marvelous Kingdom that wants to be subject to him alone.
“We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily experience the terrifying consequences. We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.”
Yes, there is a solution to this. Yes, there is hope. Yes, all is well that ends well. More about that next week. In the meantime think apocalyptically, that is, look into your own mind, turn yourself inside out, try to discover where your real commitment lies.
Next week Part 3 “What moves me to write my columns?
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