December 20 2015
ARE WE ABLE TO MANAGE THE EARTH?
The world is old, very old. The most prolific species on earth were and still are trees. In early days these trees gave the earth perfect health in the form of massive doses of oxygen, abundant rain, while strong storms battered their branches, wrenching out the dead wood, and so seeding the soil.
This beginning reminds me of a small volume of poems, Naked Trees, written by John Terpstra, an upright Frisian, now living in Ontario. Here is one of his poems:
Achievement
A tree will grow to the furthest limits of its gradually acquired strength. Leading a life of pure sensation, or rather, response: a life of pure response to its vegetable senses. And it is a major achievement of Creation to have prompted such various, unbroken replies. The earth and air, sun and water are all required: the response each time appears singularly inspired.
And yet, as it grows and spreads, budging and crimping the nether inches and taking more space from the sky, the tree will not move in the least from its original stand. Will end where it began. The sight is almost too familiar, and open to interpretation: rigid limbs extend the solid, uncompromising shaft: paralysis. Or, incomparable aspiration.
The tree grows, furthering only itself, to which end achieves this blatant majesty.
While typing in these lines I am reminded of my Father’s prayer. In the household on my youth my father prayed aloud before each meal. One phrase always was: “As the tree falls, there it remains,” hinting that when we die all chance for redemption is past: we better turn to the Lord before it is too late.
In the beginning there was the tree: the Tree of Life because the Tree personifies life. The world today will surely perish because we are mercilessly eradicating the tree. We have no regard for its blatant majesty. The Bible starts with the Tree; it ends with the Tree and in the center there is the Golgotha Tree. In the last book of the Bible, the very last chapter, it says: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” Just as we killed Christ, who, in that act, saved us, so we destroy the trees, and these trees too will do the opposite: their final act is healing the harm we do and have done to creation. It is so fitting that Jesus died on a tree. His flesh was first embedded into the tree. His blood first penetrated into the tree. When we kill the tree we kill ourselves.
While our violence towards each other has diminished somewhat (no large-scale wars since 1945), our violence towards the living planet is intensifying. The megafauna – trees from shore to shore, animals everywhere – that once dominated most parts of the world is now confined to small and shrinking pockets, from which trees are also disappearing at stupendous speed. In this year’s fire season, much of the Indonesian rainforest has been fragmented and drastically reduced. The marine ecosystem too is collapsing in front of our eyes, with food webs unraveling by overfishing and pollution. Soil, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Association, is being lost so fast that the world has, on average, just another 60 years of crop production.
Are we able to turn the corner? Can we really rectify this situation?
Professor Dr. Jan Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics wrote in 1987 a small volume, entitled: “Are we able to manage the Earth?” (Kunnen wij de AARDE beheren?).
That question came up in me when I followed the Paris conference on Climate Change. There 195 heads of states hammered out an agreement supposedly making it possible for the earth to exist a bit longer. In essence there too the unspoken question was: “Are we really capable to create a healing, healthy environment for LIFE? I write LIFE in capital letters because we cannot exist on the earth in isolation. Dying trees, uprooted trees, trees perishing in persistent conflagration, mean dying human, dying animals, dying species.
Tinbergen starts at the earth’s beginning, writing how for a very long time the earth existed without human beings: but there were trees, trillions of them. Had I existed then breathing in the rich atmosphere, saturated with oxygen, inhaling pure air, undiluted, free of any contamination, my whole being would be almost geared to live forever, just as the people in the beginning of Genesis who lived well into their tenth century.
Tinbergen traces the roots of civilization, telling us how our Western culture owes much to the ancient Greeks and Romans. To the Greeks we owe art and science, democracy and religion; to the Romans our legal system. To Christianity we owe the love for our world-wide neighbors, still evident today in the way we in Canada, in Germany and Sweden, welcome the refugees, the lost and homeless.
Tinbergen cites a book by a Finnish scientist and politician, translated in 1987 – before inclusive language – as: “The World of Man”, wherein Pekka Kuusi starts with something we all need: food. In the beginning food came exclusively from trees and plants, and from hunting and fishing. Gradually this nomadic lifestyle changed to more settled life, when agriculture became the norm.
Kuusi estimates that some 40,000 years ago there were only between half to one million people in the entire world, growing to some 5 million 8,000 years before Christ, and some 250 million people at the time of Christ, concentrated around the Mediterranean, which literally means “The middle of the earth”. Then Primary Productivity was 100 percent, which basically meant that all animals could live unencumbered by human danger, except for hunting, of course. . And trees were everywhere, so the air was pure, the water was pristine, the soil uncontaminated. Primary productivity is now reduced to 50 percent.
Of course, all people were religious, not necessarily Christian, but all believing in a god or gods. There simply was no other explanation for what people observed and experienced.
It is remarkable that every 500 years there emerges a new type of worship. Starting in the year 1000 before Christ, the Yahweh temple was erected in Jerusalem, about 500 years later Buddhism was born. We start our calendar from the date of the birth of Christ and the rise of Christianity. In the year 500 Islam came into being and quickly conquered the Middle East world because Christianity, so successfully replacing paganism by means of the Apostle Paul, had become fossilized so they quickly embraced the new gospel of the prophet Mohammed.
Europe, after the Fall of Rome in 460 AD, was traumatized, while the Crusades, the Viking invasions, the terrible plagues, then constant wars, meant that for close to 1000 years, until 1500, development stagnated, and the population remained stuck at some 250 million, too preoccupied to break the hold of Roman Catholic Christianity.
All this finally changed with Martin Luther in 1517, and the start of the Protestant Reformation.
That event is now 500 years ago, time for another major new Religion to emerge. Is the Anthropocene Epoch the new religion: the age when Humanity totally lives without God? Or the wrong God? I think so.
On July 1 2001 I bought a book in Stratford, Ontario, nothing special, since even now I keep on buying them. “Something new under the sun” was the title. The author, a historian from the University of Chicago – Canadian born – J. R. McNeill, gave it the subtitle “An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.” Most people today have little Bible knowledge, so its title probably means little to them because in Ecclesiastes 1 the Bible tells us, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
McNeill starts his book with that quotation and says that these words today are out of date: “There is something new under the sun….. The place of humankind within the natural world is not what it was. In this respect at least, modern times are different, and we do well to remember that…………..In the 20th century humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules.”
Of course, without God there are no rules.
McNeill starts with the development of Economic Growth, still the leading measure for every finance minister in the world, because without it taxable income stagnates and the Welfare Society collapses.
He provides a table with date and GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In 1500 the world’s GDP was $100 billion, expanding to $250billion in 1820, $825 billion in 1900, $12,000 billion in 2,000, while today, I might add, it is about $15,000 billion or $15 trillion. In other words the world economy today is about 150 times bigger than in 1500, while the population has grown by a factor of perhaps 30 times, from some 250 million to the present 7.2 billion. We know that consumption is not evenly distributed, with us Westerners consuming the lion share, while a third of the world’s people suffer.
Paris COP 21 was an attempt to help the poor nations at the expense of the rich. That will be difficult because we have become addicted to growth. I had a good friend who was an alcoholic, who followed us when we moved to Tweed thinking that having a good friend would save him from the consequences of drinking. It didn’t work: he died in a car accident (DUI). Being addicted to carbon is worse than to alcohol because our entire economy depends on growth.
Addiction always starts slowly. First trees were used to save us from freezing in the dark. When Europe’s forests were at the edge of exhaustion and Europe became too crowded, America’s rich shores came begging. Then coal came to the rescue, and after that dirty fuel, OIL became the Savior of Mankind: Middle East Oil especially. Now we are hooked.
In their hearts all delegates to that powwow in Paris knew that all their talk and resolutions to reduce oil use would be useless. They knew that in our ‘Anthropocene Era’ the strong lord it over the weak, the rich build dikes, the poor drown. They knew that there’d be walls everywhere: around Europe, around the USA. They knew that we live in nation-states that are only theoretically accountable to universal moral and legal standards, that global capitalism doesn’t take into account the lives of poor people or the health of the ecosphere. Our political and economic systems are designed to discourage actions necessary to prevent catastrophe: so disaster is the obvious outcome.
Can we really manage the earth?
The European Union was an attempt to make sure that the calamities of the 20th Century would never be repeated there. Today this union is on the verge of disintegration. The same is true in the USA where the political spectrum is fraying, witness the rise of a Trump, an egomaniac par excellence. The Middle East now spells mayhem. Even the weather has gone weird, thanks to our insatiable hunger for more.
Can we manage the EARTH? In 1987 Tinbergen had his doubts. Today, almost 30 years later, it looks more unmanageable than ever.
In Revelation, the last Bible book, the end of the world is spelled out in gruesome detail. There people, frustrated at their utter impotence, fully aware that their own gods no longer function, rise up against the Prince of this world, as Jesus calls him. He, the Ultimate Evil one, then uses his ultimate weapon.
Here’s how J. H. Bavinck, in a soon to be published book on Revelation, sees it:
“There is only one solution, one radical and total cure: a nuclear bomb. For the sake of preserving the realm, the capital city must be sacrificed. All these grand buildings and its beautiful squares, all its magnificence has to go. It takes a while before they dare to make that decision, but in the end the world ruler, in consultation with his ten governors, is not afraid to execute this extreme edict. During the night one single plane from a remote airport flies high in the sky over the sleeping city, never to wake again. A bomb is released, slowly a mushroom cloud ensues, and….a rebellious Babylon is abolished forever.”
Since we are unable to manage the earth, we, by our own actions, will destroy it.