May 27 2017
I’VE SAID IT BEFORE AND I WILL SAY IT AGAIN.
We are heading for disaster. Of course you know this already. Chances are you will not admit this to yourself or to others. By disaster I mean the end of carbon-driven abundance, an abnormality we have taken for granted.
Why do I say that the end of ‘normality’ is near?
Look around. Have a critical peek at your own daily routine. Is there anything you do that will somewhat slow global deterioration? I am trying it, fully well knowing that it really is impossible to make even a minute difference. True, I bike; true. I grow much of our food; true, we prepare meals from scratch, heat with recycled wood; have solar panels to save on electricity. But whatever we do, there are billions of others who want to engage the energy kick, can’t wait to get a car, have electricity. So in the end, my tiny effort comes to nothing, and really, I still live a more wasteful life than billions of others, because I no longer am able to live ‘responsibly’, fully in tune with God’s creation.
I too am like the idol so well described in Psalm 115:
But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
5They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
6They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
7They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
8Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
THOSE WHO MAKE THEM WILL BE LIKE THEM.
I too have eyes but refuse to see.
I too have ears but refuse to hear.
I too have a nose but refuse to smell.
I too have ceased to be truly human and have become unfit for the kingdom to come where only full human beings are allowed, people who have eyes that acknowledge and perceive the earth’s degradation around us. I too have ceased to be truly human because I no longer hear the cries of creation, the wailing of the whales, the buzzing of the bees, the eerie silence around the refugees. I too have ceased to be truly human because, as Jesus observed, as recorded in Matthew 11: 17, ‘We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’
We all are part of creation, but the church favors the HEAVEN HERESY over CREATION CARE by an immense margin. That’s the reason why we no longer know how to mourn, no longer know how to rejoice. Something vital has been lost because the commandment to love God – and thus his creative powers – is no longer believed.
Our future is decided in the ARCTIC.
We have become immune to the message of ARCTIC NEWS which warns us of mass extinction of species, including humans, within one DECADE, before 2027!! It records that, globally, it is 1.65°C warmer today, compared to 1890-1910. Anomalies in the Arctic are even higher. It’s around 6°C warmer at latitudes north of 70°N. This applies in particular to feedbacks associated with loss of snow and ice cover in the Arctic and to methane releases from clathrates contained in sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.
The Arctic is melting. The vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, containing almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop, thought to be safe forever, has been flooded by the ‘permafrost’ melt. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.
This proves that nothing is PERMANENT anymore. We can take nothing for granted. Everything is at odds with everything else.
Fact is that we face a totally different future. Fact is that we cannot continue in the way we do. The data (data is the plural of datum) are obvious and the logic is clear. We cannot continue as we have been. The situation is simply unsustainable.
“Make America great again” simply means going back to the good old days of the past, the ideal 1950-60’s when fuel was abundant and dirt cheap, when jobs were plenty, when men received a decent, living wage and women knew their place.
The trouble is that we can’t go back because ‘the times they are a’changing’, or rather, they have changed, irrevocably.
Species are disappearing, oceans are acidifying, glaciers are melting and sliding away, with those in Greenland and Antarctica contributing to sea level rise, a phenomenon that is not somewhere out in the future, but right here, right now.
Sell your waterfront property.
The past weeks have shown that waterfront means danger. If you own water front property worth a bundle that’s at risk, sell now and avoid the rush. Get out of Florida and New York City and Amsterdam. Soon the insurers and underwriters might pull your insurance coverage. How much is an uninsurable property on the coast of a rising sea or along a river or lake, worth? As a former real estate appraiser my answer is obvious: not much, if any.
A (very) little bit of study reveals that exponential growth on a finite planet is a bad idea, which means that perpetual exponential growth is an even worse idea. Unfortunately, and quite obviously, perpetual exponential growth lies at the very heart of every so-called ‘modern’ economic model. It’s what we seek as a culture, and is lauded and rewarded in every possible way.
However, exponential growth has taken us in a surprisingly short time from a relatively empty world to a world with plenty of people and their plastic playthings, full of their furniture and empty of what has been there before. The signs of stress can be seen in shrinking forests, falling water tables, eroding soils, disappearing wetlands, rivers either running dry or inundating residential area, and the lists go on, all too familiar to the discerning minds.
The basic problem is oil consumption. The Paris-based International Energy Agency argues that demand will grow, albeit slowly, past 2040. And the two biggest U.S. oil companies, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. , say peak demand isn’t in sight. In spite of the unbelievable bad consequences of oil use, we are hooked. There’s no way that we will curtail Carbon consumption. We are CARBOHOLICS. Electric cars? Not for many decades.
Our greedy desire for ever more, spells our doom, both for us as the human race and for the planet as a whole. These last 150 years of rampant human feasting on fossil fuels and wallowing in wanton waste is bringing us to the verge of collapse.
Our diet causes die-out.
Look at what we consume: just one example: breakfast cereal travels from land to mouth via many energy-rich processes, and ends up on our palate depleted of oil-rich or fatty substances, which ensures years of ‘durability’ but fails to be ‘real nutrition’. Result: sugar-rich non-food at a cost of 40+ energy calories for one unhealthy food calorie.
Our diet depends on cheap fossil fuel energy and corporate profits, causing cancers to mushroom. On our current course, 8 or 9 billion people will soon be trying to produce more food from degraded soils even as the production of fossil fuels from far away sources, from deeper and deeper wells, requires more and more energy to bring it to market.
Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor as the present TRUMP regime is setting out to implement. To hand back to God the gift of creation (Psalm 115: 16 comes to mind: “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind”) in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future, is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then certainly it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity, the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. To sacrifice future life to protect present luxury and extravagance goes directly against the work of Jesus who came to save the cosmos. We must face the failures of the GROWTH idolatry, the god of our present age.
Our Giant Canoe
Here’s what I read last week: “Think of our situation as if humanity were all together in a giant canoe and nearly everybody is paddling as hard as they can. After all, we’re trying to get somewhere: to improve ourselves, to grow our economy and increase our prosperity. There are goals to be met!
“Along the way we’ve convinced ourselves that this canoe is the best one ever built and it cannot fail us. It is the very pinnacle of achievement. It looks great, and there are creature comforts and pleasant distractions galore. Food has never been more abundant or easier to obtain, new gadgets keep showing up, and (in theory, at least) you can determine for yourself where you want to sit in the canoe.
The people in the front love being there, as they feel powerful and in control. Ironically, though, it’s the few people in the stern who are actually secretly and rather effortlessly steering, but nobody in the rest of the canoe seems to notice or care.
There’s only one thing wrong with this canoe. It’s headed for a gigantic waterfall, and if it tips over the lip, very few will survive. It will be like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel.
A few in the canoe have woken up and noticed this. But their protests are limited to either pulling their paddles out of the water and refusing to propel the canoe any faster, or even trying to futilely paddle backwards against the rest of humanity’s combined efforts.
Neither approach is a solution, mind you. But at least for these ‘awake’ souls, it feels better than paddling mindlessly towards the roaring falls. As it stand today, humanity’s canoe is destined to speed right over the edge. “
Today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy, our inhuman lack of creational compassion.
So I am called a pessimist, a doomsayer. I call myself a realist, a person who looks at the present condition and calls a spade a spade. I am too old “to beat around the bush”, as the saying goes.
As far as the church is concerned, its task is over. Just as the ‘world’ cannot change anymore, too set in the groove that inevitably leads to total collapse, the church as an institute has had its day. It too can no longer change course. As Jeremiah laments (51: 9), “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgement reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”
I think that this means that missions is over, because church reform has become impossible 500 years after Luther’s attempt to do so.
“Let people retreat to their own community” and prepare for the return of the Lord, and start learning to live The Gospel of the Earth, in light of the Scriptures. We cannot understand the Holy Writ if we neglect the Holy Earth. We cannot understand the Holy Earth if we neglect the Holy Writ: the two go together.
In these last days, of which the signs are all too clear for the discerning spirits, it is high time that we leave the gods of the age, money, infinite growth, pleasure, whatever, and concentrate, as much as possible, on imagining The Kingdom, the New Creation, to come. Now it is time to implement the plea Jesus left with us: Seek first the Kingdom of God, the welfare of His Creation, and trust that everything else will fall into place.
That is our only hope. Trust and obey. There’s no other Way.