LESS FOR MORE COULD LEAD TO NOTHING FOR ALL
When last week I announced my topic for the ensuing week, I had only a vague idea where I would go. I remember I was angry. Or perhaps that was not the correct word. Upset was a better description. Sad came even closer. Perhaps it was all three. My emotions are always close to the surface.
So why all this inner turmoil? I just had read that China had exceeded its fish quota by 12 times the agreed limit. We all know that the oceans are being depleted. Chinese fishing boats are more like fish-processing factories, and operate close to the Africa coast and scoop up, suck away, literally scrape the bottom of the ocean and so make it impossible for the poor African fishermen in their frail boats to catch the fish their lives depend on.
The real danger of this deathly method is a sudden fish stock collapse, similar to what happened on the Newfoundland coast where the cod disappeared in short order: for Africans less and less catch means more and more work, and when the catch collapses nothing for everybody.
Another reason for my down-mood was bees. Bees have earned a by-word: busy as bees. There now are fewer bees and many more trees that need pollination. There also is far less wisdom and far more problems. There also is far less money for much more work.
We need bees. You like apples? Almonds? Onions? How about blueberries or cherries or actually all flowering fruit out there: they all need plenty of pollination, and for pollination nothing beats the honeybee. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a quarter of our diet depends on honeybees powering pollination.
We need bees, and bees are dying en masse, have been since about 2005, when a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was first given a name. We named the result without knowing its cause. Curing CCD has proven impossibly complex, as tantalizingly difficult as preventing cancer: what’s the good of a cancer cure when the cancer rate is constantly increasing?
Bees or the lack of them is not the only stress on trees. Remember last year’s weather in Ontario? Thanks to a far too early spring followed by frost, all blossoms were killed which gave us no apples or cherries, and, of course, the price went up. Where I used to pays $22 for a bushel, last fall I paid $37. But if there are no bees, there we won’t have any fruit at all. Ever. I once did an appraisal on a GM dealership. The lady who helped me told me that she was engaged to a doctor. I told her not to eat any apples. She asked Why not? I said: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Without apples and other healthy fruits, diseases will multiply. Add a bit of drug-resistant diseases, and you better take out some extra life insurance.
So what is killing the bees? You could as well ask: what’s causing cancer. So what makes bees to die? Who knows? It could have all possible causes — bad nutrition, pesticides, an itinerant lifestyle that’s full of unnatural stresses, because bees are trucked by the millions from one pollination place to the next, from California to Georgia. I believe Monsanto is partly to blame. Its seed are impregnated with long-lasting pesticides. Also bee hives are such complex, tightly organized systems that if a few bees fall ill the whole structure might fall apart.
Fish, bees, incurable diseases are not the only new dangers. Years ago I wrote in a column that China would be the bellwether for our world to come. If China can make a go of it, the world will also do so.
So, what is happening in China? Decades of industrialization is taking its toll on the soil. All pollutants ultimately end up there. A few years ago I developed a curious head condition. My skull would feel numb and subject to heat flashes. Finally a wise doctor suggested allergies. I had been having strawberries in my porridge. I checked the label: Imported from China. I immediately stopped using them and never had these symptoms again. A soil survey showed that most of China’s growing soil is heavily polluted, containing even metal pollution from a hundred years ago, as well as the ‘666’ pesticide banned in the 1980s.
Then there is China’s air. A few weeks ago, air quality at the U.S. embassy in Beijing registered 755 on a scale to 500. A thick, choking haze enveloped the entire city. You couldn’t see from one high-rise office tower to the next; flights were cancelled, some highways were closed, schoolchildren were kept indoors, hospital admissions soared. China’s air quality problems aren’t limited to Beijing — a 2010 study found that air pollution led to 1.2 million premature deaths nationwide — and killer air is just one of the country’s ecological nightmares. I might add that China has the highest smoking rate in the world: 70 percent of men smoke but only a fraction of women, who are greatly in the minority. One-half of its surface water is so polluted it can’t be treated to make it drinkable, and half of that is so bad it can’t even be used for industrial purposes. Seventy percent of the country’s rivers and lakes receive raw sewage or untreated industrial toxins. Cancer rates are up, and the country has been losing an area the size of Prince Edward Island every year to desertification, brought on by unsustainable farming practices in grassland ecosystems. It doesn’t look that China will make it.
Is it any better here in North America? Fracking is all the craze there, some claiming that it will make the USA an energy exporter nation. Hogwash.
Why should we care? Because the shale oil and gas frenzy will be one of the most environmentally destructive initiatives in our history. Millions of acres will be cleared for well pads, drilling roads, and a mind-boggling web of pipelines, much of it on federal lands. Much of this acreage will include those carbon sinks known as trees: the same what’s happening with the tar sands in Alberta, where also millions of trees are rudely discarded to get to that tar stuff that will later spout out of our exhausts as GHG= Green House Gases. In the Dakotas this industrial wasteland will likely never be reclaimed, certainly not by the oil industry. When a well becomes unprofitable to produce – and their depletion rate is very high – the industry will close it in and move on to greener pastures to destroy. Let’s also not forget the enormous consumption of water, often in arid regions, toxic emissions from drilling equipment and rolling stock, methane released or flared, and the uncertain effect of hundreds of thousands of wells and fractured shale formations on groundwater supplies. Again less (oil) for more (pollution), and long term pain for short term gain.
I believe that all this will result in collapse, which maybe as sudden as the cod collapse and the weather change. Let those who have an open eye for the fool’s gold that our financial scenario reflects, and an open heart and mind what the Lord is trying to tell us.
What it really amounts to is that we no longer live in normal times. The past is no longer a trusted guide for the future. The assumption that “it can’t happen here” is no longer valid. Now anything is possible anywhere: the weather is haywire; financial fiascos more frequent; pandemic pandemonium increasingly possible; crop failures a constant likelihood; wars and rumors of war more worrisome.
The abnormal is the new normal. Take the economic situation. Every month Ben Bernanke, the man who is at the money till in Washington, generates by a touch on the computer $85 billion of new money, 12 month a year till Doomsday. Those trillions are posted against the debit balance of our children and grandchildren. It’s all about idol worship. By paying homage to the god of Progress we sin against God’s command not to worship other gods, leading to the “punishing of the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation, of those who hate me.” (Ex. 20:5). That phony money only benefits the already rich while burdening the overburdened innocent even more. It is bound to end badly. We have lived too long beyond our means, both economically and environmentally.
The past 100 years has been the age of extremes: the millions senselessly slaughtered on Flanders fields; the senseless Depression of the Thirties; the senseless holocaust of the Jews; the senseless Hitler mania; the senseless Republican Party today. To crown it all the senseless sacrificing of the natural state of the environment for the sake of producing more junk that nobody needs, that nobody can afford, in the process creating a society totally dependent on automobiles for survival. There is no going back. The abnormal is the new normal. All seems well until the unexpected happens because we are in the final stage of history, a highly unpopular statement, because we don’t want bad news to disrupt our comfort. We genuinely believe that if we cling to our normal routine and habitual methods of doing things, despite overwhelming proof that something dangerous is looming, everything will be OK, that bad things simply cannot happen here. But as Ayn Rand put it, “You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
Underneath our feet there is some ominous rumbling. What has happened to the fish stock, what continues to happen to the bee situation, can easily happen to the financial world.
Have you followed the situation in Europe: the crises in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and now France? Or the budget battles in the USA? It’s all about money and debt. Frankly the debt overhang is simply scary. Why does it happen now? Why is everything coming to a head? Because we are dealing with ultimate matters. We are approaching the End.
Here’s what Johan Herman Bavinck writes in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming: “The church always falls back on her great longing for the end?time. Again and again, as if driven by unseen forces, the church remembers that she is not of this world, that she belongs to the coming age, and that she must aim all her efforts in that direction. This keen awareness of the end-time—this eschatological consciousness—is today undergoing a strong revival throughout the church of Christ. The terrible blows of two world wars that lie behind us, the ruins of countless irreplaceable cultural treasures[1]—they all remind us that we live in a world that is headed for destruction. The early church understood this, as is evident from the writings of that period. In the Didachè, one of the oldest writings of the early church, the prayer for the Lord’s Supper went as follows: “Let grace abound, and let this world pass away. Maranatha!” It is true: the church can witness the destruction of world cities, and at the shattering of all these treasures she senses that these horrendous happenings will cause this terrible world to go under and perish on account of the forces at work within it. The church experiences something of the jubilations of the redeemed in heaven when Babylon falls, when all the merchants of the world are in mourning over the big city and the saints in heaven call out to each other: “Rejoice over her, O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you” (Rev. 18:20). That is not a perverse longing for death; it is a genuine conviction that this world is hastening toward destruction and that through that destruction the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ will come.”
Because we don’t want to think about this and close our minds to the possibility of collapse, the Bible tells us that the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Perhaps some old people like Simeon in the temple (Luke 2:25) and Anna (Luke 2:36) will be ready, but the vast majority of the people, both in Jesus’ days and also today, rather not entertain what the Bible tells us.
Next week: We and our connection to animals and plants.
[1] Translator’s note: Today we would add: the environmental happenings, the economic turmoil, the destruction of habitats like the rainforests.