Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

November 2010

Build houses and plant gardens and eat what they produce…… Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for if it prospers, you too will prosper. (Jeremiah 29:5 &7)

You would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed. (Jeremiah 51:9)

Here’s something we really don’t expect from Jeremiah: a positive statement. Says he “When in Babylon build houses, plant gardens, make the city prosper.”

Cities in those days where different from ours: people there were quite self-sufficient, with room to grow food.  Nineveh, too, was that way. God told Jonah, “Should I not be concerned about that great city where so many people live and many cattle as well?”

Today the only large American city with space to grow food is Detroit. It now has oodles of empty spots, places where houses used to be, having lost more than half of its population. Want to buy a house cheap? Go to Motor City and get an extra lot thrown into the bargain.

So why did Jeremiah urge the tribe of Judah to blend in? Simple. God wanted his chosen people to stay in good condition physically, materially and take time to treasure their religious heritage. As a result much of the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – came into being during that 70 year exile. Apparently absence from Jerusalem made the heart grow fonder, made them appreciate God’s hand in history, and also made them realize that they were in the city of Babylon, but did not belong there.

This applies to us as well: we live in Babylon also. David, at the end of his reign acknowledged that we are ‘aliens and transients’. Walter Lippmann, the well-known American commentator wrote, “Every one of us is, from a spiritual point of view, an immigrant.” Jesus too reaffirmed that: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

All this simply means that we are different from the world, that we may not subscribe to its philosophy of “Growth at all cost”, just to name one example that does the most harm to our fragile planet. Because it’s God’s work of art we must always treat it with reverence, reason why Jesus urges us to ‘seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness’, live in tune with God’s laws and be ready when the New World comes.  Luther once said that ‘even if I knew that the Lord would return tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.’

Back to something more in tune with Jeremiah. It’s not for nothing that he is known as ‘the weeping prophet’ and best-known for his proverbial Jeremiads, his mournful lamentations. The weeping prophet knew something that we too should take to heart: in chapter 51:9 he expresses his sorrow when he writes: “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed…… for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

We are discovering the same about our world: it too is beyond healing. We too must pray for it and work for its wellbeing, yet we see each day more clearly that our planet too cannot be healed: it has gone beyond the point of no return.

Jared Diamond in his 567 page book COLLAPSE used the Easter Islands as an example for what’s ails us. That island needed trees for its survival, but, just as we do all the time, they kept on cutting them down. Dr Diamond writes “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees?’ Or ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for our wood?’”

We are all Easter Islanders now. God’s world is choking, which means that God’s Word is choking, because God’s world is also God’s Word, if we believe what our Belgic Confession teaches us. To understand The Means by Which We Know God, it states that we know Him First by the creation, preservation, and government of the Universe since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:20. ‘All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse’.

To me this suggests that the corollary, the other side of the coin, is also true: Those who recognize God’s greatness in creation and glorify his name because of it and do everything to preserve it, stand justified.

The Belgic confession places the bible as a secondary source for knowing God, yet almost all churches see that as the exclusive way to discover Him. We speak of the Bible as His holy and divine Word, but I have never heard that the universe is his Holy and Divine Word. Does Gnosticism, which sees matter as evil, play a role here? Prof. Dr Harold Bloom – America’s most distinguished literary critic – thinks so. In his The American Religion he categorically states that because of Gnosticism, “the American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer says essentially the same when he states that those who deny that God, Earth and Humanity are intimately linked, are engaged in pious secularism.

It is high time that we reset our priorities: make God’s universe the Primary Word while using the Bible as “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in God’s created word.

The Christian Church needs an AGGIORNAMENTO: an act of bringing it up to date to reflect current conditions.

The Hielema couple lives mostly in Tweed, but is often in Ancaster where they attend a Christian Reformed Church.

October 2010

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.

(Luke 16:10)

There are seven (7) billion of us precious people populating this planet. Among these many mouths and brains there are far too few who care about the earth, mostly because they are pre-occupied with making ends meet, literally living from land to mouth. Even though many of the churchgoing folk – both Protestant and Roman Catholic – have environmental concerns, their theology pushes them in a different direction. They consciously or unwittingly still have that old song in mind: “I am a stranger here within a foreign land, my home is far away upon the Golden strand,” meaning heaven, of course, so their heart commitment is elsewhere.

No wonder the politicians exploit this feeling. Take the Republican Party. Its platform proclaims that, because we have god-given rights, we are free to pollute. Its political statement dictates that “claims of human-caused global warming are based on fraudulent, inaccurate information and that legislation and policy based on this information are detrimental to the well-being of the United States.” If the Republicans gain power in Congress in the next few weeks, watch out. Goodbye to any measures to do justice to the earth that God created. It’s like openly approving to vandalize the Mona Lisa or Rembrandt’s “Nacht Wacht.”

E.O Wilson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and world-renowned Harvard biologist, in his recent book Creation writes that our destructive power has no limit. “We have, all by our bipedal, wobbly-headed selves, altered Earth’s atmosphere and climate away from the norm… we have spread toxic chemicals worldwide, appropriated 40 percent of the solar energy available for photosynthesis, converted almost all of the easily arable land, dammed rivers, raised the planets sea level and are close to running out of fresh water.”

With a growing world population, and more people wanting our diet, there is constantly a greater need for new agricultural land. It will come by converting more rain forests and savannas.  In the meantime warning signs are accumulating. Ten million hectares (25 million acres) of grain monocultures fell victim to drought and fire in Russia this summer, partly because large tracts of peat bogs had been drained. Climate change means that extreme weather events such as droughts and floods may become more frequent in the future. In Pakistan floods overwhelmed 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of agricultural land and a significant portion of the country’s infrastructure disappeared under water.

In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we plummeted backwards. In other words, things will only get worse. There’ll never be a global climate deal.

I started with quoting Jesus. Each one of us has been entrusted by Him to take care of a minute part of his creation. We can’t do much, but that does not give us the excuse not to do anything at all. “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much,” says Jesus, also to us today. This means – since Jesus’ ministry has everything to do with the coming of the Kingdom – that when we do our small part to save creation, he will award us with all the treasures of the New Creation, his Kingdom.

Jesus also says in Luke 12:3: “What you have whispered in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops”. This is confirmed in the so-called ‘butterfly in India paradigm,’ which indicated that a small event in a complex system can lead to large results: A single butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi may be the certain cause of a hurricane in North Carolina, though the hurricane may take place a couple of years later.

It’s my job to jab, jovially, of course. There are 7 billion people in the world of which many are called, and few are chosen. The ones that are chosen are those who are faithful in small things, matters which are different from one person to the next. But one rule applies to all: Luke 16 deals with the parable of the Shrewd Manager, and ends with the words, “You cannot serve both God and Money.”

Serving God means first of all ‘serving his creation’, as John 3:16 teaches us.

Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, where he is a reluctant Presbyterian. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’.

September 2010

Could this be true? Could the use of carbon fuel, extracted from deep into the earth, whether coal or crude, be compared to the apple in Eden, that fateful fruit that set us off on the wrong track? The word ‘track’ reminds me of 1939 when, in grade 5 of the J.C. Wirtz School in Groningen, the teacher told us that some religious fanatics saw the inauguration of the first train between Amsterdam and Haarlem in 1839, as the work of the Devil. The class found this notion absurd, of course. Now I am not so sure.

I was thinking about this while weeding my extensive vegetable garden on a humid day, right after torrential rains. Hoeing is hard work, subject to sun-stroke and bug-bites, yet eerily reminiscent of Genesis 3 which mentions toil, thorns, thistles and painful sweat, a far cry from farmers in air-conditioned, stereo-equipped tractors, fully fed on fossil fuel, mingling so-called Monsanto super seeds with Round-up, generating super weeds in the process.

Oh, that oil thing again. Yet, since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted from the earth has exceeded new oil discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil, but discovered fewer than 9 billion new barrels. World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, decreasing every year.

It can’t be denied: food is oil and oil is food. Tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel, natural gas or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production also is energy-intensive. Natural gas is used to synthesize the basic ammonia building block in nitrogen fertilizers. The mining, manufacture and international transport of phosphate and potash fertilizers all depend on oil. The glib answer to the question of how we can end world hunger has always been to focus on more technology. Unfortunately this requires even more fuel and more Climate Change.

I am afraid that the Christian answer to less oil-consumption is whipping our bodies in shape and use muscle power, and so become re-acquainted with working without the ‘convenient’ carbon-powered tools, a definite no-no in the Kingdom to come.

When I started my garden 35 years ago, the soil was almost pure sand covered by a teeny-weeny bit of topsoil, enough to sprout stubborn weeds. So, in my wheelbarrow, I hauled untold many loads of decade old manure from a neighboring farm: pure black soil, one hundred percent unadulterated goodness, almost worth its weight in gold. This I worked into the sand, so that now, after more than three decades, aided by continuous increments of compost, my original sandy patch is a dark, loamy, fertile plot on which I grow potatoes, beans, raspberries, kale of course, lettuce galore, tomatoes, beets, carrots, everything. Every spring, black flies notwithstanding, I double dig my garden, and form raised beds. All hard, healthy work, and very satisfying: also a real nest-egg when troubling times arrive. And they are on the horizon.

I am a news-freak: subscribe to umpteen magazines, and view numerous news sources every day: believe me, things out there are getting more frightening by the day. I know that our press hates to publish bad news: it’s bad for business. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, I know that I am right when I voice the odd negative comment: I am merely acting as a human, calling a spade a spade. It reminds me of Jesus, who, in Luke 12, states that he came to bring division, even within the most intimate relationships. There He also tells us to be culturally aware, and interpret what goes on in the world lest we be fooled by false appearances.

But back to my 50 acre plot, the little piece of earth that I may call my own, and for which I will have to give account on the Day of Judgment. It’s typical Eastern Ontario terrain: bush, swamp, rock, and some arable land, and since I am not a farmer, I have planted most of the open spaces with trees, both silver maple and pine, thousands of those, made possible in the good times, when I could purchase them for a  penny a piece and got 10 pennies for planting them.

Our oldest son gave me a book by Diana Beresfors-Kroeger The Global Forest. In it this botanist-medical biochemist-poet tells us that “A healthy tree with a wide canopy around the house will significantly reduce particulate pollution…. They form a living wall for health and a basic barrier to the pillage of pollution.”

Get ready for Christ’s return: plant a tree, get a veggie garden, shop at farmers’ markets, drive less, walk or bike more, always keep the  Kingdom in mind.

Bert Hielema lives in Tweed, Ont., 5.6 km from the village, where the recently repaved highway has room for a bike, a real blessing. His blog is “hielema.ca.”

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.  … In his hands is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.
Job 12: 7-10.

One of my dear friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of Rene Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” His opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.

Is he right?

Years ago, while on my way to Bancroft for business, I noticed a freshly killed bird on the side on the road and its partner standing next to it as in mourning.

We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. A few months ago a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?

There is a curious passage in Genesis 2, where God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were given the right to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.

At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.

Can our mass-production of animals continue? The on-going disasters in the Gulf of Mexico and the production of Tar-Sand oil are real signs that the easy energy has been used and that EROI or Energy Returned On Investment becomes ever smaller with the result that the fuel price creeps up, and air-and water pollution is growing by leaps and bounds, heralding hard times ahead. Just as heat at the hint of a hand or cool at a computer command, so the days of the raising chickens in cages and cows in crowded quarters will soon become impossible as the oil-clock stands a few seconds before mid-point, meaning that the days of using ten energy calories to produce one food calorie will soon be over. As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the vast expanse of prairies where they belong.

But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.

However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) uses solar power to mow his grass – trying not to cut too soon the many different wild flowers.   

LAMENT FOR PLANET EARTH

Isaiah 24:5-6

The earth is defiled by its people;
they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
and broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
its people must bear their guilt.

Today these words are truer than ever. Just as Chernobyl was a horrendous man-made nuclear disaster so the Gulf of Mexico calamity is a man-made oil disaster of similar magnitude, doing direct damage in days what Global Warming is doing in decades. We, who drive cars, heat houses and use electricity, bear equal responsibility with BP.

“We have broken the everlasting covenant.” In Genesis 9 God made a covenant with us. A covenant is a contract through which two parties pledge troth, just as in a marriage. 1 Samuel 18:3 describes such a procedure. There David and Jonathan take over each other’s possessions, symbolized by exchanging their clothes and weapons. They also mingle blood, by cutting a small incision in their arms and touching these wounds so that the blood flows together, and then, as a sign of this covenant, slightly infect them, so that scars remain. Jesus, head of the New Covenant, did exactly the same when he sealed the covenant with his blood, his wounds still visible on his hands today.

In the Genesis’ covenant God gave everything he had – the entire earth and the heavens – to humanity, on the condition that we give ourselves to God, as in Mark 12:30, “Love the Lord with heart, soul, mind, best expressed in our love for creation. It’s exactly that covenant that we have discarded, and I don’t have to elaborate, as the brokenness of society and nature is all too evident everywhere. It is plain that this Covenant goes far beyond bible reading and Christian school and church attendance.

The saying goes that “The Future belongs to those who prepare for it today,” which is especially true for Christians, because they know their future: the renewed creation. With that in mind, the real challenge facing Christians today is genuinely lamenting the state of planet earth, and attempting to prepare for life in the earthly New Creation. That’s why we have to minimize “sinning against the earth which is now the most dreadful thing,” to quote Nietzsche again, who, when he saw a horse whipped to death by a drunken owner, lost his mind, so affected was he by animal cruelty.

How can we minimize ‘sinning against the earth’, and maximize preparing for eternity? A little detour first. Basically there are three distinct economies: the primary economy, the natural world of soil, seas, and forests; the secondary economy, producing goods and services by our labor; the tertiary economy, the fabrication and exchange of money.

The problem we face is that the natural primary economy has essentially no place in current economic policy. Our capitalistic system assumes that soil, seas, forests will always be there to provide the secondary and tertiary economies with our wants. So the plight of planet earth is ignored, of which the Gulf of Mexico and its wetlands is just its latest casualty.

The Gulf disaster: it makes me cry. This area is incredibly rich in nutrients and diversity, on which in season each day 25 million birds land to replenish their diminished stamina. These coast-land bird refuges are relied on by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbird species, because of their vast marshes and miles and miles of beaches. Imagine: the just born birds being fed with tainted fish or abandoned because their parents have drowned in oily muck: these once life-giving swamps and bogs have now become the Louisiana killing fields.

Raj Patel in his book “The Value of Nothing” writes that we know exactly the price of everything – the tertiary economy – but the value of nothing – we don’t value the water, the air, the soil or the birds. He notes that if we take all these primary economy costs – pollution, transportation, carbon foot print – into consideration, a hamburger should cost $200.00.

“Therefore a curse consumes the earth,” so evident in the Gulf of Mexico, where we just have destroyed the jobs of tens of thousands of fishermen, the lives of millions of birds, and made the waters there useless for Life, so that we can drive that mile to the store in air-conditioned comfort, taking God’s name in vain in the process, oblivious to the plight of Planet Earth.

The best preparation for eternity is first to pray for environmental wisdom, then to think locally and act locally, by buying as much as possible local food and produce and articles from nearby sources. Growing your own is still the best solution: it’s healthier, requires no transportation and freshness is guaranteed: that is new creation economics.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) relocated from suburban St Catharines in 1975 to rural Tweed. His many writings can be found on ‘hielema.ca’.

CC7

May 4 2010

Does the earth feel pain? Of course, if you believe what the Bible says in Romans 8: 22, where it is recorded that the whole creation has been groaning from pain. It must be screaming now that oil is destroying very vulnerable wetland in the Southern states.

What is the ultimate price we are willing to pay for oil, not only in dollars but especially in natural habitat destruction? The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is just the most recent  The other costs are more hidden: air pollution, asthma, global weirding, so perhaps the latest news that we are approaching PEAK OIL should perhaps be regarded as Good News. The bad news is that the approach of Peak Oil means that the easy stuff is gone which increases the danger of getting out whatever is left.

Who says that we are approaching Peak Oil? The United States Joint Forces Command in a press release a few weeks ago has told the world that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” The report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

Less available energy for the world’s household can be compared to a family suddenly facing job losses or decreasing wages. That would not in itself be a bad thing, if prices would also decline and so purchasing power maintained,  but if the cost of living goes up, that family will experience a double whammy, and may be reduced to sudden poverty, it not worse.

A family needs money to operate, just as oil is needed to keep the world economy going: money can be created out of nothing, that’s why banks are so profitable, but that is not the case with Oil, which is becoming ever more difficult to obtain, while demand goes up, because India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population, have an increasing appetite for energy, which will produce mushrooming prices.

Less oil will actually produce more pollution, because everyone, including China –already using 80 percent coal to generate electricity – will increase the use of much higher polluting coal, especially as electric cars become all the rage.

The recent eruption of that volcano whose name I cannot possibly remember, which stopped airplane traffic dead, is but a pinprick prelude of what is at store when high octane airplane fuel will no longer be plentiful and cheap. It will not disappear, of course, but tripling the cost of the airplane power source will put an effective stop to all but the most necessary air travel. And that will only be a minor nuisance compared to other inconveniences, such as food costs, or even its very availability.

During the past five decades agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. The earth we own has, by and large, lost its natural state and its soil has become a chemical soup laced with pesticides and herbicides – both synthesized from oil – and other chemicals. With the price of nitrogen fertilizers, produced from natural gas, increasing exponentially at the same rate as its carbon-brother oil, and tractors and other farm machinery burning diesel fuel and gasoline, with crops trucked long distances, and food packaged in oil-derived plastic, by the time it has traveled from land to mouth, very few people will be able to afford it.

One hundred years ago 70 percent of the population was rural. Today, 2010, in its US census forms there are so few full-time farmers, that such a category no longer is included in the list of occupations. It can be safely said that with no oil, or only extremely costly fuel, society as we know it, will cease to function.
Jeff Rubin, former economist with the CIBC, in his book, Why Your world is about to get a whole lot Smaller, oil and the end of Globalization, writes that our long-distance food supply, will cease to function and local produce, a 100 feet diet, will become the norm. With a 100 feet diet I mean that you will step outside your door into you garden and eat your own produce. Of course that will not be possible when you live on the 15^th floor of a condo downtown somewhere, so, with high fuel prices, these places might not be your best bet anymore. Jeff Rubin sees 60 cents for a pound of bananas or $4 for a dozen oranges or cheap California lettuce or impossible to eat Mexican tomatoes as a quirk of history, only made possible through the temporary spurt in cheap fuel.

What should we do, in the light of these circumstances?

More about that in a next column.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) has a web site – hielema.ca – on which essays, books, and more than 500 columns are available free of charge.