Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

February 15 2015

PEAK EVERYTHING

I have been a columnist for some 25 years, and an occasional feature writer before that. My first column for the Christian Courier was an evaluation of the then new Ontario Premier, Bob Rae, who, to his own immense surprise replaced David Petersen in 1990. From 2000-2010 I wrote a weekly column for the Intelligencer, the Belleville (On) daily, also placing this on my web site, where I still post a new article each week. While my Intel column was limited to maximum 800 words, the blog I now write is usually around the 2000 words length: it is easier to write a longer column than a short one.

While I am contemplating what to write next, my eye falls on a book in front of me with the title The March of Folly. If there ever is an age that qualifies for that epitaph it is the contemporary scene.  Barbara Tuchman wrote the book in 1984 and I bought it in 1985. She ends the book with the Vietnam War which did not prevent the USA from repeating this folly in both Afghanistan and Iraq in quick succession. Obama knows this, reason why he is hesitant to get involved in the ISIS mess and in the Ukraine debacle.

However, the folly to PEAK ALL FOLLIES is our relentless war on creation. This profound stupidity trumps all other ones because our very existence is at stake there, as war on creation essentially means War on God, something we simply cannot win. It’s all because we worship idols, the idols of Economic Growth especially. That’s the reason why we have lost all connection with reality: we have eyes but we see not, ears but we hear not, to quote Psalm 115.

Closely connected to this is PEAK FAITH. The church I attend was built in 1890 with a seating capacity of some 250. This past Sunday our choir of 10 people equaled the size of the audience. The average attendance is perhaps 25 and the average age about 70 years. Now with four times as many people in the world since 1890, church attendance is a tenth of what it was 125 years ago, a real reduction of more than 95 percent.  Faith has become unfashionable, faith that is belief in God as the Creator and Jesus as the Redeemer. Isn’t there a saying that when people stop believing in God they start to believe anything? That makes sense to me because The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, even though that text has become a cliché. What it really means is that we garner wisdom only when we acknowledge God’s wisdom as evident in creation, and treat creation as a holy gift from God. That is confirmed in Jesus’ prompting to First seek the Kingdom of God – which is the welfare of creation – and everything else will fall into place.  By and large Christianity has failed to make this the heart of the Gospel, and this is the principal reason for the church’s decline and the global disasters we daily experience. The sad news is that, just as the corporate world can no longer alter its approach to the natural world – inevitable leading to the demise of the earth – so the church too no longer can change its approach to the spiritual world. Call it PEAK POWERLESSNESS.

In the natural world we experience all sorts of peaks, and I don’t refer to Switzerland or Nepal. Take bees, those little insects that provide us with honey and are vital for pollinating fruit trees, from almonds to apples. No bees, no fruits, so needed for our food supply. Bees have been dying off in droves, and no one has been able to pinpoint the real cause. Blame it on the all-pervasive pollutants that, in humans, cause cancers, and in animals, death and deformation. The die-off is now world-wide.

I see peaks everywhere. Peaks everywhere really mean that from here on everything is going downhill. We now have PEAK MARRIAGE. Of our 9 grandchildren of marriageable age, only two have officially tied the knot. Failure to a faith commitment is also evident in marriage. There’s little desire to commit to a partner for life. Perhaps the economy is to blame in case of marriage. Somehow I sense a connection to Jesus’ words where he said that in the New Creation there will not be marriage. I maybe all wrong there, but that’s how I would like to explain this. I also believe that young people sense the darkness of the future and their reluctance to increase the world population, already far beyond what the earth can support.

Again this week I experienced computer fraud. My credit card was again compromised. Although for me charging purchases on credit cards means acquiring air-miles, I have decided to sever that connection, because it is increasingly my experience that the Internet and all its connections suffer from PEAK INSECURITY. I therefore will drastically reduce my exposure to the Internet and have already invalidated one credit card, determined as I am to use my debit card, cash and cheques from now on, even though I forfeit the chance to accrue air-miles. Moreover flying is one of the filthiest ways to travel in terms of air pollution.

All sorts of other peaks come to mind such as PEAK MONETARY DEBT. I just Googled the word and out came $250 Trillion as the total amount of global debt. This translates into more than $30,000 for every human being on the earth, including the 2 billion or more who have an annual income of less than $1,000. That means that we, the rich, with personal income of more than $20,000 each, owe astronomical amounts, never to be repaid, just as the Environment will never become pristine again as we also have PEAK ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT. There too we are beyond the point of no return. Some time ago, a scientist went on his biannual tour of the Russian arctic ocean, checking for toxic plumes of methane gas bubbling up from the ocean. He’d previously seen hundreds of these plumes, about a meter wide each, emitting gas 50 times more damaging to our climate than carbon dioxide. This time, as he came across the first plume, he couldn’t believe it. It was a KILOMETER wide. A vast column of gas entering our atmosphere. He sailed on and found another a kilometer wide, and another, and another. Hundreds of them. The Paris meeting in the Fall to discuss Climate Change is mere window dressing: just so much more pollution-causing airflights for the thousands of  delegates.

The world is doing everything to generate more growth. Nothing works, which also means that we have PEAK GROWTH. The entire global economy is built on growth. Just as a bike stops and falls down when the forward momentum ceases, so too the world economy collapses when growth stops. In connection with this PEAK LIES are part of the parcel. No public statements can be trusted anymore. Take everything with a scoop of salt, which reminds me of PEAK FOOD and PEAK SOIL and PEAK FERTILIZER and PEAK OIL. Closely connected to Peak Food is Peak soil. It derives from the more concrete concept that we are “mining” the soil: degrading and exhausting it by growing single-crop “monocultures”, using too much fertilizer and irrigating too enthusiastically, all in the name of higher crop yields. Since it is Oil that we eat – each food calorie requires 10 oil calories – once we reach PEAK OIL the food supply too will collapse.

Here’s what I read this week. “We know far more about the amount of oil there is globally and how long those stocks will last than we know about how much soil there is,” said John Crawford, Director of the Sustainable Systems Program in Rothamsted Research in England. “Under business as usual, the current soils that are in agricultural production will yield about 30 percent less…by around 2050.”

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 25 percent of the world’s soils that are currently under cultivation are severely degraded, and another 8 percent moderately degraded. (Even “moderately degraded” soil has lost half its capacity to store water.) And the only way to access new, undamaged soil is to deforest the rest of the planet.

All of which brings me back to the issue of PEAK FOOD. This year prices for corn, soybeans and wheat are so low that next year farmers will plant less of it. The low 2013 crop and the high prices then tempted farmers to grow much more in 2014, so much more that commodity prices collapsed. In 2015 they will plant less, much less with the result that there won’t be enough come September.

During the latter part of the 20th century, food production grew at around 3.5 percent per year, comfortably ahead of population growth, but the dramatic rise in crop yields was due to new inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, much more irrigation, and new “green revolution” crop varieties. Now those one-time improvements have largely run their course, and global food production is rising at only 1.5 percent a year. In food there already have been several peaks. A report by scientists at Yale, Michigan State University and the Helmholtz Centre in Germany in the journal “Ecology and Society” stated that peak corn happened in 1985, peak rice and wild fish in 1988, peak dairy in 1989, peak eggs in 1993, and peak meat in 1996. More recent peaks were vegetables in 2000, milk and wheat in 2004, poultry in 2006, and soya bean in 2009. Indeed, sixteen of the 21 foods examined in the “Ecology and Society” report have already peaked, and production levels have actually flattened out for key regions amounting to 33 percent of global rice and 27 percent of global wheat production.

So we are already in trouble, and it will get worse even before Climate Change really kicks  in. There are still some quick fixes available, notably by cutting down on waste: more than a third of the food that is grown for human consumption never gets eaten. But unless we come up with some new “magic bullets”, things will be getting fairly grim on the food front by the 2030s.

Of all the peaks, PEAK FOOD AND WATER are the most scary. Billions will go hungry. Everything impacts the food supply.

So what must we do? What can we do?

I hope that we also have PEAK AWARENESS because there certainly is PEAK STUPIDITY. Most people give little thought to tomorrow. But tomorrow always comes. Last month the rich of the earth gathered in Davos Switzerland. There are reports that even these billionaires fear for their future. And well they should. For too long the Western Governments have protected the banks and by implication the rich from collapsing. Once the Debt mountain disintegrates the rich more than the poor will suffer. Ted Turner may hide away at his 500,000 acre ranch in Montana but drones with bombs are now a middleclass toy. Nobody and nothing will be secure in the near future.

This week frantic conferences in Europe and elsewhere are signs that we are in an endgame of sorts. Little Greece with only 11 million people, comprising a mere 2 percent of the Euro population, may yet cause the money world to implode. The lowly honey bee, one of the smallest animals, may yet cause the food supply to be reduced by 30 percent.

We live in a totally integrated world. Collapse of one segment, however small, will have disastrous domino effects.

The Chinese have a curse: may you live in interesting times. For the few who still have eyes to see and ears to hear these interesting times are not a curse but a wake-up call.

February 8 2015

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT (3) Conclusion

God created a perfect world – still with us – and in spite of all the damage we have done to it, come time, the world will heal itself. All it needs is a few thousand years without the evil influence of us, human beings who – and here my Calvinistic streak pops up again – are born and conceived in sin and therefore children of wrath.

While I write this it occurs to me that there is no possibility that we can be present during this recuperative period, because it is impossible to totally- and I mean completely –live harmoniously, holistically, perfectly pure lives in a world suffering from human-induced ills: the world has to be cleansed of all traces of pollution before redeemed mankind can live there again, because contaminated earth breeds contaminated people. In other words we have to be ‘teleios’ – always aware what our actions will be in the short and the long run. In Matthew 5: 48 Jesus tells us not to be like the pagans but to be ‘perfect – teleios – as your heavenly Father is perfect – teleios.

For God time is no problem. With God a thousand years are like one day, which also means that God can cause the healing process to speed up.

In the first episode I mentioned that I would use a quote from a book I wrote which I gave the title of Day without End referring to the perfect state that is to come. In that book I imagined myself in that renewed world and describe what I think I will experience there and who I will meet, including Jesus. Here is an episode in which I travel with 3 other people in Africa the continent where we possibly originate. Here‘s an excerpt.

As we approach a waterway, we see a virtual paradise; trees and fields and water streams and animals in an almost chaotic abundance. A herd of antelopes is grazing and they just barely lift up their heads when we come close. Giraffes, their necks craned as usual, have their heads well in the trees. They, too, barely turn to us as they watch us with one eye. Some wildebeests are drinking and pause only briefly as we arrive. None of them show the slightest inclination to bolt from our presence as they would have in the former time. It seems as if the entire animal population has come here to meet us and greet us. This combination of water and fertile land, of low lying land and higher elevations has created a natural habitat for both a vast array of land animals and water fowl, all rich in colors and outspoken in their melodies.

“Now I see why you want to travel via water ways,” Jethro says. “It is there where eventually all animals and humans meet; the fish, the fowl, the fast-footed all need water!”

Our map shows us that we have reached one of the side arms of the Nile. Initia becomes quite excited now that we have arrived at this beautiful launching point for our African voyage.

Arctica checks out the large papyrus growing in abundance along the water’s edge. Faint memories of thousands of years ago have awakened in her, when her ancestors made ocean going vessels from these very plants and travelled from Asia to the Arctic. However, before we have an opportunity to explore the possibility of constructing a river vessel, we are startled by a sound.

It is a tom-tom, the African telegraph system, relaying messages from one tribe to another, quite close, and in the distance, a more faint reply can be heard.

We look at each other, realizing other people are here, people familiar with the ways of old. People are here, indigenous people, and they are talking to each other, perhaps already signaling the arrival of four strangers, people totally unlike themselves. How is that possible? Where do these people come from? Were they there when Jesus sat on his throne and celebrated with us the wedding, sealing the covenant that would bind us, humans, forever to his New Creation? Of course. Then they must have gone here without delay. Makes sense.

“Let’s go and find them,” says Initia, “I am sure they can help us build a boat or suggest to us where we can find suitable material.”

Jethro, the experienced outdoors man, gauges the direction and the distance of the drums, and we set out on foot.

The drums grow louder and louder, and then stop.

Not far away, at the edge of the river, we see tents, about a dozen of them, and a number of large canoes on the shore. We see sails as well, but no people. Where are the people?

While we are wondering, a face appears in the opening of the central tent, and then a hand beckons us to come and join the festivities in progress. As we approach, we see the large drum standing behind the tent.

Later I describe how these native people, so extremely knowledgeable in the ways of nature, meet Jesus. Life-long students of their own world they have concluded that there is a God, an all-wise deity, who had created it all, and they had worshiped him. Now they meet the Creator in their own setting.

How do these people live in the New Creation? They know exactly what nature provides in fruits, plants and other edibles and where to find them. They are the original hunter-gatherers. Their way of life is the only sustainable in the long run, and that’s what Day without End shows.

Today’s unsustainable situation

What is happening now? I ended the previous instalment with condemning The Green Revolution. Here is what the article The Oil we Eat says about this:

“More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

“David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if the entire world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.”

If the entire world would eat as the USA, obesity would be a world-wide curse. It already is becoming a global phenomenon thanks to the sugar content in corn, America’s biggest crop. Agriculture in North America is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That situation is totally unsustainable. We know what carbon- derived energy does to God’s creation: every carbon calorie adds to the destruction of whatever we hold dear. Thus, whether we like it or not, if we aim for eternal life in God’s creation, we need to do without energy derived from carbon sources, be that coal, natural gas or refined products. It appears that wood fires are allowed. Why?

Jesus, in the last chapter of the Gospel of John meets his disciples at the water edge, and when they spot him, “they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.”  No doubt the coals are from wood. Fish can be harvested on a sustainable basis. Agriculture too can be redeeming.

The new creation needs no technocrats, no automobile designers, no lawyers or preachers or insurance sales personnel. It does need experts in natural edibles, people knowledgeable of living off the land, skilled in organic gardening, in harvesting what the earth offers in perpetuity. God, in the Garden of Eden, showed Adam and Eve (Genesis 2: 16) “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden.” Thus basically a vegetarian diet, something to start now, I believe.

According to Genesis, the early people lived for hundreds of years, one, Methuselah almost 1,000 years. Whatever the length of life, in the very early days the air was so pure, the water so perfect, the soil so unspoiled that people lived almost forever. Now, when none of these natural conditions are in force, sicknesses are increasingly rampant.

How many people can the earth support?

Of course, I cannot give a number. I can with a good degree of confidence say that it will be far fewer than 500 million. That was the number of people alive before the Industrial Revolution, the onset of the Carbon Age, and even then deserts grew, as trees were used for fuel.

It took 150,000 years for the world population to reach One Billion in the early 1800’s. Thanks to oil it skyrocketed from there on. When the world had a mere 100 million 1600 years ago even Rome had trouble continuing its life style, which collapsed after the year 450 A. D. Due to the general weakening of health about the year 1300 – due to famine – almost half the European population died from the Black Plague.

We are creating similar conditions again, a prelude to the Great Collapse. We now are like cattle that spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. Their manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm’s fertilizer, but the feedlots are far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not “efficient” to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork. That’s why it all will end with a bang. The Great Bang  -supposed to have been the beginning of our world but now discredited – will end it all when Christ will return to claim his own.

Various estimates put the number of the people who have ever lived at about 100 billion. “Many are called, few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14).  That makes sense, as the one world we have, even under ideal conditions, can only support a limited number of people, because it has to last forever. If there have been 100 billion of us greedy customers, and if 100 million is the top figure the earth can support in perpetuity, then simple arithmetic tells us that 1 in a 1000 are among the chosen. Oops that hurts! Since our, the last generation, is also the most destructive, the number is probably less for us 21^st century people. It reminds me of Luke 18: 8 in which Jesus lamented “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Yes, we are the last generation, the generation of the Internet, of universal mostly useless television, of useless space travel, of universal waste, and frivolity, of useless lives without meaning, religion-less religion. We are the last and also mostly the lost generation.

How do we prepare for The End? 2 Peter 3 gives us the answer:

“The day of the Lord will come like a thief…….Since everything will be destroyed (by fire) what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed it coming…………We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness….. Make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”

In light of recent developments, especially world-wide pollution and Climate Change, living holy and godly lives entails loving creation- God’s first love – with all our hearts, all our souls, all our intellectual powers, and love our neighbors as ourselves.  We can only love God when we love his creation. It’s to the New Earth to which the redeemed of the Lord will return. They will enter Zion with singing and everlasting joy will crown their heads (Isaiah 35: 10).

How many can the earth support into perpetuity? That’s God’s business. God offers us a choice: Life or death. Deuteronomy 30: 19: “See I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. Choose Life.” Live in harmony with the world God loved so much: John 3:16.

Next week: Peak Everything!

February 1 2015

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT? (2)

We know that nowadays the earth is quite small. When I emigrated to Canada in 1951, it took the M.S. Veendam 10 days to sail from Rotterdam to New York. Today an airplane covers that same distance in a couple of hours, thanks to special high octane fuel. Going back 150-200 years ago sailing vessels were years on the way from one continent, Europe to another, Australia. Then the world population was only a fraction of what it is now, while their ecological footprint was negligible. And yet even 1600 years ago when Rome collapsed, as Thomas Homer-Dixon relays in his The Upside of Down, the real causes of the Fall of Rome were: “the rising complexity of all parts of Roman society – including its bureaucracy, military forces, cities, economy, and laws – as the empire tried to maintain itself……..It needed more and more energy, and eventually it couldn’t find enough.”

Sounds very much like something that could happen today as well even though today there is a surplus of the energy stuff, a sign that the world economy is in tatters. What is striking now is the speed of events, creating Black Swans, unexpected developments, faster than ever. Total dependency on oil and electricity also means total collapse when they fail to deliver.

The story of Thomas Malthus is well-known. Two hundred years ago, this Presbyterian minister said population would race ahead of food supply. In an essay published in 1798, the English clergyman argued that human numbers always increase more rapidly than food supplies and that humans are condemned always to breed to the point of misery and the edge of starvation. The two centuries since his famous essay have not been kind to Malthus’s theory. During that time human numbers have increased from fewer than one billion to today’s 7+ billion. In many parts of the world, food production has grown faster than the population, thanks to the opening of new lands, mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, better water control, improved breeds of plants and animals, and better farmer know-how. It’s the oil we eat! Though many of today’s bottom billion people live in misery on the edge of starvation, Malthus would be amazed at the relative well-being of most of a vastly enlarged population.
That Malthus’s theory failed widely during the past two centuries does not prove that it will remain wrong for the future. That there are many more billions today does not guarantee future increases.

The early Christian writer Tertullian said (around AD 200, in De Anima): “We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.”

That was when the population of the whole planet was maybe 100 million or so. We reached the first billion mark by about 1850. By 1928, it was about 2 billion. In my lifetime it has more than tripled. It passed seven billion in 2014. Note that: humans took 150,000 years to get to the first billion. The most recent billion arrived in just 12 years.

Nobody knows how many people the planet could hold. The UN has predicted that fertility would decline and longevity would increase until the global population stabilized at nine billion in 2300. I sincerely believe that we will never reach the figure of nine billion. There are a number of factors at work that will limit expansion: (1) As people become more affluent, they have less children. Already Russia is losing population, and so is Japan. (2) Arable land is disappearing at a fast clip, and what is there is increasingly contaminated. (3) Water is the great limiting factor. It takes 1000 tons of water to grow 1 single ton of wheat. (4) Climate Change will also reduce yields, as too much rain in some areas and drought elsewhere, will make agriculture a more hazardous occupation.

I believe that we are now already close to capacity. When the financial system collapses the industrial world too will cease to be. To develop the needy energy sources and renew the electrical infrastructure will take trillions of dollars which will not be available once the debt-laden economy gives up the ghost. When that happens a massive die-off will occur reducing the world’s population to a fraction of what it is now.

Still people have been busy to calculate the incalculable. Joel Cohen, the Rockefeller University population biologist, argues in a 1995 book How Many People can the Earth Support?  that it isn’t a question like “How old are you?” which only has one answer at any one time. Cohen argues that you could fit one billion people each a meter apart, into a field 64km square. So everybody in the world would fit easily into a city the size of Toronto or Chicago. But that has nothing to do with supporting these people, feeding them, providing sanitation, keeping them alive. That is the real question, because human action has its own “ecological footprint”; there has to be so much land to provide food, clothing, shelter, medicines, building material, fresh air and clean water for any one human. It takes, according to some calculations, 2.1 hectares – about 5 acres – of land and water to provide for one average human. The important word is: average. The American footprint is about 10 hectares or 25 acres. So if all humans lived at US standards, we’d need another five Earths.

How Many People Can The Earth Really Support?

The number depends on nature and on human choices. By providing numbers, population projections help nations shape social and economic policies. Before too long, Cohen notes, people are likely to confront difficult trade-offs between population size, economic well-being, environmental quality and cultural values. The clear message of the projections is that people cannot forever continue to have, on average, more children than are required to replace themselves,” Cohen says. “This statement is not an ideological slogan. It is a hard fact. For example, conventional agriculture cannot grow enough food for untold billions of people–not enough water falls from the skies. The finiteness of the Earth guarantees that a ceiling on human numbers exists.”

During the last 50 years, estimates of the number of people Earth can support have ranged from fewer than 1 billion to more than 1 trillion. The estimates vary so wildly, Cohen says, because they use different methods and make different assumptions about how people will be willing to live in the future.

In 1992, the United Nations projected that if 1990 growth rates continued, the world would have about 21.2 billion people in 2050. However, if the worldwide average fell to 2.5 children, Earth’s population would grow to 12.5 billion in 2050. If the average rate slowed to 1.7 children, the population would increase to 7.8 billion.

January 25 2015

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT?(1)

How about that for an ambitious title! How many people can the earth support? This topic is so huge that, I must warn you at the outset, this will become a series, will consist of a number of articles, because a lot of questions are involved in this issue, touching upon a number of different fields, such as ecology, religion, economy, geography, and possibly others as well.

No, don’t expect me to come up with an exact number, only the Lord knows the precise total. What we do know is that today the earth, by hook and crook, supports (?) more than seven billion people. I put a question mark behind ‘support’ for obvious reasons. I will outline how this has come about and how that number cannot be sustained for much longer.

In my series I will, of course, rely on a number of sources, including the Bible, something no other of the essayists ever include. I may also quote some excerpts from a book I wrote DAY WITHOUT END available free in digital format when you search my name. That book has its setting in a world where all the ideal conditions for permanent sustainability are present. That means that I know where I am going, something very few people do, it seems to me.

About 10 years ago Harper’s published an article with the title The Oil We Eat. It made a lasting impression on me. Underneath the title it showed a saying by Balzac:

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.

Both Toronto – in the Distillery district – and Stratford – on the Main Street – have a coffee shop by that name, serving coffee better than Starbucks or Tim Horton. However, if wealth in Balzac’s maxim is seen in terms of eternity then this is a false statement. Great wealth in Biblical terms is being a Child of God and an heir to the Kingdom. That Kingdom is eternal life on a pristine planet where bliss is forever, where all partakers share in the wealth of the world. The secret of that imperishable wealth is indeed the often forgotten crime that Jesus, who was sinless, was nevertheless hung on the cross to die.

Sorry for this little sermon, but I had to correct Balzac on this score.

So why do we have in excess of Seven Billion people on this world? Simple. We eat oil, a poisonous substance, something which we are increasingly experiencing when its carbon-saturated gases are more and more asphyxiating the atmosphere leading inexorably to the earth’s demise. At this point there is no stopping this from happening sooner than later. Be prepared.

More than 40 years ago I wrote an essay which earned me a substantial monetary award, and a free trip from St. Catharines, where our family lived from 1955-75, to Vancouver for the award ceremony. In it I, among other things, outlined the laws of Ecology then already very much in my mind. That was in the same year I read Limits to Growth which influenced me more than any other human book. In that essay I wrote that Ecology’s guiding principles are:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.

Ideally all facets of life should be part of a person’s life with living, working, learning, leisure taking place within a family or community setting, where we are in harmony with nature.

1. There is no waste.

This applies to us as well as nature. Nothing actually disappears. When energy is burned, the waste is evident in Green House Gases. Our planet is a closed system.

1. Nature knows best.

When we go against the laws of nature, introduce species where they do not belong, nature’s revenge is all too evident, especially today when the weather has become totally unpredictable.

1. Nothing comes free.

We are finding this out with The Revenge of Gaia, how increasingly pollution and ever more costly reparation has stalled he world’s Economic Growth. The law of Unintended Consequences are increasingly at work on our planet.

I will come back to these laws, as they will be a guide arriving at my conclusions. Back to the We Eat Oil article. Here is a quote from the article in Harper’s:

“We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

“Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

“Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.”

That was 10 years ago. Since that time we have added another billion of us humans: we now have 7 billion of ever more greedy customers. Since 2004 we have seen the advent of China, its unbelievable growth in factories, cities, roads, contaminated land, displacing millions of farmers in the process and causing a good part of land and water to become polluted almost beyond repair. The same has happened in India and Indonesia which makes me think that in the decade 2004- 2014 Primary Productivity has accelerated faster than ever, perhaps now reaching 50%. We know as a fact that in the last 40 years the number of mammals has been halved, that fish has disappeared at an even faster pace. All this means that humans are claiming more and more for themselves and leaving less and less for the rest of creation, with inevitably disastrous results. This Seven Billion Plus number of Human Beings on the earth is proving to be fatal for all of God’s creatures, that process  significantly accelerating with Fracking in the USA and the Tar Sands in Alberta. How long can our world-class de-creation go on? That’s the reason why it is time to consider what the optimum number of us humans is that our tiny planet can support, and how we can go about this. Does it not make sense to work to create the circumstances that would make this possible? Isn’t that our Christian duty?

That we are rushing to the end is obvious to those not blinded by the illusions of Perpetual Economic Growth.

It was not always so. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Agriculture is a recent invention. Evidence indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries.  Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since. Not much has changed. Today One percent of humanity owns 50 percent of the world’s wealth, an intolerable situation. Basically this is the result of organized agriculture, enslaving the earth for the purpose of enriching the owners, the kings, the food companies, the nobility who own the land.

I am an avid reader of several online newspapers. Every day I skim 2 Canadian, 2 British and the New York Times as well. I also often have a peak at the German Der Spiegel. Davos is in the news, the annual gab fest of the world’s billionaires, where a simple hotdog costs more than $50 (Can.) But then 50 bucks for these guys-  almost all men – is no more than a penny for us  – if there still was one of these coins around. These real rich remnants are getting worried about inequality. More than one speaker in that secluded Swiss Alpine resort has said that Capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s maxim that ‘capitalism carries the seed of its own destruction,’ something all too evident to me. Paul Polman, the Dutch boss of Unilever, a Dutch-British food giant also mentioned that “Capitalists are a threat to Capitalism”.

Imagine: just 80 of the world’s richest now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The even more infamous 0.1% has been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s. Contrast this with Africa, where the absolute number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981. Thanks to the advance of computer power and the smart brains of one of my grandsons who works in Los Angeles, robots have proliferated, and wages stagnated under this regime of privatization, deregulation and low taxes on the rich. At the same time finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a small minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy.

All this signals trouble. Both the inequality of all regions except South America, and the ongoing and unstoppable advance of social and climate conflict, wars, mass migration and political corruption, everywhere in the world we are stunting health and life chances, increasing poverty, and widening gender and ethnic divides.

This past week I met with a good friend who is active in the field of counselling. He told me that the leading cause of death today is suicide. People are both depressed and angry, filled with both fury and anxiety.

The earth feels it and is angry in turn. Perhaps the anger originates with the earth which is suffering as in pain of childbirth. After all, we and the earth belong together. Years ago I wrote a book with the provocative title The Pregnant Earth. And indeed, what is happening is that from the ashes of the Old Earth will arise a New Earth, where the number of inhabitants is regulated by the exact number it can carry in perpetuity.

Back to our current reality, where farming is an equal opportunity earth- destroyer. Not only does open pit mining – look at the Appalachians and the coal mining there – destroy the earth, block waterways, poison people, but present day farming and the distribution of food products does the same.

Let’s face it: Farming is a cruel business.  Where the original prairie supported millions of buffalo, and saw billions of pigeons flying overhead days on end, today farmers rip open this soil to grow corn and soya beans to feed the same millions of cattle which before had the precious prairie grass as fodder. Basically the entire beef industry is a gigantic waste of effort and energy and a horrendous source of pollution. Earlier, before the advent of us humans, on the endless prairies where the “antelope played and the buffalo roamed”, food was totally free. Today these beasts can only exist because of oil. Oil to pull the tractors, oil to fabricate fertilizer, oil to …. And I could go on, oil till it reaches our dinner table.

Once that oil is gone, we cannot go back to the prairie of old were food was as close as a bow and arrow. There is no going back. We are on a dead end path. Our Seven Billion Plus are speeding up head over heels our sudden demise.

Better get ready. Here is the latest on the APOCALYPSE:

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race today, we’re now only three minutes away. The clock last week was advanced by two minutes. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

More about that next week.

January 18 2015

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

Is Cancer just a matter of bad luck?

Last week the BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation – had an article, since then taken over by many other media outlets, claiming that Cancer was a matter of bad luck. We all know cancer victims. Last year I met a woman doctor at a shopping mall, conspicuous by having here head covered. We chatted for a while and she, sort of angry, told me that she was suffering from breast cancer and had already gone from some thirty treatments in the university town, some 90 km away.

Cancer strikes the best of us. For some the reason is obvious: smoking and lung cancer are intimately linked, yet a very good friend of mine, who never smoked, died of lung cancer so did a sister who did smoke, but had gone through a painful separation.

I am not a doctor and have no expert opinion on anything, being more a generalist and a keen observer of humanity. Is cancer really a matter of bad luck? I don’t think so. The incidence of cancer is increasing even as billions are spent on research which has been successful in at least increasing the lifespan of patients, although not always the quality of life.

Why is cancer increasing? It should seem logical that getting older exposes more people to cancer, although my observation is that cancer strikes more the not so old, those in the 50-70 age range. Those who live beyond that age appear to be able to somehow outwit the cancer curse. Of coursed death strikes the older folk- 80 and beyond – too but then it usually is a case of simply being worn out, heart failure and other system malfunction.

No, cancer is not a matter of bad luck. Cancer-giving elements are everywhere: the soil, the water, the air, our food: all are contaminated. There are thousands of chemical compounds out there. Yes, it can hit anybody, but there are ways to prevent them to some extent. Eating organic, avoiding meat and sugar, drinking well water, growing your own food, exercising, marrying the right person and stay married, going to church, all are preventing measures. They don’t eliminate cancer, but they certainly will reduce the incidence.

Increasing dysfunctional society

Today much is going wrong. Take infection. Infection is still a great killer and antibiotics are becoming less effective. World-wide some 13 million people die of infections. The overuse of antibiotics in raising animals, chicken and cattle, are blamed for the loss of effectiveness of penicillin in treating diseases. People who own these animals – I am reluctant to call them farmers – raise chickens and cattle in such crowded conditions that once an illness penetrates there, death is inevitable, so they saturate them with antibiotics, which causes immunity in us. Animal confinement is needed to economize on space and heating: in the final analysis it is all about cheap food which is cheap only in terms of dollars. It is expensive in causing illness and death in humans, it is expensive in terms of environmental degradation, but that is a cost born by society at large, something that exposes an entirely different can of worms.

We all clamor for lower taxes and less medical costs, but both higher taxes and greater medical expense are the inevitable result of our increasingly dysfunctional financial, medical and nutritional system.

Take the US medical system. It seems to me that the USA is leading the world in being ungovernable. The medical establishment has become outrageous. The New York Times cited some examples: A bill of over $40,000 for the 20 minutes it took a doctor to stitch a cut; an ambulance ride of only 200 feet that cost $3,421. The premium to insure people against medical mishap is often the largest expense in the budget of those who live in the US of A. The New York Times article quoted that a healthy, insured couple is slowly going under because their insurance premiums are now twice as high as their mortgage and food costs. This coverage also comes with a high deductible – often thousands of dollars – as well as obligations to share in the medical expense. The medical system there is not about healing but about fattening the wallets of the medical operators, just as the Food industry is not about nutrition but about the financial welfare of the shareholders. The political parties are there not for the voters but to please the billionaires in the USA who finance the system. I hope that the Church is there to please God and not the parishioners. A society based on greed, cannot last.

The USA is the only Western country that has no universal, state-sponsored, medical system. We, in fortunate Canada, have that. Not only is our total cost lower than in the USA but the outcome is much better with lower mortality because everybody is covered. In the USA there are tens of millions who simply cannot afford the high premiums, although, under the new Obamacare plan, there are subsidies available. The crazy Republicans are doing everything to rob the poor of their coverage: and they are the supposedly Christian Party.

Soil and health

Something new has been discovered this past week, or rather came to light in the recent past concerning soil, that basic matter we use to grow stuff on. The discovery is that it has the ability to cure infections, especially important because the common ant-infection drug, penicillin, is losing its potency. That soil has magic powers comes to me as no surprise. Genesis, the first book  in the Bible, makes it perfectly clear that we, the earth, and our bodies belong together because God formed us out of the earth, shaped us in our present form, male and female (vive la difference), and then infused us with his spirit. We are a piece of the earth and our bonds with the earth belong to our essential being. We are our bodies, are ourselves, and are now and always will be earthly beings.

This significance cannot be exaggerated. Those who renounce the body renounce the connection before God the creator. Both Johan Herman Bavinck – read his book Between the Beginning and the End – and Dietrich Bonhoeffer argue that “The essential point of human existence is its bond with mother earth.” Escape from the body is escape from being human and escape from the spirit as well. The Bible says that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Bonhoeffer also writes in Creation and Fall that we are in the image of God because of our bodiliness. Colossians 1: 15-20 suggests that Jesus was the first human being and as such, as the first human, created everything. When we dis-own the earth relationship – as most Christians do, including Prime Minister Harper of Canada by claiming heaven as life’s goal – then we feel no longer a rapport with the rest of the natural world or even ourselves. Then our bodies can no longer be sources of deep knowledge about the world and we cease to have love, respect and compassion for the earth and our fellow creatures. Thus the discovery that the soil can be a source of healing, can be the source to protect us from the ravages of infections, is really nothing new.

The Covenant

It reminds me of the Covenant. In 1 Samuel 18: 3 Jonathan and David made a blood covenant. They exchanged weapons, clothes, pledged that whatever was theirs would now be held together, and to seal this ultimate promise, made an incision in their arms, let each other’s blood mingle and rubbed in earth. Incidentally God did the same with us in Jesus Christ, the Head of the New Covenant. Soil is the all-important healing agent, and finally scientists have discovered this medium, perhaps too late, because much of the soil of the earth is so polluted that it has become in itself a source of infection.

But there is some pure soil left and most likely in your back or front yard. There’s where we all must go and plant, as much as possible, the food stuff we consume.

That is important for a number of reasons. We all know that we are headed for a disastrous change in the climate. We are not responsible for what others do, but we are accountable for what we do. I believe that, when we appear before the judgment throne of Jesus, one of the questions he will ask us is: what have you done to limit your carbon foot print. It’s no use to say that you have no clue what that means, because ignorance is no excuse. The Carbon Foot Print involves everything we do nowadays. We simply cannot avoid it, but we can limit it to some extent. Eat locally, or eat from within a radius of say 100 km. The best, of course, and the healthiest is to grow your own and eat from your own soil. I cultivate a large vegetable garden, spread out over our septic bed. There’s nothing unhealthy about this. A few decades ago a Prime Minister of India drank every day a glass of his own urine. Soil is enriched by our effluence, reason why farmers use manure to enrich the soil. “We are soil, earth, dust, and to dust, earth, soil we shall return” says the Bible.

Flowering in January in Great Britain

Last year 2014, was the warmest on record. This means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have taken place since the turn of the century. Other records are falling every year: Western Japan saw the heaviest August rains since records began. Parts of the Western US endured persistent drought as did parts of China and Central and South America.

Climate change creates ‘The Weirding of the Weather.’ In Great Britain, thanks to the above average warm weather, flowers, trees, any living plant matter is in an early bloom, posing great dangers due to their premature flowering. A few years ago we in Ontario, had an unusual warm February, causing my apple trees, and actually all apple and cherry trees to bud early. A later frost killed these early buds: no apples and cherries that year in Ontario. The same threatens for Great Britain this year.

So what can we expect?

The following is an excerpt from the Archdruid Report written by John Michael Greer.

“Those of my readers who still have a steady income and a home they expect to be able to keep would still be well advised to double check their insulation and weather stripping,  solar water heating and other home scale renewable energy technologies, and turn the back lawn into a vegetable garden with room for a chicken coop, if by any chance they haven’t taken these sensible steps already.  A great many of my readers don’t have such options, and at this point, it may be a long time before such options are readily available . This is crunch time, folks; unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re on the brink of a historical inflection point like the ones in 1789 and 1914, one of the watersheds of time after which nothing will ever be the same again.

“There’s still much that can be done in other spheres, and I’ll be discussing some of those things in upcoming posts. In terms of energy and the economy, though, I suspect that for a lot of us, the preparations we’re going to be able to make are the ones we’ve already made, and a great many people whose plans depend on having a stable income and its associated perks and privileges may find themselves scrambling for  when the unraveling of the economy leaves them without Those of my readers who have been putting off the big changes that might make them more secure in hard times may be facing the hard decision of making those changes now, in a hurry, or facing the crisis of our age in the location and situation they’re in right now. Those who’ve gone ahead and made the changes—well, you know as well as I do that it’s time to review your plans, double check the details, batten down the hatches and get ready to weather the storm.”

That storm is well in the way. The people in the weather office are pretty good in predicting stormy weather. For stormy weather in the economy we must rely on our guts. My guts signal an economic hurricane coming.

Stay tuned.

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

January 11 2015

End Times? CNN thinks so.

If the end of the world arrives, chances are you aren’t going to be watching CNN. But just in case you are, the cable news network has a video ready for the Big Sign-off. That’s according to blogger Michael Ballaban who posted the purported footage online.

The clip isn’t much, really – just low-resolution footage of a US Army band playing a mournful rendition of Nearer My God to Thee, which takes a little over a minute. The tune says it all: the same tune that serenaded the doomed passengers of the sinking Titanic would usher the world’s population into the Great Hereafter. The tune then fade, presumably, to the rapture, apocalypse, giant comet impact or whatever coup de grace fate has in store for our little blue marble. So far the comment.

False Beliefs

Of course no mention is made of the Lord’s Return, which, for the majority of Americans has no meaning, as Rapture has conquered the church, and so misled practically all of North American Christianity. In that sense it has been Satan’s greatest ally by allowing him a free hand in destroying the earth, God’s so precious possession. Is a greater distortion of the Truth imaginable?

Just as Rapture- with its Latin root ‘rapio’ from which we have the word ‘rape’ – is a false belief, so is the concept of ‘Infinite Growth’. With elections coming up in Canada this year, and in the USA next year, and with both countries struggling economically, the theme of Economic Growth will be front and center. Growth will be pursued whether it makes sense or not, and it doesn’t make sense. If we manage to generate growth, something which will benefit us in the short run, today or next week, perhaps, but which will mortally harm us in a few months or a year, then that benefit will soon become a liability.

This came home to me when I ordered a sofa bed. I had seen one in the nearest city some 45 km away, but it needed to be delivered at a cost of nearly as high as the bed itself. So it was not a bargain. Now after Christmas, and that same merchant eager to show ‘growth’ at all cost, he offered free delivery, which, I calculated, would cost the firm more than all possible profit. Makes no sense, but for me it was a good deal.

The same is true of the current gasoline war. Economists keep on telling us that it is money in our pocket. True. But the cost to society at large is immense: all investment portfolios are based on $100+ per barrel of oil. Its collapse means less future pensions, higher government shortfalls, which translates into higher future taxes. It already has caused stock markets to plunge and unemployment to soar very quickly, which again means more pressure on Federal and Provincial finances, squeezing the poor even more.

And then there is Europe

Politicians are queer animals. Actually they are worse than that. Animals have the common sense to make provisions for hard times, or in the winter go to areas where food is more abundant. Bears hibernate. So do frogs and snakes. If we were smart, we would make provisions for what is called ‘the rainy day’, when life is less abundant. Politicians are also a cowardly bunch. The only time they speak the truth is when they inadvertently misspeak. Instead of governing, which means leading the way, they follow the lowest common denominator of public opinion, which usually represents yesterday’s outdated desires. We are today in a different world, where we all thrive or fall together, thanks to the connectedness that the computer has made possible. The computer and its now indispensable offspring, the Internet, is so vulnerable that every day we live by the grace of God. The word says it all: Inter-Net, which means it connects everything with everybody. Yet it is so insecure that it poses the same threat or worse than a nuclear war which gave us the acronym MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction.

Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise. It is evolving at an alarming rate, and the Internet and its multiple offspring, called Apps, are coming to a dwelling near you, even in your very room. You will see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You will feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Is that what the Bible calls: 666? Now with turmoil everywhere all this surveying will only accelerate.

Back to Europe, the so-called Old World, with its beautiful churches, castles, museums, glorious music. It had a dream: no more wars, of which the 20^th century saw two utterly devastating examples. It had magnificent ideas of universal health care, worry-free senior years, liberal unemployment benefits: everything to make life as close to perfect as humanly possible. It all cost money, of course, but infinite growth would be with us forever. It reminds me of Africa. We – my wife and I – were there when our youngest son worked there for 2 years. One of the Africans told me that it is custom on that continent to share good fortune with all the relatives, reason why nobody ever got rich. Europe had the same idea with the Euro, counting on all nations to be honest. Greece cheated, and for a while, as long as growth was there, matters ran smooth. Now the entire Euro concept is threatened, with fatal consequences for the global monetary system. The modern world has been built on the concept of growth, a fatal misconception. Now that growth has stalled, we have no plan B. Actually it is worse than that. Because the past 10, 20 or even 40 years have not actually delivered any growth, once you look beyond the propaganda. All we did was accumulate more debt.

In a nutshell, the past four decades have given us added layers of gadgets at the price of unaffordable education and ever more expensive health care.  We have no idea what to do without growth. There is no economics class that teaches “How to live in a No-Growth Society”, and we don’t have the brains to come up with an answer. Yet, a No-Growth world is on the way, for the simple reason that perpetual growth is impossible. It’s on the way, basically it is here already, and that means that we will see unimaginable damage, mayhem and bloodshed. The world-wide mayhem, with youth unemployment escalating, are just the initial rumblings. Fanatic religious expressions is another.

A Radical Change is needed.

A radical change is needed. No more growth, because growth kills. And what is it we want to grow into? Why incessant growth? Like Cancer? Once we have food, clothing and shelter, what else do we need? Will a bigger TV set make us happier? Or a larger house? Why more growth, when we know that it means more pollution, faster Climate Change?  I’ve never seen that properly defined. Isn’t it true that if we don’t know the answer to that question, we are by definition blindly chasing a mirage? If we don’t know where we’re going, or why we’re going there, why go at all? It all boils down to us.

We can’t be part of the solution if our lifestyle is part of the problem. Our present situation where we have 24/7/365 an equivalent of 200 slaves at our disposal, can no longer be maintained:  it really is as simple as that.

That is the main reason of the increasing turmoil we encounter everywhere and in everything. It’s not only terrorism, it’s not only the drop in oil prices, it’s not only the weirding of the weather, it’s not the erratic job market: it’s simply the end of a state that is not sustainable.

The BBC and also the CBC had an interview with a scientist from London of which the key message was that keeping global temperature rise within 2C means leaving in the ground 80% of known coal reserves, 50% of gas and 30% of oil. The University College London authors invited investors to ponder whether $670bn, the amount they say was spent last year on seeking and developing fossil fuels, was a wise use of money if we can’t burn all the fuel we’ve already found.

How then shall we live?

The Pope does not pass the buck. I can see him assassinated because of his stance on Climate Change. Headlines warn us. He’s throwing down the gauntlet. Forget “Prince of Peace.” It’s 2015. Pope Francis is igniting WWIII. He knows capitalism is already at war everywhere, destroying the planet’s environment. So he is taking command, launching a counter-offensive, demanding action, leading his army of 1.2 billion worldwide, inspiring environmental activists everywhere.

This is Christianity versus the World. It’s 2015 and Pope Francis launched a full-on, major assault on capitalism, like D-Day, a major battle, a counter-attack promising to dominate global headlines for the year, as opponents scramble, regrouping to repel his war on climate-denying capitalists.

The thunder is already roaring: “Pope Francis declares war on climate deniers” reads a New Republic headline. And the Guardian headline throws jet fuel on the flames: “Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and U.S. churches.”

Anger? No, he’s provoking, infuriating, enraging! Because this “radical, anti-capitalist revolutionary’ Pope is a huge threat to everything capitalists stand for, a clear and present danger to the ideology driven Big Oil, Koch Bros, conservative billionaires, and all GOP senators and governors already on record as climate-science deniers, opposed to all taxes and regulation of their profits and toxic carbon emissions.

The Pope has become Public Enemy Number One and the Billionaire benefactors of Infinite Growth and Pipeline promoters and Tar Sand exploiters, will try to thwart his appearance on the United Nations, perhaps even try to sabotage his plane or cause some other seeming accident. When I agitate against environmental destruction, so what? I am a nobody. When the Head of the Vatican State, the Prince of the church, the Holy Father, thunders from the world podium that Global Warming is SIN, then this is a different story.

TIME magazine in 2014 chose the Ebola Fighters as the People of the Year. So early in the New Year, the 2015 Person of the Year has already made his debut. No other person in the more than 11 months to go will top what Pope Francis has already accomplished.

Of course for the majority of the people nothing will change. If Jesus Himself would come down from heaven and say the same thing, nothing would change either, because we can’t change anymore. That is the sorry state we are in.