PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (6)
Nothing is more conducive to cause COLLAPSE than war, especially the war in which you and I willy-nilly participate: our collective crusade against creation. Our hostile engagement against the very source of our existence is mostly one of passive failure to recognize our complicity and so turning a blind eye to our active involvement in the undoing of our natural environment. We blithely ignore that we are engaged in a war in which everybody loses because the first and foremost casualty is our aging mother Earth, now more frail than ever. Romans 8: 22 tells us that Creation has been groaning for a long time, and groans now more than ever. I have a dear friend who physically suffers when he sees wild life disappearing and species vanish because of our actions.
And then there are shooting wars.
Shooting wars speed up creational chaos. This past week US airplanes bombed and destroyed refineries and oil storage facilities in territory held by ISIS, an acronym now generally recognized by most people, standing for Iraq-Syria-Islamic-State.
ISIS’ fundamentalism reminds me of both the last book in the New Testament, Revelation, and the last book in the Hebrew Bible, Malachi. Revelation 22 says that “Let him that does wrong continue to do wrong – because the time is near – let him who does right continue to do right.” To me it suggests that this means that the opportunity for conversion maybe over as well, as it becomes more and more difficult for people to change their minds. Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament, has a similar passage – just before describing The Day of the Lord, Malachi 3: 18 says “And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.” Both point to the deeply digressing differences between those who serve God – and treasure creation – and those who live apart from God.
Today we see IRAQ I and II wars merge into IRAQ III. Most of us have forgotten that IRAQ WAR I in 1991 caused the largest oil spills in history: on the land, in the sea, and in the air. Massive clouds of oily pollution carried as far away as India. Was stability the outcome? Not at all: rather than a peaceful state, resentment worsened over the US behavior. Osama bin Laden cited the actions of the United States and transnational oil companies there as the reason for his launching the terrorist bombing on 9/11. Actually the destruction of the current oil refining systems also had an economic reason: oil is getting too cheap. The US Fracking Industry and the Canadian Tar Sand Companies need high prices to continue to operate in the black, even though both operations are among the most polluting in the world.
Back to IRAQ WAR I
At the time of IRAQ I, I wrote a song, which could be sung based on a sad melody in tune with the affliction felt by the Juda tribe exiled to Babylon as found in Psalm 137: By Babel’s streams we sat and wept. It is no coincidence that the Judean Exile 2500 years ago also played out in that same neighborhood: history is coming full circle, again a sign of the End of Times. You may remember that Saddam Hussein upon his retreat from Kuwait set fire to the 500 oil wells there. Below follows my song of lament, a dirge actually. If you know the tune – Olive’s Brow L.M.-, sing it aloud:
Five hundred fires cover Kuwait
Five hundred fires contaminate
The sane, the sick, the cities, the sea,
Well, what’s this got to do with me?
Five hundred fires in the Middle East,
The Devil’s delight, his hellish feast
He looks on them with pronounced glee
Because they’re set also by me.
Five Hundred fires continue to rage
Their smoke, their soot they know no cage.
The battle is over, Kuwait is free
Free to furnish more fuel for me.
The war, the West at its secular worst
Was waged to quench my insatiable thirst
My feasting on fuel set the wells ablaze
On fire through my carboholic craze
Now dominoes fall both left and right:
The oil slicks, dying Kurds, Shiites,
Forgive me Lord for being to blame,
I pray that, yet, I may honor your name.
All of us who drive cars are complicit in this crime. Oil, crude, refined, in all forms causes fatal pollution by poisoning areas forever, spreading deadly fumes over large sections of land, killing humans, cattle, and plants for generations.
War is a waste of resource and money, which can be used for a solar revolution and now are fundamentally undermining the movement for renewables. To fight the Ebola outbreak requires a billion dollars, which is less than the Pentagon spends each day to pursue its warlike actions, but the Western world is hard-put to gather these funds. What is more important? Fighting ISIS which is no immediate threat to the USA or combatting a horrible disease such as Ebola, which, indeed, may become a world-wide curse?
| Rather than helping to attain a steady state, true-cost, sustainable economy, which is needed to avoid atmospheric collapse, nothing even remotely close to this can be achieved if the US in going to engage in perpetual warfare over Middle East oil. The wars in Iraq have cost trillions in the name of (an elusive) national security—trillions that could have been spent on putting the US on a clean energy basis, including electric cars charged by solar and other renewable sources. |
Why all this bombing? So far neither the USA nor Britain has had casualties in their homeland. War is never a solution. Jesus prophetically proclaimed that those who use the sword perish by the sword.
The men in charge of the ISIS movement are not stupid. Their make-up is composed of professionals of the former Saddam Hussein army who were stupidly shunted by the American occupation forces when George W. Bush set out to destroy that regime. Bush-Cheney’s sole purpose then was to have unlimited access to the mostly unexplored Iraqi oil fields.
That war has had an entirely opposite result. The current initiative will also end up being disastrous, perhaps even more so. Now that Saudi Arabia is involved ISIS might target the Saudi oilfields, depriving the World of the last major oil reserves.
In terms of war and national security, a much more serious long-term threat is that of climate wars and infectious diseases. Money being spent on oil wars ought to be shifted to strategies to prevent climate wars by getting at the root causes of climate disruption, but that would intervene with our cozy life style, so we choose to be active participants in the Climate Wars: our way of life versus God’s creation, the cosmos God loved so much. (John 3: 16).
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond examines the environmental factors contributing to the collapse of advanced societies around the world, such as the Mayans in Central America and the Polynesians on Easter Island. The Mayans had a calendar dating back to 3114 B.C., built magnificent temples, and did sophisticated astronomy. But their population grew to an estimated 5 million, well beyond what the land could sustain, while huge amounts of resources were spent by chiefs trying to surpass other chiefs in building even bigger monuments. The leadership continued to misjudge the land stewardship and the food resource needs, and as a result several smaller collapses occurred before a large collapse around 900 AD, due in part to a severe drought. When Spaniards reached Mayan territory after 1500 AD, the temples had been abandoned and the Mayans scattered.
- The peoples settling the isolated Easter Island around 900 AD met a similar fate after several hundred years of expanding their population and quarrying gigantic stone statues (weighing up to 270 tons) which they then moved to the perimeter of the island. They deforested the island and the surrounding waters filled with silt, while at the same time vast energies were occupied on rivalries over which clan could build the biggest stone head. The first-recorded European contact with the island was on 5 April (Easter Sunday), 1722, when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited it for a week and estimated a population of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants.
When Captain Cook arrived at the island in 1774, he found a tiny population (down perhaps from a peak of 20,000) that he described as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” The civilization had collapsed in a cannibalistic endgame.
Collapse there was caused by population growth beyond the capacity of the land to support it, by destruction of good farmland, and the use of resources in tribal conflict and monument building. Leadership in both societies failed to respond to the handwriting on the wall.
As we fail to adequately address climate change and its root cause, will our society face a similar collapse? All signs point to this.
We are looking at a “perfect storm” of conditions around the world that will lead to major conflicts and wars: growing populations, reduced food resource base, destruction of fisheries with dead zones and acidification, enormous deforestation, and the like. We are courting COLLAPSE, which will be sudden once a tipping point is reached, a moment nobody knows.
Already we see serious problems with ecological refugees trying to escape unlivable conditions in their homelands and get to Europe or North America. In Asia, India is building a huge fence along its border with Bangladesh, fearing massive fluxes of refugees as Bangladesh gets swamped by sea level rise and major storms.
Our fragmented knowledge keeps us from seeing the entire picture. Everything looks normal. Newspapers, TV shows, radio reports, all major in minors, none want to sound the alarm bells, because optimism sells, and that’s what our world wants. Store shelves are stocked; traffic stagnation is still a headache in major cities. There’s simply nothing that would suggest COLLAPSE. Matthew 24 describes similar conditions: “For in the days before the Flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the Ark…. That’s how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24: 38-39).
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