WHEN WILL IT BE OUR TURN?

APRIL 7 2018

WHEN WILL IT BE OUR TURN?

When I was born, in 1928, I had 2 billion people as cohabitants on Planet Earth. Some scientists now claim that this number is the ideal goal to go back to. Back to Two Billion? That will hurt.

I vividly remember 1937 when I contracted a bladder infection – that was the time before penicillin – and was consigned to bed rest for 6 weeks, with the doctor visiting me twice a week. It helped that his father, a retired minister, lived next door.

During my period of convalescence, I read 100 books: nothing too serious I presume as a 9-10 year old lad. My bed was placed in front of a large window – three stories high – and I had a bird’s eye view of the street scene, where every day a number of milkmen came calling delivering their milk, eggs, butter, even readymade buttermilk porridge. I also each day noticed several bakers on their three-wheeled cargo bikes, and many different horse-drawn greengrocers with elaborate displays of fruits and vegetables.

I was always fascinated by the daily street cleaner, removing the horse manure and other litter, saw with awe the policeman on his bike patrolling the neighborhood, and, of course, was jealous how my buddies played their various games, and the grown-ups walked and biked to work, and everybody came home for lunch, which actually was the main meal. Only the doctor had a car, all the others either had foot or peddle-power or had horse-drawn transportation.

All in all, while being bed-bound I never had a dull moment. It was like experiencing Live TV on the all-day street-scene, constantly observing the minute by minute changing panorama from my elevated position. Oh yes, I should not forget that my teacher came once or twice a week to bring me homework and pick up my assignments.

Back then life was simple, non-polluting, basically body-powered and permanently sustainable. Churches flourished, political rivalry prominent, book stores everywhere, tobacconists on every city block, grocery stores always near, and so where butcher shops, with cow carcasses visibly displayed, with your desire meat cut cleaved out while waiting.

So how does 2018 compare?

During my lifetime the world population grew from 2 billion to 7.5 billion, an increase of 375 percent. Precaution passed away together with God, who vanished with the ascent of the Carbon Age. Today that same street is now a parking lot. No kids, no vendors, still walkers and still bikers, however.

The same is true outside the city. Where once horses prevailed now giant tractors do the job, world-wide. The result: today, anno 2018, more than 75 percent of the Earth’s land areas have lost some or most of their functions, undermining the well-being of the 3.2 billion people that rely on them to produce food crops, provide clean water, control flooding and more. These once-productive lands have either become deserts, are polluted, or have suffered flood damage beyond repair.

Today the real question is HOW LONG CAN WE LAST?

Someday soon there will be a TIPPING POINT, because we have discarded the Precautionary Principle.

So what is that principle?

One of many definitions, the 1998 Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle says: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

The ancient Romans also knew a thing or two. They coined:
Quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem:
Whatever you do, do cautiously, and look to the end.

That’s what the Precautionary Principle is, something we can all intuitively understand. The Bible is also a guide here, in the words of Jesus, (Luke 14: 28) “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?”

We should care not so much about money (we can create that out of nothing while, in Jesus’s days, money units had real value, such as gold). What we should be concerned about is ‘respice finem = look to the end’, the ultimate result of our actions, that’s why Jesus called himself an ‘Anthropos Teleios’, reminding us always to keep the ‘telos’ the END in mind.

Take our inaction on Climate Change: in 2017, the United States spent as much in disaster relief — for floods, wildfires, drought, and storms — as the total comparable spending from 1980 to 2010.
It could well be that 2018 would set another record with ominous results for the debt situation in the USA and the poor people who will lose their homes and livelihood.

In the Precautionary Principle you act without knowing exactly what will happen, but look ahead and weigh the possibilities. Insurance is a precautionary action. If we first want scientific proof that some action or product can be harmful to humanity and/or the natural world, we run the risk of inflicting irreversible damage before that proof can be delivered.

Take CLIMATE CHANGE.

Don’t tell me that Climate Change could not be predicted. In 1896 Svante Arrhenius – one of the first Nobel Prizewinners – stated that burning carbon products might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience. Now 120 years later he has been proved right.
Just this past week ARCTIC NEWS sent a new observation:
Arctic News
How much warmer is it now?

The IPCC – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – is strongly downplaying the amount of global warming that has already occurred and that looks set to happen over the next decade or so. The ‘First Order Draft of the Summary for Policy Makers’ estimates that the global mean temperature reached approximately 1°C above pre-industrial levels around 2017/2018.

That is today pure politics, catering to the USA. It acts like the Tobacco Industry when it denied a link between tobacco use and human health: that’s what the USA is doing regarding Climate Change.

Compare their previous actions with their current policy.
In 1917 the USA entered the war zone in Europe, and this turned the war around in favor of France and Great Britain. It did the same in 1941 with the same result. Now in 2018, in the WAR TO END ALL WARS, the world versus God, it has joined THE GREAT ENEMY OF GOD, making sure that God’s earth will be destroyed: all precaution has been abandoned.

MONSANTO.

A good example of that war is MONSANTO. The very name gives me shivers. MON means ‘mine’ in French. SANTO has overtones of saintly and healthy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The name could mean MY HEALTH, or even MY HOLINESS. No wonder I almost puke when it see the word: Mon Morte is a better word: my death.

Monsanto seeds.

If there ever was a need for the Precautionary Principle then it applies to the so-called GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms. To allow them to be introduced in our eco- and food systems creates unknown risks that we have no way of overseeing, because these risks may cause irreversible damage to the very systems we rely on for survival.
Dow-Dupont, ChemChina and Bayer Monsanto are not ‘seed companies’. They are ‘seeds-that-need-our-chemicals-to-grow’ companies. And they are out to conquer the entire world: a 100-times worse version of Facebook. And our governments subsidize the use of their products.

We have no clue how bad GMOs will turn out to be, a very good reason to ban them. Once they spread, they can’t be stopped anymore. Then the chemical boys will own all of our food. But we do know how bad the pesticides and other chemicals they produce are.

Monsanto et al must prove that their products do no harm. They are unable to do so, which is why they have, and need, huge lobbying, PR and legal departments.

What is the result of all these chemicals in our food and the food chain? DEATH.

INSECTS

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said. The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected.

The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research. “Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

BIRDS

Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France. “The situation is catastrophic,” said Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the studies. “Our countryside is in the process of becoming a veritable desert,” he said in a communique released by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), which also contributed to the findings.

The common white throat, the ortolan bunting, the Eurasian skylark and other once-ubiquitous species have all fallen off by at least a third, according a detailed, annual census initiated at the start of the century. A migratory song bird, the meadow pipit, has declined by nearly 70%. The museum described the pace and extent of the wipe-out as “a level approaching an ecological catastrophe”. The primary culprit, researchers speculate, is the intensive use of pesticides on vast tracts of monoculture crops, especially wheat and corn. The problem is not that birds are being poisoned, but that the insects on which they depend for food have disappeared.

WHEN WILL IT BE OUR TURN?

With Climate Change accelerating beyond all predictions, with insects numbers plummeting, and the resulting premature deaths of birds, with species disappearing faster than ever recorded in the long history of the earth, with soils being degraded everywhere, poisoned so much that soon the crops grown will become pure poison rather than pure food, with the economic situation so precarious that the slightest rumor can cause stock markets to tumble, with debts amounted to scores of trillions of dollars, the question of total collapse is not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’.

COSMOCIDE

We are the last generation, guilty of COSMOCIDE. Whatever happens to the air, the soil, the water, the animals, will happen to us, because everything is connected to everything else.

The words of Revelation 18: 4 come to mind,
“Come out of her , my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues, for her sins are (literally) piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.”

That’s what we do: we are sinning against God when we harm his HOLY creation, which could well be THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT: “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3: 29.

Oh, my Calvinistic credentials, so stern!!

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