November 8 2015
FIRES, FIRES, EVERYWHERE.
2 Peter 3: 10 comes to mind. It says that: “…the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
Just this past week I read a warning by Greenpeace that “fires raging across the forests and peatlands of Indonesia are on track to pump out more carbon emissions than the UK’s entire annual output.” The thick smoke choking cities in the region is likely to cause the premature deaths of more than 100,000 people in the region and is also destroying vital habitats for endangered orangutans and clouded leopards.
In Indonesia alone there were 10,000 fires on two of its largest islands alone: Sumatra and Borneo, now known as Kalimantan. Actually it is raging across the entire 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. One of the burning islands is West Papua. It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smolder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: the fires in Indonesia alone are producing more carbon dioxide than the entire US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany. And Indonesia is just one area: South America is just as bad and so is Siberia.
What we are now doing to the planet and to human society is exactly that – burning down the house while we are still living in it. Everyone needs fuel, especially during a bitter winter, but only a mad man starts deconstructing the house in order to burn bits of it in the stove or fireplace.
Almost as mad as that is stealing bits of other people’s houses to burn, but that at least is not soiling your own doorstep – well not at first. In a world of limited resources and limited space we’ve now reached the point where raiding our neighbours’ houses is the same thing as raiding our own house, because the net effect is the same – disaster on an unprecedented level.
Of course it’s easier to live in denial and keep on cannibalising the world’s vital resources at an ever-increasing rate and pretend that it’s business as usual, but in reality it is anything but that. The alarm bells from commentators from all sectors: science, economics, religion etc. are getting louder and more frequent, better argued and with the raw data to back it up, but we are still not listening.
So this month the Paris deliberations start, lasting until December 11. Whatever will be decided there will have little impact on the ultimate outcome of Climate Change because curtailing GHG – Green House Gases- will cost money and jobs.
More than fifty years ago I, as a member of a book club, received Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. I never read it and gave it away. Then nobody really listened that well back then, although governments paid lip-service to these troublesome do-gooders. Now we know that what they said was entirely true, that we are headed for disaster.
Just a simple statistic.
According to scenarios used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global annual per capita emissions would need to fall from today’s average five metric tons per person to less than one ton by 2075, a level well below what any major country emits today and comparable to the emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen and Malawi. Just imagine: current annual per capita emissions from the United States is 17 tons, while Europe and China are 7 and 6 tons. Get used to it: we will never reach that goal. I have never been in Haiti or Yemen, but spent some time in Malawi, where the average fuel use is what we all should aim for and will never reach: 1 ton per person. I fell in love with Malawi, where the people always were cheerful, the kids sang and danced, everybody walked and lived simply, and everybody wanted to be like the white people.
Yes, we, North Americans, Canucks and Yankees alike, use 17 tons of carbon emission per person. We have to bring this down to 1 (one) ton. Last week in the New York Times a lead article talked common sense: no matter what happens in Paris, even the most drastic reduction will not be enough, so the only thing we can do is adapt. Move to the Arctic as James Lovelock recommends in his book The Revenge of Gaia because the rest of the world will become inhabitable.
Fires will aggravate the water problem and soil erosion. Couple this with increased damming of rivers, pollutant run-off into rivers, fracking and mining and you’ve a recipe for a water crisis, which will, in turn, lead to a food crisis.
Without fresh water we cannot participate in agriculture – this is the basic fundamental industry that keeps most people on this planet alive. Of course, a few people subsistence farm or hunt and gather still, but this is a tiny, tiny fraction of the human population. The rest of the world relies on increasingly intensive agriculture to provide vegetables, grains, fruit and also meat for the several billion people that are busy doing something else with their time.
Take China. It now has come to light – yes, everything will come out as the Bible tells us – that coal use in China has been much higher than previously reported. Coal is the greatest climate enemy. What will bring China to its knees will be the collapse of the environment. Bad air, bad water, bad land and total reliance on imported food will inevitably take its toll.
Of course these problems are not restricted to China, a country simply the canary in the coalmine. Across the Middle-East, Asia, Africa, southern Europe, USA and central and southern America there are increasing difficulties relating to the basics of food, water and the condition of the land.
One of the facts I learned from translating the Bavinck book on Revelation is that the world will soon start to suffer from Hyper Inflation. Bill Bonner and Associates predict that as a result of government flooding the market with phantom money, the current deflation will suddenly jumped over into hyperinflation. Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan says the same. No wonder. With everything under threat, air, water, soil, food will become hard to come by: back to the very basics of life, just as in Malawi.
But back to the fires that are everywhere.
The global fires do more damage than burning trees: they are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orangutans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames.
South America is also severely affected. According to Greenpeace, a fire in the indigenous Territory of Arariboia has already consumed 45% of the 413,000-hectare. Worst affected are the 12,000 people from the Guajajara ethnic group, whose communities have been surrounded by flames. There are also fears for the approximately 80 members of the Awá-Guajá, an uncontacted tribe. “This is certainly the biggest fire we have seen in recent years,” said Gabriel Zacharias, the fire combat coordinator of Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources). Almost all of Maranhão’s forests have been cleared. Those that remain are on indigenous lands or in nature reserves. Loggers enter these areas illegally, cut down trees and then launder the timber for sale to the UK and other foreign markets.
Such degradation of the forest increases the vulnerability to fire. Efforts to prevent illegal logging have also raised tensions. Last week an Ibama ranger was shot in a confrontation with loggers during a fire combat operation. Indigenous forest guardians have also been involved in several confrontations.
Fires, fires, everywhere.
“The elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
What is also being revealed- laid bare – is human stupidity. Trees are a significant source of our oxygen supply. When we burn them we not only create more greenhouse gases, we also deprive future generations of absorbing the CO2 we generate, and cut back the supply of the very air our lives depend on. The seas supply the most oxygen, but there too, due to warming of the waters and its acidification the plankton- which generate the oxygen – is also under threat.
In the meantime the world population is increasing and human wants and needs are also growing while the supply of air, the supply of water and the quality of the soil is rapidly deteriorating. It seems to me that our sense of values, our capacity of understanding the basic facts of life, is rapidly diminishing. These basics are that we need three things in life: food, shelter, clothing. Make it four: an understanding of the human mystery, the sense of the supernatural. To me Romans 1: 20 tells volumes. It says that “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
We simply cannot plead ignorance. Creation all around us testifies to God’s greatness. The now global fires reveal our basic unbelief. The fear of the Lord is missing, which means that we no longer possess wisdom. Also, by deliberately destroying God’s creation for the sake of very short term gain, we are openly aligning ourselves with the Evil One whose sole aim is to destroy God’s most precious creation he so much loved (John 3: 16).
There is no greater sin than purposely destroying God’s work of art.
The basic question facing us all on this earth – especially us North Americans who create 17 tons of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) per person each year – is “how then shall we live?”
That is a question no individual alone can solve. J. H. Bavinck in his book Between the beginning and the end: a radical Kingdom vision writes (pages 34-35) “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal………The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever.” That really means that personal salvation and the efforts to restore creation go hand in hand,
This is radical language, so totally different from that useless and meaningless “Brother, are you born again”, that a completely revamped church is needed to even start this process. It means becoming fully aware of the destructive lifestyle that we Westerners, especially we North Americans are engaged in.
Job, the man who was fabulously wealthy, can teach us something. He lost everything thanks to the Satan. Now this same Satan has done the opposite to us: thanks to Satan-inspired polluting oil we too have everything, large houses, luxurious mobility, heat and cool at our fingertips, food from everywhere, all obtained at the expense of creation. The catch is that, just like Job, we too have to lose all that and have to get rid of our ill-gotten gains, because they clash with the values of God’s kingdom to come. “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal………The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever.”
Preparing for the Kingdom to come implies to “reduce, reuse, refuse, repair, recycle”, and constantly pray: “Maranatha, Lord come quickly.”