SEPTEMBER 1 2018
Globe and Mail HEADLINE.
“Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.
“The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.”
Balzac
We all are criminals. We all have great wealth, even the poorest among us are rich by historical standards. We all have cars, all have late model TVs, all live, on an average, more than 80 years, something unheard off 100 years ago.
How is that possible?
The horrible truth is that we all thrive on the proceeds of a crime, a crime that nobody mentions, a crime that remained unacknowledged for some 200 years, and is now coming to haunt us to death.
“Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”. That was the headline in the Globe and Mail of Saturday August 25 2018. How true!
Laws are supposed to rule our lives. There still is a glimmer in us of the Divine Law, “Love God above everything else, and our neighbors as ourselves”, but that facet is fading fast, also because we give it a pious twist, as if we can love an unseen God. We can’t. We can’t love someone who is invisible: only Moses, God’s friend, was allowed to see a glimpse of God’s back.
‘God is invisible’, Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody can see or has seen” (1 Tim. 6:16). It is impossible to love something unseen. That’s why God can only really be honored, can only really be praised properly, can only really be loved, when we embrace and value his creation above everything else. That’s how we adore great artists: by their legacy.
From the rising of the sun, to the hour of its setting, our constant pre-occupation ought to be: loving God’s creation in all its manifestations. Not doing this, results in sin and sin results in DEATH. Romans 6: 23 says it unequivocally, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
When the headline in Canada’s leading newspaper says, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”, then that’s only true for a few seconds in geological time, because it is impossible for humanity to thrive, to be happy, to be at ease and content when the entire planet is in agony.
Dr. Barry Commoner coined the Four Laws of Ecology. Here are the two most applicable:
1. Everything Is Connected To Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. Humans and other species are connected/dependent on other species. With this in mind it becomes hard to practice anything other than compassion and harmlessness.
2. There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.
We live in unparalleled luxury while everything around us is on fire, is being poisoned, is drowning, is endangered, then, as Law # 1 of Ecology, EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE tells us, this will equally affect us. All this creational abuse will catch up on us and death is the outcome.
We feel instinctively that a day of reckoning comes, because, ”There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.”
Some of the following I owe to a 2004 Harper article: THE OIL WE EAT, written by Richard Manning.
Here’s how we Westerners, became rich at the expense of creation.
Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from nature’s rules. Take food. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain: 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.”
When Adam and Eve appeared in The Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was One Hundred Percent: everything and everybody thrived, had sufficient food, has pure oxygen to breathe, had perfect water to drink, had unadulterated food to eat. Today everything is up in the air.
The brutal truth is that we humans, a single species among millions, consume perhaps as much as 50 percent of Earth’s Primary Productivity, 50 percent of all there is, air, soil, water, leaving little for the remainder of creation: hence we never had it so good, and the rest never had it so bad.
The Book of Revelation mentions 42 months, 3.5 years, exactly half of the PERFECT number 7. Specifically Revelation 13: 5 reveals that, “Then the beast was allowed to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do whatever he wanted for forty-two months.”
I believe that today we live in that “forty-two months” timeframe, busily blaspheming against God by harming creation, effectively sinning against one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. (Exodus 20:7). Misusing God’s name means harming creation.
The outcome is that, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”. Fifty percent is midway, just as 42 months -3.5 years – is midway SEVEN. Using 50 percent of all there is, gives us untold riches, and also signals THE END.
We, the greedy 7.6 billion of us, have simply stolen the food (the rich among us, our Western World, a lot more than others) from all other living matter, and caused animals and plants to become extinct at alarming rates.
How did this crime become generally accepted?
More than two thirds of humanity’s cut of Primary Productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world.
From land to mouth
Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. That’s how Adam and Eve lived in Paradise: God’s advice to this human pair was to eat the fruit available there and then.
Why humans might have traded the hunter-gatherer approach for the labor-intensive-back-breaking work of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts – the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries.
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.
‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’ In 1381, a radical priest called John Ball travelled the length of the country –England – stirring up the peasant class in a revolt against their feudal landowners. Nothing changed.
Farming is the process of ripping our precious earth open again and again. Take Iowa. Our oldest son lived there for a decade. We visited his family quite often. It used to be prairie, but is all fields now.
Here’s a true folly: we grow grains that we feed to livestock, but livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. There likely were more bison roaming the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today: and the stink! When the wind in that college town was from the East the entire town smelled like a sewer.
Oil is not well.
Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes some 20 liters of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land. Each year we burn through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.
Plato, a writer whom I had to read in Latin – oh how I hated him! – already lamented, “What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton”. Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the decline of Rome.
The Green Revolution.
Then science came to the rescue, a blessing until it became a curse: the Green Revolution. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of three grains, rice, wheat, corn, so that they could be hyper-charged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. In my opinion this Green Revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet, because commercial agriculture disrupted long-standing patterns of rural
life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty.
In the sixty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population has more than doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3.5 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The Green Revolution with plenty of water for irrigation, with loads of oil-based fertilizer and tinkered seeds, increased yields, and so contributed hugely to the population boom. In other words it’s OIL that caused that “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.
About two thirds of U.S. and Canada’s grain and corn is labelled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the key ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes, and the suspected culprit in the American pandemic of obesity.
Ever considered the energy content of your breakfast?
A kilo of breakfast cereal, the grinding, milling, wetting, drying and baking, bums the energy of two liters of gasoline. 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 before it leaves the factory floor. Add to this the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, and the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores, and the calorie total doubles.
So you wonder, perhaps why, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.
It’s the OIL we eat, a perfectly pervasive poison, killing not only our bodies, but also our minds and spirits.
Revelation 13: 5 reveals that, “Then the beast was allowed to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do whatever he wanted for forty-two months.”
These forty-two months are now over: we’ve been eager participants in causing creational agony. Now it is our turn to suffer because EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE.