August 26, 2017
IS IT TOO LATE?
Is it too late to return to the days when matters in minds and atmosphere were more balanced? Is it too late to return to a saner world?
My short answer is: yes, it is too late.
I will stick my neck out and say that the good days were those decades when immensely creative spirits were alive, composing major pieces of art which found a ready reception.
And when was that? What were the years when great artists thrived because there were responsive audiences?
My instinct tells me they were the decades of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Then in England there was Shakespeare, in France Moli?re, in the Netherlands (then known as the United Provinces) outstanding painters were at work, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Vermeer, Frans Hals, just to name a few. In Germany there was the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in 1685 and died in 1750, and also Georg Friedrich Handel, born in the same year as Bach, but lived 9 years longer. This period also included the Austrian born Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) who was a worthy successor to these musical giants, followed by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).
So basically the good old times were the 200 years from 1625-1825. During that period the world had less than One Billion people. It immediately preceded our CARBON AGE. From 1825 -1925 the world’s population doubled to two billion and from there it almost quadrupled, thanks to the brain-dulling convenience of our mechanical slaves. It is a sign of our times that a man like Trump has gained prominence, an outcome of the presence of false religions and lack of intellectual discernment, fostered by ubiquitous television and technical brainwashing.
The enormous increase in our world’s population in the past century is a definite example of OVERSHOOT. The world is a FINITE system, with limited resources. What will happen to these billions of ever more greedy mouths once the resources are gone and the pollution they caused becomes an untamed killer?
I dare say that people in the time of Handel and Bach would have recognized the consequences of today’s foolish use of carbon-based fuels and mind-dulling entertainment. Would a man such as Isaac Newton who lived around 1700, or Galileo, who lived a century before that, also physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician, have identified its dangers and would their warnings then have been heeded? Were people then wise enough to recognize truth and follow their advice?
I do believe that people then were more willing to recognize genuine leaders, witness the REFORMATION in 1517 which spread rapidly in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Even in the late 19th Century in the Netherlands an Abraham Kuyper emerged and was a true politician with an enthusiastic following, my parents and grandparents among them.
Of course there also was Germany, in the 1930s, where an Adolf Hitler arose, and influenced a large percentage of the German people, exploiting the uncertainty caused by the Great Depression of that time. Trump today is tapping into that same sentiment.
Overshoot.
Fact is that we are saddled with the aftereffect of our carbon overshoot, and I believe that it is too late the remedy this situation.
Addiction to a substance usually ends in death. Take my family: my father was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer, and so did 3 of my 4 sisters and 2 of my 4 brothers. We now, as a generation of earth-dwellers are in the same position: we, as a world, are carbo-holics, are addicted to carbon fuels. Thanks to CARBON FUELS everything has gone into overdrive, everything is on a permanent high, and also everything will come crashing down.
Over the past two centuries enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels has enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption. These in turn has led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity.
In my lifetime I have seen the world population increase 350 percent, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival.
Our bitter harvest.
We now live with the consequences of this exuberance. Oh yes, we do what we can, we try to save threatened species, hope to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops, but these are mere band aids, are simple stopgap measures that are bound to fail. That doesn’t mean that we should stop: as individual citizens we must do everything within our limited means to live differently, in the full knowledge that Jesus demands this of us as future citizens of the COMING KINGDOM.
It reminds me of an episode I wrote in my book DAY WITHOUT END (available via LULU- Google it) where one of the principal characters, INITIA I called her, a former Chinese empress, rejected during her reign the invention of gunpowder as it would have resulted in undue deaths. She was a wise ruler and became a character in my novel which is set in THE NEW CREATION, a manuscript repeatedly refused by numerous publishers, including Eerdmans, because the theme clashed with the generally accepted HEAVEN destination.
Today we proceed in spite of many warnings.
In Limits to Growth (1972) Jay Forrester investigated the interactions between population growth, industrial production, food production, resource depletion, and pollution, and issued a warning, which, of course, was not heeded. In Overshoot (1982) William Catton named our systemic problem and described its origins and development in a style any literate person could appreciate.
Suppose I would approach my Liberal Member of Parliament and tell him that “We have to change everything, including our entire economic system—and fast”. He is a nice guy, and probably would agree with me, but he would be powerless to change that. I am sure that Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, knows the score, but he too, as well as Germany’s Angela Merkel, are unable to change direction.
We, as a society, simply can no longer change, and I believe that this notion has penetrated the minds of many, either acknowledged or lingering without being verbalized.
That does not mean that we can do nothing. Since 1993, thus about 25 years ago, I have had solar panels and battery storage and so have reduced my electricity usage. Since 1977 I have driven a diesel powered automobile in the understanding that its better mileage would benefit the air. I now know better, a victim of false information. I do use canola oil to compensate for its destructive impact, and also use my car as little as possible by biking more but that is not a year-round possibility.
It is believed that technology will save us. Fact is that since technology has been the main culprit, more technology will not cure our predicament. It reminds me of Jesus as related in Matthew 12: 26-28 where he says that `If Satan drives out Satan, then he is divided against himself, and his kingdom cannot stand.` The same is true for our beautiful and marvelous technological fixes, but in the end they only aggravate the situation.
Everybody loves technology. It already does nearly everything for us. During the last century it solved a host of problems: it cured diseases, expanded food production, sped up transportation, and provided us with information and entertainment in quantities and varieties no one could previously have imagined. Why shouldn’t it be able to solve climate change and all the rest of our problems?
Well, I stick to Jesus’ words, my ultimate source of wisdom: technology cannot cure what technology has caused.
That begs the question: “What is wisdom?” The Bible is a bit vague on that score when is says that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding”. (Proverbs 9:10). We have to translate these words in terms that speak to us today. Just as we KNOW Bach by listening to his music, so we KNOW God by studying his works – Creation – and his Word, the Scriptures, and regard Creation too as holy. This makes “Loving Creation” the key to wisdom.
My initial question was IS IT TOO LATE? E.O Wilson recommends that we preserve 50% of the earth for rewilding: excellent idea which will never happen under current conditions.
The NEW YORKER MAGAZINE a few weeks ago published
THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH.
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
Its opening words are:
“Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.”
That is one of the many warnings. THE ARCTIC NEWS website scares the wits out of me.
With the Arctic Ice gone, the extra heat will instead reach sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean that contain huge amounts of methane in currently still frozen hydrates.
The danger is that more and more heat will reach the seafloor and will destabilize methane hydrates contained in sediments at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in huge methane eruptions.
Methane is in the long run 100 times more dangerous than simple car exhaust, the GHG, the CO2 we produce when we drive. The Arctic Ocean is quite shallow – and the waters there float over trillions of tons of methane clusters which, when suddenly released, would cause the earth temperature to quickly rise by TEN DEGREES CELSIUS, burning everything on earth to a crisp.
The Apostle Peter, in his second letter to us (2 Peter 3), writes:
7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
10 he day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.a
11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives
12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.b That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.
13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.
14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.
15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.
16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, w which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Sam Carana of ARCTIC NEWS estimates that this could happen before 2026. He even has mentioned 2021 as a likely date, based on his close examination of the ARCTIC as published in his ARCTIC NEWS.
When the New Earth comes, not 50% but One Hundred Percent will be reserved, so that all species and all humans can live in perfect symbiosis.
Those are the days, my friend, and they will never end.