MAY 11 2019
NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE
This year I actually welcomed the black flies. Fortunately I am immune to their bites. When I noticed them last week for the first time this spring, boldly buzzing around my head, I thanked the Lord: not yet a “Silent Spring”.
When Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring” – I received it as a member of a book club – I gave it away without ever reading it. That was in 1962: then I was totally oblivious to anything other than the generally acceptable opinions in all fields, including church matters, seeing my church as the only true one.
Now, more than 55 years later, I have changed radically. Frankly I don’t trust public utterances anymore. I drive sparingly (so far 1,000 km in 2019) a VW diesel, buying the company line that diesel was the best car for the environment. It’s a 2002 model, and I will hang on to it, as, I am told, the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car is more than the fuel it will ever burn.
And then there is Boeing, which I also regarded as an honest company. That too is no longer true since their 737 Max deception. The plane is like the Chevy II which Ralph Nader labelled as ‘Unsafe at any speed.”
Bad news for the earth.
This was the week when one day was set aside to broadcast the bad news for the earth. Below are some quotes from 2 major newspapers, The New York Times, and The Guardian, commenting on the UN report that creation is in trouble.
- The Guardian wrote that around the world, nature and the benefits it provides are in unprecedented decline – a trend that can be reversed, but only with a coordinated international effort and “transformative change” to the way humans draw food, water, energy and resources from the planet, a sweeping new report has found.
- The NYT said, “Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken. From coral reefs flickering out beneath the oceans to rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10m years, according to the UN global assessment report. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions, said the study, compiled over three years by more than 450 scientists and diplomats.”
There it is. Don’t for a minute believe that it will mean change in human conduct. On the contrary: with an ever growing world population, more people are vying for a higher standard of living. However, due to drought, soil erosion and floods, expect higher food prices. The same will be true for energy and natural resources, as easy access is gone, and with Energy Return on Energy Invested decreasing there too expect inflation.
Let’s face it. We are dealing here with 8 billion human beings, all bewitched by pictures of opulence of preposterous proportions, in spite of panoramas of unequaled inequality; all enamored by visions of unprecedented prosperity: they will never voluntary surrender their privileged position; all denying reality; all cloaked in utopian stupor and hiding behind fumes of ignorance until the boom is lowered, and, like anaesthetized alcoholics, stagger into the oncoming avalanches, overwhelmed by raw reality.
The Bills are due.
For the last 200 years we have used soil, water, air as a gift of nature. But, as one of the laws of Ecology states, “Nothing comes Free.” For TWO CENTURIES we’ve had a free ride. The UN has estimated that nature has provided the economies of the Americas with $24 trillion worth of non-monetized benefits each year: free water, free air, free soil. Now nature is calling for payment: restore or collapse. Nature is not a patsy: it is unforgiving.
“The most important thing isn’t necessarily that we’re losing .?.?. 1 million species — although that’s important, don’t misunderstand me,” Robert Watson, chairman of the U.N. panel that authored the UN report, told the Washington Post. “The bigger issue is the way it will affect human well-being, as we’ve said many times — food, water, energy, human health.”
In other words: Humanity is inevitably on a globe-spanning murder-suicide track. Yes, Near-Term Collapse.
I read
last week, “Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.” We fail to
remember that all 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch – a mere 15cm
– layer of topsoil and the right amount of rain: not too much, not too little.
Now 75 percent, a full three-quarter of that soil has been tampered with,
saturated with pesticides, clogged with carbon-based fertilizer, basically
poisoned beyond belief and beyond relief. Good luck.
The UN report did not mention what happens way Up North, around the Arctic, where the global heating is double or more than elsewhere, liberating, if that is the right word, the much more lethal methane and the even more deadly N20, Nitrous Oxide, the same poison that I generate with my diesel motor. The only matter that can be predicted with a great degree of certainty is NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE.
Volkswagen, Boeing and the US government with Trump – who last week passed a real milestone: his 10,000th LIE – all attempted to hide the truth, for the sake of profit. They rightly deserve to forfeit my trust.
History has shown that a civilization collapses when there is a collapse
of trust. The same applies to fiat money. An empire, a state, a family, any
social structure, rich or poor, powerful or weak, new or old, happy or sad, if
there is no trust it cannot exist for long. That’s what happened to the Roman
Empire; that’s what’s happening to us. As Matthew 12: 25 says, “Every
kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or
house divided against itself shall not stand”.
Ultimately, trust is based on truth. Without
truth, there cannot be trust. “The Truth shall set you free”, Jesus said. In
Roman times, the fight of Christianity against the Empire of Lies was more than
everything else a fight to rebuild trust by establishing a new truth, the
revealed one.
And now? We are rapidly entering a phase where the lies told to us by our governments and our elites are so huge, so pervasive, so blatant, that only the Devil can be the driving force behind all this, true to 1 John 5:19: “The whole world is under the power of The Evil One.”
In the great confusion of our times even the good among us are confused, they can’t discern the truth anymore. And the time may have come when we need a new generation of Martyrs for truth is needed.
“Climate change modelers have not understood that one of the things that they should be concerned about is near-term collapse. The rising wealth disparity in recent years is a major indicator that the world economy may be headed toward collapse,” writes Gail Tverberg in her The Finite Earth blog.
Let’s face it.
The commitments made by countries in the Paris accord don’t get us to a 2 degree world unless of course the entirety of civilization does a 180 today, which won’t happen.
Insects are disappearing at 6 times the speed of larger animals and at a rate of about 2.5% of their biomass every year. These are our pollinators. These are links in our food chain. These represent the basic functioning of every terrestrial ecosystem.
58% of the biomass of vertebrate life on earth has been lost since 1970.
Drought – or too much rain – in nearly every food producing place in the world is expected to intensify rapidly and make them basically unusable.
We can no longer save the society that we live in and many of us are going to be dead long before our life expectancy would suggest.
If your idea of hope is having some slightly modified Standard of living going forward and live to ripe old age… there is no hope. This civilization is over…
It all started in Paradise, the Garden of Eden.
Capitalism started in Paradise when the human pair saw the fruit tree there in a different light, re-arranging the priority from the aesthetic to the economic, from first seeing the Tree as an object of beauty – look at Genesis 2: 9- and later – Genesis 3: 6 – “the tree was good for food”.
Once we abandoned the beauty principle and made the economic the measure of life, the chain of destruction was set into motion. We now gather the bitter harvest: cosmic disaster.
It reminds me of Revelation 18: 11-14,
“And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one buys their cargoes any more— cargoes of gold and silver and precious stones and pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet, and every kind of citron wood and every article of ivory and every article made from very costly wood and bronze and iron and marble, and cinnamon and spice and incense and perfume and frankincense and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat and cattle and sheep, and cargoes of horses and chariots and slaves and human lives. “The fruit you long for has gone from you, and all things that were luxurious and splendid have passed away from you and men will no longer find them.”
That passage of the Bible outlines the END of Capitalism: economic collapse, societal collapse: lots of stuff on the market, but no buyers. The fruit in Paradise – see above – you longed for has gone.
Rather than pursuing beauty, as was the wish of the Creator, you, WE, have gone after things luxurious and splendid, and now we harvest the bitter results.
It is as plain as daylight: “The Bible tells you so”, as that simple children song has told us.
No, it is not too late. Yes, it is too late to avert NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE. That was evident already is Paradise: already then the first step to Collapse was taken. We now are at the end-game, almost at the finishing line.
ENTER JOHN THE BAPTIZER
So…… What must we do? Good question.
Matthew 3 starts out with these words,
“In those days John the Baptizer came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.”
It strikes me that John chose the ‘wilderness’
to start his mission, just as today the WORD comes to us “in the wilderness” we
have created. Why did John pick that location? Environmentalist he was, he did
that for a purpose: all deserts were products of humans infringing on paradise.
When God created ‘in the beginning’, the entire Middle East, the entire world,
was tree-covered and productive. Deserts are the by-products of human
exploitation and lead to war. Syria was the breadbasket of the Middle East
until Climate Change and human stupidity made it food-deficient and caused the
farmers to rise up in desperation.
Today is the time for REPENTANCE. That’s the gospel we have to
proclaim, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” That Kingdom is the New
Creation, the restored Paradise, the pristine Garden of Eden, where Adam and
Eve started out and failed: greenhorns as they were.
The Greek word for repentance is METANOIA, where the ‘meta’ indicates ‘change’ and the ‘noia’ points to ‘mindset’. We need a totally new way of thinking, from ‘profit’ to ‘beauty’, from exploitation to preservation, from destruction to enhancement of creation. With every step we take, with every thought we have, with every idea we conceive, the overriding concern must be the ultimate task we have: be servants to creation: honor God, the Creator, by word and deed, especially the latter.
It is too late to avoid near-term collapse. It is not too late to change, to undergo true METANOIA.