Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

January 28 2011

CO-OWNING THE EARTH

$350 for a barrel of oil? Douglas Coupland starts his book Player One with a sudden 400 percent oil-spike. Was he unrealistic in doing so? Let me outline the human energy history.

Our earth has no expiry date. The Lord made sure of that when he called it good seven times and very good when he had finished the final touches. But our precious planet has a ‘best before’ date. That point was passed a long time ago, coinciding with the eating of the proverbial apple. It’s been downhill ever since. God tried to correct the deteriorating situation with Noah and the Flood, but gave up in disgust with the Tower of Babel and the confusing of tongues. Now even that predicament has been overcome, with English in multiple accents the world language.

Our earth has no expiry date, but that does not mean that nothing will ever expire. A lot will, and it is now accelerating at an ever increasing pace. The world economy has always been able to cope with the disappearing of certain vital ingredients. For the longest time wood was the energy of choice: when Jesus fried some fish on the Galilean shore, he used some dead branches from nearby trees. Historian J.R McNeill in his Something New Under the Sun writes that in in Jesus’ time the world had 200 to 300 million people. Since the earth then was mostly forest, wood, as a renewable source of fuel, was able to do the job. It took 1500 years to double the population to 500 million, and because of certain discoveries, such as potatoes, only 300 years to reach 1 billion in 1800.

When wood could not do the job anymore, coal replaced it, even though it was so highly polluting that London England became Smog Town. However, thanks to those pure carbon pieces the next billion required only 120 years, reaching it in the 1920’s when I was born. In my life-time the number of people inhabiting this world has more than tripled, to 7 billion greedy consumers, and this time oil was the wonder fuel.

Oil has wrought miracles, enabling the marketing of ever more marvellous machines: television is now old-hat; land-line telephone is almost passé; Internet, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, are just the latest of the innovative litter.
Oil has also been the trigger for less pleasant plays. Where the 19th century was one of peace and progress, the short 20th one (which started in 1914 and ended in 1991 according to Eric Hobsbawm) saw almost 200 million of violent deaths. Access to Oil played a crucial role in causing these casualties.

Will our 21st Century be even shorter, and see even greater misfortune?
Our era totally depends on one vital item: carbon-based energy. The earth has no expiry date, thank God, but oil, gas, and even uranium and coal are finite substances. All are enemies of God. Enemies of God? Yes, anything that pollutes, or anybody that pollutes is contrary to God’s works, which God called ‘good.

According to the influential IEA, the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Peak Oil – 30 billion barrels per year -was reached in 2006, now about 5 years ago. Peak Oil refers to the easily obtained crude that originates in the Middle East, the North Sea and Texas, the light stuff that needs little refining, unlike the tar-sand mix that needs extracting, boiling and refining before it can further poison the air, producing only 1.3 barrel for every barrel of oil spent.

The last time I peeked at the oil price, it was around $92 and creeping up. Financial gurus are no different from you and me: they see safety in numbers, and typically exhibit herding behaviour. Once the pack decides that peak oil is real, we will see rapid shifts. If even a small percentage of restless money decides to chase after oil, there’ll be a rapid and sudden explosion, perhaps jumping to $200 per barrel overnight, just as happened in the Player One book.

It has been estimated that a 4 percent in economic growth increases oil use by 1 percent, a 4 to 1 relationship. This also means that when oil production drops, we would see about a 4 percent decline in GDP for every one percent of less oil available. Just imagine: a 10 percent drop means a 40 percent decrease in Global growth!

It is only prudent to prepare for the inevitable. Our earth has no expiry date, but our resources do. We have built a society on the assumption of cheap and inexhaustible energy supplies. The word ‘assume’ quite appropriately contains three words: it makes an ‘ass’, out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’

Yes, Coupland was right to paint a ‘peak-oil’ scenario.

Bert Hielema has lived in now notorious Tweed since 1975. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’ His e-mail address is ‘bert@hielema.ca’

December 2010

I am a very emotional man. When I discovered that Canadian Christians, working in institutions which I served on various levels, openly ridicule Climate Change and deny the findings of thousands of serious scientists, I was deeply upset.
Here is some undeniable stuff. 2010 is on track to be the Earth’s hottest year on record, and here’s the math: 98 climate scientists out of 100 tell me that our constant carbon emissions means disruptive climate change this century. Two out of 100 call this nonsense. Fundamental Christians tell me to bet on the two.
Suppose society combats climate change anyway, the sensible thing to do of course. This means that we’ll have slightly higher energy prices but cleaner air; we’ll have less sickness but more renewable energy; the Saudis will have less money but we’ll have more innovative industries. If the deniers are wrong and we do nothing, our kids – many in Christian Schools – will meet the sudden stop at the end. The Lie has won, at least until the Lord comes back.
There’s a Dutch saying, which translates something like this: “even though the Lie is fast, competing with Truth it’ll come in last.” Mark Twain a century ago said something similar, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Take the (mostly church-going) Republicans, now calling the tune in US congress. Last year, when John Boehner, of Ohio, the incoming House Speaker, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his party’s plans to address climate change, he replied: “The idea that carbon dioxide- our car exhaust – is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical.” John Shimkus, of Illinois, one of four Congress members now vying for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, at a congressional hearing in 2009, dismissed the dangers of climate change by quoting Genesis 8:22: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” He added, “I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation.”

I fail to see how these words explain the absence of Global Warming. Romans 8 is more relevant: “we know that creation has been groaning as in childbirth.” Revelation 16 reveals that “the sun was allowed to scorch the people with fire. They were seared by the intense heat.”

So why is it that sincere Christians label Climate Change a “politically correct ploy” and dismiss it as a fiction?
Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone; in parts of the oceans there’s six to ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton; there’s dioxin in every mother’s breast milk; rates of extinction are a thousand times faster.
I know, I know. I hammered on this before. The key is awareness precisely because we are talking about God’s creation, reason why every Christian, each in his/her small way, should be in the forefront of the fight against Climate Change.

That is also the opinion of E.O.Wilson, who Time magazine calls one of the world’s great naturalists. In his National bestseller, Creation, Dr Wilson, himself a son of the South, appeals to a Southern Baptist pastor for counsel and help, and suggests that they set aside their differences to save Creation – living Nature – which is in deep trouble.
He- and I also – expresses being puzzled that so many religious leaders have hesitated to make protection of the Creation an important part of their teaching. He knows the Southern Baptist ‘rapture’ bias, and debunks it as blasphemy, calling that concept not “gospels of hope and compassion, not born of the heart of Christianity, but gospels of cruelty and despair. Pastor, tell me I am wrong! ……..At the very least, Pastor, I expect we agree that somehow and somewhere back in history humanity lost its way…… We destroyed most of (creation) in order to improve our lives and generate more people.”

He writes that the natural world is embedded in our genes: a view of natural environments leads to a decline in moods of fear and anger and generates an overall feeling of tranquility; post-surgical patients looking out at trees, recover more quickly and report less need for pain and anxiety medication than those only see walls of buildings. No wonder: creation has God’s name written all over it.

Looking for a New Year’s resolution? Start a book club and make this easily read book – only $10 – your first topic of discussion.

Bert Hielema is a member of such a club, this month discussing Douglas Coupland’s Player One; what is to become of us, the latest in the CBC Massey Lectures.

November 2010

Build houses and plant gardens and eat what they produce…… Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for if it prospers, you too will prosper. (Jeremiah 29:5 &7)

You would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed. (Jeremiah 51:9)

Here’s something we really don’t expect from Jeremiah: a positive statement. Says he “When in Babylon build houses, plant gardens, make the city prosper.”

Cities in those days where different from ours: people there were quite self-sufficient, with room to grow food.  Nineveh, too, was that way. God told Jonah, “Should I not be concerned about that great city where so many people live and many cattle as well?”

Today the only large American city with space to grow food is Detroit. It now has oodles of empty spots, places where houses used to be, having lost more than half of its population. Want to buy a house cheap? Go to Motor City and get an extra lot thrown into the bargain.

So why did Jeremiah urge the tribe of Judah to blend in? Simple. God wanted his chosen people to stay in good condition physically, materially and take time to treasure their religious heritage. As a result much of the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – came into being during that 70 year exile. Apparently absence from Jerusalem made the heart grow fonder, made them appreciate God’s hand in history, and also made them realize that they were in the city of Babylon, but did not belong there.

This applies to us as well: we live in Babylon also. David, at the end of his reign acknowledged that we are ‘aliens and transients’. Walter Lippmann, the well-known American commentator wrote, “Every one of us is, from a spiritual point of view, an immigrant.” Jesus too reaffirmed that: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

All this simply means that we are different from the world, that we may not subscribe to its philosophy of “Growth at all cost”, just to name one example that does the most harm to our fragile planet. Because it’s God’s work of art we must always treat it with reverence, reason why Jesus urges us to ‘seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness’, live in tune with God’s laws and be ready when the New World comes.  Luther once said that ‘even if I knew that the Lord would return tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.’

Back to something more in tune with Jeremiah. It’s not for nothing that he is known as ‘the weeping prophet’ and best-known for his proverbial Jeremiads, his mournful lamentations. The weeping prophet knew something that we too should take to heart: in chapter 51:9 he expresses his sorrow when he writes: “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed…… for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

We are discovering the same about our world: it too is beyond healing. We too must pray for it and work for its wellbeing, yet we see each day more clearly that our planet too cannot be healed: it has gone beyond the point of no return.

Jared Diamond in his 567 page book COLLAPSE used the Easter Islands as an example for what’s ails us. That island needed trees for its survival, but, just as we do all the time, they kept on cutting them down. Dr Diamond writes “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees?’ Or ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for our wood?’”

We are all Easter Islanders now. God’s world is choking, which means that God’s Word is choking, because God’s world is also God’s Word, if we believe what our Belgic Confession teaches us. To understand The Means by Which We Know God, it states that we know Him First by the creation, preservation, and government of the Universe since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:20. ‘All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse’.

To me this suggests that the corollary, the other side of the coin, is also true: Those who recognize God’s greatness in creation and glorify his name because of it and do everything to preserve it, stand justified.

The Belgic confession places the bible as a secondary source for knowing God, yet almost all churches see that as the exclusive way to discover Him. We speak of the Bible as His holy and divine Word, but I have never heard that the universe is his Holy and Divine Word. Does Gnosticism, which sees matter as evil, play a role here? Prof. Dr Harold Bloom – America’s most distinguished literary critic – thinks so. In his The American Religion he categorically states that because of Gnosticism, “the American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer says essentially the same when he states that those who deny that God, Earth and Humanity are intimately linked, are engaged in pious secularism.

It is high time that we reset our priorities: make God’s universe the Primary Word while using the Bible as “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in God’s created word.

The Christian Church needs an AGGIORNAMENTO: an act of bringing it up to date to reflect current conditions.

The Hielema couple lives mostly in Tweed, but is often in Ancaster where they attend a Christian Reformed Church.

October 2010

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.

(Luke 16:10)

There are seven (7) billion of us precious people populating this planet. Among these many mouths and brains there are far too few who care about the earth, mostly because they are pre-occupied with making ends meet, literally living from land to mouth. Even though many of the churchgoing folk – both Protestant and Roman Catholic – have environmental concerns, their theology pushes them in a different direction. They consciously or unwittingly still have that old song in mind: “I am a stranger here within a foreign land, my home is far away upon the Golden strand,” meaning heaven, of course, so their heart commitment is elsewhere.

No wonder the politicians exploit this feeling. Take the Republican Party. Its platform proclaims that, because we have god-given rights, we are free to pollute. Its political statement dictates that “claims of human-caused global warming are based on fraudulent, inaccurate information and that legislation and policy based on this information are detrimental to the well-being of the United States.” If the Republicans gain power in Congress in the next few weeks, watch out. Goodbye to any measures to do justice to the earth that God created. It’s like openly approving to vandalize the Mona Lisa or Rembrandt’s “Nacht Wacht.”

E.O Wilson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and world-renowned Harvard biologist, in his recent book Creation writes that our destructive power has no limit. “We have, all by our bipedal, wobbly-headed selves, altered Earth’s atmosphere and climate away from the norm… we have spread toxic chemicals worldwide, appropriated 40 percent of the solar energy available for photosynthesis, converted almost all of the easily arable land, dammed rivers, raised the planets sea level and are close to running out of fresh water.”

With a growing world population, and more people wanting our diet, there is constantly a greater need for new agricultural land. It will come by converting more rain forests and savannas.  In the meantime warning signs are accumulating. Ten million hectares (25 million acres) of grain monocultures fell victim to drought and fire in Russia this summer, partly because large tracts of peat bogs had been drained. Climate change means that extreme weather events such as droughts and floods may become more frequent in the future. In Pakistan floods overwhelmed 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of agricultural land and a significant portion of the country’s infrastructure disappeared under water.

In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we plummeted backwards. In other words, things will only get worse. There’ll never be a global climate deal.

I started with quoting Jesus. Each one of us has been entrusted by Him to take care of a minute part of his creation. We can’t do much, but that does not give us the excuse not to do anything at all. “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much,” says Jesus, also to us today. This means – since Jesus’ ministry has everything to do with the coming of the Kingdom – that when we do our small part to save creation, he will award us with all the treasures of the New Creation, his Kingdom.

Jesus also says in Luke 12:3: “What you have whispered in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops”. This is confirmed in the so-called ‘butterfly in India paradigm,’ which indicated that a small event in a complex system can lead to large results: A single butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi may be the certain cause of a hurricane in North Carolina, though the hurricane may take place a couple of years later.

It’s my job to jab, jovially, of course. There are 7 billion people in the world of which many are called, and few are chosen. The ones that are chosen are those who are faithful in small things, matters which are different from one person to the next. But one rule applies to all: Luke 16 deals with the parable of the Shrewd Manager, and ends with the words, “You cannot serve both God and Money.”

Serving God means first of all ‘serving his creation’, as John 3:16 teaches us.

Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, where he is a reluctant Presbyterian. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’.