Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

February 1 2015

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT? (2)

We know that nowadays the earth is quite small. When I emigrated to Canada in 1951, it took the M.S. Veendam 10 days to sail from Rotterdam to New York. Today an airplane covers that same distance in a couple of hours, thanks to special high octane fuel. Going back 150-200 years ago sailing vessels were years on the way from one continent, Europe to another, Australia. Then the world population was only a fraction of what it is now, while their ecological footprint was negligible. And yet even 1600 years ago when Rome collapsed, as Thomas Homer-Dixon relays in his The Upside of Down, the real causes of the Fall of Rome were: “the rising complexity of all parts of Roman society – including its bureaucracy, military forces, cities, economy, and laws – as the empire tried to maintain itself……..It needed more and more energy, and eventually it couldn’t find enough.”

Sounds very much like something that could happen today as well even though today there is a surplus of the energy stuff, a sign that the world economy is in tatters. What is striking now is the speed of events, creating Black Swans, unexpected developments, faster than ever. Total dependency on oil and electricity also means total collapse when they fail to deliver.

The story of Thomas Malthus is well-known. Two hundred years ago, this Presbyterian minister said population would race ahead of food supply. In an essay published in 1798, the English clergyman argued that human numbers always increase more rapidly than food supplies and that humans are condemned always to breed to the point of misery and the edge of starvation. The two centuries since his famous essay have not been kind to Malthus’s theory. During that time human numbers have increased from fewer than one billion to today’s 7+ billion. In many parts of the world, food production has grown faster than the population, thanks to the opening of new lands, mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, better water control, improved breeds of plants and animals, and better farmer know-how. It’s the oil we eat! Though many of today’s bottom billion people live in misery on the edge of starvation, Malthus would be amazed at the relative well-being of most of a vastly enlarged population.
That Malthus’s theory failed widely during the past two centuries does not prove that it will remain wrong for the future. That there are many more billions today does not guarantee future increases.

The early Christian writer Tertullian said (around AD 200, in De Anima): “We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.”

That was when the population of the whole planet was maybe 100 million or so. We reached the first billion mark by about 1850. By 1928, it was about 2 billion. In my lifetime it has more than tripled. It passed seven billion in 2014. Note that: humans took 150,000 years to get to the first billion. The most recent billion arrived in just 12 years.

Nobody knows how many people the planet could hold. The UN has predicted that fertility would decline and longevity would increase until the global population stabilized at nine billion in 2300. I sincerely believe that we will never reach the figure of nine billion. There are a number of factors at work that will limit expansion: (1) As people become more affluent, they have less children. Already Russia is losing population, and so is Japan. (2) Arable land is disappearing at a fast clip, and what is there is increasingly contaminated. (3) Water is the great limiting factor. It takes 1000 tons of water to grow 1 single ton of wheat. (4) Climate Change will also reduce yields, as too much rain in some areas and drought elsewhere, will make agriculture a more hazardous occupation.

I believe that we are now already close to capacity. When the financial system collapses the industrial world too will cease to be. To develop the needy energy sources and renew the electrical infrastructure will take trillions of dollars which will not be available once the debt-laden economy gives up the ghost. When that happens a massive die-off will occur reducing the world’s population to a fraction of what it is now.

Still people have been busy to calculate the incalculable. Joel Cohen, the Rockefeller University population biologist, argues in a 1995 book How Many People can the Earth Support?  that it isn’t a question like “How old are you?” which only has one answer at any one time. Cohen argues that you could fit one billion people each a meter apart, into a field 64km square. So everybody in the world would fit easily into a city the size of Toronto or Chicago. But that has nothing to do with supporting these people, feeding them, providing sanitation, keeping them alive. That is the real question, because human action has its own “ecological footprint”; there has to be so much land to provide food, clothing, shelter, medicines, building material, fresh air and clean water for any one human. It takes, according to some calculations, 2.1 hectares – about 5 acres – of land and water to provide for one average human. The important word is: average. The American footprint is about 10 hectares or 25 acres. So if all humans lived at US standards, we’d need another five Earths.

How Many People Can The Earth Really Support?

The number depends on nature and on human choices. By providing numbers, population projections help nations shape social and economic policies. Before too long, Cohen notes, people are likely to confront difficult trade-offs between population size, economic well-being, environmental quality and cultural values. The clear message of the projections is that people cannot forever continue to have, on average, more children than are required to replace themselves,” Cohen says. “This statement is not an ideological slogan. It is a hard fact. For example, conventional agriculture cannot grow enough food for untold billions of people–not enough water falls from the skies. The finiteness of the Earth guarantees that a ceiling on human numbers exists.”

During the last 50 years, estimates of the number of people Earth can support have ranged from fewer than 1 billion to more than 1 trillion. The estimates vary so wildly, Cohen says, because they use different methods and make different assumptions about how people will be willing to live in the future.

In 1992, the United Nations projected that if 1990 growth rates continued, the world would have about 21.2 billion people in 2050. However, if the worldwide average fell to 2.5 children, Earth’s population would grow to 12.5 billion in 2050. If the average rate slowed to 1.7 children, the population would increase to 7.8 billion.

January 25 2015

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT?(1)

How about that for an ambitious title! How many people can the earth support? This topic is so huge that, I must warn you at the outset, this will become a series, will consist of a number of articles, because a lot of questions are involved in this issue, touching upon a number of different fields, such as ecology, religion, economy, geography, and possibly others as well.

No, don’t expect me to come up with an exact number, only the Lord knows the precise total. What we do know is that today the earth, by hook and crook, supports (?) more than seven billion people. I put a question mark behind ‘support’ for obvious reasons. I will outline how this has come about and how that number cannot be sustained for much longer.

In my series I will, of course, rely on a number of sources, including the Bible, something no other of the essayists ever include. I may also quote some excerpts from a book I wrote DAY WITHOUT END available free in digital format when you search my name. That book has its setting in a world where all the ideal conditions for permanent sustainability are present. That means that I know where I am going, something very few people do, it seems to me.

About 10 years ago Harper’s published an article with the title The Oil We Eat. It made a lasting impression on me. Underneath the title it showed a saying by Balzac:

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.

Both Toronto – in the Distillery district – and Stratford – on the Main Street – have a coffee shop by that name, serving coffee better than Starbucks or Tim Horton. However, if wealth in Balzac’s maxim is seen in terms of eternity then this is a false statement. Great wealth in Biblical terms is being a Child of God and an heir to the Kingdom. That Kingdom is eternal life on a pristine planet where bliss is forever, where all partakers share in the wealth of the world. The secret of that imperishable wealth is indeed the often forgotten crime that Jesus, who was sinless, was nevertheless hung on the cross to die.

Sorry for this little sermon, but I had to correct Balzac on this score.

So why do we have in excess of Seven Billion people on this world? Simple. We eat oil, a poisonous substance, something which we are increasingly experiencing when its carbon-saturated gases are more and more asphyxiating the atmosphere leading inexorably to the earth’s demise. At this point there is no stopping this from happening sooner than later. Be prepared.

More than 40 years ago I wrote an essay which earned me a substantial monetary award, and a free trip from St. Catharines, where our family lived from 1955-75, to Vancouver for the award ceremony. In it I, among other things, outlined the laws of Ecology then already very much in my mind. That was in the same year I read Limits to Growth which influenced me more than any other human book. In that essay I wrote that Ecology’s guiding principles are:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.

Ideally all facets of life should be part of a person’s life with living, working, learning, leisure taking place within a family or community setting, where we are in harmony with nature.

1. There is no waste.

This applies to us as well as nature. Nothing actually disappears. When energy is burned, the waste is evident in Green House Gases. Our planet is a closed system.

1. Nature knows best.

When we go against the laws of nature, introduce species where they do not belong, nature’s revenge is all too evident, especially today when the weather has become totally unpredictable.

1. Nothing comes free.

We are finding this out with The Revenge of Gaia, how increasingly pollution and ever more costly reparation has stalled he world’s Economic Growth. The law of Unintended Consequences are increasingly at work on our planet.

I will come back to these laws, as they will be a guide arriving at my conclusions. Back to the We Eat Oil article. Here is a quote from the article in Harper’s:

“We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

“Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling 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.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.”

That was 10 years ago. Since that time we have added another billion of us humans: we now have 7 billion of ever more greedy customers. Since 2004 we have seen the advent of China, its unbelievable growth in factories, cities, roads, contaminated land, displacing millions of farmers in the process and causing a good part of land and water to become polluted almost beyond repair. The same has happened in India and Indonesia which makes me think that in the decade 2004- 2014 Primary Productivity has accelerated faster than ever, perhaps now reaching 50%. We know as a fact that in the last 40 years the number of mammals has been halved, that fish has disappeared at an even faster pace. All this means that humans are claiming more and more for themselves and leaving less and less for the rest of creation, with inevitably disastrous results. This Seven Billion Plus number of Human Beings on the earth is proving to be fatal for all of God’s creatures, that process  significantly accelerating with Fracking in the USA and the Tar Sands in Alberta. How long can our world-class de-creation go on? That’s the reason why it is time to consider what the optimum number of us humans is that our tiny planet can support, and how we can go about this. Does it not make sense to work to create the circumstances that would make this possible? Isn’t that our Christian duty?

That we are rushing to the end is obvious to those not blinded by the illusions of Perpetual Economic Growth.

It was not always so. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Agriculture is a recent invention. Evidence indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries.  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. Not much has changed. Today One percent of humanity owns 50 percent of the world’s wealth, an intolerable situation. Basically this is the result of organized agriculture, enslaving the earth for the purpose of enriching the owners, the kings, the food companies, the nobility who own the land.

I am an avid reader of several online newspapers. Every day I skim 2 Canadian, 2 British and the New York Times as well. I also often have a peak at the German Der Spiegel. Davos is in the news, the annual gab fest of the world’s billionaires, where a simple hotdog costs more than $50 (Can.) But then 50 bucks for these guys-  almost all men – is no more than a penny for us  – if there still was one of these coins around. These real rich remnants are getting worried about inequality. More than one speaker in that secluded Swiss Alpine resort has said that Capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s maxim that ‘capitalism carries the seed of its own destruction,’ something all too evident to me. Paul Polman, the Dutch boss of Unilever, a Dutch-British food giant also mentioned that “Capitalists are a threat to Capitalism”.

Imagine: just 80 of the world’s richest now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The even more infamous 0.1% has been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s. Contrast this with Africa, where the absolute number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981. Thanks to the advance of computer power and the smart brains of one of my grandsons who works in Los Angeles, robots have proliferated, and wages stagnated under this regime of privatization, deregulation and low taxes on the rich. At the same time finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a small minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy.

All this signals trouble. Both the inequality of all regions except South America, and the ongoing and unstoppable advance of social and climate conflict, wars, mass migration and political corruption, everywhere in the world we are stunting health and life chances, increasing poverty, and widening gender and ethnic divides.

This past week I met with a good friend who is active in the field of counselling. He told me that the leading cause of death today is suicide. People are both depressed and angry, filled with both fury and anxiety.

The earth feels it and is angry in turn. Perhaps the anger originates with the earth which is suffering as in pain of childbirth. After all, we and the earth belong together. Years ago I wrote a book with the provocative title The Pregnant Earth. And indeed, what is happening is that from the ashes of the Old Earth will arise a New Earth, where the number of inhabitants is regulated by the exact number it can carry in perpetuity.

Back to our current reality, where farming is an equal opportunity earth- destroyer. Not only does open pit mining – look at the Appalachians and the coal mining there – destroy the earth, block waterways, poison people, but present day farming and the distribution of food products does the same.

Let’s face it: Farming is a cruel business.  Where the original prairie supported millions of buffalo, and saw billions of pigeons flying overhead days on end, today farmers rip open this soil to grow corn and soya beans to feed the same millions of cattle which before had the precious prairie grass as fodder. Basically the entire beef industry is a gigantic waste of effort and energy and a horrendous source of pollution. Earlier, before the advent of us humans, on the endless prairies where the “antelope played and the buffalo roamed”, food was totally free. Today these beasts can only exist because of oil. Oil to pull the tractors, oil to fabricate fertilizer, oil to …. And I could go on, oil till it reaches our dinner table.

Once that oil is gone, we cannot go back to the prairie of old were food was as close as a bow and arrow. There is no going back. We are on a dead end path. Our Seven Billion Plus are speeding up head over heels our sudden demise.

Better get ready. Here is the latest on the APOCALYPSE:

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race today, we’re now only three minutes away. The clock last week was advanced by two minutes. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

More about that next week.

January 18 2015

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

Is Cancer just a matter of bad luck?

Last week the BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation – had an article, since then taken over by many other media outlets, claiming that Cancer was a matter of bad luck. We all know cancer victims. Last year I met a woman doctor at a shopping mall, conspicuous by having here head covered. We chatted for a while and she, sort of angry, told me that she was suffering from breast cancer and had already gone from some thirty treatments in the university town, some 90 km away.

Cancer strikes the best of us. For some the reason is obvious: smoking and lung cancer are intimately linked, yet a very good friend of mine, who never smoked, died of lung cancer so did a sister who did smoke, but had gone through a painful separation.

I am not a doctor and have no expert opinion on anything, being more a generalist and a keen observer of humanity. Is cancer really a matter of bad luck? I don’t think so. The incidence of cancer is increasing even as billions are spent on research which has been successful in at least increasing the lifespan of patients, although not always the quality of life.

Why is cancer increasing? It should seem logical that getting older exposes more people to cancer, although my observation is that cancer strikes more the not so old, those in the 50-70 age range. Those who live beyond that age appear to be able to somehow outwit the cancer curse. Of coursed death strikes the older folk- 80 and beyond – too but then it usually is a case of simply being worn out, heart failure and other system malfunction.

No, cancer is not a matter of bad luck. Cancer-giving elements are everywhere: the soil, the water, the air, our food: all are contaminated. There are thousands of chemical compounds out there. Yes, it can hit anybody, but there are ways to prevent them to some extent. Eating organic, avoiding meat and sugar, drinking well water, growing your own food, exercising, marrying the right person and stay married, going to church, all are preventing measures. They don’t eliminate cancer, but they certainly will reduce the incidence.

Increasing dysfunctional society

Today much is going wrong. Take infection. Infection is still a great killer and antibiotics are becoming less effective. World-wide some 13 million people die of infections. The overuse of antibiotics in raising animals, chicken and cattle, are blamed for the loss of effectiveness of penicillin in treating diseases. People who own these animals – I am reluctant to call them farmers – raise chickens and cattle in such crowded conditions that once an illness penetrates there, death is inevitable, so they saturate them with antibiotics, which causes immunity in us. Animal confinement is needed to economize on space and heating: in the final analysis it is all about cheap food which is cheap only in terms of dollars. It is expensive in causing illness and death in humans, it is expensive in terms of environmental degradation, but that is a cost born by society at large, something that exposes an entirely different can of worms.

We all clamor for lower taxes and less medical costs, but both higher taxes and greater medical expense are the inevitable result of our increasingly dysfunctional financial, medical and nutritional system.

Take the US medical system. It seems to me that the USA is leading the world in being ungovernable. The medical establishment has become outrageous. The New York Times cited some examples: A bill of over $40,000 for the 20 minutes it took a doctor to stitch a cut; an ambulance ride of only 200 feet that cost $3,421. The premium to insure people against medical mishap is often the largest expense in the budget of those who live in the US of A. The New York Times article quoted that a healthy, insured couple is slowly going under because their insurance premiums are now twice as high as their mortgage and food costs. This coverage also comes with a high deductible – often thousands of dollars – as well as obligations to share in the medical expense. The medical system there is not about healing but about fattening the wallets of the medical operators, just as the Food industry is not about nutrition but about the financial welfare of the shareholders. The political parties are there not for the voters but to please the billionaires in the USA who finance the system. I hope that the Church is there to please God and not the parishioners. A society based on greed, cannot last.

The USA is the only Western country that has no universal, state-sponsored, medical system. We, in fortunate Canada, have that. Not only is our total cost lower than in the USA but the outcome is much better with lower mortality because everybody is covered. In the USA there are tens of millions who simply cannot afford the high premiums, although, under the new Obamacare plan, there are subsidies available. The crazy Republicans are doing everything to rob the poor of their coverage: and they are the supposedly Christian Party.

Soil and health

Something new has been discovered this past week, or rather came to light in the recent past concerning soil, that basic matter we use to grow stuff on. The discovery is that it has the ability to cure infections, especially important because the common ant-infection drug, penicillin, is losing its potency. That soil has magic powers comes to me as no surprise. Genesis, the first book  in the Bible, makes it perfectly clear that we, the earth, and our bodies belong together because God formed us out of the earth, shaped us in our present form, male and female (vive la difference), and then infused us with his spirit. We are a piece of the earth and our bonds with the earth belong to our essential being. We are our bodies, are ourselves, and are now and always will be earthly beings.

This significance cannot be exaggerated. Those who renounce the body renounce the connection before God the creator. Both Johan Herman Bavinck – read his book Between the Beginning and the End – and Dietrich Bonhoeffer argue that “The essential point of human existence is its bond with mother earth.” Escape from the body is escape from being human and escape from the spirit as well. The Bible says that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Bonhoeffer also writes in Creation and Fall that we are in the image of God because of our bodiliness. Colossians 1: 15-20 suggests that Jesus was the first human being and as such, as the first human, created everything. When we dis-own the earth relationship – as most Christians do, including Prime Minister Harper of Canada by claiming heaven as life’s goal – then we feel no longer a rapport with the rest of the natural world or even ourselves. Then our bodies can no longer be sources of deep knowledge about the world and we cease to have love, respect and compassion for the earth and our fellow creatures. Thus the discovery that the soil can be a source of healing, can be the source to protect us from the ravages of infections, is really nothing new.

The Covenant

It reminds me of the Covenant. In 1 Samuel 18: 3 Jonathan and David made a blood covenant. They exchanged weapons, clothes, pledged that whatever was theirs would now be held together, and to seal this ultimate promise, made an incision in their arms, let each other’s blood mingle and rubbed in earth. Incidentally God did the same with us in Jesus Christ, the Head of the New Covenant. Soil is the all-important healing agent, and finally scientists have discovered this medium, perhaps too late, because much of the soil of the earth is so polluted that it has become in itself a source of infection.

But there is some pure soil left and most likely in your back or front yard. There’s where we all must go and plant, as much as possible, the food stuff we consume.

That is important for a number of reasons. We all know that we are headed for a disastrous change in the climate. We are not responsible for what others do, but we are accountable for what we do. I believe that, when we appear before the judgment throne of Jesus, one of the questions he will ask us is: what have you done to limit your carbon foot print. It’s no use to say that you have no clue what that means, because ignorance is no excuse. The Carbon Foot Print involves everything we do nowadays. We simply cannot avoid it, but we can limit it to some extent. Eat locally, or eat from within a radius of say 100 km. The best, of course, and the healthiest is to grow your own and eat from your own soil. I cultivate a large vegetable garden, spread out over our septic bed. There’s nothing unhealthy about this. A few decades ago a Prime Minister of India drank every day a glass of his own urine. Soil is enriched by our effluence, reason why farmers use manure to enrich the soil. “We are soil, earth, dust, and to dust, earth, soil we shall return” says the Bible.

Flowering in January in Great Britain

Last year 2014, was the warmest on record. This means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have taken place since the turn of the century. Other records are falling every year: Western Japan saw the heaviest August rains since records began. Parts of the Western US endured persistent drought as did parts of China and Central and South America.

Climate change creates ‘The Weirding of the Weather.’ In Great Britain, thanks to the above average warm weather, flowers, trees, any living plant matter is in an early bloom, posing great dangers due to their premature flowering. A few years ago we in Ontario, had an unusual warm February, causing my apple trees, and actually all apple and cherry trees to bud early. A later frost killed these early buds: no apples and cherries that year in Ontario. The same threatens for Great Britain this year.

So what can we expect?

The following is an excerpt from the Archdruid Report written by John Michael Greer.

“Those of my readers who still have a steady income and a home they expect to be able to keep would still be well advised to double check their insulation and weather stripping,  solar water heating and other home scale renewable energy technologies, and turn the back lawn into a vegetable garden with room for a chicken coop, if by any chance they haven’t taken these sensible steps already.  A great many of my readers don’t have such options, and at this point, it may be a long time before such options are readily available . This is crunch time, folks; unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re on the brink of a historical inflection point like the ones in 1789 and 1914, one of the watersheds of time after which nothing will ever be the same again.

“There’s still much that can be done in other spheres, and I’ll be discussing some of those things in upcoming posts. In terms of energy and the economy, though, I suspect that for a lot of us, the preparations we’re going to be able to make are the ones we’ve already made, and a great many people whose plans depend on having a stable income and its associated perks and privileges may find themselves scrambling for  when the unraveling of the economy leaves them without Those of my readers who have been putting off the big changes that might make them more secure in hard times may be facing the hard decision of making those changes now, in a hurry, or facing the crisis of our age in the location and situation they’re in right now. Those who’ve gone ahead and made the changes—well, you know as well as I do that it’s time to review your plans, double check the details, batten down the hatches and get ready to weather the storm.”

That storm is well in the way. The people in the weather office are pretty good in predicting stormy weather. For stormy weather in the economy we must rely on our guts. My guts signal an economic hurricane coming.

Stay tuned.

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

January 11 2015

End Times? CNN thinks so.

If the end of the world arrives, chances are you aren’t going to be watching CNN. But just in case you are, the cable news network has a video ready for the Big Sign-off. That’s according to blogger Michael Ballaban who posted the purported footage online.

The clip isn’t much, really – just low-resolution footage of a US Army band playing a mournful rendition of Nearer My God to Thee, which takes a little over a minute. The tune says it all: the same tune that serenaded the doomed passengers of the sinking Titanic would usher the world’s population into the Great Hereafter. The tune then fade, presumably, to the rapture, apocalypse, giant comet impact or whatever coup de grace fate has in store for our little blue marble. So far the comment.

False Beliefs

Of course no mention is made of the Lord’s Return, which, for the majority of Americans has no meaning, as Rapture has conquered the church, and so misled practically all of North American Christianity. In that sense it has been Satan’s greatest ally by allowing him a free hand in destroying the earth, God’s so precious possession. Is a greater distortion of the Truth imaginable?

Just as Rapture- with its Latin root ‘rapio’ from which we have the word ‘rape’ – is a false belief, so is the concept of ‘Infinite Growth’. With elections coming up in Canada this year, and in the USA next year, and with both countries struggling economically, the theme of Economic Growth will be front and center. Growth will be pursued whether it makes sense or not, and it doesn’t make sense. If we manage to generate growth, something which will benefit us in the short run, today or next week, perhaps, but which will mortally harm us in a few months or a year, then that benefit will soon become a liability.

This came home to me when I ordered a sofa bed. I had seen one in the nearest city some 45 km away, but it needed to be delivered at a cost of nearly as high as the bed itself. So it was not a bargain. Now after Christmas, and that same merchant eager to show ‘growth’ at all cost, he offered free delivery, which, I calculated, would cost the firm more than all possible profit. Makes no sense, but for me it was a good deal.

The same is true of the current gasoline war. Economists keep on telling us that it is money in our pocket. True. But the cost to society at large is immense: all investment portfolios are based on $100+ per barrel of oil. Its collapse means less future pensions, higher government shortfalls, which translates into higher future taxes. It already has caused stock markets to plunge and unemployment to soar very quickly, which again means more pressure on Federal and Provincial finances, squeezing the poor even more.

And then there is Europe

Politicians are queer animals. Actually they are worse than that. Animals have the common sense to make provisions for hard times, or in the winter go to areas where food is more abundant. Bears hibernate. So do frogs and snakes. If we were smart, we would make provisions for what is called ‘the rainy day’, when life is less abundant. Politicians are also a cowardly bunch. The only time they speak the truth is when they inadvertently misspeak. Instead of governing, which means leading the way, they follow the lowest common denominator of public opinion, which usually represents yesterday’s outdated desires. We are today in a different world, where we all thrive or fall together, thanks to the connectedness that the computer has made possible. The computer and its now indispensable offspring, the Internet, is so vulnerable that every day we live by the grace of God. The word says it all: Inter-Net, which means it connects everything with everybody. Yet it is so insecure that it poses the same threat or worse than a nuclear war which gave us the acronym MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction.

Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise. It is evolving at an alarming rate, and the Internet and its multiple offspring, called Apps, are coming to a dwelling near you, even in your very room. You will see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You will feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Is that what the Bible calls: 666? Now with turmoil everywhere all this surveying will only accelerate.

Back to Europe, the so-called Old World, with its beautiful churches, castles, museums, glorious music. It had a dream: no more wars, of which the 20^th century saw two utterly devastating examples. It had magnificent ideas of universal health care, worry-free senior years, liberal unemployment benefits: everything to make life as close to perfect as humanly possible. It all cost money, of course, but infinite growth would be with us forever. It reminds me of Africa. We – my wife and I – were there when our youngest son worked there for 2 years. One of the Africans told me that it is custom on that continent to share good fortune with all the relatives, reason why nobody ever got rich. Europe had the same idea with the Euro, counting on all nations to be honest. Greece cheated, and for a while, as long as growth was there, matters ran smooth. Now the entire Euro concept is threatened, with fatal consequences for the global monetary system. The modern world has been built on the concept of growth, a fatal misconception. Now that growth has stalled, we have no plan B. Actually it is worse than that. Because the past 10, 20 or even 40 years have not actually delivered any growth, once you look beyond the propaganda. All we did was accumulate more debt.

In a nutshell, the past four decades have given us added layers of gadgets at the price of unaffordable education and ever more expensive health care.  We have no idea what to do without growth. There is no economics class that teaches “How to live in a No-Growth Society”, and we don’t have the brains to come up with an answer. Yet, a No-Growth world is on the way, for the simple reason that perpetual growth is impossible. It’s on the way, basically it is here already, and that means that we will see unimaginable damage, mayhem and bloodshed. The world-wide mayhem, with youth unemployment escalating, are just the initial rumblings. Fanatic religious expressions is another.

A Radical Change is needed.

A radical change is needed. No more growth, because growth kills. And what is it we want to grow into? Why incessant growth? Like Cancer? Once we have food, clothing and shelter, what else do we need? Will a bigger TV set make us happier? Or a larger house? Why more growth, when we know that it means more pollution, faster Climate Change?  I’ve never seen that properly defined. Isn’t it true that if we don’t know the answer to that question, we are by definition blindly chasing a mirage? If we don’t know where we’re going, or why we’re going there, why go at all? It all boils down to us.

We can’t be part of the solution if our lifestyle is part of the problem. Our present situation where we have 24/7/365 an equivalent of 200 slaves at our disposal, can no longer be maintained:  it really is as simple as that.

That is the main reason of the increasing turmoil we encounter everywhere and in everything. It’s not only terrorism, it’s not only the drop in oil prices, it’s not only the weirding of the weather, it’s not the erratic job market: it’s simply the end of a state that is not sustainable.

The BBC and also the CBC had an interview with a scientist from London of which the key message was that keeping global temperature rise within 2C means leaving in the ground 80% of known coal reserves, 50% of gas and 30% of oil. The University College London authors invited investors to ponder whether $670bn, the amount they say was spent last year on seeking and developing fossil fuels, was a wise use of money if we can’t burn all the fuel we’ve already found.

How then shall we live?

The Pope does not pass the buck. I can see him assassinated because of his stance on Climate Change. Headlines warn us. He’s throwing down the gauntlet. Forget “Prince of Peace.” It’s 2015. Pope Francis is igniting WWIII. He knows capitalism is already at war everywhere, destroying the planet’s environment. So he is taking command, launching a counter-offensive, demanding action, leading his army of 1.2 billion worldwide, inspiring environmental activists everywhere.

This is Christianity versus the World. It’s 2015 and Pope Francis launched a full-on, major assault on capitalism, like D-Day, a major battle, a counter-attack promising to dominate global headlines for the year, as opponents scramble, regrouping to repel his war on climate-denying capitalists.

The thunder is already roaring: “Pope Francis declares war on climate deniers” reads a New Republic headline. And the Guardian headline throws jet fuel on the flames: “Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and U.S. churches.”

Anger? No, he’s provoking, infuriating, enraging! Because this “radical, anti-capitalist revolutionary’ Pope is a huge threat to everything capitalists stand for, a clear and present danger to the ideology driven Big Oil, Koch Bros, conservative billionaires, and all GOP senators and governors already on record as climate-science deniers, opposed to all taxes and regulation of their profits and toxic carbon emissions.

The Pope has become Public Enemy Number One and the Billionaire benefactors of Infinite Growth and Pipeline promoters and Tar Sand exploiters, will try to thwart his appearance on the United Nations, perhaps even try to sabotage his plane or cause some other seeming accident. When I agitate against environmental destruction, so what? I am a nobody. When the Head of the Vatican State, the Prince of the church, the Holy Father, thunders from the world podium that Global Warming is SIN, then this is a different story.

TIME magazine in 2014 chose the Ebola Fighters as the People of the Year. So early in the New Year, the 2015 Person of the Year has already made his debut. No other person in the more than 11 months to go will top what Pope Francis has already accomplished.

Of course for the majority of the people nothing will change. If Jesus Himself would come down from heaven and say the same thing, nothing would change either, because we can’t change anymore. That is the sorry state we are in.

THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE MANY UNKNOWNS

2015: what is in store?

January 4 2015

This is my first column of the New Year. May it be a healthy year for you all, a year that, without doubt, will bring us closer to the Grand Denouement, the Day when all will be revealed, which is the true meaning of the word Apocalypse.

In 2015 expect the worst, hope for the best, and be surprised. I was one year old when, in October 1929, the Great Depression started. For some reason – and I cannot pinpoint why –somehow the year 2015 reminds me of 1929, and the beginning of something for which no word has yet been invented, which perhaps indicates a condition infinitely worse than what some have called “The Ten Lost Years” referring to 1929-39, when only the unleashing of World War II ended that decade of economic malaise.

In this year I hope to continue writing weekly comments on current events from my perch in Tweed, Ontario Canada, where my wife and I live on 50 acres- 20 hectares – of mostly rock and trees. There, in 1975 I constructed a 2 storey dwelling, passive solar, well insulated, built into a small hill.

Over the forty years I developed a 2000 square feet – about 200 sq. m. – vegetable garden, and planted a few apple trees. I also have a sugar bush where I tap maple trees in the late winter- early spring, boiling down 35 liters of sap to obtain one liter of syrup, a labor intensive job, but the results are sweet. In a good year I get about 8 liters.

We live about 5 km – 3 miles – from the village where we shop for stuff we can’t grow or make ourselves. We heat with wood, and have a few solar panels, but are still connected to the grid.

I will continue to insert into my columns the odd bible text where it suits the message. I am a great believer in what I call ‘a biblical perspective’. I don’t know any other news source that ‘religiously’ does this on a weekly basis.

By the way, I am becoming a great admirer of Pope Francis, who is one person who does honor to Christianity. Laudate Dominum, Praise the Lord. Often Christianity separates grace from nature, in that sense it resembles the secular press which sees most news from an a- religious perspective, and thus misses the real story. The real story is that we are all part of God’s plan with the world, a plan that rushes all the way from Adam to that overwhelming finish when the reign of the Antichrist will be destroyed by the coming again of the Son of Man. All the news fits into that framework: the year 2015 will develop the way God wants it to go, even by allowing Satan to continue to create havoc for a while, which really means that we will speed to the End faster than ever.

It also will be a year where we will continue to read much misinformation in the newspapers and do the same on TV, because it is in the interest of the Corporate World to feed us with erroneous messages, all meant to prolong as much as possible the fake economy in which we all participate whether we like it or not, a state of affairs that is based on the fallacy of perpetual Economic Growth, and on the concept that we can pump poisonous gases into the air we breathe without fatal consequences.

I, as a teenager, lived through the war 1940-45 in German-occupied The Netherlands. Then too newspapers were printed and radio broadcasts were aired, but they all were totally censored to reflect the aims of the Nazi regime. For real news we, on peril of imprisoning, listened to the BBC. These broadcasts from London were heavily interfered with so that through all the static it was sometimes impossible to listen to the Dutch version coming from Lomdon. Yet they were a tonic to us. The sign-off slogan every day was:

Hoe moeilijk de dag, how zwaar ook de tijding, we zijn weer een dag dichter bij de bevrijding, which means

However difficult the day, however perilous the situation,

we are again a day closer to the liberation.

That liberation came on April 10 1945, exactly one month short of 5 years, as the Netherlands was invaded on May 10 1940.

The occupation bred the underground press. Many risked their lives in highly courageous ways to get news out to people, putting out newspapers, or mostly simple sheets so there would be a version of events out there that was real, and not just what the Germans wanted us to believe. The courage of these people is hard to gauge for us today, and I’m convinced there’s no way to say who amongst us today would show that kind of bravery if we were put to the test; I certainly wouldn’t be sure about myself.

There is something like that going on today. During the war all the so-called legitimate news was totally slanted to favor the Germans and their vassals, of which there were a few also among the Dutch people. Before the war the NSB, the political party favoring Germany, pulled something like 4 percent of the voters, a not inconsiderable number. Today the opposite is true: a vast majority of people favor the capitalistic structure, even the Socialists. A very tiny portion – perhaps less than 1 percent – tries to live more organically. No wonder the Press is 100 percent in the power of the Corporate World. These days, the media can make people believe just about anything, and they have the added benefit that they can pose as friends of the people, not the enemy.

In my own little way I will try to do what the ‘illegal’ press did more than 70 years ago in occupied Europe.

Let me begin to say that we have become very vulnerable. We increasingly, I should say, we totally, as a society depend on the Internet to do business. You and I can live without it, if we so desire. I know of very people who are not ‘wired’ but they are a tiny minority. But society at large cannot.

The network has become the nervous system of the planet. This is why it now makes no more sense to argue about whether the internet is good or bad than to debate whether oxygen or water are desirable. We’ve got it and we’re stuck with it. While offline crime has decreased dramatically – car-related theft has reduced by 79% since 1995 and burglary by 67%, for example – serious crime has now moved online, where its scale is staggering, even if the official statistics do not count it. I know because a few times my credit cards were compromised and also my line of credit affected – both totally compensated by the bank.

The same goes for industrial espionage (at which the Chinese are currently the world champions) and counter-espionage and counter-terrorism. Cyber-warfare is already in full swing, the latest being waged between North Korea and the USA.  Beware: the internet is dangerous, untrustworthy and far from being private. E-mail never disappears, can easily be checked, and can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. Actually if the entire total www computer network were to cease to function, it would mean the collapse of society, not at all a remote possibility,

This time it is different

2015 might be much worse than 1929 when there were a mere 2 billion people on the earth, Climate Change an unheard-of phenomenon, and almost all people had a rural connection, assuring a guaranteed food supply. When computers fail, in three days we all starve to death.

It’s not the first time that I have been wrong. For as long as I can remember I have warned people to prepare for the day when we run out of oil when the demand for oil exceeds its supply, which would result in economic stagnation. Well, I was wrong, and so were most investors, oil companies, and banks. They all followed the same reasoning and acted in the sure conviction that the oil price would forever range in the $100 per barrel. On that assumption companies invested billions in Arctic oil exploration, in deep sea and fracking adventures, in oil-sand expansion, not realizing that all these ventures would require billions of dollars and a lot of extra oil, as all the easy stuff had already been exploited, the so-called low-hanging fruit.

There is only so much that people can afford. A friend of mine, working for a large company complained to me that he hasn’t had a raise in 10 years. His lament is not an isolated one. That also means that his spending power has decreased, as the cost of living in that decade has increased by at least 25 percent. In order to enjoy the same standard of living, people have borrowed, so debt has skyrocketed. With income down, spending too is down, and the demand for oil has decreased while the supply has skyrocketed. So we see the law of economics still work: more supply, less demand, means lower prices.

Lower prices for oil mean trouble.

When prices for oil are low no one invests in exploration or drilling or production, or probably even maintenance for years. Chances are that when an economic recovery happens, perhaps a year or two down the line, with oil suddenly in demand, but supply lagging, Peak Oil may then become a reality. Whatever happens, life is going to change.

It looks very much that the global economy is unraveling, that unemployment, underemployment, and fear will combine to reduce consumption. We are in for deflation just like the 1930s, but now a world-wide event.

When – and it looks much more a ‘when’ than an ‘if’ – the world economy deflates, fixed asset values will decline. Real estate is especially vulnerable. Canada has seen the highest house prices ever. Where in the USA real estate values are, generally still well below their peak, in Canada they have steadily risen. Now stagnant incomes, increasing unemployment, and credit card debt guarantee consumers will prioritize spending decisions based on urgent need: food, fuel, and then rent (or mortgage payments).  This last Christmas binge could be the last.  In periods of declining economic activity, rental property owners (houses, apartment buildings, supermarkets and so on) face potential bankruptcy because of higher vacancy rates.  It will also become increasingly difficult for rents to keep up with maintenance costs.

One key indicator of deflation that seems to be even more worrisome to investors, however, is global commodity prices and what commodity price weakness suggests for demand. Copper fell over 12% in 2014, largely due to slumping demand in China and other industrial economies. Natural gas prices have fallen more than 12% this year. And oil prices have fallen by over 40% due to a glut of new supply and weak demand growth in many developing economies. The International Energy Agency has cut its estimates for demand for crude five times in the past six months, The Wall Street Journal reports.

2015: what is in store?

Just as last year, don’t expect a raise. If indeed, deflation appears, that in itself means a raise, as goods are cheaper. We see it already in the fuel situation, which, although it has a positive angle, will lead to future problems. Cheaper oil will lead to more GHG – Green House Gases – and more unpredictable weather, more insurance claims, higher premiums, and, eventually, higher food costs.

Don’t for a minute believe that we, as a society, will do anything to reduce the effects of Climate Change. However desirable it may be to protect the Earth from the dire consequences of a runaway climate the chances that the world will agree to cut its emissions quickly enough to stay below the 2C threshold are somewhere between zip, zilch and zero.

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

December 21 2014.

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” (Jeremiah 8:20)

Another year is almost behind us: Time to tally the toll for 2014, this time looking at movies and books. Are they harbingers of what is to come?

It has become plain that nothing has improved in the past year. On the contrary. What has become increasingly obvious is that the entire world is racing toward its end, and people, especially those in the entertainment industry, are started to realize this and warning people to prepare. It reminds me of another Bible passage at the start of the Mark Gospel where John the Baptizer calls himself: “A voice crying in the Wilderness, preparing the Way of the Lord.” I feel a kinship with that solitary figure.

What is it that is evident to Hollywood and the literary scene but fails to register with business and politics? Has Hollywood, the film industry, whose wicked people bring us nothing else but violence and murder and fornication, a message for us that by and large churches fail to bring? Yes, when it comes to the steady unraveling of essential earth systems — ocean health collapsing, biodiversity plummeting and, of course, the fraying of the atmosphere’s stability — much of the political establishment continues to ignore this, but Hollywood capitalizes on these disasters. Politicians find no votes in doom and gloom. False optimism is the politicians’ mantra. How wrong they are, but then looking ahead and ‘govern’ has never been the politicians’ strong point.

Filmmakers are sending out an unambiguous S O S: We’re doomed. We are doomed, but….. we can fix the problem somehow. For some people that is, and actually, they are right for the wrong reason. It reminds me of a saying of Jesus when he said (Matthew 3:9) that God could raise children of Abraham out of stones, so he certainly he can use films by godless people to proclaim the truth, or a version thereof. End-of-the-world scenarios appear so regularly in books and films now that they have their own mini-genre — cli-fi: climate – fiction. By and large cli-fi films have gotten grimmer. Have I seen any of these? No, except for AVATAR I haven’t seen a movie in years, but I always read the reviews because movies often signal the future.

One example is the writer-director Christopher Nolan’s epic sci-fi adventure, “Interstellar.” With Earth on the brink of collapse as crops wither and oxygen in the atmosphere dwindles, a team of astronauts race to distant galaxies in search of a new planet for the human race. Earth’s last survivors won’t starve, we are told. Lack of oxygen will do them in. Still, “It’s a perfect planet,” one of the astronauts says in “Interstellar,” referring to spaceship Earth. “We’re not going to find another one like it.”

In this day of global warming – the year 2014 will go down as the warmest ever – cli-fi made an early splash with “Waterworld.” There Kevin Costner in 1995 had already a vision of a future where the polar icecaps have melted and Earth is almost entirely submerged. Another example is “The Day After Tomorrow,” where also a climate disaster is unfolding. While that movie had its fair share of Hollywood hollowness (there was a wolf pack chase through Midtown Manhattan), the film at least made an attempt to detail the basic science of man-made climate change. The protagonist, Dennis Quaid, was a climatologist.

I also read about “Elysium,” in which Matt Damon fights to get off a dusty, overcrowded Earth and makes it to an Arcadian space station. Pixar’s “Wall-E” had a similar scenario, apparently. In that computer-animated satire, Earth is toast, and what’s left of humanity spends its days slurping supersize drinks and splurge-shopping on a blimp-like spaceship. In “Avatar,” – the movie I did see – the Marines are on the planet Pandora, because we’ve already strip-mined Earth.

According to another review I read, perhaps the best of this bunch is “Snowpiercer,” the Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s fable about social injustice and environmental hubris. Released earlier this year, “Snowpiercer” imagines that civilization — in a botched attempt to reverse the effects of global warming via atmospheric geoengineering — has turned Earth into something like the ice world of Hoth from “Star Wars.” I have no clue who or what Hoth is, but it must feature in Star Wars somehow. There the survivors are stuck on a train that rattles in an endless circle around the planet. The folks in first class get spa treatments and dance parties, while the proletariat in the caboose has to choke down protein bars made of ground-up bugs.

Conservative reviewers like to grumble that such films just spread liberal propaganda. After all, so says ultra-conservative Senator Inhofe, Climate Change is a hoax: perpetrators are like communists such as Obama. But ecological meltdown makes for a reliable sci-fi setting for the same reason Wall Street tycoons are convenient villains — to the average moviegoer, it’s believable.

Let’s face it: serious environmental dislocations are all but inevitable. Many of them are underway. The last line reminds me of placards I have seen at climate marches: “There Is No Planet B.”

Books also have this “Armageddon” theme, including Margaret Atwood’s dark MaddAddam trilogy, Nathaniel Rich’s “Odds Against Tomorrow” and Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which closes with New Yorkers flocking to the top of a giant sea wall, one of the few spots in the city where you can still glimpse a proper sunset.

Here’s what I read in the New York Times a while ago:

“Emily St. John Mandel doesn’t seem like the paranoid type. Cheerful and preternaturally poised, she spends her free time tending to the flower beds in her rooftop garden in Brooklyn and working on her rudimentary French.

“But last fall, she started fretting about the end of civilization — specifically, whether publishers were growing tired of the dystopian trope. She was shopping around her new novel, “Station Eleven,” which is set in the near future, after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. Ms. Mandel, who got her start writing crime fiction, worried that the post-apocalyptic wave had peaked.

“When I started writing, there were a few literary post-apocalyptic novels, but not quite the incredible glut that there is now,” Ms. Mandel said in an interview on her terrace. “I was afraid the market might be saturated.”

It wasn’t. A three-day bidding war broke out among a half-dozen publishers. The novel sold to Alfred A. Knopf, which paid a mid-six-figure advance, far more than Ms. Mandel had made on her previous three novels combined. She now feels reassured — if not about the future of the planet, then at least about the shelf life of dystopian fiction.

“It’s a somewhat anxious time, and post-apocalyptic fiction is a way to channel our anxieties,” she said.

Station Eleven,” is part of a cluster of post-apocalyptic novels landing this fall that seem steeped in the anxieties of our era: pandemics, environmental catastrophes, energy shortages, civil unrest. These works blur the line between literary and genre fiction and seem positioned to capture both science-fiction readers and fans of more experimental fare.”

Michel Faber’s “The Book of Strange New Things” unfolds on a distant planet as a Christian missionary seeks to convert its inhabitants, while his pregnant wife, left back on Earth, is shaken by a series of global disasters: extreme weather, famine, widespread power failures.

Howard Jacobson, a Man Booker Prize laureate, surprised critics and readers recently when he abandoned his usual comic motifs and turned out “J,” a dark novel about a broken futuristic society in which everyone has suppressed the memory of a horrific historical catastrophe.

In David Mitchell’s new novel, “The Bone Clocks,” the narrative stretches to the year 2043, as dwindling fossil fuel supplies, shortages of food and medicine and global warming cause governments to collapse.

“It’s in the air, isn’t it?” Mr. Mitchell said of the literary preoccupation with the end of the world. “In a way, how can you be a sane and compassionate human being and not be increasingly alarmed by what’s happening to the planet, when it’s potentially civilization-ending?”

While some literary critics have started to grumble about post-apocalyptic-fiction fatigue, publishers, agents and authors are betting that readers’ appetite for cataclysm is nowhere near sated. Dystopian series like “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” have sold tens of millions of copies and seem to occupy a permanent place on young adult best-seller lists, while also attracting swarms of adult readers.

And the end-of-the-world scenarios continue to multiply. Edan Lepucki’s recent breakout debut novel, “California,” takes place in the near future, as a young couple flee Los Angeles for the California wilderness to escape food shortages and rising violence as society collapses. Laura van den Berg’s “Find Me,” due out in February, centers on a lonely grocery store clerk who struggles in the aftermath of a deadly mass contagion.

Humanity is even worse off in Benjamin Percy’s forthcoming novel, “The Dead Lands,” a retelling of the Lewis and Clark story set in a futuristic America that’s been destroyed by a super-flu and nuclear fallout.

End of my survey of recent ‘end of the world’ movies and books. Do these writers sense something?

Time to face reality

So with the Gospel of Hollywood out there, and lots of books with an apocalyptic theme, what else is going on?

The oil price collapse, the Russian ruble rout, the stock market extreme volatility all signal one message: The days of plenty are over, the high-energy phase of human life is coming to a close, and we have not yet learned all that we need to know — about ourselves or the world — to adapt to a new era. We better start learning fast, not really a human trait, because our greatest handicap is our politicians and the system in which they operate, predicated on Economic Growth. Any normal person – and fortunately there still are a few left  – who is only faintly aware of what’s happening out there, given the intensifying negative effects of our activity on the water, soil and climate of the planet, must come to the unpleasant conclusion that an ongoing large-scale human presence on the planet is impossible. Put bluntly: what we have conceived as being “the good life” is inconsistent with Life: it has become a way of Death. Sorry to offend you. Pussyfooting the issue is no longer proper.

I take the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” seriously. I guess it helped that I grew up during the Depression and War-time Holland. Expect those conditions to re-appear, and worse. What kept us going then was: After the War matters will improve. Now there is not such an outcome.

Time to face reality. And the reality is that there is more to the new life to come than just being frugal and living simply. It takes an entirely new mindset, where agitating against capitalism’s logic of endless growth and the mindless consumption that it generates is not enough. The truth is that our society today is based on a collective denial of limits, a delusion made possible temporarily by the reigning fundamentalist faith of our day, technological fundamentalism — the belief that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology can solve any problem, including the problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology. Frankly there is no evidence that any society is ready to engage in the necessary discussions or consider the necessary changes, least of all we in North America.

I have a dear friend who told me that he, at times, suffers from physical and emotional pain because of the State of the Earth. To him apply the words of Jeremiah: “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me.” (Jeremiah 8:18)

We pray in The Lord’s Prayer: “Your Kingdom Come”, without often realizing that we are asking God to speed up this earth’s demise – something which we are very good at – and bring on The New Creation. It takes more than a song and a prayer to become ready for this. It is THE major challenge that faces us bar none. It starts with grief and ends with confession.

Till next week, the week after Christmas and before New Year.