Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

IS PREACHING THE PROPER APPROACH TO PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL?

June 2014

Earlier Experiences

While biking – which I do a number of times each week, always between where I live in the country and the village where I shop, a distance of 11.2 km back and forth – I calculated that in my life-time I have gone to church and heard a sermon at least 5000 times. I started going there when I was as young as 5 years old.. Then attending worship services on Sundays was the family routine, always twice, followed by Sunday School. That meant sitting still some 90-105 minutes, standing up when ‘the long prayer’ was being held, that one alone often taking 10-15 minutes, about the duration of an average sermon today. And Sunday School yet to come!

Standing up in church?

I now think that that custom of some men- never women – to stand up during prayer was probably to fight any inclination to fall asleep. I remember my paternal grandfather doing the same even during the sermon to fight the urge to take a snooze, accustomed as he was to outdoor life because a stifling hot church produced mind-numbing conditions.

I also remember how, in the absence of a minister, an elder would read a sermon, prepared by a minister of course. That same grandfather refused to use the pulpit for that purpose: to him that was a holy place reserved for the holy man, appointed by God to be the proclaimer of the Good News, and he was not worthy to occupy that elevated position.

It must be me, but of the 5000 plus sermons uttered in my presence during my long life, I can only recall two, both at funeral services, one by Dr. Paul Schrotenboer, who preached on Psalm 116: 15: “The Lord takes pleasure in the death of his saints”, and one not too long ago by my friend Stephen Dunkin, also at a funeral. He, so far, has been the only preacher mentioning the New Creation as the destination of the saints. It could quite well be that I have subconsciously been influenced by pulpit talk. I do remember a few sermon-related incidents, one involving my future father-in-law- who died when both my future wife and I were 8 years old- pounding the pulpit to emphasize a point. The other instance was a merciful short service when our then minister, K. G. van Smeeden, had received some negative feedback from his church council and in retaliation, highly inflamed, quickly read through his prepared text and we were out of the church within an hour to our great delight. Those were the days when the ministers saw themselves a bit better than most, a notion that, I think, is still out there.

New wine: new containers

On that same bike ride one of Jesus’ sayings came to mind: you don’t put new wine in old wine bags, because that only leads to trouble. Any person with a bit of insight into the times we live in, realizes that we face different circumstances, of which the church itself is a shining – or better a terrible – example.

That the church is in trouble is no secret. Our church building was erected in 1891, almost 125 years ago. It seats at least 250 people. Today the audience often is no more than 25, a tenth of the capacity, the average age well in excess of 70 years of age. The people, my wife and I included, go to church faithfully, partly to express our loyalty to the people we love.

In an age where communication is mostly graphic, where the attention span has become shorter and shorter, the traditional church communication, by means of the spoken word, is sorely outdated. Jesus’ reminder that new wine belongs in new containers, is not followed. The church, almost without exception, has stubbornly stuck to the old model of preaching. The retention rate of speeches – and that is what sermons are – is less than 10 percent if it penetrates at all. When our congregation was established there were no other distractions, no radio, no television, let alone the host of mind-numbing electronic devices we have today.

Today our church- and all churches – uses the same format to tell people about the gospel as was done 125 years ago, when the church was full, the wine was new and so were the containers. Now the containers are old and whatever Good News is out there, is leaking away because the method of delivery no longer functions. Everywhere churches are grasping at straws to find new ways.

Are there new ways?

When Jesus spoke, as he did in the Sermon on the Mount, he sat down amidst his eager listeners, all stretched out around him while he spoke. Why did Jesus sit on the ground? It seems to me that he derived strength from the soil, totally aware that, fully human he was and we are, the soil was the material out of which we all are formed, something both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Johan H. Bavinck constantly emphasize. Communication is more than just uttering words. By standing above the crowd, away from the earth, the elevated position suggests that the message has nothing to do with the earth. Heaven comes to mind. Also, after hundreds of years of sermons, it is almost impossible to hear something new. The Bible’s basic message is that God created, we uncreated, and Jesus has made all things new.

There’s also something else. In many denominations a minister is called Father. The head of the R.C. Church is even called Holy Father. When the new pope is elected the Latin words are: Habemus Papam: we have a new daddy, suggesting exactly what it is “paternalism”, which literally means ‘letting father call the tune while the children have no voice and the women are not even allowed to think for themselves.’ That stratagem has led to constant immaturity, and is one of the basic causes of the church’s stagnation. Having a person address the laity without a chance for discourse, without an opportunity for discussion, is entirely out of tune with the spirit of the 21^st Century.

Jesus sat down, fully conscious of the mood of the people, feeling their reaction as shifting body weights or strained attention vibrated through the common ground. By sitting among them he could sense the bated breath, but also the waning of interest. I have a picture book of Dietrich Bonhoeffer where he too is seated on the grass while conversing with others.

There is much more to communication than mere words. Ministers, by and large, are not trained in the full spectrum of conveying meaning: it also involves voice projection, a logical structure of the message, enunciation, the inclusion of emotions in the presentation and an intimate involvement of one’s own feelings.

Most people have become aware that the way we live leads to death. We constantly violate the laws of creation, which means we sin against God in the way we live. We also sin when we violate the laws of communication. Even though a person may have the correct academic qualifications and has been institutionally properly installed, this means little or nothing when he or she is not schooled in the total range of communication. Sermons usually lack creational input: today in whatever we do we have to take God’s cosmos into account because God’s Word is more than the Bible. God’s creation is the Primary Word: the written Word is needed to understand the Primary Word. Failure to integrate the two Words is a form of “the shifting baseline syndrome.” Coined by the biologist Daniel Pauly, it described our relationship to ecosystems, which is utterly relevant to theology as well: we can’t have one Word – creation -without the other Word – the Scriptures. To charge ahead without doing justice to the totality of the Word is the main reason why, by confining preaching to one dimension, we have imperiled the entire ecclesiastical system. That’s why the church is suffering, retaining mostly only those who are loyal to the institution through friend- or family ties or simply through custom and superstition.

Seek First the Kingdom

Another reason why preaching is a passé experience is that it promotes individualism. The church has the wrong approach when the goal of the church is nothing else but personal salvation, with heaven as the eternal destination. It seldom mentions the pursuit of the kingdom, the dominant feature in the Scriptures.  “Seek first the Kingdom,” is Jesus’ most emphatic exhortation.

Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer emphasize the corporate aspect to salvation. J. H. Bavinck writes:

“The central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering: its entire focus is aimed at the unique, powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.

It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over­arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the King­dom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

So far this quote from Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision.

A new approach to worship: preparing for the New Creation!

So how then should worship services be fashioned? Yes, there is a place for sermons, but only by those who have mastered the necessary art of combining the both Words and are capable of using the entire range of communication to implement that: speeches are not dead. If a minister lacks these integrated gifts then sermonizing should stop, with the assembly concentrating on singing, prayer, the Lord’s Supper and Bible reading, all done with everybody doing a part, however imperfectly. The audience should then split up into smaller groups where a bible passage is studied, with the aid of some guidelines distributed in advance, always relating them to today’s circumstances: theology has no place in church services.

Some weeks ago I injured a muscle in my shoulder and right away went to see a physiotherapist who gave me instructions and helped me to heal myself. The church plays a similar role: it must help us, as communities, to live in God’s creation in preparation for the Kingdom to come, especially now in an age of universal turmoil.

Numbers are not important. Where there is a pool of knowledgeable people a paid preaching position is probably not necessary. Bonhoeffer recommends that the church leader has a fulltime job in the real world. The money saved from paying a stipend can be better used elsewhere. Also with economic prospects from poor to disastrous, this would be the only way for a church community to survive financially.

Since energy is highly polluting, and church buildings – especially the ancient ones – are notorious for being energy hogs and all require automobiles to reach, gathering in nearby homes must be considered. Also when church people are re-settling, they must contemplate buying or renting in close proximity to like-minded people, keeping in mind that future economic development will require much more sharing in preparation for the End to come.

The ultimate solution is to form convents for families. When we visited our youngest son who served in Africa, we discovered that such communities are standard practise there: people are clustered around the place of work, a hospital for instance, complete with school, church, market and stores. Those churches will survive which are composed of self-sufficient communities, with as principal aim to prepare the people for The Kingdom to Come.

Bavinck has stated: “The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the King­dom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

If we want to be part of the kingdom, then we have the glorious task to make that ideal our own and, even though our entire society conspires to prevent that all- inclusive aspiration, we still have to mentally, spiritually, if possible physically, embrace that ideal. The word is E.Q is the opposite of Q.E. which is the current monetary scheme – Quantitative Easing. Q. E. propagates to tell us to enjoy life today and pay tomorrow. EQ, on the other hand, measures a person’s Emotional Intelligence. It sees through the phoniness of today’s economic state and works for a better world. Thanks to Q. E. every child born in America has a $176,833 debt sticker on its head. E.Q. sees beyond today, embraces the hardships facing us now and looks forward to the Kingdom and speeds its coming. That’s what Jesus wants us to do, mindful of his words: “my burden is light and my yoke is easy.”

More on this in a following blog.

WHERE ARE WE?

Conclusion

Are we in the last days?

Of course we are in the last days. The entire New Testament has been written in the expectation of Christ’s return. In Acts 2, when the church had its modern beginning in Jerusalem, we read that people sold all their possessions and shared what they had, in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. Since then there have been a lot of false alarms. Is this one of them? Perhaps.
All informed Bible readers know that the day and the hour of Christ’s coming again is unknown. That restriction means very little. I compare it to the birth of a child. There we know the approximate date, but not the ‘day or the hour.’ We know that after a 9 months period more or less, a new life will emerge but even when labour pains start the actual time of birth cannot be exactly established. That’s why we cannot say that on July 10 2014 at 8.22 p.m. we will see Christ’s glorious re-entry. The Bible is quite emphatic on this point: the Lord repeats it twice in Matthew 24 that not even the angels or the Son of Man himself know the exact date and time. That makes eminent sense to me because nobody can accurately pinpoint the tipping point. Still, the Lord tells us to keep watch, because there will be definite indications. That’s why Jesus used the example of the fig tree and how it, at a certain time, will change in appearance, signaling summer. So too we always have to look around us and see what sort of signs point to the expiry date of the world’s time clock, when the birth of the New Creation comes and eternity enters. Romans 8: 22 explicitly mentions labour pains: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of child birth.” These pains, it seems to me, are now in its final phase.

There are definite signs.

There are major indicators.
One is Climate Change, the topic of a study commissioned by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The latest report written by hundreds of reliable scientists concluded that, unless the world acts now, Climate Change is irreversible, making our planet inhabitable. Climate Change also affects everything including the world’s waters. There are now 530 dead zones globally, and another 228 showing signs of stress. Toxic blooms are replacing the fish-depleted areas with disastrous effects on the remaining species. With much of the big fish and marine mammals having vanished, with birds and the mussels and sea cucumbers choking on plastic, the only persistent survivors are the jellyfish. Like rats and cockroaches jellyfish kill all the predators. Even when they die they rot and help create toxic bacteria.

Another sign, published just this past week involves the West Antarctica, where the immense ice sheet is in a permanent melting phase, causing sea-levels to rise so that many of the world’s coastal cities will eventually have to be abandoned.  All this is happening much faster than predicted earlier. So far everything predicted on Climate Change has proceeded at an unprecedented accelerated pace. Welcome to a new worrying water world.

And on land?

Weather change will cause:
1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production;
2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts
3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess, while the world’s population is still rapidly expanding, all of which is causing considerable stress.

Already there is a lot of stress and unrest everywhere. Where do you think the sudden world-wide turmoil has its roots? Humans fight when they outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment. Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid. From hunter/gatherers through agricultural tribes, chiefdoms, and early complex societies, 25% of a population’s adult males die when war breaks out….
As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance. Imagine eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply.

What is really at stake here is what J. H. Bavinck describes in his forthcoming book Between Beginning and End: a radical Kingdom vision. Here is a quote:

It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majes­tic, harmonious unity of creation as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, com­prises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The King­dom includes the sea and the land, the moun­tains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole.

The dangers Bavinck outlined have been the result of human-induced actions, due to the burning of fossil fuels. The increase of carbon-dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is something new under the sun, by now all too well documented.

According to a Waterloo professor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, the future looks bleak. He writes: “what we have experienced (are) so far only the earliest stages, just the leading edge, of the planet’s environmental crisis. Far, far greater environmental challenges are still to come.”
Here are some statistics.
During the past century, our population has quadrupled, but our energy use has increased 20 times, on an average. In countries like the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, the production of goods and services today requires, for each person, over 80 metric tons of natural resources annually. We consumers don’t notice that producing food causes about 15 metric tons of soil erosion for each North American resident each year. Building roads and other infrastructure need the moving of a further 14 tons of rocks and soil for each person on this continent. If present trends continue, by 2050 the total quantity of energy, resources and waste moving through the world’s economy each year will have nearly tripled, and Planet Earth, the only one we have, will have to withstand nearly three times today’s dangerous annual impact.
Here’s another example of our energy extravagance. Harriet Friedman, a University of Toronto professor specializing in analysis of food systems, writes: “more than half the world’s agricultural land suffers moderate to extreme soil degradation. Climate change will certainly make yields unpredictable in the future, if not already.”
Our efforts to change the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept indicating the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.” All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants and solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger. When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent.
In our age of rapid population growth this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following, quoted from “The Ingenuity Gap” by Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon.
“We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We have used more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry as much as eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities – especially the construction of cities, industries and aquaculture pens – have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation.”

It is now estimated that we use almost 50 percent of the Earth Primary Productivity, almost half of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet: we, the 7 billion plus, have simply stolen the food, the rich, a lot more than others.
It’s the Oil we use that now makes up the difference. Oil is Primary Productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. However of that trust fund we not only have used the interest but the capital as well, to the point where we now must envision, “The End of Oil,” with drastic consequences for the human race. Fracking will only delay the End of Oil by a few years.
Consider the following. In 1960 expansion of the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. In spite of that, grain yields tripled. Ever since we ran out of land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by about ten calories of oil. That figure does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to the store, or the fuel used by us driving to the store. Writes Dr. Harriet Friedman, “One kilogram of asparagus sent from Chile to New York takes 73 kg of fuel energy and contributes 4.7 kg of carbon dioxide to global warming…The food miles average of the supermarket items was more than 5,000 times greater than the same items in the farmer’s market.” Compare this to 1940 when the average farm produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used.
Basically this means that the End of Oil means also The End of Food. Not only poses Climate Change almost insurmountable problems, when combined with “The End of Oil,” potential catastrophes are so big that they remind me of the seven angels in Revelation 8.

Oil is a finite fuel

When wood ran out, some 400 years ago, coal came on line. When coal proved to be too polluting, oil and natural gas were available. Now, what do we do? Rely mainly on Natural gas of which the world still has plenty, but all in very remote locations, such as Siberia or Australia? It will take trillions of dollars to feed the North American market with adequate supply, assuming there is plenty of it left.
Once we pass the oil production peak, a return to a medieval style of existence looks a frightening possibility. It will mean a greatly reduced human population. Thanks to oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population tripled from 2 billion to more than 7 billion. As late as 1945 my maternal grandfather had no electricity on his small farm. He managed with one horse and one help. Then people were mentally and physically equipped in coping with little. These skills we have lost. Also much of the earth has been spoiled, unfit for intensive, organic, agriculture. The End of Oil may mean a reduction in the world’s population to perhaps 1 billion. Imagine the hardship.
Now we have a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure powered almost exclusively by fossil-fuels. Cars, trucks, roads, boats, docks, airplanes, airports, hospitals, schools, farms manufacturing plants, food processing centers, water treatment plants – all run on fossil fuels. All plastics, pesticides, and fertilizers are derived from that source as well.
The End of Oil means the End of growth, on which our economy depends. A world-wide recession may make oil too cheap: OPEC, Russia, the largest suppliers, need $100 plus per barrel. Oil too cheap may also spell the End of Oil.

What we have in abundance is debt: corporate debt, government debt, and consumer debt, all at record levels. In order to finance debt, we need economic growth. Economic growth requires a constantly increasing consumption of consumer goods – most of which are made from plastic, which comes from petroleum (oil) and are delivered by trucks, which consume diesel fuel (oil). Even a truly successful conservation program would require us to drastically cut our consumption of consumer goods, which would also stop economic growth. Conservation would cause indebted corporations, governments, and individuals to slide towards bankruptcy. No wonder the USA and Canada are against the Kyoto Agreement. Banks would call in outstanding debts, businesses would close, government services would cease, and people would lose their jobs. During the Dirty Thirties many people had relatives in the country, where food, at least, was plentiful. That option is gone. Even farmers don’t grow their own food anymore.
You don’t have to be a prophet to conclude that without an abundant supply of cheap energy, transportation systems will break down. Electrical grids will collapse. Unemployment levels will skyrocket. Consumer goods will only be available to the super-rich. Food and water will become desperately sought after commodities. Riots and urban uprisings will become common.
There is no doubt that we have followed the path of least resistance, assuming that current conditions will last forever.

The Tipping Point: a possible scenario

All this points to the last days. What will speed up the pace is the Primary Productivity percentage, with China and India leading the way. Cambodia, Mongolia, Indonesia, all are being stripped of trees to feed the building booms there, including Brazil to supply China with soya beans.
Primary Productivity now stands between 45 and 50, meaning that almost half of the world’s basic energy, vested in plants, trees, animals, has been used for the benefit of the human race, but in such a way that once it is used, it cannot be restored. Depleted oceans, soil degradation, disappeared species, cannot be re-created by human technology.
Revelation 11: 2 says that “they will trample on the holy city for 42 months.” That’s what’s happening right now. Revelation 13: 5 repeats that: “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise authority for 42 months.”
Satan, God’s great Adversary, is the beast whose aim has been from the beginning – starting in Eden – to destroy God’s beloved cosmos. (John 3: 16)
There is significance in the number of 42 months, which is 3.5 years, exactly half of that perfect number ‘7’. Matthew 24: 21-22 says that “For there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened.”
Allow me a brief detour by means of a riddle, illustrating the nature of exponential growth. A lily pond contains a single leaf. Each day the number of leaves doubles – two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the four, and so on. “If the pond is full on the thirtieth day,” the question goes, “at what point is it half full?” Answer: “On the twenty-ninth day.”
Back to two things: the 3.5 year period and Primary Productivity.
It is my contention that we are quite close to the 3.5 year mark, judging by the number of Primary Productivity, which now stands somewhere between 45 and 50 percent. Due to the scramble for more oil to keep our economic system lubricated, so-called fracking, the Fukushima nuclear fiasco, and also the increasing pace of Global Warming, environmental destruction will greatly speed up, rapidly approaching the 50 percent mark, which is the half- way to total chaos, just as 3.5 years is halfway to 7, the number of fullness.

Where Are We?

I believe that the Lord will not return on Day 30, but Day 29, when, seemingly, the glass is still half full. That can happen anytime: like a thief in the night, as the Bible puts it. The human time clock is about to stop. We only have a few seconds left. Are we ready for time-less eternity, when the trumpet will sound and, all will be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of the eye.
The words of Peter come to mind: “Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life? Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival. The galaxies will burn up and the elements melt down that day – but we’ll hardly notice. We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.” (The Message, 2 Peter 3.)
What constitutes a Holy Life? We all must answer that question. That it has something to do with “LIFE”. our daily doings, our activities in God’s creation, is beyond question. This makes me think of Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect.” The Greek word there is ‘teleios,’ which is best translated as ‘holistic,’ derived from ‘telos’, which suggests that we always have to live keeping the End – telos- in mind, our final destination, the New Earth.

Remember, the signs will be quite subtle, so vague that the Bible repeatedly states that The End will come ‘Like a Thief in the night!’

This is my last blog for some time. I will post new articles on www.hielema.ca/blog from time to time, but will not e-mail them anymore. So occasionally visit hielema.ca.

Watch for August 30, the release day of

Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision.

Part of the description in the Eerdmans catalogue says: Bavinck challenges believers to live as Kingdom people…his eschatological vision is now more relevant than ever as climate change, resource depletion, financial turmoil, and other issues increasingly threaten our world.

May 11 2014

Where are we in the mad maze of magic money?

 David Attenborough once famously said: “Anyone who believes in infinite economic growth on a finite planet is either a madman, or an economist”.

Perhaps we all are mad. Perhaps we all need to be detoxified. We may deny that infinite growth is possible, but, really, when it comes down to it we love to see expansion in the place we work, because that means security and perhaps promotion. Our entire world, the way we shop, the way we move about, the way we live is premised on the basic fact that economic growth is forever.

It even applies to ecclesial organizations. When a new church is built or when a religious organization makes elaborate plans for the future, of course lots of prayers are offered, but the untold basis of all this is economic growth, the ability to make the supporters believe that the future is rosy and pledges will be the responsible thing to make.

It’s not only that economists say this and base their entire models on this supposition. The entire ‘science’ of economics as taught in the most prestigious universities is based on the irrefutable fact that growth can and will and shall and must continue. And politicians too bank on this.

Never mind that all this is a very asinine assumption. Economists are not only useless but also dangerous because they have titles and receive Nobel prizes, reason why people listen to them and entire government policies are built around what they say.

Politics and Economic Growth

Where I live, in Ontario, Canada, in about 4 weeks – June 12 – we have an election because the budget proposed by the ruling minority party was not accepted by the opposition. That this budget only increased the already large deficit was not the reason for defeat. All parties religiously accept that growth will happen whether they are Liberal, the current rulers, or Conservatives, or the Socialists. In politics, as in economics, growth is regarded as a physical law, similar to gravity. Never mind that in physics, eternal growth is seen as absurd, but if absence of growth takes place in an economic system, it must be because the wrong policies have been applied. Economists will then prescribe the right recipe, after which growth is certain to return. So the politician who comes up with the most plausible promises will take his or her turn, and the same policies, which did not make sense before, are again implemented.

Fact is that we all are meandering in the mad maze of magic money, and totally lost there as well, because the only exit out of this labyrinth is blocked by our complete lack of direction, as we prescribe policies that did not work yesterday are seen to be the cure for tomorrow.

Yes, we are all mad, mad because we live in the age of Mammon. The pursuit of happiness has now become the pursuit of money.  The bible tells a different story: “The lust for money is the root of all evil.” And the money can only come from one ultimate source: further exploitation of a finite earth.

Solomon and Friedman

Just think about that for a minute: our constant desire for greater wealth forms the basis of all the world’s ills. Solomon, who was the Bill Gates of his days, “the richest man on earth,” actually did not like his status all that well if his claim in his Proverbs is correct:  “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.” In those days a king’s real place among the nations was determined by the number of wives. Solomon had a 1,000 of them, which, probably, gave him second thoughts about being so well off.

Contentment is our greatest treasure, but, thanks to television – Mammon’s most effective pulpit, preaching the gospel of More 7/24/365 – money is seen as the main source of happiness.

Milton Friedman, who died a few years ago, is still our money prophet. His teachings governs the monetary policies of our reigning economists, including Canada’s very own Stephen Harper and especially the Christian Republican Party in the USA where such matters as minimum wage and old age provisions, are rejected, because they obstruct the free flow of capital. “The best government is no government” is their motto. Tim Hudak, the Conservative man vying to become Ontario’s Premier, wants to fire 100,000 civil servants, his first step to create 1 million jobs, which makes perfect sense in his mind. I wonder whether he has ever heard of the domino effect: eliminate one well-paying job and another position disappears as well. Never mind: outsourcing is all the rage, even in war. The market is God and price is the only criterion for value. In Friedman’s words: ”Everything that makes human life livable in this world must be enclosed by the high fence of price, a cage with a lock that can only be opened after dropping a coin.” According to this man, enjoying sunshine, admiring scenery, visiting a park must always come at a monetary price. Watch fees rise.

This capitalistic notion is evident everywhere: in Indonesia, in South America where rain forests are clear-cut; in the oceans, sucked dry of fish,  in the mountains, leveled for gold, in Alberta’s rivers, emptied to give the oil companies free water to boil the oil sands; in the greater Toronto area, with the best farmlands converted to subdivisions. Behind all this cosmos-degrading is the ‘lust for money.’

Money versus Nature

As economies expand, politicians simply promise more. As governments grow bigger, debt grows even faster. Even when times are hard governments cannot cut back: as environmental challenges increase, public reconstitution, in the form of payments for storm, water and other damage, also become bigger. As citizens become older and more frail, and but also live longer, medical and pension obligations mean greater monetary outlay.

All this means that debt always goes up, but we also know – and are now discovering – that our practices go against the natural system we live in. When we look around and observe creation we see that the amount of fresh water stays pretty much the same. In fact, aquifers may deplete if we over-use them, or water becomes polluted, as in China. The amount of topsoil stays pretty much the same, unless we damage it or make it subject to erosion. The amount of wood available stays pretty constant, unless we over-use it.

Nature, instead of having an agenda of growth, operates with an agenda of diminishing returns with respect to many types of resources. When we set out to produce more of a resource, the cost tends to rise: deeper wells, more remote raw material, Arctic drilling and deep sea exploration are just the most obvious.

The result is that our economic system becomes less and less efficient, as it takes more resources and more of people’s time to produce the same end product, measured in terms of barrels of oil or gallons of water. With stagnant wages, with higher fuel costs, with food inflation, due to drought or other weather-related damages, our costs of living increases, even though the Government controlled Cost of Living Index shows little change, all part of the increasing level of fraud perpetuated on all levels.

There comes a time, and I believe it is already here, when, due to shrinking income, higher cost of living, greater unemployment, government intake – based on an ever-expanding-economy – drops, posing a real threat to our medical-pension-social welfare-system and to the entire money system  when extra debt has negative results, and debt cannot be repaid.

What does the Bible say about all this?

We are at the end of the money line because the premise on which we have built our society no longer works. We are there now, because the world-wide creation of magic money in the form of trillions of dollars, Japanese yen, euros, Chinese yuan, no longer produces results.

No, the Bible is not a text book for economics. Yes, there is a Christian answer to this, an answer that will not please a lot of people. Let’s start with Jesus. In Matthew 6: 24 he calls money Mammon, an Aramaic word that usually means “money” but also can mean “wealth”. Here Jesus calls money by its real name, considering it a sort of god. This personification, this affirmation that we are talking about something that claims divinity reveals something exceptional about money. In reality Jesus is saying that money is power, a force capable of moving other things. Jesus also is saying that money is autonomous, a law unto itself. Because of this God as a person in Jesus and Mammon as a competing god find themselves in conflict. Mammon can be a master the same way God is; yes, Mammon can be your or my master. I think we all struggle with this because we claim that we only use money even though often it is money that uses us. By bringing us under its law we become its servants.

Revelation 18: 11-13 describes our situation today where retailers have a difficult time: “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore- cargoes of —and you fill in your favorite products or toys, such as cars, cruises, and beach houses.” Then, at the end this text includes in the items which find no buyers the bodies and souls of men.” The author of Revelation sees people here as objects, not to glorify God- which is our first duty – but people placed under a false authority, one that is not God. Jesus himself was bought with a price, foreshadowed by the story of Joseph who was sold by his brothers.

Jesus is usually portrayed as meek and mild-mannered. He, however, got really worked up by the church authorities of his day, the Pharisees, who failed to proclaim the Coming of the Kingdom. He also agitated violently against the profaners of the temple, those who brought business to the place where God’s grace should shine through in all its manifestations.

The Hebrew law, in its entirety, protects human life from the devastating influence of money. The Year of Jubilee comes to mind, where property is restored to the original owners every 50 years, negating the accumulation of excessive wealth and alleviating poverty. We see today more and more that money is a force of destruction. The curious characteristic of money is that its power originates with the issuers. Money would be nothing, materially speaking, without human consent. The mad maze of magic money is just that: its magic is that we give value to something which by itself has no value of use or of exchange, especially today when most of the money is simply an entry or figure on a computer screen. The mad maze is evident in the universal fraud that entails money today.

The entire concept of money is completely unexplainable and irrational. Nothing, whether in human nature or in the nature of things, whether in technology or in reason, can rationalize the original act of creating and accepting money. Nothing can interpret the blind confidence we maintain in money, in spite of all the monetary crises. The only acceptable explanation for this absurdity can be traced back to the spiritual power of money. Only because money is a spiritual power penetrating our very being, enslaving our hearts and minds, replacing God’s spirit in us, prevents us from detecting this ultimate madness.

Our disregard for his creation, our callous conduct in connection with environmental degradation, all point to our love for money. How can we say that we love God when we destroy his work of art?

Of course money in itself is not evil. It could be argued that debt is evil, because it makes us dependent on money. I see debt also as applying to environmental matters because depleting natural resources entails a debt for future generations. Loving our neighbor also includes those who will come after us: our neighbors in time. Our sins literally cry to heaven, therefor God’s judgment will focus especially on our treatment of the cosmos, because John 3: 16, loving the world and all it contains is so central to salvation.

Grace is what saves us, grace, derived from the Latin word ‘gratia’ of which the plural is ‘gratiis or gratis’ which means ‘for nothing’. We are saved not because we have done something that redeems us, but because Christ has set us free.

Next week the final instalment of Where are we?

It will also be the final blog I will post or send. The garden beckons, weddings coming up, birthdays to celebrate, family to visit.

Occasionally, as the Spirit moves me I will add to my blog ‘www.hielema.ca/blog’.

Look forward to August 30 when Eerdmans will publish

Between Beginning and End: a radical Kingdom Vision.

WHERE ARE WE? (see the special announcement following this blog)

Part 3: We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making.

According to the Bible the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were stuck in the desert for 40 years, during which the Lord provided them with ‘food from heaven’, manna. During those wandering days the manna was only good for one day, except on the Sabbath when miraculously, it lasted for 48 hours. Those Israelis with an inclination to trade and profit- not an unusual trait among these folk – got a bum deal. If they gathered a bit more than needed for their own family intending to sell it later to the lazy fellows who had not picked up enough for themselves, this effort would misfire as speculation in food proved impossible. The Lord ordained that all manna, being essential food and not a commodity, could not be sold for a profit. Does that mean that holding back food for later gain is a sin? Yes. It is equally true is that robbing food off its nutritional value, for the single motive of profit, is a sin as well.

Today we, like the people of Israel, also dwell in the desert, one of our own making. We have fashioned a world that is increasingly unfit for all living creatures, plants, animals, and us humans as well, God’s Kingdom to come. By growing and distorting the food the way we do, we are becoming self-consumers: cannibals in other words.

That needs an explanation.

Thanks to intensive land use through mining, road building, city construction, vacuuming the oceans, tar-sand extraction, and especially land-clearing, we humans have appropriated major portions of the globe for our exclusive use at the expense of everything else, and have made the earth largely unfit for organic cultivation. By mainly relying on chemicals to grow crops we are destroying the very basis of life, leaving little or no space for the non-human world. Don’t get fooled by the package: by all appearance our planet still looks OK. It’s the invisibles, the air, water and soil that hide the contamination.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass originally available, our total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity,” which was 100 percent ‘in the beginning.’ 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 concluded about a decade ago, that we humans, a single species among millions, consumed about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. Now, thanks to fracking, the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the rise of China as an industrial power, the never-ending global forests clearing and fires, overgrazing, ocean depleting and the ever higher pollution, a rapid increase in Primary Productivity is occurring: it could now easily be more than 45 percent. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We, the 7 billion plus of us raping plunderers,  have simply stolen the food, the habitat, the soil, air, water from all other creatures, all deserving an equal portion to live, in the process distorting our own habitat.

The Dust Bowl in the Thirties and the sand storms in China and fire storms elsewhere are no accident of nature. Intensive cultivation and replacing the prairies with our own preferred grass, wheat, has vastly reduced the top soil, while Climate Change is doing the rest. The paradox is that now we feed most of this grain to livestock, while that same livestock was perfectly content to eat native prairie grass. Never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef cattle raised in the same area today. We call that progress.

I have this book: Fast Food Nation. I bought it at the Tweed Thrift shop for $2.00, brand new, never been read. The original price was $38.95 purchased at the Redeemer College Bookstore of all places. In it I read that on these same former prairies where once millions of buffalo roamed, now covered with endless stretches of corn and wheat, ConAgra operates feedlots containing up to 100,000 head of cattle, so closely crowded together that it looks like an ocean of mooing, moving mass of multiple shades of white and brown. These animals eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs, their digestion aided by anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. Just to gain 400 pounds – about 180 kilos – each animal consumes 3000 pounds – 1350 kg – of grain, while each day depositing 50 liters of urine and manure which is dumped in a nearby lagoon, leaving more excrement than a city of Chicago produces.

By plowing up the prairies, by eliminating the buffalo and replacing them with grain-fed cows, we have caused the topsoil to disappear. But no problem: when the most fertile soil in the world vanishes we fill it again with new energy in the form of (finite and polluting) oil-rich fertilizers. Chandran Nair, who runs the Global Institute for Tomorrow, argues that the true economic cost of a US$4 burger is US$100, if the cost of converting grain to meat, water and energy use is factored in. That is just one example of the debt we owe to our children and grandchildren. Indeed we live on Borrowed Time.

God had a purpose when he told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to live off the fruits of the land, be vegetarian. Now, in 2014, this truth makes eminent sense again because the mass marketing of meat is leading to the death of the country side, in the process pumping billions of tons of Green House Gases – the most lethal methane – into the air. Thanks to the nitrates in fertilizers sea-beds are deprived of oxygen, creating numerous dead zones in the world’s oceans. Thanks to endless monoculture crops, fields lose their wildlife. Thanks to expanded need for feed, native tribes are forced out of their rainforest habitat, depriving the world of so needed weather stabilizers and precious oxygen. Thanks to America’s cheap meat peasants in India no longer can make a living, committing suicide in droves. Thanks to ‘mega-dairies’ where 10,000 cows are kept fouling the air in California, children suffer from asthma. Thanks to the excess of effluent from nearby farms where as many as a million pigs are produced each year in China entire villages lack clean water.

The Oceans too suffer.

Next time you eat chicken, which, thanks to Tyson Foods, has become the lowest priced meat, you might pray a prayer for the poor people in Peru.

In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat a special chapter is devoted to the fish meal industry. The lunacy of this business is that it takes a valuable protein that very few people eat enough of – oily fish – and turning it into a protein that is less healthy and that we already eat in excess: broiler chicken. Here is a quote from that book:

Fishmeal is one of the filthiest secrets of the factory-farming industry, an environmental catastrophe that involves sucking millions of tons of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens. The process deprives millions of larger wild fish, birds and marine mammals of their natural prey, drastically depleting stocks of important species. It also pumps vile fatty waste into the ocean bays, creating dead zones; polluting the atmosphere around the processing plants, causing wide-spread human health problems; and diverts what could be a highly valuable source of nutrition for people to industrially farmed animals.

The result is that in Peru, near these factories, 20-30 percent of the people suffer from malnutrition and children develop lesions on their skin from the fumes the fishmeal factories emit. The book states that 99 percent of the broiler chickens in America are reared in the worst kind of processing plants where many chickens are diseased and in such poor shape that they can barely walk, while the minimum-wage workers suffer swollen hands from being pecked when catching the birds. Due to the crowded conditions food poisoning is rampant. Nearly a third of the planet’s land surface is devoted to rearing farm animals or growing their feed. If these cereals went directly to humans, an extra three billions people could be fed.

Where are we?

We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making and dying in the process thanks to fast – and increasingly foul food. Capitalism is decapitating us. “The lust for money is the root of all evil” writes Paul to his protégé in 1 Tim. 6:10. That is especially true in food production. Food now comes from oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least ten calories of oil. When my grandparents farmed, they produced pure food calories: no electricity but real horse- and human muscle power for input. Now even to obtain the oil takes lots of oil: today there is a lot more oil in our food and there is less oil in our oil. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today that ratio is as high as 40 barrels equivalent for 100 obtained in the Alberta Tar Sands. Fracking too has an extreme high ratio. The lower the energy return, the higher the pollution, and this danger will only increase as we need the energy to survive. Forget sustainable development. Forget measures to control Climate Change. We are at the point of no return, addicted as we are to oil, to sugar, to processed foods, all conspiring to make us dig our own graves.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food. Want to abandon our sugar addiction? Simple. Make meals from scratch. Even better: grow it yourself. Liberate yourself from the corporate clutches that cater to our cravings for sweets that slowly kill us.

Get a healthy breakfast. It is so simple to prepare oats in a slow cooker at night to be ready in the morning, rather than eat cereals. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap.

Then there is ethanol, another lie. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The (US) Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a “clean fuel,” which is just as much baloney as calling Tar Sand Oil ethical. This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. The grain used to make a gallon of ‘bio’ fuel can feed a family for weeks. Eating a carrot gives the eater all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other in-edibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten.

Where are we?

Just as the cows, the pigs, the chickens, all wallowing in their own dirt on the way to a cruel death, pumped full with antibiotics, our bodies too, chockfull with chemical compounds, are on that same road, rapidly losing the ability to resist infections, while wandering aimless from mall to mall.

Psalm 13 comes to mind: “The fool has said in his heart: There is no God above.” We are those fools. My commentary says, “A fool is not an ignoramus, an atheist or an agnostic. A fool is one who has his values all wrong, and is encouraged to live as if God would never take action.” In food production too we have chosen the way of death, death for ourselves and death for the planet.

I’ve been taught that Reformation applies to all of life. Everything needs to be changed drastically. The matter of SEAKING FIRST THE KINGDOM, as Jesus asked us to do, means embracing a Global Perspective, involving also seeking the welfare of all animals and every single aspect of the natural world.

Next week: Where are we in the mad maze of magic money?

The book featured below has influenced my thinking and my life more than any other book I own. Translating it so that a wider audience may also benefit, has, without doubt, been, by the grace of God, my most rewarding accomplishment. The translation has greatly benefitted from the careful editing by Harry van Dyke, professor emeritus in history of Redeemer University College.

Copyright © 2014 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, All rights reserved

April 27 2014.

WHERE ARE WE?

Part Two

 IS EVER GREATER ECONOMIC GROWTH THE ORIGINAL SIN?

Barack Obama was one man who was influenced by a sermon. In 2004, as a senator, he recalled that his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in a sermon, used the phrase: the Audacity of Hope. Obama says that this audacity is what “was the best of the American spirit,” namely “the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary.” That belief, he said, was to be convinced that America would always be on top, would have an ever-growing economy.

However, there is a major difference between the hope Christians have and what the politicians proclaim as “hope for an ever-growing economy”. Ten years later, today in 2014, there still is a completely unfounded and utterly irrational picture of the world being touted that claims all will be fine, just wait, be patient because soon, when the world economy rebounds, the wonderful certainty of unbounded growth will dissolve all debt and make us richer than we’ve ever been before. All we need is hope.

Actually it is all ‘hype’.

Of course hope and faith fit together like an automobile and fuel. We used to sing “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage”, but that line now is totally outdated. Hebrew 11: 1 refers to both hope and faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” but the Americans, being very religious, apply this biblical definition of faith to Infinite Growth. For them this confession reads: “Faith is being sure of our hope for economic Growth and being certain that this will continue for ever and ever”. It’s also the “golden calf” of the Canadian Harper government which has three priorities: Growth, Jobs and lower Taxes.

The characteristic of an idol is that it does not condone critical views and questions. We can argue with God but an idol does not grant us this opportunity. The Growth God is such a powerful deity that taking on additional, even unlimited, debt, in order to get to the Promised Land of More tolerates no scrutiny.

The adherents of the Church of Forever Growth, having Faith in Infinite Economic Advance, far outnumber the believers in the God as confessed in the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The faithful flock of “Forever More”, after having accumulated already infinite earthly possessions, blindly follows their Golden Calf along its unidirectional and one-dimensional path to more of the same, because The Lord of More demands that we shop till we drop. The Lord of More demands that we never question why. The Lord of More demands that we close our ears to the cries of creation. The Lord of More demands that we close our eyes to the floods, the droughts, the heat waves, the stress on trees, the dangers for our very lungs. The Lord of More demands that we close our hearts and minds to what the real Lord of the Universe is trying to tell us. The Lord of More demands that we dull our minds, never wondering what we wish to do with all the “more” we want to own. The Lord of More demands that we regard as false all the surveys that show that the happiest people on the planet do not live in the richest communities, but in the closest knit ones.

Stones for Bread, Snakes for Fish

The Lord of More gives us exactly what Jesus pointed at in Matthew 7:9: “Which of you, if his son or daughter asks for bread, will give them a stone? Or if he or she asks for a fish, will give them a snake?” Yet that is exactly what we are doing to our children where it concerns their future! We are sacrificing our children for the immediate gratification of our wants, which are never satisfied, and leave a world full of our toys and trinkets but empty of everything that guarantees life.

Still a bit hesitant to believe that the Lord of More is a real god? Christians believe that the Lord created the world ‘ex nihilo’ out of nothing. The banks, the real rulers of the world nowadays, have, since 1970, created 33 Trillions of virtual dollars ‘ex nihilo’, yes ‘money out of nothing’, making the bankers, including the head of the Federal Bank, Janet Yellen, the modern equivalents of ‘gods’.

No wonder the faithful followers of the Lord of More keep on chasing the ‘the golden calf.’ They do because they know of no other reality and have no other answer. The bitter truth is that only growth can rescue us from the economic situation we find ourselves in. Even though we can rationally understand that the principle of ‘always more’ is ridiculously impossible, and fatal to our survival, we cannot escape the trap it lures us into. The human mind is as unidirectional and one-dimensional as the Religinon of More. We simply have no other choice but to lie to ourselves about that. We must believe that we do the things we do because our rational brain tells us to, even though, when we take a step back, we are all perfectly capable of seeing that it just can’t be possible. There’s where the true faith of the Western World comes in, a faith inspired by the Great Deceiver, already present in the Garden of Eden where Infinite Growth had its birth.

A curious reversal

There is a curious reversal in the first few chapters of the Bible. Look it up, easily done by going to Google and type in Genesis 2:9. There the fruit trees are described as “trees pleasing to the eye and good for food.”  In the next chapter, Genesis 3: 6, the order is reversed. Suddenly it says: “the fruit was good for food and pleasing to the eye.” It is exactly there that the economic desire, the Lord of More took over from the Lord of All, for whom beauty and splendour and the aesthetic always has preference over the economic, the urge for MORE.

Years ago, in 1972, when I read the first publication by the Club of Rome, the still utterly relevant The Limits of Growth, I had a real conversion: I saw the impossibility of Infinite Growth. Now this same Club of Rome- yes they are still there- has just published a new book: Extraction: How the Quest for mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet. It emphasizes that as we dig, drill, and excavate to unearth the planet’s mineral bounty, the resources we exploit from ores, veins, seams, and wells are gradually becoming exhausted. Mineral treasures that took millions, or even billions, of years to form are now being squandered in just centuries–or sometimes just decades.
Will there come a time when we actually run out of minerals? Debates already soar over how we are going to obtain energy without oil, coal, and gas. But what about the other mineral losses we face? Without metals, and semiconductors, how are we going to keep our industrial system running? Without mineral fertilizers and fuels, how are we going to produce the food we need?
Ugo Bardi, the author, delivers a sweeping history of the mining industry, starting with its humble beginning when our early ancestors started digging underground to find the stones they needed for their tools. He traces the links between mineral riches and empires, wars, and civilizations, and shows how mining in its various forms came to be one of the largest global industries. He also illustrates how the gigantic mining machine is now starting to show signs of difficulties. The easy mineral resources, the least expensive to extract and process, have been mostly exploited and depleted. There are plenty of minerals left to extract, but at higher costs and with increasing difficulties.
The effects of depletion take different forms and one may be the economic crisis that is gripping the world system. And depletion is not the only problem. Mining has a dark side–pollution–that takes many forms and delivers many consequences, including climate change.
The world we have been accustomed to, so far, was based on cheap mineral resources and on the ability of the ecosystem to absorb pollution without generating damage to human beings. Both conditions are rapidly disappearing. Having thoroughly plundered planet Earth, we are entering a new world.

We are entering a new world.

Bardi draws upon the world’s leading minerals experts to offer a compelling glimpse into that new world ahead, a world filled with our toys, but empty of the basics of life, as we now have to deal with Peak soil, Peak Oil, Peak Water and still peaking populations and ever expanding desires.

We live in a time of glaring paradoxes. We have convinced ourselves that it is possible to take on more debt in order to get out of debt, as long as there is more growth awaiting us in our fantasy future. It’s no more than yet another lie we can’t escape, simply because we can’t escape who we are. The Lord of More will always in the end leave us with less. When we pursue the economic at the expense of all that is beautiful, we end up with total misery.

 Where are we? Have we reached the End of the Line?

Suppose for a minute that we have reached the final stage of history, one where there not only is no longer growth, but where our ever-more complicated system collapses, a situation that is becoming ever more likely.

I am trying to determine where we are in the year of the Lord 2014. There is an urgent need for ideas about what to do in case growth does not return, in case there’s no going back to the golden era of ever more, even in case our house of cards, built in debt, collapses.

Do you have any idea? Do I? If you have, tell your politician because there are no such ideas. Politicians all over the world are desperate. That’s why war is becoming a real possibility, the last thing we need. China, with its teeming billions, is at its wits end. It needs growth. There are millions of peasants out there who want work. China needs growth but its previous growth came at the expense of poisoning its waters, its soil and its air. Now, with pollution saturating its very soul, where does it turn? How is growth possible when the system is so sick? More of the same will speed up the process of decay. Still the only real discussion is not whether we do or do not need growth, but is how much growth is needed. And the answer always is: as much as we can.

The world has a big problem. Economic advance has lately been seen as a sign of progress, and, for the last 200 years, even during the Dirty Thirties, our world has, indeed, seen steady growth. Yet for many countries in Europe, the 17^th and 18^th Centuries were The Age of Progress: Cultural Progress: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Bach, Handel, Mozart come to mind: that was real progress: artistic advancement. Where are these people today? We are culturally deprived. The singular quest for economic growth has dulled our minds. And now we are stuck. Now nobody has any idea what to do without growth. There is no course that teaches “The No-Growth- Society.”

 Herman Daly is the exception.

Herman Daly, formerly with the World Bank, now a professor at the University of the Maryland School of Public Affairs, and a recipient of the Heineken Prize for environmental science by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, has long advocated a fundamental change in economic thinking. In his book Beyond Growth he argues that we must conceive of the economy as part of the ecosystem and, as a result, give up on the idea of economic growth because it leads to universal destruction. He writes: “The value of a sawmill is zero without forests; the value of fishing boats is zero without fish; the value of refineries is zero without remaining deposits of petroleum; the value of dams is zero without rivers and catchment areas with sufficient forest covering to prevent erosion and siltation of the lake behind the dam….Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity – the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future.”

He concludes his book as follows: “We must face the failures of the growth idolatry. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, “Deliver me, for thou art my god!” Instead we must have the courage to ask with Isaiah (44:20, The Message) ‘This lover of emptiness, of nothing, is so out of touch with reality, so far gone, that he can’t even look at what he’s doing, can’t even look at the no-good stick of wood in his hand and say, “This is crazy.”’

Where are we? We are in the grip of the idolatry of Infinite Growth which is the ultimate destroyer.

Where are we? (All about food.)

Where are we?

Part one.

General Overview.

Of course the question of Where are We is not a difficult one if it is a matter of location, especially if we are the proud owner of a GPS instrument. A few years ago I rented a car in the Netherlands on my way to visit relatives in a country with such a maze of streets that exact destinations are difficult to find, so I used a GPS and the voice directed me perfectly to the correct address.

The question Where Are We is a little harder to answer when we include (1) politics or (2) economics or (3) the environment or (4) food supply or (5) even religion. Yet it is exactly to these fields where I will venture to go in my explorations of this topic: in other words a discovery tour where we are in 2014 in the greater context of the world’s happenings.

This year, 2014, is exactly 100 years after the start of The Great War that was primarily fought in Belgium and France on the West front and along the Russian frontier in the East. It lasted from 1914 till 1918 and involved almost all European nations, plus from 1917-18 the USA as well.

When the strife started, Europe still had two Emperors: Kaiser Wilhelm II of greater Germany and Franz Joseph, the ruler of Austria-Hungary. His realm included not only Austria and Hungary, with Vienna as the capital, but also Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Galicia, Transylvania, Bosnia and Croatia: too much of a mix to be stable. Once that war was concluded on November 11 1918, millions of soldiers had been killed, nothing concrete had been achieved, but two emperors were gone, together with their empires, and finally the 20^th Century had begun, which ended in 1989. Now the long interim period to Century 21 is over, and we have arrived at the final stage of humanity. The Final Stage? Yes.

Exactly 100 years after WWI, war rumblings are again everywhere. In Margaret MacMillan’s book The War That Ended Peace, the road to 1914, I read (page 440): “Across the (European) Continent in 1911, economies were sliding into recession. Prices had been going up while wages had been falling behind, something that had hit the poorest classes hard.” That sentence scared me, because it depicts exactly our situation today. Are we now at that same point in 2014 as Europe was just before World War I? Are the great nations, Russia and China on the one hand and the NATO countries plus Japan on the other hand, manoeuvring themselves in such a situation about the current flashpoint of the Ukraine, where backing off becomes impossible?

Margaret MacMillan starts her book with two quotes, one by Albert Camus, “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always wars and plagues take people by surprise.” The other quote is by Elizabeth Bowen: “War is not an accident: it is an outcome. One cannot go back too far to ask, of what?”

Are we in for both wars and plagues? The Spanish Flu, emerging when World War I was winding down, killed as many civilians as there had been battlefield casualties: both events took more than 20 million to the grave, and that in a world with less than 2 billion inhabitants, the majority small settlements dwellers. Now most people live in cities, perfect disease breeding grounds, with a world population in excess of 7 billion and unmatched mobility, where obesity and diabetes are reaching epidemic proportions, all perfect conditions to propagate a pandemic. Already MERS- Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – and EBOLA, both highly contagious and dangerous diseases, are making the rounds in Africa and the Middle – and now Far East.

Where are we? Are we concerned? Do people talk about the current threats, such as Climate Change, resource depletion, fragile economic conditions? Not that I have noticed: on the contrary. Mentioning these distinct possibilities, bordering on certainties, is a sure way to become unpopular. As long as we can watch inane TV and see silly film stars and increasing nakedness we are satisfied with that pure insanity. Fact is that when civilizations start to die they go insane, and indeed craziness is evident everywhere. We don’t mind that the ice sheets in the Arctic are melting. We don’t care that temperatures are rising. We pay no attention to the scary scenarios the scientists tell us about, with the poisoning of air, soil and water. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, insider-trading and outright theft. Jesus has something to say about this: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.” (Matt.11:17). If there ever is a time to mourn, with the death of species, the global spread of pollution, cancers proliferating, fraud more frequent than ever, it is now. Where are the real eyes that realize real lies?

 How did we get to the point we are today?

Of course it’s ‘the frog in the slowly boiling pan’ symptom all over again. It all is happening so gradually. I remember spending time at my maternal grandparents’ farm in the 1930’s: a dozen cows all milked by hand, the milk processed the same day in the nearby plant. No refrigeration, of course, so small was not only beautiful, but the only way to go. No carbon footprint whatsoever. My paternal grandparents had a grocery store, selling sugar, coffee, tea, often in exchange for eggs, thus partly a barter economy. The church was at the centre of life.

Now everything and everybody has changed. The church is at the margin for most. Society at large evolved from religious authority to secular rule, from agriculture to industrial, from rural to urban, from local to global, from periphery to centre, from decentralized to centralized, from low-density energy to high-density energy, from wood to coal to oil/natural gas, from industrial to communication technology, from gold to fiat currencies, from local scarcity and high cost to global abundance, from islands of prosperity to continents of prosperity, from cash to credit, from collateral to leverage, from productive to consumerist and from sustainable to unsustainable. That’s where we are now.

Here’s why. In today’s world the resources needed for our technological pursuits are being used at breakneck rates and thus are either already facing depletion or will do so in the near future. When coal has already been mined so heavily that sulfurous, low-energy brown coal—the kind that miners in the 19th century used to discard as waste—has become the standard fuel for coal-fired power plants, for example, it’s a bit late to talk about a coal-to-liquids program to replace any serious fraction of the world’s petroleum consumption: the attempt to do so would send coal prices soaring to economy-wrecking heights. Richard Heinberg has pointed out in his book Peak Everything, that a great deal of the coal still remaining in the ground will take more energy to extract than it will produce when burnt, making it an energy sink rather than an energy source.

Where are we?

In the early 20th century, there was an abundance of everything, allowing the development of autos, highways, aircraft, radio, telephones and most recently the Internet. This progress started slowly, picked up speed, creating a period of widespread adoption and technological leaps, followed by a maturation phase allowing the advancement of refinements rather than leaps. Now we enter a mature economy with no or little growth, stagnated development and, in a world with a growing population, a shrinking job market.

Take air travel. The leap from open-cockpit aircraft of the 1910s to the long-distance comfort of the DC-3 in the 1930s was enormous, as was the leap from the prop-driven DC-3 to the greater capacity and speed of the 707 jet airliner. But since the advent of the Boeing 727 in 1964 and the jumbo-jet 747 in 1969, very little about the passenger experience of flight has changed (or has changed for the worse): the envelope of speed is little changed, and efficiency has improved, but these are mostly invisible to the passengers.
Cars too are a good example. I bought my first one in 1952, an Austin, which lasted exactly one year. Improvements in the past 60 plus years since have been gradual: my current car, a diesel, is still excellent, even after 12 years, but the basic concept has remained the same. The same is true of computers. Once computers reached the Mac OS X/Windows XP level, improvements have been of marginal utility. All this suggests that we are at the end of technologies.

In the meantime the costs of our lifestyle continue to go up due to higher energy costs, bureaucratic bloat and weather related crop failures. At the same time, with stagnant wages and interest income lower than the inflation rates, more of our collective consumption is being funded with debt, which is another way of saying that present consumption is being paid for with future income.

Ever since 1800 one invention after another has created more wealth and more jobs, while plenty of cheap energy led to an exponential increase in population. This ever upward rise in production moved to lower-labor costs and with automation and mechanization gave us higher-value services.

Now no longer is there the Next Big Thing that generates more jobs. On the contrary: the next big thing is ROBOTS, taking away whatever manufacturing jobs there still are, and new soft-ware, that can do almost anything, may make accountants and lawyers disposable too. The logical Next Big Thing is De-Growth, forcing us to consume less and do more with less. But there is only one problem with this: our system cannot cope with De-Growth, because it is built on Growth, depends on only one pathway: higher consumption, higher costs and higher debt. Any reduction in any of these three collapses the system. The current Big Thing–the world-wide web–is the first technology that is not creating more jobs than it eliminates. But how safe is this new trend? The recent appearance of the Heart Bleed virus shows that the Internet is extremely vulnerable.

Where are we?

Basically we are at the end of the line because we have placed all our bets on continuous growth, which means that we are on a one-way street to exhaustion. Our pensions, our labour market, our entire merchandizing set-up depends on more sales, growing revenue, increasing tax revenue to pay for the medical expense, old-age pensions and repairing and maintaining our infrastructure, roads, bridges, electrical system and education on all levels.

We cannot imagine a world that consumes less, generates fewer conventional jobs and reduces debt rather than creates more debt. The only strategy left is to do more of what has failed before, until it collapses. And sooner or later our Capitalist system will go the way of all systems before it, because, simply put, many of the problems which we see today in the world, economic problems, political problems, strategic problems, geo-political problems, are due to the fact that resources everywhere are running out because of natural limits. Some of these boundaries are pollution-related, such as climate change. Others are cost-related, such as the need for deeper wells or desalination to provide water for a growing population, and the need for greater food productivity per acre because of more mouths to feed. The extraction of oil and other fossil fuels are another good example as resource extraction becomes more complex, requiring a larger share of our shrinking pay cheques.

When limits hit, governments are especially likely to suffer from inadequate funding and excessive debt, because tax revenue suffers if wages and profits drop.

Let me give a simple example: imagine a few persons in charge of a million dollars. The interest is higher than their outgo, so for a while the capital increases, but as the number of dependents grows the income of that huge amount is no longer sufficient, so they start eating into the capital, something we as the human race have been doing now for decades. Now the original sum is almost gone. Then what? The only outcome is collapse.

We have made a deal with the Devil.

Why does this happen? We have made a deal with the Devil. We have become hooked on the heroin of carbon-fuels. We have become carbo-holics, offered our very selves in exchange for diabolical favours, such as supposedly unlimited energy, unlimited wealth, unlimited convenience, unlimited luxury and unlimited economic growth. The devil has sold us an illusion, still perpetrated by electioneering politicians.

Where are we?

More about that next week.