Our World Today

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 8 2013

The Mess in the Middle East

Civilization started there. Will it also end there?

 

Last week I started to brush up on the Syria question. In the New York Times in just one day I found 29 articles dealing with the problem, the huge problem of which Syria is but a symptom. I read most of them, but found no magic key.

To fathom the basis of the situation we have to go back a few years. This week, re-reading Johan Huizinga’s classic The Waning of the Middle Ages I came across an interesting passage. In the last paragraph of the first chapter, summarizing the 14th century with its Black Death, its 100 year war (1337-1453) Huizinga wrote – and I translate- “The world is an evil place. The flames of hate and violence burn high and injustice rules the day; the devil with his black wings overshadows a darkened planet. Humanity, constantly on edge, expects the end of everything. Yet people refuse to turn from their evil ways; the church fights back but her preachers and poets cajole and admonish in vain.”

In that same period, seven centuries ago, the Middle East was the place to be: Jews, Arabs, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, all were one happy family, so unlike Europe. Science flourished, art thrived. It truly was a “Golden Age”: in contrast with Europe the Middle East was incredibly advanced.

When we look even further back 2-4,000 years ago, at ancient Mesopotamia, the Garden of Eden, Persia, Greece, Rome all located around the Mediterranean Sea, then we see that recorded history started there. The name Mediterranean indicates this: ‘the centre of the earth’. Today, in the 21st century,  by a quirk of providence, the focus is again on the Middle East because there’s where the bulk of the crude oil is buried, the stuff needed to grease the technological system we have designed.

There’s something about oil that is more than mere inflammatory. Cursed are the countries rich in crude. Where there is oil the few benefit and the masses miss out: Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, Guinea, Saudi Arabia, all are prime examples of plutocracies, lands where the rich rule thanks to the soil being carbon-saturated.

Why did the Middle East Golden Age disappear? Calcified religion. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”, Karl Marx wrote some 150 years ago. Stagnated religion, religion that has lost its soul breeds fanaticism. Fanatics are people who have lost direction but are redoubling their efforts.

Stale religion was not the only reason for their cultural collapse. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I, the victors, France and England, arbitrarily redrew the boundaries of the Middle East without taking into account the situation and religion of the various tribes. Over the years only dictatorial regimes were capable to maintain a semblance of normality. Now, with Climate Change devastating agriculture in Syria, throwing people off the land and robbing a generation of honourable labour, tempers are flaring. Constant hot weather does that to people. No agriculture means no food, no work, lots of unemployed young bodies, anger, resulting in uprisings and revolt. Climate Change is also stoking religious fires, as tiny differences in Koran interpretations lead to murder and vendettas.

I experienced something similar while attending a small Christian college. There I witnessed such hatred as well. The sons and daughters of ministers who had left the Reformed Church because of a dispute involving some facet of children’s baptism refused to be present when teachers, not of their persuasion, opened the school day with prayer. I believe that the tensions of being occupied then by a foreign power, was a contributing factor. These religious schisms, coming to full play during the war 1940-45, have never been solved. Actually the differences have grown, more splits have occurred and most people in the Netherlands sick of the sectarian strife simply abandoned the church.

The entire Middle East too is under extreme tension not only due to the religious divisions, but also because of the daily struggle for food and the rising cost thereof, the impossibility to provide work for its restless army of young people and the oppression by dictators who favour their own tribal allies.

It seems to me that the Middle East religious divisions are intractable. There is no solution when there is an unwillingness to be tolerant. Johan Huizinga, the author of In de Schaduwen van Morgen (In the Shadows of To-morrow) writes somewhere that Onderwijs maakt onder-wijs. The play of words cannot be duplicated in English. It literally means that a little knowledge- failing to see the entire picture- is dangerous. The Lord himself, addressing Job (Job 38:2) said “Who is he that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge.” T.S. Eliot famous question comes to mind: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” That certainly applies to religion which has become pietistic, supplanting genuine biblical insight. Bonhoeffer calls it pious secularism.

In the Middle East life is religion, religion is life. One’s existence is defined by a certain view of the Koran. Of course the West is no different. Canada’s Prime Minister’s religion is Economic Growth, which he has in common with all of the G20 leaders, whose official doctrine is Capitalism, a system that cannot function without cheap oil, and it so happens that the cheapest and best of the crude lies in the deserts of the Middle East, now occupied by warring factions.

In Syria the opposition is dangerously divided making it impossible to form a stable government in the place of the Bashar al-Assad regime which itself favours its own tribe of supporters, the Alawites.

Meanwhile, the strife appears to be spreading. Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is spiking upward. Reports in The Times and elsewhere have said that many Iraqis fear their country is sliding back to the worst of the chaos experienced in the last decade. Even Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain and Kuwait could be infected. It could become a regional religious war similar to that witnessed in Iraq 2006-2008, but far wider and without the moderating influence of American forces.

All this reminds me of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618-1648, a series of wars principally fought in Central Europe, involving most of the countries of Europe. It was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history.

Initially, it was fought largely as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. Over time it developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers of the time. When that happened the war became less  religious and more a rivalry for political domination degenerating to further warfare between France and the Austria- Prussia powers, the old Habsburg Regime. The war saw the devastation of entire regions. Famine and disease not only greatly decreased the population of the central Europe, it also bankrupted most countries.

It could well be that the Sunni-Shiite conflict will follow that same pattern, starting out as a dispute between two or more tribes and then involving Turkey, Iran, Israel, and perhaps eventually the USA, Russia and China.

Back to Syria. I don’t believe that Assad is to blame for the poisoned attack. He was gaining the upper hand and the opposition was being pushed back. Cui bono: who benefits from such a chemical event? Certainly not Assad because such a monstrous act would lose him whatever goodwill he still possesses. Who benefits?  The opposition does. By blaming the regime in Damascus it aims to involve the USA. It is a plus for Israel as well. Its motto is the old Roman one: Divide et Impera – divide and rule. The weaker Assad is the better for Israel; a feeble Syrian leader poses no threat. Who else benefits? The American military, whose budget faces drastic cuts. Who else? The American government under the threat of a debt ceiling.

The entire episode reminds me of Henry Kissinger, adviser to numerous governments. He probably whispered this scenario to the Israeli secret service, the execution to coincide with the meeting of the G20 in Russia.

Never forget that there is oil and gas here. Qatar wants to sell its natural gas to the world. So does Russia. Russia and China want to undermine the US petro dollar, which gives the USA licence to print money ad infinitum. This is about hard core geopolitics, resource wars and monetary control, period.  The USA is dead set to defend the Petrodollar hegemony at all costs, and above all else. Without it, its financial system collapses. The powers in Washington are starting to realize that the entire western world’s monetary banking system, which has dominated global trade and finance over the past 100 years, is rapidly coming to a critical point.

Here’s what Jim Willie writes, somewhat bombastically: “The massive, unsustainable and decidedly unhealthy debt loads, carried both publicly and privately by all our seriously sick western societies (+Japan), will soon metastasize the malignant experiment of free flowing money induced by the carcinogen of incessant debt financing, which we all boorishly feasted and overindulged on, into a colossal carnivorous cancer on mankind, causing a caustic calamity of epidemic proportions.   Make no mistake.  One thing you can count on is that the grand masters playing this global chess game are very well aware of this unequivocal and salient fact.  They are well prepared and setting up to make their geopolitical counter moves. The pending tomahawk missile strike at Syria is the most telling, overt and obvious move to date.  Why else would they be prepared to take such an inane, insane and absolutely absurd risk over a couple of opened canisters of bad gas, ask yourselves deep in your psyche.  When things make zero sense with this much at stake, you can be sure something else is afoot.”

Just as there is no solution to the Middle East Mess, neither is there a solution to the debt debacle the West faces or Climate Change. Of course there are solutions. For the debt problem the simple solution is to become frugal, to save money, to lower our standard of living, and pay off the balance. Politically that is unsalable. The same is true of reducing Green House Gases. Go back to a simple life style and live environmentally within our means. That too cannot be sold to a spoiled electorate.

So we are stuck. Given our unwillingness to do the right thing, given our political system that is always promising and can no longer deliver, the real danger is war: when all else fails, fight.

In 1914, June 28, just about 100 years ago, a few bullets from a pistol killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek. Thirty-seven days later the world was at war, which lasted four year, killed 15 million young men and injured 20 million more, many permanently disabled.

Today the world is again at a threshold just as in 1914 the year, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th Century ended. Then the old rulers had become tired; all empires were in decline. Today’s state of affairs resembles that pre-World War I situation. Now too everything is up for grabs. Nothing is sure anymore: jobs, working conditions, pensions, the weather. In 1914 a radical student, an anarchist, lit the fuse that engulfed the world. In the aftermath Russia collapsed, emperors were exiled or killed, Germany saw hyperinflation, the world experienced the Dirty Thirties during which Hitler rose to power, ending the armistice of 20 years -1918-1938 – and concluding the war that had started in 1914, and that, before it ended in 1945 with the atom bomb, also gave us the Holocaust and another 60 million casualties.

Civilization started in the ancient Middle East. Will a guided missile, the equivalent of the bullets fired in Sarajevo, aimed at the powder keg that is the Middle East, where the enemy of my enemy is another enemy, have identical consequences for Our World Today and unleash the war to end us all?

Pray for peace. Support efforts to help the refugees.

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Our World Today

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Our World Today

Will Fracking free us from fuel famine forever?

September 1 2013

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
President Barack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union speech

Costica Bradatan in a recent article in the New York Times starts his article as follows:

In her exploration of the Catholic religion, “Letter to a Priest,” written the year before her death in 1943, Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.” The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who was one such writer, talks of the change of language as a catastrophic event in any author’s biography. And rightly so.”

This definitely fits my profile. My writing in a language different than my original tongue has been a life-altering experience: it has changed my entire personality, my outlook, my way of life. I believe that this applies only when a person is an adult and is basically fully formed when making such a switch. At least in my mind this accounts for me being different from most others, and explains my inner urge, bordering on obsession perhaps, to broadcast my views with the zeal of a new convert. The article states that “This is why to abandon your native tongue and to adopt another is to dismantle yourself, piece by piece, and then to put yourself together again, in a different form.”

I do believe that all immigrants are affected by moving from one language to another. Many remain intellectually and spiritually at the level where they were when they emigrated: that is the safest way to cope with a new country and a new language.

With me it is different. I question all the time. In a sense nothing is sacred. By that I don’t mean that I hold nothing sacred: I do. I have become convinced that our planet is sacred, that loving God is best expressed by loving his creation and all it contains, just as we show our love for J. S. Bach by listening to his music.

I certainly question Obama’s boast that America has a 100 year supply of natural gas, if by gas he means the burnable stuff. Gas also means ‘empty talk’ and of that, indeed, politicians have an infinite supply. Obama bases his claim on the new/old method of ‘fracking’. There’s a new word for you. Just as ‘to fax’ comes from ‘to make a facsimile’, a copy, in the same way ‘fracking’ is derived from ‘hydraulic fracturing’. Hydraulic indicates that there is water involved, and, indeed, it needs lots of it. This fluid, laced with chemicals, is pumped into a well under high pressure in order to release the tight natural gas or shale oil. This process was well-known, but was not used before because it’s highly expensive, so it became ‘new’ again when $100 per barrel made it feasible.

A barrel of oil sells at a premium, while natural gas is cheap, so cheap that it is simply burned off on site. The reason is transport: oil can easily be shipped anywhere in the world. Natural gas takes a lot of volume, and, before it can make the trip overseas, it needs to be compressed into liquid form (LNG – Liquid Natural Gas) which is an expensive process. Then at the port of entry it needs decompressing, another money-intensive transaction. Thus natural gas, unless transported by pipeline- only possible overland- tends to stay close to home where there is an abundance of supply. Thus the supposed 100 year supply in Obama’s grand oratory is only valid when natural gas is high-priced.

The current saying is that ‘water is the new gold’. I recently noticed a news item, tucked away in the back pages, how in Texas, which has suffered from a 3 year long drought, entire villages are without water because ‘fracking’ nearby had sucked away whatever was left. I imagine that these people now use an adjective that sounds the same as ‘fracking’ but has a rather derogatory meaning. They will not be the only ones to use that description of ‘fracking.’

Criticizing ‘fracking’ is all the rage now. Richard Heinberg, an author of some 10 books on peak oil and related resource depletion topics, is one of them. The title of his book says it all: Snake Oil, with as subtitle “How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future”.

Fracking- frankly I hate the sound of the term – is simply an outcome of Peak Oil. Its real beneficiaries are the financial institutions who have sold this concept to gullible buyers, no different from the Mortgage Backed Bonds prior to 2008 which precipitated the money crisis then. Today money earns only 1-2% which has given rise to a lot of gambling. (A million bucks only earns $10,000 at 1 percent.) So people invest in Fracking. Oil companies basically are after oil. They know that production from the world’s existing oil fields is declining by 4-5 percent annually while demand is increasing by about a million barrels per day (b/d) each year. This simply means that the world will have to come up with 5 million barrels per day of new oil production each year for the foreseeable future no matter what the cost. We, you, I, are hooked on crude oil: we demand an infinite supply which each day comes at a higher price, both in climatic consequences and in hard dollars because it takes more and more energy to produce energy.  It’s simple. The easy oil has long gone which has given birth to a new acronym: EOEI, which stands for Energy Obtained by Energy Invested.  Fracking is high in EOEI, and its depletion rate is outrageous with per-well production decline rates of between 81 and 90 percent in the first 24 months, which means that new wells must be drilled constantly to keep production up. If environmental cost were counted, fracking would have long been abandoned. In spite of Obama’s pledge to develop this safely, the industry sees only one thing: oil at all cost, and that cost is enormous.

What is the cost? The oil and natural gas pumped out floats on the water pumped in, water that is totally polluted. Whatever poisonous substances are left in the ground tend to penetrate into neighboring wells. The unsettling of the underground structures, due to the unusual pressure exercised there, is causing minor earthquakes as well. Also a lot of much more potent methane escapes when the oil and gas surfaces.

Heinberg in his book Snake Oil makes four points.

First. He refutes the claims that fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans. They are based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all the downsides of a far from flawless technology.

Second. Fracking piles up short term profits for a few by loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and future generations.

Third. A major portion of what Obama paints as a century supply has been fabricated by those same folks on Wall Street who brought us last decade’s housing bubble and bust, and the financial footwork that nearly torpedoed the global economy in 2008 and 2009.

Fourth. This fracking phenomenon prevents us from facing the real crisis of our time, that of saying good bye to our current dependence on fossil fuels. As Heinberg points out, there aren’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuels left in the planet’s crust to keep the world chugging ahead on a business-as-usual track of economic growth for much longer, but there’s more than enough to finish the job of destabilizing the Earth’s climate and pitching us face first into a very difficult future.

I found some revealing calculations of the true cost of fracking. Raoul Meijer of the Automatic Earth concluded the following: based on 840 new wells, which added 52,828 barrels per day, or an increase of 62.89 barrels per day per well ( 52,828: 840). Given a cost of $8 million per well, the capital cost works out to $127,205 per barrel/day. If their profit margin – just for the sake of argument – is $30/barrel, this suggests that it takes $11.6 of investment to make $1/year of return. No wonder big oil names Shell and BHP Billiton are writing down the value of their shale assets by billions of dollars.

Out in shale country reality is sinking in. The pace of drilling in the Fayetteville shale has dropped dramatically this year; in Texas, meanwhile, gas production from the Barnett Shale has dropped more than a billion cubic feet a day, to levels last seen in 2009; while in the Marcellus Shale country of Pennsylvania, insurance companies are starting to cancel homeowners insurance and home mortgages are becoming unavailable as the health and environmental toll of reckless shale development piles up.

Writes Meijer: “Still, you won’t hear that from the media, not until long after the boom has gone bust, the hardware has been sold to the Chinese for scrap, and the sole remaining legacy of the shale bubble consists of county-sized areas where the groundwater is too toxic to drink.”

To me there are no longer holy cows. Every institution is in the deceiving game, with banks, oil companies and governments leading the pack.

In the utterly cruel world we live in we better start realizing that the absurd abundance of energy and resources that we all enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century was nothing else but a flash in the pan, a brief period of abandonment of all common sense. Where in Europe cities were built with 2 legs in mind, an avalanche of cheap fuel caused America’s cities, suburbs and ex-urban developments to be founded on four wheels. Now the wheels are coming off the economy. Cheap fuel fueled extravagance and waste that will have to be unlearnt painfully as the last of the surplus fades away.

I am the old-fashioned type, reared on thrift and preservation, on make-do and economy, grown up on buying the best and wearing it out.

We are returning to war-time conditions, to depression-dominated days, so brush up on what that really means. Learn the trades of the forefathers: to make things by hand; to re-use and wear out or even do without. Become self-sufficient and a contrarian. The people in power will keep on lying about the future.

In Ontario where I live the year 2013 has been a fabulous growing year, in direct contrast with 2012 when nothing grew. Apples galore; raspberries aplenty; potatoes prodigious; glorious cabbages: I even made sauerkraut this year for the first time; carrots and red beets in abundance: we had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate our blessings. It makes me wonder whether this year encapsulated the ‘seven fat years’ all in one brief season. Who knows what next year will bring.

An era is coming to a close: the age of abundance is fading. This unprecedented period also saw the rise of antibiotics and the onset of the Green revolution, guaranteeing long life with plenty of food. Anti-biotic resistance is on the increase: too much of the drug has made it ineffective with dangerous implications, as a simple infection may become deadly. A growing world population, higher expectations, expanding deserts, too much rain or not enough is imperiling global food supply.

Will fracking free us of from fuel famine forever? No. Fracking is as cruel to the earth as crucifixion is to us. Fracking is fulfilling the Isaiah prophecy “The earth is defiled by the people; they have disobeyed my laws…therefore a curse consumes the earth.” (Is.24: 5-6).

However, it will speed up the coming of the Kingdom.

 

Next week:

The mess in the Middle East. Civilization started in the Middle East. Will it end there too?

In August my blog hielema.ca/blog had almost 7000 visitors: 6,988 to be exact.

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Our World Today

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Bert Hielema

August 25 2013

77 + 77

At the time I never gave it a thought. When my grandparents’ farm, after the war, got electricity, their beautiful oil lamps were discarded as useless, thrown into the garbage. The age of energy via a magic wire originating from somewhere in the provincial capital would forever ban that smelling kerosene and eliminate fire hazards, but it also meant that something natural had vanished and a piece of the ‘world’ had been imported, the first small step on the path to complete mechanization and surrender to the money god.

My maternal Opa and Oma had two of these colorfully crafted lights, one in the living room and the other in the “pronk kamer”, the ‘show-off room’, the place only used when important people came visiting such as their church minister, or, on Sundays after church when relatives came for coffee. There, in the most spacious room of the farmhouse, the best furniture, the heirlooms, were located, all in immaculate condition, gleaming from the wax and polish.

I remember also that after the church Sunday coffee hour I would get a sugar crystal, a transparent candy rock that made cracking sounds when hot liquid was poured over it. This was before the war, of course, in the Dirty Thirties, during the deep depression, supposedly never to return.

What if?

The then new electric grid is now the Achilles heel of society. The ancient Greek hero had only one vulnerable spot on his body: his heel, and that’s how his enemy slayed him. We can cope for one hour without that miraculous power source – short interruptions happen all the time; we can cope without it for a day perhaps, as long as the weather is not too hot or cold; but weeks on end? Yet that happened not too far from where we live when freezing rain buckled the arms of the hydro transmission towers from which the hydro lines were suspended. It took weeks to repair this damage.

Everything now runs on electricity-powered computers, which are beautiful tools but also extremely vulnerable. They can run a few hours on battery power, but that’s it. Without electricity nothing works and everybody who is anybody realizes that without that magic current that is delivered to our home 24/7/365, everything stops. Without “hydro” as we call it in Ontario, no gas pump works, no refrigeration is possible, no meals are cooked, no groceries available, no water on tap, no heat in the house. In Canada we simply freeze in the dark. In the USA we fry in the summer without air conditioning.

People are realizing that we have a problem. Here is what the New York Times reports:

“The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11.

This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical – and cyber attacks that could take down large sections of the power grid. They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.

77+77

On September 1 1859 – exactly 77+77 years ago – Richard Carrington, an amateur astronomer from England, observed sunspot activity: next he noticed two brilliant spots of light twice as bright as the sun lasting about 5 minutes. Early the next morning much of the world witnessed a massively bright display of the aurora. At the same time telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, spraying out sparks from telegraph poles and causing widespread fires. Then the telegraph was the only high technology of that day, archaic by today’s standards. It was brought to a complete standstill by the invisible force of the sun.

What if?

Today in North America there are some 6000 major power plants and some 500,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, controlled by a staggering mix of devices installed over decades. A solar storm as occurred early September 1859 would completely destroy all that. What if this happens next week, 77 + 77 years after it happened before? Does that number indicate the fullness of time? A solar storm would melt all transformers. Worse all wires would fry to a crisp, causing a universal conflagration. Imagine a world without electricity, a world that depends for every action on hydro-electric or coal-generated or nuclear- power induced current. Is that how our world will end? A recent movie “The World’s End” mocks this prospect, yet it is another indication that the End is near. When? Only God knows. It will come totally unexpected, but the countdown has started.

Even if a melt-down does not occur, computer security experts say they believe that there is software- known as malware – that can disable the electrical systems or destroy their ability to communicate, leaving the operators blind about the positions of switches, the flows of current and other critical factors.

Of course it is good that people start realizing the tremendously vulnerable system we have devised. Given a solar storm of the magnitude experienced in 1859, nothing can protect us from such an event. Life could be extended by a few weeks with diesel generators, given that these people or institutions also have a large cache of food and water, but in essence it would be the End. Period.

A few books have been written depicting such scenarios. One is the 2009 novel “One Second After”, by William Forstchen. The author describes an attack on a quaint North Carolina mountain town, where a retired Colonel is living a peaceful life as a widowed professor with children when one day the lights go out and don’t come back on.  Food deliveries cease and so does water supply. Through the next few days people there start to realize that something much larger has happened.  What they eventually learn is that multiple solar storms have gone off over the US and over other strategic countries around the globe and everything immediately stops. Fortunately local leadership and a good community bring a small town together.

Another more recent publication, also a novel, with the apt title of “Gridlock,” describes an attack initiated by a rogue Russian agent working for Venezuela and Iran in which he helps hackers to disable the grid.

Authorities realize that such an attack could cause 10,000 times more devastation than the terrorists’ strike on September 11 2001.

I believe that’s the reason why neither Israel nor the USA has dared to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities is the fear that Iran might retaliate with just such a countermeasure.

There are also other threats, perhaps minor compared to the paralyzing of the grid but also more immediate. A recent article in TIME Magazine describes “A World without Bees” which would imperil a wide range of our favourite foods. Here are some quotes from that TIME article: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the globe, man would have no more than four years to live………What is really scary is the fear that bees may be a sign of what is to come, a symbol that something is deeply wrong with the world around is….. “If we don’t make some changes soon, we’re going to see disaster,” says Tom Theobald, a beekeeper in Colorado. “The bees are just the beginning.”

 Why are people not worried?

There certainly is no reason for complacency, yet that is the general atmosphere out there. People carry on as if there is nothing to fear, and that too is understandable. We are like the proverbial frog who, when dumped in hot water, immediately jumps out but who, when sitting comfortably in water that is slowly heated, blithely boils to death. This is exactly what is happening to us: we fail to perceive gradual changes as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate change is a case in point: it is occurring so slowly that our minds do not adjust to it which makes it a deadly threat: it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us inertly passive in front of the TV set.

The first step is to acknowledge that there is a problem which is not easy since half of the US population even denies the fact of Climate Change. Canadians are a bit smarter in that regard, though very few either here or in the USA are cutting down on airplane trips or eating less red meat or walk and bike rather than drive. Yet we say we do care for God’s earth. So it’s not a lack of compassion for the planet: I think we find the conflict too painful to bear. Our apparent apathy, writes one psychiatrist, is just a defense mechanism in the face of this psychic pain. Still we have to come to terms with the reality that this planet of ours has an expiry date, which is rapidly approaching. We must make it socially acceptable to discuss this and prepare ourselves, probably more mentally than physically, even though the two are interlinked. It is God’s creation after all, and anything that affects God’s beloved earth also affects our spiritual status.

The world is waking up to this. Somehow the church is loath to alarm its declining membership. They have enough problems already, or so they reason, erroneously I believe. After all creation is God’s Primary Word. We conveniently ignore that whatever harm we do to the cosmos is a direct trespass of the third commandment, which says Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

We are paying the price of taking God’s name in vain. The changes we see in Our World Today are its direct consequences. God’s signature is evident throughout creation; his name is written on each species, especially on our own body, created in his image.

 

What must we do?

 

We must take the warnings seriously. We must urge our church fellowship to prepare for the return of the Lord.

One of my favourite sayings is that “we can’t do anything without God, and God won’t do anything without us.” We have a total partnership with God. That also means that we can’t be idle when these matters appear imminent. Jesus urges the people of his day to ‘flee to the mountains’ (Matthew 24:16). You do well to read that entire chapter because much of what Jesus mentions there is taking place right now.

What can we do? We can’t be passive. We must at all times be ready to help ourselves and others: love your neighbours and yourselves.

If you have a rural property and are on a well, buy a hand pump. In Tobermory, the most northerly town of the Bruce Peninsula, is a firm which ships frost-free hand pumps all over North America. They are priced in US dollars. Those who are on city water, and living in a single family dwelling, get a few rain barrels. Water is just as essential as food. Also have a thousand or so dollars in small bills tucked away and a supply of emergency food. Also keep your gas tank topped up. If you are ready for retirement, sell your city home and settle in the country with some land and woods. Seek a supporting community.

The dangers I have outlined are not imaginary. For our very eyes we see the conditions Jesus outlined in Matthew 24. For the churches to ignore these issues is irresponsible.

 

Next week: Will ‘fracking’ free us from trouble?

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Our World Today

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Bert Hielema

August 18 2013

Our World Today

A Unique Experience

America is alive and well. Or so it seems. We, our entire family, spent an entire week in a Colorado resort north of Denver, in the mountains there, quite central for our widely dispersed extended clan: a unique experience. Our five children had rented an immense -10,000 square feet- mansion with everything: 10 bedrooms, 3 kitchens, 5 bathrooms, huge living room with a grand piano, two dining rooms, one table seating 16 people and another with 11 chairs, easily accommodating the 27 people from age 5 to age 85, celebrating our 60th wedding anniversary.

As is custom when we gather we have long walks, now, for the first time, daily excursions in the Rocky Mountain National Park, providing wide vistas which gave me, at times, jolts of euphoria. We also played games, ate a lot, drank modestly, talked, read: it all filled me with a great sense of gratitude. I did a bit of writing as well, hence this column.

Our universal religion

On Sunday, August 11, I read the real New York Times there, not on the computer screen this time, my usual way, but in its Sunday voluminous mass complete with magazine and book report. There is still magic in these pages, even though selling these printed versions becomes increasingly difficult. The value of newspapers in general has dropped dramatically: the Boston Globe which the New York Times had bought for $1.1 billion a bit over a decade ago was sold last week for $70 million at a loss of more than $1 billion. That same week the Washington Post went for a mere $250 million, acquired by a man who is worth $25 billion for just 1 percent of his net worth. It appears that the future is digital, reason why I have started to write a weekly blog rather than be a monthly columnist for a bi-weekly.

I often read the Friedman column in the Times. This past week’s was especially good, so good that I will quote a few sections. He- like I – takes a global view on matters.

In this column he writes about “The Commons” which has nothing to do with the House of Commons, that institution where people talk not to each other but at each other, like estranged spouses. The US Congress is the same, even more so, with the stakes there much higher and the malfunction even greater, and that at a time when immense problems scream for solution and consensus. The real “Commons” are the air, soil, forests and waters which we all share because they are the basics of all of life. Every minute of the day I try to keep their welfare in mind. It is these ‘commons’ that are under daily attack. They are in such danger because of our state of mind that is totally at odds with nature at large. A universal consciousness underlies every decision made globally. It is the only true global religion. It is a mindset, a way of thinking and a belief system all in one. It is the world’s biggest confessional doctrine. What is it? It is the religion of Economic Growth. Its followers and proponents hold that ‘economic growth’ is the only necessary element of survival, that technology is capable of solving all problems, and that the earth, nature, the living environment, is there for us to be exploited at will to achieve that growth.

The “Real Commons” are totally at odds with this world-wide belief-system that overrides any other religion, whether that is Islam or Judaism or Christianity. What really makes it a religion is that it doesn’t like to question its own assumptions, let alone have them questioned by others, and anyone who does so is immediately ostracized. I sense this often myself. It is the un-confessed faith of all the important people in the world, including all politicians of every stripe in every country, including those in China, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Indonesia, just to name the most populous countries, including, of course, our Western world. Even though Christian institutions never mention it, they too depend on this idol for the payment of the minister’s or priest’s stipend, the mortgage on the church buildings, while parents need it to afford the high tuition for their educational facilities. This never mentioned assumption prevents them from fighting this idolatry tooth and nail and makes it impossible to strive for a stable, no growth society, with continuous emphasis on preservation.

A glaring paradox

Here is a glaring paradox: just because all churches and religious bodies have gone along with this ruling religion, they have lost their most promising members: their young people. The only way to win them back is to challenge the economic growth paradigm from top to bottom, which, I am confident, will cause the aware youth to return to the church. Only when God’s Primary Word – the creation and all it contains – is given equal billing with the Scriptures – God’s Secondary Word- the problem of youth membership loss can be solved. Of course it will also cause people to leave. Perhaps it may evolve into a Gideon band situation. For those who don’t know the Hebrew bible a pointer. In the early days of Israel’s conquest of Palestine they were often occupied by their neighbours, from whom they had taken the Promised Land. For Gideon, a ruler appointed by Yahweh to reconquer the country, the victory was gained not by overwhelming numbers but by 300 men equipped with a torch and a trumpet. Jesus too was never impressed by numbers, and neither should the church. The Church must adopt this two-pronged Word to be ready for the Kingdom to come. If not they may become the victim of the monoculture Friedman mentions in his column.

Thomas L. Friedman is the celebrated columnist of the New York Times who is making a movie which touches on these matters. Here is what he writes: “I’ve spent the last few months filming a Showtime documentary about how climate and environmental stresses helped trigger the Arab awakening. It’s been a fascinating journey because it forced me to look at the Middle East through the lens of Arab environmentalists instead of politicians. When you do that, you see the problems and solutions very differently. Environmentalists always start by thinking about the health of the “commons” — the shared air, soil, forests and water — that are the basis of all life, which, if not preserved, will undermine the whole society. The notion that securing the interests of any single group — Shiite or Sunni, Christian or Muslim, secular or Islamist — over the health of the commons is nuts to them. It’s as laughable as pictures of gun-toting fighters strutting on the rubble of broken buildings in Aleppo or Benghazi, claiming “victory,” only to discover that they’ve “won” a country with eroding soil, degrading forests, scarce water, shrinking jobs — a deteriorating commons.”

Friedman goes on to say that his team looked at the connection between the drought in Kansas and the rise in global food prices that helped to fuel the Arab uprisings, and discovered that there was the parallel between how fossil fuels are being used to power monoculture farms in the Middle West and how fossil fuels are being used to power wars to create monoculture societies in the Middle East. And why both are really unhealthy for their commons.

My comments

For decades I have been writing about the dangers of going against the grain of creation. I remember visiting a small town in Iowa where, when the wind was from the North, the entire town was engulfed in a manure smell so strong that people had to shut themselves up in their homes. This was when I had just read how less than 200 years ago the prairies there fed millions of buffaloes which flourished on the natural grasses there, now almost completely plowed under to grow corn to feed its very cousins, the beef cattle or produce fuel for the minor idols of our age: the automobile and all combustion engines.

The buffalo, the prairies’ natural friend, was eliminated to make place to support an equal amount of cattle which are fed a diet with the help of pesticides and Monsanto genetically modified seed- a creational enemy. Two centuries ago the prairie was a balanced eco-friendly wilderness which supported all kinds of wildlife, not to mention American Indians — until the Europeans arrived, plowed it up and covered it with single-species crop farms, mostly wheat, corn, or soybeans. Thanks to what politicians and farmers alike are calling progress, top soil is disappearing at a frightening rate. Where the original ground cover could tolerate and withstand long period of drought, the present “man-made improvement” not only has depleted the underground water supply, but also is endangering the availability of the very soil itself.

Friedman, in his column points out that “Annual monocultures are much more susceptible to disease and require much more fossil fuel energy — plows, fertilizer, pesticides — to maintain…. During the Dust Bowl years of the ’30s, the crops died, but the prairie survived.”

Of course with the price of acre of farmland skyrocketing as food producing land becomes a precious commodity, nobody in his right capitalistic mind would buy land with the very purpose to cultivate prairie grass – a decade long process – and so restore it to its natural state.

It is wishful thinking to suppose that the prairies had remained in their virgin state and the pursuit of growth at any cost would never have taken place. It is wishful thinking to suppose that the Arab/Muslim mix had remained in its ‘Golden Age” from the 8th to the 13th Century, of which the amazing Wikipedia says, “During this period the Arab world became an intellectual center for science, philosophy, medicine and education. …” It was “a collection of cultures, which put together, synthesized and significantly advanced the knowledge gained from the ancient Roman, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine and Phoenician civilizations.”

Friedman writes that, “What is going on in the Arab world today is a relentless push, also funded by fossil fuels, for more monocultures. It’s Al Qaeda trying to “purify” the Arabian Peninsula. It’s Shiites and Sunnis, funded by oil money, trying to purge each other in Iraq and Syria. It’s Alexandria, Egypt, once a great melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Jews, Christians, Arabs and Muslims, now a city dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, with most non-Muslims gone. It makes these societies much less able to spark new ideas and much more susceptible to diseased conspiracy theories and extreme ideologies. To be blunt, this evolution of Arab/Muslim poly-cultures into monocultures is a disaster. Pluralism, diversity and tolerance were once native plants in the Middle East — the way the poly-culture prairie was in the Middle West. Neither ecosystem will be healthy without restoring its diversity.”

When I survey the church scene then, in general –there are exceptions- I see a church which has remained stagnant in a world that is rapidly changing. I see a monoculture religion that overrides all religions in the world including Christianity. I also see fundamental churches which have become victims of another monoculture based on the bible only with even a more devastating outcome.

America is alive and well. Or so it seems. The area where we were breathed money. Or was it debt? It’s hard to say. Last week I read that 80 percent of Americans are one paycheque away from being broke.

Behind the scenes our Western world is desperate. So far the high priests of finance at their Washington Holy of Holies have offered $3 Trillion of borrowed money to revive the economy, to no avail. It reminds me of 1 Kings 18 where it is related how Elijah teased the Baal priests to ignite their sacrifice and how these false priests failed of course. Read the chapter: highly hilarious. Baal is the god of fertility, the god of Economic Growth, the god that failed. Similarly the false priests of finance are failing to revive the false god of Economic Growth with equally disastrous results. The Baal priests were all killed. The same will happen to the false prophets of the god of Economic Growth.

“The Commons” will always triumph because they are of true divine origin. Our planet has her built-in defense mechanisms that ensure eternal life on earth, thanks to John 3:16, where it says that God loves this world. His love endures forever. Be part of that lasting love.

 

 

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Posted on August 9, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Our World Today

August 11 2013

Ancient events: current repercussions.

The bible is not a history book. The bible is not a handbook for any science, except for theology. The bible simply tells us that God created the cosmos ‘in the beginning’ whenever that may be, of which the human race became a part. It also relates that God gave the human race ownership of creation. There they had a faultless start, but then somehow were enticed to sell God’s creation to God’s enemy. Later God sacrificed his son to redeem (the French bible uses ‘racheter’ which means ‘buying back’ or ‘repurchase’) creation from the grip of his great adversary. Just like a ‘van Gogh’ painting will always be associated with that artist, even though he no longer owns any, so in the same way creation will always be ‘the Lord’s’, even though for the time being ownership has changed.

Colossians 1: 15-20 gives us some insight what took place ‘in the beginning’.  Here is my liberal not literal version of what Paul wrote there:

“This human being Jesus of Nazareth is precisely in his unconditional love for humanity the image of the invisible God.

Jesus Christ makes God’s love visible for us and so enables us to experience this love also.

Jesus Christ lived as a human being, reason why God too wants to be seen as a human being. In Jesus Christ we see God at work for us.

As the first-born of the entire creation Christ is the prototype of our humanity.

In his human existence Christ has made clear what God himself has intended for us as well, because the universe, everything that exists, has been created by Christ and for him.

For all of us Christ went through death because, in solidarity with all humans, he would be the first in everything, including the firstborn from among the dead.

Nothing happens in our lives that he himself has not experienced first: sorrow, loneliness, sickness, pain and even death, because in him God has chosen to dwell in his entire fullness to reconcile everything to him by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.”

Here is something that I think is possible. I am always amazed how we humans are so clever, so inventive and artistic and so exceedingly smart. Colossians 1 tells us that everything without exception is the work of Jesus. Based on that I am inclined to think that he, being fully human and possessing ultimate wisdom and knowledge, called, as the first human being ever, everything into existence. He created us in his image, which to me suggests that we not only look like him, but also have some of the brainpower he possessed, which accounts for the fabulous accomplishments we as the human race have achieved.

Let me backtrack a bit to Adam and Eve and especially Cain and Abel, the first sons of Adam and Eve. These two young men represent an eternal motif: good versus evil: God versus Satan. Cain and Abel are two siblings as different as brothers can be. Cain was a man of action who worked the land, tamed animals. Abel was a shepherd, slow in pace, contemplative, not a go-getter. Somehow Abel understood God’s plan for creation, relied on God’s law, studied the way of nature, and marveled at God’s goodness.

Cain was different. Because his parents had insisted, he too went through the routine of worship but really thought offering an animal to God pretty silly stuff. He noticed Abel’s contentment, his happiness, his lack of uptightness and realized his own anxiety and his own restlessness. Cain saw Abel’s close contact with God Creator and his jealousy and anger grew.

The Lord God also spotted Cain’s unhappiness and discussed it with him, something Cain resented. God asked “What’s the matter with you, Cain? How come you are so strained and uncomfortable? You know the way. Your parents have shown you.”

Cain knew the way alright. He also knew that God favoured Abel’s way. Cain started to hate God and his anger centred on his brother. With his mind in turmoil he thought: “I, Cain do all the work aro0und the place. I toil from dawn to dusk and beyond. And Abel, the pious bastard, what does he contribute to the economic wellbeing of our family enterprise?” So, at one time when Abel had forgotten to close the gate and his sheep had accidently strayed into a field ready for harvest, his anger boiled over and he knocked him cold. Abel’s head hit a sharp stone and he bled to death.

When Cain saw what he had done, he left the scene of the accident.

Then God got into the act again.

“Cain, where is your brother Abel?”
Cain kept going. Stubbornly he refused to listen to God. He tried to ignore God, acting as if he did not exist.

“Cain, I know exactly what you are thinking. You may try to ignore me, but that is impossible.”
Stubbornly Cain plodded on. Then suddenly he yelled, “Leave me alone.  Am I my brother’s keeper?  I don’t know where Abel is and I don’t care.”

“Cain you killed your brother. Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Creation, holy creation groans because of his blood. Do you realize what you have done? Because of this murder you are under a curse and because of Abel’s blood the ground is cursed as well.”
“But God, I couldn’t help it. I don’t deserve such punishment. Your sentence is too heavy. I made an offering to you but you did not want to accept it. I’ll no longer be under your protection and whoever finds me will kill me.”

Then a strange thing happened. God made a promise to Cain. God condemned Cain for killing his brother, yet God protected him, promised him that he would be safe from others. God allowed him to develop his world in the direction he wanted to go.

Why did God give Cain such freedom?

Strange as it may seem, God did this for the sake of his covenant people. God wanted to speed up the development of creation. God wanted a faster pace of progress in the world.

Cain, driven from his fields, uprooted from a slow-moving agricultural life, God gave Cain carte-blanche to bend God’s creation in an effort to mold it into his image.

Until now, until Abel’s blood flowed, God’s protection had enabled life to go on quietly, serenely, imperceptibly slow. There was still a great deal of stability, a good deal of affinity between the human race and God’s creation. Cain had shattered that closeness. He now introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, a desire for revenge. Cain, his arms raised in defiance to God, had broken this covenant bond. No longer does he have a home because murder destroys a home. Now he is a fugitive, a vagabond. Cain, the insecure wanderer, who yet craves for security, Cain is promised protection by God, a God whose existence he denies, in whose promise and covenant he does not believe. The tragedy of Cain, the tragedy of the Human Condition is that the human Cain will always be in search of a home.

So where does Cain search?

Cain turns his eye and his desire to Eden, to the lost paradise, and this too is the perpetual quest for humanity. The search for a home, for Paradise Lost is nothing else but the human desire for God’s presence, the God Cain and humanity in general, rejects. Cain, in search for a home, in search for security, builds a fortified city.

It is now impossible to imagine life without the city. People even in the most remote regions depend on the city. The pensions cheques, the TV programs, our tax notices, they all come from the city. The city, the place of human progress is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his refusal to accept God’s protection. Yet without Cain humanity’s progress would have been drastically slower and Jesus’ birth and Second Coming would have been delayed by many millennia.

Cain built a city. For God’s open paradise, Eden, he substituted his closed fort. He called his city Enoch which means New Beginning. Cain is going to make the world over again in his image. God’s creation is seen as nothing. God did nothing. A new start is made, a new beginning. Cain, with everything he does, digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God. Each solution to a problem becomes a new disobedience, each invention, each remedy a new offense to God. With Cain paradise has become a legend, creation a myth. Cain, in his city called “New Beginning” takes possession of the world, and molds creation to his concepts.

The City, what is it?

The City is a centre of crowds, of churches, of cathedrals, of concert halls and commercial premises. Many people of God live in the cities yet, basically, a city appears to be a place where human desire to exclude God from creation is the prime motive. The city is where people display a remarkable unity to be separated from God. The city is a place built by humans for humans where constant efforts are being made to exclude any divine intervention or power.

Perhaps 50 years ago there was still a country and city separation. Now there is no difference. Food production, with monstrous tractors and so much energy intensive machinery, has become just as heavily dependent upon a total energy packet as the city. The modern farmer is no more than an extension of the city system. Today the globe is basically an immense city. The city now is based on one factor only: economic growth, progress at the expense of creation, progress at the expense of human survival.

Yet the city, Cain’s answer to Eden, to Paradise, is God’s way to prepare his people for the New Jerusalem, the City of God.

The city is now the place through which every Christian has to pass. The City is Our World Today. The World is the City. We must be in the City but not of the City. We must work for the betterment of the City.

For Cain, when he founded the City it was first of all a monument to show his pride and display his defiance to the God whose existence he even denied. Now God has used Cain’s pride and is now using our pride to bring everything to its full potential. The city depends on progress, on permanent economic growth. Once that stalls, the city is in trouble. Detroit is not the only city that no longer functions. Basically all cities everywhere are under a death warrant. All depend on economic growth to pay for the upkeep of its infrastructure, its sewers, water, electricity and roads. Once growth stops, cities degenerate. And growth is stopping. The One Trillion Dollars Bernanke is pumping in the US economy each year is the last desperate gasp to revive the economy by artificial means, and it is not working. Climate Change is the icing on the cake of decay.

We now have entered civilization’s final stage. The Tower of Babel was something God could not tolerate because (Genesis 11:6) “nothing has become impossible for humankind”. Last week I read that people are experimenting with implanting certain ideas into the human mind: nothing now is impossible. Today eerily resembles the visions of Nineteen Eighty Four that dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. In it he visualizes a world of perpetual war – today -, omnipresent government surveillance – today- and public mind control where an ‘Inner Party’ elite – the banks – persecutes all individualism and independent thinking. That to me suggests another Tower of Babel event, something God will not tolerate and in which he will actively intervene by establishing his kingdom.

The City of God is on the way. Cain’s city, that ancient event, is having its repercussions even unto today. It could never last because its foundations are based on human endeavour. The City of God has Christ at its foundation.

 

Next week, all week, our entire family – some 25 children and grandchildren – are at a retreat in Estes Park Colorado. I will probably have no time to write my column. That’s why this column also is a few days early.

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Our World Today

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Bert Hielema

August 4 2013

LEARNING, UNLEARNING AND RELEARNING

Early memories

When I was in the third grade the teacher told us about the first ever train in the Netherlands, one that operated between Amsterdam and Haarlem in the year 1839, just a short distance of some 15 km. What really made us laugh as 9 year olds was that there were people then who called this new invention the work of the devil.

Another memory: my father owned a factory run by his manager and his helpers while he and others traveled to drum of business. Each morning before he set out in his car – this was in the 1930’s – I went to the nearby tobacco store and picked up 2 packs of cigarettes – North State was the brand name- and a box of 10 cigars: Hofnar was his favourite smoke. With the small bakers- he was in the bakery raw material business – he shared a cigarette, and with the better clients a cigar. So each day he smoked at least 20 cigarettes and 5 cigars. That was very normal in those days. That’s how I learned to smoke. The slogan then was “You’re not a man if you’re not a tobacco fan.”

He also was a member of the church council and when they met twice per month, once with the deacons present and once with the elders only, everybody smoked cigars there so that these brothers- all men of course- could hardly see each other in that dense smoke. Nobody questioned this practice.

When I was 10 years old I contracted a bladder infection. The doctor ordered me to stay in bed and asked my mother not to give me food with salt or vinegar. I have no clue why. He visited me a couple of times per week and after 6 week – in which I read 100 books – I was declared healed. Of course there was no penicillin in those days. Women who gave birth stayed in bed for 10 days. This past month Mrs. Kate Windsor, also known as the Duchess of Cambridge, was up and active, showing off her baby boy within 24 hours of giving birth.

The times, they are a’changin

Why do I recite these personal happenings? There is a Latin saying: Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. I know I am a bit of a show-off, here demonstrating that I have had Latin drilled into me for six years. That school also taught me a measure of discipline- which took about five years. Oh yes, the Latin means Times change and we change with them.

Learning is difficult. Un-learning is even more so.  Take the stubborn apostle Peter. For the longest time he clung to the notion that the Laws of circumcision and Sabbath worship, the dietary regulations and the belief that salvation was for the Jews only took precedence over Jesus’ all-embracing  teaching. He needed a special dream from the Lord and later a verbal fight with his colleague Paul to make him change his mind. Paul himself required three years of closeting with the Lord, first to unlearn all the Torah drills he had undergone for perhaps decades as a pious Pharisee, and then to re-learn what the Scriptures said about Jesus and him being the very focus of the Scriptures. Unlearning is difficult. In 1959 I had an insurance agency. One of my clients was dying: couldn’t stomach food or drink anymore but still smoked. Then and there I vouched to quit smoking. Yes, my father too died of lung cancer.

Now it is our turn to unlearn and re-learn.

On Chris Martenson’s blog Amanda Witman has written a series of articles dealing with the changes we have to make in the (near) future, and wonders whether we are still capable of doing so. Her main warning – and my constant thesis as well – is that the last 20 years are not the template for the next two decades. The times are changing. Are we still able to change with them?

The examples of my pre-war experiences show that everything is different now in the field of health, technology and business. However my grade school teacher’s ridiculing that the early trains foreshadowed the work of the devil does not look so outrageous anymore. I now believe that the entire technological development in our lifetime has had a satanic stamp. Each day we are experiencing “the law of the unintended consequences of our past and present life style”.

It is my sincere conviction that teachers and preachers, parents and politicians, must all look ahead, assess what is in store and act accordingly. Fact is that “we are heading into a future that does not follow the rules and expectations that the past few generations have been raised to expect…. We are all newcomers to this changing landscape.  How can we teach young people to thrive in a future we do not yet fully understand ourselves?” wonders Amanda Witman.

Last Monday – July 29- I read in the New York Times, in an editorial by Anthony R. Ingraffeas, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, that the so-called ‘fracking’ way to obtain natural gas which supposedly will cause the USA to become a net energy exporter, will increase Green House Gases emission to intolerable levels due to the resulting methane gas emission. Over a 20-year period one pound of methane traps as much heat as at least 72 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Hard Times Ahead

Each day now we sense anew that something is amiss in society. Last week we learned that the number of honey bees and monarch butterflies are in free fall. I am beginning to think that the coming collapse may not be caused by big banks going belly up but by the disappearance of something totally different and unexpected. Just imagine a solar storm that will knock out all electricity for weeks.

Today there are two opposing trends at work: on the one hand we see accelerating developments in technology – robotics are the current rage – and software that can mimic much of human action. We already know how China and the Far East are taking over factory jobs and that the world population and peoples’ expectations are rapidly increasing. On the other hand the middle class is disappearing while everywhere available energy, water resources, soil fertility and weather stability are quickly decreasing. This guarantees that for those of us who still have some decades to live life will be drastically different. The changes we will experience will be greater than the ones which triggered the Industrial Revolution. Nothing was easier than to embrace the carbon revolution and nothing is more difficult than to unlearn our prodigious life style and to relearn how to live on less and cope with rapidly diminishing resources.

 

We, the 21st century humanity, at least its Western section, are facing a super-human challenge. We have to let go of everything we have taken for granted because we have to learn how to live with less energy, less food and less income while governments need higher taxes. No more lavish holidays or disposable income or all-you-can-eat-food or the use of automobiles. We also will have to learn how to deal with weather-related disasters without government or insurance bail-outs.

Some hints

Writes Amanda Witman: “We must lead by example, and we must begin now.  Know your own values and actively explore your own expectations and how they are shifting as you help the children in your life to develop new perspectives on preparing for what will likely be a different kind of future.

  • A smaller/moderate/slower/less kind of future.
  • A future in which reduce/reuse/recycle goes without saying and goods are valued for their longevity and reparability.
  • A future in which people who can make or fix useful and necessary things are valued more highly in the workforce than people whose businesses and/or skills relate only to luxury living.

“As we cling to what is familiar, we must make resilience familiar.  Families and communities in which kids experience a higher level of self-sufficiency as the norm will have an easier time adjusting to changes that limit their consumer power.  If your kids have grown up thinking that vegetables come from the backyard and the best presents are handmade, they’ve been given a gift of perspective.  If they grow up in a vitally supportive community, they will be likely to cultivate community wherever they land.  If they’ve spent their lives eagerly awaiting hand-me-downs from others and taking care of their clothing so it can be handed down, they will innately understand the chain of giving and receiving that operates outside of the fiat economy.  If they grow up taking energy and resource conservation for granted, those habits will carry them through an adulthood of potential scarcity.  If your family uses many modes of transportation – walking and biking, in addition to or instead of driving or public transportation – your children are already thinking out of the ‘oil’ box.  If you and your friends are in the regular habit of cultivating gratitude and finding the good in your situations, the young people in your life will follow suit.  They’re going to have an easier time accepting that their needs will be met in creative ways, they are likely to feel less deprived than their peers might under the same circumstances, and their outlook and positivity will remain higher.”  So far Amanda Witman.

Back to war-time conditions

Her writings remind me of the war 1940-45 when the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany. We were exceptionally well off during that period with lots of farmer relatives and with my father being in the bakery supply business we had ample access to the necessities of life. There was a solidarity then that made that period, in spite of the cruel treatment of many, a most memorable time. Then too we had to cope with little or no electricity, for many little or no food and only secret radio news, so that entertainment had to be home-made. With a curfew from 10 p.m. till 6 a.m. and later from 8 p.m. till 6 a.m. we were forced to be home. We played chess, checkers, monopoly, read, mended clothes, knit, told stories. The highlights of those days were listening to the BBC world service, following the wars in Russia, in Africa, Italy, later in France and the Allied forces coming closer all the time. The excitement when thousands of troops were dropped near Arnhem and the let down when this bold move failed.

We always used the term: “After the war.” That prospect kept us going. Now there is no such an outlook. There will be only more hardship and more destitution, more desperate people, and more uncertainty.

Writes Amanda Witman: “Personal resilience will be an extremely powerful tool in the future that we face, and we must begin cultivating it now. Honestly assess what you are modeling for the children in your life, and make sure that everything you teach – through both your words and actions – is fully aligned with your beliefs about the future.  The example of adults is an extremely powerful force in the lives of children and youth, and so we must start with ourselves in raising kids for a resilient future.”

As a Christian I have definite views on the future. She is right that we must prepare ourselves and our children for a totally different future. The bible has foreseen all this. Our world dominated by the devil will not last, but the final struggle to wrest it out of his hands will be horrible beyond description. According to Jesus (Matthew 24:22) “if those days had not been cut short, nobody would survive.” Revelation, the last Bible book, also paints a most gruesome picture of the days ahead.

Let me finish with a quote from the Apostle Peter (2 Peter 3:11) “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the Day of the Lord and speed its coming.”

That holy and godly life includes staying cheerful, not succumb to despair and always being ready for acts of kindness: “loving your neighbour as yourself” remains the basic law.

 

In July more than 5600 visitors came to my blog:www.hielema.ca/blog.

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