Earth--Something We Can Fix?

This year marked our fortieth “Earth Day”. I rather agree that it is a good idea to remind ourselves—especially if we are of the Christian Faith—that our Bible tells us we were put on this planet to “dress, till and keep” it.
That means we should be conscientious conservators and observant environmentalists. After all, you cannot keep (preserve) what you haven’t bothered to understand. As far as “Earth Day” goes in agreeing with that, I have no problem.
The problem I have with “Earth Day” and Environmentalism as it is practiced today is that it goes beyond this. It almost becomes a kind of worship of the Earth itself, for its own sake. Implicit in that attitude is the belief that man, by himself, both knows enough about the Earth to know what it needs and that he has the power to do something about it, again, by himself.
No. I don’t think so. I disagree profoundly with some very basic assumptions made by “Earth Day” adherents.
The first of these assumptions is that whatever may be wrong with our planet we caused it. The second is that we can fix it, using means and technologies we have at hand right here and now. I doubt both very, very much.
We are not powerful enough—our destructive capabilities not great enough—to produce all the problems this planet is having now or has had in the past. To think so is to indulge in an absurd kind of arrogance. We are saying that not only are we captains of our souls and masters of our fates, but we are masters of the workings of this planet.
Stop a tornado. Turn a hurricane aside. Tell a volcano to cease spewing ash or a forest fire to turn back the way it came. Halt or deflect a Tsunami. Break up El Nino and bring the rains back to our continent—or direct the Monsoon rains to fall, or make them stop. We can neither cause nor prevent any one of these natural phenomena.
We couldn’t stop the last ice age; we haven’t the faintest idea what we might do to halt the next. We have no idea how to stop hot and cold masses of air from crashing into each other and producing violent storms. We can’t keep a sand dune from eroding.
We assume that our power plants and carbon emissions are the cause of global temperature change. This is a comforting assumption indeed. It implies that we had the power to do this—and, as an obvious corollary, we have the power to stop it from happening.
The alternative is to horrible to contemplate. What if we didn’t do it? What if we have no control at all of the natural forces at work here—forces that may have whipsawed the planet a thousand times since it was formed out primordial space dust?
What if we are no more masters of the fate of the planet than we are of our own selves? We cannot guarantee we will not be stricken with a fatal disease or mishap—or Christopher Reeves would be making “Superman VII” as I write.
Equally we cannot guarantee that we caused the climate changes we all sense occurring around us—or that we, by some action of our own, can change them back. That’s a far more scary thought than believing that if we just cut back auto emissions all will be well.
So what happened to the planet that the Biblical writer, Isaiah, says was not created as a “chaos”, but was formed “to be inhabited”? (Isaiah 45:18) The present planet—with no help from humans at all—is closer to chaos than we like to think.
Ask people who’ve faced unexpected Tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or sudden sink holes that swallow whole houses. Or mudslides, forest fires, killer floods, drought, vicious predators (by land or sea), lightning, hail, sand storms, giant seas (vertical walls of water 50 or more feet high that defy all survival rules on the high seas), blinding, freezing blizzards—I doubt if many of them would call this planet “fit to be inhabited” or the least bit benign.
So if our power plants and automobiles didn’t do it—what happened? What reduced the planet to the shattered chaos described in Genesis one. Not carbon emissions. Let’s look at a few clues tomorrow.