Earth--Fixing The Unfixable?

We live on a planet that acts more like a mortally wounded creature than a home for living beings. Its waters, its winds and the violent movement of its tectonic plates, and the sudden up thrusts of its volcanoes are more like death throes than natural phenomena.
They are all dangerous to human and animal life; they all kill. Coming out of the Christian tradition, I am struck by the fact that Christian prophecy makes no pretense that this earth will long endure. Biblical prophecy predicts that it will be destroyed.
Many traditions and myths talk about a destructive past in Earth’s ancient history—battle and war between gods and Titans, angels and demons, aliens and terrestrial life forms. Genesis states that after these battles the planet is reduced to a formless void with no habitable surfaces left at all.
Many religious traditions hold that man can look forward to leaving this planet—most notably our Muslim friends who hold that believers will enjoy an extra-terrestrial Heavenly Paradise. Jewish tradition has held that man leaves earth and goes to a place called Sheol.
Hindu tradition holds that man reincarnates until he has finally reached a level of goodness that takes him out of the reality entirely. In any case, off the planet. Buddhism basically denies the existence of person hood entirely and sees salvation as a form of non-being, again, off the planet.
Christianity is unique in that it holds not merely to the concept of resurrected beings—but of a completely resurrected planet (the “new Earth” of the Apocalypse of John—that descends from a renewed Heaven.
The entire cosmos is remade (Revelation 21). There is a new Heaven and a new Earth. None of the world’s religions hold that the Earth is salvageable. Only Christianity suggests that it will be completely renewed.
That it needs to be completely renewed suggests strongly that it could not be put back together—the damage that was done in the eon’s before man appeared on Earth finally proves fatal.
Totally non-scientific, I grant you—but does science offer a better explanation for all the things that go wrong on this planet. Above all, does science offer ANY sort of solution to earth quakes, shifting plates, ice ages, violent storms, weather shifts that result in drought and destruction?
The only thing scientists seem able to suggest is that driving cars and generating electricity causes all the woes on this planet.
Let’s admit: we do a wonderful job of making bad situations worse. We built shoddy buildings on fault lines, we drill for highly pressurized oil deposits so far under the oceans we cannot easily get at them to correct mistakes or fix accidents.
We use poisons to increase the yield of our farm fields—without reminding ourselves that what kills boll weevils and corn borers may not be healthy for us either. We log off forests and over cultivate fertile plains and valleys—and wonder why they erode and become arid.
But, fundamentally, what’s dangerously wrong with this planet is not a result of any human activity. It so far has shown no sign of being fixable by human actions.
That’s like looking up at the stars—on the one hand it is humbling; on the other—when you realize one of those lights may be an asteroid racing toward us—it is scary. Looking at the Earth—and all the things we cannot fix—is also humbling and scary.
Walter Hoving, when he ran Tiffany’s, may have had a point—even in the area of global warming and natural catastrophes. Remember the little pins he created and sold? What was it they said? “Try God.”
Likely to be more effective than another round of Kyoto Protocols.

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.