Realistic responsibility for Mother Earth
People have been predicting the end of the world almost as long as it has been in existence. Most world religions have origin stories about the world, and most of them also have end stories. Word was that the world would end just before my birthday in December of 2012. That was the Mayan Calendar business. Unless I’ve miscalculated my ongoing existence, I’m still here and so are the rest of you.
In the Middle Ages when century dates had been counted for many years, there was a fuss about the turn of the millennium from One Thousand to One Thousand and One. Oh right! We went through that again in the “Year 2K” frenzy. And then you remember Joachim of Flora? He was a medieval religious leader who predicted the end of the world around 1200. People even built towers to watch for the coming of the messiah. On and on it goes.
John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) in the fourth century, in response to a question about what to do if you knew the world would end tomorrow, said “I’d plant a tree.” Martin Luther repeated the line in the sixteenth century. Takes a minute for the implication to sink in; namely, don’t hold your breath about these dire predictions.
Today we tend to look more to the scientists for our dire predictions. The world clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been poised shortly before Doomsday for quite a few years now. Meanwhile most of us continue to plant trees…and flowers and tomatoes and peppers.
Recently a major magazine article predicted that a tsunami would wipe out the Pacific Northwest as we know it. Californians have lived under the threat of “the big one” that would sink everything west of the San Andreas fault into the Pacific via earthquake. This year we’ve got orange skies from unprecedented Canadian forest fires. Hurricanes increase in intensity along the southeast coast. There’s always something.
I don’t mean that we should ignore signs of destruction roundabout us. Human encroachment on the earth does hold consequences which are sometimes dire. We are always in danger of rendering living things extinct by our overuse of natural resources. Habitat continues to shrink for birds, even as the birds continue to seek and find ways to endure under reduced circumstances. The oceans need our help. The glut of junk continues to choke us.
Are human beings resourceful enough – one is tempted to say, clever enough - to continue to find the balance between our actual needs, the life cycle of those roundabout us, and the finite resources of the planet? That’s the question I always find myself asking.
Public figures within our memory span suggested that it didn’t matter what we did to the earth because God would end it soon anyway and put us out of our misery. This is not the sort of “religion” I want. I can’t imagine you do, either. Such talk is a call to irresponsibility and/or greed under the flimsy cover of divine providence. Reject it out of hand, please.
The process of continuing to live on this blue sphere requires incremental victories. People look for small improvements, not gigantic solutions. The gigantic solutions are more than we can handle; they are overwhelming and thus become a counsel of despair. Maybe that’s why people respond to the memes online when somebody saves one drowning fawn.
Arbor Day was in June, but you might want to plant a sign that life goes on despite our problems…but it will take all of us to find new ways to live on and sustain planet earth.
Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is a retired Orthodox Christian priest. Contact him at gabrielcroch@aol.com.
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Realistic responsibility for Mother Earth
