CLIMATE CHANGE: REPENTANCE OR COSMOCIDE
And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the
earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree.
Revelation 9, 4
The climate of the world is changing. Nobody now doubts it. Whether it
is the unusual number of hurricanes of unheard violence sweeping off the
Gulf of Mexico into the southern United States, or the cooling of currents
from the Gulf Stream which could one day freeze north-western Europe,
or floods or droughts in so many parts of the world, climate change is
here. However, there are two questions which remain in doubt. The first
is how fast the climate is changing. The second is the extent to which
manmade pollution is the cause of these changes.
Perhaps no scientist knows the answer to the first question and opinions differ. As regards the second question, the answer is obscured by human politics. Those on the right wing claim that manmade pollution, the burning of fossil fuels, is only one of the reasons for what they see as a cyclical climate change. Those on the left, however, claim that manmade pollution is wholly to blame for it.
It is not for us to talk politics. Nevertheless, one fact remains. To some extent, lesser or greater, according to political preferences, human sin and greed are destroying the planet. It matters not if the source of the problem is deforestation, as in Romania or the Ukraine, the Amazon or Indonesia, so causing flooding, or industrial pollution in resource-hungry Western Europe, North America, China and India, the fact is that none of this change is inevitable. Human beings could choose to live differently. There is no reason to despair at the melting of ice-caps, the rising of sea-levels, the warming of the oceans, recurrent flooding and droughts. Repentance is always possible, even at the last minute, for those who are prepared to confess their sin. However, repentance is impossible, if man is so stony-hearted that he refuses to admit his own responsibility and make the necessary sacrifices, hypocritically blaming everything on someone else somewhere else.
In the atheistic
philosophies and theories of the Western world, the nineteenth century
became that of the death of God, Deicide. In the World Wars and concentration
camps of the Westernized world, the twentieth century became that of the
death of man, Genocide. Unless there is repentance, in its environmental
pollution, the twenty-first century promises to become that of the apocalyptic
death of God’s Creation, the death of the Planet: Cosmocide.
