Monday, March 23, 2009

 

Can You Believe...

...there are still people crowing about this?
It's the great taboo of environmentalism: the size and growth of the human population.

It has a profound impact on all life on Earth, yet for decades it has been conspicuously absent from public debate.

Most natural scientists agree our growing numbers and our unchecked impact on the natural environment move us inexorably toward global calamities of unthinkable severity.

They agree the need to address population has become desperate.

Yet many environmentalists avoid the subject, a few objecting strongly to any focus on our numbers.
And they seem to be doing so on multiple fronts in England as Al Mohler points to a similar article from the London Times. Mohler has a very good response:
Christians must be reminded that we do bear responsibility as stewards of God's creation. But we cannot be faithful in that stewardship if we adopt the logic of the Culture of Death. Human beings cannot be reduced to any cold economic or ecological value. Each human being is made in God's image, and each can be part of the fulfillment of our stewardship.
I have recently reread C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man. More cogently than anywhere else I have ever read it anywhere else, Lewis argues Mohler's point:
I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent victories is a good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man's conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?

[...]

At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its
Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.
Environmental problems, both real an imagined have solutions, coming from man, not by his elimination. We are created in the image of a creative God. Which means, we have the capability to create solutions to the problems resulting from increasing population.

Humanity is not the problem, but the solution. All we need do is tap into that which God has given us.

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