Global warning... or is it too late?

More than a month without posting?... OK, call it holidays then.

I may be wrong, but looks like it´s true; looks like it´s after all our generation the one that will pay nature´s bill and reap the consequences of a couple hundred years of our unbriddled, unreasonable, perversely greedy and technologically-aided depredation of natural resources. Looks like the party is over and it´s time to nurse the hangover and do the picking up after the horde of drunken partygoers has gone, leaving everything quite silent, reeking of cheap smoke, vomit, and alcohol... not to mention other more serious stuff. Glaciers are evidently shrinking, the North Pole will lose completely its ice cover this summer for the first time in who knows how many years, and so on and so forth... we all read the papers, I assume.

What all that will really mean in practical terms is anybody´s guess. Surely some coastal regions will have to be abandoned in the best of cases and will be violently wiped out by tsunamis or similar phenomena in the worst; several species of plants and animals will disappear faster than expected as their habitats change dramatically, too quickly for any form of adaptation to develop, and all that will happen without any possibility of us doing anything to stop it. We could have prevented it, but seems to be too late, and we certainly can´t stop it (and even now, with catastrophre breathing on our necks, our so called world leaders spend days together sipping whisky just to come to the agreement that CO₂emissions will be cut down in 20% in the next 20 years!?... do give me a break!).

Anyway... at this point, we might as well speculate and imagine that not everything is or will be a natural catastrophe; just as Iwrite this, food prices have soared everywhere in the world, and that which is a nuisance to you and me, or at the very worst a cause of concern and of family-budget readjustment perhaps, means literal starvation to millions upon millions of people who were already walking a very tight rope along the lines of survival. Jut now, for example, the international oil prices and –even worse-- the international food prices are artificially high today with the result that a very few will get incredibly rich and a very many will get incredibly dead.

Trying to get a panoramic view of things, as if we were out of planet earth, it would seem as if there are two situations coming into a clash: our global system (economic, social, political and philosophical) and our numbers. Being as many as we are on this planet and demanding the impossibly high levels of prosperity that we all demand as birth rights, the situation is no longer viable. In other words, there is absolutely no way that this planet can support almost 7 thousand million people having cars and consuming wood and food and fun and producing garbage and polluting streams and stealing habitats from other species indefinitely... and that is considering the ideal situation in which all 6,700´000,000 of humans have enough comfort and can indeed consume those resources... which is not the case (but as if to compensate, the relatively few who do have resources, use, spend and waste them so enthusiastically, that it does not matter if others don´t). And that takes us to a second dimension of the problem:

Apart from the merely natural crossroads we have reached just by the arithmetical problem of consumption being greater than nature´s capacity for renewal and that pollution is far greater than nature´s capacity for assimilation of those pollutants –and as if that were not enough to threaten our survival-- there´s still another problem: there is enough food on this planet for everyone to eat well; there are enough economic resources for everyone to have a basically comfortable life; there is plenty of room to live in, at the same time sparing great areas for animals and other forms of life, but there´s not enough room or resources in the universe to satisfy man´s desperate hunger for accumulation, status, recognition, power and so on. As a result of that, hundreds of millions of the poor and destitute of this world have started a slow but

steady and strong movement towards those areas of the world where there seems to be more than enough for everyone. Illegal immigration has become a huge problem for the US or the EU, and the response has been clear: walls, fences, strict policies, all say “Go away... we don´t want you!”, but the boats won´t stop, “tourists” won´t go back after a couple of weeks of crazy spending (yes, with the money that you pay for the simplest hamburger in a European city, a whole family can eat for more than a couple of days in other parts of the world). So those people will stay up north and start dreaming of preposterous things like eating properly, sending their kids to school, living in a comfy place, getting medical attention if needed and a bit later, if things go well, their crazed minds will entertain absurdities like cars, holidays, theatre, travelling, sports, hobbies, books and stupidities like those. Therefore, they and their ridiculous dreams have to be kept away or, if they manage to sneak in, have to be found, detained, confined andsent back to their countries where they can properly enjoy all the benefits of being a legally entitled citizen there: starvation, persecution, abuse, disease, lack of opportunities, lack of education, and so on and so forth.

I come from a country that traditionally “exports” immigrants, and live in another one that does the same, so I´ve come to know quite a few of them (indeed, I wonder if my fellow countrybear Paddington will be detained and deported back to darkest Peru ... as far as I know, he´s still an illegal alien)... however, the point is that those who leave and let themselves fall in the pit of illegal immigration are not the people who can live comfortably in their own countries; the relatively wealthy, relatively educated, who can live realtively comfortable lives will stay where they are, enjoying fresh fruits and mild weather all year round; the ones who go to play hide and seek with immigration authorities, and the police, polizei or carabinieri are –generally speaking-- the ones desperate enough to think they have no other option.

But I´ve come too far from where I was going to... the thought where my initial digression took me was that if the Lord is not to come anytime soon (and I´m not using “soon” in the biblical sense, that can mean another couple thousand years), but really if the Lord Jesus is not coming in the next 50 years or so, there has to be, inevitably, either a huge natural catastrophe that wipes out a good percentage of the world´s population, so that the planet gets a bit of breathing air, or an equally huge social catastrophe that produces the same result, one besides which both World Wars and the bubonic plague put together will pale in comparison. The rate of consumption of natural resources, the rate of production of contaminants and the depth of the gap between the so very rich and the so very poor have reached their very limits.

What does our theology say about such a plausible scenario? Are we as Chrisians prepared theologically, intelectualy, emotionally for such a thing? Can we get ready and help the world get ready for a partial holocaust? We know how to warn people about the final days and find solace in knowing that whatever happens it´s the doors of heavens opening for our entry, but what about something really big and horrible happening when our Lord´s return is still far away in the future? Do we have the spiritual resources to become this world´s reserve for hope and life when we are surrounded by despair and death? I´m afraid our record is not so good, though: we´ve been so far particularly lame and inefficient in fighting against inequality or against the destruction of the creation of which we are stewards.

I used to think those questions would have to worry my children and their kids, and my heart bled for them... now I´m not so sure I won´t have to think of something myself.