I have never owned a car. Between 1980 and 2000 I flew on only 3 occasions (admittedly more frequently since). I haven't eaten meat since 1978. I got central heating at home for the first time 20 years after leaving my parents' house. I don't consume much and waste as little as possible. I have always loved the natural world. Theoretically I could be a poster boy for environmentalists but I have absolutely no interest in the environment.
What is the environment? Surely only someone with no real feeling for God's green Earth could call it that. It is a word for technocrats and materialists. I don't believe in the environment, I believe in the creation and this is the difference. The environment has no Creator. It is a soulless place despite efforts to pretend it is sacred in an atheistic kind of way in which Nature exists above humanity. But God made Nature to serve humanity. We are her gardeners not her subordinates because although we are part of Nature we are also above her. That doesn't mean we should exploit or mistreat her which we certainly have. But the solution is not to make ourselves inferior to nature. It is to treat her properly and with respect. However, she is still there for us not vice versa.
There seem to be two sorts of environmentalists. The materialists who worry about depleting the planet's resources and the spiritualists who have a vaguely pagan attitude to Nature, seeing her as the earth mother. I don't necessarily disagree with either of them but their view of the picture is incomplete and therefore wrong. We should cultivate our garden with care, attention and respect for its needs, and we would do well to honour Nature as the source of our material self. But above the natural man is the spiritual man. Above the earth mother of Nature is her Creator who is God, and God gave us this planet for us to act as his regent here. Nature is ours in the same way as our body is ours. We treat both well seeing them as the earthly temple of God but ultimately they are there to act as the vessels for spirit to manifest and express itself and it is the spirit that truly matters.
Nature is not the environment. It is the Creation.
2 comments:
It occurred to me a while ago that Adam and Eve were the gods of the animals, that the human race was meant to be the ruling pantheon of all plants and animals on Earth. It's also thought-provoking, those comments we exchanged some time back, that it would be okay for humans to engage in genetic engineering vis a vis creating new plant and animal species, so long as we did it with the Holy Spirit. If only high-tech civilization were to return to God, we could multiply every species on Earth the same way we multiplied the common wolf into all the different species of dog. Surely this is the real solution to extinction and bio-degradation: genetic creativity, the next artistic frontier.
But not the creation of horrors, like Frankenstein or all the mad-scientist parables - rather the creation of new beauties. Maybe like Jurassic Park - without the T-Rex! One can dream.
Epimetheus. Yes, I can see we are meant to be different but we are not. It all comes down to realising that the political system ensures that we are fools to ourselves.
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