Scripture is full of prophets warning people about the consequences of their sins. And, sadly, it seems that the prophets’ warnings were not often heeded. Indeed, the people would listen to anyone else but them, anyone who would tell them what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear. They would point to those who said they could continue on as they are, saying that they, not the prophets, were right. Of course, they did so at their own expense. Failing to listen to the prophets brought grave consequences to society. One of the most important examples of this surrounds the warnings which preceded the Babylonian Exile. Many would-be prophets predicted peace and prosperity for Jerusalem, saying that God would protect them and that they had nothing to fear. Those who said otherwise were ridiculed and abused, if not imprisoned and killed. Time and time again, God’s prophets, those who felt and experienced the pathos of God, would speak up, and then they would find their message rejected, especially by those in positions of power. More often than not, one of the key messages the prophets gave was about the way society, and therefore, the government, failed to uphold social justice, that is, they failed to give help to the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner, even though God had already indicated it was expected of them. The prophets warned that such grave injustice could only last for so long before society would have to bear the consequences of such injustices for itself.
We don’t know all the names of those who pretended to speak for God and who said that everything was going to be alright. We do know, however, the names of many of the prophets who warned the people of Israel, prophets like Jeremiah who felt burdened both by the need to speak but also for what they saw was going to happen to their people. Many Christians like to look back and thin that if they had lived in the time of the great prophets, they would have stood by the prophet and listened to their warnings. The thing is, they show they would not, because they are unwilling to heed their warnings today. What the prophets said to their leaders is applicable to society today. They gave warnings indicating what happens when society supports and builds up structures of sin. Sin is corrosive; it destroys everything in its path. Those who embrace some sort of sin because of the gain they feel they gain by doing so will eventually see its strike back at them and make them suffer just as they made many others suffer by they way they embraced it. Thus, the warnings of the prophets to not be selfish or greedy, to not to consume the world and destroy it, and indeed, the way the prophets told people to take care of those in need, not just individually, but as a society, remain as prophetic today as they did in the era they lived in. The same Christians who say they would have listened to the prophets find all kinds of excuses to ignore their message. They think they do not have to care for or be concerned for others or deal with systematic structures of sin. They give all kinds of excuses to justify the government, and society at large, to ignore or even be cruel to those who are in dire need. We find many who proclaim themselves to be Christians to be the first to speak out against refugees and migrants, ignoring the way Scripture said foreigners should be treated. They do not listen to the plight of the poor, the homeless, the abused women, the orphan, but instead, say that whatever they suffer is because of what they have done, and so, they should deal with their own mess without any help. Such a lack of mercy is itself contrary to the Christian spirit, and yet, those who uphold this not only claim to be Christian, but think this is what Christianity teaches. It is clear they have not paid close attention to Scripture and its messages. The same people, likewise, tend to ignore the warnings concerning the fate of the world and what humanity is doing to the earth through its selfishness and greed. The world is being consumed without pity; its natural environments are being destroyed; species after species are going extinct. All of this is thanks to climate change, and climate change is clearly being affected by humanity and its treatment of the environment. Scientists, discerning the patterns, seeing the way human activity affects the environment, and therefore, the climate, have been warning us for years of the devastating effects of climate change; some have listened, but many, especially many so-called Christians, have rejected them even as they have rejected the message of the prophets of old. That is, they say the world will be just fine, it will never be able to made to suffer, especially due to the sins of humanity. They say they world will carry on. God will protect it. When will they pay attention and see the changes going on around them, the changes which not only were predicted, but spell out how terrible the world is going to be for humanity, and every other creature on earth, if things do not change?
How long do we have to go before all leaders of the world will admit we are in a dire situation? How long will it take for everyone, or at least most of the people, to care about the future of the world and do something to help improve things? It is ironic that many of the same people who ignore climate change worry about the cost of dealing with climate change in the present day, saying that it is an expensive debt being placed on future generations. The reality is that if we don’t change things now, the cost will be much greater for those living in the future. Not only will things have gotten worse, requiring much more money and resources to deal with them, the actual way of life will be worse, and people will have to deal with all kinds of environmental hazards, making life itself miserable. Economically, and morally, it is imperative we deal with climate change now and not put it off to later.
Honestly, no one can say there have been no warnings, no signs, which can be used to confirm the horrors of climate change. People can easily check the records themselves. They can read about the rapid climate changes which have happened in the last several decades, seeing the damage which has already been done, from the melting ice caps, to the worsening weather conditions which global warming produces. Among those effects are the ways wildfires are likely to increase in number and in intensity. While there have always been fires which get started, some naturally, such as from lightning strikes, but others due to some human activity, such as arson, what happens after they get started has changed: they last longer, they spread further, the damage and destruction they cause is far greater than before. We can see this with the recent Canadian wildfires, and the way the smoke it sent across North America. What we saw then is just a prelude to what is going to happen in the future. We will see more devastating fires, more torrents of smoke coming from such fires. The very air we breath will be toxic due to that smoke. These fires confirm one of the many predictions climate scientists have been making for years, predictions which analysis after analysis shows, is being confirmed, as Isabella Kaminski indicated on the BBC (6-12-2023):
The latest report from scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021 found that fire weather – dry, hot, windy conditions that make it more likely for fires to take hold – is already a growing problem in many parts of the world and will become more common in some regions if climate change gets worse.
On the other hand, British Columbia’s fire season was so bad in 2017 that it broke its own records for the area of land burned. A study later found that climate change had a “profound influence”, greatly increasing the chance of underlying extreme warm and dry conditions and increasing the area burned by a factor of seven to 11.
Thus, in the future, when a fire is set, or caused by some natural phenomena, it will easily spread and cause great amounts of destruction, more than it would have caused years ago because the environment will make it difficult to get them under control. That is, once they get started, they will be more difficult to put out, allowing them to be much more extensive than they were just a few decades ago, as Ian Livingston explained in the Washington Post (6-12-2023):
Over the past 20 years, there have been more than 2,000 fewer fires per year in Canada compared with the first 20 years in the modern record. Although Canada’s wildfire-fighting abilities lag those in the United States, the decrease observed is probably an indicator of improved prevention.
But while the number of fires is decreasing, the average size of any given fire has substantially increased.
From 1982 to 1993, Canada’s median wildfire size was 112 hectares. From 2013 to 2022, it was 509 hectares. This year so far, it’s about 1,900 hectares.
Thus, even if, for now, we find the number of fires in some places have gone down, the measures we have taken for that to happen will not be as effective in the future. And so, what we saw in Canada will be far more common. Fires will easily get out of control. If anyone has been paying attention, California has long been dealing with this problem, as Caroline Mimbs Nyce said in The Atlantic (6-13-2023):
In the past six years, California has logged three of its five deadliest fires on record, and eight of its 10 biggest. More than 100 people have died, tens of thousands have been displaced, and millions more have been subjected to smoky air, the health consequences of which we don’t fully understand.
We know that climate change supercharges these fires thanks to the drier environments it creates, but by how much is tricky to say. Fire science is a complicated thing: A blaze might arise from a lightning strike, a hot car on tall summer grass, snapped power lines. But a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delivers a fuller sense of the relationship between human-caused warming and California’s wildfires. It finds that climate change is responsible for almost all of the increase in scorched acreage during the state’s summer fires over the past 50 years. And its authors predict that the increase in burned area will only continue in the decades to come. The arrival of this study is a timely reminder just days after East Coasters endured a toxic haze that originated in Canada: Wildfire is an international problem, and it’s likely to get worse as time goes on.
In the past, people often asked for signs from the prophets to prove the veracity of their claims. Many people have asked climate scientists the same thing. If we pay attention, we can see the signs, for we see the effects of climate change are already here with us. We see what was warned about is happening now. We know our contribution to it. And Christians, likewise, should know the things associated with climate change are also things associated with social sin. We ignore our duty, both as individuals and as a society at large, to the earth, because we deem it inconvenient to do what we need to do. We are selfish. We consume and destroy the earth without concern for the future. The costs of our negligence are going to go up and up and up if we do nothing. Now is the time to deal with it. Yes, it is costly. Yes, it is going to require us to repent and change our ways. We will have to be better than we are today. We will have to reject selfish individualism and instead embrace the way of community, knowing that we are in this together. We have a duty to the earth. We have a duty to protect it and help heal it from the wounds we have caused it. We have a duty to the future of humanity. We can’t speak about caring about them if we ignore all the ways we are making it worse for them. We are borrowing, as it were, from the future, the more we neglect climate change. We still have time. We still can change things. What we must not do is listen to those who tell us we need to do nothing, that everything is going to all take care of itself without us. That is nonsense. And Christians, especially, should know it is nonsense, as Scripture tells them they are not to be selfish, that if they are so selfish, they will create the conditions for their own suffering, their own punishment. It, therefore, is as Pope Francis said in Laudato si’ (#220), a time for us to repent and change our attitude towards life. We must serve each other and the world in a spirit of loving devotion, for it is only this way that humanity might have a future:
This conversion calls for a number of attitudes which together foster a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness. First, it entails gratitude and gratuitousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift, and that we are called quietly to imitate his generosity in self-sacrifice and good works: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing… and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Mt 6:3-4). It also entails a loving awareness that we are not disconnected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion. As believers, we do not look at the world from without but from within, conscious of the bonds with which the Father has linked us to all beings. By developing our individual, God-given capacities, an ecological conversion can inspire us to greater creativity and enthusiasm in resolving the world’s problems and in offering ourselves to God “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable” (Rom 12:1). We do not understand our superiority as a reason for personal glory or irresponsible dominion, but rather as a different capacity which, in its turn, entails a serious responsibility stemming from our faith.
Protecting the environment is protecting the future of humanity. It requires us to act in and with great love. We must be selfless instead of selfish. We should imitate those poor, struggling parents who selflessly give all they can to their children, even if it means they do not get all they want out of life for themselves. Loving parents will do all they can for their children. They are willing even to suffer if it means their children do not have to. They will not ignore the plight of their children saying that their children should just fend for themselves. We need to embrace that love if we are to survive as a species.
We have the opportunity to change our ways, to fix things before they are too far gone. We have the means to change and make things better for the future, and when we do, we will find it will make things better also for ourselves. But the thing is we must learn balance, a balance which will require us to stop taking from the world, seeking our own selfish gratification without concern for the way our actions influence and harm the world. We must give up or sacrifice our selfishness. If we do so, we will find, we will find great satisfaction and meaning for our lives, allowing us to become much happier than if all we did was pursues all our inordinate pleasure, wherever they should lead us. For such mindless pursuit of pleasure without consideration of others and the harm we cause by pursuing them only lead to suffering, not just for others, but for ourselves. And so, by changing our ways, we will find we will attain the happiness which we seek instead of the happiness which we think we can and will get by being selfish. By taking care of the earth and its future, we end up taking care of our own interests.
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N.B.: While I read comments to moderate them, I rarely respond to them. If I don’t respond to your comment directly, don’t assume I am unthankful for it. I appreciate it. But I want readers to feel free to ask questions, and hopefully, dialogue with each other. I have shared what I wanted to say, though some responses will get a brief reply by me, or, if I find it interesting and something I can engage fully, as the foundation for another post. I have had many posts inspired or improved upon thanks to my readers.
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