The Late, Great Planet Earth

Back in high school when I was a Jesus freak there was one author that captivated the imagination of me and my Christian friends, and that was Hal Lindsey. His best-selling book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, was a biblical template for the end times. He had combed through the bible to look for all of the prophecies in both testaments that talked about the return of Christ and the destruction of the earth that would accompany it. What we were most intrigued by is the idea of the rapture, when god would come down and save all of the true believers, taking them to heaven without the necessity of death to transition them. That book was from 1970 but his most recent book at the time, called There’s a New World Coming, was a thorough analysis of the book of revelation. We not only devoured that book but the youth pastor at my church also taught a class on it for teenagers on Wednesday nights. Well, it’s forty years later and Hal Lindsey is still preaching the end of the world, this time on television in The Hal Lindsey Report, in which he continues to espouse dispensationalist doctrine that also includes castigating the Muslim world and calling President Obama the Antichrist. The Earth is still here and so am I, and Christ, like the Christian god, is nowhere to be found. But one aspect of Linsey’s proselytizing is coming true, and that’s the destruction of the Earth, but it isn’t from the hand of god. Instead, the end of life on Earth is going to come at the hands of man himself.

Now, this isn’t anything new. Since 1945 man has had the ability to obliterate life on this planet through the deployment and detonation of nuclear bombs. But this kind of dramatic occurrence is obvious and much of the world has recognized the folly of allowing such a major disaster to occur and have worked toward minimizing the possibility of mutually assured destruction. What hasn’t been typically been understood by the average person, however, are the long-term effects of human presence on the planet and the ways in which the increased population of humans as a species are currently threatening their own survival. In the 1999 film The Matrix, actor Hugo Weaving makes this point through the character of Agent Smith:

          Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding
          environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until
          every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another
          area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know
          what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague . . .

It’s a startling revelation. Humans routinely call cancer cells the stupidest organisms in nature because they kill themselves by killing their host, but that is exactly what is going on now with humanity. What the Wachowskis, who wrote the screenplay for the film, failed to fully explain--or perhaps didn’t quite understand--is that the virus of humanity is not only killing other species by destroying the planet, it is actually killing itself.

Most of the efforts to preserve the planet have been, until recently, exactly that: preservation efforts. Beginning in the seventies in this country--with the realization that we were actually polluting ourselves to death--we began a systematic attempt to reverse the effects of decades of industrial pollution and toxic waste in an effort to reclaim wilderness areas and wildlife itself. All the while, however, industrialization continued to do harm to the environment through deforestation, invisible pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as unchecked pollution elsewhere in the world. Though the problem existed, and scientists were aware of it’s significance long before the year 2006, global climate change didn’t really make front-page news until former Vice-President Al Gore decided to lend his story to a film called An Inconvenient Truth. The film focused on what were called greenhouse gasses, and the results of their emission, which was tabbed global warming. The hotter temperatures, which were a fact around the world, not only caused more heat waves, but increased in number and magnitude events like hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. Just as important, however, the melting of the polar ice caps slows down the warm ocean currents, causing equally catastrophic cold snaps that have been occurring more recently, plunging most of this country into record lows during the winter, thus prompting a name change to more accurately reflect the results of this kind of pollution: climate change.

While the attempt to save animal species through vehicles like the Endangered Species act in the U.S. and The Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species worldwide is well known, what isn’t typically grasped is the way in which the extinction of those species is like a dead canary in a coalmine: whatever killed those species also has the potential to kill us. One masterful demonstration of this is the film Racing Extinction by Oscar-winning director Louie Psihoyos. While the film begins as a plea to reverse the effects that man is having on the planet in order to save animal species from extinction, in evolves quite naturally into a demonstration of how continuing these destructive practices can lead to the end of our own species through the destruction of the oceans and forests which produce the oxygen necessary to sustain life on Earth. The film discusses the ideas set forth in a book entitled The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert who also appears in the film, which traces the five major extinctions visible in the fossil record of the planet. The fifth event was the asteroid that hit the Earth and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. The sixth event is man’s presence on the Earth, an era labeled the Anthropocene, an epoch in which the human imprint upon the planet is so large that is able to actually alter the planet itself. Psihoyos believes that we are at the tipping point, where man either has a final opportunity to reverse the devastating effects of his destructive presence on the planet, or that it is already too late to go back.

On the same night I saw this documentary, I also watched an episode of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and was surprised to see two segments on the destruction of the elephant population in Africa, something that the Psihoyos film only touches on. Thirty years ago the elephant population was somewhere around a million and a half, but since then they have been reduced to just four hundred thousand. Their deaths are primarily caused by poaching and big game hunting, and those rates don’t show any inclination of slowing. As long as there is a market for tusks, then poachers will kill as many as they can get their hands on. And, of course, hunters refuse to acknowledge that there even is a problem. The ugliness of human behavior toward all animals in the wild was also part of the story. I’m ashamed to be related to these creatures with whom, in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I feel a “loathful brotherhood.” And this is the message that seems to come out loud and clear from all of these films, that man simply can’t be bothered. I used to be fascinated at the idea of lemmings, who would follow the rest of the herd right off a cliff to their deaths. How could they do that, I wondered. But then they were just animals, a “lower” form of life. Humans have no such excuse, or at least they shouldn’t. In the area of climate change, however, as in so many other human endeavors, it seems that people are just as stupid as animals. And when looked at from the Wachowski’s point of view, even more so.

One of the other major forces for destruction of the earth is, ironically, food production. Three quarters of the land used for food crops grown in the world is for the raising of livestock, the single most wasteful use of natural resources in world history. Over twenty-five years ago, when I discovered this fact, I stopped eating meat for that very reason. It wasn’t an ethical issue for me, it was one of pure waste that I could prevent simply by stopping my consumption of farm-raised animals. In addition to the waste of land by deforestation needed for meat animals as well as their grain and water consumption, there is also the fact of methane emissions from the animals that is even more destructive than carbon dioxide. All of the major extinction events on Earth prior to this one have been associated with an increase in carbon dioxide but none of them as extreme as what is going on today. The CO2 that is indirectly increasing the temperature of the water in the world’s oceans is also directly being absorbed into the water, creating carbonic acid and raising the acidity of the water, killing fish, shellfish and coral reefs. But the most damaging effect of this ocean destruction is the way in which it is killing plankton. Dr. Boris Worm has done extensive studies on the effects of absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans. Plankton account for half of all the oxygen produced on the plane, and yet plankton numbers have been reduced by forty percent in just the last fifty years. The end of oxygen production on Earth would certainly wipe out a majority of land-dwelling species, including most human life.

In the movie The American President, written by the great Aaron Sorkin, actress Annette Benning is attempting to get a bill presented to Congress that would mandate lowering emissions levels by twenty percent. In talking to a congressman she finally says in exasperation, “Harry, think like a father for a second. Wouldn’t you like your kids to be able to take a deep breath when they’re 30?” In the context of the film--produced four years before The Matrix--the line is humorous because of its hyperbole. Twenty years later it’s not. The destruction of the plankton in the oceans, combined with deforestation on the land, is going to result in a major decrease in worldwide oxygen production at some point. If it was just that people were ignorant and didn’t care that would be one thing, but the reality is much more insidious. A great portion of the world’s population, deluded by the promises of religion, actually denigrates the world itself as well as all life on it. Both Muslims and Christians believe in a fairy tale of life beyond this one, and their holy books tell them to focus on that and ignore hardships and struggles here. This has led to an unprecedented amount of human death and destructing at the hands of religion, not just the terrorism we’re experiencing today, but terrorism from Christians in the form of the Inquisition, the Crusades, and Witch Trials which have murdered more people than all Muslim terrorist attacks put together.

One of the most powerful lines from An Inconvenient Truth comes early on in the film, something of a thesis statement, really. Al Gore states: “There are good people who are in politics, in both parties, who hold this at arm’s length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes become inescapable.” It’s a great line because it stresses the moral obligation that we have to stop destroying our planet. But morality has been kicked to the curb in recent years, in the cruelest of ironies by those from the right who used to espouse it the most. With the ascension of Donald Trump, however--not to mention scandals too numerous to count--the right has no more moral high ground on which to stand. They are liars who deny climate change in order to line their pockets with money from fossil fuel producers and get elected by a base constituency that is too ignorant to understand what they’re doing. They pander to evangelicals by telling them that science is lying to them, because Christians are not allowed to believe that god is not in full control of nature or it would expose what they’ve childishly believed for the last two thousand years as the giant deception it really is. By killing the planet and everything on it, we are really killing ourselves. It’s that simple. Forget black lives matter, all life matters, not just human life. Because without those other lives on Earth, it may very well mean the end of our own.