Sunday, July 12, 2015

Green Killers

Worldview
Green Killers
The worship of Nature
By Stephen L. Wilmeth


             The sun came up over the Organs in a blaze of glory.
            The rain of yesterday afternoon and last night enveloped everything in heavy dew. The smell of freshness mingled with the twang of creosote that only the children of the Southwest can find nostalgic and soothing. The monsoons are suggesting they are once again on time and on our doorstep. Hope is creeping into our discussions.
            In an introductory prayer at our monthly conservation district board meeting, Joe offered praise to our Lord. He asked for abundant rains to recharge our parched lands and spread health across our community.
            Prayer this morning in the presence of sunrise and the magnificence of the landscape was no different. Praise and thanksgiving was renewed with conviction, but the prayer was not offered to the mountain or the first rays of the sun, nor was it given to the serenity of the cool, breaking dawn.
            Praise and thanksgiving was given to our Father, our all loving, living God … Creator of all.
            Despotic radicalism
            The presence of mere politico jeffes has given way to historical tyrants.
            These people are not just authoritarians that are ruled by ideology and force their presence on us by oppressed obedience. These people have emerged as depots who demand their belief system be accepted on the basis of systemic change. Their tools are regulatory instruments of bludgeon to torture masses until they denounce even their loved ones.
            George Orwell’s genius has foretold naked truth.
            The problem with regulatory bludgeoning, though, is that it invariably gives rise to fundamental dissection of society and the world community. Complete compliance to a sustainable and altered belief system cannot be achieved with victories in the courts or negotiated outcomes alone. In our case, there remain too many people who harbor constitutional objections and they will become dangerous to the agenda. The regime will be forced to compel that element to obey in more drastic measures, but this process isn’t new.
            How do we know this? The progression is as old as mankind itself. It has been repeated time and again, but what we are starting to realize is that it is grounded in the most simplistic of beliefs. It is a matter of the conflict of the most basic of Mosaic Law.
            You shall have no other gods before Me,” God spoke to Moses. “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath; or that is in the water under the earth.; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them … for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”
            Whether you are a believer or not, there is great evidence that departure from this Judeo-Christian commandment has resulted in repeated and profound consequences. The matter is grounded in the outcome of choosing to honor and worship the Creator or the alternative of honoring and worshipping the creation, nature.
            The former necessarily elevates the individual to the intended stewardship of his surrounding and to be judged by his own actions. The latter reverses the process and proclaims that the Judeo-Christian ethic is not only wrong it has created earthly disasters by its self assigned dominion of nature.
            Since the whole of nature becomes the object of worship, indeed the revocation of God, any sin against the earth is a crime. Blame and diminution is cast toward the individual. Nature emerges as all powerful. It must be obeyed. This obedience is enforced through the state. There, enlightened men must craft legislation for new rules based on biology and instinct rather than Christian-Judeo philosophy and rationality.
God is dead theology emerges and the remnants of western morality must not just be eliminated, but … annihilated.
            Green killing machines
             For too long, we have been immersed in a stupor of false expectation that we can prevail in the environmental debate with reason and or concession. In every instance, that assumption is woefully irrational and naive.
            Let’s start with the United State Forest Service. It was founded on the premise of maintaining a ready supply of timber for the conversion of lumber for the American public. The other mission pillar was to assure downstream flows of water. Neither of those charges is even remotely managed today. Up until the ‘90s, 10-12 billion board feet of timber were harvested for lumber. Last year only 2.9 billion board feet was harvested. The pent up fuel inventory from excessive growth has placed more than a third of all forest growth at extreme risk of catastrophic fire loss. Snow pack models no longer result in expected downstream flows of water. Timber with historic 50-75 trees per acre no longer exist. Densities of up to 2500 trees per acre sop up down stream flows.
            Environmental extremists including the agency’s hierarchy along with their controlling nongovernmental conservation groups have all but halted productive management. Their slanderous accusations that human action is destructive to their natural shrine have all but destroyed American forests along with the communities that must rely on them.
            America isn’t the only stage, though, for the grand operatic performances of the God is dead theologians.
            Wrecking crews from the UN are leading the assault on carbon based energy supplies across the globe. The sustainable fuel frenzy has placed hydropower dams in the pipeline on the major watershed of Asia and South America. A new study from the Amazon suggests that opting for hydropower versus petroleum based fuels jeopardizes 3800 species.
            The same climate policy threatens to displace millions of people while destroying China’s entire river system. To satisfy goals for generating renewable energy, all rivers in the southwest quadrant of that country will be damned by 2030. In reviewing the plan for presentation at the Paris energy summit in December, our White House hails the effort.
            Similar policies in England have eliminated or delayed efforts to make that country energy independent through their shale based oil reserves. With data now streaming in from the absence of sun spot activity, the loser of the English energy wars will not be the environment when winters over the next quarter century could begin to experience to ‘Maunder minimum’ effect. The last time that happened, between 1645 and 1715, the Thames froze. It will be the poor … the very people who can ill afford the policy debacles and gutted aftermath of the green killing machine.
            The greenest sacrifice
            The most horrific consequence of nature worship, however, is the armed conflict that invariably occurs after the followers elevate mortals into worship status. The Old Testament doesn’t provide the only examples. World War II is the modern iteration.
            The war was not just a conflict of Nazis against the Jews, Christians, and Bolsheviks, a diatribe where those people were labeled as aliens in the natural world and interfered with its harmonious natural processes. It was a war waged by Germanic naturalists supporting their need for expanding wilderness against invasive species of humans who threatened the “eternal justice” of the nature that Hitler called Heaven. This heavenly place, this wilderness, was termed lebensraum which translates as living space. In the Hitler view, it meant “natural habitat” where the Aryans or Volk would spring from ‘the blood and the soil’ of Germany.
            As planned by Hitler, the modern Lebensraum was going to be carved out of eastern Russia where the Volk would resettle and live in harmony with nature. The resident Bolshevik (Slavs and Jews) was going to be eliminated or enslaved. The Nazis used that excuse to invade Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine.
            Under the banner of National Socialism, Nazi chauvinism, the protection of the fatherland, and their environmental policies worked hand in hand. Millions of people were killed on the battlefields, the cities, and … in the ovens.
            Worldview
            We have a real problem.
            Once again, the two sides, the God centered believers and the environmental existentialists, are arrayed in juxtaposition. We have observed that the acceleration to this point was not swayed by reason or concession.
            This time we don’t have a leader or leaders that we can rely upon to make decisions that are best. We have leadership that demonstrates acceptance of the stance of the environmental theologians.
            There is also the growing chasm between people who actually deal with stewardship of land and those who lend their voices and allegiance to saving the environment without a clue or practical knowledge as to how to actually fend for themselves in a time of shortage, famine, and or hostility. The risk of catastrophe the like the world has never seen looms larger and larger.
            In prayer this morning, my Creator was once again sought. “Deliver me from evil” was the plea in the morning silence.
Indeed … deliver us all from evil.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “For your Bible lesson today, read and reread Psalm 2.”

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