Food and Climate Change

Good morning, Foodies of the realm!

I'll bet you ate today. I did. We take food for granted, don't we? Maybe we shouldn't. After all, in recorded human history, the plenty we have enjoyed here in America, despite the Dust Bowl days, is nearly a complete anomaly.

Never have so many needed to feed every day from this planet and its life support systems. And never has human activity so heavily altered those very systems with a relentless and ongoing assault.

Consider this: People warned us that our financial system and sudden boom of apparent wealth was built on a house of cards. But we plunged full speed ahead anyway. Sure, some people got mortgages for homes they could not afford. But lenders were only too willing to give them ever bigger ones when alarm bells should have been sounding all over the place.

But here's the real kicker: The Big Shot bankers and creators of "financial instruments" were only too eager to bundle, buy, sell, repackage and overvalue all this trash TO US AND TO EACH OTHER--KNOWING FULL WELL THAT IT WAS TRASH, THAT IT COULD NOT LAST FOREVER, THAT IT WAS BASED ON FICTION AND DENIAL, AND THAT SOMEDAY IT WOULD CRASH. We all had a hand. We were all only too happy to have a fattening IRA or 401K with visions of how well we could retire, the house we could suddenly afford--not by saving or flipping burgers but by flipping dwellings.

But wasn't it one hell of a joyride while it lasted? It's like taking a brand new Corvette, stomping the gas full to the floor and heading straight for the biggest concrete bridge abutment a mile down the road at 185 MPH. One hell of a joyride! While it lasted...

It didn't. The crash was predictable and predicted. But we wouldn't listen. After all, we had a war to fight on credit. We couldn't actually be asked to pay as we went. That might hurt our precious economy!

Yeah, and we needed a wildly growing economy (at least on paper) to even come close to living within the delusionally cooked federal books based on the lie that deficits didn't matter and that nobody would actually have to pay. Ever. We would "grow" our way out of irresponsibility. Yeah, right--when all our stuff is made in China. Yeah, right!

Didn't work. Never has and never will.

Consider these three questions:

1. Are we any better prepared to head off climate change disaster than we had prepared ourselves to head off financial disaster?

2. Are we any better prepared to head off food disasters and famines--even here in our own country--than we were prepared to head off financial disaster?

3. Is question 2 in any way shape or form dependent on question 1?

As you ponder the above, ponder this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29386865 .

Didn't we say for the past decade that we could not actually severely limit our anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases and other causes of global warming because it might "hurt our economy"?

What economy can there possibly be without the healthy life support systems of earth? Answer me that, and I'll totally shut up forever.

Otherwise,...let's talk and be about repentance and prayer.

Meanwhile, devour the Spring 2009 issue of yes! Magazine. It's all about food: http://www.yesmagazine.org/ . You can even get a free trial issue. Free. The economy gets a mention, too. The real one. There's a metric ton of stuff you and I can do. Right now.

Shalom,

Pastor Roger