Sometimes when humans do wrong, we have trouble facing the music. It's never easy to admit our misdeeds, especially when 99.9 percent of us are involved. Anyway, we didn't choose this one.
It came to me in half-awake slumber one night with the coal-laden night trains' whistles wafting upstream from the Big Horn River bridge into my open bedroom window. As I drifted off to sleep, a nightmare of millions of tons of coal rained down from the sky, rose up and flooded the property around my house like the river did last month and I was frantically and foolishly filling sandbags again.
There really are consequences to the corporate sin of turning stones into bread—black stones stripped from the earth and burned by the megaton to feed our appetite for more calories. It's not just a dream; worldwide climate trends indicate there may be little time to alleviate some of the consequences of our massive burning of fossil fuel. A simple on-line search of "world people's climate change conference Bolivia," and you will find many opinions from both sides of the fence.
It took five hundred thousand years for the earth to sequester the amount of carbon that humans now, in one year, pull out of fossil rock, oxidize and inject into the paper-thin layer of air we breathe according to Fredric L. Quivik of Michigan Technological University. The Creator did not put it underground for people to extract and insert into our atmosphere.
Our human greed motivated us to dig and drill. It's all about turning stones into bread, ostensibly to feed the world's energy needs for the greedy good life.
Here on the Back 40 nature operates mostly within natural law. No plant or breathing animate life gets too far out of balance in proportion to the calories provided by photosynthesis: the essential ingredient for survival in Big Horn County winters and hot summers. Since creation, all life on planet earth had been operating within the calorie limits of the carbon life cycle, harnessing solar energy to photosynthesize carbon into food or energy.
Once the uses of fossil energy were discovered, we began consuming calories from fossil carbon at a rate astronomically beyond the calories available in the carbon life cycle of our planet. We are now injecting carbon into our planet's air at rates unprecedented in human existence. We have gone far out of balance with God's natural carbon life cycle.
In our farming practices in America, we take pride in our efficiency, but we don't look at the calories we burn to produce food calories we harvest to feed the world. In calories consumed to produce calories for food, modern farming is more inefficient than ever. The typical modern commodity agriculture farm uses up ten calories for every calorie produced. Around the world, rapidly advancing farm technology is raising, not lowering, the calorie input proportion to production.
In recent years, climate scientists in our country and abroad have reached a consensus ignored by the media and many politicians – that the burning of fossil energy sources is largely responsible for the imbalance we now face. We have driven carbon dioxide in the atmosphere worldwide up to unprecedented amounts.
Since drastically increasing the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the earth has gone out of balance and dramatic changes are becoming more apparent.
These changes have caused suffering already, and other nations accuse us of contributing to the problem. Of course, there's lots of denial and misinformation on both sides as in any argument, but the privileges we enjoy require us to listen to the outcries of the multitudes suffering because of the carbon ascending into our atmosphere. It really does take an impossible dream: lowering our calorie consumption back in step with the Creator's scientifically determinable design.
Sadly, there is a million-dollar-plus propaganda campaign now snowballed into every sector of public and religious life convincing us to believe a lie: that humans are not responsible for their climate sin against God's creation. They are smugly watching their stock numbers rise as media preachers tell us God is in charge, he has blessed our sin, and will bail us out before we suffer consequences.
Michael Pollan, the food journalist, writes, "When we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating (coal and) oil and spewing greenhouse gases." Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread too.
He rejected that temptation to sin. It's time for us to confess, repent and start making amends along with the rest of the nations of planet earth.
Dave Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
