Destroying the world's most successful killing machine

Humans killed by sharks annually: 5.

Sharks killed by humans annually: 100,000,000.

Source, based on this study and others (see comments for more).

This discrepancy points to a common feature of our predicament, the often vast gulf between our usual assumptions (sharks are a dangerous animal) and our rapidly changing situation (during my lifetime, literally billions of sharks have been killed and their populations have fallen off a cliff, declining by somewhere in the region of 90%). The fact that sharks are survivors from the Silurian period (making them roughly twice as old as the oldest dinosaurs! And there is some evidence that they may be even been around during the Ordovician) and yet our actions are having such drastic effects during the blink of a geological eye highlights just how powerful we (collectively) are. We have truly become a force of nature. I get the impression that few people have really grasped emotionally how shocking and radically novel this new situation is.

There seems to me to be a misunderstand claiming a particularly Christian character holding back such understanding, namely, the idea that it is somehow arrogant to think that puny little humans can have such large, planet-wide effects. Yet true humility is really an extension of the virtue of honesty. There is no virtue in pretending to be something other than we are. Romans 12.3 says "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought" but does not go on to say "but think of yourselves as lowly worms, capable of nothing and worth even less". Instead, the second half of the verse is "but rather think of yourself with sober judgment". Sober judgement is what is needed. We have all kinds of reasons to be humble - from dust we came and to dust we return - yet let us acknowledge that various historically novel quantitative developments over the last few decades have brought us into a qualitatively new relationship to the rest of the natural world. To do so is not arrogance, but sober judgement. And when we notice that this relationship is increasingly one of destruction, then the potential for arrogant boasting of our powers is quickly chastised.

The title of world champion apex predator, held for over 400 million years by sharks, is now ceded to homo sapiens sapiens, who will be doing well if we can make it through the next 400 years without being the cause of another mass extinction.

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Making Scotland's Landscape

I previously recommended a five part BBC documentary series by Prof Iain Stewart called How Earth Made Us. Unfortunately, I only got around to mentioning it when it just about to disappear from BBC iPlayer. So this time, I would like to recommend a five part BBC documentary series by Iain Stewart with a little more time to spare (it's available for the next three weeks). Called Making Scotland's Landscape, it is a fascinating look at Scottish history through the human fingerprints all over Scotland's famed "natural" beauty. The first four episodes have already screened and are available on iPlayer: Trees, The Land, The Sea and Water. The final episode Climate is coming soon. I particularly enjoyed the second episode and the fourth was obviously shot during the cold snap last winter. Unfortunately, BBC iPlayer is only available to UK residents.

The central idea of the series is nothing new, being but an application of Bill McKibben's thesis in The End of Nature: that human activities have so colonised the natural world that "untouched" nature no longer exists. But it is beautifully shot, coherently narrated and brought home to landscapes with which I am increasingly familiar and of which I am increasingly fond.

This series may be of particular interest to those who think that it is arrogant to believe that our puny species could possible affect something as robust and enormous as the planet.

I made the mess; I'll clean it up?

The myth of reversibility

I made the mess, I'll clean it up.
I opened the door, I'll shut it.
I tangled the fairy lights, I'll unknot them.
I pulled apart the radio, I'll reassemble it.

I scrambled the eggs, I'll unscramble them.
I ate the omelette, I'll regurgitate it.
I burned the masterpiece, I'll repaint it.
I chopped off my leg with a chainsaw, I'll sew it back on.

We depleted the aquifer, we'll recharge it.
We burned the oil, we'll regenerate it.
We destabilised the climate, we'll restore it.
We pushed the species into extinction, we'll resurrect it.

Not all actions are equally reversible. Some, like opening and closing a door, can be easily "undone" with similar effort to the original deed. But many actions lead to a significantly lower level of order (i.e. a gain in entropy), and consequently are significantly more difficult to reverse. While microsurgery may indeed be able to reattach an amputated body part, this is far more difficult than causing the initial injury, and there will still be scars.

Yet the idea that "because human actions have caused our various ecological crises therefore human actions must also be able to be solve them" is a common theme in popular environmental discourse. Even some scholars repeat this unfortunate meme.

Despite this frequently expressed hope, some deeds have effects which are very difficult, if not impossible, to undo. The inequality of ease between actions that increase order and those that decrease order is one implication of the second law of thermodynamics.

Prevention is cheaper than cure
In other words, prevention is better than cure. At least, it requires less effort in most instances. In fact, an EU report on the costs of biodiversity loss due out later this year is expected to put the costs of prevention at somewhere between one tenth and one hundredth the costs of remedy.

We underestimate our ability to cause damage (a topic for a future post) and overestimate our ability to fix it. This is not a recipe for inaction, paralysed for fear of doing harm, but a reason for taking greater care in what we do. Humanity has a marvellous ability to adapt to new and challenging circumstances, but we are also right to cherish prudence.

Who is a child? III

Back in August, I began a three part series exploring my current theological understanding of children and so of my new role of parent. It took me a month to get to the second post and now I'm finally getting to the third and final one. Since it has been so long, here (again) is the outline:

Who is a child?
• A precious gift of the Father and a member of the community of creation
• A brother or sister for whom Christ died and an image-bearer called into service of neighbour
• A recipient of God's Spirit, an addressee of God's word and a bearer of living hope

A recipient of God’s Spirit
Children, as members of the community of creation, are not only dependent upon the Father’s initiative and formed in and for the likeness of the Son, but are also quickened by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is God’s pneuma or breath, which he graciously breathes into all living things. Hence, for children too, each breath is not earned but received as a gift. The length of their lives is not a right, but pure grace. Therefore, while early death is a tragedy, even so it is both possible and right to give thanks amidst the tears for whatever life was given.

Being alive also means being able to act, and to be acted upon: to give and to receive; to kill and to be killed. And children, for all their surprising capacities, are nonetheless more sinned against than sinning, more recipients than givers. We are all mortal and vulnerable to the violent attention of our neighbour. But for children, as their capacity for action is generally less developed, so their vulnerability to being harmed is greater, and their need for nurture, protection and provision increases.

Yet the Spirit is not only the source of life, but also its perfecter, drawing all things towards their fulfilment in Christ. And so the growth of a child in being able to give and receive love is also the work of the Spirit. Children embody an openness to growth and change that is at once fragile and full of possibilities. It is fragile because the accumulation of hurt can lead the heart to close up, to harden in vain pursuit of self-protection. But it is also full of possibilities, because only a childlike willingness to trust and explore can expand lives beyond the borders of the self. Such openness is not only for children, since from them we all might learn again of the renewal of wonder and the wonder of renewal.

And so the double vulnerability of human life is brought into focus by the lives of children: vulnerable to sin; but also vulnerable to grace. We are never so secure in one that the other might not break through. But belief in the Spirit means discovering that the fight is not evenly-matched. And so children are not condemned to repeat the mistakes of their parents or their culture. The gift of the Spirit is not simply being, but truly being, and ultimately, truly being ourselves.* The Spirit brings not only life, but power. Not power to pursue our whims, or crush our enemies, but power to become children of God, power to act despite fear, power to persevere in love, power to break free of destructive habits.

And so it is possible for children to learn their parents’ strengths without each generation being an inevitable degeneration. There are no guarantees of progress, but it is possible for parents both to aim to set an example, and yet hope that their children might yet exceed it.
*Thanks to Anthony for this formulation.

An addressee of God’s Word
Children learn to speak because they are first addressed. Their communication skills are gained though imitation, repetition and play. They are brought into a conversation they did not start but in which they are invited to play a genuine role. This is true both at a sociolinguistic and theological level. Parents and carers speak to an infant who can only reply with cries and gurgles, in the hope that one day the conversation will be richer and broader. God initiates a spiritual conversation with us, rejoicing over us with singing before we know who we are or how to respond. And we only learn through imitation, repetition and play, gradually discovering the language of love in which we are addressed and through which we begin to form our stumbling replies.

The word with which children are addressed is the same Word given to us all: the incarnate Christ, breathed out by the Spirit. And as such, it is a word of welcome and permission: "let the little children come to me". This divine word of acceptance is spoken through many messengers and generally begins in and with the love and acceptance offered by parents and family to a newborn. It may be more or less articulate, more or less liable to be confused or drowned by other voices, but it is never entirely absent.

As co-addressees of God's revealing and redemptive Word, children are therefore dignified. The divine address is a recognition and conferral of personhood. Before knowing anything, they are known, and loved. They are welcomed by God and so are to be welcome among us. We must make room in our lives for children. This is not to say that all have an obligation to generate offspring, but that no one may attempt to live a life that avoids or ignores the voices and presence of children. If God has recognised them, welcomed them, who are we to turn them away?

With this recognition comes the responsibility to respond. Communication is far more than a mere transferral of information, it is an offer of communion, of mutual sharing, of relationship. To be addressed is to be invited, summoned to reply. The same Spirit that breathes out the word also opens the heart to respond. And so all children are to be given room to hear and obey the divine address, to begin learning the language of faith, hope and love so that they may become full conversation partners. Fluency is the task of a lifetime.

A bearer of living hope
Finally, children are born into a dying world, a world filled with problems they did not create. They suffer deprivations and afflictions they have done nothing to deserve. They frequently succumb to the patterns of failure in which they are raised, or by rebelling against them, create an equally distorted mirror image of their parents' dysfunctions. Likewise, they inherit riches they have not earned and a cultural and familial legacy deeper than they can fathom.

And yet, children also represent a renewal of life, a new generation that will face different possibilities (and which may face similar possibilities differently). They are not bound to repeat the mistakes of their parents. They can grasp afresh the human condition and act in ways that are more than merely the sum of their inputs.

And so children are at once bearers of both continuity and discontinuity, ambiguous symbols of new life amidst decay, and yet still of death amidst even new life.

But children also live in a world ravaged by grace, inundated with the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead, and so a world infected by hope. Their lives, though arising from the dust, are not exhausted in three score years and ten. Their bodies, though frail and susceptible to accident, neglect and abuse, are nonetheless witnesses of an open secret: all things are to be made new. Even here, amidst the most beautifully fresh and thus also most poignantly flawed aspect of human life, the already-dying flesh of a newborn, even here, the Spirit of God hovers, waiting to breathe life forevermore.
See here for the first post and here for the second post in this series.
Image by Steve Chong.

Moltmann on creating the future

"We tend to think that the future comes with time. That is how it used to be. But if humanity's threat to itself by atomic, chemical and biological means of mass destruction and by the rapidly developing destruction of nature becomes a total threat, then the future is no longer a matter of course, but must be deliberately 'created'. Its own life-span is within human power, and we must keep creating new respites for life if we want the life of coming generations and the life of the beings which live with us on this earth. The human race has become mortal. Our time has had a limit put on it. That is a new situation in human history, in which Christian faith and Christian theology must also find a place. As a result of this possibility of annihilation, the time in which the end of humankind and all higher living beings on this earth has become possible has taken on the character of an end-time in a banal sense which is not at all apocalyptic. In this situation it is more important to learn the new questions of life and death to which we still have no saving answers than to repeat the old answers to the questions of former generations."

- Jürgen Moltmann, Creating a Just Future
(trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1989), vii.

How new are the threats that face humanity? Does the rise of nuclear weapons or the scale of ecological destruction raise a novel situation for us? In the past, this or that society could face catastrophe or decline due to their own actions, hostile forces or natural disasters, but some of the threats of today are potentially global in scope in a way not previously imaginable. Is there are qualitative, not simply quantitive difference here? Has humanity itself become mortal?

Personally, I think that while we would have to try very hard to erase ourselves entirely from existence, I don't believe it is beyond our power to cause ourselves massive damage. Indeed, this is patently the case with total nuclear war, which, despite the end of the cold war, still remains only minutes away should certain key individuals so decide. However, the threat from ecological and resource degradation is of a differ order. It is to this difference that I will turn in my next post.