Green Folks
22/August/2007 10:04 Filed in: Weekly Column
22 August 2007; Volume 9, Issue 27
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I had the opportunity this last week to take a short driving vacation from northeastern Washington, through central Oregon, down to the Oregon-California border. A distance of about 900 miles. The occasion for this opportunity was that I was to pick up a friend and his son, after bicycling the Oregon coast and ferrying them and their bikes back to Seattle, where I would then complete my remaining obligations to the Emerald City.
At a stop at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (Clarno Unit) somewhere between the towns of Fossil and Antelope, Oregon, I had the opportunity to meet with John, the Park Ranger in residence, in his small hut. The Clarno beds are really conglomerate mud flows several hundred feet thick, which have solidified into interesting palisades which are exposed along the canyon walls. (When I get the opportunity I will post some of the pictures of the trip for those who have never been there to get a glimpse of this amazing scenery.)
We got to talking about the type of people who visit the area, about 5000 a year. He mentioned that the people from Oregon just sort of showed up, while the people from Washington had researched their excursion, knew what they wanted to see, and had definite plans on where and why they were making the journey.
As our conversation continued John mentioned that what he really enjoyed about his work was taking people into the back country to really get a taste and educating them on the Juniper desert he called home and loved so much. As an impulse I ask if any of the people who had intensively researched their trips were part of his true wilderness groups? Then a strange thing happened, John put both of his hands, like blinders on the side of his head, indicating that the researched visitors were only comfortable dealing with things they knew something about and the back country wilderness was not part of their researchable data.
I’ve been thinking of that especially in the context of last week’s article on green coal, the non green energy, on which the world must rely to continue economic prosperity, while at the same time counter the effects of carbon dioxide, save the planet, and create that new garden of eden. It must work in the vision of the urban high rise office, and around the wide screen plasma in the condo, at least according to the news reports, but will it work in the real world?
The Chinese are bringing on line two coal fired generating facilities every week. They are mining and buying coal where ever they can get it. They really don’t care about the environmental aspects of strip mining. All so they can build our plasma set, those evacuated tubes for solar water heating, and even the most worthless piece of kitsch. Soon perhaps they will try to sell us their bottled water. Water which they used to grow the shrimp we now buy at the market.
On the PBS News Hour this evening there was a piece on the rise of the use of bottled water, and the energy and the waste that all the plastic bottles create, but last year bottled water sales grew nine percent. I know people that don’t even drink tap water, even though it must pass more stringent quality standards than bottled water. Once you move beyond pure water, you have all the non carbonated beverages in the same bottles that are supposed to make you hydrated, healthy, and really cool, packaged with the same problems.
So the question for this week is, are there really any green folks out there, willing to make the commitment to this new more healthy, carbon sequestered electricity, that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” says we must accomplish if civilization, as we have come to expect, is to continue on the earth?
The answer, in the cultural or societal construct, is absolutely not. I want to wear my self created blinders, stay in my comfort zone, watch HDTV, drink bottled water, retire early, and do what I always wanted to do, but was afraid to try. The word for this we have used for the last few weeks is self indulgence. Comfort always, commitment only when it is comfortable.
The High Definition news in Seattle Tuesday announced that this summer is the fifth coldest, and fifth wettest on record. I doubt that will sequester man induced global warming advocates, but as time passes we have entered the real weather season again. All you have to do is to look at some of the Chronicle archives to see that I am a firm believer in stupendous changes, including climate changes. I also believe that most of it is brought about by mankind and his desires. I just believe that the issue relates to something you don’t hear much about these days, that is a three letter word, sin.
Just how much of this modern environmental dilemma is the result of sin is will beyond the space and inclination of this article. However, the solution to the sin problem is not. And the real problem does not rest with the sinners in that big evil world out there. The problem rests to a large degree within the church.
It has come to my attention recently that historically in times when the world or society seems to be in pretty good shape, the church preaches a gospel message centered in the cross of Jesus Christ alone, His death for the sins of mankind and His resurrection as the visible sign that it all worked.
In times when the church proclaims another gospel, basically something that man adds to that Christ alone gospel, or instead of the true gospel, things tend to deteriorate at a rapid pace, and stupendous changes take place within and outside of human civilizations.
I seriously doubt that humanity is going to do anything significant about green house gases in the atmosphere. However, things are getting really serious with those who treat this as a fundamentalist religion. They are acting like religious zealots. The problem is that gases only occupy the space not occupied by birds, animals, plants, people, and similar kinds. Burn a stick of wood, you can get warm, and it is carbon neutral. With a similar volume of coal, you will get somewhat to significantly warmer, but it is not carbon neutral, so you need to purchase some carbon credits. It makes perfect sense in this vapor religion.
I seriously believe that those conglomerate clarno palisades were the result of the great uplift of land following the Genesis Flood. If the Bible be true in any sense that can only be thousands of years ago. If you look out into the back country you will clearly see that these deposits rest on basalt and in the distance there are some clarno deposits with a layer of basalt on top. That is some pretty heavy stupendous change. Not just something to do with geologic changes, commonly known as catastrophism.
It is a whole lot easier to believe that it all took place over millions of years, even though you can see a long piece of a vertical petrified log about forty feet up one of the faces. Especially when John the Park Ranger told me that there was about 2000 feet of basalt overlying the preexisting sediments in this location, and then the clarno is on top of that. That is some pretty significant change. To use the term stupendous or even catastrophic, is way too gentile. Put into the context of the Bible which says that in the Genesis Flood only eight people survived, and all this geology is a result of sin, should scare the hell out of any at all rational person.
A line in one of my western songs by Don Edwards about a cattle stampede says that “that’s a whole lot more powerful than a camp meeting, when it comes to getting men to pray.”
If all this took place in a short period of hours, days, weeks, or even months, it surely is more powerful than any altar call any preacher ever gave.
So there are no truly green folks out there. And only a few green preachers. All the rest of the preachers are content to do things the way they learned, or were told how to do it. Give them those blinders to keep them on course, and they will never venture into a field where common grace and natural law rules. After all it would be uncivilized and they would not be in control of the circumstances. Who knows they truly might have to rely on God for their protection, from the snakes, the scorpions, and even the polar bears.
PDF copy
I had the opportunity this last week to take a short driving vacation from northeastern Washington, through central Oregon, down to the Oregon-California border. A distance of about 900 miles. The occasion for this opportunity was that I was to pick up a friend and his son, after bicycling the Oregon coast and ferrying them and their bikes back to Seattle, where I would then complete my remaining obligations to the Emerald City.
At a stop at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (Clarno Unit) somewhere between the towns of Fossil and Antelope, Oregon, I had the opportunity to meet with John, the Park Ranger in residence, in his small hut. The Clarno beds are really conglomerate mud flows several hundred feet thick, which have solidified into interesting palisades which are exposed along the canyon walls. (When I get the opportunity I will post some of the pictures of the trip for those who have never been there to get a glimpse of this amazing scenery.)
We got to talking about the type of people who visit the area, about 5000 a year. He mentioned that the people from Oregon just sort of showed up, while the people from Washington had researched their excursion, knew what they wanted to see, and had definite plans on where and why they were making the journey.
As our conversation continued John mentioned that what he really enjoyed about his work was taking people into the back country to really get a taste and educating them on the Juniper desert he called home and loved so much. As an impulse I ask if any of the people who had intensively researched their trips were part of his true wilderness groups? Then a strange thing happened, John put both of his hands, like blinders on the side of his head, indicating that the researched visitors were only comfortable dealing with things they knew something about and the back country wilderness was not part of their researchable data.
I’ve been thinking of that especially in the context of last week’s article on green coal, the non green energy, on which the world must rely to continue economic prosperity, while at the same time counter the effects of carbon dioxide, save the planet, and create that new garden of eden. It must work in the vision of the urban high rise office, and around the wide screen plasma in the condo, at least according to the news reports, but will it work in the real world?
The Chinese are bringing on line two coal fired generating facilities every week. They are mining and buying coal where ever they can get it. They really don’t care about the environmental aspects of strip mining. All so they can build our plasma set, those evacuated tubes for solar water heating, and even the most worthless piece of kitsch. Soon perhaps they will try to sell us their bottled water. Water which they used to grow the shrimp we now buy at the market.
On the PBS News Hour this evening there was a piece on the rise of the use of bottled water, and the energy and the waste that all the plastic bottles create, but last year bottled water sales grew nine percent. I know people that don’t even drink tap water, even though it must pass more stringent quality standards than bottled water. Once you move beyond pure water, you have all the non carbonated beverages in the same bottles that are supposed to make you hydrated, healthy, and really cool, packaged with the same problems.
So the question for this week is, are there really any green folks out there, willing to make the commitment to this new more healthy, carbon sequestered electricity, that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” says we must accomplish if civilization, as we have come to expect, is to continue on the earth?
The answer, in the cultural or societal construct, is absolutely not. I want to wear my self created blinders, stay in my comfort zone, watch HDTV, drink bottled water, retire early, and do what I always wanted to do, but was afraid to try. The word for this we have used for the last few weeks is self indulgence. Comfort always, commitment only when it is comfortable.
The High Definition news in Seattle Tuesday announced that this summer is the fifth coldest, and fifth wettest on record. I doubt that will sequester man induced global warming advocates, but as time passes we have entered the real weather season again. All you have to do is to look at some of the Chronicle archives to see that I am a firm believer in stupendous changes, including climate changes. I also believe that most of it is brought about by mankind and his desires. I just believe that the issue relates to something you don’t hear much about these days, that is a three letter word, sin.
Just how much of this modern environmental dilemma is the result of sin is will beyond the space and inclination of this article. However, the solution to the sin problem is not. And the real problem does not rest with the sinners in that big evil world out there. The problem rests to a large degree within the church.
It has come to my attention recently that historically in times when the world or society seems to be in pretty good shape, the church preaches a gospel message centered in the cross of Jesus Christ alone, His death for the sins of mankind and His resurrection as the visible sign that it all worked.
In times when the church proclaims another gospel, basically something that man adds to that Christ alone gospel, or instead of the true gospel, things tend to deteriorate at a rapid pace, and stupendous changes take place within and outside of human civilizations.
I seriously doubt that humanity is going to do anything significant about green house gases in the atmosphere. However, things are getting really serious with those who treat this as a fundamentalist religion. They are acting like religious zealots. The problem is that gases only occupy the space not occupied by birds, animals, plants, people, and similar kinds. Burn a stick of wood, you can get warm, and it is carbon neutral. With a similar volume of coal, you will get somewhat to significantly warmer, but it is not carbon neutral, so you need to purchase some carbon credits. It makes perfect sense in this vapor religion.
I seriously believe that those conglomerate clarno palisades were the result of the great uplift of land following the Genesis Flood. If the Bible be true in any sense that can only be thousands of years ago. If you look out into the back country you will clearly see that these deposits rest on basalt and in the distance there are some clarno deposits with a layer of basalt on top. That is some pretty heavy stupendous change. Not just something to do with geologic changes, commonly known as catastrophism.
It is a whole lot easier to believe that it all took place over millions of years, even though you can see a long piece of a vertical petrified log about forty feet up one of the faces. Especially when John the Park Ranger told me that there was about 2000 feet of basalt overlying the preexisting sediments in this location, and then the clarno is on top of that. That is some pretty significant change. To use the term stupendous or even catastrophic, is way too gentile. Put into the context of the Bible which says that in the Genesis Flood only eight people survived, and all this geology is a result of sin, should scare the hell out of any at all rational person.
A line in one of my western songs by Don Edwards about a cattle stampede says that “that’s a whole lot more powerful than a camp meeting, when it comes to getting men to pray.”
If all this took place in a short period of hours, days, weeks, or even months, it surely is more powerful than any altar call any preacher ever gave.
So there are no truly green folks out there. And only a few green preachers. All the rest of the preachers are content to do things the way they learned, or were told how to do it. Give them those blinders to keep them on course, and they will never venture into a field where common grace and natural law rules. After all it would be uncivilized and they would not be in control of the circumstances. Who knows they truly might have to rely on God for their protection, from the snakes, the scorpions, and even the polar bears.