Essays in Idleness

It would appear that there is no shortage of water on this planet. I have travelled broadly, and can assure gentle reader that this is so. Very well, I have not crossed the Sahara, but neither have I rowed up the Amazon where, I hear, everything is damp. These things balance out. There don’t seem to be any waterspouts, spinning our precious water into outer space. I’d be alarmed if there were. But no, it appears the water is staying. When I read the works of our environmentalcases, who tell me there is a shortage of water, I must fight the temptation to say: “Thou fool!”

This is not Venus, or Mars. I am prepared to believe there are water shortages there; and perhaps worse on Mercury, to say nothing of the Moon. Moreover, our water comes (overwhelmingly: again, I have checked) in convenient liquid form. True, much of it is salted; but that is a problem we can cope with. Verily, we’ve been coping for some time, and as the population of soi-disant Sapiens increases, we have increasing brain-power to address such tasks. Let me not bore gentle reader with the latest I have read in the popular science journals.

For this is my point. The good Lord placed us in our orbit, just so. In innumerable other ways, He made this planet suitable for human habitation. (See: Isaiah.) And then He put us here. (The whole story is told at the beginning of Genesis, in words that were comprehensible to the ancient Hebrews, and remain so even to me.) Our advancement to the anthropic cosmological principle is just scientific details; the whole thing fits together better the more we look.

I was a conservationist as long as I can remember. That’s not the same thing as an environmentalcase. Built into my assumptions about the world, even before I consciously “believed in God,” was the notion that the universe is big, and that the point of conservation was to make things better for the people who live in this tiny place. The planet — Gaia, or however you want to personify it — can take care of itself. (Or herself, as I prefer.) She is not within our power to abuse. Problems only arise when she is apparently abusing us, and in that case, the solution seems invariably to be, quit being stupid.

We shouldn’t do a thing for Gaia. We should only do things for ourselves. Sometimes, as in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and so forth, this involved megaprojects, and sometimes it might still. But day to day, the rule “adapt or die” is sufficient instruction to be getting on with.

As gentle reader may guess, I am working towards a subtlety. In fact, I have already revealed it. The world is for us, not us for the world. We are in the world, not of it, as Christ and various predecessors stated; or at least hinted, in their seasons. What the world “owes” us she has long since paid; what we owe the world is, arguably, our children. (Not killing them is, to my mind, an important conservation point.)

Glancing through this Tutti Frutti document, or whatever the label was on what was discharged from the Vatican the other day, I am appalled. My own Holy Father gets the order backwards. He seems to think that we owe the world something. He really should clarify that we do not.