Tending and Keeping the Garden

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Genesis 1:26-28

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. Genesis 1:15

Genesis 1:26-28 has been referred to by environmentalists as “the dominion passage.” Many of them make the case that the predations of the western capitalist system are a consequence the injunction delivered in Genesis by God to man to go out and dominate the earth.

David Suzuki, who I frequently have mentioned in a less than positive light, has claimed that the statement gives rise to man’s inappropriate assumption that we have a right to exert control over the world and that it has made the anthropocentric modern man into a terrible monster intent on destroying the environment. The Club of Rome has claimed that the “dominion passage” is at the core of the western world’s destructive presence leading to their frequent use of terms like “cancer on the planet” or “viruses inhabiting the ecosystem” to describe mankind.

Today I would like to take a brief look at the claims of environmental alarmists and how they have misinterpreted or misrepresented what they call the dominion passage to use as validation for a modern environmentalist movement which has nothing to do with science, philosophy or theology and merely serves as a vehicle for resentment against prosperity with a deep genocidal undercurrent which underpins all modern environmentalist thinking.

Dave Foreman, founder of the Earth First! movement, inspired by Arne Naess’ “deep ecology,” has made claims such as Ethiopia’s famine is merely nature’s way of controlling population. Him, along with other climate alarmists such as Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968), John Gray (Straw Dogs, 2002) and Michael Zimmerman (Contesting Earth’s Future, 1994) have made frequent claims devaluing human life and the

uniqueness of human consciousness, suggesting our rapacious nature derives from “the dominion passage” and that there are too many people on the earth. It is important to remember that the claim that there are too many people on the earth comes, embedded with it, the suggestion that we ask a couple billion of them to leave.

Bill Gates, in his 2010 TED Talk Innovating to Zero!, suggested the necessity of slowing population growth with the goal of reducing the overall population of the planet. The Club of Rome, an international think tank founded in 1968, addressing this overpopulation in their 1972 report The Limits to Growth, suggested, wildly incorrectly, that overpopulation would lead to global famine by the year 2000.

I want to leave absolutely no ambiguity here, modern environmentalism is genocide by a kinder name. The abhorrent and despicable undercurrents of the environmental alarmists (as well as several 20th century dictators) is simple — the population of humans needs to be drastically reduced. Under the guise of environmental sustainability, environmentalists since the 1960’s have been advocating for genocide and many of them have pointed to “the dominion passage” in Genesis as the origin of man’s predatory nature on the ecosystem which has led to the need for depopulation.

So let’s leave the genocidal climate alarmists to the side for now and take a look at some interesting things.

In 1883 the British government along with the Prince of Whales (later King Edward VII) asked Thomas Huxley (grandfather of Aldous Huxley) to speak at the International Fisheries Exhibition in London. The text of his speech was later published in both The Fisheries Exhibition Literature and the scientific journal Nature (July 19th, 1883 edition). Thomas Huxley’s speech focused on ocean sustainability. In that speech, Huxley, one of the most famous scientists of his day and a die hard supporter of Darwin, made the claim that the supply of fish in the sea was “inexhaustible” and mankind could not put a dent in the supply no matter how hard or for how long they tried.

Huxley was wrong. However, keep in mind that when Huxley did his studies leading to these claims the average lifespan in the United Kingdom was 40-43 years and the infant mortality rate was 150 out of 1,000. Fifteen percent of children died before the age of one in the U.K. and the numbers in the U.S. were nearly twice as bad.

Walter Garstang, an English biologist, in his paper The Impoverishment of the Sea (1900), conducted scientific studies on trawl fisheries in the North Sea and at this time he began to show a marked decrease in the abundance of larger, marketable fish in heavily fished areas. Unlike Huxley’s time, nearly twenty years earlier, the average lifespan in the U.K. had risen to 50 and the infant mortality rate had reduced to 120 per 1,000 births.

By 1965 when the U.K. life expectancy had risen to 70 and the infant mortality rate dropped from 120 per 1,000 to 19 per 1,000, British and U.S. scientists had a better understanding that humans could pose a threat to their environment. Since 1965 ocean sustainability has risen, thanks to the collected efforts of the western world, from 10% sustainable to 65% sustainable.

So, why am I telling you about fishing sustainability?

In the sixty years since 1965, when the western world finally stopped dying at what we now consider middle age and

children stopped dying at the rate of 15% before the age of one, we have acknowledged the need for humans to contend with their impact on their environment. We have made exceptional changes in both habits and technology to address that problem leading to an extraordinary reversal of the destruction of the planet by humans.

Amazingly, in 1965 we had a population of 3.3 billion people with an Extreme Poverty Rate (estimates by the World Bank and U.N.) of 48.7% while today we have grown that population to 8.25 billion while lowering the Extreme Poverty Rate to 10.3%.

Having nearly tripled the population and quartered the poverty in the world we have simultaneously made extreme progress in reversing the damage to the environment done since the Industrial Revolution and have set the world on a path towards sustainability.

The long and short of it comes down to this: at best environmentalists are grifters and at worst they are genocidal lunatics. Any claim to the contrary needs to totally ignore any actual facts.

Having said this, I want to get back to what comprises the cornerstone of the environmental grift/genocide — the so called dominion passage.

I do not know and I will not venture to guess whether the environmental alarmists cherry pick Genesis out of context to support their outrageous and dangerous claims, if it is just a con or if they simply do not have the cognitive horsepower to read and understand the book. Instead, let’s take a look at what is actually going on in these first chapters of Genesis.

God, in Genesis 1:1, sets down the pattern which will be repeated throughout the biblical stories. That pattern is the fundamental binary of the universe, the known and the unknown, order and chaos. Keep in mind that this is the fundamental reality for both the biblical account of the world as well as Darwinian evolutionary biology as that binary has exerted selection pressure on the world for the longest period of time. Having created habitable order out of the chaotic watery void, he also creates the balance that will be important from Adam through Christ.

The first time we see this pattern reemerge after Genesis 1:1 is in the Garden of Eden. Paradise, the well watered place, the walled garden we spoke of in the last post, is a blend of chaos and order in terms of nature and culture. Nature in its malevolent guise, the tsunami, the earthquake, the dragon, is balanced — not eliminated — by order allowing its benevolent guise, the garden, to flourish. At the same time, nature has allowed the potential from which culture, in its benevolent guise, the walls around the garden, to flourish while mitigating the disaster of its malevolent guise — the overly rigid tyranny, the biblical Egypt.

The proper mode of being in the biblical stories is always presented as being in balance. Here we have the walls of

culture balanced by the garden of nature forming paradise. However, paradise is not self-sustaining. After having created the garden, in Genesis 1:5, we are pointed to the fact that “there was no man to till the ground.” Creation, even for God, comes about from a need, a lack. The garden was perfect and in balance, yet it required man to till the ground. God’s first commandment to man, who he created to till the ground of the garden, is to “tend and keep it” (Genesis 1:15).

So we see that the actual story of Genesis is quite different than the ultimately cynical story presented by the environmentalists. The proper state of the world here is presented as a walled garden — that is, the balanced coexistence of culture and nature such that culture does not become rigid, tyrannical and overbearing and nature flourishes without becoming too chaotic and dangerous. In short, a proper garden has walls that aren’t oppressive and allows nature to flourish while simultaneously protecting from natures malevolent ravages and with a man in the garden to tend and keep it.

Man and nature, living in harmony, doing their best to help one another flourish. What is best for the nature is the protection of culture and what is best for culture is the rejuvenating beauty and abundance of nature and what is best for the maiteencne of the balance is man to tend and keep it. This is the hypothesis in Genesis, a far cry from rapacious domination.

The tyranny and the chaotic danger are the pathologies of culture and nature respectively just as the cynical story of the environmentalists is not the story of man, but the story of the danger of man’s pathologies We will deal with the consequences of the pathologies of man and woman when we talk about the fall. Here, however, we are presented balanced mitigating the pathologies and allowing for beneficial coexistence. Further, the proper life of man is presented as one who tends and keeps that garden. This is to say that, in the Genesis account, the proper life of man is to maintain the harmonious coexistence between society and nature. That is the very reason for our existence according to these first chapters of Genesis.

Pointing to this to discuss the rapacious nature of mankind on nature simply doesn’t work without either a total breakdown of context or lack of understanding. Further, the actual history of the world in the last sixty years as man realized his potential impact on nature doesn’t support the conclusion of the enviornmentalists. Further, none of the facts, either philosophical or scientific, justify any of the claims by modern environmentalists.

With neither a valid premise nor conclusion I am going to leave the environmentalist thinking behind and even stop picking on that poor genocidal moron David Suzuki from here on in. Aside from the understanding of the misuse of biblical literature which is currently having a massive impact on the world we live in today, I do want you to leave this post with the even more important reminder that the biblical stories will continue to show the proper state of being to be a balance all the way to the end.

There are some who might erroneously conclude that the harsh tone I’ve taken towards modern environmentalism is a critique against the very notion that man rightly shows concern for his environment. In reality, it is quite the opposite. Far from the cynicism of the modern environmentalists, the world is presented, in Genesis, as a balanced garden and man is tasked with the maintenance and stewardship of that garden. The care for nature and the environment is the primary reason, according to the first few chapters of Genesis, for mankind’s existence.

The utterly cynical and motivated reading by people in the modern environmentalist movement has nothing to do, despite their claims, with the Genesis account which clearly presents the hypothesis that the world is a garden and man is a gardener.