Consider the situation on the small planet Ecos. The planet’s population is around 1000 people who are organized into a single nation. On the tiny planet is a forest of 1,000,000 acres that provides vital services for people. Along with other plants, the forest clears the air of carbon dioxide and provides oxygen in order that people can continue to breathe. The forest also regulates the rain that waters the field crops and the trees themselves. It keeps Ecos’ temperature comfortable, it nourishes and protects the soil; it provides food and shelter for all living things. This is what the living trees provide. Unknown to the people is the fact that the planet must have no less than 500,000 acres of healthy living trees to continue to prov
ide life and health for all its creatures—including people. [Impressionist photos by harald_kirr]
The dilemma is that the trees of Ecos also provide many vital things by dying: humus for soil, lumber for building products, healing products, paper products, essential wooden items, and fuel for heating and cooking.
The human culture on the planet is not religious. There is no belief in a creator God. The people believe that as the highest, most intelligent, and most powerful form of life on Ecos, they are in control. Morality is based on what seems to work to maintain order, especially economic order, among individuals whose chief motivations in life are freedom, self-preservation, personal comfort, pleasure, and happiness.
The economy of Ecos is based on a free market and on the right of individuals to personally own its land. Through the years the most shrewd, most industrious, and most powerful individuals and their children have gained control of the planet’s land surface—especially its forested land.
This controlling elite has discovered that by cutting the forest and selling the products of dead trees, they can greatly increase personal comfort, pleasure, and happiness. Some do understand that without trees, life on Ecos would become less and less healthful, and would eventually end. But no one knows just how many living trees are necessary for the health of the planet. And through clever use of their money, skills, and the other natural resources of the planet, they have managed to create an artificial environment that masks the fact that the real environment is deteriorating. Within their artificial environments, the controlling elite continues to add to their personal comfort, pleasure, and happiness by rapidly cutting and selling the products of dead trees—and by using for new and different purposes the land previously occupied by the trees.
The rest of the people and living creatures are forced to struggle for life in Ecos’ consequently degraded environment and cannot afford to purchase land. Most of these people are compelled to work for the elite, and some of the most fortunate among them are rewarded with their own artificial environments—though significantly more austere. Those who are in some way handicapped, weak, or have been disenfranchised by the elite are forced to deal first-hand with the diminished forest. Being eyewitnesses to the destruction, they weep as the forest creatures suffer, die, and disappear—perhaps sensing in the death of these fellow forest dwellers their own demise. They struggle with a hard life and die young.
Because there is no God to worship or obey, no life after death to consider, no understood responsibility to other people, and no understood responsibility for the other living things on the planet, the human population continues in its self-centered ways. The result, or course, is that Ecos is doomed. Someday, perhaps sooner than later, their consumption of the trees will go beyond the life-sustaining limit. But safe in their artificial environments, away from the stumps and litter of a devastated forest, they reason that since no one can prove scientifically how many acres of trees must be left alive for human survival, it's likely that doomsday is at least not going to come during their lifetimes.
With purblind eyes and callused hearts they continue to live in luxury, pampering their doomed children and grandchildren with profit from the dying forest and the land previously occupied by trees.
Truly the end.
1. People need trees.
The purpose of this simplified and exaggerated picture is to help provide a lens through which to view our own planet: Earth. The facts within the fable are these:
2. People need trees both alive and dead.
3. We don’t know for certain how many forests must remain intact to adequately provide their essential life-sustaining services.
4. Aside from not knowing how many trees need to remain alive and standing, we don’t have a fully clear understanding of which forests need to be where for what purposes (though in some instances, we are rapidly finding out!)
5. For the first time in human history, people have the numbers and the power to cut most of the planet’s forests in a very short time.
6. Most people who have the power and legal right to cut and kill trees do not understand fully the ecological value of living trees and intact forests.
7. Forest creatures and fragile forest plants are dying and becoming extinct at a rapid pace because of rapacious and careless timber cutting.
8. Many people who have the power and legal right to cut trees do not care that some species will cease to exist as a result of their cutting of the trees.
9. Few of the people who have the power and legal right to cut trees seem to have a religious orientation that would compel them to consider their stewardship obligations to the Creator of both themselves, the forests, and the forest creatures.
10. Most people responsible for the cutting of trees live either in comfortable, artificial environments created by profit from dead trees or in such poverty that they have to cut trees to survive. In the destruction of our forests, the rich and poor are oddly linked.
11. The ethical behavior of most of the people responsible for the cutting of trees is based on the maintenance of economic prosperity and personal freedom, happiness, pleasure, and comfort (free-market idealism) living in homes on beautiful wooded lots they protect from chainsaws.
12. The consumption habits of most people demand the increased cutting of trees.
13. Most people live in self-manipulated, artificial environments that often keep them from seeing first-hand--and understanding the condition of the planet’s forests.
14. Few people understand fully the complexity of what they are seeing when they look at a forest.
15. Few people who have the power and legal right to cut trees ever take time to consider their “moral responsibility” to leave a significant number of trees standing in intact forests.
16. Only a small number of people make the tree-cutting decisions that affect the lives of all the rest of us.
17. Few people who buy large tracts of forest land consider that they have a responsibility for all its living and life-sustaining elements and for the masses of the people of the earth who need intact healthy forests for physical fitness, happiness, and survival.
18. Relatively few people who can afford to buy large tracts of forestland buy it because of its ecological and other non-economic values. They buy it primarily for the value of its trees as saw timber or for the land beneath the trees.
19. Harvested in a sustainable manner, the earth's forests can remain intact and still provide for the legitimate needs of all the earth’s living things.
Aware of these facts, how must we then live to escape the certain doom faced by the people of Ecos?
Read the October National Geographic article on the redwoods.
Dean Ohlman is the host of RBC Ministries website: "The Wonder of Creation." You can read more of Dean's writing at the RBC site: http://www.wonderofcreation.org/
