The Goose-girl

I was thinking about why it is, exactly, that I don't think humans can wreck the earth. It isn't solely that the people who think we can tend to try to manipulate science, or that they claim to put humans in a class with all the other animals but don't want to allow humans to do what they do (in other words, beavers build dams, men build houses, if they are each animals, how can you say the dam is okay but not the house?). It isn't even the Jurassic Park catchphrase "Life finds a way."

I think the reason that I'm skeptical about man's apocalyptic abilities is how well everything works. From the water cycle to the human pancreas, nature really works remarkably well. Of course, it sometimes gets screwed up--that's our fault--but things are designed to work perfectly, absent sin and its whole rotten inheritance.

Which is what you'd expect from a perfect Designer, after all. God looked at His creation and said it was good. And so mighty was this goodness that even after the people God had put in charge of nature decided to wreck themselves, nature followed her human masters but kept hints of her former character, like the princess who is forced to be a goose girl temporarily.

I don't think man has the power, or for that matter the time, to tilt things so far that the world becomes uninhabitable.

We can be foolish, of course, and waste and wreck and damage her, or obsess over and worship and fear her, but the world is older than we are. She has seen us swing back and forth between treating her like a goddess and like a whore--we're in a goddess phase at the moment--when in actuality she's neither. We've been given dominion over her in the same way that a good man has dominion over a dog or indeed, that Christ has dominion over us: not to exploit us, but as C.S. Lewis puts it, to make us "more ourselves than ever".

In other words our proper occupation is to garden the world, which means neither leaving huge slag heaps nor fencing off large portions of the outdoors lest any human footstep soil the virgin forest. Being sinners we want to do one or the other. If we're redeemed, we know we must repent of both and set about gardening.

So Nature, in her goose-girl rags at the moment, waits like the rest of us for Christ to come and make all things new. I think she'll last until then. God has seen to it that she will.

Cheers,

Breanna