Full Moon Howl 2- The Good Stewards
Luke 2 states that if we cannot be trusted with a little wealth then how can we be trusted with true riches? I feel this is definitely a commentary on our country today. We are so concerned with our own greed that we have lost sight of the bigger picture. We were given stewardship of this planet and all that is on it and we have done a poor job with our responsibilities to each other and the rest that share the planet with us. Leopold called for us to be better stewards of the planet in his Sand County Almanac and we have not heeded his message. From the farthest reaches of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans, we will be held accountable for what we have done to each other and to the planet. Human kind has been like a virus infecting the entire Earth and making it sick with our presence. We are like the deer population on the Kaibab Plateau with no checks and balances our population is growing out of control and devastating the rest of the globe. But just like the plateau deer population, we cannot display rampant growth without our day of reckoning.
Humans have become the proverbial drunken sailor just interested in gratifying himself at that moment…we are trading in our precious time on the planet for stuff. Stuff that means nothing in the overall scheme of things. We are too busy trying to keep up with the Jones and Smiths to realize that there is nobody at the controls and the train is out of control. Well, the Earth is that train and it is rapidly running out of tracks.
The day of reckoning has been developing unheeded for the past generation. For the last 50 years, world population multiplied more rapidly than ever before, and more rapidly than it is projected to grow in the future. In 1950, the world had 2.5 billion people; and in 2005, the world had 6.5 billion people. By 2050, this number could rise to more than 9 billion (see chart “World Population Growth, 1950-2050”). Our population has exceeded 7 billion and will soon be at 8 billion. Just as uncontrolled growth of the deer on the Kaibab in the early 1900s had disastrous consequences on the deer population back then, unfettered human growth will also have serious consequences. Little is expected for those who are given little and much is expected for those given much. We have been given the entire planet to act as stewards to…we are failing miserably. It is thought that by the year 2050 over half of the species that are found on this world will be gone due to our greed and unfettered lusts.
The word is not a commodity…it is a community that we are part of and that we are making sick. The day of reckoning is coming and soon like the Dodo, mankind will look out at the rising sun no more. That day is rapidly approaching and we are like children on a toboggan careening toward the cliff oblivious of what awaits us.