Conservation of natural habitat and our native animals is a pointless waste of time, good only for occupying the idle time of the naïve and the unemployed.

At last!  Something on which Christian fundamentalists and evolutionary biologists can agree.

Christian fundamentalists know that the world will end in an inferno, so faffing around to keep it beautiful in the meantime is a distraction from getting people saved.  By people of course I mean humans, as they are the only ones, in the fundamentalist world view, with souls.

Evolutionists know that almost all life on Earth has, at least six times, been nearly wiped out.  They also know it is bound to happen again.  Human driven extinctions look a little less spectacular against meteor and volcano driven ones.  Evolution doesn’t conserve species, it uses them as grist for the mill.

Just consider our local environment in Adelaide.  For much of history it was an ocean!  It’s also been a rain forest if I remember right.  Creating a marine park is at best a temporary business, ditto for stopping old growth logging.  Eventually all old growth forest will be dead, displaced by those bloody eucalypts, which took over Adelaide not that long ago.

As for global warming, it comes and goes.  Whatever we may be persuaded to do about it now, in about 600 million years oxygen levels will be so low (because of the expansion of the sun), that all animals bigger than a gnat will be dead, as will all complex plants.

So conservation is doomed.  Evolution is the stuff of life.  Change.  Death, extinction, reformation.  The Earth will end in a fiery apocalypse, either driven by God or the sun.

Why then, are so many evolutionists and Christian fundamentalists and others in between, engaged in some form or other of nurturing and protecting other life forms?

Is it that they have forgotten the big picture in which their faith locates them?  Are they backsliders?  Have they forgotten that Earth is, inevitably, going to die?

Hopefully some psychology or sociology student with better than a credit average will write something for the next edition of On Dit to tell us.  In the mean-time, maybe it’s a bit like this.

I am going to die.  It’s a shame but there it is.  It’s a terrible waste of a good student and a good father, but it is inevitable.  Yet I don’t abuse my body.  I don’t chain smoke.  I try to have some kind of decent diet.  I try to pay attention to what’s going on inside and outside, even as it gets a bit saggier and weaker.  If I come to see that something I’m doing is accelerating my body’s demise, or making it a less enjoyable skin to be in, I try to do something about it.  I don’t just say, “Oh well, it will be compost one day anyway!”

I notice my fingers.  I find them interesting.  I try to keep them in good health so that I can use them to type and dial and tickle.  They may be arthritis ridden one day, but why accelerate that? 

This idea extends out from my body to the body of Earth.  Sure, any tree I look at will be a rotting log one day, but why hurry that?  Why not revere its life because of, not in spite of, its impending death?

Capitalists often take the micky out of a word like conservation- it sounds old, musty, stick in the mud, cantankerous.  Reverence for Life is a much harder concept to disparage.  Reverence is not diminished by change or necessarily opposed to change.  It is open to all, fundamentalist and evolutionist and everyone in between.  Try it, you’ll like it!  Actually, you probably won’t- it makes life slower and decisions more complicated, but old people who have lived it seem to find it to have been worth-while!