David Bentley Hart, a man whom I muchly admire for his profound intellect and learning, has deepened my appreciation of his being by the publication of this fine little piece:

“I am as a rule happiest when I am out in nature, as unadorned and untouched by human labor as possible. I hate cities. I hate suburbs. I hate towns and villages, for that matter. My ideal habitat will always be a cabin on a forested mountain, or maybe a limestone cave beside a deserted beach on some remote Pacific atoll. But I find it increasingly difficult to go out into the natural world, or to commune with whatever embassies the natural world sends into my life, without also feeling a sense of imminent cataclysm, and a deep despondency and anger over everything already lost. I cannot look at the ocean these days without thinking of the toxins and synthetic polymers and heavy metals we keep pouring into it. I cannot walk in the woods without being consumed with anxiety over deforestation and destroyed habitats. I cannot see butterflies or bees without an acute sense of their diminishing populations. I cannot enjoy the sight of fireflies without my mind floating back to my childhood, when they were still numerous enough to transfigure the fields near my home into surging seas of golden light.

Every day brings reports of probably irreversible calamity. Today I learned that the world’s population of insects—the indispensable foundation of any thriving ecology—has declined by about 75% over the last half century. But on another day I might have been reading about the disappearance of amphibians, or the acid waters eating away the coral reefs, or the microplastics pervading the entire world from the summits of the highest mountains to the most abysmal depths of the sea, or about the record heat this summer in the cities of the Pacific Northwest, or about rising coastal waters, or about vanishing icecaps and dissolving glaciers, or about wildfires so vast that they can choke half a continent with their smoke, or about the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, or about mass extinctions, or about half a hundred other features of the hell on earth that our species seems intent on creating. We are killing the world, relentlessly, and have no intention of stopping. We will suffer enormously as a result, of course, but we will also visit that hell on billions of creatures who had no part in our stupidity or avarice.

So, I suspect that, on the day of that particular stroll, my little spasm of misery before the witness of the groundhogs was born of remorse and contrition and a sense of hopelessness—for the groundhogs themselves, for the small children on the other side of the field, for everything innocent and lovely in the world. The mood passed after several minutes. But it will recur. It does so ever more frequently these days.”

David Bentley Hart

I am much sympatico with the feelings expressed in this short but powerful piece. I grew up in a rural area of Georgia, surrounded by a rich forestry in which we, as young lads, would get lost for hours, enjoying the various games we played within the welcoming walls of numerous pine trees. It was a wonderful place for a child to be reared, and in a time when, for the most part, a mother could turn her child loose for hours without fear that some demon-possessed maniac would cart the child off to be drugged and used for the sexual gratification of maniacs who should have been long ago permanently removed from the company of decent people. To allow one’s child such freedom today would subject a parent to lawsuits suggesting child abuse or neglect. I share Hart’s deep dislike and distrust of cities in general. I have found that some of the happiest times of my life, moments of deep contentment, have come from driving through the Virginia countryside, observing the beauty of nature and relishing the day.

Capitalists do not know how to do this. For them, everything is about the Almighty Dollar, and to stop and take an hour to just sit and enjoy a sunny day is an hour wasted and opportunities lost for further profits. People who have no business being admired, men and women who are moral degenerates but who have great wealth, are lauded, both in public media and in private, as exemplars of how life should be emulated. Children are influenced from an early age that the rich have lives that we should strive to obtain.

I remember as a child having some small bushes outside our bedroom window. They were about four feet tall, and every spring and throughout the summer, they would be festooned with tiny white flowers. At almost any time during the day, I could go to those bushes and see them absolutely covered with all manner of insects seeking the nectar within those flowers. Bees, butterflies, and assorted other insects were there in abundance.

Now, one can hardly find insects around flower beds. This is because we have been told, by those who wish to make a crap load of money off of us, that your lawn and yard must look a certain way, and in order to make it achieve this perfection, you must absolutely douse it to the point of saturation with chemicals of all sorts.

The point of all this is not your yard, the point of this is being a good little Capitalist and making as much money as they can, regardless of the damage being forced upon the environment.

In the opening scene of the movie, WALL-E, we see a barren landscape, cluttered by the detritus of Capitalism. The little robot, WALL-E, scoots to and fro, digging through the piles of trash, examining the various items which are found, and keeping for himself the most interesting of them. The whole landscape consists of monstrous piles of discarded waste. Nothing there is alive. The one thing that the movie producers missed putting in that opening shot was a dead human hand sticking out from the piles of garbage, desperately clutching a dollar bill.

The worst part of all this is how many Christians, who should know better, are onboard with the degenerate system called Capitalism. By its very nature, Capitalism breeds greed, greed which is sin. Not far behind greed come the lies, invented to get people to buy more stuff they don’t really need. St Paul said “. . . having therefore food and raiment, let us therefore be content.” Try telling that to the average American Christian, who has been programmed to believe that contentment comes with owning as much stuff as you can jam into your house (and the overflow into one of the multitudinous storage facilities which litter our cities). People look at the lives of monks and nuns, who live out this Pauline admonition, and cannot understand how they could be as content as they appear. It is because in the deepest parts of our hearts, we do not believe that our home is in the next life. This life is home, and we are determined to make it a paradise on earth.

And in doing so, we have all but ruined it.