If you were able to control a large area which had many kinds of
plants and animals that lived on the land and on each other, and
which had roughly the same critters and climate as one hundred
years ago, and you put a fence -- an impenetrable
barrier -- around it, and each year made it smaller, do you
imagine that the "balances of nature" within your enclosure
would not be affected? Not so. Species dependent on the same
resource would, of course, be in conflict with each other. As
your fence hemmed in less territory, the conflict would become
more deadly, and some things would decline or perhaps disappear.
Fear, anger, slaughter would increase. So should we wonder that
as populations grow, our world with its finite resources would
be fought for and endangered? Add wild growth in communications
and you have the world we live in.
The world, in effect, is getting smaller. Something has to give.
The earth is for all life, and we humans are not the owners and free
exploiters we have thought we are. We imagined God to be made
in our image -- or was it the other way around? -- and we paid
no mind to the evidence of the past -- the fossils, the
disappeared species such as passenger pigeons and bison, victims
of our "free" enterprise.
Mostly, we think that we humans, or at least our particular colour
in our generous open spaces, will be alright. Whatever is wrong
we will fix, somehow.
However, our world is getting smaller, more crowded, its
irreplaceable resources exhausted. God has watched many experiments
fail. It seems we are determined to join the list.
