The World Is Getting Smaller

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.