4/22/2019
We stand here in this world hoping for a good ______. You can fit any of several words into this blank spot: day, season, crop, profit, pain-free (hour, day, treatment), or some other hope. Today is a good day to align our expectations with life’s reality. It’s called “Earth Day.” It was started in 1970, by those who expected more from the earth than they were able to see come to pass. The day doesn’t improve the earth, but perhaps there is more awareness of certain principles which might be forgotten through the normal days of our particular environs.
Some of these principles are taught pretty universally, but some are thrust aside as being unimportant. I can remember as a high school student, the beginning of a “trash-off-our-highways” plan to clean up the roadways. Indiana enacted a state imposed fine if caught throwing trash on the highways. (I can’t find evidence they were the first, but certainly they were one of the first states to do this.) It took most Hoosiers a while to make it a part of their highway usage to stop being casual about trash. Since the mid ‘50s, our population has doubled (160 million to 325 million) and our highway paved highway miles have quadrupled, up to 2.3 million miles, with more coming everyday. The startling part of the statistical list of comparisons is how many more vehicle miles travelled (in the trillions) there are without (relatively) keeping up with enough roads to accommodate that—traffic snarls and miles of backed up sitting on interstates, thusly explained.
So, now imagine what all that might look like without awareness to our personal trash containment. Ergo: Americans love driving, Americans should work at keeping the roads clean. Prior to post-ww2 emphasis, the paved road percentile was pretty low. (Gravel, caleche, and dirt.) In mostly rural America, household garbage and old unwanted metals were thrown into gulleys and ditches (the origin of landfill?) and everything which would burn, the people burned. I remember going with my lifelong friend and his father (who was a disabled man) to many of these places with magnets in hand (a forerunner to metal detectors) to find salvageable materials he could sell for pocket change. Those places stank! I’m glad of many things, but the gulleys and ditches not being strewn with trash ranks right up there for the way the land looks. So, we now have all these roads paved and we gripe if we have to go down “dirt roads.”
But, paved roads cause their own set of problems: first, they create miles and miles of “impervious surface”—a term I used when I built a large building and paved a parking lot. This creates, in any given area such as a county, 15-18% greater water runoff. If the water running off was just rainwater it would be fine, However, there are three sets of additional problems because this runoff exists. One is the paving is largely made from petroleum byproducts creating a wear and tear runoff into the soil of those altered organics. Secondly, the cars have a “shedding” from exhaust to tire wear to oils, coolants, and gasoline spills. Thirdly, roadways are kept free of weeds and spreading ground cover by sprays of herbicides, free of mosquitos and other pests by insecticides, while fielding the slough-of of mowers and trimmers.
We’re a mess, folks! …But, the good news is this: We who know the Lord Jesus Christ and the Word which He left us know there is (every day we are still here) at least 1007 years of good earth days to come!! That’s the promise. If you want to understand that, first trust the Lord for salvation, after all, He died for our sins, was buried, and was raised again for our justification. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved….and then—go clean up our environment!
Thanks for reading, the Elder
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