JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 27
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JOE BOOT JOE BOOT is the founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world. Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, and as Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California based Centre for Cultural Leadership. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.
THERE ARE FEW THINGS that the mod-
ern state is not willing to regulate out of existence in our era, but some time ago I came across an example that really caught my attention. In 2016, in the great state of California (where else?), a law was passed to regulate cow flatulence.1 Globally, taxes are increasingly being proposed on milk and meat to reduce cattle populations. Apparently cows with bad gas are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions (methane and carbon) which are to blame for pretty much everything these days, from poverty to international terrorism to hurricanes. We hear such claims so often that whenever we read of a significant phenomenon effecting the earth’s ecosystem, most readily assume it is another piece of evidence for catastrophic manmade global warming – or to use that panacea for the world’s problems, climate change. This oddity happened recently when I was watching a wildlife documentary with my children and learned a very interesting and troubling fact: 45,000 square miles of arable land on the planet are being lost to desertification each year. Which is to say, at present, every year, about 45,000 square miles of land on earth becomes desert. By the end of the century, that’s a lot of desert and potentially means a lot of displaced people, especially in Africa, central Asia and Australia. As I expected, the commentator on this program implied that ‘climate change’ was responsible for desertification. So, on this occasion I took some time to look into the insinuation and found that this documentary’s view of the subject is far from the settled truth. Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are not, in themselves, the cause of desertification. On the contrary, increased levels of greenhouse gases have helped boost green foliage significantly in the world’s arid regions for decades, lengthening growing seasons in northern areas so that global green coverage is greater today than it was in the 1970s. So if not greenhouse gases, what is creating deserts? It is soil degradation that creates deserts. If this sounds like a trivial point not suited for non-scientists, think of it in these terms: at a more basic level, it is a failure to observe God’s
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law and norms for land, crops and herds that turns once-good fertile land into desert, and it is this disobedience which in the end can starve and displace peoples. Environmental science shows that in temperate and sub-tropical climates which have a rainy season and a dry season, the vegetation holds moisture in the soil between the seasonal rains. However, if the soil degrades to a point where vegetation is no longer growing, then the moisture quickly evaporates and the land becomes dry and arid. The dilemma has been described this way: In seasonal rainfall environments we find a mass of vegetation grows each year during the growing season…. Of the annual growth of vegetation, a very high percentage dies at season’s end and has to decay to cycle the nutrients, retain the carbon and clear the way for the following season’s growth. These are the environments in which we find the large herding herbivores and the pack-hunting predators and this was not by chance. In these environments it is essential that a high proportion of the annual vegetation, once dead, be consumed by herbivores and converted to dung and urine partly broken down for micro-organisms to complete the task…. The role of the predator was an essential one in this complex whole. The fear of predation kept many herbivore species concentrated and as no animals like to feed on their own concentrated dung and urine, they kept moving. Movement kept plants from being nibbled to death in overgrazing and overbrowsing and thus helped maintain both vegetative mass and diversity of the entire community. The trampling of concentrated animals also assisted decay and the maintenance of covered and broken soil surfaces for better moisture penetration, aeration and life.2
This describes a remarkable balance within creation. If wild herds are reduced, domestic mobile herds of grazing animals need to replace them to aerate soil and fertilize land. In other words, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
