There was absolutely no single reason it had to turn out the way it has. There were many smaller reasons that shaped our path to now, which added up, are mostly still with us in one form or another.
In the long shadow of that most elegant document, we began to suffuse our fate with God’s, which is natural enough if you’re predisposed to delusions of grandeur. At least the Greeks lived in fear of their deities. But our cherry picking knew no limits, absolute or otherwise, for so long that coming up against some now is leading to quite a bit of confusion. Ah, now.
Running out of some things, ruining many others… were we not actually supposed to run roughshod over fish and fowl? Was that dominion-thingy some kind God-forsaken metaphor? You see how messy this can get. Antagonized by talk of external events like global warming and peak oil, many Christians among us just block it out as liberal politics. But I don’t mean to castigate them. I am curious about how we have connected our God-given rights to our license to plunder, and how, as this license seems to have expired, we plan to pivot toward a conservation-oriented policy.
We do plan to pivot, right?