#148 – Brian MacLaren: Life After Doom

Brian takes an entirely new and unexpected direction in this latest book: it’s not enough to talk about bringing heaven down to earth, we have to stop creating hell on earth.

Brian MacLaren is widely recognized in the Evangelical community. In fact, in 2015, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in America! But he’s been on a journey through Evangelicalism that whole time, and he recounts some of that history during the first few minutes of our conversation with him. He’s documented the details of that journey in his many books … over two dozen of them. If you’ve read even a few of them, especially the most recent ones, you’d be forgiven for making hasty assumptions about the subject of this next one. But I guarantee you would never have predicted this one.

Life After Doom is about the coming apocalypse …. total ecological and societal collapse. As he put it: “we have created a civilization that, the more it succeeds, the faster it accelerates toward suicide … we’re sucking more resources out of the earth than it can sustain, and we’re pumping out more waste products than the earth can detoxify … we’re destroying our life support system.” After years of fact checking and careful research, he’s not sure if it’s even possible to turn our civilization around, or if the better thing is to let this one fall apart so that something better can be built in the ruins. Many experts feel it’s too late for change.

Brian envisions these two major collapses — of human society, and of Earth’s ecology — interacting with each other, producing four likely outcomes:

• Scenario 1: Collapse Avoidance: civilization destabilizes the ecology, and ecological decline destabilizes civilization; humanity gets its act together and drops in number to a level that Earth’s ecology can sustain (~2.5 billion people); this will be a slow, painful, and costly outcome.
• Scenario 2: Collapse/Rebirth: civilization doesn’t learn fast enough, and essentially collapses; but the ecosystem rebounds in time for a remnant to survive and rebuild that more sustainable (and possibly even enjoyable) existence on the planet, in harmony with the planet
• Scenario 3: Collapse/Survival: civilization collapses, and devastates the ecosystem in the process; humanity manages to build something from the ruins, but it’s a meagre struggle for mere survival
• Scenario 4: Collapse/Extinction: civilization collapses and nations resort to catastrophically destructive means (total nuclear, chemical, biological war) to protect their interests in an attempt to “survive” … and completely ruin everything in the process

Folks, these are not happy scenarios. Think about what happened when recent societal collapse in parts of Asia or South America sent only a few million migrants into Europe and the United States — the anti-immigrant response … forced encampment …. Fascism (in Europe) and White Supremacy (in the U.S.) — and then multiply that conflict by several thousand when not just a few million, but a few billion people are similarly affected.

Brian places a lot of blame on the fossil fuel industry, for using huge amounts of money to cover up the data which predicted these outcomes decades ago, just so that they could continue to make more money.

But he also says that, really, we’re all culpable for ignoring the warning signs. He uses a great analogy of a lumberjack cutting down a tree with a trunk 10 meters in diameter. As the lumberjack gets through the first half of that cutting, the tree continues to stand. Seven meters in … it’s still standing. By eight meters there’s a little bit of creaking and groaning. When the cut is just over nine meters deep, the tree gives out a couple sudden explosive warning shots that reverberate through the forest, and the worker pauses. But the tree is still standing, apparently unaffected by the deep cut. The only real sign of any damage to the tree is a small pile of sawdust accumulating beside the tree. The worker continues. But he only manages to cut for another minute or two before there is one more thunderous crack that he can feel in his chest. At this point, it’s too late. The die is now cast. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop the inevitable. No quick fixes will keep that tree standing. The outcome is assured. And final.

In this analogy, the small pile of accumulating sawdust is the smog in our air, and the grunge in our waters. The loud thunderous cracks are the melting of the polar ice caps, the shut-down of the ocean currents, and the massive and accelerating species extinctions going on around the world.

Do we really need to wait for that one last irreversible explosive warning shot before we ask whether we know what we’re doing, and whether we should maybe stop?

And Brian also attributes an additional but different kind of blame on the shoulders of Evangelicals. They typically dismiss the warning signs by thinking/saying things like: “it’s all gonna’ burn, right? … Jesus is coming back and he’s just gonna’ torch the place anyway. We’re just accelerating the timeline for him.” In all honesty, that kind of thought went through my own head when I was in my Fundamentalist teen years. Evangelicals also contribute in their tunnel-visioned science denial, resistance to authority and controls, and by aligning with big money interests. Brian paints a convicting picture. The shoe does fit.

But not content to just dramatize and criticize, Brian then provides four steps towards solutions. You’ll need to read the book to find out what those are.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more about Brian MacLaren’s story, his books, and upcoming appearances at his website.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #67, where we talk specifically about the Evangelical response to Climate Change, or a series of episodes dealing with Evangelical science denial.

Episode image used by permission of Brian MacLaren.

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