In his opening paragraph, Carroll notes warnings about global warming is usually in measured tones, dire warnings framed in the context of the uncertainty of the future.

But as governments fail to act strenuously enough against the villainous carbon emissions, and as the broad public continues in a state of environmental quietude, if not indifference, scientific voices are sharpening the alarm.

He then makes reference to the work of four men to illustrate this point, E. O. Wilson, James Lovelock, Jagadish Shukla, and Bill McKibben. For example,

Bill McKibben declares that the time to mitigate disaster is upon us: "2009 may well turn out to be the decisive year in the human relationship with our home planet.’’

Carroll then explores the notion of Apocalyptic thinking, which he describes as "anti-human" despite our deriving it from the Bible and our frequent reference to it in popular culture {"transformers" anyone). He warns that the human readiness to see a looming catastrophe has itself often borne catastrophic consequences. He warns that the biblically based apocalyptic thinking has the consequence of viewing such destruction as good, as God destroying the world in order to save it.

When I read those words I thought of a different time, in my own life, of an American field grade officer in Vietnam arguing that we had to destroy a village in order to save it. That did not work then, and remembering that makes me resist those who might welcome destruction of the earth now as something to be welcomed.

Perhaps knowing Carroll's background, one might be surprised with where he goes in a exploration of the two apocalyptic books in the Bible: Daniel, written in the time of Jewish uprisings against Seleucid tyranny in the 2nd century BCE and that against the Romans in the 1st Century CE (Carroll choosing to deliberately use non-Christian terminology of Before the Common Era and Common Era, appropriate if one remembers that for Jews and many others Jesus is not the Lord, the Anointed [Christos - Greek term; Messiah - equivalent Hebrew term]); and Revelation, which offers an avenging Christ presiding over the chaos of destruction. Carroll reminds us that neither book has been universally accepted as canonical.

He also argues that Jesus offered a different approach than that of John the Baptist, whom the Gospels could be fairly described as apocalyptic in his approach. Carroll describes Jesus as insisting

on the preciousness of life here and now. His message in no way devalued the present world in favor of a future heaven, any more than the author of Genesis denigrated the created world when God saw it as "good. . .very good.’’

That is from his final paragraph, and I fully realize that there are many in this nation whose selective reading of biblical material, often well out of context and translated through a prism of a predefined theology that is contrary to that derived from reading the Bible not in isolated chunks but as a series of prooftexts will cause them to argue with Carroll's interpretation. Christianity has always had adherents who argued for the imminent final return of Jesus, who were looking for signs that it was upon us. For many of these, warnings about global environmental crisis are real-world affirmations of the belief that the end-time is upon us, something also reinforced by the near constancy of war, and especially of the possibility of serious conflict involving the "holy land" of which the modern nation of Israel is only a part. They welcome such things in the belief that they will be among the Elect, those who will be saved midst the destruction of the 'final judgment' that will occur upon the return of Jesus.

The Republican party has a key part of its core constituency many of those who accept such apocalyptic thinking. When that is combined with a near theological belief against government regulation of business (although the same people are often willing to regulate the most intimate details of human behavior according to their religious beliefs) it is understandable why so many Republicans so strongly oppose environmental regulation. Some will argue that God has given man dominion over the lands and the seas, and thus it is ours to do with as we see fit, entirely ignoring the thrust of much biblical language on stewardship, on preserving God's creation. It is one reason why an increasing number of those who view themselves as evangelicals, especially in the younger generations, split with Republicans on environmental issues. Perhaps it is because they take seriously God's promise in Genesis at the end of the Flood that never again would he threaten his creation, for as we read in Genesis 8:20-22:

rhen Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease."

Carroll concludes his piece with these words:

Uncriticized theological assumptions, in other words, are part of what inhibits the human capacity to respond appropriately to Earth’s new vulnerability. The overwhelming message of the Bible, read critically, is that this world is the world that counts. Any notion of afterlife that suggests otherwise, undercutting care for the home planet, must be discarded, along with the habits that have put us at this precipice.

I chose to do a Masters in a Catholic seminary, and my concentration was on Scripture. The monsignor who had the greatest influence upon me during that time was a graduate of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, as were several other priests with whom I studied. They would be very much in accord with Carroll's interpretation of material in this column.

But they are Catholics, and many who rely on inaccurate and selective interpretations of Biblical material as weapons (and I use that term deliberately) against reorienting their thinking in light of the environmental crisis reject the entire edifice of the Catholic Church, including any biblical interpretation coming from a tradition that too many view as Rome, "the whore of Babylon," an image that comes from the Book of Revelation.

And then there are the billions for whom Christian scripture carries no weight. That includes many who will read these words, as well as myriads whose thinking is shaped by other religious traditions in other cultures.

And it is not the the Catholic Church does not have its own culpability in the environmental crisis. The Church's continued opposition to birth control is one reason the earth is under threat - we cannot continue unbridled population expansion. Certainly were the entire world to live at the "standard of living" (which might be better phrased as the "standard of wasteful consumption") we Americans "enjoy" global population is already far too large to be sustainable by the resources at hand.

Why do I choose to write about Carroll's column? I think it useful for us to have as much intellectual and moral "ammunition" for the continued discussion of the crisis. I use the quoted word because this is a conflict, one which we cannot afford to lose. It is not that I seek to slay those who refuse to consider the seriousness. Rather, if we are not as blunt as possible, in terms people can understand, in fashions that can help shape their world view, then in fact sooner than later all will be lost.

In my recent diary on the birth of the nuclear age, one person criticized my use of the Sanskrit which ran through Oppenheimer's mind at Trinity - I am become Death, the destroyer of world - because, as the commentator noted, the world will survive even if we eradicate all of humanity. Perhaps true. Perhaps true even were we to wipe out most life forms that currently exist, a process of extinction that is already ongoing and does not require the use of nuclear weapons.

We are as a species solipsistic. If as the Bible says God created man in his own image and likeness, then we more than return the favor. We think of God and of creation in human terms, we rarely ponder existence without humanity. Even more basically, we rarely contemplate an existence beyond our own lives, which is why so many hold on to the notion of some kind of life after death. Those who have biological children balance this by the hopes and dreams for their offspring - a hope seen in the Preamble in the words to secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity.

There is no liberty without life. One can argue that a responsibility for preserving the biosphere as a place of human habitation have a Constitutional responsibility to act responsibly now about the oncoming ecological crisis. Let me change that - it is not oncoming, it is already here.

There may be a danger in the use of Apocalyptic language and thinking. But is is a part of our culture. It is often used to justify preparing for war in the hope of preventing war, seen in expressions such as "better dead than Red" that were part of the cultural background in which I grew up in the 1950s. Often we see politicians overuse apocalyptic language against their political rivals.

Yet the threats to existence are real. We must remember that there are some among us who welcome such threats, perhaps because they gain political or economic advantage in the short term by fanning the flames of fear that are ignited by such threats. For others, they welcome the threats because they look forward to a different kind of existence, one which they perceive as in opposition to the world in which most of us find ourselves rooted.

We may not be able to reach them, but there are many who are reachable, whose sacred texts can serve to remind them that in Genesis the creator imposed upon man a responsibility for a creation s/he called 'very good."

These are my reflections, arising from reading and considering Carroll after having read and considered stranded wind. I offer them for your consideration.

Peace.