Welcome to The Liberty Insider.
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This is the program
bringing you discussion, news,
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updates and analysis of
religious liberty events
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in the United States
and around the world.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
Editor of Liberty Magazine.
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And my guest is
Scott Christiansen.
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And Scott, I want to talk
about a book that you have
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just recently written
and is almost printed from
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the Review and Herald
Publishing Association
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in Hagerstown, Maryland.
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Not too far down the
road from where I live.
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Even I work in
Silver Spring, Maryland.
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The book is--
Planet in Distress.
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Planet in
Distress. Planet in Distress.
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You're talking about global
system decline. Yes, I am.
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From a
theological and a scientific
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point of view
explaining I think very clearly.
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How man's and natures systems,
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which are very much
intertwined, sort of
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spiraling down in what I think
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is a terminal decline, isn't it?
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And fulfilling prophecy
while doing so. Absolutely.
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we expect that.
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But Seventh-day Adventists
and many other Christians
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see evidence of what
the Bible talks about.
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But you're laying it
out in a logical fashion
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that relates to scientific
and observational analysis
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that a world
traveler like you can see.
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Now you've been
in different places.
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I know you were based
in Mongolia for a while.
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Now you live in Maine.
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We like the cold
place-- You see the system
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collapse up in
Maine? A little bit, yeah.
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System collapse in
Maine is probably when the flu
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blocks up and you can't run
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that far in the
winter. It's true.
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Actually, it's literally true.
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You say that jokey,
but it's actually true.
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No, I'm serious,
it's life and death.
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I wrote a book
years and years ago
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about a survivalist who
went through a lot of personal
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traumas and ended up
as a doctor in Nepal.
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But he told me
when he was hiking up
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in your part of the woods
up in Canada in the winter.
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He nearly lost his life once.
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His boot got
developed a little cut in it
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and I think he got
some water in crossing
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a stream but a little
chink in your arm or like that,
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you literally
can freeze to death.
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Everything starts
small. Big things starts small.
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But I'm not really
wanting to settle on Maine,
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you also were posted
for a while in China. Yes.
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And I know from
reading your book
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that China was a huge
case study to impress on you.
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How the system
declines working on a
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massive scale
and just so obvious.
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And with your indulgence,
I'll point you toward
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what you said there about
flying over a part of China.
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Oh, oh, yeah, in the book, yes.
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Tell us a little bit about that?
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Well, you know, in
China, 1.3 billion people and--
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It's a little bit
like the national debt.
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It's a number
almost too big to get
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your head around, isn't it?
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Yeah, you know,
there's a joke in China.
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That's one thousand
three hundred million, right.
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It's one thousand
three hundred million,
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that's a lot more
than we have in the U.S.
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Four times.
Approximately four times.
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There's a joke in
China that you can make
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the absolute
worst product in China.
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And the example
that was used for me
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was a when one of my
hosts in China on one of my
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many trips, they
bought me a popsicle.
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The popsicle was horrible,
it was like eating chalk.
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I threw it away and
they said well, you know
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that Popsicle maker can
sell one Popsicle only one time
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to every one
hundred person in China
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and be fantastically successful.
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Yeah, so that's a lot
of, that's a lot of people.
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The thing in China is
that China is probably
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the foremost
example of a country that is
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currently stressed
almost to the breaking point.
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Has basically
destroyed their environmental
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resources and have
engineered their country.
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And that has brought them
close to the breaking point.
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One of the interesting
things I think it's a story
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that you're referring to.
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But you are with the
Chinese official. I was--
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Flying over a
farming area of China
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and he was
reminiscing about his childhood.
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Well, it was in
Northern Province.
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It was in Northern
Province and we were flying
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and he was going up to
se an ADRA project with me.
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I was the country
director for ADRA for China
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at that time
and a very wealthy--
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That was the--Adventist
Development Relief Agency.
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Thank you, I shorthand and I--
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There's gotta be a few
viewers that don't know.
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Okay, all
right--It's an International
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Aid Organization
that's administered by
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the Seventh-day Adventist
Church. that's correct.
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Using combination of church
and government money, right.
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And we had -- yes, exactly,
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and we had some fascinating
projects in China that dealt
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with basic social
needs and environment
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at the same time.
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Fascinating,
that's where the needs
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were in China and still are.
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But this--this was a
very powerful gentlemen,
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he was a member of
the Central Committee
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or the People's Congress anyway,
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very wealthy gentleman.
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And at that time I was maybe 40
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and he was maybe 60. All right.
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And we were flying over
a Northern Chinese Province
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and if you look down and it's--
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it's always smoggy,
everywhere in China.
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And if you look
down you could just see
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that it was all
small farm plots.
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And maybe a small
stream, but nothing else
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and he was telling me
about how--Open fields.
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Open fields. This wasn't
country and woods all over.
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No, no, none of that,
none of that, none of that.
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You could see to the horizon
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dimly and there wasn't much.
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And he was
telling me this wonderful
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and romantic story
about how he had been forced
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out of the city during
the Cultural Revolution,
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then forced to
live with the farmers,
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to whom he was
nothing but a burden.
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Because he
didn't know how to farm.
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And how a beautiful
young woman had also been
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forced out to the same village
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and they would go
into the woods at night
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and they would-they
would talk and they would cry
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and they grew close, you know,
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but they drew
strength from each other
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and they ended
up getting married.
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And he said, it's
because of those forests
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that my wife and I
were able to spend time
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together privately and
to grow close together.
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He said, I'll
always remember that.
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And he said in fact
he was right below us.
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What do you say?
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Well, and I'm
listening and I was looking out
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the window again,
there was nothing.
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There are farms, you
know, but there are no trees.
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And -- and I said
to him, I said wait.
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Are you--you are
talking about right now,
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right below us. I
said, there are no trees.
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And he says, well,
yeah, we need food more than
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we need trees
and they're all gone.
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It is incredible and
the thing is once you
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get rid of the forests,
which are meant to absorb
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rainwater that
comes in big storms
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and percolated into the soil.
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Once you start--
Plus the trees attract
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the clouds, not smog.
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Well--So it affects
the rainfall pattern.
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And they make
oxygen and they've got
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a number of tasks.
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Once you thoroughly
disrupt that, remember
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this is the size of a
couple of states in the U.S.
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and the trees were
used to be all trees
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and now they're all were gone.
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Once you do that,
you've re-engineered the Earth
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and you messed up the basic.
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You mess up the amount of water
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that's able to
go into the Earth.
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You mess up the
ability to create topsoil.
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This is a very big deal.
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And probably was in the
same part of China, when I saw
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a program fairly
recently, that outlined
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how the farmers are
growing fruits and stuff.
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There's no breeze in that
part of the China anymore.
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And people
hand-pollinate everything.
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Every piece of
fruit or fruit flower
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on a tree has to
be hand pollinated.
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The Chinese are notorious
for overusing fertilizers
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and for overusing pesticides.
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And yes, they kill off
some, not all the bugs.
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We've developed super bugs.
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But they kill
off the bees as well,
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but in the same
part of China if I could.
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The farmers after a
while they ran out of water
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and they had to drill
wells in order to get the water
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that they needed
to water their crops.
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And then after a little
bit longer they found out
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they had to sink
those wells yet deeper.
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By that time I was
there 10 years ago and looking
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at the situation
and trying to figure out
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what could be done.
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These farmers were
being told they absolutely
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had to produce food.
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But their wells were
300 some odd feet deep.
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They were reaching
both the technological
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and economical limits for
being able to get water out.
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And I asked them
what you're going to do
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and they said,
well we'll just move
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to the city and find a job
and be--We starve together.
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Yeah, this land
won't be farmed anymore.
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Yeah, you're mentioning
the magic figure almost.
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I lived in Idaho some years ago
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and the Development Bureau
had a huge well to service
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probably 30 or
40, 2 to 4 acre lots,
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it was 400 foot deep.
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It impressed on me,
that's pretty deep to get water.
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That's--that's, yeah.
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But China has, when it comes
to converging catastrophes.
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Here's a country
which is one of the most
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powerful on earth.
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Certainly perhaps
the most vibrant economy
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at the current.
The up and coming.
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Not the largest, but certainly
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the one with the most momentum.
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And yet it's the one that has --
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it's the canary
and the coal mine
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when it comes down to collapse,
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actual collapse of systems.
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If we can see it
anywhere in the world,
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we can see it in China.
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Well it's really
stage 2, because I remember
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with the fall of the Berlin Wall
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and the true opening
up of what was behind
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the iron curtain,
not the bamboo curtain,
00:09:34.11\00:09:36.38
we discovered
that the east--lot of
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Eastern Europe was in
the same desperate situation
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and of course
Chernobyl, bit of an example of
00:09:40.78\00:09:44.89
things run amuck.
00:09:44.90\00:09:46.31
So that the whole
atmosphere is pretty much being
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poisoned in those
huge sewers of the world.
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And mind you, I've just comeback
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from New York City and Chicago.
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In my view, they're
blotted in their own way.
00:09:56.52\00:09:59.04
So your book resonated
with me, yet man is pretty
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much filing his nest in a
major ecological way. Yeah.
00:10:02.94\00:10:06.65
And it's more than just sad,
more than just even creating
00:10:06.66\00:10:11.02
an immediate desperation.
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It's really dragging
the entire infrastructure
00:10:12.88\00:10:15.03
down, doesn't it?
00:10:15.04\00:10:16.07
It is, it is, and
you know it's not just,
00:10:16.08\00:10:19.45
it's not just the
systems that God created,
00:10:19.46\00:10:23.66
that sustained
life on this planet.
00:10:23.67\00:10:25.00
Our food production
system, our oceanic system,
00:10:25.01\00:10:27.26
our freshwater system,
it's not just those things
00:10:27.27\00:10:31.26
what we're also
getting at the same time
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is the failure of an systems.
00:10:33.53\00:10:36.52
Our financial, our
global financial system,
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that's a global system
that God didn't create.
00:10:39.23\00:10:41.61
Thank goodness for
our mailing system,
00:10:41.62\00:10:43.81
but also our oil system.
00:10:43.82\00:10:46.03
And--and financial
systems very much tied up
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to the natural system.
00:10:48.29\00:10:49.30
Like the pork belly
futures and all the rest.
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Well that's just not
a phrase that's tied up
00:10:51.49\00:10:53.86
to farm production.
00:10:53.87\00:10:55.23
And it's man financial
betting on the outcome of--
00:10:55.24\00:10:59.33
in that case in an
industrial operation--
00:10:59.34\00:11:02.45
an agricultural operation.
00:11:02.46\00:11:04.46
Well, there's a saying,
and the person to attribute
00:11:04.47\00:11:07.83
it to escapes my mind at
the moment unfortunately.
00:11:07.84\00:11:10.89
But the say it's quoted a lot.
00:11:10.90\00:11:12.44
The saying is that,
"our real economy is wholly
00:11:12.45\00:11:15.35
owned subsidiary
of our natural economy
00:11:15.45\00:11:18.18
and without the
benefits that were--
00:11:18.19\00:11:23.43
that we received for so
long from an abundant planet
00:11:23.44\00:11:26.79
that was created by God,
we actually don't have any
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basis for
industry or anything else."
00:11:29.56\00:11:31.73
Absolutely, we'll probably
be reduced for those that
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remembereth, it's
in my younger days
00:11:34.27\00:11:37.21
days but there was a
movie that I never saw
00:11:37.22\00:11:39.23
which featured Soylent Green.
00:11:39.24\00:11:41.17
Oh, I've heard about
that. I've never seen it again.
00:11:41.18\00:11:45.78
People were living on
this mysterious green substance
00:11:45.79\00:11:48.41
and it turned out that it
was recycled people. Yeah.
00:11:48.42\00:11:51.65
You know, the Bible in prophecy,
00:11:51.66\00:11:54.75
well not a prophecy, it
tells stories of desperate
00:11:54.76\00:11:57.32
time in the past where
people are reduced to that.
00:11:57.33\00:12:00.27
We might think we're
immune but in the reality
00:12:00.28\00:12:02.28
we're already
consuming our environment
00:12:02.29\00:12:07.59
in very veracious ways.
00:12:07.60\00:12:10.42
We have enough people
that become a commodity
00:12:10.43\00:12:12.25
and this is part
of the connection
00:12:12.26\00:12:14.24
I see to religious liberty.
00:12:14.25\00:12:15.50
As this spirals down,
the value of a human being
00:12:15.51\00:12:18.59
is being degraded I think. Yes.
00:12:18.60\00:12:20.41
Man's fellows
aren't as important,
00:12:20.42\00:12:22.74
in fact we're more
and more in competition
00:12:22.75\00:12:24.24
with each other. Yes.
00:12:24.25\00:12:25.59
And the image of
God is being erased.
00:12:25.60\00:12:29.16
We need--this is a
good time to take a break,
00:12:29.17\00:12:31.54
so we'll move
away for a few seconds.
00:12:31.55\00:12:34.65
Please come back after
the break and we'll continue
00:12:34.66\00:12:36.86
this discussion of
global system degradation
00:12:36.87\00:12:39.24
and looking at China
as our prime example.
00:12:39.25\00:12:41.86