Participants: Lincoln Steed (Host), Scott Christiansen
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI000174A
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00:22 Welcome to The Liberty Insider.
00:24 This is the program bringing you discussion, news, 00:27 updates and analysis of religious liberty events 00:30 in the United States and around the world. 00:32 My name is Lincoln Steed, Editor of Liberty Magazine. 00:37 And my guest is Scott Christiansen. 00:39 And Scott, I want to talk about a book that you have 00:42 just recently written and is almost printed from 00:45 the Review and Herald Publishing Association 00:47 in Hagerstown, Maryland. 00:49 Not too far down the road from where I live. 00:51 Even I work in Silver Spring, Maryland. 00:54 The book is-- Planet in Distress. 00:56 Planet in Distress. Planet in Distress. 00:58 You're talking about global system decline. Yes, I am. 01:01 From a theological and a scientific 01:03 point of view explaining I think very clearly. 01:06 How man's and natures systems, 01:09 which are very much intertwined, sort of 01:11 spiraling down in what I think 01:14 is a terminal decline, isn't it? 01:16 And fulfilling prophecy while doing so. Absolutely. 01:18 we expect that. 01:19 But Seventh-day Adventists and many other Christians 01:23 see evidence of what the Bible talks about. 01:25 But you're laying it out in a logical fashion 01:28 that relates to scientific and observational analysis 01:33 that a world traveler like you can see. 01:36 Now you've been in different places. 01:38 I know you were based in Mongolia for a while. 01:43 Now you live in Maine. 01:45 We like the cold place-- You see the system 01:47 collapse up in Maine? A little bit, yeah. 01:50 System collapse in Maine is probably when the flu 01:52 blocks up and you can't run 01:54 that far in the winter. It's true. 01:56 Actually, it's literally true. 01:57 You say that jokey, but it's actually true. 01:58 No, I'm serious, it's life and death. 02:01 I wrote a book years and years ago 02:03 about a survivalist who went through a lot of personal 02:07 traumas and ended up as a doctor in Nepal. 02:10 But he told me when he was hiking up 02:11 in your part of the woods up in Canada in the winter. 02:15 He nearly lost his life once. 02:17 His boot got developed a little cut in it 02:20 and I think he got some water in crossing 02:24 a stream but a little chink in your arm or like that, 02:27 you literally can freeze to death. 02:28 Everything starts small. Big things starts small. 02:32 But I'm not really wanting to settle on Maine, 02:34 you also were posted for a while in China. Yes. 02:37 And I know from reading your book 02:38 that China was a huge case study to impress on you. 02:43 How the system declines working on a 02:45 massive scale and just so obvious. 02:48 And with your indulgence, I'll point you toward 02:51 what you said there about flying over a part of China. 02:53 Oh, oh, yeah, in the book, yes. 02:55 Tell us a little bit about that? 02:56 Well, you know, in China, 1.3 billion people and-- 03:02 It's a little bit like the national debt. 03:04 It's a number almost too big to get 03:05 your head around, isn't it? 03:06 Yeah, you know, there's a joke in China. 03:09 That's one thousand three hundred million, right. 03:11 It's one thousand three hundred million, 03:12 that's a lot more than we have in the U.S. 03:15 Four times. Approximately four times. 03:17 There's a joke in China that you can make 03:19 the absolute worst product in China. 03:21 And the example that was used for me 03:23 was a when one of my hosts in China on one of my 03:26 many trips, they bought me a popsicle. 03:28 The popsicle was horrible, it was like eating chalk. 03:31 I threw it away and they said well, you know 03:33 that Popsicle maker can sell one Popsicle only one time 03:38 to every one hundred person in China 03:40 and be fantastically successful. 03:42 Yeah, so that's a lot of, that's a lot of people. 03:46 The thing in China is that China is probably 03:49 the foremost example of a country that is 03:51 currently stressed almost to the breaking point. 03:54 Has basically destroyed their environmental 03:58 resources and have engineered their country. 04:02 And that has brought them close to the breaking point. 04:05 One of the interesting things I think it's a story 04:08 that you're referring to. 04:09 But you are with the Chinese official. I was-- 04:12 Flying over a farming area of China 04:15 and he was reminiscing about his childhood. 04:17 Well, it was in Northern Province. 04:18 It was in Northern Province and we were flying 04:20 and he was going up to se an ADRA project with me. 04:22 I was the country director for ADRA for China 04:24 at that time and a very wealthy-- 04:26 That was the--Adventist Development Relief Agency. 04:29 Thank you, I shorthand and I-- 04:31 There's gotta be a few viewers that don't know. 04:33 Okay, all right--It's an International 04:35 Aid Organization that's administered by 04:38 the Seventh-day Adventist Church. that's correct. 04:39 Using combination of church and government money, right. 04:44 And we had -- yes, exactly, 04:46 and we had some fascinating projects in China that dealt 04:49 with basic social needs and environment 04:51 at the same time. 04:52 Fascinating, that's where the needs 04:54 were in China and still are. 04:56 But this--this was a very powerful gentlemen, 04:57 he was a member of the Central Committee 05:00 or the People's Congress anyway, 05:02 very wealthy gentleman. 05:03 And at that time I was maybe 40 05:07 and he was maybe 60. All right. 05:09 And we were flying over a Northern Chinese Province 05:13 and if you look down and it's-- 05:15 it's always smoggy, everywhere in China. 05:18 And if you look down you could just see 05:20 that it was all small farm plots. 05:22 And maybe a small stream, but nothing else 05:26 and he was telling me about how--Open fields. 05:28 Open fields. This wasn't country and woods all over. 05:30 No, no, none of that, none of that, none of that. 05:32 You could see to the horizon 05:34 dimly and there wasn't much. 05:36 And he was telling me this wonderful 05:39 and romantic story about how he had been forced 05:43 out of the city during the Cultural Revolution, 05:45 then forced to live with the farmers, 05:47 to whom he was nothing but a burden. 05:49 Because he didn't know how to farm. 05:50 And how a beautiful young woman had also been 05:53 forced out to the same village 05:55 and they would go into the woods at night 05:58 and they would-they would talk and they would cry 06:00 and they grew close, you know, 06:02 but they drew strength from each other 06:04 and they ended up getting married. 06:06 And he said, it's because of those forests 06:08 that my wife and I were able to spend time 06:11 together privately and to grow close together. 06:14 He said, I'll always remember that. 06:16 And he said in fact he was right below us. 06:18 What do you say? 06:19 Well, and I'm listening and I was looking out 06:21 the window again, there was nothing. 06:23 There are farms, you know, but there are no trees. 06:27 And -- and I said to him, I said wait. 06:29 Are you--you are talking about right now, 06:31 right below us. I said, there are no trees. 06:32 And he says, well, yeah, we need food more than 06:35 we need trees and they're all gone. 06:38 It is incredible and the thing is once you 06:41 get rid of the forests, which are meant to absorb 06:44 rainwater that comes in big storms 06:46 and percolated into the soil. 06:48 Once you start-- Plus the trees attract 06:51 the clouds, not smog. 06:52 Well--So it affects the rainfall pattern. 06:54 And they make oxygen and they've got 06:56 a number of tasks. 06:57 Once you thoroughly disrupt that, remember 06:59 this is the size of a couple of states in the U.S. 07:02 and the trees were used to be all trees 07:04 and now they're all were gone. 07:05 Once you do that, you've re-engineered the Earth 07:07 and you messed up the basic. 07:12 You mess up the amount of water 07:13 that's able to go into the Earth. 07:14 You mess up the ability to create topsoil. 07:18 This is a very big deal. 07:19 And probably was in the same part of China, when I saw 07:21 a program fairly recently, that outlined 07:25 how the farmers are growing fruits and stuff. 07:28 There's no breeze in that part of the China anymore. 07:30 And people hand-pollinate everything. 07:33 Every piece of fruit or fruit flower 07:36 on a tree has to be hand pollinated. 07:38 The Chinese are notorious for overusing fertilizers 07:41 and for overusing pesticides. 07:43 And yes, they kill off some, not all the bugs. 07:46 We've developed super bugs. 07:48 But they kill off the bees as well, 07:50 but in the same part of China if I could. 07:54 The farmers after a while they ran out of water 07:58 and they had to drill wells in order to get the water 08:01 that they needed to water their crops. 08:04 And then after a little bit longer they found out 08:06 they had to sink those wells yet deeper. 08:09 By that time I was there 10 years ago and looking 08:13 at the situation and trying to figure out 08:15 what could be done. 08:16 These farmers were being told they absolutely 08:18 had to produce food. 08:19 But their wells were 300 some odd feet deep. 08:22 They were reaching both the technological 08:24 and economical limits for being able to get water out. 08:28 And I asked them what you're going to do 08:29 and they said, well we'll just move 08:31 to the city and find a job and be--We starve together. 08:35 Yeah, this land won't be farmed anymore. 08:37 Yeah, you're mentioning the magic figure almost. 08:40 I lived in Idaho some years ago 08:43 and the Development Bureau had a huge well to service 08:47 probably 30 or 40, 2 to 4 acre lots, 08:51 it was 400 foot deep. 08:52 It impressed on me, that's pretty deep to get water. 08:55 That's--that's, yeah. 08:57 But China has, when it comes to converging catastrophes. 09:03 Here's a country which is one of the most 09:04 powerful on earth. 09:05 Certainly perhaps the most vibrant economy 09:09 at the current. The up and coming. 09:10 Not the largest, but certainly 09:12 the one with the most momentum. 09:14 And yet it's the one that has -- 09:16 it's the canary and the coal mine 09:17 when it comes down to collapse, 09:20 actual collapse of systems. 09:22 If we can see it anywhere in the world, 09:23 we can see it in China. 09:24 Well it's really stage 2, because I remember 09:28 with the fall of the Berlin Wall 09:29 and the true opening up of what was behind 09:34 the iron curtain, not the bamboo curtain, 09:36 we discovered that the east--lot of 09:37 Eastern Europe was in the same desperate situation 09:40 and of course Chernobyl, bit of an example of 09:44 things run amuck. 09:46 So that the whole atmosphere is pretty much being 09:48 poisoned in those huge sewers of the world. 09:53 And mind you, I've just comeback 09:54 from New York City and Chicago. 09:56 In my view, they're blotted in their own way. 09:59 So your book resonated with me, yet man is pretty 10:02 much filing his nest in a major ecological way. Yeah. 10:06 And it's more than just sad, more than just even creating 10:11 an immediate desperation. 10:12 It's really dragging the entire infrastructure 10:15 down, doesn't it? 10:16 It is, it is, and you know it's not just, 10:19 it's not just the systems that God created, 10:23 that sustained life on this planet. 10:25 Our food production system, our oceanic system, 10:27 our freshwater system, it's not just those things 10:31 what we're also getting at the same time 10:33 is the failure of an systems. 10:36 Our financial, our global financial system, 10:39 that's a global system that God didn't create. 10:41 Thank goodness for our mailing system, 10:43 but also our oil system. 10:46 And--and financial systems very much tied up 10:48 to the natural system. 10:49 Like the pork belly futures and all the rest. 10:51 Well that's just not a phrase that's tied up 10:53 to farm production. 10:55 And it's man financial betting on the outcome of-- 10:59 in that case in an industrial operation-- 11:02 an agricultural operation. 11:04 Well, there's a saying, and the person to attribute 11:07 it to escapes my mind at the moment unfortunately. 11:10 But the say it's quoted a lot. 11:12 The saying is that, "our real economy is wholly 11:15 owned subsidiary of our natural economy 11:18 and without the benefits that were-- 11:23 that we received for so long from an abundant planet 11:26 that was created by God, we actually don't have any 11:29 basis for industry or anything else." 11:31 Absolutely, we'll probably be reduced for those that 11:34 remembereth, it's in my younger days 11:37 days but there was a movie that I never saw 11:39 which featured Soylent Green. 11:41 Oh, I've heard about that. I've never seen it again. 11:45 People were living on this mysterious green substance 11:48 and it turned out that it was recycled people. Yeah. 11:51 You know, the Bible in prophecy, 11:54 well not a prophecy, it tells stories of desperate 11:57 time in the past where people are reduced to that. 12:00 We might think we're immune but in the reality 12:02 we're already consuming our environment 12:07 in very veracious ways. 12:10 We have enough people that become a commodity 12:12 and this is part of the connection 12:14 I see to religious liberty. 12:15 As this spirals down, the value of a human being 12:18 is being degraded I think. Yes. 12:20 Man's fellows aren't as important, 12:22 in fact we're more and more in competition 12:24 with each other. Yes. 12:25 And the image of God is being erased. 12:29 We need--this is a good time to take a break, 12:31 so we'll move away for a few seconds. 12:34 Please come back after the break and we'll continue 12:36 this discussion of global system degradation 12:39 and looking at China as our prime example. |
Revised 2014-12-17