“Glaciologists were shocked as much by the speed as by the scale of the collapse. “This is staggering. It’s just broken apart. It fell over like a wall and has broken as if into hundreds of thousands of bricks”, said one.

“This week, ice scientists meeting in New Orleans warned that something even more alarming was brewing on the West Antarctic ice sheet – a vast basin of ice on the Antarctic peninsula. Years of research by teams of British and American researchers showed that great cracks and fissures had opened up both on top of and underneath the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and it was feared that parts of it, too, may fracture and collapse possibly within five years or less.

“Thwaites makes Larsen B look like an icicle. It is roughly 100 times larger, about the size of Britain, and contains enough water on its own to raise sea levels worldwide by more than half a metre. It contributes about 4% of annual global sea level rise and has been called the most important glacier in the world, even the “doomsday” glacier. Satellite studies show it is melting far faster than it did in the 1990s.” Scientists Watch Giant ‘doomsday’ Glacier in Antarctica with Concern, The Guardian, January, 2022

Ocean acidity has increased twenty-five percent in two centuries, sea levels have risen eight inches in a century, while nearly half of Arctic ice has melted in fifty years. Fierce hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and floods remind humans that tampering with nature’s ecosystem comes with consequences.

Earth managed to survive several thousand years of human occupancy and exploitation but inevitably, it became clear wear and tear on Earth’s delicate ecosystem came with a cost. Forests that had provided fuel for fire, began disappearing as recently as 300 years ago. Facing this shrinking source of energy, carbon locked up in fossil fuels coal, oil, and gas, came to the rescue—but at an unforeseen price. Carbon released by fossil fuels pollutes the atmosphere, causing a devastating, negative impact on climate, hastening upset of a balanced ecosystem.

Archaeological records picture families, growing into tribes, with mini-kingdoms, crowning egocentric, would-be kings. These make-believe monarchs, lead multitudes of human pawns to their deaths, locked in hate-sponsored combat. Waving colorful banners, the quest for a fleeting moment of “power” and imagined “glory” evaporates like a whiff of methane, touched by a match. Human lives disappear, destroyed by surrender to the routine ritual of man’s unspeakable cruelty to other humans.

Ozymandias, real or imagined, symbolized the futility of mankind’s pride, greed, and hate-inspired discrimination.

“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Despite threshold moments of achievement, civilization drifts in a bleak direction. Legislative action, military victories or scientific breakthroughs are unlikely solutions. Nature speaks the last word when confronted with man-made exploitations. Negative consequences emerge.

Pandemics, catastrophic climate changes, street violence, deteriorating financial systems, earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, corrupt governments, starvation, relentless wars and “rumors of war,” floods, fires, mass murders, contaminated air, polluted water, droughts, vanishing aquifers, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, religious and political persecutions, cruel and inhuman suffering inflicted on humanity by evildoers and the killing power of an atomic bomb, triggered by some future unhinged tyrant.

Locked in a struggle for survival, many become vulnerable to “…a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” PROVERBS 14:12. Feeling lack of hope, the strongest human hearts “fail them for fear.”

Isaiah predicted decline of the environment while pointing to a solution. “The earth will wear out like a garment, and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever, my righteousness will never fail.” Isaiah 51:6, 7 The solution was secured by a promise made by the Messiah. “Jesus said, ‘I will make all things new.’” Revelation 21:5

WLJ