Pro Nobis

Ora Even the wisest and most knowledgeable people of the world can be right and wrong in their views of things. Even dear elders whose ideas we always highly respect and treasure miss it sometimes. Yet there are things in life that don’t require either superior intellect or vast experience to grasp — you’ve got to be dead dumb or just plain dead not to get them. 

When I was small I wondered if the earth had enough of the good things to support human populations all throughout time. Then I noticed that the population was growing and people were consuming the earth’s natural resources faster and faster. I thought that at some point things would just run out if the escalating trend in their consumption continued without any significant efforts to replenish what was expended.

I’ve since worried about it. The only consolation I get every now and then is when I open the TV and see the rest of the world having fun. I’d think that maybe I really should not worry after all.

We’ve been told that scientists, inventors, and other top professionals are continually working to find substitutes for the diminishing natural reserves. But the question is: Will we find enough of these alternative resources before we run out of the things we need to sustain ourselves on the planet? Oil and coal deposits, for instance, are not infinite; one day we’re going to run out of them.

For sure, in another hundred years or so there will only be a few small patches of forests left. And it’s silly to wish that the enormous amount of garbage we turn in day after day will become a reliable source of fuel within the next decade or two. By the looks of it, we’re headed towards really difficult times.

But then again, I may be wrong in suggesting impending doom. Only that it’s hard to think there’s still more oil in the ground than we’ve already used up. And harder to imagine that there’s still enough coal in the world to last seventy-five or a hundred years more when we never plant as many trees as we’re cutting down and, besides, it takes much longer time for timber to mineralize into coal.

We’re so far talking of only two of the basic materials we’re taking from the earth. There are actually a whole lot of other resources we’re continuously using up. With our fast increasing number and wasteful ways, it takes only common sense to figure out what’s coming for us.

The fumes that our industries have been pumping into the atmosphere have polluted the air so much and wrecked the ozone layer. And there are now much fewer trees to cleanse the air we breathe and summon the rains for our crop fields. This is more worrisome.    

It is not so far-fetched to say that hand-size canisters of clean air will soon outdo the present popularity of cellular phones. As environmental pollution seeps deeper into the ground, time will come that a small bottle of clean drinking water will be treasured as diamonds are treasured today because of its rarity. As we can see, the pharmaceutical industry is now beginning to work round-the-clock in trying to respond to the runaway health conditions of entire populations.  

These recent years we’ve already had some taste of what’s to come. There have been natural calamities like nothing our great, great grandparents had seen in their days. On several occasions the sea waves rose to horrible heights completely covering the horizon, the ground shook so hard that you couldn’t manage to stand on your feet even for short seconds, and whole mountains crumbled to the ground.

The devastation was widespread, every time. We all saw it happening. But not all of us understood about our individual participation in causing it.

To this day, many people still think that we should use everything there is because the earth and nature always work together to make everything all right. These people are not necessarily selfish. They just don’t believe we should worry about the future much past our own grandchildren’s foreseeable life expectancy.

Some groups feel there’s always someone to find an answer to every new problem. So they pump out all the oil, mine all the coal, cut all the trees, and take from the earth anything useful they can find. They’re aware that there may not be more where these things come from, but they think someone will find something else, somewhere else, that will be as useful.

Other groups, on the other hand, campaign for conservation. They call for the setting aside of a lot of everything. They want to save the forests and reduce our dependency on coal and oil in order to keep these things, as though no adequate substitutes would ever be found.

I believe that neither camp wants to do what is wrong, at least not intentionally. Yet as they continue to argue, in the meantime the earth’s resources are getting scarce more and more. And the whole planet is warming up.

Would it have been better if we never touched the forests and the oil and the coal in the world, and endured the dullness of life from the absence of the many beautiful things these resources provide? Some say we need to find a middle ground to the contradictory points of view. But is there really a middle ground?

Many of us cannot stand the summer heat. We turn the air conditioner on, even if we know that its chlorofluorocarbons can further aggravate the already bad state of the ozone layer. We cannot suspend today’s little comforts for the sake of tomorrow, a future that we think is way down the line of many years yet anyway.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” my former philosophy professor once said in our class. But I like it better coming from my pious aunt: “Ora pro nobis. May the saints in heaven pardon our folly and be kind enough to pray for us.”

Even the wisest and most knowledgeable people of the world can be right and wrong in their views of things. Even dear elders whose ideas we always highly respect and treasure miss it sometimes. Yet there are things in life that don’t require either superior intellect or vast experience to grasp — you’ve got to be dead dumb or just plain dead not to get them. 

When I was small I wondered if the earth had enough of the good things to support human populations all throughout time. Then I noticed that the population was growing and people were consuming the earth’s natural resources faster and faster. I thought that at some point things would just run out if the escalating trend in their consumption continued without any significant efforts to replenish what was expended.

I’ve since worried about it. The only consolation I get every now and then is when I open the TV and see the rest of the world having fun. I’d think that maybe I really should not worry after all.

We’ve been told that scientists, inventors, and other top professionals are continually working to find substitutes for the diminishing natural reserves. But the question is: Will we find enough of these alternative resources before we run out of the things we need to sustain ourselves on the planet? Oil and coal deposits, for instance, are not infinite; one day we’re going to run out of them.

For sure, in another hundred years or so there will only be a few small patches of forests left. And it’s silly to wish that the enormous amount of garbage we turn in day after day will become a reliable source of fuel within the next decade or two. By the looks of it, we’re headed towards really difficult times.

But then again, I may be wrong in suggesting impending doom. Only that it’s hard to think there’s still more oil in the ground than we’ve already used up. And harder to imagine that there’s still enough coal in the world to last seventy-five or a hundred years more when we never plant as many trees as we’re cutting down and, besides, it takes much longer time for timber to mineralize into coal.

We’re so far talking of only two of the basic materials we’re taking from the earth. There are actually a whole lot of other resources we’re continuously using up. With our fast increasing number and wasteful ways, it takes only common sense to figure out what’s coming for us.

The fumes that our industries have been pumping into the atmosphere have polluted the air so much and wrecked the ozone layer. And there are now much fewer trees to cleanse the air we breathe and summon the rains for our crop fields. This is more worrisome.    

It is not so far-fetched to say that hand-size canisters of clean air will soon outdo the present popularity of cellular phones. As environmental pollution seeps deeper into the ground, time will come that a small bottle of clean drinking water will be treasured as diamonds are treasured today because of its rarity. As we can see, the pharmaceutical industry is now beginning to work round-the-clock in trying to respond to the runaway health conditions of entire populations.  

These recent years we’ve already had some taste of what’s to come. There have been natural calamities like nothing our great, great grandparents had seen in their days. On several occasions the sea waves rose to horrible heights completely covering the horizon, the ground shook so hard that you couldn’t manage to stand on your feet even for short seconds, and whole mountains crumbled to the ground.

The devastation was widespread, every time. We all saw it happening. But not all of us understood about our individual participation in causing it.

To this day, many people still think that we should use everything there is because the earth and nature always work together to make everything all right. These people are not necessarily selfish. They just don’t believe we should worry about the future much past our own grandchildren’s foreseeable life expectancy.

Some groups feel there’s always someone to find an answer to every new problem. So they pump out all the oil, mine all the coal, cut all the trees, and take from the earth anything useful they can find. They’re aware that there may not be more where these things come from, but they think someone will find something else, somewhere else, that will be as useful.

Other groups, on the other hand, campaign for conservation. They call for the setting aside of a lot of everything. They want to save the forests and reduce our dependency on coal and oil in order to keep these things, as though no adequate substitutes would ever be found.

I believe that neither camp wants to do what is wrong, at least not intentionally. Yet as they continue to argue, in the meantime the earth’s resources are getting scarce more and more. And the whole planet is warming up.

Would it have been better if we never touched the forests and the oil and the coal in the world, and endured the dullness of life from the absence of the many beautiful things these resources provide? Some say we need to find a middle ground to the contradictory points of view. But is there really a middle ground?

Many of us cannot stand the summer heat. We turn the air conditioner on, even if we know that its chlorofluorocarbons can further aggravate the already bad state of the ozone layer. We cannot suspend today’s little comforts for the sake of tomorrow, a future that we think is way down the line of many years yet anyway.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” my former philosophy professor once said in our class. But I like it better coming from my pious aunt: “Ora pro nobis. May the saints in heaven pardon our folly and be kind enough to pray for us.”