[vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_single_image image=”2445″ img_size=”full”][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]The National Academy of Sciences says a third of all plant and animal species on the Earth could be wiped out in the next fifty years.
It is the latest research to paint a bleak picture of future biodiversity on Earth, as other scientists have warned our species is responsible for bringing about a sixth mass extinction event.
Oh, no!
You can relax. This isn’t what you’d call “breaking” news. It’s an article I read recently in the Indy, which, by the way, is owned by a former KGB officer. But I digress. Anyway, it’s an alarm bell that’s been ringing for a while now.
Last year, for example, a 1,500-page report—offered as “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization,“—warned that “Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction.” Global warming, of course, is the villain.[1] But we won’t go into that.
For some reason, that brings locusts to mind, “leaderless insects, yet they strip the field like an army regiment.”[2]
Labeled as the worst locust outbreak in decades, desert locusts are ravaging crops in Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Tanzania and Uganda and recently entered South Sudan “worsening food shortages in a region where up to 25 million people are suffering after three consecutive years of droughts and floods.”[3]
“One swarm in Kenya reached around 930 square miles—an area almost the size of Moscow—meaning it could contain up to 200 billion locusts. ‘A swarm that size,’ said Priya Gujadhur, a senior official of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, “can consume food for 85 million people per day!’”[4]
Am I saying that the end of the world has begun? No. Probably not. At least, I don’t think so. Not yet. But, of course, it will.
Then, what does this all mean?
If nothing else, it’s a reminder that we need to get our act together. The world may not end next week or next year or before we die. Then again, we have no idea when we’re scheduled to die. It could be next week or next year or tomorrow.
My point is that we need to quit dawdling and end any habitual sins we’ve been struggling with once and for all. We need to start today doing whatever’s necessary to spend more and more time with God. We need to pick up that leather bound or faux leather bound Book with the ribbon marker today and start reading it again—anywhere, just pick it up, let it flop open and start reading. It doesn’t matter what book or what verse. God will meet you there. But you need to get in there and look for him and listen for his voice and take seriously what he says and do it again and again until you develop such an appetite for him that his Book will never lie idly on your bookshelf again.
Disappearing plants and animals and swarming locusts may not be a sign that the times are coming to a close. Then again, they may. But we shouldn’t need a global sign to stop indulging this sinful failure of a world and make solidifying and stoking our love affair with God the biggest priority of our life.
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[1] Plumer, Brad, “Humans are speeding extinction and altering the natural world at an ‘unprecedented’ pace,” The New York Times, 6 May 2019.
[2] Proverbs 30:27, MSG.
[3] “Locust swarm into crisis-hit South Sudan as plague spreads across east Africa,” Reuters, 18 February 2020.
[4] O’Hagan, Michael, “Uganda army fights voracious desert locusts,” Agence France-Presse, 19 February 2020.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]