I want to reiterate again how important I think David Wallace-Wells’ latest book “The Uninhabitable Earth” is. It should be read by everyone. It’s best value is in how extensive it is in laying it all out there for us: the intricate, interconnected flow of ecological life, and how this has supported human life for tens of thousands of years (even hundreds of thousands, and millions, if you go all the way back to the first emergence of living creatures that are now known as human, or human ancestry). The ecological conditions were such that this emergence could happen as life adapted to the conditions. And now—

this **Eaarth**, as Bill McKibben named this “Tough New Planet” that is no longer hospitable to the flourishing of humans and civlizations of them;

this “Anthropocene”: the entry into a new ecological epoch and out of the “Holocene” in which human civilization has been built;

this “Unprecedented time” in which are having our sense of “normality” deceive us into thinking we have a handle on this

— Now we are uniquely challenged in these new conditions; this “new normal”. Wallace-Wells reiterates this again and again throughout the book, amidst all the jarring science of the *overshoot* we humans have managed.

We all need to take this in. When we “take it in”, we let it “hit us” and are able to begin awakening. It is , profoundly so, a “Conversion” from a blindness to an awareness. A “being present” which is required if we are to see how we Christians, who lay claim to a Jesus whose “message” was that of The “Kingdom of God”, are to see this crisis through the eyes of citizens of this Kingdom. This Kingdom which is defined in the prayer Jesus taught us to pray :

“Your Kingdom come, 
your will be done on earth, 
as it is in heaven”

This Kingdom is defined by the instances of God’s will being done on earth in the way it is done “in heaven”: which is to say, where it is done as it should be and was meant to be.

What is the will of the Creator who saw all this as “Good” and then “Very Good”? Why was this all “Good” and “Very Good”? Because it was the “Place” or “Stage” of the drama of Life, Seeking, Rebellion and Failure, and then Restoration and Redemption? Was it not so that the “conditions” created then and there were intended to let this story proceed, and let it happen with the life processes that enable us to be sustained so that we might live it? Many many more such questions present to us in this crisis time, that surface such questions!