There is deep down in ALL Americans (even the newest citizen) the feeling that we are a special people.  Even a “chosen people.”  The early Europeans who arrived here in the late 16th and early 17th century believed they were “the New Israel” and that the land they had found here was “surely the promised earthly paradise.”  They believed that it was “God’s will that they be here” even that “God” had sent them here.  Later this feeling was called “Manifest Destiny,” or as invoked by nearly every president since Washington, “providential.”  That everything from the Revolution to the “taking of the land” from the “savages” was simply the out working of “the divine plan.” 

Paul Davis, author of Free Will and Determinism, has this to say: “It is important to realize that determinism does not imply events occur in spite of our actions.  Some events occur because we determine them.  Determinism must not be confused with the doctrine of fatalism, which asserts that future events are entirely beyond our control” (italics ours).

John Calvin, the French Protestant theologian (born Jean Chauvin), was singularly responsible for the spread of the doctrine of predestination - that one’s “salvation” - and everything else for that matter - had already been determined by "God" and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.   In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God "freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass" (italics ours).

Davis goes on, ‘It is all written in the stars,’ declares the fatalist. ‘What will be will be.’  The soldier who behaves recklessly on the battlefield in the face of a hail of bullets while thinking ‘if my number is on it, no precaution will avert death’ is a fatalist.  Some Oriental religions contain fatalist overtones, and many people are inclined to lapse into fatalism from time to time, especially as far as major world affairs are concerned” (italics ours).

The deforestation of the world may be attributed to the fact that millions of people believe the earth is going up in smoke in some final reckoning with God (and soon).  What difference does it make if the earth is full of trees or empty of them?  Gandhi saw this attitude with the British and with many in India as well: “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves,” he said.

In his book Strangely Like War, Derrick Jensen, who writes about matters directly related to deforestation (among other environmental concerns), and who adamantly denies that “God” or anyone else has predetermined that all the forests be cut down, says that we must “immediately leave the remaining frontier forests alone, and confine industrial forestry to existing plantations.  Soon, once we have learned how, restore most and then all of the plantations to natural forests.  This work could be done by restoration ecologists, who, like traditional forest-dwellers, are grounded in their specific local natural communities...

“...The purpose of restoration is not fiber production, even sustainable fiber production, but restoring ecosystems and their humans to their natural local patterns and processes.”

The next post we’ll continue this theme of forest restoration, how the industry pundits recoil at the idea, and what the next step might be toward its eventual reality.