Crystal Clear

I’m looking for a new type of economy. I find our current ‘market’ economy severely lacking as it seems to preclude environmental degredation.

Jane Jacobs in “The Nature of Economies” attempts to describe our economies using terms normally used for describing nature. She postulates that an economy follows the same laws nature does: “through development and co-development through differentiation; expansion through diversification; continuation through self-refueling; stabilization through self-correction–all brought into order through unpredictable self organization.” (p. 145)

Starting from natural selection and evolution, she attaches no right or wrong to how this works out. Jacobs also briefly mentions that humans are different than the rest of animals because we have obtained consciousness. Becuase of this, we have choices to destroy and become tyrants. Yes, she has an overriding belief that forces will correct themselves after enough mistakes and time. Hopefully we will ‘wake up’ and see how working symbiotically with the world is preferable.

Alan Weisman in “The World Without Us”, also trust in evolutionary processes. He feels that if humans destroy the earth so much that we would no longer be around as a species, the world would right and correct all the messes we have made.

Both are void of a belief that something is fundamentally flawed with the world. I think Jacobs may have hit upon the ‘natural laws’ of the world, and how it should be. But my Christian faith tells me the reason there are problems and suffering is due to evil being in the world.

So I cannot hope in the ‘natural’ processes to eventually work themselves out. My hope is in the redemption through Jesus. But this doesn’t answer all the questions.

Jacobs hopes our consciousness will point us to a higher enlightenment so that we will stop the destruction. Weisman hints towards an extinction of our current species and a subsequent re-evolution of one better. (Interestingly, Ben Bova, science fiction author, mentions something like this is a collection of short stories, “Forward in Time”. But our race holds out (one person) until the universe collapses, hoping for a new universe to fare better.)

But my beliefs say that the only solution is to root out sin and evil in the world, and only Jesus can do that when he returns. So what of my time now? The only response I can settle on is to cling to the hope that Jesus’ parable of the yeast working through the whole dough will be enough to leaven the whole world.

Christians (yeast) then need to work and live and strive for the kind of economy Jacobs talks about. If not, then maybe we’ll end up with Weisman’s world–without us.

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