This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
How did it all go so wrong? How did the magnificent machines and mighty structures of our civilization become instruments of the ecological disasters that could destroy us all?
We have become divorced from the land. More than half the world's population is now urban, and the percentage of world population making a living from agriculture has declined from 53% to 27% just since 2016. In the U.S., our 3.4 million farmers are barely 1% of our population.
A chasm has emerged between city-dwellers and those who remain on the land: a stark difference in interests, in culture, and even in average ages. This is not because the rural residents are more concerned with ecological preservation, but they somehow sense that those in the cities are deaf to long-lasting traditions based on living in a particular environment. Nowadays, around the world, class differences have been eclipsed politically by the urban-rural divide.
The Bible traces this societal dysfunction to the second generation of humanity. After Cain kills his brother, God cuts him off from the land and declares that he must wander the Earth. As if in sympathy for the land, which had to absorb the blood from the murder, God thunders that the soil will no longer yield its strength to Cain. (Genesis 4:12) He is effectively divorced (which is what the word gerasht in verse 4:14 means in modern Hebrew) from the soil.
What is Cain to do? If he cannot farm, he must depend on the mercy of others. But as he himself blurts out (Genesis 4:14), his crime leaves him in danger of retribution from the growing population of Adam's descendants who must fear and disdain him.
Cain solves this problem by founding a city (Genesis 4:17). He is said to have settled in a place called Nod, but that word is actually the verb “wander.” So Cain has not escaped God's command to wander; he has simply found a creative way to do it. Cities are permanent wanderers on the Earth. And indeed they have always seen a lot of travel, absorbing immigrants and shedding inhabitents who are seeking other opportunities.
From the earliest founding of cities, they come to exploit the lands outside them more and more, extracting most of the wealth created by farmers and herders. First the cities charged for trade and for services to the rural areas, then become manufacturing centers, then exported culture, and ultimately created new forms of exploitation through finance and digital technologies.
And with each step away from the roots of what gives us life, the cities have become more extractive, more destructive. For all the marvels and benefits that cities have developed, the cry of murder has never left them. We need to honor the soil in order to heal our ecological, political, and spiritual crises.
June 6, 2024
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.