Many people try to follow “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” interpreting ‘have dominion’ to mean steward nature to at least not degrade it; to keep it neutral or improve it.

I don’t know what people imagine, but what can a person do?

Nearly not one person on Earth is living sustainably, maybe a few people in hunter-gatherer tribes. The rest of us are trashing the planet. I want to illustrate how far we are from dominion or stewardship. Or to activate you, the reader, I’ll ask: can you draw the line from where crossed the line from dominion to trash?

You’ve no doubt seen pictures like this for evolution:

Well, below is a progression of images of what we’ve made of nature from grassy field to utter destruction. Where would you say we stopped “having dominion” or stewarding?

Nature without us

Doesn’t nature look beautiful on its own? Here’s a field that humans apparently haven’t touched.

Nature we lightly affected

Here’s a footpath through a grassy field. I ‘d say it falls within stewardship.

Nature more strongly affected

When a path gets used enough, it becomes a road, less a part of nature.

Upper limit of stewardship

Here’s a cobblestone road that I’d still call stewardship. They moved stones to create it, but didn’t create new materials.

Paved road

By this point, I don’t see how a culture that paves over a field like this one is stewarding or leaving it better than found. I could imagine people still calling it sustainable, but I’d disagree. It removes life. Anyway, it continues the progression.

Far gone.

I hope you can see the progression in how much we corrupt and pave over nature. I don’t see how anyone could call a culture or community that produced the road and city below and consider it sustainable or desirable. Can you imagine what nature was there before humans? Any doubt that it was beautiful and life-giving?

We’re poisoning ourselves

Any culture that creates abominations like the one below has lost its way. No way is it remotely stewardship or even neutral.

We’re killing ourselves

This scene actually happened. As the top image in this post represented humans as the culmination of a long line of evolution, the scene below shows an evolution of a different line, but seems to result from those early paths above.

I hope the comparison I made makes sense. Here’s the original image again:

We don’t have to do it this way

At least we can try to avoid buying fossil fuels. Do you think if you buy something plastic, that you aren’t helping drive the system paving over the most beautiful spaces? When we put money in the system, we help drive it. That’s why I take years to fill up a load of trash. I don’t want my pollution to still be hurting people centuries from now.

You can never fly again, never eat meat again, never buy bottled water again. You’d help us move upward on the images above instead of downward.

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