Gain’s Offering And Abel’s Cry: Reading Sabbath Jubilee at the Crossroads of Farming and Foraging

Abstract

Asindicated in chapter 1, sustainability has emerged in recent years as perhaps the burning question of our lime, pointing to the interlocking crises sweeping toward as from the future. Peaking reserves of global oil deposits, potentially runaway climate change, species extinction, water table depletion, and population overshoot threaten the viability of our species on the face of the planet. Eco-seien fist James Lovelock of Gaia fame is convinced that the planet is already in the process of eliminating us as too dangerous to the homeostasis necessary for biosphere continuity. Geo-engineering writer Gwynne Dyer, though less totalizing in his alarm, is another scientific voice beginning to break the silence about the growing terror in the science community that our current political gridlock will not be able to loosen and respond before the tipping point into unstoppable warming is reached. Certainly no one can be certain of time lines or magnitudes of catastrophe; but that major upheaval is in the offing seems irrefutable. What is patent is that our addiction to consump lion and our fetishism of growth as our primary economic values are beginning to show their true character as the inverse of sustainability. Unleashing (as we have) a logic of infinite and relentless expansion, putting every possible resource up for sale in the market as rapidly as possible, in a context where such resource stocks are, in fact, limited, is a formula for disaster.