Everyone seems to be well aware of the environmental crisis that is present all around us. While acknowledging over harvesting of the land and increasing pollution as being major contributors, it has become almost unambiguous that humans are at the center of these environment issues. As our population is approaching an unsustainable level, we have caught ourselves in a perpetuating cycle of exploiting our environment. Mankind has worked hard and contributed thousands of years of labor in developing and reaping from nature. As the book of Genesis shows, this labor of the land began in the very beginning of life on earth.
The passages of Genesis state that God created all things living and non living, the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon. God made the land fruitful and replenishing so that it nourished man and all the animals. However, when Adam ate the forbidden fruit, God banished him from the garden of Eden by saying, “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). Adam and Eve would no longer live leisurely in the fruitful garden of Eden, but rather in the hardship of harvesting the land himself.
Before the tree of knowledge was violated, the garden was replenishing and provided food for all who lived there without requiring the hard labor of man. “And God said, ‘See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food’”(Genesis 1:29). However, Adam is now required to work the fields through hard labor in order to provide for himself, similar to the way our current population has to work the land in order to provide for our self.
Furthermore, man was commanded by God to multiply and fill the earth, of which Adam and Eve fulfilled. At this moment, man has been doomed for a finite existence. By the passages of Genesis, man is destined to reproduce and propagate while also working the earth to provide for them self. This would insist that mankind will continue to grow while consequently increasing the demand of land for harvesting food, that is until there is no longer suitable land. Whether mankind’s existence on this earth be finite or not, the land of which we depend upon most certainly is.
WOW! I really like how you worked this all together. I would never have found a path from Adam and Eve, the original sin and how man is now responsible for the earth and sustaining it. In other words I really like where you went with this post. It has brought a lot of thoughts into my mind. It almost seems like we are destined to fail in the end.
I found your blog post extremely interesting! Is it to be implied from reading your post, that God’s punishment of Adam and Eve is the root cause of our current environmental condition? Since man was destined by God to continue to reproduce and harvest the land, does the responsibility and or blame fall into our hands or God’s? Great job!
I found your blog post to be rather intriguing. I’ve never put so much thought into God’ punishment of Adam and Eve and you bring up a very interesting point. I like how it’s implied that God meant for mankind to begin and continue to destroy the earth–as is there punishment. It gives one a lot to think about.