Lessons from Nature

In 1935, officials in Australia, seeking a solution to their Cane Beetle problem, imported 102 Bufo Marinus otherwise known as the notorious Cane Toad. The Cane Beetle you see was a natural threat to sugar cane crops and it had been reported that Cane Toads were an environmentally friendly way of eliminating the pest. Sounds like a good plan, right?

Unfortunately the Cane Beetle lives in the upper stalks of the sugar cane and apparently Cane Toads can't jump very high; who would have thought? So, the Cane Toad proved utterly ineffective against the Cane Beetle. But rather than collect the imported toads, of which no natural species of toad existed in Australia, everyone simply forgot the Cane Toad. That is until it began to multiply like rabbits (which is another story Australians are familiar with). Suffice it to say that the Cane Toad is highly prolific, laying an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 eggs per spawning. The result has been one of the worst environmental disasters in Australia.

The highly toxic Cane Toad has no natural predators and apparently eats almost anything including virtually every scrap of vegetation in a given area thus destroying the natural habitat of entire eco-systems.

Seventy-one years and millions of dollars later the Australian government is still contending with the growing Cane Toad problem and is now seriously considering releasing a genetically-engineered virus into the environment that will supposedly only target the Cane Toad. I am sure that will come off without a hitch as well.

This is only one of countless examples where mankind has made seemingly minute alterations to the natural order producing disastrous results. From Kudzu to the introduction of Mongoose in Hawaii; virtually every man-made attempt to manipulate or alter the natural order has been catastrophic.

I believe the same can be said for the natural moral order. In very much the same way that erroneous manipulation of the natural environment produces negative results, any attempt to alter or deviate from the natural moral order, no matter how slight will likewise produce negative effects.

I was recently reading an article in USC Health, a quarterly publication of the University of Southern California which hi-lights their research activities in the area of science and medicine. Included in the spring 2006 issue was an article on the growing problem of obesity and its causal relationship to numerous cancers. In particular, researchers want to understand the causes of obesity among children since this is a strong predictor of adult obesity.

According to the article, "Over the past two decades, the percentage of overweight teens in the U.S. has tripled." The report focused on the possible causes, including poor diet and decreased activity among children. Apparently the decrease in physical activity among children represents a dramatic shift that has only taken place in the last several decades. And this where I think some parallels to the Cane Toad disaster exist demonstrating that even the smallest variation in the moral environment produces a host of deleterious consequences in society.

According to the latest research, one of the contributing factors to the decrease in activity among children has been changes in the "built environment." The built environment refers to the physical community in which people now live; how residential areas are built in relation to recreation, shopping, work, etc. In addition, the built environment would include the perceived level of safety within a given community.

In both areas we have seen substantial changes over the last half century. Physically speaking, communities and neighborhoods are more spread out and isolated than ever. Localized commerce has been consolidated into shopping malls and "Super Stores." Homes are built on vast tracts of land to maximize every square inch for profit without regard for the community or quality of life. Gone are the small neighborhood grocers and Five & Dime stores. You may think, so what? The fact is this consolidation into mega shopping centers and bedroom communities has had a disconnecting affect on individuals that discourages real community.

In building such consumerist innovations these marketers are dependent upon a larger volume of consumers to support their investment. This demands that these stores draw from more than the immediate neighborhood and there is by necessity a loss of familiarity that is necessary to produce communal reciprocity among neighbors. Without this sense of reciprocity; in other words, having a sense of obligation to people known to you and with whom you interact regularly, there is a diminution of "community." This diminution of community eliminates an important safeguard for children where "Mrs. Smith" once exercised a cooperative interest in "those children down the street" and thus served as an extra set of eyes to watch over them.

This lack of communal reciprocity combined with the post-sexual revolution culture that is producing sexual predators like Cane Toads has rendered our society unsafe for children. (If you think I am exaggerating, visit the National Sex Offender Registry to see just how many live in proximity to you.) This, according to the researchers, is a significant factor in the decreased physical activity among children. They cannot go outside and play the way children used to, they cannot walk (nor can we for that mater) or ride their bikes down to the local grocer, Five & Dime or the Drug Store for a big fat milk shake, which didn't seem to make us obese!

Here again, you find that the slightest variation from God's moral design for family, community or even our relationship to material goods, i.e. consumerism, has produced a negative social condition which has innumerable symptoms apparently one of which is childhood obesity.

Copyright S. Michael Craven 2006

Comment on this article here

You can listen to this message online here

S. Michael Craven is the Founding Director of the Center for Christ & Culture, a ministry of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.