Recently I’ve been watching the news, as have most of you, I suspect, with increasing anxiety. The world seems to have gone completely mad. We no longer consider anything but the short term. Even things that threaten our own existence.

I think that the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a great analogy as to what is happening.

‘What are these Horsemen?’ you ask. Well I’ll tell you.

They first appear in the Old Testament in the prophetic book of Zachariah and Ezikiel. Then they re-appear in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

They are named as War, Pestilence, Famine and Death, and will ride at the End of Days.

Let’s take them one by one.

War.

There seems to be a lot of fighting around the globe at the moment. It’s not only Russia and Ukraine, although if you watch solely the news in the UK, you might think so. There are wars going on in Africa, (including Rwanda where the British Government has thought fit to send illegal migrants!). Have we forgotten about Syria’s civil war? And what about the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts?

I’m also going to include here the civil unrest in many parts of the world that have not completely turned into civil wars, but there are violent protests everywhere it seems.

Peaceful protest has gone. Take the Maillot Jaune in France, the storming of the White House in the USA, Sri Lanka, Equador, India, Hong Kong, I could go on.

People are turning to violence almost as a first resort.

So wars everywhere.

The first Horseman has ridden.

Pestilence.

We can’t forget the pandemic of the last three years. The lockdowns, the deaths, the seriously ill.

Now there’s Monkey Pox. And before that, AIDS. What next?

These things spread because we can travel around the globe so easily nowadays. Jump on a plane and within a few hours you can be in most parts of the world. Once, if someone was ill, they would have recovered, or not be infectious when travel was slow. If it takes a week to cross the Atlantic, a person who is infected would be known before arriving, and quarantine could be begun. But now, they arrive in a few hours and contact many people (maybe even thousands, certainly hundreds) before even knowing they are ill.

So the second Horseman has ridden.

Famine.

Climate change is having a devastating effect on agriculture. We recently heard about the farmers in the Po Valley in Italy having crop failures because of lack of water in the river. This river is fed from the snows in the Alps, but those snows are melting and are not there any more.

Glaciers are retreating. They are the source of many rivers, and rivers are where agriculture gets its water. Lakes are drying up, causing the death of wildlife who have nowhere else to go to drink.

Now you might think that that’s not a problem. We can desalinate the sea water as they do in Dubai, and use that to irrigate the crops, but it’s not that simple. We are an integral part of life on this planet. We aren’t separate. Insects need water, too. We’re already destroying many of our pollinators with indiscriminate use of pesticides, and their food plants, by indiscriminate use of herbicides, all in the name of maximizing profit. If the wildlife dies, ultimately, so do we.

Then there’s the grain shortage brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been told that will cause famine in Africa, and maybe elsewhere.

Here in the UK, the cost of living is rising, and more and more people are living in poverty, not able to afford to buy food for their families. They are relying on food banks. Food banks in a comparatively rich economy in 2022!

The third Horseman has ridden.

We are just waiting for the fourth. Death.

He may not come soon, but unless we do something to ameliorate these things, come he will. The human race will not survive. It’s not just being too hot that climate change causes, but all these other things too.

The British Government has, I understand given the go ahead for more north sea gas exploration, and I just read that one of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party is promising he will allow no more onshore wind farms. So much for cutting carbon emissions!

Economic considerations come first, before the life on this planet, which will die unless we do something about it NOW.