One of the things that most irritates me is that static view of reality most people have. They talk about 'using up our resources' or 'peak oil' as if resources are physical entities. The only real resource is knowledge, information and our capacity to gather it and put it to good use. God said it best when he said "In the beginning was the Word". Here is a good example from Brazil: Transforming the Cerrado from wasteland to productive farmland through the application of God given knowledge. In the Economist here.
When we despair of our ability to cope and of man's prospects for the future, we despair of God's ability to transform us and to master the world which, of course He made. Despair is not a Christian value.
Clarification: we are not perfectible except through Christ's death and resurrection, however through that redemption we are given a glimpse of the sublime beauty of God's perfect plan which if grasped hold of allows us to use knowledge to do right. The social Gospelists were wrong: we cannot save ourselves but being saved, we can make far better use of God's special and common revelations to do right in this world.
Not to do good which is a saccharine and cliched phrase describing an outcome but to do what is right which I define as acting in conformance with God's will. True good can only come from doing the right thing, thus we must focus on what is right.
Incidentally, it's taken me 49 long years to figure this out.
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