Seeing a way through the forest
Gary Bates and Don Batten
talk to forest and ecology authority Dr Jaroslav Joseph (Joe) Havel
Joe Havel’s life journey sounds like a wartime movie plot where a local boy
escapes oppression and makes a better life for himself in another country. But this
story is true.
Dr Havel had a non-Christian upbringing in Czechoslovakia, where the schools were
either controlled by Nazis or by communists, neither of whom had any time for Christianity.
As the war engulfed most of Europe, he observed that morals were regarded as relative.
‘Lying’, for example, ‘was seen as just an essential survival
skill’, he says.
Hatreds ran deep and in the end even vengeance killing was seen as a virtue, not
a crime. In the post-war refugee camps, people stole fruit and corn from German
farms. It was justified as a form of compensation for German oppression. Joe says,
‘There were no twinges of conscience about it.’
The fruits of evolutionary thinking
The Nazi political regime brought with it an ideology that Joe sees in today’s
Western societies—evolution with its idea of survival of the fittest. He says,
‘Under the Nazis I was classified as half-human (Halbmensch) because
I spoke Czech, so I had no access to a university education. Graduates from our
high school were drafted into bomb disposal squads. They were seen as intelligent
and educated but expendable. There were no Czech lands on Nazi maps, so presumably
there was no future for us Czechs. They rated one of my schoolmates even lower because
he was a Jew and therefore regarded him as “non-human”. He died in the
Terezin concentration camp.’
Joe exhibits one of his favourite mandarin trees, from which he also grows tangelos.
Understanding how genetic information is stored and how it can be transferred forms
the basis for Joe’s hobby of growing fruit trees—many with two types
of fruit from the same tree (by grafting one onto the other).
As thoroughly documented by Prof. Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler,1 Hitler based his Nazi ideology on
the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, and he carried it out to its extreme.
In his notorious book, Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), Hitler wrote,
‘Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity
that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely
by means of the most brutal struggle. If you do not fight, life will never be won.
… He who wants to live must fight and who does not want to fight in this
world where eternal struggle is the law of life has no right to exist.’
Hitler believed that what applied to animals should also apply to humans. For example,
tens of thousands of disabled people were murdered because their survival was deemed
not to be in the best interests of the nation.
One evil replaces another
The Nazis were defeated, but Joe again encountered a political system with evolutionism
in its engine room. In 1948, the Czech communists, as puppets of the Soviet Union,
took over the government. The non-cooperative were labelled ‘class enemies’
and incarcerated in labour camps. Joe had seen this ‘naked power of the state’,
as he called it, before, and he did not like it. Joe says, ‘It does not seem
to occur to people that once they can be persuaded that they are just smart monkeys
produced by chance through a struggle for survival, they can be pushed around by
dictators much more easily than someone who believes he was created with an eternal
soul.’
Escape
Before finishing high school, Joe escaped into the American occupation zone of Germany.
Joe said, ‘People with luggage were caught as they tried to go through the
heavily guarded mountain passes. My friend and I travelled light, without luggage,
enabling us to cross over the mountains at night. It made it harder on the other
side, and even what little we had, such as watches or money, was stolen from us
in the refugee camps, where people were freezing and starving.’
Joe adds, ‘When a fellow refugee, a strongly built army deserter, was diagnosed
with tuberculosis (TB), it terrified me. My mother had slowly died from it when
I was young.’
Although an agnostic at the time, Joe became so desperate that he cried out to God,
‘If you help me get out of here, I will believe in you.’ Joe struggled
in continuing the story—remembering the hardships on the one hand, and yet
God’s providence on the other.
Joe applied to migrate to Canada, but the Canadians rejected him because they wanted
skilled tradespersons and had no use for students.
A new beginning
However, Australia took young men, provided they were single, fit and willing to
work in the ‘bush’.2
In Australia, Joe completed his high school education—the hard way. He studied
by correspondence while working in a sawmill and a forestry gang in the magnificent
and unique jarrah3 forests in the
south-west of Western Australia. This area experiences searing heat in summer and
near freezing conditions in winter.
During those years, Christians whom Joe met impressed him with their consistent
moral living. Two families befriended him and showed him lots of kindness. Joe found
this perplexing because he could not find a material motive for their behaviour.
After finding out it was the Bible that motivated them, he studied it and eventually
became a Christian. In one of the families Joe met his future wife, Betty.
Later, Joe entered university to study forestry. He says, ‘My newly found
Christian faith nearly foundered when I heard evolution taught as a fact, not by
a political regime, but by a supposedly impartial educational institution. It made
my simple faith seem outdated.’ Fortunately Joe heard a lecture by a senior
Christian scientist on campus who argued convincingly that creation by design was
more logical than evolution by chance. As his studies progressed he started to see
more and more holes in the theory that flowering plants evolved.
Evolution anti-science
Hoop pines planted in 1957 dwarf Joe. Evolutionists regard hoop pines as ‘primitive’,
but Dr Havel disagrees.
Joe’s research and postgraduate studies strengthened his conviction that evolution
impedes scientific progress. After graduating, he supervised the planting of hoop
pine in New Guinea. At university he was taught that the hoop pine family, Araucariaceae,
was a collection of primitive ‘living fossils’4 unable to compete with broadleaf trees (angiosperms).
Yet hoop pine had, until quite recently, an extensive distribution from New South
Wales through Queensland and Papua into New Guinea and even Iryan Jaya, and was
the basis of the early timber industry.
The related klinki pine was even more important in New Guinea, and Joe’s next
job was to develop cultivation techniques for it. That research led to his master’s
degree. He then studied the ecology of these species, particularly their ability
to compete with hundreds of broadleaf tree associates. He published internationally
on both the silviculture5 and the
ecology of the Araucarias.
Later in New Guinea, he became the founding principal of the forestry college and
compiled an illustrated textbook of forest botany for Papua and New Guinea. It described
56 families and 160 tree species. Evolutionists regard many of these families and
species as ‘primitive’, yet they are both ecologically and economically
important today. During the preparation of the book, Joe discovered several previously
undescribed species of trees.
Joe later returned to Australia and changed the direction of his work, but pursued
his interest in Araucariaceae, studying them on visits to Queensland, Indonesia,
Malaysia, New Caledonia, Fiji, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. In a recent
paper summarising these studies, he concluded that the reduction in range of the
Araucariacae is not due to their inability to compete with flowering plants, because
they co-exist well with hundreds of broadleaf tree species. The main long-term adverse
influence has been the drying out of climate on continental scale and the associated
increase in wildfires, to which most Araucariaceae are vulnerable. Such a climatic
change would have followed Noah’s Flood.
In the past two centuries, the major factor in the reduction of the area of these
trees has been logging followed by conversion to agriculture, which has occurred
widely in Australia, New Zealand, Chile and especially in southern Brazil, where
millions of hectares of Araucaria forest have been destroyed. It is still occurring
in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Philippines and in Malaysia.
An example of Dr Havel’s mapping work in Western Australia. The exquisite
detail can only be appreciated at full-scale reproduction (not possible here).
Career change
In Australia, Joe’s research mainly involved the ecology and mapping of forest
types in south-western Australia. He pioneered the use of computers in analyzing
large amounts of ecological data, and in comparing maps of vegetation, soil and
topography to analyse their inter-relations. This was published both locally and
internationally.
Toward the end of his career in the public service, Joe got increasingly drawn into
research administration, retiring as the Director of Research and Planning in the
Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM). That job included planning
nature reserves, national parks and state forests—a hot topic today due to
its environmental significance.
Active retirement
After retirement, Joe returned to fieldwork as a consultant on environmental and
forestry issues, advising government organizations on water catchment issues, and
private companies on tree planting. He was also involved in reforestation research
in Indonesia as part of Australian foreign aid programs, using his New Guinea experience
of tropical forestry. His last major paid job was co-operative mapping of the entire
south-western forests of Australia, as the basis for the conservation of old growth
forests. He used this research to write a doctoral thesis, for which Murdoch University
granted him a Ph.D. (at age 71).
Dr Havel’s career demonstrates that belief in evolution is not necessary for
scientific research. In fact, Joe has observed that most of the researchers that
he worked with find the theory of evolution irrelevant to the operational science
that they do. They are concerned with the solution of everyday problems on the basis
of present-day observations and statistical analysis. Evolution is a topic of academic
interest only. It has nothing to do with how the real world works. He adds, ‘I
don’t have that luxury. I have lived under two regimes that used evolution
as a basic doctrine and translated it into a political weapon that ruined millions
of human lives. I cannot see it as just academic.’
Evolution…has nothing to do with how the real world works.
A passion for the truth
In a democracy like Australia, it rankles Joe to see his grandchildren being taught
this ‘destructive and flawed theory’ as a fact. He says, ‘Teachers
in government schools, no matter how well qualified in science, are forbidden to
expose students to creation. But any teacher, no matter how poorly qualified, is
expected to teach evolution. The faith of many young Christians is destroyed along
the way.’
It is this tax-payer funded indoctrination that has led Joe to become more active
against evolution, using every opportunity to put the case for creation. He fears
that state education is heading to where education in central and eastern Europe
was 60 to 70 years ago—devoid of freedom and balance, and lacking absolute
moral values.
The creation/evolution issue even relates to Joe’s main hobby, the cultivation
of over 100 different sorts of fruits. He has numerous individual fruit trees that
produce two kinds of fruit. One example is a mandarin tree that also bears tangelos.
Joe showed how he achieved this by taking a tiny bud of a tangelo and placing it
into a small cut in the branch of a mandarin. He explained, ‘I don’t
even need this much material. Just one unspecialized growing cell could efficiently
transfer all of its genetic information—the size and shape of leaves, the
colour and structure of flowers, the shape and taste of the fruit, etc.—from
one tree to another. Hundreds of books’ worth of information is transferred
so accurately and efficiently that our current technology cannot match it. Yet we
are being persuaded that this information storage and transmission technology is
all due to chance.’
An impact
Joe’s legacy will live on. His adult children all profess faith in Christ.
One son coordinated a National Professional Development Project that produced one
of the main source documents used to develop Western Australia’s Values Framework
that all schools are required to implement. He is now a Principal at a Christian
School and has overseen the development of a Christian beliefs and values framework
that sees staff integrate Christian beliefs and values into their learning programs.6
Dr Havel’s pioneering work in plant ecology and taxonomy will also live on.
He is well-known for his research in many countries. Those who know him will testify
that Joe readily recognizes that his life’s journey and subsequent body of
work are only due to the goodness of the One who made the very trees that he studies
and Who gave us the capacity to understand. We can all praise God for that.
References and notes
- Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004. Reviewed in
Creation 27(4):39, 2005. Return to
text.
- An Australian colloquialism for the country or rural areas.
Return to text.
- Jarrah, Eucalyptus marginata, (also known as Swan
River mahogany) is the principal hardwood tree of the region. As it is resistant
to termites, and it is extensively used in the furniture and building industries.
Before the advent of bitumen, some famous roads in London and Berlin were paved
with jarrah blocks. Return to text.
- The family Araucariaceae includes the Norfolk Island pine,
hoop pine, Bunya pine, monkey puzzle tree, kauri, klinki, and the Wollemi pine,
which has come into recent fame because of its extreme ‘living fossil’
status (see Creation 17(2):13,
1995; Creation 23(3):56, 2001).
Return to text.
- The care and cultivation of forestry trees.
Return to text
- Unlike the USA, Australia does not have a Bill of Rights that
activist judges can misconstrue to effectively ban Christianity from government-funded
schools. Return to text.
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