The Ecocide Revelation: Joseph Christian Jukic
It was 1989, in the gritty heart of East Vancouver, and Joseph Christian Jukic (JCJ) was sitting through his Catholic Confirmation class. The air was thick with the scent of old incense and restless teenage energy. The priest, aiming for a dramatic impact, had brought in a special guest reader for the Book of Revelation: a local, Portuguese-Canadian girl who would later become the famous singer, Nelly Furtado. Her voice, before it would echo across the world’s dance floors, had a raw, haunting quality, perfect for delivering the coming apocalypse.
Nelly opened the Bible to the terrifying sixteenth chapter, the Seven Bowls of Wrath. But as her voice recited the ancient plagues, they ceased being divine acts of vengeance in JCJ’s mind. They became a meticulously detailed prophecy of environmental collapse—the ecocide revelation he alone seemed capable of deciphering.
The first profound moment struck him at the third bowl. Nelly read, “And the third angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.” JCJ didn’t see blood; he saw the final result of unchecked industry. He saw the death of the ocean as its vast body was poisoned by runoff, oil spills, and the shimmering, invisible infiltration of quicksilver (mercury). The great global circulatory system, choked with plastic and heavy metals, was turning septic—a colossal, dying organism. The whales and fish weren’t punished by God; they were suffocated by humanity’s refuse.
Then came the fourth bowl, where the vision of global warming was unveiled in devastating clarity. “And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.” The priest spoke of divine wrath, but JCJ saw only the compromised atmosphere. The endless belching of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane—had thickened the Earth’s atmosphere, transforming it into a thermal lens, trapping heat. Worse still, he saw the rupture: the hole in the ozone layer that allowed lethal ultraviolet radiation to pierce the shield entirely. The sun, our life-giver, was now directed back at us with intensified malice.
The result was the inescapable burn. The fire and heat burned people with a relentless fever they could not escape, turning the sky into an executioner. He saw the prophecy made manifest on the other side of the globe: people in Australia, where the hole was widest, being scorched by the raw power of the unfiltered sun, their skin peeling away from the intense ultraviolet radiation. The Revelation wasn’t about the sun changing; it was about us changing the atmospheric conditions until the light that once nurtured life was now scorching the skin from people’s bones. This was the truth of Revelation 16: a meticulous blueprint of ecocide achieved through technological folly and capitalist greed.
When Nelly Furtado closed the Bible, the room remained silent, broken only by the priest’s attempts to steer the discussion back to conventional morality. But for Joseph Christian Jukic, morality had changed forever. He had received his confirmation—a terrifying, personal vision of the Earth’s end. He was the only one in the room who had cracked the code, and he walked out onto the streets of East Van a changed man: a prophet not of salvation, but of ecological urgency, the self-proclaimed Christ of East Van, whose only gospel was the warning of the dying sea and the burning sky.
