Earth’s Survival Or Ours?

Given by James Covington on April 20th, 2008

While the official date for Earth Day is actually April 22, millions will begin the celebration today, including the presentation of our own Sustainability Fair organized by our Green Sanctuary study group. The first Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, 1970, was one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy!Twenty million people demonstrated their support. The Environmental Protection Agency was created within three years after Earth Day, 1970. The UUA General Assembly has passed 23 resolutions on ecology, energy, and population issues. The seventh principle of our association, affirming “respect for the interdependent web of all existence,” was conceived and embraced as the environmental plank of Unitarian Universalism.

And today, the message about the personal responsibility we all share to “think globally and act locally” as environmental stewards of planet Earth has never been more timely or important. Michael Pollan writes in today’s New York Times Magazine: “Climate change is upon us and it has arrived well ahed of schedule.” [1]

As Vaclav Havel has written: “Over the past few years the questions have been asked ever more forcefully whether global climate changes occur in natural cycles or not, to what degree we humans contribute to them, what threats stem from them and what can be done to prevent them. Scientific studies demonstrate that any changes in temperature and energy cycles on a planetary scale could mean danger for all people on all continents.”[2]

It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we may not know just how big its contribution is. But is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point? By waiting for incontrovertible precision aren’t we simply wasting time when we could be taking measures that are relatively painless compared to those we would have to adopt after further delays?

Maybe we should start considering our sojourn on earth as a loan. In the words of an old Kenyan proverb, “Treat the earth well. . . it was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children.”

There can be no doubt that for the past hundred years at least, Europe and the United Sates have been running up a debt, and now other parts of the world are following their example, China and India being the most obvious. Nature is issuing warnings, that we must not only stop the debt from growing but start to pay it back. There is little point in asking where we have borrowed too much or what would happen if we postponed the repayment.

The effects of possible climate changes are hard to estimate. Our planet has never been in a state of balance from which it could deviate through human or other influence and then, in time, return to its original state. The climate is not like a pendulum that will return to its original position after a certain period. It has evolved turbulently over billions of years into a gigantic complex of networks, and of networks within networks, where everything is interlinked in diverse ways.

Its structures will never return to precisely the same state they were in 50 or 5,000 years ago. They will only change into a new state, which, so long as the change is slight, need not mean any threat to life.

Larger changes, however, could have unforeseeable effects within the global ecosystem. In that case, we would have to ask ourselves whether human life would be possible. Because so much uncertainty still reigns, a great deal of humility and circumspection is called for. The sage of ancient China Lao Tzu gives us spiritual and ethical direction in this work: “Nature sustains itself through three precious principles, which one does well to embrace and follow. These are gentleness, frugality and humility.” These are not popular virtues in our time. As we continue to mine the lands, decimate our forests and pollute our air and water, we are obviously harder on the earth than we are gentle.

And we are not encouraged to be frugal when we are bombarded day after tiresome day with messages urging us to buy - why wait? Enjoy the good life - the consumer life - now. I agree with whoever said, “Shopping is a form of mental illness.” We are victims of an attitude of endless expectations, somehow believing each of us is going to have more of everything. We are infected with instant gratification. We consume with reckless abandon, acting as if we were the last generation to inhabit the earth.

The third principle, humility, is a virtue sparsely distributed in the human race. American destiny was to conquer the wilderness. There is precious little wilderness now, but we are still in a conquering mood, denying the hard reality that all of us are totally dependent on nature and its resources.

But here’s my point: We can’t endlessly fool ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our wasteful lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution. Maybe there will be no major catastrophe in the coming years or decades. Who knows? But that doesn’t relieve us of responsibility toward future generations.

Whenever I reflect on the problems of today’s world, whether they concern the economy, society, culture, security, ecology or civilization in general, I always end up confronting the moral question: what action is responsible or acceptable? The moral order, our conscience and human rights–these are the most important issues at the beginning of the third millennium.

We must return again and again to the roots of human existence and consider our prospects in centuries to come. We must analyze everything open-mindedly, soberly, unideologically and unobsessively, and project our knowledge e into practice policies. Maybe it is no longer a matter of simply promoting energy-saving technologies, but chiefly of introducing ecologically clean technologies, of diversifying resources and of not relying on just one invention as a panacea.

I’m skeptical that a problem as complex as climate change can be solved by any single branch of science. Technological measures and regulations are important but equally important is support for education, ecological training and ethics–a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility, starting with you and me, even if it means nothing more than changing light bulbs.

This latter point I make, the quest and practice of ethics–a consciousness of our commonality, of course, is the very mission of any religious community, certainly our own. I have said that we must respond as a religious people. We are gathered here today as a community of faith, and that should make a difference in how we approach this critical issue.

Let me be clear. As I see it, the religious community is not here to please congregants, as though you were good consumers of a product. The Beloved Community of faith is here to be faithful to its mission, to speak the truth to power–yes, to provide a caring community for its members, where they can grow spiritually, to welcome all human being who enter our doors, but not to participate in the massive denial of this society. If we do that, why even call ourselves a religious community?

When I attended seminary in Louisville, KY, many years ago, a group of us went on a trip into Eastern Kentucky, into the hills and hollers, because we wanted to see the strip mining that we had heard so much about. As we left the urban community and traveled across the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky and went into the mountains, the poverty was evident–people were living in run-down trailers perched on the sides of hills, in the midst of ruined land. And mountains had literally had their tops cut off by these gigantic coal-mining machines. These machines were like skyscrapers. The topsoil was gone, washed away, and the gain had gone to companies that had no care or concern for the poor of Appalachia. There is a theological term for this–it is called sin. Too often have religions emphasized personal sins–you know, those sins that are sung about in country songs: lying, betrayal, and adultery–but churches have not held up to view those systemic sins which wound the earth and sicken the people who live here. This is not just an economic issue here–this is a moral issue and the deep pain that we feel with the death of the land or the drying up of the salmon runs is not just economic, it is spiritual.

A true religious vision is one that sees the natural world as a gift, a kind of grace that we have neither created nor earned. We see it everywhere. I described my experience a few weeks ago about looking out into the endless sky and ocean while sitting on the sands of a Caribbean beach. But I also saw it this morning, as I drove up the highway to Croton along the Hudson River. I see how the sun comes up every day, and how life is renewed, and what a miracle even one leaf is, and my soul is lifted.

The religious traditions of all people ask them not to turn away from what disturbs them, but to try to be with whatever is–it is essential that we learn to “sustain the gaze.” If we want to deepen spiritually, we have to open our hearts to the suffering of the world, and we have to be present with our own fear and grief. Sometimes I just have to stop and sigh with grief when I listen to the radio or read the newspaper. I just have to let that grief come, before I can get on with my day. And so here we are today, talking about this hard stuff. How can we bear it?

What sustains us is our spiritual grounding, the roots that we have put down in this community, and the values that we have chosen to live by. We have a radical devotion to the whole of creation, which we see as sacred. We know what touches one touches all. And we are devoted to discerning the moral and ethical consciousness that will help us discern our moral responsibility.

If you are here today, and you are thinking that you want to be more intentional than you have been in living out of these principles, then we do have some help for you. At the Sustainability Fair, you can learn of alternatives of how we can all be gentler to our Earth home. And you can join our very active Green Sanctuary study group. It’s so much easier to sustain this work in community.

I like to think that in this Fellowship we work from a positive vision–a prophetic alternative. Here at this place we ask, “What gives health? What gives life? What gives hope?” And always we must ask, “And how are the children?” How can we not think about the kind of future that we’re creating for the children among us? It just breaks my heart when I think about it.

Because, listen, either we will achieve an awareness of our place in the living and life-giving organism of our planet, or we will face the threat that our evolutionary journey may be set back thousands or even millions of years. That is why we must see this issue as a challenge to behave responsibly and not as a harbinger of the end of the world.

Vaclav Havel reminds us that “the end of the world has been anticipated many times and has never come, of course. And it won’t come this time either.”[3] We need not fear for our planet. It was here before us and most likely will be here after us. But that doesn’t mean that the human race is not at serious risk as a result of our endeavors and our irresponsibility our climate might leave no place for us. If we drag our feet, not only our freedom, but our very lives will be at stake.

So we must re-imagine our world, according to spiritual values, human values. And as we do, a new world can arise, as it always does, out of the human imagination.

In the words of Denise Levertov:
“. . . we have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope? - so much is in bud.
How can desire fail? -
we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision how it might be to live
as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.
Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet - there is too much broken that must be mended, too much hurt that we have done to each other than cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture.
So much is in bud.”[4]