A sermon for Earth Day by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 17, 2005
A sermon for Earth Day by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 17, 2005
On April 22, 1970 — 20 million Americans joined the largest organized demonstration in history. It was the first Earth Day. This coming Friday will be the thirty-fifth.
There had been another oil spill, and Gaylord Nelson, then a senator from Wisconsin, wondered: If so many students across the country could mobilize against the Vietnam War, why could they not organize a nationwide teach-in about the environment? What he wanted to do was "to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda." Later he said "It was a gamble, but it worked."
On that day there were neighborhood clean-ups and trees were planted. There were demonstrations against polluters. In New York City, Mayor Lindsay closed Fifth Avenue to traffic and 100,000 people attended an ecology fair in Union Square.
It did work. The Environmental Protection Agency was established and the Clean Air and Water Acts and Endangered Species Act were passed into law.
And the next year, United Nations Secretary U Thant declared an International Earth Day on the Vernal Equinox. Which means there are now two Earth Days every year.
It was a time of massive V8 sedans that guzzled leaded gas; when smoke and sludge belched out by industry was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity.
It had seemed that Earth Day 1970 turned that all around. The environmental movement was born and it achieved a rare political alignment of Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city dwellers and farmers, business and labor leaders.
In Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan they began building wind turbines and mounting buildings with solar panels.
Then, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) joined with the United Nations Environment Programme to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. That was 1988, and it that led, via conferences in Rio and Kyoto, to the Kyoto Protocols to keep "greenhouse gases" at 1990 levels by the year 2000. But no legally binding targets or timetables came out of it and the rest is history you know too well.
New powers have risen and taken the reins of government. The scientists began issuing their increasingly urgent warnings, and the small voices that rose in protest were not enough to halt the processes that had been set in motion and were sustained by greed.
But never has there been anything like the last four years, when the ink on one urgent scientific report is barely dry when another, more ominous, more appalling, is issued. Five years ago 14 scientific papers on global warming had been published; now there are a thousand.
We would be right to tremble at the thought of what will happen to this world of Life and Nature if we, the human component of the world, fail to do what must be done to save it.
A lot has happened since we marked Earth Day last year. Most of this news is not good news. If, hearing it, you decide to become sad, depressed, discouraged — that is a choice. I recite these things so that you can become energized by the knowledge that this Earth that gives us life, this Earth we love, now needs us. —
That our lives need not be lived without meaning or purpose —
That what we do now matters and that we are honoured to share in a Great Work. What an honour to be a part of the generation of humanity to which this work is entrusted!
At an international conference of 114 governments, in January, the current chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri — said he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and and he said there must be immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive." That's his word. The American government was shocked.
This is why the Administration was shocked. The White House had gotten the previous chair, Dr. Robert Watson, removed — at the request of Exxon, because he kept calling for urgent action. They wanted him replaced by Dr. Pachauri — and so the Administration lobbied other countries to vote Watson out and Pachauri in.
So here's the new guy, the one Exxon and the White House wanted, and he tells the delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose." Later he said that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to prevent us reaching — had already been reached.
In February, Tony Blair convened 200 of the world's leading climate scientists at Exeter, in the south of England. They issued the most urgent warning to date.
Then the biggest study of climate change ever made, based at Oxford University, said that what we're headed for will be be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC's worst predictions. Then an international task force reported that we could reach "the point of no return" in a decade.
And then, just before Shell Oil reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, the head of Shell in the UK, Lord Oxburgh, warned that without urgent action by the governments of the world, there "will be a disaster".
Future historians, looking back from a much less hospitable world, will certainly pay special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. They will puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster — destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years — and they may well identify the first weeks of this year as the time when the last alarms sounded.
It all came together last February at Exeter. The conference had been called by the Prime Minister to advise him on the urgent steps that would have to be taken. He needed help persuading the world to act.
It opened with his Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, saying that "a significant impact" from global warming "is already inevitable."
There were presentations from top scientists and economists from every continent showing that dangerous climate change is already happening and that catastrophic events that were once thought highly improbable were now seen as likely. Avoiding the worst would be technically simple, and cheap, they said, provided that governments could be persuaded to take immediate action.
The conference learned that glaciers are shrinking. Arctic sea ice has lost almost half its thickness and will disappear altogether by 2070. By 2075, most of the glaciers on the Swiss Alps will be gone. The director of the British Antarctic Survey showed that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, which will mean a rise in sea levels of 15 feet: which is something when you consider that 90 per cent of the world's people live near sea level.
They learned more things:
There are now far more natural disasters caused by violent weather.
The bird populations in the North Sea collapsed last year. Maybe a quarter of the world's coral reefs are already gone.
There is powerful evidence that the oceans are slowly turning acid.
A University of Illinois professor reported that the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, which was once seen as a "low probability event," was now 45 per cent likely this century, and 70 per cent probable by 2200. If it comes sooner rather than later it will be catastrophic for Britain and northern Europe, giving them a climate like Labrador even as the rest of the world heats up.
There is a new scientific consensus — that the warming must be kept below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided. That involves keeping concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change, below 400 parts per million. But we're already at 370 ppm.
The good news is that what has to be done can be done with technology that already exists.
The better news is that it wouldn't cost much: maybe about 1 per cent of Europe's GNP spread over 20 years; maybe just postponing an expected fivefold increase in world wealth by a mere two years. And a lot of experts believe combating global warming would increase prosperity, by bringing in new technologies.
The big question is whether governments will act. Or will our children and grandchildren wonder — "how on earth could they be so blind?"
I was struck by what the correspondent for the Independent who reported the Exeter conference wrote about his experience:
I am willing to bet there were few in the room who did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. . . . The cautious scientific language scarcely does justice to the sense of the meeting.
What could happen?
Wars could break out over diminishing water resources as populations grow and rains fail.
What could happen? London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, many other cities and vast areas of countries from Britain to Bangladesh disappear under tens of feet of water of rising seas. Even the EPA says that by century's end it will only take a storm to flood Boston — and all the way to Duxbury would be under water.
How likely is it? Inevitable. Even if global warming stopped today, the seas would continue to rise for centuries.
Even the United States Energy Information Administration says that world demand for all forms of energy will rise 54 percent in the next 20 years. Fifty-four percent.
If the tide isn't turned, by 2025, the world will use twice as much electricity and 50 percent more oil.
But — here is what we're letting our corporations get away with.
Carbon dioxide is one of the principal greenhouse gases that cause all this. An unusually candid executive at ExxonMobil says his company expects CO2 levels to rise 50 percent by 2020.
But there was a handy solution. In 2003 the Bush Administration's EPA proclaimed that CO2 and those other greenhouse gases — are not pollutants and and so they don't have to be regulated.
The greenhouse gases aren't pollutants?! Handy. So the major carmakers — Ford, GM, Toyota, BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Nissan and Honda — in order to defeat a new set of regulations in California — launched a TV and print ad campaign declaring their vehicles "virtually emission-free." The auto makers' alliance explained that the term "virtually emission-free" should be understood to refer only to emissions classified as pollutants by the Environmental Protection Agency. Handy.
No wonder Dr Pachauri concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive."
But I said there is good news. The greatest achievements to reduce global warming are happening now in Europe. Britain has agreed to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent over 50 years, Holland by 80 percent in 40 years, and Germany by 50 percent in 50 years. Russia has ratified Kyoto. And even China — whose intention to burn huge quantities of dirty coal has everyone scared — China recently established fuel economy standards for its cars and trucks that are much tougher than ours in the US.
The Kyoto protocol is now in force — signed by 141 nations but rejected by the United States.
Germany is committed to make the transition to 100 percent renewable energy sources. The German government accepts the proposition that it is possible and they believe that everything depends on what we do between right now and 2020. Their accomplishments so far have been simply astonishing. In wind, in solar electricity, in solar water heating. Germany is the single fastest-growing market for photovoltaic power. The German government's planning and commitment runs through 2050. All this happened within ten years.
Britain is now building a thousand more offshore wind turbines — and spending more than $12 billion to do so — and they believe they could generate three times Britain's electricity needs that way. Britain has pledged that by 2010, 10 percent of its energy will come from those turbines.
Already wind farms provide 20 percent of Denmark's total power. While the rich folks of Cape Cod are blocking the first serious windfarm in America because they don't want to look at it, the Danes think they're beautiful.
So my question is, What will we do?
What will we do? Here we are, a committed Unitarian Universalist community of faith and action. What are we going to do?
I know a few things. Among our congregation the rate of purchase of energy-efficient automobiles has risen, I think, more rapidly than the temperature at the Arctic or the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Some have had energy audits and adapted their houses. You wouldn't be caught dead with an incandescent bulb where a compact flourescent will work, would you?
But we must also bear witness on behalf of this imperilled earth. I don't have all the answers as to what we are going to do. There is enough imagination and determination and daring in these pews to figure that out. Maybe a study group that familiarizes itself with the facts and the latest developments and charts out a path for us?
And I know this. Who will do what must be done? Whose committed and daring efforts will turn the tide? This is who:
It will be those who understand what Henry Thoreau was talking about in Walden. It will be those who love this Earth as much as they love their lives, love it more than their possessions, their ambitions, their security; who know it as their beloved friend.
There is a difference between using this Earth, and loving it.
It will those who, like Annie Dillard, see, everywhere they look, see fire; and in whose eyes the whole world sparks and flames with glory.
It will be those who, like Mary Oliver, in the morning feel themselves held in great hands of light.
Henry Thoreau's friend, our Transcendentalist forebear Bronson Alcott wrote this in 1840:
Nature is not separate from me; she is mine alike with my body; and in moments of true life, I feel my identity with her; I breathe, pulsate, feel, think, will, through her members, and know of no duality of being. It is in such moods of soul that prophetic visions are beheld . . . for the joy and hope of mankind.
When you breathe the spectacular Spring air this afternoon, tell me, Is there anything beneath, beyond the surface?
If there is a human capacity to forget, to lose sight, to see only the daily grind and the quest for wealth and advancement —
— there is also a human capacity to feel something else, some universe beyond this surface, a sense of belonging to a bigger drama, a realm beyond the surfaces and appearances of things.
Shelley gave words to this sense:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves . . .
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around . . .
. . . all seems eternal now.
You and I are part of a larger drama and we can become forces of Nature.
Aren't you glad we are here, with each other, a Unitarian Universalist congregation committed to a mission that is sacred and worthy of sacred commitment of our life-energies?
Some of my sources:
Geoffrey Lean. "Sleepwalking Toward Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse now: how mankind is sleepwalking to the end of the
Earth." The Independent (UK), Feb. 6, 2005.
"EPA Study Projects Massive Flooding in Boston. Study predicts Boston flood threat due to warming."
The Boston Globe, Feb. 15, 2005.
Larry Rohter. "Antarctica, Warming, Looks Ever More Vulnerable."
New York Times, January 25, 2005.
Steve Connor, Science Editor. "Global warming is 'twice as bad as previously thought." The Independent, 27 January 2005.
Bob May. "Under-informed, over here. The climate change denial lobby — funded by the US oil industry — has now moved to
the UK, warns." The Guardian, Thursday January 27, 2005.
Ian Sample. "When will global warming reach a point of no return?"
The Guardian, Thursday January 27, 2005.
Jared Diamond. "Disasters waiting to happen. The tsunami may have been an act of nature, but further environmental
catastrophes caused by humans will be much worse."
The Guardian, Thursday January 6, 2005.
David Adam, science correspondent. "Oil firms fund campaign to deny climate change."
The Guardian, Thursday January 27, 2005.
Richard Black, environment correspondent. "Alarm at new climate warning." BBC News, 26 Jan. 2005.
"Task force urges action on climate." Press Association (UK), Tuesday January 25, 2005.
"Report: Global warming approaching critical point. `An ecological time-bomb is ticking away.' Associated Press, carried on
CNN, January 25, 2005.
Tom Burke. "Going beyond Bush. In hosting G8, the UK has its chance to affect climate change but should forget about
influencing the US." The Guardian, Wednesday January 26, 2005.
Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor. "Countdown to global catastrophe. Climate change: report warns point of no return
may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages."
The Independent, 24 January 2005.
"Speed of Warming Prompts Europeans to Plan to Adapt Changes. Study: European winters may vanish by 2080." Reuters, Aug.
18, 2004.
"Europe `must adapt on climate." BBCNews, Aug. 18, 2004.
"EIA: Global Oil Use Seen Soaring. Global energy demand to rise 54 percent by 2025, says U.S. EIA." Reuters News Service,
April 15, 2004.
George Monbiot. "Mocking our dreams. The reality of climate change is that the engines of progress have merely accelerated
our rush to the brink. The Guardian, Tuesday February 15, 2005.
Paul Brown, environment correspondent. "Climate conference hears degree of danger."
The Guardian, Thursday February 3, 2005.
Michael McCarthy, Environment Correspondent. "Global warming: scientists reveal timetable."
The Independent, 03 February 2005.
Today I will do something I never do, read somebody else's Meditation. It's from John Seed and a Buddhist UU named Joanna Macy.
What are you? What am I? Intersecting cycles of water, earth, air and fire . . .
Water—blood, lymph, mucus, sweat, tears, inner oceans tugged by the moon, tides within and tides without . . . washing and nourishing through endless riverways of gut and vein and capillary. Moisture pouring in and through and out of you, of me . . . You are that. I am that.
Earth—matter made from rock and soil . . . — pulled by the moon as the magma circulates throught the planet heart, and roots suck molecules into biology. Earth pours through us, replacing each cell in the body every seven years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we . . . are made from the earth. I am that. You are that.
Air—the gaseous realm, the atmosphere, the planet's membrane. The inhale and the exhale. Breathing out carbon dioxide to the trees and breathing in their fresh exudations. Oxygen kissing each cell awake, atoms dancing in orderly metabolism, interpenetrating. That . . . is what you are, is what I am.
Fire—fire from our sun that fuels all life, drawing up plants and raising the waters to the sky to fall again replnishing. The inner furnace of your metabolism burns with the fire of the Big Bang that first sent matter-energy spinning through space and time. The same fire as the lightening that flashed into the primordial soup [firing] the birth of organic life.
You were there, I was there, for each cell of us is descended in an unbroken chain from that event.
Nature is not separate from me, Mr Alcott said; in this silence, know that Nature is yours alike with your body; that in moments of true life, you may feel your identity with Nature; breathe, pulsate, feel, think, will, — with no duality of being — in this silence.
Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety —
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light —
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness
Annie Dillard
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness...The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Susan Griffin
You must not let terror overtake you.
It is a bone breaking in the middle of the night.
It is a misspelled word.
It is everything you thought you knew
becoming unknown, the leaves
stripped from the tree,
all the greenness orange and dry,
it is a pain past bearable, you must not.
—Prayer for Continuation
Henry Thoreau, Walden:
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.
It is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. . . . Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath. . . .
For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops. . . .
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolean music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. . . .
I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods . . . In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me . . . I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, . . . that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? . . . What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to . . . the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, . . . but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.