Earth Sunday 2000. Let me tell you the story of the man whose considered himself the family environmentalist. His main concern was preserving the giant redwoods of California. He would tell all his relatives about the importance of these old-growth trees that were so beautiful land needed to be saved. But one summer he found that he needed to replace the pier at his lakefront home. He was advised that the best material for a new pier was redwood, which he proceeded to use. The man still considered himself the family environmentalist, but he no longer talked about saving the redwoods. Instead, he became an enthusiastic defender of whales.[1] I am wearing my whale tie today in recognition of how hard it is to live lightly on the earth.
I remember my first Earth Day sermon, "A Theology of Ecology," preached on April 19, 1970. I spoke of the Biblical dimensions of our struggle in trying to live lightly on the earth. In the Book of Genesis we read God's instructions to Adam and Eve:
"And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.' . . . And God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good."
Unfortunately, that passage has become an invitation to live heavily on the earth. "Be fruitful and multiply" - an understandable imperative in a time of few people and much land - becomes a real hazard in a time with too many people and resources too poorly distributed. Worldwatch Institute, a progressive Washington think tank recently issued its report, State of the World 2000, noting there are some 1.2 billion undernourished people in the world who have too little, and an equal number of overnourished people who have too much.
Subduing the earth and having dominion over it suggests that we are master of all we survey. Worldwatch reports with concern the steadily disappearing species of the earth, upsetting the fragile balance of nature. And some of us believe the natural world is touched with divinity - the God of Genesis said it was good - and the disappearance of a species by our hand becomes sacrilege. As William Conway of the Bronx Zoo said some years ago: "When the last snow leopard goes there is no way we can make another."
Judaism and early Christianity represent a transition from pagan earth-centered traditions to the so-called high religions. That transition is seen in the prophet Isaiah: "For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing and the trees of the field shall clap their hands," a clearly animistic text, attributing human gestures to non-human organisms. Whereas pagan religion was non-violent toward the earth, our western religious tradition, emboldened by Genesis, has too often thought of the earth as a mine to be exploited rather than a garden to be cultivated.
Shortly after I preached that sermon I learned experientially what I already knew intellectually: preaching can, and often does, lead straight to hypocrisy. I was eating lunch while basking in the warm sun at the foot of the Cascadilla Falls in Ithaca, enjoying a few moments of peace and beauty in a very hectic week.
A gentle breeze picked up my empty Styrofoam - yes Styrofoam - cup and deposited it neatly in the water and it began to bob its way downstream toward Cayuga Lake. I was tempted to let it go, but consciousness and conscience, having been ecologically sensitized by the Environmental Teach-in at Cornell, hit me with full force. My companion and I began to devise ways and means of retrieving that cup. He climbed down to the water's edge but was too far away. I hastened to the bridge to catch it as it came by, but it had been swept to mid-stream. There I stood helpless.
It was a small thing, that single cup, but its minute addition to our contamination of the environment stood as a judgment upon me and a testimony to the several billion inhabitants of the earth, reminding me that human beings are the most lethal creature ever created. That cup was my contribution to God's own junkyard.
Some of my ecological preaching has had a different kind of result. In May of 1992 we inaugurated what has become an annual ritual - our animal blessing. We bring our beloved pets to share with others - bless them in the service - and then sing them into the great out of doors with their youthful owners to cavort while most of us adults had to stay and listen to a boring sermon. I had decided to tackle a new topic - animal rights. By the time I had finished, I had become a vegetarian - one of those all-too-rare occasions of trying to practice what I preach. That was a tad unsettling to some of us.
Some of my environmental sermons have been quite controversial. In my 1979 Earth Sunday sermon, "Living with Less," I suggested that we who are affluent need to celebrate a theology of relinquishment - voluntarily acting against our own self-interest, lowering our luxurious standard of living so that resources might be distributed more equitably. Asking for tax increases on the affluent to fund anti-poverty and pro-environment programs is not necessarily a way to win friends and influence parishioners.
Jean Mayer, former President of Tufts University, a Unitarian Universalist, and an expert on hunger, provided my text: "It's the rich - in a relative sense, the people less likely to starve - who wreck the environment. Rich people occupy much more space, consume more of each natural resource, disturb the ecology more, litter the landscape with bottles and paper, and pollute more land, air and water with chemical, thermal and radioactive waste. . . . It might be bad in China with 700 million poor people, but 700 million very rich Chinese would wreck China in no time. It's the spread of wealth that threatens the environment."[2] To which I add: Imagine a world full of SUV's. As one of the Henry Fords is reported to have said, "Minicars make miniprofits."
On another Earth Sunday, after talking with my older son about his college course in environmental ethics, I raised a tough question: "Does the Earth Have Moral Rights?"
While we agree persons have rights, do birds and bees and trees and rivers and mountains have a right to exist on their own? Are they here solely for our pleasure or do they have intrinsic worth, so we must use them conservatively? When we see a redwood, do we think picnic table? When we see a field of flowers, do we think housing development?
We are nature. We are part of the earth family. When we wantonly and needlessly take non-renewable resources from the earth; when we transform affluence into effluence, we are guilty of ecocide - which is but another form of suicide. Actions have consequences. We are all downstream. The earth bats last.
The writings of Henry David Thoreau have, of course, been a favorite launching pad. While it might be said that his is a rather romantic view of the relation of human beings to the natural world, he does provoke. When he writes "Life is frittered away by detail. Simplify. Simplify. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail," I know how far I have strayed from the simple life. My life is now so complex I can barely keep track of it on my Palm Pilot.
Perhaps Thoreau was right. He thought the Gold Rush to California was the nakedest of all the manifestations of the essential vulgarity of American ambition. "Going to California. It is only three thousand miles nearer to hell. . . . What a comment, what a satire, on our institutions! The conclusion will be that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And who would interfere to cut it down?"[3]
Our denomination has chosen as one of its study resolutions "Responsible Consumption as a Moral Imperative," which our Adult Education class has called, "Living Simply." Instead of lofty theoretical discussions, each week they talked about how each might change their life style to live more simply - and more lightly - on the earth. It's a matter of many small commitments - commitments to change one's personal life style - commitments to political action on behalf of the environment.
In one way or another we have each cast a Styrofoam cup on the waters. So what one small change will each of us make in our lives? I have resolved to begin reducing the "stuff" in my life - recycling old "stuff" and not buying any more new "stuff" than I absolutely need. And the election campaign this fall affords opportunity to inject the environment into a campaign where real choices must be made. We have to hold George W.'s and Al's feet to the environmental fire. Or perhaps we'd like to ask Ralph - as in Nader - to build an ark.
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.
Gentleness is something of which we see little. It is a lost art. I have observed how hard we are on the earth: I have seen the Finger Lakes when DDT washed from the farmlands into the lakes; I have seen the Adirondacks and the results of acid rain; I have seen the deserts of the Middle East where the mighty Jordan is a trickling stream I could jump across without difficulty; I have seen patches of green amidst the brown of Tucson, Arizona, a booming metropolis rapidly depleting its aquifer, while we hear talk of piping water from the Great Lakes to the great Southwest; I have heard the whine of jet skis interrupting the beautiful calm of a Finger Lakes afternoon, polluting the air I breathe and sending me scurrying from the lake in fear for my life.
I know there are those who believe I am one of those Green Cassandras shouting "Ain't it awful!" There are those who believe global warming is a huge farce; that the earth can sustain still more people; that everything is getting better. And there are substantive debates on all these issues. I am not technically competent to resolve them, much less choose between competing experts. I can only ask - what if the optimists who deny the depth of these problems are wrong? What if they lose the bet? The consequences are harrowing. Living lightly on the earth not only gives us better odds of sustaining a congenial environment, but it is spiritually more fulfilling at the same time. Just ask Henry David Thoreau.
Frugality is what was practiced in the Great Depression - out of necessity - but it is rather ignored in our time. Our national savings rate is abysmally low, and why not? 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." If this is true, and I think it is, then the whole nation is caught up in a frantic produce-consume cycle - a buying frenzy, and it is a sick thing.
We are victims of an attitude of endless expectations, somehow believing each of us is going to have more of everything. God has evidently taken up residence in one or another shopping mall, so pervasive is our worship of them. We are being malled to death. We are infected with instant gratification. We consume with reckless abandon, acting as if we were the last generation to inhabit the earth.
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."
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. We conquer mountains instead of befriending them. In 1969 the Pope congratulated the astronauts for "conquering the moon." I didn't know we were at war.
We tend to believe that we are the apex of evolution - what God had in mind all this long time. But as one zoologist wrote, "The direction of evolution . . . has not been oriented toward (us). (We were) not planned. Nature chanced to discover (us) in her somewhat random search for better models."[4]
What does our society teach its young? Gentleness, frugality, humility? Lots of luck. In a commentary aired on "All Things Considered," Jim Roberts, a family therapist in Kansas City, told the following story. "He was visiting the fourth-grade class of his son Daniel, where the teacher had organized a "balloon stomp.
Each child had a balloon tied on his or her leg, and the object was to obliterate everyone else's balloon without letting anything happen to yours. It was every one for him or herself and each against all. As soon as somebody stomped you, you were out, and the child who still had a plump, glistening balloon when everybody else's hung limp and tattered would have the winner's glory. "The teacher gave the signal, and the children leaped ferociously on each other's balloons, doing their best, meanwhile, to protect themselves against the onslaught of others. All, that is, except one or two who lacked the spirit of competition. These were just dismayed by all the hullabaloo, and their balloons were predictably laid waste. In a few seconds all balloons were burst but one.
"Then a disturbing thing happened. Another class, this time a class of mentally handicapped children, was brought in and prepared to play the same game. Balloons were tied to their legs and they were briefed on the rules of play. Said Roberts, 'I got a sinking feeling in my midsection. I wanted to spare these kids the pressure of a competitive brawl.'
"They had only the foggiest notion of what this was all about. After a few moments of confusion, the idea got across to one or two of them that the balloons were supposed to be stomped, and gradually it caught on. But as the game got under way, it was clear these kids had missed the spirit of it. They went about methodically getting their balloons stomped. One girl carefully held her own in place so that a boy could pop it, and then he did the same for her. When all the balloons were gone, the entire class cheered in unison.
"These children had mistaken the competitive game for a cooperative one, but their error has some advantages. "In the original game only one child could win, but they discovered how to make everybody a winner! In normal balloon-stomping, the participants are momentarily alienated from one another (it's you against me), but as these children played it, the game was an occasion for camaraderie. Instead of feeling anxious about fellow players, you know the others are there to help you along.
In the original game, you wouldn't be likely to learn love, but the play of this second group of children seemed to foster generosity, trust, cooperation, gentleness, and concern for one another."[5]
I know it's a sentimental story which won't prepare these children for the "real world." I know it doesn't easily apply to the tough problems of economics and ecology. But perhaps business moguls and government leaders obsessed by globalization will remember that while profit counts for something, the environment counts for more. Maybe the world's wheeler-dealers will recognize that maybe it's not such a good idea to be the only winner.
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."[6]
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