August 2, 2009

Facing the Heat

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

READINGS

Adapted from The Great Work by Thomas Berry

We are beginning to understand the universe as an epic story and in that to understand our human identity with all other modes of existence that constitute with us the single universe community. The one story includes us all. We are, everyone and everything, cousins to one another.

We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human. What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world. If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished.

Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

We are now experiencing a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine. The distorted dream of an industrial technological paradise is being replaced by the more viable dream of a mutually enhancing human presence within an ever-renewing organic-based Earth community. The dream drives the action.

But even as we make our transition into this new century we must note that moments of grace are transient moments. The transformation must take place within a brief period. Otherwise it is gone forever. In the immense story of the universe, that so many dangerous moments have been navigated successful is some indication that the universe is for us rather than against us.

From Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the Universe?

Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, but the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

SERMON

I have no high-tech wizardry to offer you today, no stunning power point presentation that will interlink shrinking polar ice floes and vanishing tropical species with dramatic charts of rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and average global temperatures. Al Gore several years ago did us all the service of convincingly demonstrating the “inconvenient truth” that the Earth’s climate is changing in ways that threaten not only our own survival but the future of much of the vast biome of our planet, and more than that: that we humans are the primary drivers of these changes.

This is no longer news, no longer the subject of reasonable debate. Instead, we are left with the puzzling question of how we must change to avert world-changing disruptions to our planet. This is hard because the factors at play touch on such basic things as how we grow our food, how we heat and light our homes, the processes for industrial production, how we organize our cities, where we build, what we build, how we transport ourselves, and ultimately how we organize our lives.

And so it’s little wonder that we have had such a hard time coming to terms with it. Some years ago when a hole was discovered over Antarctica in the blanket of atmospheric ozone that protects life on Earth from dangerous cosmic rays and solar radiation, scientists found that the cause was chlorofluorocarbons from aerosols and industrial processes that collected in the upper atmosphere and broke down the ozone. After a campaign to reduce or eliminate the use of that chemical, the ozone in the atmosphere was restored. Ta da!

The problem of climate change is a challenge on another level of magnitude. In fact, it is arguably the most difficult and most urgent problem that humankind faces today: Difficult because this time there is no magic bullet. Instead, there are many contributing factors. Each linked to the others, and all key to the way of life to which we are accustomed. And urgent because we are late in responding. Climate change is not something far off: we are in the middle of it, it has already had devastating effects, and even worse potential problems are on the horizon.

The woes of climate change have begun insinuating themselves into the public imagination. An example is a wave of catastrophe movies, where they are offered up on a par with zombies and invading aliens. The difference, of course, is that while we can leave the living dead behind in the theater, the effects of climate change, albeit at a level short of catastrophic just now, are still very much with us.

Much of the discussion so far over how to address it has focused on technological solutions – alternative energy sources or more efficient building practices or industrial processes. All of that is useful, but technological fixes alone will not solve the problems before us. That’s because many of the practices that have contributed to climate change arise from beliefs and ingrained habits of mind centered in an understanding about the nature of the world and our relation to it. The problem is not just belching furnaces and gas-guzzling clunkers, but a mind-set that views the larger natural world as primarily of service to humankind, to be tapped, used and disposed of. And this attitude, in turn, is rooted in an ancient view that sees humans as the pinnacle of all things, as prime shaper, determiner and beneficiary of life’s bounty.

It is this belief that imperils us. Whatever marvels technology may offer us, they can help only if they are created in the wider context of a new understanding that locates humankind as deeply enmeshed in a larger web of life, dependent on and contributing to life’s flourishing.

One way to begin is to see how we might frame the issue before us in a larger context. Climate change has taught us how interwoven the systems of the Earth are. The Earth’s climate is essentially a means for the exchange of energy. Radiation from the Sun strikes the Earth. Almost a third of that energy is reflected back into space, but the rest is absorbed and distributed in forests, deserts, ice caps, oceans, and the like, as well as in vapor created when water evaporates that collects in the form of clouds. This energy exchange drives the weather and ocean currents and it also fuels the beat of life. Every living thing dips into that stream of energy to sustain itself.

But those living things also depend on having a certain amount of energy of a certain kind available to survive. When conditions change, it throws energy systems off kilter and disrupts the patterns that living things depend on. The tricky part is that there is no way of predicting the impact of changing conditions with any certainty. There are just too many variables and some energy systems are more fragile than others.

It has only been within the last century or so that humans had any inkling that anything we do could affect the global climate system. In the late 19th century the focus of Western society was to build industrial might, and it did. But during the same time, as the writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells it, John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, made a curious discovery. He invented the first device that could measure the way different gases absorb radiant heat. And he discovered that while heat passed unimpeded through the most common atmospheric gases, nitrogen and oxygen, it was partly blocked by carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor. Those gases, he suggested, acted as a kind of invisible dam or blanket, holding in radiant heat and moderating temperatures worldwide.

Studies following Tyndall’s not only confirmed his work but found that carbon dioxide concentrations seemed to be rising. But no one was alarmed. Some even suggested the change would help by encouraging the growth of plants.

What no one anticipated was how quickly CO2 concentrations would rise, and rather than promoting plant growth how dramatically they would begin disrupting Earth’s energy systems. Industrialization is pushing carbon dioxide levels today to the highest levels in the past three million years, before modern humans lived. Some of this CO2 has been absorbed by plants, and some by the oceans, where it is altering the ocean’s chemistry. But most had the effect of something like throwing another blanket on the Earth. Less of the radiant energy reflected from the Earth has been allowed to escape. One impact of this added blanket has been to raise average temperatures slightly, something that scientists have documented since the 1950s. But that’s not all. Some of it drives weather patterns, which have been increasingly chaotic; some has been absorbed by the oceans, where it is causing currents to shift and also raising sea levels, since water expands when heated; and some is absorbed by the land, where it contributes to overall warming or melts glaciers and ice packs.

Among living things, scientists have documented that climate change is beginning to drive evolution. Conditions are changing so dramatically that living things must evolve to cope with them. Among creatures like insects that breed quickly, the changes are contributing to the creation of new species. Among slow breeders like mammals, long-growing, stationary plants like trees, or those dependent on narrow niches we are beginning to see decline and extinction.

I suggested earlier that the history of heedless development and industrialization in the West had its origin in a habit of mind that saw no limit to human ambition, that viewed the natural world as a venue to conquer and exploit as we chose. This habit of mind has its origin in the ancient text of Genesis, where in the first chapter after having created woman and man, God is said to have blessed them and urged them to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the Earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves on Earth.”

This text has been widely cited as a way used to give people license to exploit the Earth as they chose.  But some commentators insist on another way of interpret that passage. Rabbi Daniel Fink says he reads the text as saying that humans “are preeminent only when we act in keeping with the highest standards of responsibility” and that we lose that place and debase ourselves, when we damage. He points to the wording of the creation account in the second chapter of Genesis where God sets humans in the garden and tells them to keep it and watch over it. Rather than an inheritance to use or waste as we choose, this interpretation views nature as a trust we are given to protect.

Yet even this interpretation, while encouraging responsible action, preserves the fiction, the conceit, really, that we humans have some special status among living things, that we are somehow set apart. Ultimately, it is that act of separation, I want to suggest, that is the root of our difficulties.

It is true that we are players, and, with our expanding presence on earth and technological capacity, an increasingly important influence in the Earth’s labyrinthine system of energy exchanges. But that fact gives us no special privilege among living things to impose our will to the detriment of others or the planet as a whole. If anything, it imposes a special onus on us to take into account the welfare of the wider web of life in anything we do. The more we learn about the natural world the more we come to see that our lives are woven into that wider web, that we are deeply dependent and that our own flourishing depends on the web of life’s flourishing.

This is a message that it seems to me we Unitarian Universalists are well-positioned to proclaim. It is rooted in our earliest days when Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that rather than being separate, we humans are “embosomed” in nature, “whose floods of life stream around and through us.”

Our hope, our understanding lies in our learning “an original relation to the universe.” There is where we are to find that which stirs our souls and connects us to the holy, however we may experience and conceive it. This thread has stuck with our movement throughout and has grown in recent years in importance and strength. For we have come to see how much we have at stake in the many rhythms of the natural world and how deeply it feeds us.

Unitarian Universalist minister Clare Butterfield puts it succinctly: “We will, in the end, save only what we love,” she says. “We must learn again to love the places we inhabit, to know them like kin, which they are. We must see in the face of the earth the face of our own children. Then we will know what to do.”

To find such a love we must erase the separation that Western culture has erected between the human and the natural world and see how each of us has a stake in the losses that accompany a warming world.

Some 10 years ago I was stirred by the suggest by the Unitarian Universalist minister David Bumbaugh, who would later become my advisor in seminary, that the hope of our religious movement lay in our taking ownership of our seventh principle, covenanting to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

That principle, he said, “calls us to reverence before the world, not some future world, but this miraculous, awesome world of our everyday experience. It challenges us to understand the world as reflexive and relational rather than hierarchical. It bespeaks a world in which neither God nor humanity is at the center; in which the center is the void, the ever-fecund matrix out of which being spirals. It bespeaks a world in which, because all things impinge on all other things, everything matters.”

Such a viewpoint is at the center of the vision that Thomas Berry offers up, a vision where the human story and the universe story are one story, where human and nonhuman are inextricably woven together.

This is the locus of hope for us today, that we might see and help bring about a shift from a human-centered viewpoint to one that Berry calls “ecozoic,” in which, he says, “humans will be present to the planet as participating members of the comprehensive Earth community.” In this way might we abandon ancient notions of separation and dominion so that as we craft technological fixes, we will have in mind not only the human, but also, as Mary Oliver suggested, the sunflower, the hummingbird, and the clam. In that way, these innovations will serve not only us humans but also the flourishing of the vast buzzing, blooming community of life in which we live and on which we gratefully depend.