My first experience in ministry marked a turning point in my understanding of the environmental relationships. The United Church provided a program where you could go and try out ministry and if you made a flub of it, no one would here about it till years later, so remote were these locations.
I was in Ear Falls, a little hydro dam up 100 miles or so from Vermillion Bay, on the way to where the highway ends in Red Lake. I was running a summer camp for kids who were from a Indian village 700 miles further north of Red lake.
Our task was to take them down to Kenora and show them how to survive in a city where to look for work in the pulp mill, where to find job listings. But I wanted this to be a two way street. A learning for both us and them.
So we showed them how to live in the city and they in turn would take us on a 600 mile canoe trip and show us how to live off in the wilderness. Although one of the youth asked me later "Why do you call it a wilderness? It's home to us. It’s only a wildernerness for people who don’t understand it."
It happened on the second day of our canoe trip, and I asked one of the kids to show me how to set a rabbit snare. I looked in my eyes and asked if I was hungry. I said no. He said, "when you're hungry, I’ll show you." That began a shift in my thinking that hunting contained it’s own justification to seeing that the interdependence of life with life is for sustaining each other.
Well back to Job. Job is a good man but he finds himself tested by God. God and the devil have a debate about Job. The Devil says Job loves God because of all the good things Job is provided with; that if you remove all these wonderful relationships and things, Job will no longer love you.
So his life unwraps to the bare bones, first his family dies, he finds himself living on a dung heap on the edge of town, covered by oozing sores. By the way, that’s where the term hell comes from; it means a garbage dump. So when someone is in hell, it means they are living in ways that are worthless regarding what the future is asking of them.
His friends come to visit, and try to calm his woe by explaining that he must have somehow sinned, and earned this punishment. But Job will have none of it—he insists loudly that he was a good man, and over 37 chapters demands that God appears and account for his suffering.
This falls in the category of Be Careful What You Wish For, because at the 38th chapter, God does appear, speaking from a tornado, gives what is His longest soliloquy in the Bible, Old Testament or New. It is, on the one hand, beautiful—a tour of the vast natural world, from the morning stars to the gazelle, from the edge of the ocean to the eagle’s nest. But it is delivered in a sarcastic, taunting voice, as if God is annoyed at having been bothered for an explanation.
"If you’re so smart," he tells Job, "where do you keep the thunderstorms? Can you whistle up a blizzard? Do you tell the proud waves, here you shall break and no further?" And Job, of course, has to answer like all of us mere mortals. "No," he says, "that’s your department. I can’t make the weather. You’re big and I am small. Can I sit down now?"
Or rather, Job has to answer as all mortals up until our time. Because all of a sudden humans now think of themselves as rather large.
Our first sense of that sudden change in stature came with the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the mushrooming cloud, quoted from the Gita, the Hindu Scripture: "We are become as Gods, destroyers of worlds." But the image of the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was enough to persuade us, so far, to go no further down that path; we could imagine the horror of those titanic explosions.
We, so far, have not been able to adequately imagine the effect of the explosion of billions of pistons in billions of cylinders every minute of every hour of every day. But those explosions are wrecking the earth just as surely and almost as fast as nuclear war.
Consider that so far humans have burned enough coal and gas and oil to raise the temperature one degree Celsius. That’s the equivalent of about ¾ of watt of extra solar energy per square meter of the earth’s surface. Which doesn’t sound like much—less than one small white Christmas tree light per square meter. But it turns out there’s a lot of square meters, and so the heat trapped by our carbon is the equivalent of exploding 400,000 Hiroshima sized bombs every day!
That’s been enough energy, so far, to melt the Arctic—the latest satellite data shows that 80% of the summer sea ice that covered the north when, say, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon has now vanished. We’ve taken one of the largest physical features on earth, and we’ve broken it. With others not far behind.
The oceans are now 30% more acidic, as the chemistry of seawater changes as it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. The atmosphere itself, becomes warmer and because warmer air holds more water vapor than cold, is now 5% wetter, loading the dice for drought and flood.
You see where I’m going. We no longer have to back down before God. Unlike Job, we can answer him right back: "Do you set a barrier to the ocean, saying here the proud waves break and no further? Sure, God. Waves are us."
So far we’ve raised the sea level of the Atlantic off New York a foot, as we found out two years ago when Sandy filled the subway tunnels of New York with saltwater. When Sandy came up the coast, it set the mark for the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras, and for the widest wind field ever observed by satellite.
But it wasn’t, to use the language of Job and of the insurance companies, an act of God. It was an act, at least in part, not just of stupidity but of blasphemy. And, crucially, an act committed against the least among us. Hurricane Sandy killed people in New York, but it killed more in Haiti.
Last summer’s drought caused trouble for American farmers, but it caused a crisis for poor people the world around, who had to somehow figure out how to cope with a 30% rise in the price of grain. For us, it’s not too hard—if you buy cornflakes, you pay more for the box than the corn. But if you have to find the coins each day to buy the corn meal to make your family tortillas, it is the biggest of deals.
This is the biggest social justice issue of all time, and the people most victimized, who have often done the least to cause it, are at the forefront of the fight. Most of the people really working environmental issues today are poor, black, brown, Asian and young, because that’s what the world mostly consists of. It turns out they’re just as concerned about the future as anyone else, and perhaps more so, since the future bears down very hard on you if you’re poor.
What this means, in the end, is that we’re called not to charity, or maybe even to justice—the scale of injustice is so enormous it’s hard to imagine ever rectifying it. What we’re called to is something even more basic: solidarity.
Now, given that we’ve been warned by scientists of our fate—given that they’ve shown quite clearly that that 1 degree will be 4 or 5 by century’s end unless we act swiftly to get off coal and gas and oil—the logical question is: why aren’t we changing?
Why aren’t we following the lead of, say, Germany, which is the only major country really pursuing renewable power at an appropriate pace? There are now more solar panels in Bavaria than in the whole U.S.—there were days last summer when Germany generated more than half the power it used from solar panels within its borders. And this is Germany—Munich is north of Montreal. Think what a country could do if it had, oh, I don’t know, Florida and Texas and Nevada and California and Arizona.
But we don’t act, and for a particular reason, one that will be clear to those who read the Gospels. Remember the story of the rich young ruler who asked Jesus what he must do. Jesus tells him to sell everything and give the money to the poor and follow him. The guy in the story lowers his head and walks away. Sometimes our corporate interests always trying to appease Wall Street don’t want to change , because it would reduce their stock value.
The fossil fuel industry is the richest enterprise in human history. Exxon made more money last year than any company in the history of money. And so far they have been able to deploy those funds to make sure that nothing ever changes—they have bought, in our nation’s capital and many others, a 25-year bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing.
It’s not that Americans are addicted to fossil fuel: most of us would be just as happy if our power came from the sun and the wind, if our cars ran on electricity. The addicts are the folks who run the fossil fuel empire, addicted to profits so great that they turn away from the knowledge that they’re playing around with the future. The man, who is the CEO of Exxon, admitted for the first time last summer that global warming was real, and caused by carbon emissions. But, he said, it was an “engineering problem with engineering solutions.” Asked what he meant, he explained, "If we need to move our crop production areas, we will."
This is wrong. Crop production areas are what most of us call farms, and we already have them wherever we can grow anything. It’s true that Exxon is helping melt the tundra, but that doesn’t mean that if we make it too hot to grow corn in Iowa, as we did last summer, that we can simply move the whole operation north to Siberia. There is no soil there. No, the Exxon CEO made plain the reason for his unwillingness to change in a second interview a year ago with Charlie Rose, who asked him his philosophy. He thought for a second and said, "My philosophy is to make money."
We must stand in counterpoint. Our goal must be to make real the Gospel, with its injunction to love our neighbors. Not to drown them, not to sicken them, not to make it impossible for them to grow our crops. But to love them. Desmond Tutu said last year. "If you could see what climate change is doing to Africa," he said, "if you could see the famines and droughts, you’d understand why once again we’re asking you to take up this tool of divestment, to do again what you did a quarter century ago."
This divestment campaign alone will not win the fight to guard creation; we will need many other fronts. Some with an engineering bent will have to build the new renewable infrastructure. We’ll need to push Congress for a price on carbon—but that won’t come till we’ve weakened the power of the fossil fuel industry. Having lost the Arctic we have no room for complacency. But we do have room for faith.
Here we’re allowed to believe that if we do all that we can—if we force ourselves to think beyond our bankbooks—then God, even that God of Job’s whirlwind, may still be willing to meet us halfway.
When I was in Alaska I was at a meeting with the Fishers Dept and our local Athabasca people. The government guys were explaining how the Japanese were to blame for the depletion of the salmon runs. They were now using giant nets off the Pacific coast and capturing everything that swam, before the salmon could make it back up to their spooning grounds.
One older man rose up and said, no, the reason that the salmon ranks were depleted was because the salmon were not giving themselves to them any more. Why because the fish were insulted because the folks in town just harvested the row whereas in the past they used the whole fish. After they dried the meat and harvested the eggs, they would bury the guts and then the worms would lunch on those buried carcasses. Then folks would dig them up and feed the worms high in protein to their dogs. Because we used the whole fish the fish gladly gave themselves to us.
I liked his response because first it showed relationship. He was taking the issue and showing to everyone that we have a relationship to this problem in how we use the fish. Second he took responsibility in ways that he could exercise. He could change the way he used fish.
Relationship and responsibility . What relationships do we have to our carbon footprint? What ability can we exercise in changing some of our response or behaviors within those relationships, in others words responsibilities?