Some of you may have read in this month’s Open Door newsletter that today, 10-10-10, is a day of global action to celebrate climate change solutions, sponsored by 350.org cofounded by environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben. The name of the organization refers to the number of parts per million of CO2 scientists have identified as the upper safety limit for humanity. Currently, the number hovers at 390 ppm. Quite literally, we — and the polar bears — are on thin ice.
As Richard Ellis writes in his book entitled, On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear,Adult polar bears—in captivity or the wild—now stand (or swim) for global warming, considered the major threat to the planet today.…The bears’ habitat is disappearing, and human beings are responsible. We have filled the sky with poisonous fumes and chemical aerosols that effectively trap heat in the atmosphere and warm the surface of the planet.
Ellis draws on the work of geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee to point out, it is not just the bears whose lives are precarious. A warming world will bring about rising sea levels, changing plant communities, and the migration of tropical diseases into more temperate regions. There may be an increase in the violence of storms, more droughts and floods, and disruption of agriculture. As the earth heats up, wars over food, water and habitable land may increase. 1
The devastating floods of Pakistan and to a lesser extent, some we’ve seen recently in the U.S.—such as the flood that overtook Nashville, Tennessee less than three weeks after I visited last spring—suggest changes are already underway.
The purpose of bringing this up on a lovely crisp Sunday morning is not to bum you out, but to pause on this day of global action, long enough to ponder, as Mary Oliver does in her poem entitled: “Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive in the Melting Ice Floes,” That God had a plan, I do not doubt. But what if His plan was, that we would do better?2
In the spirit of confession I must tell you, each day I sit in my prayer space, in a lovely bentwood rocker, facing three extraordinarily beautiful polar bears rendered in blown glass. Above them hangs a photo of a polar bear rolling deliciously on its back. The prayer I utter goes like this; Thank you God that I live in a world with polar bears, that I have seen them with my very own eye, and thank you for these beautiful glass bears upon which to gaze, and I say a prayer of contrition for the ways my life imperils the bears. Please help me to change.
Then I gaze at the bears for a few moments in silence. It is my version of meditating. I just try to quiet my mind long enough to hear, for lack of a better phrase, God’s plan. What on earth does the universe want from me and how do I give it?
Glory for and to the polar bear no doubt. But when I really let the weight of those glorious bears—that can grow to well over a thousand pounds—be surpassed by the weight of their peril, the likely possibility that they will become extinct at the edge of my life, or your children’s, it is hard to move. It is, no pun intended, hard to bear.
The great irony is that when I traveled to Churchill, Manitoba in 2004 to see polar bears in the wild, I got on a plane and flew from southwestern Ontario, and rode around for three days in a tundra buggy, that for all the assurances from the tour company otherwise, probably left more of an imprint than its giant tire tracks in the snow. I knew there was no carbon-neutral way to see the bears so I prayed hard that somehow my gratitude would magically erase my eco-footprint or at least balance it out.
To this day, having seen those bears up close remains one of the great moments in my life. And it makes the ache of their potential demise one of the heart, not the mind. I think of a congregant in a previous congregation, a retired biochemist who said, rather glibly, species are made to go extinct. But doesn’t it sadden you to hasten their extinction? I pressed. He gave a shrug of inevitability.
Psychologists have documented that humans respond most compassionately to a single being in need, beings with faces as expressive as our own. Perhaps that is why, having looked into the eyes of a polar bear through a telephoto lens, and then without need of a lens as a bear poked its head into the wheel well of the tundra buggy in search of food, I feel their plight in a way that haunts me much as the hungry child begging in the streets I encountered in Mexico.
So while everyone here knows about global warming and has probably experienced changing weather patterns first-hand, as New England has had its share of wacky weather of late, it’s a bit like a precarious church budget: easier to ignore while there’s still an endowment, but the finitude of resources will eventually hit home.
So the intent this morning is to ponder the poet’s question, and to widen it to those who may not truck with a divine plan, who may instead consider whether the cosmos, the course of evolution contains a blueprint less willing than my previous congregant in Canada to shrug at accelerated extinctions—extinctions that foreshadow our own demise.
An article in this week’s New York Times notes: With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply …the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.… In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.
“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.
He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.3
And consider this staggering fact: “Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan… While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.”4
Thus our dependence on fossil fuels carries far more than an enormous financial toll. To the soldiers, sailors and marines who lose their lives guarding oil, it is hard not to ask, can we do better than this? Clearly, the U.S. military thinks so. Ironically, it is the military that leads the way innovating and implementing alternative forms of energy. I wonder though as I imagine those polar bears swimming between ice caps, must we be prodded by the machinations of war? Could we be moved by anything less?
When I read “in 2006, Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life [and] that request catalyzed new research,” and that “while setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy,” 5
I wonder, if we jammed rocks in the gates of war, would arctic ice melt all the
faster? Would temperatures rise and crops fail, droughts and flooding wreak even greater havoc? Is it possible peace and genuine security would lull us into greater environmental complacency? Must we have disruption and death to respond decisively to human-induced climate change?
And if so, what does that reveal about the condition of our psyches, our souls, our longing for connection? In an interestingly provocative book entitled The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton writes: The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also a thinking that is ecological.…The ecological thought doesn’t just occur “in the mind.” It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be — can we even imagine it?6 What would we say to the polar bears about why our quality of life is intrinsically more valuable or pressing than theirs? Really, what does assert in any ultimate way, our right to impinge on another species? According to Ron Paul and other libertarians, I would guess one answer is personal liberty. I was struck by his comment that freedom is all about personal liberty, which for me begs the questions, but what happens when your liberty to blare your music trounces my liberty to enjoy some quiet? Or my liberty to hop on a plane and view polar bears impinges on their liberty to forage for seals on frozen—not melting—ice.
Is this the cosmic plan: the evolution of a subset of humanity for whom personal liberty triumphs everything else? Of course there are other subsets, societies, even nations built on the premise of the common good as central, not individual liberties, but to Americans rallying for the right to do whatever they damn well please without regulation, intervention, or apparent regard for others—animal, vegetable or mineral—such a premise makes little sense.
Somewhere is the earth longing for a collective sensibility, a democracy of species, or even a benevolent dictatorship? What is the plan creation rolls out to insure its own existence? Are the nihilists right that nothingness enfolds us? That species evolve only to become extinct by whim or will of another?
Or as Timothy Morton asks in his book:
Is there such a thing as the environment? Is it everything “around” us? At what point do we stop, if at all, drawing the line between environment and nonenvironment: The atmosphere? Earth’s gravitational field? Earth’s magnetic field, without which everything would be scorched by solar winds? The sun, without which we wouldn’t be alive at all? The Galaxy? Does the environment include or exclude us? Is it natural or artificial, or both? Can we put it in a conceptual box? Might the word environment be the wrong word? Environment, the upgrade of Nature, is fraught with difficulty. This is ironic, since what we often call the environment is being changed, degraded, and eroded(and destroyed) by global forces of industry and capitalism. Just when we need to know what it is, it’s disappearing.
On this Sunday morning like most others, I offer questions not answers: any
inducement to action comes in the form of words. The crisis we face is not environmental; it is existential. For some it may be spiritual, or deeply religious, reckoning with what it means to stray from a plan that “we would do better.” When I gaze at the polar bears on a prayer table, or more potently, recall their look as they gazed at me, I hear the question Timothy Morton poses: “What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine it?”
In this mid-term election year as talk of democracy extirpated and restored fills the airwaves and most of cyberspace, it is the great white (or more accurately, off-white) bears of the north, greater in size and stature than us yet unequal in power, who are asking plaintively across the melting ice, how can you be so sure?
Amen.
I close this morning with the African concept of ubuntu (oo-BOON-to). As one translation goes: “I am what I am because of who we all are." Or to paraphrase Nelson Mandela: Are we going to enrich ourselves in order to enable the community to improve? Will the democracy we seek, the solutions we reach thin the ice or thicken it? When the waters rise with whom will we swim?
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1 Quoted in On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear, Richard Ellis, p.282
2 Mary Oliver, Redbird, Beacon Press
3 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/earth/05fossil.html?_r=2&th&emc=th
4 ibid
5 ibid
6 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 7
© Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish UU, Fitchburg 10 Oct. 2010
