Earth Made Fair With All Her People One
Six year old Niklas Rimbach, Thursday evening at our church catered dinner wished me a Happy Earth Day, and when I asked him how he had celebrated Earth Day he told me he had picked up trash, and had gone around his house turning off lights.
What good news! Something important is happening in human consciousness.
I can remember the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. Forty years later there is much good news to celebrate, amidst our continuing global warming, population explosion, and natural resource depletion. But let’s not go there yet.
I remember television coverage of the first Earth Day. I was Student Senate President of our Knox College student body, and was one of those student leaders across the country that received an invitation to sponsor campus events that day. I believe we held a rally. What I remember are people walking around in gas masks.
Though that first Earth Day was a huge success, “ some discredited the … cause, as some do today. The Daughters of the American Revolution passed a resolution calling the issue "distorted and exaggerated by emotional declarations and by intensive propaganda." One delegate called the environmental movement "one of the subversive element's last steps." And, in Georgia, Comptroller General James L. Bentley warned that Earth Day might be a communist plot—because it fell on Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin's 100th birthday.1
But, I remember that spring of 1970 for another reason. In Galesburg, Illinois, we had a “gas war.” Service stations around the town kept lowering their gasoline prices, luring customers to come in and fill up. I had never seen gasoline sell for 19.9 cents per gallon, and I, and my Chevy Carryall, appreciated it.
A few years later, in October of 1973, I was a theological school student in Chicago when the gas crisis hit. Arab nations, protesting U.S. support of Israel, instituted an embargo, and lines for gasoline in Chicago, and all over the country,
got longer and longer.
One of my classes that year was with UU Environmental Ethicist Ron Engel. He had us read the new book The Limits to Growth that included documenting the exhaustion of the Earth’s oil supplies within decades. The book was subsequently translated into 35 languages and sold millions of copies.
“Published in 1972 by the Club of Rome… [it] looked at five factors affecting human society: industrialization, population, food production, natural resources, and pollution. It particularly stressed the consequences of ultimately limited resources being consumed at an exponential rate.”
“The study's … conclusion was that if (then) present growth trends continued, the limits to growth on this earth will be reached in the middle of the Twenty-first Century, followed by a dramatic, uncontrollable collapse of population, food production, and all the other significant measures of a society's welfare.2
I must admit at the time I was unconvinced of the seriousness of our natural resource depletion. How do they know how much oil is in the Earth? How do they know that more exploration will not produce oil fields larger than those now in use? But, a seed of consciousness was planted.
The study's second, usually ignored conclusion was that it might be possible to establish a state of global equilibrium in which the basic needs of all are satisfied and in which each person has an equal opportunity to realize his or her individual human potential.3
Professor Engel reminded us of Rachel Carson, who little more than a decade earlier had published Silent Spring, documenting the overuse of pesticides, proclaiming that all species are related, and, in doing so, started what came to be called the environmental movement.
In 1963, Rachel Carson said,
"We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.
"But [we are]… a part of nature, and [our] war against nature is inevitably a war against [ourselves]. The rains have become an instrument to bring down from the atmosphere the deadly products of atomic explosions. Water, which is probably our most important natural resource, is now used and re-used with incredible recklessness.
"[W]e in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as [hu]mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."4
1963. The fact that Rachel Carson was dismissed at the time by cadres of male scientists provides evidence that the newly forming consciousness was not only of cosmological and ecological awareness, but also of gender awareness, of women’s liberation, of human equality.
Six years later the first human steps were taken on the moon, and our consciousness, more and more, has been formed by images of the Earth from space: We are children of the Universe, one body. We are the first generation to see our Mother Earth, one, without boundaries.
Every year, since 1970, we have stopped on a day in April, to reflect on what this means.
Here at UUCB our theological theme for April has been “salvation.” In this post-Rachel Carson era, salvation has increasingly been seen as saving the Earth. There is a new movie by Sam Green, called “Utopia in Four Movements,” that opens tonight at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
I was struck by a quote from Sam Green, “The more I thought about it, the more I realized utopia was a collective experience.”5
The original meaning and usage of the term “resurrection” did not focus on individual salvation. It arose within Jewish teachings before Jesus, and focused on the idea of the establishment of the Kingdom of God. It was to be a collective experience.
After 2000 years, and the predominance in the West of a hubris-filled, egocentric philosophy enshrining individualism, following prophets like Rachel Carson, we understand that salvation is of the whole. We are of the Earth, one body, no boundaries.
During our sabbatical a year ago, Barbara and I visited Kathmandu, in Nepal. There is so much I loved about this city, and its ancient religious roots. But, the rivers that run through Kathmandu left us gasping. They are garbage dumps.
And the exhaust and congestion on the roads, the traffic jams and endless cacophonous blaring of horns are expressions of humanity alienated from the Mother that sustains life. All over India, in the major cities, we witnessed our population explosion. The bustis, or slums, with millions of people living in make-do huts of tarp, or cardboard, or whatever could be found, are expressions of a species having lost our way.
We have made amazing strides in the last forty years. Solar panels and wind turbines abound. Hybrid and electric cars are in demand. There’s been a revolution in light bulbs. And still the Earth’s population is growing: more than 6.8 billion people live on this planet today.6 We have more than doubled the Earth’s population since the first Earth Day.
The planet is warming, yet still more cars are produced than ever before. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that in China alone, in March overall auto sales rose 56% from a year earlier… Total Chinese vehicle sales may hit 17 million this year, more than the biggest year ever in the U.S.7 As we strive to save Mother Earth, it’s the future that is scary.
Currently, China has some 40 vehicles per thousand residents … while the US has about 950… "If each Chinese family had two cars like [the average of] U.S. families, then the cars needed by China would exceed all the cars in the world today combined.8
The carbon monoxide they would produce would be disastrous.
The message today is we need six billion people to wake up with a different consciousness, a global consciousness, a consciousness that recognizes each action, or non-action of our lives expresses our commitment to Mother Earth’s salvation, to our survival. This Blue Boat Home, this interdependent web of all existence, cries out for our care: Make this Earth fair with all her people one.
It starts at home. Like Niklas, we can pick up trash, or let it lie. We can turn off the light switch, or leave it on. We can walk when we could drive. We can recycle when we used to throw away. We can flush less and turn the water off when we brush. And we can lobby, with our friends, our co-workers, our representatives, that education and legal reform can shape a saving salve.
There is so much we can do. The Unitarian Universalist Association invites us to join the 40/40/40 campaign. On this 40 th Earth Day, we are invited to commit to small and large daily actions over the coming 40 days, for the sake of the Earth and all who live here. The hope is that 40 people, or 40 percent of the congregation will commit to trying out new life styles, knowing that our personal choices affect many aspects of global environmental justice. Turn out the lights. Turn off the water. Recycle. Ask each other if you are a 40/40/40 participant, and share your experiences.
Another way to be involved is through the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California’s efforts at lowering our carbon footprint, and to establish a right to water for basic human needs as a policy of this State. The goal is a day when everyone in California can safely fill a glass of water from their tap and drink it without fear of becoming sick. Information about these programs is available at the Legislative Ministry web site, and at our Social Justice table in the Atrium.
The first sentence in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”
May this vision be alive in us,
not as an image of what once was,
but of how we may all become.
Rachel Carson said:
"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
Isn’t it so?
When the fruit tree bursts into blossom,when the soil is parted by the green stem pushing upward,
when the bird calls in sweet melody,
when clear, clean water quenches our thirst
when the “pasture gleams ‘neath billowing skies,”
when the “dragon-fly hangs like a blue thread lossened from the sky,”
then,
we know the wonder of this life,
then,
we ache for the Earth’s salvation,
then,
we give ourselves to love.
1 Mercury News, April 22, 2010
2 http://www.globalfuture.com/book-limitstogrowth.htm
3 ibid.
4 http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0527.html
5 San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, April 23, 2010, p. F3.
6 U.S. Census estimate of the world population, April 2010.
7 www.counterpunch.org/engler04232010.html
8 ibid.
Copyright © 2010, Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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