|
Sermon by Leland Bond-Upson,
Well friends, we can end the suspense right now, because we're pretty sure we know how the world is going to end, and-we may be there for it. Well, not us gathered here today, but our descendants. And likely, fewer generations hence than the builders of the Great Pyramids are behind. This brief "interglacial period" we're in will come to a close. In just a few thousand years the glaciers will return, as they always have. In time, a glacier two miles thick will scrape off the cities of Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit and deposit them in Tennessee. Our science and technology may permit us to survive this, although previous Ice Ages have lasted for 90,000 years and are characterized by numbing cold, ice, drought, and dust. Perhaps by then we will be able to manipulate global warming to save ourselves, by preventing the ice from building up. That would be ironic, wouldn't it? But even if our species can survive an Ice Age, we're still doomed. Science predicts that in a billion years, the sun will be 10% brighter, and the mean global temperature will be 160 degrees F. Eventually, the oceans will boil off. In seven billion years an expanding sun will first incinerate and then absorb the Earth. That's if a comet or black hole doesn't get us first. There's an asteroid headed straight for us that will arrive in only 877 years. There's a nasty black hole only 1500 light years away. O yes, Nature will definitely have the last word. It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that we live in a moment of blessing and wonder. These are the times of soft grass, of great trees, of rain and sun and fog; of plants and animals multiplying, and of gathering the bounty of the land and river and sea; of fruits and nuts, of wine and roses. It was hell on earth before, and it will be hell on earth later, but it is heaven on earth, right now. Or it could be, were we wiser! Einstein is said to have said "Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the
former." The key is Right Relationship. Have you experienced the interconnectedness of all existence? [pause] I have. Once. It has been my delicious privilege, to have once known and felt oneness with Creation, to have had an epiphany. I have not experienced, since then, with such religious intuition, that revelation of inter-relation. Perhaps it's one of those things, like first love, that can only be experienced once in such a way. After that it is only a reminder, or a variation, and can no longer pack the power and thrill of the first time. It occurred on a solo wilderness trip, in a special place on a sacred mountain. During my rambles and meditations, it came to me at mid-day, with a clarity and power that transcended normal knowing, that everything was moving and interacting perfectly with everything else. Everything was breathing and transforming, each in it's own way, snow melting, plants absorbing water and air and sun, water vapor escaping the rocks, trees breathing in CO2 and exhaling oxygen, insects, birds and animals going about their business, wildflowers growing where they were able, all in natural harmony, and me, a part of it, not an invader, not a despoiler. I felt, as the words of the Desiderata assure us, that I too was a child of the universe, and that I had a right to be there. I had always been a conservationist, but this experience gave me a respect for Creation which I had not known before. To Albert Schwietzer, the idea of "reverence for life" came to him in an epiphanous moment. To me, the idea came, of "reverence for everything." Years later, I discovered a poem, "A Dialogue of Self
and Soul," in which the poet Yeats, in the last lines of
what some say is his greatest poem, writes, Have you experienced the interconnectedness of all existence? There are many ways. Sex. Pregnancy and childbirth. Deep friendships. Deep learning. One's garden. Meditation. Star-gazing. For most of human time on earth, we lived like the weak and frightened animals that we were. The Neolithic trackways on the downs of England remind us that high, open ground was the safe place for us, and that only the most brave or the most desperate ventured down into the valleys and glens where the bear and wolf and lion dwelled. We were no match for the sabre-tooth tiger. We still aren't--lions and tigers and crocodiles kill thousands of us every year. But we survived and we began to learn new things. Tools. Fire. Weapons. There came a day in our pre-history when we killed the last sabre-tooth tiger. And there came a day when we had the ability to shape and smooth the ground, and walked on paths of our own making instead of following trails made by animals. Then we made them hard enough to allow chariots and carts and carriages. The early engineers, especially the Romans, built roads and aqueducts that curve and follow the land. They did it because they had to. They didn't have the power to blast and fill. Looking at them now, these structures feel graceful, and natural, reminding us that it was not so long ago that we once lived in better harmony with the earth. Even well into the 20th C., our highways followed the land. If you take the old highways that, since the building of the interstate system now exist as secondary roads, you will have a driving experience that is like a time machine. Route 66 is a famous example. For an example closer at hand, take old U.S. 40 over the Sierra summit from Soda Springs to Donner Lake. It's a revelation. If you're ever near the Columbia Gorge, 20 miles upriver from Portland, take the Scenic Highway that begins at Troutdale. It's a marvel of engineering, half of it built by hand. This highway, with its sculptural retaining walls, is featured in many automobile ads. It looks like a European highway set down in the fir and cedar forests of Oregon, and in fact, Italian stonemasons did the work. What changed everything was the industrial revolution, beginning with harnessing the power of hot water. The steam engine appeared. Suddenly we had the power to move mountains, and we did. The industrial revolution changed everything, much of it for the better, but at great cost to the structures of our former lives. Rock and river were no longer the obstacles they had been throughout our history. The connection of people and the land was gravely weakened, as jobs in the factories drew families off the farms and crowded them into fetid slums of the new towns. There was a rush to capitalize, and in the stampede, nature was often trodden underfoot. The pollution and scarring wasn't war on nature, wasn't intentional, merely careless. These things are in our nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English Jesuit priest, lamented the wanton destruction of the natural world in his poem, "Binsey Poplars, felled 1879." My aspens, dear, whose airy cages quelled, O if we but knew what we do After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. The power of our machines means instead of going with and
around, we cut through. We do it because it makes the way straighter,
wider, faster, more profitable. We do it for the trucks. We do
it to save time. We do for safety. Some say we often do it just
because we can. I hope to live to see the day when the dam is no longer needed, and the Falls reappear. It's not impossible. Dams are being removed on rivers all over America. We thought we'd never see San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway come down. But an earthquake happened along. In his book "The Control of Nature" John McPhee wrote about three human attempts to defy nature. One was the attempt by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River in its current channel. The river, you see, wants to resume its course down one of its other channels, which we call by its Indian name, the Atchafalaya. So far the Engineers have contained Old Man River, but it's taking a mighty effort. The second attempt was that of diverting a lava flow away from a town in Iceland by strategically pumping seawater onto the leading edge so that it would cool and harden and become its own retaining wall. It was close, but the plan succeeded. The third attempt McPhee describes is the practice of people in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Mountains building expensive homes in ravines that are the avenues for flash and debris floods. These buildings are doomed, but they build anyway. It the same thing as the folks in my home area who insisted on building their homes in the flood plain of the Yakima River, and then, when a flood came and damaged their houses, they sued the community for damages. In my description of this sermon, I asked, is this baseball metaphor a reassuring faith statement, or a revenge fantasy by discouraged conservationists? For reasons already discussed, it is not reassuring to know that mother nature has the last word. And if some conservationists derive pleasure from thinking that nature will 'win,' they're not thinking about the lives and the suffering involved. That Nature bats last is simply a cold, hard fact. The reason we want to control nature is that nature is cruel. We may love nature, but nature, for all its beauty, does not love us. We must not fool ourselves about that. Nature has, in the words of the poet, "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." Left to her own devices, nature delivers floods, hurricanes, tornados, blizzards, earthquakes, pestilence, plagues of locust, drought, famine, flooding, volcanic explosions, lava and pyroclastic flows, forest fires, viruses, bacteria, funguses, birth defects, and clouds of flies and mosquitoes. So it's good for people that we've learned to control nature as much as we have. Understandably, it's less good for the other inhabitants of the planet, and it's been disastrous for many of the wild places. In many areas we've been too successful, we've gone too far. We need to be smart about all this, and despite Einstein's opinion, we can be. It was Walter Cronkite or someone like him who said that there
are three great challenges to our survival that must be overcome.
What come to mind for you? His three are Today's sermon could be said to address all three, but the poisoning issue is the most directly related, so I'll give an example from that realm of the type of work we need to do. We cannot stop the advance of knowledge and technology, so we need to manage it wisely. We are charged, as the creators of this mess, with the work of figuring it out, and making good choices. Now this should be easier for us religious liberals than some
others, because we're accustomed to this kind of work. We are
already in the habit of thinking things out for ourselves, rather
than accepting some authoritative answer from the experts. The question is, what is the best solution for our energy needs? There is no one right or easy answer, for each of the alternatives has a set of problems. Gas and oil are highly efficient and the machines that run on them are already built. However, they have noxious by-products, the supply is going to run out pretty soon, and they keep us tied to the corruption and danger of oil and Middle East politics. How about coal? We have enough of to last centuries, and it's cheap. But it's dangerous to its miners, the land is stripped to extract it, the streams are poisoned, and burning it has noxious by-products, such as carbon monoxide and acid rain. Hydro-electric? It's clean, and the fish are being better cared for than ever before. But dams submerge valleys like the Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon, and falls like the Celilo, and turn free rivers into a series of lakes. And anyhow, there aren't many good places left to dam. Nuclear? Nuclear power plants now provide a steadily growing percentage of our electricity. Few of us would be happy if this contribution were lost. It's clean, except for the problem of nuclear waste disposal. And a serious accident would be worse than a serious accident at a coal-fired generator-- but not as bad as a breached dam. Full disclosure: I must remind you that I come from a nuclear energy town, and have lived close to the issues, and do not have a horror of the idea. The thing about nuclear waste is to store it in a safe, geologically-stable place until we figure out a way to detoxify or re-use it, which is what is being done now. How about windmills? They are only suitable for a few windy locations, and they're unsightly. Solar panels? Still not cost-effective. Tidal generators? Still not cost-effective. Fusion? Can't seem to make it work. Alternative fuels? Methane is being worked on with some success. And hydrogen seems to hold a lot of promise, but at best, it's years off in the future. So the answer is that there is yet no answer. In the meantime, we must keep juggling the pros and cons of all of them. The most helpful thing, of course, is to consume less, and more and more of us are 'thinking green.' It is said that a 20% improvement in automobile fuel efficiency would end our dependence on Middle East oil. But Detroit and Washington aren't interested. My next car will be a hybrid. But not till my Landcruiser dies, because even though it's an SUV, it takes more of the world's resources to build a new car than it does to keep operating an old one. A big change in the cost or availability of fuel will change the equation for me. In every other issue that deals with our relation to nature, there is a similar requirement to take everything into account. Loggers have families to support, but should every tree, in every place be cut down before our society assumes some responsibility for retraining these hard-working guys for some other line of work? Fishermen have families to support too, but can't something be done for them AND keep the fisheries from being exhausted? Can wolves be re-introduced into the lower 48 to restore ecological balance while preventing the ranchers from suffering slaughter of their calves and sheep? Can we transition to a better-planned economy so that economic expansion does not require constant population growth? We must. Can we learn how to share? We have the ability to provide for all, but half the world has next to nothing. Can either side of the abortion fight see any virtue in the position of the other side? I know this might seem a little off-topic, but it's the same kind of inclusive thinking that's needed to find compromise, as with the competing claims of Man and wild nature. In my description of this sermon, I asked if our own nature, human nature bats last too. And of course it does, but human nature is not simple. We're not just one thing. We can be really really smart, and really really stupid at the same time. It's as remarkable contradiction as the fact that we love peace with all our hearts, but we also love war, and can't seem to do without it. It's human nature to survive, to be self-preserving. At the same time it's our nature to be so stubborn and blind and foolish that we act against our own best interests. God knows we have a sorry history of that. And look what we're about to step into in Iraq. There are so many reasons to be cautious, so many reasons to hold back the dogs of war, and yet, what can stop it? The best possible answer lies waiting in all things. We, as
religious liberals, are as well-equipped as anyone to determine
the highest good for the greatest number. Because we can, we
are called to do that work, and then to speak, and act.  |