Below is a reading - a sermon really, that I gave at a Unitarian Church in October 2000. It concerns climate change, and the reluctance of humanity to address it. I had been tracking the issue of global warming since the early 1990s.
At the time, the environmental movement was organizing to confront the administration of George W. Bush, over its intransigent refusal to address global warming. Then came the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the consequent "war on terror" which fatally vitiated the planned environmentalist campaign. And, America went to war - laying waste to an entire nation which had not attacked us.
By 2004 the drumbeats of war were again pounding, this time for an attack on Iran: a potential catastrophe we narrowly avoided. My curiosity turned towards the American factions beating those drums - especially to the Christian right, and its Christian Zionist faction which, as it happened, tended to oppose action to combat global warming and even went so far as to depict environmentalism as a satanic plot that would help bring to power the Antichrist.
After my decade-long research into the Christian right, it is now 2015 and the drums of war are again beating: for war on Iran, for intervention in the Ukraine. And, again, we risk locking ourselves into conflicts that would consume our energies and finances that, for the sake of humanity and the well-being of our planet, we must instead commit to the technologies to dramatically reduce humanity's output of greenhouse gasses.
Time was short then. It's shorter now.
"A child shames us all"
--Reading given at the Andover, Mass. Unitarian Church, 10/15/2000, by Bruce Wilson
The historical Buddha died with these last words to his disciples ; "do your best". And I am trying to do my best here, gesturing at some things which disturb me, - things both vague and shifting and as obvious as the side of a cow.
Everything is connected to everything else. Once, this was an insight rare, hard fought and granted to only the spiritually brilliant - The Meister Eckharts, the Boddidharmas, the Sufis, the blessed. Now, to teach us all that insight, the world threatens to rear up to smash us about the head as does a Zen master smite a recalcitrant pupil for stubborn confusion. We will learn, sooner I hope rather than later, that all systems are parts of larger wholes which in turn are pieces of still greater wholes.
As De Morgan paraphrased Jonathan Swift;
"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum."
We all are pieces of greater wholes - families, local communities, cities, nations. But we are also fleas and the earth teems with us and begins to shiver feverishly with our load.
Much is made about the human economy, of our fears at erratic lunges of the stock market, and the need for continual increase in the gross national product. It is only vaguely recognized and then quickly forgotten that we live in a larger economy, that of the biological world.
But the study of this larger economy which some has taken to calling Gaia - for the Greek goddess who drew the world forth from chaos - has gained the momentum of a quiet revolution in many of the biological sciences, for this system provides the oxygen we breathe, cycles the nitrogen which fertilizes plant growth, and somehow regulates global temperature and ocean salinity levels. Everything that we take for granted is given.
Have we proven ourselves wiser than fleas? We take and take from that larger economy and never acknowledge the debt. Someday I feel that we will do so, and I hope that this day comes soon.
But our understanding is dim and our vision is narrowed, in turn, by aches and pains, by the sorrows of life, by the chattering of the television and the screeching of tires, and by the growling of our stomachs.
When I try to peer back down through the mists of memory at my childhood I seem to recall a sense I once had that there were adults - whom I suppose I identified by the gray hairs on their heads - who were wise and in control of things. But over the years, as I learned more about the world, this faith of mine that someone, somewhere, was in control ebbed away and was replaced by a view of humans on the earth as an uncontrolled and untamed process.
As individuals, we all lead our lives with intelligence and some even manage with grace. It is difficult enough to deal with the immediate sphere; our individual decisions and tragedies seem insurmountable enough and to even drive a car every day, through rush hour traffic, is a daily flirtation with death.
But as species we resemble nothing as much as a collective process. Loren Eiseley likened us, at times, to beavers with mechanical contrivances gnawing and damming our way through through the world's biota -- and in his darker visions he likened us to the slime molds which gather together, as individual amoebae, to coalesce into larger bodies to propel spores upward and outward as Eiseley feared that humans might project themselves upward and outward into space.
"Perhaps", he wrote, "Homo Sapiens the wise, is himself only the mechanism in a parasitic cycle, an instrument for the transference, ultimately, of a more invulnerable and heartless version of himself."
I worry that as we lust after the conquest of the universe, and as we dream of a future in which we create intelligent machines to do our bidding and transform our world into an earthly paradise, we neglect developments that are happening under our very noses.
The transcendence of the physical world which we seem to seek has not yet arrived and, meanwhile, we are rapidly transforming our planet. It is a race, it seems to me. Will our dreamed of utopian technologies arrive before we lay waste to the earth and thus to ourselves?
We humans once looked to shamans to foretell the future in signs read in entrails and in sticks cast upon the ground. Later, we chose priests and, later still, scientists. Now, I think, we choose no one at all to predict our future for we no longer listen to the scientists when they tell us that our pollution is heating up the earth's atmosphere or that we will soon be responsible for the elimination of half of the number species which currently live on this earth.
I think that we do not look anywhere for guidance as much as we wallow in a cynical and relativistic skepticism which holds that all knowledge is suspect. I think that, in the face of disturbing truths, we retreat from the notion of truth itself.
"Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices, for us and our children.....Our climate is now changing rapidly....Our new data and understanding now point to a critical situation we face." This quote comes from a joint letter written last February to the London Observer by James Baker, the Undersecretary of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Peter Ewins, head of the British meteorological office. When our leading climatologists take the career risks of issuing such bold pronouncements about our changing climate, we ignore them.
And when agencies which seek to mitigate the suffering of human conflict - such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - state that "The explosive combination of human-driven climate change and rapidly changing socio- economic conditions will set off chain reactions of devastation leading to super-disasters" we merely shrug.
When we hear that the heat of 1998, which seems to have been the hottest year on the planet in at least the last thousand, caused as much as 5% of the world's population became environmental refugees, we shrug some more. What can be done? There are bills to pay, and our house needs a new roof.
As as we drive on, with fingers clenched on our steering wheels, headlong into the future, we sow the seeds of future conflict. The principle is simple; when besieged by heat, thirst, and hunger, humans fight.
I once saw this demonstrated, during a month long heat wave, in Baltimore Md., when a friend of mine made a cross comment to a local landlords' employee - who was throwing trash into a collapsing alley garage where rats bred in profusion. The employee ran into his apartment to come out waving, of all things, a scimitar - which he tried to taunt my friend into charging at. Presumably, he meant to lop off my friend's head. Fortunately, calmer natures prevailed and no blood was shed.
But blood will be shed and weapons of mass destruction will be employed unless we stop our collective project of destabilizing the Earth's environment. We can hope that, even though world oil production is now projected to begin declining within 5 to 12 years, that current supplies will allow those adults here today to drive comfortably into the grave. But today's children will witness the aftermath as the world fights over the last of the oil. And we can hope that we do not see what happens when the ice cap covering our north pole disappears, as some have predicted will happen within this century. But today's children will see the results.
We are now laying a grim legacy, of a destabilized climate and a biologically impoverished world, of human conflicts and wars.
And I think that the children and young people of today have the right to be angry at our passivity and the right to demand action. All here who have at least three or four decades behind them are well into that process of entrancement and accommodation to the ways things are which is required to successfully function in human society. But the young can expect to live to see, at least, the middle of the next century and so have a right to be concerned, to be angry even, and to scold us.
They have the right to demand that we plan for them a viable future, that we begin the transition now to cleaner energy sources, that we address the poverty of the world if only to prevent the destruction of the world's remaining forests, and that we relinquish our weapons of mass destruction.
I think that the time has come for a children's crusade for nothing can shame us more, I think, than the questions of the young. A crusade to demand a future and not the grotesque calamity which we are bequeathing to them, but a real future, a future which has hope and not merely devastation.
Last summer, at a vacation house on Cape Cod, I saw my niece enlist two other children - children of parents with wide divergences in political opinion - to protest the cutting of a small tree by groundskeepers. It was a small insurrection, really, and insignificant, I suppose, except for what it pointed towards. The children made, on their own initiative, signs saying "don't cut the trees" and "let the trees live" and stood there in a protest to shame larger society, in their desire to protect all life. And I thought, Let it start there.