Thursday, June 27, 2019

 

How Long Do We Have? (Part Two)


The answer to the question highly depends upon feeding the masses. "There are no seasons anymore. Agriculture is a gamble." A woman farmer in Uganda is speaking to Mary Robinson (former Irish president, eloquent spokesperson for climate justice) in 2009. Peter Sawtell quotes her in a post at Ecojustice Notes on the summer solstice, which is predictable, as the seasons, and agriculture, are not anymore.

Genesis seems to say otherwise. "As long as Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Gen 8:22). James Imhof, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, frequently quotes this verse to prove that climate change is a liberal hoax; God has promised not to allow it.

As a Christian theologian, Sawtell wrote Imhof an open letter pointing out that what the Genesis writer was pointing to was the dependable journey of the Earth around the sun on its axis. But we humans can still sin, and since our technological prowess, multiplied by our numbers, has allowed us to be giants in the Earth, we have taken sin to new levels. We are, as Brian Swimme says, a "planetary power,"capable of ecological sin, with our initially "innocent" use of fossil fuels now turned monstrous.

The bottom line for all life to flourish on the Earth is respiration, food and water, and a temperature range in which the organism can function. Agricultural output for a species now numbering well over 7 billion is one important subset of this process. So the unpredictability for farmers in the ongoing collapse of seasons is a key to the question of survival. Farmers are adaptable, but there is only so much they can do in response to the accelerating disruption of growing conditions. To paraphrase the hymn, they have the whole world in their hands.

For the Beauty of the Earth....

But what of the other aspects of climate disruption? Losing the seasons is a loss of stability, and of the aesthetic delight we have been blessed with for much of our history (the exceptions being ice ages rather than rapid warming, which we have never before encountered species-wide). Every time I hear birdsong I say a prayer of thanksgiving. It is no longer something to take for granted. The same is true for cool breezes, refreshing water for recreational bathing, and the wildlife I see in my yard. And as I wrote here a couple of years back, it is true of looking up and seeing blue sky, since rapid warming will soon probably result in deployment of sulfur aerosols at the poles to dampen incoming solar radiation, causing the skies to turn gray. For as long as we seed the polar stratosphere, it will be the atmospheric equivalent of a continuing eruption of large volcanoes, and there will be serious side effects, chiefly the loss of the monsoon winds upon which South Asian farmers depend. No blue sky, no monsoon, even as the Himalayan glaciers, mothers of the major South Asian rivers, are on course to completely dry up before mid-century.


So, Peter Wadhams' testimony aside, we will last awhile, but only through the continued application of human ingenuity, which got us into deep trouble in the first place. In the end, only restraint of our appetite for comfort and the easy path, driven by corporate greed and nationalism, will save us and the rest of the biosphere from ourselves. We have missed the window for climate mitigation, and now must achieve the miracle of transformation of global civilization to one of cooperation, even as nativism and reactionary denial of our crisis have become the rule. Adaptation, which is so often framed as a technological feat by individual nations and city-states, is ultimately a social problem. And that social problem is the key evolutionary issue for our species in the face of its greatest challenge ever. Sadly, the odds favoring abrupt climate change dwarf those for rapid evolutionary change.


The human experiment hangs in the balance. As you go forward with your life, restrain your consumption of fossils, pray for resilience, and recognize the possibility, however slim, of human and divine miracles. Above all, have compassion for everyone you encounter.


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# posted by Robert McGahey @ 4:30 PM 0 Comments

Thursday, September 11, 2008

 

Forgive them, for they know not what they do

But what if we do indeed know what we do? A small number of ecologists, climate scientists, and elders of first peoples have known that we are crucifying the earth for a long time. And now, many more have witnessed "An Inconvenient Truth," and thus recognize that we are creating an accelerating greenhouse effect by burning up the earth's fossilized carbon sinks. But the vast majority of us are unwilling to take personal responsibility for this greatest of sins because of our habit of easy compliance with the structural sin of global industrial capitalism. This sin is condoned by the church itself, as the initial Protestant blessing of its children, seeing those who reaped the abundance of capitalism as a sign of God's favor, has morphed into the church's sanction of rampant greed in the late industrial and terminal holocene ages.


Unfettered corporate behavior, complicit with sovereign nations' pandering to their richest citizens' comfort over all other government responsibilities defines the deeply entrenched structural sin whereby we have thoroughly commoditized the earth. Though we protect ourselves by burying the guilt the moment it starts to grow in our hearts, deep down we know that our everyday actions trash the earth. But as my cousin says, that's somebody else's problem. Let the government take care of it.


We know not that we crucify something divine by poisoning the atmosphere? That would be pantheism, the whole terrible universe experienced as divine. But if God is the Ground of Being, the beloved earth is His raiments. For the pantheist, it is divine simply as it is. For the panentheist, it is divine because God made it, working from within, its holy source.


And does the traditional Christian, viewing the earth from God's perspective above and around her in the vastness of space, does she not also know what we do? God told us to be stewards, and the closer we look at our lives, the more we realize we defy him. We are not stewards, except in the limited ways we tithe to the earth at the margins of our economic lives. So in this sense, we do know what we do.


Forgive them... How can we be forgiven if we knowingly destroy creation? The earth cannot forgive; she can only heal though adaptation. And what would the Creator's forgiveness entail? Given that the earth is entering old age, there is probably insufficient time to recover the complexity of higher life, once extinct, during her remaining lifetime. Accepting such divine forgiveness would entail a faith of cosmic dimensions, trusting the everabundant Creator to recreate the unlikely conditions of life on earth in another universe, either with a new start or in some kind of "parallel play" in which theoretical physicists like to speculatively engage.


But do we really know what we are doing to the earth? I was at a discussion this spring of global challenges with a group of highly educated, spiritually grounded "elders" (our median age was in the 60's). One woman blurted, "We're not in crisis." Industrial urban life hides eco-justice and social justice effects from the consumer, for our resource and trade base is the whole world. Lacking systemic thinking and moral imagination, we are blind to the beginning wave of distant environmental refugees, the huge holes in the fabric of Gaia opening as we dredge the seas for protein, and slash and burn rainforests. And at home in our comfortable enclaves, we ignore the small, but numerous signs of the unraveling of Gaia's web.


Isn't our collective behavior the sign of an addiction so deeply entrenched that we cannot fathom it? The order of sin from within late industrial capitalism is so enormous that we in our complicity can scarcely imagine being forgiven. How can we contemplate the level of forgiveness required if we cannot even imagine the sin itself?


The scale of the Creators’ forgiveness is beyond our imagining, even when we realize we have been complicit in the murder of Creation. Facing up to this complicity can be a huge burden. Personally, I need to move beyond superego-driven, human judgment to allow divine compassion. It is not up to me to forgive. Yet as along as I am part of this culture, however aware and careful I am with my material choices, I simply cannot honestly accept Jesus' admonition, Go, and sin no more. Go where on this commoditized earth? To do so would be to accept self-annihilation, and to wish my own or my species’ death would be blasphemy, for we are integral to Creation. Once we accept ecological sin, we need to accept the infinite nature of God's forgiveness, even unto the end of the earth.

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# posted by Robert McGahey @ 2:54 PM 0 Comments

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