The Climate Crisis: Fear, Love, and Hope
A message for Integrity of Creation Sunday - April 28, 2019
St. Paul's United Church of Christ
St. Paul's United Church of Christ
As many of you know, I have two daughters. Daphne is eight and is in third grade. She loves sushi and is perpetually halfway through making up a board game. Iris is five and in pre-K. She’s a puzzle whiz and a fearless gymnast. Lately, both girls have been talking about what they want to be when they grow up. Iris’s current thought is a veterinarian. Daphne has reached a point of eight-year-old wisdom, realizing it’s really hard to pick just one thing and wonders how often she can change jobs. Like any mom, I love these two girls more than anything. I see what incredible potential they have to be amazing human beings. And I want them to be able to follow their dreams as they grow up.
But I know, and more and more I feel, that they will be growing up in an intensely challenging world. I’m sure you remember February (unless you’re trying to forget it). We were battered with our snowiest February on record. 39 inches, with several inches falling every few days. One Sunday night in the middle of the month I made the mistake of checking the forecast for the coming week before going to bed. I had already shoveled several times that week, and the week before. And the forecast called for more snow on Tuesday, and yet again on Thursday. In that moment, I felt a rising sense of panic. Initially for the week ahead and how to fit another several hours of shoveling our 110-foot long driveway into my busy schedule.
But the largest weight was knowing that this is just the beginning of increasingly unsettled weather. That disrupted cycles of precipitation - too much all at once, or too little for too long - are becoming the norm not just here, but all around the world. Seasonal transitions are wavering, coming earlier or later, and with less predictability, wreaking havoc for migrating animals and for farmers.
As the disruptions intensify, they will have consequences for food and water supplies, for disease and health, and ultimately for the fabric of human society. And this is the world in which my daughters are going to spend their entire lives. I wonder whether Iris’s dreams of becoming a veterinarian, or Daphne’s quest to thrive at whatever it is she decides on will even be possible in the kind of world that is coming.
At this point, I was going to walk through some of the data illustrating the severity of climate change. My day job revolves around data and I am very comfortable with it. But I decided that now is not the time for comfort, on many levels.
But I know, and more and more I feel, that they will be growing up in an intensely challenging world. I’m sure you remember February (unless you’re trying to forget it). We were battered with our snowiest February on record. 39 inches, with several inches falling every few days. One Sunday night in the middle of the month I made the mistake of checking the forecast for the coming week before going to bed. I had already shoveled several times that week, and the week before. And the forecast called for more snow on Tuesday, and yet again on Thursday. In that moment, I felt a rising sense of panic. Initially for the week ahead and how to fit another several hours of shoveling our 110-foot long driveway into my busy schedule.
But the largest weight was knowing that this is just the beginning of increasingly unsettled weather. That disrupted cycles of precipitation - too much all at once, or too little for too long - are becoming the norm not just here, but all around the world. Seasonal transitions are wavering, coming earlier or later, and with less predictability, wreaking havoc for migrating animals and for farmers.
As the disruptions intensify, they will have consequences for food and water supplies, for disease and health, and ultimately for the fabric of human society. And this is the world in which my daughters are going to spend their entire lives. I wonder whether Iris’s dreams of becoming a veterinarian, or Daphne’s quest to thrive at whatever it is she decides on will even be possible in the kind of world that is coming.
At this point, I was going to walk through some of the data illustrating the severity of climate change. My day job revolves around data and I am very comfortable with it. But I decided that now is not the time for comfort, on many levels.
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To summarize the main points: Relatively stable temperatures have prevailed for the past 10,000 years, throughout the history of human agriculture. Until now. The change in global average temperature resulting from human-caused climate change is expected to be similar in magnitude to the difference between the last ice age and that stable level. And that change is happening over a mere 100 years, not gradually over thousands of years. That severe and abrupt change will disrupt the earth’s physical and ecological systems in ways we cannot predict, or maybe even imagine.
This is undeniably scary stuff, as we begin to feel the possibility of literal truth in the prophetic words from Isaiah. “The world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted...and a curse devours the earth.” So I want to spend a few moments talking about fear, love, and desperate, but no less real, hope.
Climate change - which some are now calling climate chaos - is hard to think about. It is very human to turn away, to allow ourselves to be distracted by what can seem like more urgent priorities. There’s actually a whole book about why we are so good at NOT thinking about climate change. We all know it’s happening. We know it’s a big problem. But I suspect that most of us have not fully, deeply considered what it means.
Until a couple of years ago, that’s where I was. I had bought a copy of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and started reading it. But it took me months to really dig in. Because, at a certain level, I was afraid to. I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. I didn’t want to follow the implications of climate chaos to their conclusions. I didn’t want to look too closely at this big, messy problem that is bound up in every single aspect of our way of life. Eventually, I worked up the courage to keep reading. And it was scary. It was terrifying. But Klein also makes the case that changing everything is not necessarily a bad thing.
That’s the same case made by the Transition Movement. If you’ve been around here for the past several months, you have probably heard at least some hints about Transition. Transition empowers individual communities to come together on a very practical level to transform themselves into the locally-oriented, relationship-based, fossil fuel free, resilient communities we need.
For me, and for many others, Transition resonates strongly with the teachings of Jesus and the three great loves that the broader United Church of Christ emphasizes - love of neighbor, love of children, and love of creation. But, for me at least, this is not a safe, tame love. It is not a love that settles for appreciating a walk in the woods or bringing a meal to a neighbor in need - though it absolutely does those things too. But it is more than that. It is a fierce love. Love that wraps itself tightly around the grief and pain of every beloved being and every sacred place that is destroyed by our way of life. It is the anguished love of a mother for her ailing child, cherishing every good and precious moment of beauty that is here, now. The kind of love that drew Jesus’ followers to huddle together in the dark days following that first Good Friday, when Easter was not a foregone certainty. Love that fights every day to protect my children's future.
The Transition Movement speaks to me because it taps into this fierce, desperate, gathering love. Transition is ultimately about relationships, joy, and hope. Relationships are central to meeting our needs locally, in low-energy, community-based ways, freeing ourselves from the vast fossil-fueled consumer economy. Strong relationships will be necessary to weather the coming challenges of our changing planet. Nurturing these relationships between neighbors and with our home places also inspires great joy. Authentic joy that is not available in stores. And working together, we also find hope.
Action is a great antidote to despair. Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, has said, “If we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.” I hope - I pray - that he is right.
This is undeniably scary stuff, as we begin to feel the possibility of literal truth in the prophetic words from Isaiah. “The world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted...and a curse devours the earth.” So I want to spend a few moments talking about fear, love, and desperate, but no less real, hope.
Climate change - which some are now calling climate chaos - is hard to think about. It is very human to turn away, to allow ourselves to be distracted by what can seem like more urgent priorities. There’s actually a whole book about why we are so good at NOT thinking about climate change. We all know it’s happening. We know it’s a big problem. But I suspect that most of us have not fully, deeply considered what it means.
Until a couple of years ago, that’s where I was. I had bought a copy of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and started reading it. But it took me months to really dig in. Because, at a certain level, I was afraid to. I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. I didn’t want to follow the implications of climate chaos to their conclusions. I didn’t want to look too closely at this big, messy problem that is bound up in every single aspect of our way of life. Eventually, I worked up the courage to keep reading. And it was scary. It was terrifying. But Klein also makes the case that changing everything is not necessarily a bad thing.
That’s the same case made by the Transition Movement. If you’ve been around here for the past several months, you have probably heard at least some hints about Transition. Transition empowers individual communities to come together on a very practical level to transform themselves into the locally-oriented, relationship-based, fossil fuel free, resilient communities we need.
For me, and for many others, Transition resonates strongly with the teachings of Jesus and the three great loves that the broader United Church of Christ emphasizes - love of neighbor, love of children, and love of creation. But, for me at least, this is not a safe, tame love. It is not a love that settles for appreciating a walk in the woods or bringing a meal to a neighbor in need - though it absolutely does those things too. But it is more than that. It is a fierce love. Love that wraps itself tightly around the grief and pain of every beloved being and every sacred place that is destroyed by our way of life. It is the anguished love of a mother for her ailing child, cherishing every good and precious moment of beauty that is here, now. The kind of love that drew Jesus’ followers to huddle together in the dark days following that first Good Friday, when Easter was not a foregone certainty. Love that fights every day to protect my children's future.
The Transition Movement speaks to me because it taps into this fierce, desperate, gathering love. Transition is ultimately about relationships, joy, and hope. Relationships are central to meeting our needs locally, in low-energy, community-based ways, freeing ourselves from the vast fossil-fueled consumer economy. Strong relationships will be necessary to weather the coming challenges of our changing planet. Nurturing these relationships between neighbors and with our home places also inspires great joy. Authentic joy that is not available in stores. And working together, we also find hope.
Action is a great antidote to despair. Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, has said, “If we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.” I hope - I pray - that he is right.