2017.9.17 Resilience in a time of Climate Change
Rev.
Laura Bogle Foothills UU
Fellowship
Time for All
Ages: “Flood” a South American folktale,
told by Sheri Liles
In which
two boys survive a catastrophic flood because they heeded the warnings of
animals, and were saved by the food and nurture brought to them by magical
parrots.
Last Christmas we were sitting down to a rare
adult-only dinner with my partner’s family.
We had been focused on family togetherness and private grief, it being
the first Christmas without my partner’s step-father who had died earlier in
the year.
Into the
dinner table conversation, my partner’s father asked a question. I don’t
remember if there was a graceful segue or if he just asked it.
Basically he asked, Can we talk about a family plan for when things get really bad? When the climate gets so bad that things
start to fall apart? Can we decide as a
family where we will all live together, how we can best take care of each
other? Taking into account who has access to land, and what areas may be less
likely to be burning up or submerged by ocean?
And, hoo boy, I can tell you no one wanted to
have that conversation.
Not my brother and sister-in-law who live in
New York City. Not my mother-in-law who
lives in Indiana. Not me. Not even my spouse who works on projects
related to climate change for a living.
We could argue that maybe it wasn’t best moment
to pose the question—and you know, Christmas dinner tables always have all
kinds of family dynamics.
We awkwardly moved on.
Yet still:
I haven’t revisited those questions in any significant way. I haven’t
asked my neighbors or my immediate family the question either. Even though the headlines are bleak.
Bleak
headlines
These headlines are all from the NASA Global
Climate Change Vital Signs of the Planet website from just the last month—( https://climate.nasa.gov/news/ )
August 15, 2017: July 2017 equaled record July 2016: July 2017 was statistically tied with July
2016 as the warmest July in the 137 years of modern record-keeping, according
to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by NASA scientists.
September
6, 2017: Wildfire smoke crosses U.S. on the jet stream Smoke
and particles from numerous fires burning across the West ride the jet stream
3,000 miles to the East Coast.
September
7, 2017: Hot water ahead for Hurricane Irma: As
the storm approaches the Bahamas and Florida, it will be passing over waters
that are warmer than 86 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to sustain a Category 5
storm.
September
7, 2017: Evidence of sea level 'fingerprints': For the first time, scientists have
detected sea level "fingerprints" – patterns of variation in global
sea level due to changes in water and ice on land – in GRACE data.
September
12, 2017: NASA flights map summer melt of Greenland land ice: Operation IceBridge is flying in
Greenland to measure how much ice has melted over the course of the summer from
the ice sheet.
Then there’s this one that I’ve been pondering,
from June, in the NY Times:
“As Climate Changes, Southern States Will
Suffer More than Others”
Watching the devastation unfold in Texas, the
Carribbean, and Florida the last few weeks, I believe it.
And I frankly, at times, have felt fear and
terror grip me. Watching a hurricane 400 miles across.
Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt, the Director of the
Environmental Protection Agency, has said, that it’s not the right time to be
asking about climate change. We need to
worry first about people’s private griefs and losses. After Hurricane Irma he said, “To have any
kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people… is
misplaced. …To use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very
insensitive to the people in Florida.”
Pruitt is doing what I and my family
essentially did around our Christmas dinner table, said: “We’ve got more
immediate griefs to handle, we can’t talk about that right now.”
Yet, we
know that one of the three main qualities that resilient people and communities
have is the ability to face reality.
My partner Katie works on land management
projects related to climate change – all over the world. Basically, she studies and tracks how forests
can capture and store carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. How can smart forest management help mitigate
the relentless release of greenhouse gas emissions, which is leading to climate
change?
And how can developing countries tap into
resources and basically get paid for *not* cutting down or degrading their
forests?
What she and her colleagues are seeing is a big
increase in global funding towards “climate resiliency.” Basically, it is an admission on the part of
the international development community and climate scientists that global warming
is happening, is already adversely impacting communities around the world, and
that its going to get worse much faster than many had imagined. So we’ve got to help people figure out how to
adapt and reorient. Those scientists,
and funders, and especially the communities they are working with, are facing
reality—much more than most people in this country.
Katie has worked over the past several years in
Guyana—a small country sandwiched between Venezuela and Suriname. Even when she was there 6 or 7 years ago, it
struck her that every-day people – the taxi cab driver for instance—talked
about climate change as a matter of fact.
They were well aware of the effects climate change was already having on
their country and on their individual lives.
I also think this morning of my life-long
friend Susanna. Born and raised in East TN, she moved to the island of Tortola
in the British Virgin Islands over 20 years ago for an internship after college
and she’s never left. She married a man
from there, a marine policeman, and she has worked in journalism and government
there. And today as we sit here, she and
her family and community there are waking up to an island that was blown away
by Hurricane Irma. Islanders have been
well aware of their vulnerability, they’ve been talking about it, and they’ve
been planning for it. But it doesn’t mean
they are getting all the resources they need to make it through.
Why is it
so hard to ask and talk about the Big Question in this country? Not, “Is it really happening?” But “What will we do, because it is already
upon us?”
Last weekend I was driving into the National Park
and could see clearly the scars on the mountain from last year’s fires. A visible reminder that is hard to look
at. It hasn’t even been a year since our
mountains were blazing, and people lost their lives.
Opening up to the question “What will we
do?” requires considering a very hard
future for our communities and our children – not our not-yet-born future
generations, but our children who are living today. The children we know and love.
And it is hard question to talk about because,
really, it means considering our own death.
Not just my individual death, but the death of the human race, not to
mention the already completed extinctions of many species.
It is so, so huge; it is overwhelming.
In her article, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Deal with Climate Change,” Eve Andrews says:
“No one likes being told what to do. They also don’t typically
enjoy pondering their demise. But resistance to confronting climate change is
essentially choosing not to think about your own death.”
So I want to ask us to stop for just a moment
this morning, and really feel--
What about this earth, and who on this earth do
we love? Let us hold that close.
What are we losing? Let us
grieve that.
What scares us? Let us name that.
How have we participated in the process of
climate change (because we all have, it is unavoidable)?
What do we need to confront about our own
participation and choices? How have we
forgotten and ignored one of the principles of our faith – that we are all
deeply interconnected. Let us confess that.
Making
Meaning
As we feel, and grieve, and confess—then we might be able to make meaning
out of our time on this planet during the age of climate change. And making meaning is another quality of a
resilient people.
Katie tells me that some developing countries
are realizing they are a place of hope for the rest of the world: they can
assist the mitigation of climate change because they have carbon sinks that
haven’t been destroyed yet. They have
skills and knowledge about living in balance with the land. They can offer those up to the global
community.
And other countries, like Norway, have said:
those carbon sinks are important enough for us and our survival, that we are
going to put resources to those countries to preserve and protect them. They are not being altruistic, it is a
symbiotic relationship.
Perhaps one way we can make meaning out of our
lives in this time is to really experience our interconnections with a global
community, people and creatures and plant life and sea life, in a new way.
Joanna Macy, a Buddhist eco-philosopher, and environmental
activist said in an interview last year (http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/joanna-macy-on-how-to-prepare-internally-for-whatever-comes-next/ )
“Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive
now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. …In all great
adventures there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally
outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings…. You learn to say ‘It
looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.’
…. This
may be the last gasp of life on Earth, and what a great last gasp, if we
realize we have fallen in love with each other.
…. If we are going to go out, then we can do it
with some nobility, generosity and beauty, so we do not fall into shock and
fear.”
What is the identity you want to cultivate for
yourself during this time? Healer? Activist?
Farmer? Earth lover? Warrior
scientist? Teacher? Bicyclist? Green
entrepreneur? Artist?
What is the meaning you want to make of your
life, your one life, in the context of this global grief?
The Houston Chronicle has been collecting poems
about the great flood after Hurricane Harvey.
Some are long. Some are haikus,
like this one, by Ayokunle Falomo:
I woke up today
even though it is in a
bed that isn't mine.
even though it is in a
bed that isn't mine.
We here in this room are alive. How will we share that life with one another?
Improvise
– Do what we can with what we’ve got
Each one of us can do only what we can do. But I am challenged by the work and writing
of climate change activist Bill McKibben.
He says that in his travels around the country, organizing people to get
active for climate justice, the question he gets asked most is “What can I do?”
He says that’s actually the wrong question.
What we need to be asking is “What can we
do?”
He said,
just earlier this year: “By ourselves, there’s not
much we can do. Yes, my roof is covered with solar panels and I drive
a plug-in car that draws its power from those panels, and yes our hot water is
heated by the sun, and yes we eat low on the food chain and close to home. I’m
glad we do all those things, and I think everyone should do them, and I no
longer try to fool myself that they will solve climate change.” (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-04-04/question-get-asked/ )
He
says “the most important thing an individual can do is not be an individual”
but be part of a group, a movement, an organization, that is engaged in the political,
policy-making arena, and engaged in creating together a different future.
Resilient
people and resilient communities know how to make interesting connections, we
know how to improvise with what is at hand. We may not live in an area of the
country where there’s lots of radical environmentalists.
But we live
in an area of the country that is beautiful, where people—whether they’ve lived
here for generations, or moved here from somewhere else—feel attached to the
landscape. What can we make of that?
Our Hope
as Unitarian Universalists is rooted
in a
revolutionary kind of Love
that is available to all,
and that calls us to acts of mercy and
generosity and courage.
A Love that also calls us to humility, and a
recognition that sometimes we’ll be the ones needing to receive the help.
We are both the children stranded at the top of
a mountain,
while the waters rise around us, in fear and
trembling, wondering what is happening, and looking for a way to survive.
And, we are the parrots, the unexpected
bringers of salvation,
the ones who can come to the rescue when it
seems all is lost,
and the ones who stay to build something new.
May it be
so. Amen.
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