2019.1.13 “Islands of Sanity” Rev.
Laura Bogle
This world does not need more
entrepreneurs.
This world does not need more technology
breakthroughs.
This world needs more leaders.
We need leaders who put service over
self, who can be steadfast through crises and failures, who want to stay
present and make a difference to the people, situations, and causes they care
about.
We need leaders who are committed to
serving people, who recognize what is being lost in the haste to dominate,
ignore, and abuse the human spirit.
We need leaders because leadership has
been debased as those who take things to scale or are first to market or
dominate the competition or develop killer apps. Or hold onto power by constantly tightening
their stranglehold of fear until people are left lifeless and cowering.
We need leaders now because we have
failed to implement what was known to work, what would have prevented or
mitigated the rise of hatred, violence, poverty, and ecological
destruction. We have not failed from a
lack of ideas and technologies. We have
failed from a lack of will. The
solutions we needed were already here.
Now it is too late. We cannot solve these global issues
globally. We can see them clearly. We can understand their root causes. We have
evidence of solutions that would have solved them. But we refused to compromise, to collaborate,
to persevere in resolving them as an intelligent, creative species living on
one precious planet.
Now it’s up to us, not as global leaders
but as local leaders. We can lead people
to create positive changes locally that make life easier and more sustainable,
that create possibility in the midst of global decline.
Let us use whatever power and influence
we have, working with whatever resources are already available, mobilizing the
people who are with us to work for what they care about.
If climate change has
ever led you to feel despair, hopelessness, grief, disorientation, or even
nostalgia about how the weather or the land used to be – there’s a word for
that: solastalgia. Solastalgia is a word
coined just a couple of years ago by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who says: “Solastalgia is when your endemic sense
of place is being violated.”
The word is being picked up
by medical and mental health professionals.
According to the BBC, “Medical
journal The Lancet’s 2015 Health
and Climate Change report discusses how solastalgia is connected
to ‘dis-ease,’ or a lack of ease due to a hostile environment that a person is
powerless to do anything about.”
I felt it just this week when my daughter was commenting “It’s
never going to snow!” and I thought, wow
I don’t feel like I can tell her any differently. I have no idea what the weather pattern here
will become in her lifetime, and no one else really knows either.
The report released last October by the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change is enough to send any of us who are paying attention
off to bury our heads in the sand. It is
really, really hard to face. But face it
we must, and more and more I believe that the inevitability of climate change
and how we as human beings will live in the midst of it is the central question
for us as a religious community.
Although I know many of you are familiar with the main points
of that report, I want to repeat them here this morning, not to be depressing,
but because I think it is important that we say this stuff out loud to one
another.
According to the NY Times: “The authors found that if
greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm
up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above
preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts
and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average
temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees
Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for
the most severe effects of climate change.”
Johan Rockström, a co-author of the recent Hothouse
Earth report, said … ““Climate change is occurring earlier and
more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is
painful….”
According to The Guardian: “The world’s leading climate
scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be
kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly
worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of
millions of people.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report
Mind-boggling and very rapid global economic and policy
change like the world has never seen would need to occur to keep us to the 2.7
degree Fahrenheit (or 1.5 degree Celsius) warming mark. Meanwhile we have a President who has promised to pull us out of
the Paris accords, and Brazil, the world’s seventh largest emitter of
greenhouse gases has recently elected a leader who vowed to go down that same
path.
It is way beyond the scope of one sermon for me to fully
explore this, but I am convinced by reading the reflections of many others that
the global rise of religious fundamentalism and fascist political ideology is
not unconnected to the instability, fear, and uncertainty that global climate
change produces.
For 50 years Margaret Wheatley has been working with leaders
and organizations around the world. She has worked with grassroots change
groups, and large Fortune 500 companies, and even our US military. The quote you heard comes from her new book “Who
Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity.” In this book Wheatley lays out the general
trajectory of rise and decline that all human civilizations and empires
throughout history have cycled through—and points to our place in that cycle
today. We are on the downward slope, and
climate change is putting us beyond a tipping point. As she says “at a certain point, criticality
is reached and the system changes rapidly into a new state.” (46)
She writes that “In our bright, shiny, techno-optimistic
twenty-first century global culture, we believe we have stepped off the arrow
of time. Our technological and
scientific genius gives us the capacity to bypass the fate that has overtaken
all other complex civilizations.
In our arrogance, we believe that we can use our superior
intelligence as never before, change history, bounding forward in great leaps,
no longer subject to the arrow of time.
We believe we are the height of human evolution rather than just its
most recent, predictably problematic manifestation. The belief in never-ending progress is fueled
by our inexplicable arrogance that we can supercede the laws of the
Universe. Our constantly expanding
technologies and innovations may appear to be adaptive responses to the environment. But this is not true. Quite the opposite: for the first time in history, humans are
changing the global environment rather than adapting to it.” (31)
This trajectory of global environmental collapse touches
everything.
Think about the issue of immigration that our country is so
divided by – some predict that there could be as many as 300 million climate
refugees worldwide by 2050.
Already, the hidden driver behind the migration of Central
Americans north is climate change. They
may say they are fleeing violence in cities, which is certainly true, but often
they moved to the cities because their crops in the countryside were failing
due to drought and disease brought on by changing weather patterns. Food insecurity is a powerful motivator to
move, just like the threat of violence.
And climate change isn’t currently a reason that someone can claim
asylum – though there are people working to change that.
Writing last November, long-time climate activist Bill
McKibben talked about how climate change is shrinking our planet, as more and
more of it will become unfriendly to human habitation. He says, “Human beings have always
experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism.
We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is
different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature
Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will
“extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.
The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest
price.
…The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and
its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth,
for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.
…a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of
the habitable earth.”
According to one study, sea level rise alone could displace 13 million people just in the United States. Think
about this—already our community has seen people coming through here, escaping
hurricanes and floods to the south and the east of us. Needing housing, food, work; some never able
to go back and rebuild. Those with
resources are able to pick up and move to literal or figurative higher ground, and
while still difficult, have a better chance of making a new life; those without resources will move when they
have to, if they can at all, and will depend on a web of support from others to
survive.
So right here in Blount County, as we as a congregation are
engaged with community organizations creating more support systems for the
homeless, how is climate change
intersecting with that work?
We could ask the same question about other issues we care
about -- Health care, senior care, education, racial and economic inequality,
the health of animals and plants and whole delicate ecosystems. It is all interconnected. As John Muir once said, “When we try to pick
out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” This is no place more true than when we are
talking about the very planet on which we depend for life.
I know many of us have and are personally taking steps in our
every day lives to reduce our “carbon footprint.” Driving less or driving a hybrid, or eating
less meat or no meat at all, reducing how much plastic we use, bringing your
own mug on Sunday morning, turning down the thermostat—all those kinds of
choices. And I think those are important
things to do, because if nothing else they are a kind of spiritual practice, a
daily reminder of commitment, and a way to feel like you can do something.
And I also believe that there are many amazing steps being
taken around the globe towards using more renewable energy, and that gives me
hope. For instance, California has
recently committed to making all of its electricity carbon free by the year
2045. I do not want us to give up on the
possibility of making big policy changes, regardless of who is in the White
House, that will make a big impact. I
recently met a woman who was involved in an 18 month campaign to stop a
high-pressure gas pipeline from being built under the streets of Roxbury,
MA. They didn’t win that campaign but
they sure got a lot of attention on the issue and won some smaller victories,
like forcing the gas company to admit that they didn’t have a sufficient safety
plan.
So, virtuous and ethical personal choices are important. Political
and community organizing is important. Policy
change is important. I find hope in
them. But to be truly hopeful we must
grapple with the reality that we aren’t stopping climate change at this point –
we are simply trying to make it less worse.
Who, then, do we choose to be?
For Wheatley, hope lies in our ability as human beings to
create and lead what she calls “islands of sanity.”
She asks, “Who do you choose to be for this time? Are you willing to use whatever power and
influence you have to create islands of sanity that evoke and reply on our best
human qualities to create, produce, and persevere?”
Islands of sanity are places where people are able to retain
their humanity, their human being-ness, no matter what.
How do we remain faithful to our Unitarian Universalist
principles and faithful to our basic humanity under conditions of great
suffering? This question is why I think
it is important to really face and feel the despair that climate change
provokes in us. Otherwise we aren’t able
to act in truly hope-filled, faithful ways.
I’ve been thinking about this for months now. For me, right now, this is the core reason we
exist as a community of faith. To be an
island of sanity, amidst a lot of increasing chaos. This is what gives me hope for the future –
all of you, all of us, and all those many other islands around us with whom we
are in relationship. I want to be clear
here, I am not just talking about Unitarian Universalists – that would be the
height of arrogance and exceptionalism. We
have a lot to learn from other communities and congregations and organizations –
especially those less privileged who have endured and survived through periods
of suffering in the past.
Margaret Wheatley sets out some good questions to consider
whether your organization is developing as an island of sanity. (pp. 55-56)
What is the quality of relationships? Are people willing to really be there for one
another? Are people more self-protective
or less so? Every week we when we affirm
our covenant we promise “to help one another.”
Are we living that out?
Are we expressing more fear?
Or more love?
When a crisis happens, are we using our values to resolve the crisis, or are we being reactive? Are we thinking long-term when we approach
challenges?
Is there a high level of willingness to contribute? And do we have high expectations about those
contributions?
In regards to financial matters, do we have a sense of
abundance or do we protect what we see as scarce resources? “Has selfishness replaced service?”
I encourage our leadership to be asking these questions of
one another. And let’s keep asking each
other and ourselves, given the reality of climate change, who are we choosing to
be now and in the future?
This week several people in our congregation will be
gathering to do some visioning about our service and justice work into the
future. (And if you are interested in
that conversation, please talk to me or Board President.) Let’s keep these questions in mind as we do
so.
In addition, I am challenging all of us in these two specific
ways:
1) I want to learn more and be in conversation with each other about what is
happening with climate change and how we are called to respond here where we
are. In April I’ll be leading a
conversation on one book entitled “Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at
the intersections of Race, Class, and the Environment.” If there is interest, I will lead on ongoing
study and reflection group bringing in other resources. So, let me know if you are interested.
2)
The
second way I want to challenge all of us right now is to remain open to our
neighbors. As climate unpredictability
increases, and resources become more scarce it will be very easy to circle the
wagons and protect what is ours. Right
now the dynamics of division in this country are encouraging us in that
mindset. It is very easy to objectify “the
other” across the political divide – often in a sarcastic or funny way that releases
tension but nevertheless dehumanizes.
I see this a lot on social
media. I want to challenge us to take
all our neighbors seriously enough to engage in public on the issues, with
compassion and vulnerability. We don’t
have to like people who think differently than us, we don’t even have to give
any time or credence to their viewpoints, but we are called by our faith to
remember that they are human beings who suffer like us. As even climate deniers will be impacted by
climate change, will our compassion be there for them too?
Community organizer Sendolo Diaminah has said: “Organizations are actually networks of
coordinated promises…. They are ways of
being with each other that allow us to coordinate our commitments and therefore
have more power to shape (that is be in a relationship of agency with) the
future.”
How are we as an
organization shaping the future? I am
not optimistic about the future of our planet.
But that does not mean I am not hopeful. Climate change will force us
into different ways of living. I am
hopeful because I still believe that we human beings can choose the way of
love, the way of compassion, the way of sharing resources, the way of adapting
using our highest values.
Rebecca Solnit reminds us that
despair is just another kind of certainty, and our spiritual task is to live
hopefully in uncertainty. In her 2017
essay “Why Giving Up Hope is Not an Option” she says, “Optimism assumes that
all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable;
both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the
future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but
know we may be able write it ourselves.”
Let us all consider ourselves as
leaders from the future, knowing that the choices we make today will impact
far, far beyond our lifetimes.
Let us open to the despair enough to
be truly moved to change and action.
Let us remember that the promises we
make to ourselves and to one another, and our ability to lives out those
promises, is the hope we seek.
And let us never forget that we need
each other, we need to stay together, for that hope to flourish and grow.
May it be so, may we make it so. Amen.
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