Saint Francisco

Today is the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day in the United States. To celebrate, I took public transportation to work (not actually any different than any other work day), I sat out in the sun to enjoy my vegetarian lunch, visiting the Whole Foods store across the street after finishing my own items to snack on all of their locally-sourced, organic, shi-shi treats, and spent my entire day sitting at my desk thinking about earthy things in our lit-only-by-sunlight office. (Did you know that we inhabitants of this “third rock from the Sun” have only been referring to our home as “Earth” since 1400 CE? I wonder what it was called before that?) Thinking about where we have been, and where it looks like we are heading, it has been somewhat of a solemn day wondering, “What will our home look like in another 40 years?”

To those who have been paying attention at all to the science of climate change, it’s a real (i.e. legitimate), important question and a frightening topic to ponder. I have been aware of the climate crisis for the past few years since liberalizing-up a bit in college, but recently, watching the film HOME [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU] brought out the gravity of the situation for me. A poignant and sobering film, HOME is a documentary released last year by filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand with a clear environmentalist and humanitarian agenda, pleading for industrialized nations to consider what harm they are doing to the Earth and exposing the ominous path down which it is rapidly leading us. After an hour of some of the most fantastic and breath-taking cinematography of locations all over the world, the audience is brought to face some of the stark realities upon us: 20 percent of the world’s population consumes 80 percent of its resources; the world spends 12 times more on military expenditures than on aid to developing countries; 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water; nearly 1 billion people are going hungry; 1 in 4 mammals, 1 in 8 birds, and 1 in 3 amphibians are threatened with extinction, and species are dying out at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate; the ice cap is 40 percent thinner than 40 years ago; there may be at least 200 million climate refugees by 2050. “We are living in exceptional times,” it tells us; “Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth’s climate.” This is a moment of truth.

I recently moved to San Francisco from rural Ohio, where I spent the majority of the first 22 years of my life. Besides the sheer awesomeness of now living amongst great cultural diversity, having incredible opportunities for numerous exciting activities, and being surrounded by lots of progressive people, I was thrilled to learn recently that living in a city decreases my carbon footprint significantly. [http://ecards.aecom.com/dencity/] As you might guess, growing up in rural Ohio was a bit different from life in “the City.” Indeed, growing up, I am sure I fit just about every stereotype of a conservative Midwesterner these “hippie” Californians might hold: I was incredibly religious, I voted for Republicans, I drove everywhere I went … you know the picture.

One of my housemates tells me that I am her “most conservative friend,” and while I am sure that back in Ohio, I am considered a flaming liberal (and maybe some other labels that wouldn’t be appropriate to mention), here I’ve been called “wholesome” more than once. What occurred to me today, though, as I pondered the state of our planet, is that: amidst all this strife between “conservatives” and “liberals,” I do not understand why environmentalism is an issue over which we are divided. Is sustaining the planet, our home, and therefore also sustaining our own species’ ability to continue living here not a pretty much universally appealing cause? With all the debate going on, somehow it doesn’t seem to be.

I was reminded recently of the state of the debate between those striving to “be green” and those, let’s call them, “not as enthused as I am,” while visiting—you guessed it—rural Ohio. One in a myriad of topics on which my father and I disagree, is the crisis of global climate change, or as he might call it: “the liberal myth of global warming.” I forget how exactly the topic came up—probably something like his unwillingness to recycle plastic milk jugs at home—but once it did, we spent a hearty 30 minutes debating the evils of the liberal “earth-worshippers’” agenda.

You heard right—“earth-worshippers.” And immediately the environment became not just a liberal-conservative issue, it became a religious issue. Now, this might frustrate the more secular among us—after all, “how can you just ignore what’s going on? This isn’t an issue about politics or about faith in anything—it’s just about survival!” I could echo those words (in fact, I’m pretty sure something like that went through my head at the time); but, turning the topic to one of religion, which was not a surprise in the least knowing my staunchly evangelical conservative father, did not present a difficulty to me in my goal of trying to reach out to this man and bring him to understanding. If it was religion he wanted to talk about, we could indeed talk about that; he was the one who needed to be compelled, so I was going to have to use his language.

Thankfully, I did not have to devise a new language integrating my father’s religious mores with my own worldly (or “Earthly,” rather?) agenda; some folks in the Church have been awakening recently and pushing to make environmental awareness an issue of faith, and they have already coined the fitting term “Creation Care.”

My father’s main qualm with environmentalism seemed to be that it was a movement begun by whom he deemed “earth-worshippers.” While this is a ridiculous statement and easily refutable, my father would not back down from this claim. What was required, therefore, was an appeal to his own faith. “No, you may not agree with earth-worship, but your own God demands you act differently than you are.” For those in a Judeo-Christian tradition, there are numerous biblical imperatives for stewardship and care of the Earth. (This is not the place to start quoting scripture, but those interested might consider the Green Bible [http://www.greenletterbible.com/]—a soy-based-ink-recycled-paper-cotton-and-linen-covered “good book” with more than 1,000 verses printed in green to draw attention to biblical authors’ attention to Earth and God’s loving imperatives for its care.) Even prominent evangelicals such as Reverend Richard Cizik, former head of the National Association of Evangelicals, have begun publicly preaching on the Christian Church’s need to start paying attention to the crisis of global climate change.

Furthermore, my father expressed the sentiment that “since Jesus is coming back soon, it really doesn’t matter what I do; I’m not going to be here much longer.” Ultra-cringe. This eschatology is not only unreasonable considering every generation since Christ has thought it would be the final generation, but it is incredibly damaging as holders of this type of belief system are willing to rampantly destroy the Earth with willful disregard for any longer-term consequences than getting a few more barrels of oil out of the ground. Thankfully, this mentality, too, is being reined in by responsible evangelicals like Cizik, who said in an interview with The Great Warming [http://www.thegreatwarming.com/revrichardcizik.html]: “There are some who believe that environmental degradation is simply one sign of the coming of Jesus Christ. Therefore there is no need to take action. … It is heresy and is not what the Bible teaches. If it’s God’s world, we have no license to destroy it.” Indeed, what the world needs now, is a lot less Christians latching onto the Genesis 1.28 license to “drill, baby, drill!”—“fill the earth and subdue it”—and a lot more who are concerned with their stewardship of the Earth, which, according to their faith, is not their own—it still belongs to the God who created it. Pitting the science of the environmentalists against the Creationist belief of Evangelicals, Cizik still thinks it will be possible for the two groups to work together on this monumental task of confronting climate change. Says Cizik, “God doesn’t intend to ask me ‘Rich, how did I create the Earth?’ He won’t ask me that. He’ll say, ‘Rich, what did you do to protect that which I created?’”

The Hebrew prophets are one of the three divisions of literature in the Hebrew Bible / Christian Old Testament. They continually call the people back to account, reminding them of God’s instructions and portraying the consequences that will follow if the people continue to travel down the wrong course. In the book of the Prophet(s) Isaiah there appears a picture of what will result when people do this kind of wrong and refuse to reform: “The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled, and few people are left” (vv. 24.4-6). This is a sobering picture, indeed.

Though this is getting long, I just can’t resist mentioning the movie Avatar. By now, it’s almost cliché because there has been so much hype around the film, but today of all days, the message of Avatar (the message of unity with all living things—not its message of redemptive violence) holds a special meaning. In the film, the Na’vi beings are a species completely in tune with nature. They are a beautiful “people” who respect every living thing, and they are intimately connected with other creatures and the environment around them. Even the trees of their world form a living network; everything is completely interconnected—pulsing, breathing, living as one. This is not just a fantasy though; this is our reality too, but we have scarred that reality to a point so deep that we rarely recognize it here on Earth anymore.

No, I’m not beginning to spout some Earth-worshipping primitive spirituality; there have been others before, even in the Christian tradition, like Saint Francis(co) of Assisi, who recognized that we are all one. Our interconnectedness is not just some metaphysical spiritual awareness of others’ presence, but a physical truth that we experience every moment of every day. The clouds of the atoms making up my body are constantly overlapping, dancing perhaps, with the atoms of all the things around me. The same atoms that were in a meteoroid 100 million years ago as it crashed into Earth, are the same atoms that made up a grain of sand that blew across the Sahara under Cleopatra’s camel’s feet, are the same atoms that formed the water droplet that grew the mango tree that produced the mango that I ate for lunch. You understand the idea. I find it very unlikely that name of the “Na’vi” was a random choice—it is very reminiscent of the Hebrew “nevi”—prophet. In the film, these beings are beautiful prophets reminding us of our relationship to all things and calling us to become more aware of our connectedness.

Forty years ago, one-tenth of our nation’s entire population—20 million people—rallied together to bring attention to the need to care for the Earth—our home. As stated in the film HOME, “Let’s face the facts. We must believe what we know”: it is time to put on the brakes and backpedal as fast as we can. Climate change is a natural wonder of a living planet, but the current crisis of global climate warming is irrefutably a human-initiated phenomenon. We started the problem, and it is our responsibility to get ourselves—and all of our fellow creatures—out of it. What we need today is not more people who deny what is clear; we need a reawakening of that same spirit in 1970 that moved so many people to declare they believed in keeping the Earth alive.

Jake Sully, the representative of the invading power who had come only to strip their planet of the precious mineral “unobtanium,” stands before Mo’at, the clan leader of the Na’vi with his life in the balance. Mo’at, a being who is connected with everything around him, is fearful of the invaders because they have shown that they care only about destruction and not life, but he has compassion, allowing Jake to live. “It is decided. My daughter will teach you our ways. Learn well, ‘Jakesully,’ and we will see if your insanity can be cured.”