Rights

I spent some of last week indoors to avoid air pollution and was reduced to watching a national joint conference of two large denominations live-streaming their sessions. Since I had been onsite at one event in the past it was interesting to see what was on the agenda.

One of the motions had to do with rights of all Canadians to clean water. No one would deny these in theory; we still have a long way to go in practice. Like many of the motions, this one had to do with social justice. It brings up a question for all of us as the last species to arrive. Is justice exclusively social justice? The eco-theologian Thomas Berry, who preferred to call himself an eco-geologian to avoid too much prying from the Roman Catholic church - especially since he was a remember of a religious order as well as a professor, asked the question. Does water itself have rights? We pretend that corporations are persons in terms of rights. Why not natural elements - soil, water, air? Berry looked at the importance of water for survival of all creatures, human and otherwise, in the Hudson Valley where he lived for many years. He also wondered about our ability to change the course of water by creating dams for our own convenience.

He would be pleased by one Canadian story.

“In February 2021, the world was introduced to Mutehekau Shipu — also known as the Magpie River — when the people of Ekuanitshit, Que. and the regional municipality made a joint declaration granting the river legal personhood and rights.”

Our first nations brothers and sisters have understood this instinctively until we took many away from the parents as children and placed them in residential schools. We act as though we have just awakened to something they have always known. It’s time for us to be their students and sit on the ground with humility.

Now we know

There is such a tendency to think we are free and independent. We are city dwellers or live in towns or in rural villages or farms. We have our own lives and we are unaffected by things going on in other places - until we are.

I’m indoors with air conditioner and air purifier running full blast. It’s better today with high moderate air pollution as opposed to two days ago when air quality in my city was the worst in the world. US neighboring cities are experiencing the same problems - caused by forest fires in several of our Canadian provinces. Air pollution doesn’t respect international boundaries. Fires take their own direction from the wind. We like to think we are in charge of the earth. We aren’t. We thought we had a master-slave relationship with nature. Nature is talking back.

Getting out of this will take more than modest remediation. Many are evacuated from their homes. Some have lost their homes entirely. My current discomfort is minor and I need to stop whining. Governments have work to do. Companies that burn fossils or like to log have work to do. Ordinary people have work to do - to protect themselves, yes, but to go much further. Now it is not only the dispossessed that can’t breathe. Now we know.

News - Bad and Good

The morning paper contains news of a tragic accident in Manitoba killing several seniors and wounding others. Their small community is grieving and we must join them. Hidden behind the main outline, though is another tragedy. The seniors were travelling two hundred kilometers to visit a casino - ‘for fun’.

As a senior myself, I would never suggest that seniors don’t deserve travel or pleasure. My guess is that the casino in question probably pays for the cost of the bus as they do in Ontario to lure seniors to casinos here. Sitting around a group some years ago, all of us confessed we had never been to a Casino and decided as a group to go one summer afternoon. We had agreed that our spending limit was $30 each. Among the six of us, we paid $180. One of us lucked out by winning $75. She noted that this gave a rush of pleasure, which made her feel guilty - but it didn’t occur to her to share the proceeds with the rest of us. Most of us were losers. We could, in fact, afford to lose the money on one afternoon of experiment. But what we learned was what a joyless place it was - subdued lighting, no sense of time or place, and too many vacant senior faces with no sense of joy or fun whatsoever - and less money than they came with, which most of them, unlike us, could ill afford. They had been brought in by a bus that probably cost the Casino about $300. Significantly the date was one day after old age pension cheques arrrived. To question it takes less than an ounce of moral courage to question this as a system on my part - but I do and more today than usual.

Better news came in a story about seven-year-olds learning about climate change in a school in New Jersey. The teacher had told the kids about penguins in Antarctica ; the warming of their environment meant that the penguins had to charge accordingly. What might they do?

Seven-year-olds are nothing if not inventive. Solutions ranged from penguins migrating to the US in winter to their building igloos. One thought she could keep a few in her fridge. It is the wife of the state governor who encouraged the school system to have children start to think seriously about the climate emergency, because they are the ones who will have to deal with it. Unlike others, who want to protect children from realities, this program encourages them to enter it now - not to scare them, but to become aware and to consider local solutions. While there were naturally dissenters, 70% voter in favour and the subject penetrates several curricular areas.

They are learning close to home:

“Outside, in a corner of the playground, there’s a fenced-in butterfly garden, a compost bin, and a soil bed where kids have tested which type of fertilizer, a chemical commercial variety or a natural blend, best helped plants (the natural one came out ahead).”

They are starting local and exploring a much larger framework. Would that we all did the same.

Very High Confidence

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”

Very high confidence that we are headed toward disaster, What does it say about us as human beings in 2023?

It is a message from hundreds of scholars studying the climate emergency and approved by 195 countries. It points to the disaster caused by the continuing use of fossil fuels. Those of us in the west - focused on bank failures and interest rates and whining. while we enjoy the prosperity and other parts of the world suffer much more. The UN Secretary is right to see us as sitting on a time bomb.

Despair is not the answer. Any action is better than none. These are the strategies that the studies propose:

• Expand solar and wind power

• Improve energy efficiency.

• Make cities more friendly for walkers and cyclists.

• Reduce nitrogen pollution from agriculture.

• Eat better.

• Reduce food waste.

Every one of these have implications for individual actions. All of them have a relationship with fossil fuels. Every one is related to what we value. It is a reminder that the most powerful countries are the largest promoters of fossil fuels - and we are not far behind. Nature shows considerable power to answer to our treating it as a communal gas station. Will we continue to ignore what we are doing at our peril?

We are members of many communities - neighborhoods, the arts, faith groups, political parties, social action groups. Voices used to be only top down but now they can be raised from the smallest and most surprising places. Let’s use them.

The Speed of Change

I’ve been busy with many things in my life and remiss in writing. I observed to someone recently, “Keep your day job, You will be much less busy than you will be later in retirement”. The Canadian orchestral conductor, Boris Brott, observed in an interview that he would not want to ever retire. Sadly he did not, when he died in a hit and run accident.

I don’t have paid employment, but I have lots of it in volunteer and self -imposed places. Reading and other kinds of writing do take up time. And reading gives me my best posts - not original at all, but thought provoking. Here is one from Larry Rasmussen’s Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key.

“Anyone born in 1936 and still alive in 2003 (I was for both ) was around for 97.5 percent of all the oil ever pumped and burned. In the prodigious half-century from 1950 to 2000 the global consumer economy produced, transported and consumed as many goods and services as throughout the entirety of prior history.”

What is enough is a question that has been asked before. The Limits to Growth, the Report of the Club of Rome was published in 1972. Forty years later we still avoid it. Rassmussen does not let us off the hook. He’s asking for changes based on the faiths we have inherited which asks things of us. I’ll be quoting more from him in the future.