Local & Global

This morning’s parish newsletter arrives as usual with a reminder of a coming Community Dinner. This is a project going back more than twenty years. Once a month we feed 80-100 urban poor - some occasionally homeless, but most with some kind of permanent shelter. What they don’t have on a welfare income is the ability to buy enough wholesome food. We try to provide that. It is the least we can do for these regular guests that we have come to know over the years - and sometimes they tell us their stories.

Stories count in the world of climate change and too often they are horror stories. The fires in Hawaii have hit home and in a recent Zoom meeting, people talked about the places they had been - now completely devastated. Being there in the past made it matter. They understood the loss.

What is difficult is the stories we don’t hear. I’ve been reading the book, Not Too Late, which is full of stories of parts of the world with which I have no direct connection. Many are heartbreaking as the people affected suffer the climate degradation caused by mining, deforestation and other forms of exploitation that lay waste their world, while we ignore them. What if it were mandatory for any community like mine to adopt a far off island where the people face the disappearance of their land through erosion and flooding and hear their stories regularly in their own words? It might knock some sense into us as we recognize what we are doing to our island home and its effects on our siblings.

Normal?

We have seen some encouraging return of audiences to arts events and other places where people congregate. During the pandemic there was a lot of hope for things to go “back to normal” - as though life in the twenty-first century ever had a degree of stability. Recent years were not without abnormal events - in New York in 2001, or 2020 with an insurrection in Washington, or the discovery of mass graves near Canadian residential schools. The world before the 1950s wasn’t exactly normal either, but the 50s remain a dream world to return to for many.

We are hearing “normal” preceded by “new” in descriptions of climate change now. There’s a deception in feeling that the heat, flooding and fires will stay at the same level as they are now. We just have to accept that and deal with it and that will make it OK.

What a cop-out. It shows how we resist facing the reality that there is only a now - and that a future that depends on what we do today. Doing the same things will not create normality, however dysfunctional. It will only make things worse.

An App for That

The other evening I sat on my balcony watching planes circle and appear to be going east when the airport was to the west - but it was a pattern that allowed them to form a line to come in as others could be seen heading out to the east until they disappeared at higher heights. New planes coming in dotted the evening sky and suddenly their landing lights appeared in a kind of fairy tale illiumination - until one thought of how much energy all this was taking as their passengers landed to consume even more as they boarded their cars, buses and taxis.

A better choice might be using apps to explore nature - even in an urban environment. Here are some:

Search your app store for a bird identifier software. You will find several of them Try E-Bird or Merlin from Cornell labs designed to answer the question, What’s that Bird? Most of us as children could name several - and now we can’t - either because we have forgotten. or because they are not around any more. Becoming conscious of other forms of life around us matters more for our future than watching planes come in. It’s a great story about citizen science,

PlantNet and Picture this does similar things for plants. There’s another one for trees. We need to become much more aware of our surroundings - and remind ourselves that technology is a means to the ends that we actually value.

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.

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.