Doing it Right

The Washington Post recently published an article about a poll that asked the best ways for our individual actions to tackle climate change. It states that most of us get it wrong.

These were the items in order that people polled in the USA thought were the best ones:

• Installing solar panels

• Recycling

• Driving an electric car

• Taking fewer plane trips

• Using a heat pump for air conditioning an heating

• Choosing an electric stove over a gas one

• Living in a smaller house or apartment

• Not eating meat

• Driving more slowly

• Not eating dairy

I wanted to see how I scored.

• Estimating the value of recycling: I do it, but I know that most of the things discarded end up in landfill. I’m trying to reduce my use of plastics by paying more for containers in glass, but I still have far too much garbage. I live in an apartment with a gas stove installed so I can take no credit there. I drive slowly in town only and not often, though the grandchildren borrow the car for trips Nevertheless, the experts say these are not climate solutions in any case, and they don’t make much difference.

• The best steps were flying less and cutting out meat and dairy. I win on the first flying only twice since the end of 2019 - but I lose on the second two = perhaps I eat less of both than previously, but that is more a factor of age than choice. The article says, “Project Drawdown estimates that if three-quarters of people around the world adopted a plant-rich diet by 2050, they could avoid the release of more than 100 gigatons of emissions.” What is noticeable here is how small individual actions have a huge collective impact - but they do have to be collective.

• The winner for both the experts and the people is solar panels. I don’t have a choice on that one personally, but I can be an advocate for them.

• Some of the other items are proportionate to size. If everyone did an energy audit and responded. there would be some true benefit.

• Our most important action is at the ballot box to vote for climate friendly policies and monitor them in between elections. I get a B plus, I guess, for writing to the premier of Ontario to protest his opening up environmentally protected land for housing. Our combined protests have at least led to the firing of a chief of staff and a resignation of a cabinet minister. Our task is not over.

But neither is our need to reduce our carbon footprint when it is one of the largest in the world. Every choice we make enhances that world or diminishes it.

Violence as Protest

I read a story this week about a young man being arrested for defacing a famous painting in Canada’s National Gallery. He was protesting Climate Change and picked a painting by the famous Canadian painter Tom Thompson as the image shows here.

I find it troubling to see a public protest - even an individual one- resorting to violence. When the man did this, he knew that there was protective glass covering the painting and assumed he would still be arrested, but not guilty of actually damaging it. But would any other youthful protester know the whole story and simply imitate the practice with lasting consequence. My guess is that this will not please the visual artists who spread the message of climate through displaying depicting of the tragedies of our human impact on the natural world.

I’m more impressed by those who use non-violent methods - though some of them risk arrest as well. A young woman working as a barmaid in New York travelled to Standing Rock to support the Lakota people in their opposite to the Keystone Pipeline. The experience prompted her to run for the US Congress and Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez won the election to become the youngest person ever to be seated there. From there she went on to sponsor the Green New Deal in 2019, her first year of office. It took a while to for that bill to succeed but finally much of the best of it was incorporated in more recent legislation and passed.

The young man wanted to attract attention to something worthwhile - but how it is done also counts. I hope he learns to have bigger dreams of how he will change the world.

Interpretations

I’ve been reading Karen Armstrong’s latest book, Sacred Nature, Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World. One of her strengths is a thorough understanding of Christianity and her additional willingness to explore the teachings of other faiths and to share them. This book reinforces something that I have come to realize in my own explorations. Faith communities need to play an important role in the conversations around aspects of climate emergency and climate justice that cannot be provided by either science or environmental advocacy groups, important as both are. Ours relates to values, ethics, meanings and the rituals where we enact our understandings.

Armstrong has much in common with the views of Thomas Berry, though it is surprising not to find him listed in her bibliography -though his students, Tucker and Swimme are very much there though.

Other faiths have always the divine in nature and continue to do so. Christianity did in its earlier days, but diverged in the fourteenth century. Western people encounter the God of history, especially as it is understood in the Old Testament, rather than a God of nature. When we are encouraged to look at nature, we are encouraged to see beauty and look for comfort now - while forgetting the ugliness and discomfort that we have wreaked upon it through the notion of domination over it. What we may miss in the process is nature’s power to disrupt and destroy, which other faiths and cultures recognize more fully. Job, for Armstrong, is the Biblical figure who gets it right - but not without going through a major transformation. Armstrong sees it as a lens worth exploring.

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.