Don’t Pray for An End to the Violence – Live For It.

On a man helping a birth in a grave, 59 massacred and 500+ wounded and a Messiah.

In the Nuremburg war-crime trials, writes Paul Tillich, a witness told of living in a Jewish cemetery grave as he and others hid from the horrors. This 80 year old man told of assisting a woman giving birth to a child in another grave. He said this is what he prayed as this child was born 6 feet under: “Great God, has Thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah himself can be born in a grave?” Tillich wrote this about that: “For him [the witness] the immeasurable tension implicit in the expectation of the Messiah was a reality, appearing in the infinite contrast between the things he saw and the hope he maintained.”

The expectation of the Messiah and Las Vegas killings. Our confession as Christians is that the Messiah has been here already.

The things we see.

The things for which we hope.

I see 59 killed and 500+ more mowed down.

I hope for an end to that violence but too I know the violence goes deeper still and must be addressed. The violence of scarcity and poverty, the violence of inequality, the violence of bigotry, the violence of religious fanaticism, the violence of land and water degraded and diminished.

The things we see.

The things for which we hope.

In between comes and stands the Messiah who died at the hand of all this violence and left us with but a promise and a promised presence with which to engage all this same violence.

But what then are we waiting for?

A Savior?

A Lord?

Has he not already arrived?

Is this not our utter declaration?

How is it then that we think we are not the ones, the only ones, who can stop the violence? How is it that we think the Messiah should arrive and do something more than we are fully capable of doing? Why do we pray that the Messiah change things when he already has done so?

So we see, what we hope for has already occurred. We see the hope is already realized.

So what now but for us to live into Life. Live into the violence with non-violence, and be killed by it if that is what will be.

What we need to see is that there is not other “hope” out there that is to come or will come on our behalf. The solution to our violence has already been revealed in the poverty of the manger and the depravity of the cross.

Letting death have its way without dealing death back is resurrection.

Dealing death back at death is only destruction.

Instead of building shooting ranges we need to be building non-violence training centers.

The things we see.

The hope we maintain.

In between the two lives the Messiah who died.

How then shall we live?

Ramblings  on Humanity and a Healthy Planet: There Does Not Need to Be a Breaking Point

From the time I studied environmental education in the 1970’s I have been sensitive to knowing the use of non-renewable resources for consumption and development cannot go unabated without a breaking point bringing deteriorating decline or catastrophe or both. I remember the debate about growth and progress in an international conference in Rome in the 70’s and a publication called “The Limits of Growth.” The very notion of limits is a problem for us – we don’t like to think there is a stopping point. In Laudato Si, the 2015 Papal Encyclical on the environment there is this: “Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.” It’s paternalistic and selfish of so-called First World countries to think and say all the developing countries (and why do we use that term ‘developing’ to describe a country?) cannot or should not all have washing machines like everybody in the so-called developed nations (to use an actual appliance that changes lives as a metaphor for development – see www.ted.com  for the Hans Rosling “The Magic Washing Machine”TED Talk on resource depletion and development). Even with that, there is the necessity of a change in defining progress since progress now is becoming or has become earth-depleting and self-defeating. We are ravaging the planet.

This would and will continue without what added to the equation makes it a tsunami of hurt: an ever increasing population of human beings (not to mention that simultaneously we are killing off hundreds of other species and creating a monoculture that will be unsustainable). In the Daytona Beach News Journal of June 3, 2017 (we were visiting the East Coast sand and water for some R and R) I caught a Letter to the Editor on Volusia County development and water quality saying “the elephant in the room” is “an every expanding population.” The writer was talking about our inability to set limits on growth.

This, my friends, will not go away. “This” being our critical need to reduce growth and development while renewing the planetary environment while we redefine what it means to progress. I left my undergrad world of  Environmental Science and went to a theological seminary for graduate studies because in my altruism to change the world I thought there could be no solution to the technical challenges of environmental decline until and unless there was a change in attitude and understanding of our human relationship to the divine and thus too to creation as a whole.

I still feel that way but realize we in the church have not overall done a good job of translating our faith and have it contain a direct and not indirect connection to care of creation. The reconciled relationship with God is not realized without the reconciled relationship to the created world. Care of creation is not a sub-set of concern, a social issue, but rather an integral part of the primary concern of faith. We simply do not see this. Again, Laudato Si: “the external deserts of the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast.” U.S President Trump, in announcing the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord focused on the economic and labor impact on American citizens, with a particular emphasis on how Americans cannot and will not afford helping other people, nations, bear the cost of transitioning to sustainable development. This is morally bankrupt on at least 2 fronts: 1) the US has been the prime polluter in greenhouse emissions for the past 100 years, just recently taking 2^nd place to China, and so bears the primary responsibility for the global consequences of warming the entire planets suffers 2) even if we disregarded this past culpability, we have current responsibility to do all we can as much as we can for the common good, not simply our singular best.

What are we to do?

First, serve God by investing time, money, wisdom and energy on all personal fronts: advocacy, stewardship practices (i.e. consumptions, waste management, product use all in the familiar reduce, reuse, recycle vein) to earth care.

Second, help each other redefine progress and level the playing field so all nations can have enough for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Third, work with your local government to produce real zoning regulations that promote growth in designated areas while creating real limits to urban and suburban sprawl (see “first” above regarding advocacy).

Fourth, raise the discussion on the limits of population growth so that our nation and all nations create a population accord which calls for all families to have no more than 2 children.

I know, I know, it’s all hard, especially that last one on population limits, since we have personal and social freedoms with which to honor and contend. But this is not the time to be timid. This is the time to engage with as much heart and soul and good sense that we can muster. We must listen deeply to each other and respect each other immensely. And we must make the changes needed. Faith in God calls for it, humanity’s and the natural world’s survival necessitates it.

Why Bother With Trees or........Take a Hike!

It seems that everything has to pay its own way these days. Everybody and everything must be able to state its case for its value, significance and why anybody should pay attention. And, in these days of efficiencies and effectiveness to determine whether there is value in keeping you, it, whatever, around, it’s more important than ever to be able to state your case.

Even if you are plants and trees. Maybe, on the planet where 8 billion people and growing means ever shrinking habitat for every other species (I heard a news blurb this week about how the greatest threat to lions in Africa is not poaching but rather shrinking habitat…..and I thought to myself…..”this is news?” loss of habitat as the key threat to all of the animal life in biodiversity is ecology 101 from the middle part of the 20^th century!) it’s not surprising we need to state the case for plants and trees.

Time (July 25, 2016), in “The Healing Power of Nature,” cites studies indicating the wellness virtues of spending time outside walking the forest floor. Ok, if it takes the telling with significant data how the outdoors increases human serenity and health in order to get us to set policy that will safeguard greenness, bring it on.  If we can’t see the forest’s intrinsic value and therefore work to not to destroy it all but rather need to see it’s extrinsic payoff in order to pay attention, please collect more data and publish more stories like this: spending time outdoors 1) can lower blood pressure 2) increase awe 3) promote cancer-fighting cells 4) help with depression and anxiety 5) help with ADHD symptoms. And then this: even “fake nature has benefits.” If you can’t actually get outdoors, pictures of it or looking through windows helps too!

To me this is another indication of the new look of how stewardship of creation that disciples of Jesus do: we don’t so much take care of creation as it takes care of us. But because we dominate we necessarily do need to take care so that it can continue to take care of us.

Henry M. Paulson Jr.,  a Republican, writes in the Sunday June 22, 2014 Sunday Review (“The Coming Climate Crash”), saying that managing risk is a conservative goal that Republicans should embrace.  He states, “…viewing climate change in terms of risk assessment and risk management makes clear to me that taking a cautiously conservative stance – that is, waiting for more information before acting – is actually taking a very radical risk. We’ll never know enough to resolves all of the uncertainties. But we know enough to recognize that we must act now.”

Paulson, in this article, supports a carbon dioxide emission tax  that would not only reduce the carbon-footprint that is escalating atmospheric warming (the science is definitive on this) but drive the growth of alternative energy development that would not only reduce the rate of growth of carbon emissions but also fuel job growth in other energy sectors.

So, a significant voice of the largely skeptical if not opposing side of the carbon emission debate that is the Republican rank and file, speaks for significant change in our energy policy to reduce our carbon emissions. And he says we cannot wait.

Michael Grunwald in the June 23, 2014 issue of Time, writes of a new global survey by Time that indicates  many Americans still don’t believe climate change is a real issue or a real thing at all. For example, only 40% of Americans “strongly agreed” that the earth is getting warmer when, in fact, the earth is getting warmer.

There are not enough visible and credible voices keeping climate change issues and policies on the front burner.  There are credible voices by the carbon-footprint load, but they are not visible. We need  both: people who get press and are influential as well as credible.

A person like Paulson, from the tribe (Republican) who is largely dismissing the concern as either second-rate or too economically costly (short-term!) to address, on the cover of the Sunday Week in Review is good.

Creating Environmental Edges in my Thoughts and for our Policies and Directions This Week……

“A goal of the collaboration between Dow and the Nature Conservancy is to create software that helps a company assess its natural resources so that they can be compared with man-made assets. What is a swarm of wild bees worth? One way to answer this question is to determine the coast of pollinating a crop with managed honeybees. To assess the value of a clean river to a soda bottler, you could tabulate the price of purifying a gallon of polluted water. The assumption is that if you want companies to care about nature you must put a price tag on it. Otherwise, as one Nature Conservancy economist told me, “it implicitly gets a value of zero.” The idea is not new: for two decades New York City has been buying up land in its watershed or paying property owner to stop polluting, because the cost is lower than building the purification plants that it would otherwise need. But the Dow collaboration extends this principle much further. They key piece of software, still under development is the Ecosystem Services Identification and Inventory program, which will make it easy for engineers – ideally, in the field, with a tablet – to enter data about a company’s natural resources. The Nature Conservancy plans to make the software publicly available.”

Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014. 

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 “Bolstered by Tercek (ed.: The Nature Conservancy’s (T.N.C.) CEO) support, Kareiva (ed.: N.T.C.’s Chief Scientist) promoted his views by giving talks, writing blog posts, and publishing magazine articles. The new science of conservation would be data-based, corporate-friendly, and anti-elitist. It would not fetishize biodiversity. It accepted a world more like, say, the Meadowlands, in New Jersey – where MetLife Stadium shares space with twenty thousand acres of wetlands – than Yellowstone National Park. In ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene,’ an article published in February, 2012, Kareiva and two co-authors, Michell Marvier and Robert Lalasz, wrote, ‘By its own measure, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.’”

Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014.

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 “And the disasters aren’t just projections for the future. ‘The single most important bottom line is that climate change is not a distant threat,’ said White House science adviser John Holdren. ‘It is happening now.’”

Lighting a Fire: President Obamas campaigns to spread new climate-change warnings,” by Bryan Walsh, Time, May 19, 2014.

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 “Kleeb had spent the last 15 years looking for dramatic, visual stores to advance political agendas, working on the principle that the best way to convert people wa to show them others who were affected by an issue. Here was one of the best stories she’d ever seen: Conservative American farmers rise up to protect their land. She could use the image of the family farm to reframe the way Nebraskans thought about environmentalism. It wasn’t going to be Save the Sandhill Cranes. It was going to be Save the Neighbors.”

This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.

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“One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. ‘One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,’ she said. ‘People here care about their neighbors. So we are looking for a face.”

 This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.

I believe facts are our friends. I believe it’s important to know where you are in order to best configure where you are going. Because of this on this Earth Day 2014 I am dedicating time to review and read deeper into the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published report. I invite you to do the same. Follow this link: http://www.ipcc.ch/ “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. In the same year, the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC”

Happy Earth Day 2014

It turns out much of the key research on climate change was completed in the 1970’s. The first major report on the subject was requested by President Jimmy Carter. So reports and writes Elizabeth Kolbert in a good piece entitled “Rough Forecasts” in the April 14th issue of The New Yorker. Yes, we’ve been looking at the data for at least that long. At a meeting in Yokohama the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released just shortly ago it’s latest update on the crisis. It’s not pretty. We don’t seem to have the political will and moral power to do anything about the one thing that impacts every aspect of life. As one person in an NPR story Morning Edition story today on the lawsuits pending in Louisiana regarding oil and gas companies having liability in the steady and significant loss of land mass along the coast, most the significantly New Orleans area, stated: We are not talking about paying attention to the pretty little birdies or worrying about how what once was nice and pretty but isn’t nice to look at anymore, we’re talking about survival. Back in 1970, at the first Earth Day, we weren’t just talking about the pretty little birdies either. We were talking about survival. But things are now 44 years later. All attention on earth-keeping is necessary. Not faddish attention. Not stylish attention. Not 9-5 attention. All attention. Elect leaders who get this. Appoint leaders who get this. If you are a leader now, get this. Happy Earth Day 2014.