EARTH DAY: GREEN SANCTUARY

Comments By

The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale

Tomorrow morning I leave very early out of Phoenix for New Orleans to attend my Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association Executive Committee meeting. We had set the date last year, long before Hurricane Katrina, and we didn’t want to cancel it and the hotel didn’t want us to cancel it, so we’re going. As I packed yesterday, I found myself wondering about the water, and whether I should plan on drinking bottled water. Then I noticed I was running out of face moisturizer, and pondering whether I could find it in the stores there, and would the hotel have an iron for me to use, even though the hotels our arrangements person chooses always do? It suddenly occurred to me that I was thinking of New Orleans as if it were a third world city; in other words, I couldn’t bring my usual American city expectations on this trip. Who knows, really, what I’ll encounter?

I do know that things aren’t back to normal there. People are still displaced. Areas are still disaster areas, or so I’ve been told. And I received an email, forwarded from my mother and which I also forwarded to my Exec committee, asking anyone coming to New Orleans to bring books for the library—any books because they’ll give what they can’t use to the rest of the city who lost so much. So I have some books in my suitcase as well.

In an article in Vanity Fair magazine, their Green Issue of May 06, Al Gore says that Hurricane Katrinas will likely be on the rise around the world as a result of global warming. He calls the climate crisis a “planetary emergency,” and contends we must “act boldly and quickly” if we are to have an effect. (p. 170) He cites the melting of the glaciers on every continent as evidence, and repeats the warning we have probably all heard that if this continues, the seas will rise by the end of this century so much that our coastal cities will be flooded. Vanity Fair presents a series of pictures which show what New York City and Washington DC would look like in that event—quite a bit more flooded than New Orleans last fall. (p. 200, 202)

Some people, like Jonah Goldberg in an opinion piece in yesterday’s AZ Daily Star, say that we can’t know what is causing this warming, or predict what the planet will do as it warms. Goldberg criticizes Gore for “playing on our fears,” and claims that Earth Day proponents are engaging in a “green scare.” He even goes so far as to say that there might be some pleasant consequences of this rise in temperature, and that the proposal to reduce “global carbon dioxide emissions to 60 percent of 1990 levels before 2050, while China, India and (hopefully) Africa modernize, is ill-conceived and also immoral because it would consign generations to poverty.” (April 21, 2006) Well, Goldberg’s article doesn’t even talk about the alternative energy resource development proposed by the Green Movement, as if it weren’t even a viable option.

I was curious to review what it is that is happening—how our emissions are causing global warming in the first place, if this really is not a natural cyclical trend of the earth towards warming. Carbon Dioxide is called a greenhouse gas because it traps heat from the sun. Both the oceans and the plants do their part in absorbing it, but there is too much now, produced by the burning of fossil fuels and the clear-cutting of forests around the world. Even though seventy percent of the earth is covered by water, the oceans can only absorb about a third of what we’re producing now, and that third is altering the chemical pH balance of the water, affecting the growth of corals and the formation of shells which starts a chain reaction at the bottom of the food chain.

The atmospheric warming is melting the glaciers and the polar ice cap. The Artic cap cools the planet and like a giant mirror, reflects the sunlight that hits it (Gore, p. 170). As that has been melting, the open water is now absorbing the sunlight and heat rather than reflecting it.

I learned about some of this way back in the late sixties in my Junior High science class. Air and water pollution were just coming into awareness and we spent a memorable year studying it. That was just a couple years before the nation started celebrating Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Thirty-six years of trying to bring our awareness up to the level that we can do something about our actions, and yet, we are reaching a crisis point, if Gore and many other scientists and leaders are right.

Last decade, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in their report that if we could do one thing to help save the planet, we should stop driving SUVs. I find it interesting to read an internet article put out by newscientist.com, dated December 17, 2005. Now I don’t know them, so I can’t vouch for their research standards, but I think Vince might have emailed me the link, and the article did grab me, so I’ll share its point with you. They say that instead of buying an eco-friendly car, we can all do more for reducing greenhouse gases by going vegan! Why?

They did research into how much fossil fuel it takes to cultivate and process different foods, as well as quantified the amount of methane and nitrous oxide that comes from the manure of food animals in their lifetimes. The amount of carbon dioxide created in the production of meat for our diets is 1.5 tons more per person per year than that created in the production of plants and foodstuffs in a vegan diet. The difference in emissions between a “saloon car” and a hybrid is just 1 ton. So, they say, eat vegan.

Each of us needs to do what we can, one step at a time. The problem seems so out of hand at times that we can get depressed. But that is what religious community is all about: helping each other to reflect on what is important to us, individually and as a community, and to support each other in making the necessary changes in our lives that will make a difference, however small, to the entire planet.

I’ve tried to eat vegetarian over the years, and haven’t succeeded, but my daughter is vegetarian, sometimes vegan, and seems to be committed to that. Curtiss gave up meat for lent, and now that Easter is over, he wants to continue, so we’re eating vegetarian now, with a little lapse on my part, but I’m not worried about that. I think changing habits is sometimes slow business, and being nice to ourselves in the process will make us want to keep trying, over and over, until we get it right or it becomes a new habit. Or spiritual practice. How we live our lives has everything to do with our faith, and daily living can be spiritual practice with the awareness, or mindfulness as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, of how what we do is important to the betterment of life on earth.

One person who can help is Peggy Raisglid. She is a former friend of our congregation and has given sermons over the years with Marion here. She was the one who first made vegan foods that proved to me that they taste great, because she had made foods for us to sample during the coffee hour after her service. Now, Peggy has opened a vegetarian restaurant on Campbell called Lovin’ Spoonful. It’s actually vegan, but she bills it as vegetarian so that the average person won’t be put off, but you can go in there and know that nothing you put in your mouth was tortured or wasteful. It is a spiritual practice to eat there, I think, because Peggy has put her beliefs into practice in creating the only vegan restaurant in Tucson, and the food does taste great! And it’s a beautiful environment. Curtiss and I ate there Friday night and picked up menus and business cards for you.

Maybe you saw the article in the paper about Eegees? I wanted to mention them, too, because they are another example of business putting their beliefs into action. Eegees recycles everything as well as sends their left-over food to the food kitchen on a regular basis. Why? Because the owner, Ed Irving, grew up in paper recycling. He learned from his father’s business and the habit took.

Step by step we can make the changes, but we also need to be paying attention, because it makes sense to me that if there is anything we can do to reverse the damage we know we are doing, the pollution and the waste, we should do it, regardless of whether the planet is entering a natural warming phase or one created solely by us. If anything is clear, it’s that we ARE polluting the planet, and that all things ARE interconnected. It behooves us to be responsible, caring citizens of our planet.

[second part delivered by Vince Pawlowski re UU Ministry for Earth’s Green Sanctuary]