Eco-Community: Changing the paradigm of Environmentalism

I gave this talk speaking from an outline, not reading from this document, so I went back to try and create the talk as i gave it, as close as possible. I figure that typing straight out with minimal editing might give the same result. Sorry for the typos y'all.

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12/10/2006

Back in August when I agreed to give this talk it was going to be during the first week of October, but because of scheduling conflicts it got pushed back until now. Back then it was a completely different talk that was rattling around in my brain. I had been riding my bicycle in the countryside and I would see neighborhoods where it seemed that everyone was out cutting their yards on their riding lawn mowers. The thought entered my head that it wasn’t necessary for *everyone* to have a riding lawnmowers. What if communities pooled resources? What if, instead of every household having a drill and a circular saw and so forth, what if we as a church community pooled our resources and cut down on the amount of stuff. What if shopping trips were consolidated? What if cars that weren’t being used by one member were available to other members that needed them? The idea was to have a ‘stuff’ bank, to cut down on the amount of stuff by acting as a community. The American ideal of rugged individualism, and the resulting marketing that makes everybody think they need a complete set of powertools, or dryers, or deep freezers, or (fill in the blank) and the consumption that goes with it, is poisonous. I still think it’s an idea worth exploring, but to be honest the more I wrestled with my talk, this topic, this environmentalism thing, the bigger it became. I’ve ridden my bicycle more than 2,000 miles since I first agreed to present the topic, and there hasn’t been a single mile that this hasn’t been stretching me into uncomfortable places, marinating, growing, gelling. It is a work in process, far from complete, but this is the day, and this is what I’ve got so far.

Btw, when I’m on my bike, during the day, at night, in the city, in the countryside, I’m alone with my thoughts. I’m free from the radio and TV filling me with their nonsense. All the nonsense is purely my own. I’ve also noticed that no matter where I am, there’s an odor of some chemical in the air – car exhaust, oil based pesticides, fertilizers – sometimes it is a faint thing, but it is nearly always there.

I have come to believe that our relationship with energy, specifically carbon based energy (i.e. oil – the energy of ancient sunlight) cuts to the very heart of several of our principles as Unitarian Universalists. If we are serious about the promoting justice, equity and compassion in human relations we need to come to grips with our addiction to oil. If we are serious about affirming and promoting the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all, we need to come to grips with our addiction to oil If …. IF it’s true that as Unitarian Universalists we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, then we need to come to grips with our addiction to oil.

The way I figure it, we have two ways we can end up, a vague/foggy utopian society or a society that is seriously screwed up.

Joan said that I’m passionate about this, and I am. I’ll admit it. I’m a fanatic. But I’m plagued with doubts and second guessing. I suppose that doubt is a common feature inherent in fanaticism.. I mean, NOBODY’S fanatical about whether the sun will come up tomorrow. There are a lot of religious fanatics, however. What if I got this whole Christianity thing wrong? What if global warming is really a cyclical phenomenon like James Inhofe says? What if technology and the markets will come to our aid just in time? I personally don’t believe it, choosing to place my trust in the hordes of scientists that say yes, we are running out of oil, that there is no easy fix.

Incidentally, the folks who say there’s nothing to worry about and are counting on science to provide the easy fix when the oil runs out are also insisting that science is wrong when it points to global warming. You can’t have it both ways.

And, another thing to consider is the very sticky catch 22, that the worst thing that could befall us would be the discovery of vast new oil fields or the burning up of what we already know about.

Cheery, eh?

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was talking with some friends during lunch after church, and the subject had segued to the topic of energy (ok… I’ll admit it, I did it, I usually do… like I said I’m a fanatic and you should expect this from me) and one fellow pointed out to me that not everybody wants to live in a little house and ride a bicycle everywhere like I do. He said this in a way that suggested it wasn’t already glaringly apparent to me. For the record, I know this.

Here’s the thing, if everybody lived like I do, in a 580 square foot house, waking up to an indoor temperature of 65 degrees and having a hot shower from indoor plumbing, riding my bicycle to the supermarket to get bananas from Honduras, oranges from California, wearing a coat made in Bangladesh, a t-shirt made in Haiti, shoes made in China, jeans from Sri Lanka, and socks from Pakistan, on the way to a centrally heated church, and afterwards planning to have a meal at Jumbo China Buffet… it wouldn't be sustainable. It would slow the inevitable, but we would still be headed to the 'we're screwed' place.

By the way, there’s a story behind the t-shirt, more on that later. But… If everyone on the face of the earth lived like me, the earth is screwed. Seriously. Our relationship with energy is so insidious that we don’t even think about it. We think cars, and they are certainly a big part, but it's also shoes, dentures, fingernail polish, computers, plastic spoons, food supply, out of season fruit, clock radios, fiber optics, tires on a bike, insulation, ... almost everything that touches our lives has a carbon component linked to manufacture and supply routes... it's NUTS. Hence the notion of our paradigm with energy and why we need to address it. If we were to totally overthrow the systems that are keeping us in our unhealthy energy relationships, but continue to think the same way, we’ll just rebuild the same old crap.

I wish I had a cookbook, like the joy of cooking is to food. I really do. That vague/foggy uptopian society I mentioned earlier? That’s because I have no idea what that society will be like, what it’s structures will be. It won’t happen in my lifetime, but we as people of faith must begin to work for it NOW. It must begin with US. We cannot wait for the politicians and the corporations and the ‘other’ people out there before we act. If we care about equity, justice, the interconnected web, future generations, this house we call the earth, we have to begin the process NOW.

I’m working from an outline here, so if I ramble I’m sorry, but the outline has three parts and the first part is ‘just the facts jack’. So I suppose you could call this part ‘Just Say Know’… that’s ‘Know’ with a ‘K’.

Over 3 years ago, on the eve of our invasion of Iraq, Al Dodson gave a service where he shared a poem by Helen Weaver Horn, a quaker. It stuck with me, and I want to read it for you again.

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My Grandma Knew What She Was Doing
By Helen Weaver Horn

Your war is packaged neatly
as a precut chicken-select
facts stacked under headlines,
pale as breasts in plastic wrap-
but Grandma set me straight.

When I was ten she yanked
the biggest Leghorn from the coop.
she made me hold her squawking
on the maple stumps
and chopped her head off.
blood gushed hotly on my hand,
her feet clawed air, her limpness
quivered. I felt sick to death.

But Grandma made me hold her
upside down and dip her
in the boiling pot, pluck out
her feathers, split her open.
There inside, her eggs lay
forming. There her heart
was knotted down. I had to
tear them out, her lungs,
intestines-save the liver-
rinse and cut her up, prying
my knife between her joints
so like my own two knees.

I had to dry and salt and flour
each piece and fry them
in the spitting iron skillet
pile them on the heated platter.
Bring them in to Grandpa
at the dinner table. Eat.

My grandma knew what she was doing.
Never, never will I see
a packaged chicken blind again.

Or buy your Grade A federally-
inspected bloodless war.

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I recently viewed a video by Robert Newman, the History of Oil. Have any of you seen it. No? Good. I mean, I think you *should* see it, but it’s good for me that you haven’t, since none of you will realize how poorly I present the following by way of comparison.

(if you're reading this, check out the video here.
You'll need a fast internet connetion... be warned!)

Among other things, he lays out a convincing argument that the first world war was triggered by an invasion of Iraq. Seriously… but I’m not going to talk about that, I’m going to head straight to 1951, when the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosedek, set out to nationalize the British Petroleum oil company. The US and Britain would have none of that, so they overthrew the government and installed the shah that was such a nasty fellow for such a long time. But something really really important happened in 1971. At that time OPEC decided that all oil transactions would be conducted in US dollars. No matter where in the world you were, if you needed to buy oil from any country that produced oil, you had to spend US dollars to do it.

From that point on, we had a magic checkbook. I didn’t understand what that meant until I saw the analogy that Robert Newman had. Salvadore Dali, at the high point of fame, would buy the finest clothes, eat at the finest restaurants, travel, live a high style with lots of friends and continually pick up the tab. But when it came time to pay his bills, he would write out a check, turn it over, and make a drawing… a *signed* drawing. Needless to say, the checks never made it to his bank.

But what would have happened if high level art critics had suddenly declared that Dali wasn’t such a good painter after all, and he fell from favor, and all those businesses suddenly weren’t so enamored of having signed Dali checks on their walls? And the checks made their way back to his bank? Dali would be in deep doo doo, that’s what.

I promise, I’m going somewhere with this. …..

That almost happened to the US dollar. Right now we are overdrawn in the world banks and have been for a while, but the world needs dollars to pay for it’s oil.

In November of 2000, Saddam Hussein made a request of the French bank BNP to switch from US dollars to Euros. This was the account that was handling Iraq’s 2.3 million barrels/day of oil through the UN oil for food program. The officials told him he was crazy since the Euro was $0.80 to the dollar, but he said he didn’t care. At the end of 2000 the switch was made.

In 2001, the Euro had gained significantly on the dollar, and Iran (axis of evil member #2) began selling its oil in Euros.

By the end of 2002, North Korea (axis of evil member #3) announced that ALL of it’s commodity trading, not just oil, would be in Euros, not Dollars.

In 2002, democratically elected Hugo Chavez, another darling loved by the US, had the chairmanship of OPEC fall to him, and on the table for the April, 2003 meeting was the proposal that all OPEC transactions would be in Euros, not dollars.

That, my friends, would be the Federal Reserve’s WORST nightmare. All of our checks would come back in a great flood and our economy would suffer greatly.

It’s not hard at this point to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a very public beating to make an example of what happened if you mess with our economy. It’s what addicts do to keep the juice flowing. And let’s face it. We are addicts.

We're not any better than anybody else, we just had the military ability. There are a lot of addicts out there who would loved to have had access to that crack pile.

Just as a crack addict will rob, lie, steal, even sometimes kill to get what he needs for that next rock, governments will do the same on a much larger scale. We call it 'Bringing Democracy to the Middle East'. Just say Know. ….

It was at this point in the talk that I was worried that some of you might begin to consider me mad, but two weeks ago I was talking with a health worker on campus, a professional, an educated person with a Masters degree, and again the conversation had segued into energy talk (again, my fault). She said that we needed to find a way to fold time, and then we could farm other planets. We needed another one, possibly two. I thought she was kidding and played along, wondering where we could find such planets and if they would welcome us, etc…. but she was dead serious.

I wasn’t the mad one in that conversation.

Folks, there is no folding time, no extra planets out there to be ‘mined’. This is it… we’re not getting off this planet so we had better come to grips with the way we behave.

I mean, if we were given one body for our entire lives wouldn’t we take care of it?

Okay… bad analogy. How about if you were given only one car for your entire lives? Wouldn't you take care of it?

If you gave more thought to the car scenario rather than the body scenario … well, think about it.

So, the second part of the outline was the paradigm thing. How did we get here?

Jan Garrett sent me a sermon by Rev. Dr. Lucy Hitchcock Seck, Unitarian Universalist. I’m gonna read something right off the page. It was an eye opener for me.

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“… It is important to understand the history of how we got to where we are now so that we will not stay trapped by that history and mindset. But, I believe it is also absolutely simple and dare I say common sense….. Thomas Berry, a catholic well into his nineties, writes … Within the biblical context, the continuity of divine presence with the natural world was altered by establishing the divine as a transcendent personality creating a world entirely distinct from itself. The continuity between the human community and the natural world was altered by identifying the human as a spiritual being in contrast to all other beings. Only the human belonged to the sacred community of the redeemed. The previous sense of a multi-species community was diminished. …. This is the most devasting critique of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition I have heard and the most telling. The earth’s troubles began with a concerted attempt by religion and the governments who came to expression out of that religion to separate what is religious, what is spiritual, what is good, from what is earthly. …. The wilderness became demonic. The human began to use the earth for agriculture, for fuel, for “development” The earth was deforested, polwed, built upon, paved over, polluted, abused. This process of abuse and neglect of the earth which should have been a relationship of a basic spiritual interconnection and care was defended because of religion - a religion that held the human in higher regard than all else. This same humanism that inspired great books and art, music, cathedrals and museums, and locally sustainable agriculture for a growing population, has also led to the devastation of the planet on which we must surely depend for our future…. “
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Heady stuff, that. … you could spend a lot of hours in discussion groups pontificating on this point or that, and it would be OH so very interesting… As Unitarians we like to parse words, analyze, disect arguments, we are point and click activists a lot of the time, thinking that the online petition we just signed really makes a difference.

Myself, I like Robert Fulghum’s take on it. This is from his book ‘It was on Fire when I lay down on It”

“I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. “

And that, friends, brings me to the III part of my outline.

Getting Off our Collective Asses.

A publisher rep who calls on me at work is a Unitarian, and when I told him of my nervousness in talking to you about this he told me ‘relax… you’re preaching to the choir’.

Well, he’s right in a sense, but the message I have for the choir is that half the time you don’t show up, you refuse to learn to read music, you’re content to sing the same songs over and over, your sense of rhythm is shot, your intonation is way off, you breathing and phrasing is bad, and you continually think that if we could just hire a paid quartet then everything would be okay. Oh… and every single one of you is ready to learn new music, as long as your neighbor starts first. So yeah, I’m preaching to the choir….

He also said I could tell you about some of the things I do and here’s the story of the t-shirt. I won this T-shirt because I wrote an essay that was published on the blog minuscar. I want to read it for you.

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It began as a desire to lose some weight and just stop being tired all of the time. I was nearly 300 pounds in the fall of 2003 and had a cholesterol level of nearly 400 points. I was as good a candidate for stroke as there ever was. So I set out on a quest to use more energy than I took in on a daily basis, and I was determined to avoid big pharma for cholesterol control if at all possible. The age old story of diet and exercise, often told but rarely lived, became my mantra.

During my lunch hour I lifted weights at the gym, and during my early evening hours I rode a stationary bike for an hour while watching the banks of televisions. By August of 2004 I had lost nearly 100 pounds, and my cholesterol was finally under control without having to ‘talk to my doctor’ about Lipitor or Plavix or any of that. I felt good! A woman at my church invited me to join the local bike club and I found out that seeing the world go by while pedaling was so much better than Fox News or Elimidate or Room Raiders or ESPN or any of the other trash that the boob tube offered. I was (and still am) hooked on cycling!

I began to frequent bicycling specific websites and following the links I found within. One day I stumbled across a powerful, simple statement.

Here it is folks, this is the meat… right here… this is the important part of this entire talk today, I found this on MinusCar... it's why I wear this shirt and hope that people will ask me about it...

‘I believe people that think that the globe is warming because of human activity, specifically carbon emitting human activity, might be right. Because I think they might be right, I think humans need to change. And because I think humans need to change, I think I need to change.’

Let me repeat that in case you didn’t get it the first time…

‘I believe people that think that the globe is warming because of human activity, specifically carbon emitting human activity, might be right. Because I think they might be right, I think humans need to change. And because I think humans need to change, I think I need to change.’

If you ever think about China and the fact that the HUGE population of china wants the lifestyle that we enjoy- maybe I should say the lifestyle that is akin to crapping in our own bedrooms - the cars, the houses, the supermarkets, the long commutes, and you find yourself thinking that if China lives that way, the earth can’t support it… if you find yourself thinking that we need to somehow limit China or India, or your neighbor whose Hummer just bugs the crap out of you... If you find that they need to change, then instead try thinking that *YOU* need to change.

BTW, who is going to feed China? Who is going to feed the estimated 7.5 BILLION people projected to inhabit the planet by the middle of this century?

I have it memorized. Anytime anyone asks me how I can ride on a day like today (98 degrees out, 95% humidity – well, it WAS august) I repeat that statement to them. Once their eyeballs glaze over and the lights go out, that usually gets a response of ‘I bet you save some money’ or ‘it’s good exercise’. Yes, it’s that too, but it’s so much more.

I now ride to work, to church, to the grocery store. I laugh at the idea of parking permits. I’m convinced that my current car will be my last car. Cold days, warm days, frigid days, hot days, dry days, rainy days – you name it, if I have to go somewhere I take the bike. I’ve learned how rich I am and how my 580 square foot home, formerly thought of as a stepping stone to something much nicer, is a luxury rather than a liability. I used to consider it a mark of poverty but now I plan to live in it forever. I’ve learned about the freedom of being debt free because I've learned to live on less than I earn. I've learned that the bicycle is the natural enemy of impulse buying. My previous dreams of new cars, large houses, and secluded lots far out in suburbia have morphed into dreams of simple, chemical free living with plenty of time to enjoy life. I've learned that I can live without a dryer, that it's okay to sweat in summer. I've learned to appreciate the chill of winter. I’ve discovered my neighbors and we know each other by name. I’ve learned that I’m not meant to go fast, that going slow gets me there just as quickly.

I’ve learned to live more deliberately with less.

I’ve driven a total of 3560.2 miles this year in my car, all of them under 55 mph. I think next years mileage should be half that.… and then half of that… and then half of that.

And I’ve learned that I’m not the only one.

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Now you’ll notice that I’ve not ‘pushed’ bicycles or bashed cars that much today. I really think that if you care, that if you are truly intent on action, then you’ll get there on your own or suffer extreme cognitive dissonance in the process. The idea that we are running out of cheap energy isn’t some abstract idea. I’m not talking about something that might happen one day. It’s on it’s way. You can go to the bank with that news. Euros or dollars, it won’t matter that much.

There are ideas bubbling up all over the place, and voices coming together across the world, a rag tag chorus singing of sustainability. Robert Newman calls this thing radical direct action non-heirarchical eco autonomous grassroots organization. In other words… it starts with us. Not the politicians, not the other countries, not our neighbors, US. Me… you. Sitting down, figuring it out. The food thing, the transportation thing, the clothing thing, the money thing.

Now for a shameless plug for just such a grassroots organization and an invitation to whomever will show up this afternoon. (BgGreen)

What can you expect there? I’m not sure, but I’ll be there. I guarantee that this meeting will be the beginning voices of those who care and are searching. And they, we, you, if you show, are bound to screw it up and come back to it, and screw it up again, and come back to it… and slowly, surely, these young voices and ideas, some from the elderly among us, will start to get it right… the important thing is to START and not wait on anyone or anything else… If I think that you should be involved, I should be involved. See how that works?

I want to leave you with a poem from the Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. Archy is a cockroach who leaves messages for Don Marquis by diving onto the typewriter keys headfirst. Early on in the book he is upbeat and full of suggestions to help humans be, well, less human... a good thing according to him, but by the end we're left with this final entry. Maybe we'll listen to the cockroaches, the ants, the scorpions and centipedes...

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what the ants are saying

By Don Marquis, in "archy does his part," 1935

dear boss i was talking with an ant
the other day
and he handed me a lot of
gossip which ants the world around
are chewing over among themselves

i pass it on to you
in the hope that you may relay it to other
human beings and hurt their feelings with it
no insect likes human beings
and if you think you can see why
the only reason i tolerate you is because
you seem less human to me than most of them
here is what the ants are saying

it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

we ants remember
and have it all recorded
in our tribal lore
when gobi was a paradise
swarming with men and rich
in human prosperity
it is a desert now and the home
of scorpions ants and centipedes

what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
man is never on the square
he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
each generation wastes a little more
of the future with greed and lust for riches

north africa was once a garden spot
and then came carthage and rome
and despoiled the storehouse
and now you have sahara
sahara ants and centipedes

toltecs and aztecs had a mighty
civilization on this continent
but they robbed the soil and wasted nature
and now you have deserts scorpions ants and centipedes
and the deserts of the near east
followed egypt and babylon and assyria
and persia and rome and the turk
the ant is the inheritor of tamerlane
and the scorpion succeeds the caesars

america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
from the alleghenies to the rockies
the deserts are coming
the deserts are spreading
the springs and streams are drying up
one day the mississippi itself
will be a bed of sand
ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth

men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn

rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the
billion meticulations of the roots

it wont be long now It won't be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone

dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform
archy
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Thanks for listening. Now, get off your asses and do something. If nothing else, then KNOW.