Hilton Head Island, SC – February 10, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 104:1-9; Psalm 104:16-27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. – Psalm 70:1 (RSV)
Climate change is a subject which evokes --- you should parson the expression --- a great deal of heat. Few remain totally cool when talking about it. However, within a two-week period, from about January 23 to February 6, a few hundred communities in the continental USA east of the Rockies experienced all-time lows on the earlier dates in that fortnight. But also, others experienced all-time highs for other, later dates in that fourteen-day stretch. In a few places, they had all-time lows and highs for certain dates only days apart from one another.
“Global warming” has been abandoned as a term intended to evoke widespread attention among climate watchers. Far more places are getting warmer than are getting colder, but still, “climate change” is now the operative expression. Nevertheless, there is almost as much strong opposition to the idea as there is strong support for it. Nothing I shall say in this sermon will change the mind of anyone who denies the concept of climate change, nor shall anything herein add fuel to the disputatious fire that is already burning. The debate shall continue whether or not a preacher preaches anything about this. But I want you to know that from here on, I will be asking far more questions than I shall be making statements as from the summit of Mt. Olympus.
Many powerful business people and politicians either flatly deny that the climate is changing or they declare that it has changed many times in the past millions or billions of years, and thus we should not become alarmed now. Rather than attempt to refute the denials, I shall posit this sermon mainly as a very lengthy series of questions for everyone to consider. IF the climate indeed is changing, why would anyone deny it? Business people and political candidates often deny it, because to affirm it is bad for business and for wooing certain kinds of voters. And in many cases climate change would be bad for business --- wouldn’t it?
Oil companies, coal mining operations, and manufacturers of internal combustion vehicles have long minimized the effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere. Not to do so would be to admit that they were in the wrong business, and who wants to do that? Furthermore, the people who oppose the notion of climate change tend to be far more likely to vote for candidates who also oppose it than are those who support the notion are likely to vote for candidates who also support it. In general, political opposers to anything are more committed than supporters.
There is one segment of one sector of the business community which has decided that internal combustion is not in their best interests, nor is it the wave of the future for vehicle manufacturers. More and more car and truck manufacturers are making more and more electric vehicles and fewer and fewer fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. Some plan to stop making gas-guzzlers altogether by 2030 0r 2035. Do they know something the climate-change deniers don’t know? Or have they concluded that national governments in developed countries will ban the primary vehicles of the past century, and they had better get ready for that dismaying eventuality?
In several parts of several books, the Bible clearly proclaims that God created the world. You might choose to deny that, but in my current questioning mode, why would you do that? The Bible further proclaims, somewhat clearly, that God created the world for the benefit of humanity. But that’s a very anthropocentric notion, isn’t it? Are humans the epitome of creation? Who seriously could believe that? Is not all of creation what God intended for creation? However, most of the people who wrote the Bible believed God was most concerned about humans, not animals or plants or mountains or plains. Nevertheless, God created the world to benefit everything that exists, even mosquitoes, leeches, and rattlesnakes. God created the universe for everything that evolves in the universe. Evolution does what it does. But biblical writers didn’t know that, did they? We do, though, don’t we? Don’t we? We may have evolved to be the most sentient of all beings on this planet (so far as we know), but the planet does not exist mainly for our benefit. In fact --- and the Bible also proclaims this --- WE are to be the primary stewards of the earth. Presumably only we know how to provide the best care for the earth, although I think lots of species of animals would dispute that, were they able to launch a dispute. But if climate change is occurring, and if it is mainly caused by humans, does it not behoove us to fix it --- if we can? Is not God requiring that of us?
“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1). “Thou didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be shaken” (Psalm 104:5). Well, sort of. Even the earth has evolved, and it its evolution, it is still evolving, which means earthquakes strike here and there because they can’t not strike. “The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon which he planted” (Psalm 104:16). But if the climate is changing, some trees would not get enough rain --- would they?”Thou dost cause the grass to grow for the cattle” (Psalm 104:14). I just read the fascinating book 1491. It said that in the mid-nineteenth century there were far more buffalo in this country that at any time before or since. In the early sixteenth century, there were bison all over the eastern United States. White men came and killed them all. The Indians used to burn the prairies to keep the buffalo from becoming too plentiful. Too many buffalo meant too little food for everything else, including the Indians. Whites came and killed the Indians with their guns and with their diseases. The prairie grass grew too thick over too wide an area. Rather quickly there were far too many millions of buffalo. So “great white hunters” from the East came on trains and shot the buffalo. By the hundreds of thousands they shot them. They almost brought them to extinction.
“So God created man in his image….And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea” etc., etc. (Genesis 1:27-28). Whoever wrote that meant well, but it’s too anthropocentric, isn’t it? We are to be stewards of the earth, not its dominators. But instead, we have dominated it, and in so doing, we have created “dark satanic mills” and coal-fired power plants that belch forth carbon dioxide by the millions of tons every year. In so doing, the climate changes, and the earth melts, as the Bible says --- or doesn’t it melt? Is the climate changing at all? Many say it isn’t.
Are we aware of the moral ambiguities which confront us many times every day of our lives? Do we turn off lights that we don’t need, or insist our legislators support measures to subsidize solar or wind power? How many empty-nesters drive big cars, and how often are there only two people in the car, or just one? How many people recycle everything that can be recycled? What kinds of products should we stop using? What do we need to start using? What, definitely, should we do? Will anything matter? Do we need a peaceful but forceful revolution? Are autocrats the answer to stemming climate change, if it needs to be stemmed? Autocrats tend not to be environmentalists. Is autocracy good for the environment, either natural or human?
Do we need specifically to tax environment-threatening products? Should we create special taxes for climate-altering corporations that adversely affect the world’s climate? Should we fine people whose electric bills or cars or houses are deemed too large? Should we imprison the President who refused to become a signatory of the Kyoto Treaty or the one who passed on the Paris Treaty? Assuming we aren’t going to do anything that drastic (which I, and I trust you, are not proposing), what are we going to do? And are we going to do enough before it is too late, if indeed it will ever be too late? Or what if, as climate change deniers claim, climate change is merely a big bugaboo intended to take our eye off more pressing problems, like immigrants, or terrorists, or tariffs, or the economy, things that are more tangible and thus more treatable? Is climate change nothing more than an insipid response of insipid scientists to an insipid issue?
Without question, you and I are guilty of not personally doing more to slow climate change – aren’t we? If we did more, it wouldn’t make much difference, because our carbon footprint is quite small, relatively speaking. But do we sense the moral ambiguities at all, by which we are confronted every day of our existence? Individual decisions will not make much of a difference. Only corporate decisions, those of governments, corporations, and educational institutions will turn the tide, if it is still possible to turn the tide. But does that excuse individuals?
For a couple of minutes, I am not going to continue asking questions. I am going to give an opinion, as I am often wont to do. I doubt that the climate will change so drastically that all life on this planet will cease altogether. However, things will get so bad that millions of species shall become extinct. That is already happening. The least likely species to experience extinction is Homo sapiens: us. Some of us shall manage to muddle through. However, only a fraction of the world’s current population will survive. Our species, which will have caused the near-apocalypse (IF it happens) will survive for the same reason that we are the most culpable of all species. We know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, wisdom and folly, and yet individually and collectively all of us too often choose wrong, evil, and folly.
Nevertheless, Homo sapiens is a remarkably resilient species. Scattered groups of humans in isolated pockets of the earth will figure out ways to survive. Whether they will have managed to maintain the vast store of knowledge and expertise which we have acquired through the millennia is impossible to predict. They may become like our distant hunter-gatherer forebears, and will have to evolve their way back up to where we are now, replenishing the earth as fast as they can, while still trying, as our species always does, to subdue the earth in our own image rather than in the image of God.
And now back to the questions. If we are concerned about climate change, why does that subject concern us more where we live than where it greatest effects are being felt, in the Arctic North and the Antarctic South? The atmosphere above the poles is heating far faster than elsewhere around the globe. Each year, permafrost that is melting north of the Arctic Circle releases millions of tons of methane into the air, and it creates many times greater a rise in global temperature than from all the carbon dioxide produced by power plants and automobiles. Methane release created by off-shore drilling is doing the same thing. Many parts of the world are drying up. Should Americans be more alarmed by increasing deadly forest fires here, or in Brazil or New Guinea? Or should we pay more attention to increasing major forest fires anywhere?
Why aren’t people who live on an island on the western edge of the Atlantic more alarmed by the inexorable rise in sea level than we are? Is it because we think it won’t affect our generation, and therefore we aren’t worried about how it might affect future residents of this community? Why does the town council keep approving building permits for more timeshare buildings or businesses or homes? If climate change is definitely happening, is that responsible governmental oversight, when this island may be underwater in a few decades? But if they forbid building permits for anything, won’t that drive down the property values of everything?
Because individually we can do so little, should we therefore do nothing? That seems to be what legislators around the world and in Washington, DC have concluded. “Because nobody else will do anything, why should we do anything?” they seem to ask.
This past Wednesday afternoon I attended the monthly meeting of the Hilton Head Island Ethics Society. The topic was The Ethics Involved in Climate Change. Many opinions in many directions were offered. These are intellectually curious, widely-read people. I was both greatly encouraged and greatly dismayed by the discussion. There was no unanimity at all among this group of concerned and well-informed citizens.
Does anyone truly believe that climate change can be slowed or halted solely by individual efforts? Isn’t governmental action through legislation the primary way, and maybe the only way, to solve the problem --- if it IS a problem? Do we have enough individuals willing, individually, to do enough in enough time? Or must we have an informed electorate who are willing elect candidates who forthrightly proclaim the necessity of taking all the painful and expensive actions to put the brakes on climate change?
There was a great cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. It showed Moses on the top of Mt. Sinai with the two stone tablets and the Ten Commandments in his hands. He looks up toward God in heaven (if God is “up” and heaven is “up”) and says, “So, basically, this is all about what you want?” Well, yes. But what God wants is good for all living things, including human beings. And He has created us to be the primary caretakers of the earth.
St. Francis of Assisi was and is the patron saint of nature. His Hymn to Brother Sun and Sister Moon is the basis for our closing hymn today. In the original text, Francis wrote, “Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures/ Especially Brother Sun…./ Praised be You, my Lord, for Sister Moon and all the stars…./ Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind/ And through the air, cloudy and serene/ And every kind of weather, through whom You give sustenance to Your creatures.”
We human beings are examples of those creatures, but we are only one of millions of kinds of species. Because of changes in the climate, countless thousands of those species have become extinct. Yet God has conferred upon human beings the greatest responsibility for being the most reliable and influential guardians of nature. We may not have sufficient data to know whether climate change is definitely of human origin, or even if climate change is occurring in a major way. But if it is, you and I live daily with huge ethical ambiguities, and we may choose to ignore them altogether. God is closely watching us. Assuming the concept of climate alteration is valid, we might ask this of ourselves: Will whatever we do be enough, or is it already too late?