The Greatest Romance Ever!

It was Valentine's day and Adam’s and Danielle's first date. They sat in the darkened theatre waiting for the movie to start. The screen finally lit up with a flashy ad for the concession stand. Adam and Danielle quickly realized that there was no sound. Then the feature film began but the silence continued.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, an irritated voice in the back shouted,

“Okay, who's got the remote control?”

Regarding climate change, did you ever wonder whether there was a remote control?

Scientific Researchers in the Beaufort Sea attached a GPS collar to a Polar bear trying to track her movements. She had a cub with her at the beginning. In search of an ice flow to land on, incredibly, this female bear swam for 9 days continuously in the Beaufort Sea. The mother covered an amazing 687 kilometers. Eventually she saved herself but at the loss of over 22 % of her body fat and her cub who was not able to keep on swimming…

"This dependency on sea ice potentially makes polar bears one of the most at-risk large mammals to climate change," the scientist said.

Perhaps you remember as I do the excitement about doing something about climate change in the US in 2006? It was quite amazing at the time of the release of the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth. The theatres were packed and the churches were happy and there was a new unity around climate change. Then came the recession and the media went into silence around climate change. We lost touch with Al Gore with the mortgage meltdown. We did not know that he was training country by country volunteers to educate people all across the world. He just dropped off our radar and TV screens.

A recent Pew survey indicates that Global warming has hit a new low as a priority for Americans in 2011.Asked to rate 21 top priorities, Climate change came in a dull last with only 28 % of Americans thinking we had a problem down from 38% the year before the current survey.

There is a statement often made by scientists that climate change cannot be traced to single weather events. That assertion is seized upon by special interest groups and results in the behavior of weather forecasters who have become silent about climate change (to the glee of the oil and coal and natural gas corporations who fund special interest anti climate change lobbies in Congress and state governments.) Now these events are just the weather. But notice this also- there is more and more reporting of the weather, more weather forecasters than ever before. Why?

The weather forecasters and special interest lobbies do not seem to be listening to the voice of nature in an increasingly unprecedented display of climate change events. For instance we have had 2 recent droughts in the Amazon rain forest. A drought year in the Amazon rain forest is predicted to occur once in a hundred years. We have had two 100 year events in the last 5 years and scientists are now saying this is caused by climate change. What is happening is that the warmer oceans are taking up more moisture and moving it Northwards. If we lose the Amazon as a carbon sink we also lose the lungs of the world. When droughts happen in the Amazon trees die and release more carbon than does the US in any given year...

Perhaps you have followed Russia and its position over Kyoto and the climate protocols. They were very much of the convenient belief that climate change was a myth and that they didn’t need to do anything. Then last summer came the wildfires around Moscow. They were unprecedented and thank God Medyedev suddenly reversed his position. He said it was climate change and that the Russian people needed to change their ways of relating to the earth.

This year in the US we have had incredible repeated events of snow and cold. It is getting harder and harder to find precedents for these events and as we search for the precedents we have to go back further and longer to find them. The climate is destabilized and getting worse.

Off our coasts and around the world the most notable phenomena change is the tracks of the hurricanes since the 1950’s when Global warming first began to be felt. Frequencies have also changed, up in some areas,down in others. Hurricanes are more frequent in North America. In 1996,1997 and 1999 the United States endured over twice the average expected over the 20th century. Their intensity was greater. We had to reach back to the great hurricane of 1780 to get a more severe impact. And people are dying despite all the warnings. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed

10,000 people and made 3 million homeless. In 2004, 4 major storms swept across Florida. Experts see Florida real estate as a poor long term investment.

Then there are the floods- England, Europe, and Australia. In the 1960’s 7 million people annually around the globe were affected by floods. Today that figure is over 150 million.

In Europe the summer of 2003 was so hot that statistically speaking an event like this should occur once in 46,000 years! 26,000 people died during June and July when the temperature exceeded 104 F. A year later in Egypt they recorded one of the highest temperatures ever recorded at a stunning 123.8 degrees F.

The greatest single cause of death in the world is heat waves- scientists tell us that we have only just begun this grim statistical climb.

Yet even amidst all this data there is wholesale denial going on.The Pewsurveys indicate that only 1 in three Americans believe that climate change is human induced. But the real myth is somewhat different. Americans have been told and believed it that doing anything about climate change will be too costly. Actually, to do nothingand carry on the present course will be ever increasingly costly to the economy in damage done by the climate, as year after year it gets wilder. The Russian loss of revenue from crops this year was devastating- over $10 billion. The big picture economic costs are probably in the nature of 20 billion dollars over 1.8% of their GNP.

Consider the costs of clean up in Australia from the floods and now this cyclone. Or the cost of clean up from Katrina or all the Florida hurricanes. Never mind the mind boggling costs of deep water exploration for oil with its short term environmental impacts and its long term carbon impacts. For BP has two spills. The one we all could see with its impacts and cost of $40 billion, the other as it explores for more fuel for global warming, with an untold cost in future human suffering…Oil and coal are not okay! They are the past of a very bad love affair that has gone sour.

What the real problem is, is the failure to do whole cost accounting- the cost of the big picture versus the profit made by special interests like the oil companies.

I want today to talk about the Greatest romance ever our love affair with the earthy and her love for us. What do we do when a love affair goes bad, especially if we want to keep it going? We go for counseling, learn from our mistakes and recommit to do all it takes to make it work.

In this love affair the earth herself will conspire with us. The earth is remarkably resilient and if we do what is right by her, as our scientists instruct us, she will nurture us as we nurture her.

In America, unfortunately, we have made this a political issue with politicians calling the tunes instead of our scientific communities. We are hopelessly polarized and thus really hampered when we all need to be unified. When it comes to the earth we need to forget about left and right and find scientific consensus on these matters, educate the public and then have our politicians call for sacrifices and action on behalf of the earth. That is the way forward.

The awesome task before us is to educate and unite the world’s peoples, restore nature where we can, plant trees, stop cutting them down, lower everyperson’s carbon footprint, reduce human births and regulate the huge swings of capitalism away from either fear or greed. We need to reduce the human population and stabilize it. And we need an economic system that works with the planet and is renewable.

Although these are enormous challenges that will require us to come together world wide, I am happy to report that there are some remarkable things happening in leadership coming from world religions.

Religions that many people had consigned to the trash binare being remarkably reinvigorated by getting on the bandwagon of climate change education and sacrifice.

Today all across America’s pulpits Sally Bingham , the Creatrix of Interfaith Power and Light has organized a “preach in” on Climate change. We are a part of that.

As Elizabeth Kadetsky writes: “For increasing numbers of religious communities, preserving and restoring the collectivity of life has led to pragmatic actions and consciousness... Religion may be breathing new life into environmentalism, but environmental thinking may yield the unintended side effect of reviving religion itself. "New scientific understandings of the cosmos may totally overturn earlier understandings of the divine," writes Bernard Zaleha of the Boise, Idaho-based Fund for Christian Ecology, in his paper, "Recovering Christian Pantheism as a Lost Gospel of Creation."

I have talked so far about the big picture.

What can we do as individuals to restore our love affair with the earth?We can reduce our Households carbon emissions by:

  • Changing to an accredited green power option
  • Installing a solar hot water system benefit/ up to 30% reduction in household emissions
  • Installing solar panels eliminating household emissions from electricity when the sun shines
  • Use energy efficient appliances(up to 50% reduction)
  • Use a triple a rated shower head (12% reduction)
  • Use energy efficient light bulbs (10% reduction)
  • Check fuel efficiency of our next car (up to 70% reduction in transport emissions)
  • Walk cycle or take public transport
  • Calculate your personal carbon footprint on the Web
  • Suggest a workplace energy efficiency audit

Write to your senator Barbara Boxer today and Doris Matsui and encourage them to support the Clean Air Act and continue to empower the EPA to regulate pollutants and carbon as a pollutant.We have the cards for you to fill out and a small gift from the earth for you to say thank-you.

What difference can one individual make, ordinary people like us?

Paul Rokich was a boy growing up in Utah, close to a wasteland caused by an old copper smelter pouring tones of sulphur dioxide into the environment.

One day Paul,as a boy, took another boy who was visiting to show him the 14,000 acres of former forest. When the visitor looked at the land he saw no trees, no animals, no grass or birds. The land was barren and smelled bad. The boy said “ This place is crummy!” Paul was so angry for him for saying that, that he knocked him down. And then and there he made a boyhood vow that he was going to bring this barren land back to life!

Years passed and one day Paul returned to the smelter office and asked if they had any plans to plant trees? “No.” Would they let him plant trees? “No.”

Paul decided that he needed credibility and so he went to college to study botany. While there he shared his dream with an expert who told him it would take 20,000 years to re-vegetate the land. There were no natural means of spreading tree seeds- no squirrels and the winds would manage about 40 feet a year. He would waste his life to try it.

Discouraged Paul gave the idea up for awhile. He got married and went on with his life becoming a heavy equipment operator. But the dream wouldn’t die in him. One night under cover of darkness he sneaked onto the land with a backpack of seedlings and started planting. He worked for 7 hours and then returned again each week to plant more trees shrubs and grass. Most of it died.

For 15 years he did this.

A careless sheepherder burnt down a whole valley of his fir seedlings and Paul wept. Then he got up and went on planting.

Winds heat, droughts, landslides and floods destroyed his work time and time again. One nighta road crew took away tons of fill for a road destroying allof the seedlings he had just planted. But Paul kept on planting.

Week after week, year after year, against no trespassing laws, against these formidable odds and even against common sense Paul kept on planting.

And slowly, very slowly things began to take root. Then slowly, very slowly wildlife began to return- gophers, rabbits, porcupines…

One day the old smelter called him up and gave him permission to continue his work and offered him a job doing it with big equipment and teams to work under him. Progress accelerated.

What is it like today?

Today these 6 square miles have 14,000 acres of trees, grass, bushes and theyare full of elk and eagles. Paul has won every environmental award that Utah has to offer.

Paul says that he always thought that he was doing this for a future generation. Now with his hair white he says “I never thought I would live to see this day.”

Paul had kept his childhood vow to restore the earth.

What can we do?

How can we love the children of all species for all time?

We can embark on thisGreatest Romance ever! What will that look like?

As world famous architect William McDonough writes in his Cradle to Cradle.

“Imagine what a world of prosperity and health in the future will look like, and begin designing for it right now. What would it mean to become once again native to this place- The Earth, the home of all our relations? This is going to take us all, and its going to take forever. But then, that’s the point!”

The remote control for climate change is us!

Amen!