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"Our Big, Beautiful Planet"
I recently had occasion to talk to a family who had just taken their two newborn kittens outside for the first time. Watching these kittens respond to the newness of the outside world was a source of delight. At first the kittens were afraid of the grass in which they were placed and afraid, too, of the sensation of a mild wind which was enough to make them squint. What was that? The ground under their feet, the sky overhead - all unknowns to be observed for the first time. Watching the kittens, full of wonder, undertake their first exploration of the earth was fun.
Today is Earth Day, a day which is set aside for us as a nation to reflect on the earth, its health, and our relationship to the earth. Earth Day is always April 22. I confess to being very pleased that this calendar year Easter is sufficiently separate from Earth Day so that we can devote a worship service to the earth. There is no more pressing issue than our care of the Earth. For a long time the earth has seemed as impossibly big and wild and wonderful to humanity as to those little kittens.
Amerigo Vespucci, on his second voyage to the New World, reporting on the land that would be known as South America for the first time:
"This land is very pleasing, full of an infinite number of very tall trees which never lose their leaves and throughout the year are fragrant with the sweetest aromas and yield an endless supply of fruits, many of which are good to taste and conducive to bodily health. The fields produce many herbs and flowers and most delicious and wholesome roots. Sometimes I was so wonder-struck by the fragrant smells of the herbs and flowers and the savour of the fruits and the roots that I fancied myself near the Terrestrial Paradise. What shall we say of the multitude of birds and their plumes and colours and singing and their numbers and their beauty? I am unwiling to enlarge upon this description, because I doubt if I would be believed."1 (But, of course, he did babble on about so many kinds of amazing animals he didn't know how they'd all fit on Noah's Ark!)
And here's a quote by Merriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark
expedition, on viewing the Great Falls of the Missouri, for the first time:
"To gaze on this sublimely grand specticle... formes the grandes sight I ever beheld.... Irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below receives the water in it's passage down and brakes it into a perfect white foam, which assumes a thousand forms in a moment... From the reflection of the sun on the sprey or mist which arrises from these falls there is a beatifull rainbow produced, which adds not a little to the beauty of this majestically grance senery. After wrighting this imperfect discription, I again viewed the falls and was so much disgusted with the imperfect idea which it conveyed of the scene that I determined to draw my pen across it and begin agin, but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than pening the first impressions of the mind. I wished... that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnifficent and sublimely grand object which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man."
Listen to these words from historian Frederick Turner: "To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich variety of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory."3
Turner describes men who were so blinded by the bright lights of their own civilization they were unable to see the natural world. They took inventory. Those words sound harsh. It would be unfair to leave it at that without also mentioning that under these spacious skies the people of this growing land put forth with a creative burst unlike any that had come before - they came for beaver skins and built sky scrapers - they came by ship but invented automobiles and flying machines, invented the telegraph and telephone, medicines, cures for many of the world diseases. Yes, they took inventory; they marshalled the earth's resources in a completely new way - they seemed to conquer Nature. A happy result of these successes is that people are living longer than ever before and there are enormous numbers of us. But today there is a downside. Theologian Dieter Hessel says, says it simply, "The scale of human activity relative to the biosphere [the earth] has grown too large." There does exist a biological category called "hypertrophy" -- over development, a good thing that has gone too far. Due to our sheer numbers we have the capacity to upset the ecological balance; it is feasible that we might inadvertently destroy life on earth. It's fun to consider the earth from a vantage point of innocence and wonder rather from our current perspective. But we can't.
Now we need to take stock. We need Earth Day annually to ask ourselves, "What is our relationship to Nature and what should it be? Earth Day was founded in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson. For several years, it had been troubling Gaylord Nelson that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Back then he wrote:
"All across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed except the political establishment. The environmental issue simply was not to be found on the nation's political agenda. The people were concerned, but the politicians were not. Why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment? The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air - and they did so with spectacular exuberance. Twenty million demonstrators and thousands of schools and local communities participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself."
There were many reasons that earth day organized itself. Our air quality and water quality had become issues in our urban areas, cancer in its various forms had become an important new health problem, ..... There are many reasons, but I have to think something important happened to the human psyche when we began to explore the vastness of outer space from planet earth. When Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon they were debriefed and kept in seclusion upon landing for a number of hours, but there were televisions broadcasting reaction around the world to their mission. Aldrin recounts that he spontaneously tapped Neil on the shoulder and said, "Neil, look up there - we missed the whole thing!" I think what I was trying to say was that the significance of the moon landing was in the people back here who had shared and witnessed the event."
And I think he was right. Earth Day might have begun with this exploration. Listen to the testimony:
"The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in
the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally
it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That
beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with
a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a
man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God." James Irwin, USA
"They say if you have experiments to run, stay away from the
window. For me, preoccupied with (an experiment) it wasn't until the last day of our
flight that I even had a chance to look out. But when I did, I was truly overwhelmed. A
Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty,
became her protectors rather than her violators. That's how felt seeing the Earth for the
first time. "I could not help but love and cherish her." Taylor Wang,
Chinese American
Once during the mission I was asked by ground control what I could see. "What do I
see?" I replied. "Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can
see it all. The Earth is so small." Vitali Sevastyanov, USSR
"And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what
country you look at. We are all Earth's children, and we should treat her as our
Mother." Aleksandr Aleksandrov, USSR
"I have been in love with the sky since birth. And when I could fly, I wanted to
go higher, to enter space and become "a man of the heights." During the eight
days I spent in space, I realized that mankind needs height primarily to better know our
long-suffering Earth, to see what cannot be seen close up. Not just to love her beauty,
but also to ensure that we do not bring even the slightest harm to the natural
world." Pham Tuan, Vietnam
"From space I saw Earth - indescribably beautiful with the scars of national
boundaries gone." Muhammed Ahmad Faris, Syria
"The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we
were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day we were aware of only one Earth."
Sultan Bin Salman al-Saud, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
We can no longer afford the luxury of looking at the world only through eyes of wonder or consumers eyes, which, without restraint become eyes of plunder. We must become the earth's protectors.
Today's Boston Globe (Saturday) reports that a spokesperson for the Bush
Administration reaffirmed that they reject the Kyoto Agreement under any circumstances.
This treaty aims to cut the level of greenhouse gases which scientists think are causing
the earth to get warmer. President has also reneged on his campaign promise to treat
carbon dioxide from power plants, a major target of the treaty, as a pollutant and a
source of global warming. President Bush has also recently scrapped a regulation holding
arsenic in drinking water to a level Europe has comfortably met for years. He wants to
drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve
This morning's paper shows pictures of protesters outside the Summit of the Americas in Quebec. These demonstrators are there to show their opposition to the free Trade of the Americas Act which 34 leaders are attempting forging there. You may have little idea what the fuss is about. The purpose of the FTAA is to lower barriers to trade in the entire northern hemisphere. Barriers to trade include all manner of things, from tariffs to local price-supports to restrictions on currency speculation. But the treaty is written so that even local environmental legislation or human rights standards can be considered a restraint of trade. The effect is to transfer power and control from people to corporations.
One major concern being voiced by the protesters is that this agreement, which is basically a huge extension of NAFTA, allows corporations to sue foreign governments for impeding trade. For example, when a province of Canada banned the use of a gasoline additive because of a reported carcinogenic risk, the manufacturer sued the Canadian government. The NAFTA tribunal then ruled in favor of the company, ordering the Canadian government to pay the corporation $13 million in compensation fees and overturn the ban.2 The central issue is obvious - one of governance. Who has the right to make decisions about our lives?
There used to be an expression - "What's good for business is good for America." The FTAA seems to embrace that notion on a grander scale.
The issues being dealt with behind Quebec's Summit doors are complex. The bulk of the protesters outside are young people and members of trade unions. Our daughter Annie is there. Annie was born on Earth Day, 1979 and turns 22 today. I am proud that she is there, that she cares and that she keeps herself informed. I am, sadly, not as well informed as she is.
You may agree with the protesters, or you may agree with the policy makers. My intention today is to point to the issues and to state to this community that ignorance is a luxury none of us can afford. For the sake of the earth and the well-being of our children, we need to become educated citizens. The earth is fragile and she is at risk. There is much to lose.
I close today with a poem by ecologist Wendell Berry:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with the forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.
1 Eyewitness to History, John Carey, ed. P. 79
2 "Free Trade Area of the Americas" (Washington, DC: Alliance for Global Justice, 2001)