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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 16, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
As we approach Earth Day, what is the current status of the climate crisis? We will examine what we can do to make a difference and how viewing the climate crisis as a spiritual and personal issue might help sustain us for the sacred journey ahead.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.
– Lokota Proverb
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
The rivers are the veins of God, the ocean is His blood, and the trees the hairs of His body. The air is His breath, the earth His flesh, the sky His abdomen, the hills and mountains are His bones, and the passing ages are His movements.
– Hindu Srimad-Bhagavatam
Sermon
When I was in my 20s, I lived for a while in Denver, Colorado.
I loved it there, primarily because it was so close to the Rockies. My family had brought me to those mountains as a child, and, over time, several areas in them had become holy to me.
One such area has always been a drive that begins right outside of Boulder and follows the winding course of a crystal clear river through jagged, spectacular rock formations, soaring to miraculous heights above the roadside.
Along the river, aspen trees and a dazzling variety of forest life thrive, then around other curves, great pine forests climb up the mountainsides, green and lush.
I have been on that trek many times, the last just a little less than a year ago.
As an adult, I have always felt compelled to stop quite often to absorb the shear beauty and experience the sense of transcendence such beauty can awaken. It had become a spiritual journey for me.
So my spirit was shattered the last time I went, because as I rounded the first curve where one of the great pine forests had been, what was formerly green and lush was barren and brown.
All of the pine trees were dead.
And this is happening all over the Rocky mountains.
According to the Colorado Forest Service, there are now close to one billion dead, standing trees in Colorado, due mostly to the climate crisis.
Average temperatures have risen by several degrees, leading to extreme heat during summers and an ongoing drought.
These two factors alone have killed many of the trees and severely weakened others.
A beetle that attacks the trees has also killed many more of them. At one time, a symbiosis of sorts had existed. The beetles would kill off older, weaker trees, clearing space for new growth.
However, long periods of extreme cold would kill the beetle off during the winter, keeping it from multiplying to the point that it could overwhelm even healthy trees.
Now though, the trees are already weakened by heat and drought. The winters are shorter and less cold. Now, the beetle is killing trees in 3.4 million acres of forest. All that dead wood provides ready fuel for wildfires, which not only kill more trees, but spew more carbon into the atmosphere, escalating a vicious cycle.
Next Saturday is Earth Day, so we are centering this Sunday on how we can spring into action regarding the climate crisis.
And my beloveds, it is a crisis.
As young climate activist Greta Thunberg said it, “Can we all now please stop saying ‘climate change’ and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency…?”
Now, I want to acknowledge that words like “crisis” and “emergency”, especially when it is on a global scale, can seem so big and overwhelming that we want to just avoid it.
We can feel stuck – like we can’t possibly do anything to make a meaningful difference.
So to resist falling into what is being called “climate doomerism”, know that in a few moments, we will talk about actions we can take.
And I began with that personal story, our readings today came from religious texts, because if we can begin to see the climate crisis as a personal and a spiritual issue, we may also develop a fortitude that sustains such actions.
And it is a personal and a spiritual issue.
In fact, all of the world’s major religions emphasize responsible environmental stewardship.
The Muslim Quran reminds us not to shirk this responsibility: “Corruption has appeared on land and sea Because of what people’s own hands have wrought, So may they taste something of what they have done; So that hopefully they will turn back.”
An existential corruption has appeared upon on our land and sea. The United Nations recently issued a report stating that “The chance to secure a livable future for everyone on earth is slipping away.”
“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, adding “Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast.” Literally.
As polar ice sheets, as well as other fresh water ice sources, melt, sea levels are rising.
So much so, that repeated flooding in cities like Miami had led to “climate gentrification”, where wealthier folks are buying up property on higher ground, making it too expensive for folks with less resources.
Here is a projection for what happens to the gulf coast, depending on how much ice melts and sea levels rise.
VIDEO – “SeaLevels”
The video goes on to show the state of Florida completely disappearing under water if all the ice sheets melt.
And just as these rising sea levels threaten entire habitats, the climate crisis more generally is destroying many others.
Hundreds upon hundreds of animal species are threatened with extinction, including those pictured in this slide.
SLIDE – “Extinct”
And, I suppose, human beings should be up there too. While scientists encounter more difficulty determining the threats as precisely, we know that a great many plant species are threatened also, including many of the crops upon which we depend.
These include potatoes, avocados, vanilla, cotton, beans, squash, chili pepper, husk tomato, bananas, apples, prunes, and ginger, to list just a few.
In Austin, we have shifted from a Zone 8 to a Zone 9 habitat, meaning that when we look at our church grounds, which plants are native or adaptive has changed since some of our existing foliage was planted.
Worse yet, it is getting much harder to even classify habitats.
Extreme weather events are defying what had been normative climate ranges – think our recent snow-then ice-pacolypses, separated by sustained days of triple digit heat.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Goes the climate crisis time-bomb.
OK, enough of crisis caterwauling though. Lest we fall into that climate doomerism, let’s about how we take action. And for this, we return to the personal and the spiritual.
The Buddhist Metta Suttra says, “Even as a mother protects with her life Her child, So with a boundless heart Should one cherish all living beings, Radiating kindness over the entire world, Spreading upward to the skies, And downward to the depths…”
That’s so beautiful, because it centers our personal commitment to our planet in a love for all that is.
And we can put that love into action in our individual lives.
We’ve provided this flyer that outlines some of the personal ways we can reduce climate emissions through our transportation and travel, home efficiency, dietary habits, and much more.
Our Green Sanctuary Team and representatives from guest environmental groups are available to provide more information after the service.
Now, some climate activists argue against focusing on this type of individualized approach to the climate crisis.
They argue that it distracts us from the movement building we must do to demand change from the real culprits behind climate warming emissions – large corporations and the governments that do their bidding.
Climate activist Derrick Jensen even made a film about this called, “Forget Shorter Showers”.
And these worries have some legitimacy.
For a couple of decades now, British Petroleum has run an ad campaign designed to shift the public’s focus away from the much larger role oil corporations play in the climate crisis by pushing individual responsibility instead.
Yet, all of our individual efforts combined, no matter how strong and widespread, will never be enough to offset the damage being done by giant corporate polluters.
I don’t believe we can “forget shorter showers” though.
The film itself states that individual efforts could reduce our carbon emissions by 22%.
These efforts are necessary, just not sufficient. So, we need both.
We need to reduce our own, individual climate emissions, while also coming together to demand major changes in climate-related government oversight and corporate practices.
And we must try to convince others to join our advocacy efforts.
We must know that these too ARE spiritual practices.
A Baha’i sacred text states, “We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. We are organic with the world. Our inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in life is the result of these mutual reactions.”
And my beloveds, we can mould that environment. So much is already being done. There is so much for which we can advocate.
Scientists are developing technologies that can both help vastly reduce our emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the air.
SLIDE – air capture
Researcher Jennifer Wilcox describes advances she and others are making to create carbon capture technology that is both economically and scientifically feasible.
Scientists with an organization called Project Drawdown are proposing achievable ways that we cannot not only halt the increase of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere but actually reverse it! You can find out more about their work at drawdown.org.
I want to show you just one of their graphics.
SLIDE – “drawdown”
This shows just some ways we can begin to drastically reverse the climate crisis.
I’ll address just a few of these very quickly.
Refrigerants: Not so long ago, because of environmental advocacy, the world came together successfully to address the use of refrigerants that were destroying the ozone layer.
Regrettably, some of the chemicals that manufactures then began using have been discovered to greatly increase atmospheric warming. A new effort is underway to promote the use of even newer cooling methods that do not contribute the climate crisis.
The good news is we already have a model for such advocacy. We’ve done it before.
Education and equality: These scientists’ studies have shown that, for a multitude of reasons, if we begin to address educational, economic, social and racial inequalities throughout the world, particularly as regards girls, women and family planning, an additional benefit will be remarkably large reductions in atmospheric warming. And this work is already consistent with our Unitarian Universalist principles!
In his book Blessed Unrest, activist Paul Hawkins proposes that a global movement to demand environmental and social justice is already underway.
VIDEO – “blessed unrest”
And to build on that momentum, we have to talk about the climate crisis. We have to convince others to join this movement.
Now, how many of you have tried to engage with someone in denial about the climate crisis?
How’d that go for you? How well did throwing facts and figures at them work? Environmental scientist Katherine Hayhoe says that we must talk about the climate crisis, but that we may have greater success if we emphasize values and common ground over rehashing facts.
Here she is describing doing so at a rotary club meeting in the second most conservative U.S. city, Lubbock, TX.
VIDEO – “values”
So, whether it is rooted in a common love for the outdoors or her own Christian faith, Dr. Hayhoe’s research has led her to believe a values based approach is most likely to motivate change.
While reading her book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing, I kept finding myself thinking about by Grandpa Leo.
SLIDE – “leo”
There he is – young Leo, and Leo as I more often remember him. After my parents divorced, my grandfather became a role model for me. He instilled in me a love for nature and those mountains in Colorado. I remember him taking us camping in the piney woods of East Texas. One of my favorite memories is walking with him during a rainfall under the pine tree canopy, shielded from the rain, saturated with the intoxicating smell of dampened pine needles.
Now the thing is, Grandpa Leo and I probably had very different ideological leanings.
He was, after all, a Deacon in a small-town-Texas Baptist Church. And yet, were he alive today, I believe we would find common ground in our shared values – a love for nature and a faith-centered call to responsible environmental stewardship.
If I told him about the dying Pines in Colorado, the glaciers disappearing in Glacier National Park, his beloved Gulf coastline slowly fading away under the rising waters – I have no doubt that Grandpa Leo would soon become a leader in the movement!
After all, it is the values he instilled in me that lead me to think of it as a spiritual journey – a sacred undertaking.
My beloveds, our time is running short, but we do still have time. Our spiritual journey begins now.
We undertake this sacred quest of resurrecting the very future of life and creation, together.
And the Grandpa Leo in me is saying, “Come on ya’ll, let’s get going.”
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