© Dina Claussen
November 4, 2007
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
While working on this sermon, I had a vision. I saw a huge boxing ring with thousands of people gathered to watch the match of the century.
The announcer began “In this corner, we have those elegant, linguistically sophisticated, technologically savvy bipeds: Human Beings: Masters of the Universe!”
The crowd goes wild. He continues.
“Now in this corner we have that fascinating and dangerously unpredictable force: the bringer of fire, flood and upheaval, the ancient enemy of mankind – Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nature, ruler of the Earth!” There is only a smattering of applause; the animals, after all, have not been invited. It’s home ground for the humans, so hisses and boos predominate.
Meanwhile, technology reigns supreme: the stadium is climate controlled and large television screens bring the ring up close and personal to everyone. Everything is accompanied with canned music.
Isn’t that how we like it – nature as entertainment? Meanwhile, we leave the stadium in our cars, increasingly sealed in, having less and less contact with the world around us.
I have been meditating on that “sealing in” process since I have been here. One day, early in the morning, I stepped out onto the porch of my home, and let the Austin environment wash over me. I have read many accounts of “sultry” days before that sounded wonderful, but that was the first day that I had really experienced it. The humidity clung to my skin, giving me the sense of being enveloped in the warm air. The many overhanging limbs of large trees in my neighborhood felt inviting and comforting. The cicadas were at it serenading with their almost buzz saw like sounds as they went about their business. Even the birds made some sounds that were different than I was used to.
I was experiencing a language of the land that was different than the familiar West Coast places that I have lived. It could be said that I really began to hear Austinese, the language of this land, for the first time. As I walked to church, I could smell, feel, hear, and really see the details of things around me. Even the walk along Lamar Blvd had its own language, though it was much more a language of technology – the buzz of electricity, the sounds of the vehicles, and the smells of pollution, along with many others.
On the other hand, recently, I have been gifted with the use of a car for a month: a wonderful Prius with all its lovely technology. I began to notice how different an experience it was. As I glided down the street, I felt powerful, less vulnerable, less likely to pay attention to the needs of the people around me. I became impatient with even the smallest delay on the road and I even began to forget that I actually liked walking. I didn’t really notice much of the landscape as I moved along either, as I was focused on when to stop and go and turn in order to reach my destination. I mostly heard only muted technology sounds. I wasn’t hearing the full spectrum of Austin’s language anymore – I could have been anywhere.
As much as we love the comfort of the technology, it’s inescapable that we are in trouble with it these days. So, how did we get to this place anyway? After all, for millions of years, human beings lived in concert with the land with minimal technology. They knew the land because they had to in order to survive. There are many accounts now of the lives of current indigenous people, so we have some idea of how it used to be. These people know their land thoroughly and have respect for its abundance and poverty, as well as for its dangers and safety. They have a habit of thrift in the use of its resources so as not to endanger that which sustains them. They don’t need a scientist to tell them this. It’s part of the grammar of their full language of being embedded in this world that they learn from birth.
Over the past 40 years, I have read a great deal about the environment, about anthropology, and about body wisdom (whether in movement or in the healing arts). Because of those interests, I read something recently that ordinarily I would never have picked up. For one thing, it has a great deal of philosophy in it and I am not a real fan. I go for the Cliff notes versions you find on Wikipedia these days. And then there is the very long title. It starts out well: The Spell of the Sensuous (could be a body thing). But then it continues: Language and Perception in a More than Human World. Still it sounded intriguing and it had been highly recommended by someone who knew me, so I read it. The author, David Abram, is a philosopher, an ecologist and, fortunately for me, a compelling and lyrical writer. His is one of the many important voices these days writing about the intersection of humans and the environment.
We don’t know what came first, but he asserts that language changed along with a change in attitude away from the clear connections with the land that humans started with. The oral languages and even the first written languages were still tied to the land. I recommend reading about the Aborigines in Australia with their dreamtime stories for a modern day feel of that. It is quite compelling. As western languages came to be written down in symbols not referencing the land in any way, there was also a move into thinking of the environment as something to exploit, to control, to own. Abram suggests that Greek thought especially, was the beginning of the idea that our minds and souls were considered separate from the sensing body and religion played a part as well.
Certainly we do know that by the time of the Enlightenment, we were on a clear track to thinking that our minds (souls) were separate from our biological body and our humanness in general was separate from everything else. And that view persisted despite Darwin’s work that pointed us to being part of the animal kingdom. The jump to the sense of entitlement over the environment that has come to dominate western history since was not a huge one.
Now, we are so out of touch with nature as a culture that regularly we have people wandering off even on snow covered mountain trails and getting lost with out having taken adequate clothing, food and water, because they just wanted to take a bit of a walk. In Austin, I understand that 3 students got lost exploring a cave that was really only for advanced spelunkers and it took 11 hours to rescue them. They at least took the precaution of telling someone to call for help if they did not return in 13 hours and that may have saved their lives, as they had run out of water before getting rescued.
On a more communal note: There is an island, very close to the Massachusetts mainland called Plum Island. It’s really just a large sand spit. When I was there, there were a number of people who lived on the north side of that island who were up in arms about what they felt was a property rights issue. The winter storms were regularly eroding away the sand on the north end and sending it to the south, where there was a nature preserve. People thought that the government should do something about that. The government should either stop the sand from moving somehow, or they should have some government program that would ensure that the sand was brought back to the north end.
Now I thought that that was an incredible story when I heard it, but recently, I heard from someone that in Southern Florida they are moving the sand back after storms to ensure that the huge resort buildings have their beaches intact. I can totally empathize with them, and at the same time, be appalled.
These are stories of a people not knowing and not accepting the reality of the land where they were living. This earth is a living earth. It moves and changes by understandable processes, but over the centuries, we have come up with some pretty hair-brained ideas of how to control these, rather than trying to figure out how to be with the earth as it is.
If you want to read a textbook case of the basic insanity of this approach, a good one is that of the Imperial Valley in California, a desert sink area that used to be flooded by the mighty Colorado River every couple hundred years or so, and thus had rich silt deposited and re-deposited on the desert floor. That rich soil drew people to begin to dam up the river for irrigation canals and so that the river would not flood anymore. Then big business agriculture (the only ones who could afford the technology needed) came in to exploit the soil for as long as it lasted.
If you check online under “Imperial Valley,” you can begin to get a taste of the incredible and unending story of more and more expensive technology being proposed to get around the increasingly sterile soil for agriculture since it is no longer replenished by the flooding.
If you check under “Salton Sea” you can read about the build up of salt in the Salton Sea, which is destroying the sports fishing resource and the wildlife refuge for migratory birds. The technology that has been seriously proposed to deal with that is truly bizarre. There are many stories in other places with issues of increasing technologies to deal with the consequences of the original technology.
Abram writes that we probably cannot go back to the ancient way of living in small groups, totally in tune with the environment. Certainly a completely oral culture has its own problems. He suggests that what we can do is to use the language that we do have in new ways; to use our cool reason and our more sensory ways of knowing to root us in the particular and the local as we work on solutions using more sensitive technologies; and to write, speak and think of ourselves, not as masters of the Universe, but as fully responsible citizens of this planet. Let’s return to our birthright and know it in this new way.
On the other hand, why should we? It all sounds nice, but we can fool ourselves a bit longer couldn’t we? What would really do it for us to move ourselves out of the current technological comfort that we are enjoying at an already high price? Do we need to have a messy, violent revolution to get it? Do we need to wait until our technology leads to complete breakdown of our whole system of living?
I don’t know about you, but going over all of this, tends to make me hyperventilate a bit, and begin to go into evangelical mode: “The End is Near” and Repent and Be Saved!” Fortunately, I have another impulse that so far has won out. I would rather look at what is actually happening in the world that might reverse that whole trend.
In 1962, Rachel Carson brought the conversation about the consequences of our technology out into the community, with the publishing of her book, Silent Spring about the evils of the pesticide DTD. Carson also described in other books, the complex web of life that linked mollusks to sea birds to the fish swimming in the ocean’s deepest and most inaccessible reaches.
Though she never used the word ecological, it was what she was describing. There are more and more people who have made a commitment to that conversation by learning the language of their particular area and sharing their experience and knowledge.
There are writers, activists, inventors, ecologists and scientists working on this already, some of who are in Austin, as well as in this congregation. In our congregation, I know of Margery Adams, a nature writer, who has shared with us the stories of the birds of this area. Dale and Pat Bulla, who are National Wildlife Habitat Stewards, have a home that is built to be environmentally sustainable. Don Smith has built an environmentally sound home as well. Elizabeth Gray has spearheaded turning our grounds into an accredited wild life habitat.
Our church also has a Green Sanctuary Committee, which is giving a program this next Tuesday evening that you might want to check out. I also discovered that Austin is a mecca of wildlife preserves, which gives us other places to get a feel for the land and of that special language.
I for one, am going to put my efforts into assisting the move forward in that conversation, as we utilize a full dance of ideas, information, stories rather than relying on scripted rhetorical bouts, like the ones that would go in the stadium in my vision. This would be a conversation that included more of the kind of people who I have already mentioned and a place of respect for all at the larger table of society. This would be a conversation that included the larger educating of all our children and a willingness to let them take the lead in it more and more.
There are actions to be taken and we need them badly. We need the same kind of actions that labor activists did in the 1930’s that gave us whatever work benefits we have now. Our world needs us to wake up and to live out what we believe in as fully as possible.
It is a challenge, especially for those of us who have gotten really comfortable in our technological cushion, but it is one that can use the best of our traditions’ liberal ideals and efforts. If we can move out of guilt and into action, we can then have a cheer, a roar come up that has, alongside our voices, the sounds of the wolf, the crocodile, the birds, and the rush of the wind and the rain through the trees, as we speak the language of the earth that includes us no longer as a major menace, but as once again true partners.
