When I was asked to preach on this topic I flat-out refused - refused with great passion - because it wasn't easy for me to do so. It is a topic that matters to me very much. However, I was asked to take a leading role in support of our "Green Sanctuary" project, and I felt, and indeed still feel, that anything that I will say in a sermon about it will undermine rather than support a project that I believe is essentially worthwhile - certainly in intention if not in significant result - and which our members could get behind with real enthusiasm. Nevertheless, as the conversation continued I realized that I would have to run the risk of clarifying my concerns as my silence might be interpreted as apathy or even opposition. It is neither. It is my fear that we run the risk of cleansing our consciences at the danger of our souls, that we will achieve the designation of "Green Sanctuary" with formal congratulation both from ourselves and others, which we can easily do, and feel that we have solved the problem, or are at least no longer part of it. We tend to do this, you know, about the great issues, racism, homophobia, war, environmentalism. We know that we are on the right side of the issues, we feel confident in our own virtue, and therefore we need hear or think no more about it. And it is certainly true that there is little point in rehashing the same information and the same arguments over and over again when the point has been made and the sinners are converted. And then nothing changes, and we don't have to do anything more because we're on the right side anyway and we don't really know what we can do except preach the same sermon to the same choir. So that's what we do, and everyone, including the preacher, gets tired of it.
Environmentalism is easy for us. Why there are people who think that the definition of Unitarian Universalist is organic food and Birkenstocks. We love nature and don't want it damaged, and striving for the simple life, however minimally makes us feel wholly virtuous. It was easy for my grandparents, too. When it began to be a major issue, back in the '70s they became environmentalists and got all emotional and self-righteous about litter in the places they liked to go fishing and failed to notice that the river in Cleveland was on fire and people in Los Angeles were dying from the smog. Luckily, the people in Cleveland and Los Angeles noticed it, and the river now is fairly clean and so is Los Angeles air, and our answer to global warming is to reduce our electricity use minimally, promise that our new cars will have less environmental impact and recycle our paper. That is simplistic, but so are most of our answers.
One of my concerns is an inherent classism in the program. Unitarian Universalists vehemently deny it when the accusation arises that we are classist, and in traditional terms, even though as a religious movement we are the most affluent. That denial is correct. However, we are indeed classist. The boundaries of our class are rigidly defined, not by blood, as it used to be, or by money as it often is now, but by liberal education, I suppose. The Birkenstocks are part of it. We all watch public TV and listen to NPR. We go to classical music concerts, and if we love other kinds of music we either keep it to ourselves or we turn it into an area of expertise, like the young man at the Willy Nelson concert that I heard making it an educational experience for his date by tracing for her the history and impact of country music. We read primarily for edification, slogging on through books we don't particularly enjoy because we think they're good for us. We eschew trade movies and watch only art and foreign films. There are exceptions to that, but only ones that we can be earnest about. If we do something like that just for fun we deprecate our own escapism. We are very well educated, even our politics are predictable, and we celebrate the simple life.
I had an acquaintance at one time who had the particularly annoying trait of telling me what I thought on matters of public opinion and then explaining to me why I was wrong. He was not infrequently wrong about my opinions, and even when he was right my attitudes were usually somewhat more nuanced than he allowed for, but he felt justified in pronouncing upon what he was sure I believed because of the class that he knew that I belonged to, the class to which nearly all Unitarian Universalists belong. The boundaries are very clear, and we are satisfied that ours are the correct tastes and opinions, and that those who do not share them may be worthwhile people, but not quite one of us. We seldom feel much need to examine the tastes and opinions of those who feel or think differently from us, and those who do who come to visit us feel, rightly or wrongly, that we feel a bit superior, a little, perhaps, condescending.
I was reminded of that during an exchange on the ministers' email list when one of them said that they would be having an accordion at the service on a forthcoming Sunday and wondered what hymns would be appropriate to accordion music. The answers were highly entertaining, but the biggest entertainment felt was clearly that such an "of the people" sort of instrument would be played in one of our services at all. Next thing might be a harmonica, for goodness sake! It was - yes, it was condescending. I have been lucky enough to hear marvelous classical music played on an accordion and I am aware that it was invented as a portable organ for the playing of hymn tunes, so I did not join the chorus of jests.
I was reminded again when I thought of the Green Sanctuary program. It is tailored very directly to our class of earnest, well-intentioned, well-informed, comfortable people. That is, of course, appropriate, and the things that it urges us to do may mortify the flesh a little - but that's okay, we like a little flesh-mortification in a good cause - but they will make no significant difference either to us or to the environment. It may suggest vegetarianism, but if so it does it gently, and a refusal to comply would not endanger our designation. We would still get our gold star. It would be completely irrelevant to the guy who lives in Golden Gate because he can't afford anything closer to his work at the beach and is just grateful that his old clunker can still get him there so he can get the rent paid and food on the table. He couldn't care less what its emissions are, and even if he had a hope of getting a newer car it would be the price, or more likely the availability of credit, rather than the environmental impact that would sway his choice. And as far as something like air conditioning goes, if he's got it it's already turned up as high as they can stand it to save on utility bills.
The issues are extraordinarily complex, having to do with land use and economics at the very least. They are simple for us, we think. We just reduce our fuel use and our direct emissions, use environmentally safe pesticides, pay attention to the way we eat and dress, raise the temperature in our houses and recycle, and we're doing our part. People in a different class than ours can recycle now that it's been made easy for us, but the other things simply cannot be within their purview. The issues for them are housing and transportation. Naples is probably too small and certainly too spread out to make public transportation particularly viable, and how likely is it that we ourselves will think it practicable to lug home multiple bags of groceries on a bus, with the milk likely to go sour if we have to wait too long for it? But of course we're not asked to give up our cars, just to stop driving the ones that use too much gas.
Yet is it not a matter of human survival? Is it not true that fossil fuels are limited and even outside of the issue of global warming there are such things as energy independence to think about? I do not believe that the kinds of actions that we are urged to take will make much more than a dime's worth of difference. Conservation is merely a matter of putting off the evil day when our dependence on fossil fuels will become a crisis, and the percentage of human production of greenhouse gases as a cause of global warming is still a matter of debate.
I wish it were a responsible debate. I have learned to avoid looking for information from either very liberal or very conservative sources. Both of them use models that are suspect and it has become a matter more of faith than of science. Each side issues doomsday bulletins with Florida sinking under the sea within a matter of decades, or human beings being forced to live in caves and returning to a hunter/gatherer, or at least a pre-industrial culture. Well, that last might be good for the environment, but my survival skills are strictly urban, and I'm not sure what percentage of the human race would still be alive under those conditions.
There is no question that it is the rise of technology, and with it the rise of energy consumption that has enabled the human race to survive so well as to be a danger to every other species and even to itself. Every animal when it overcomes or loses its natural enemies overpopulates. For that matter so does every living thing. That is the problem with the punk tree (I can never remember its real name - it starts with an M) and the Brazilian pepper. For the human race to survive as it is at present, and I, for one, am not ready to try disease, violence or starvation to decrease its size, vast resources of energy are necessary. Even country folks, who, according to Hank Williams, Jr. can survive need, also according to him, their pick-up trucks and guns, and unless I am sadly misinformed and such things grow on trees, it took a lot of technology and therefore energy to produce them. There is also the reality, as the Green Sanctuary project tacitly acknowledges by its low level of demand, survival has to be worth it. Life still needs graciousness, comfort, even what might be considered the luxuries of beauty to be worth continuing. Simple survival is not, at least to my way of thinking, an option.
In the long run - and perhaps it is a longer run than the continual warnings that we are running out of oil will admit - there is no sustainable environment based on fossil fuel. We will not hear it. At this present there seems to be none based on other methods of producing energy. They are too expensive, they are unreliable, they don't produce enough - to produce enough ethanol just to drive our cars would take more farmland than we can imagine - and acceptable changes in the way we live our lives could only be accomplished very slowly. The fact that we in the United States consume more of the world's energy than our population would seem to warrant is an argument that cannot sway me to personal mortification of the flesh either. I'd just like the rest of the world to be at our standard of living, not that ours should be lower.
It is not that I do not care. I hate pollution and hate the kind of waste that we countenance all the time. I even share my late grandparents' dislike of litter, and the disappearance of benign or attractive species both of plants and animals is a tragedy. That FPL plans to put a coal burning energy plant in the Everglades makes me a little crazy. Destroying the rain forests to put the land to other uses seems to me worse than self-destructive. The human need for such environments, the necessity of a balance of nature was taught to me from childhood up. However, Band-Aids ultimately will do us little good. The only answer will be - must be - a viable and renewable source of energy.
I support the Green Sanctuary project not because I think it will solve our environmental problems or even make much dent in them, but because, if we understand it correctly it will keep the love of our beautiful world and the depredations we so carelessly make on it at the forefront of our minds. If we allow ourselves to become complacent, to feel that we have done our part, that we, doing it, are no longer part of the problem and can plume ourselves on our virtue, then it will have done more harm than good. Should we achieve the designation and receive the plaque to display proudly along with the Welcoming Congregation plaque and the Fair Compensation Congregation plaque, let them not be gold stars we wear upon our brows but signposts and warnings of the direction we should be going and the good ends that we should serve. The problems are complex and not nearly so well understood as we believe, the solutions are more difficult than we imagine, but awareness and good will mixed with a certain amount of wisdom and balance will surely find solutions as they have in the past.