Sermons
EARTH SUNDAY
Lea Hall
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
April 17, 2005
What famous television personality said, "It's not easy being green"? [slide of Kermit Director] Yes, Kermit The Frog, the Muppet! How true it is still.
Some of you know enough about the state of the environment to be wondering, why celebrate Earth Day? You may be thinking glumly, we're goners anyway. One day I stood in an elementary school classroom with sixty-some third graders seated on the floor around me. As I finished my rainforest talk & slide show on behalf of the Sierra Club, a small unsmiling boy raised his hand. "Why do you bother?" he asked. "Excuse me?" I said. "It's not going to matter anyway," he said. Although I gave him my standard third-grade level story about how the personal is political, everyone's important, everyone can help, I could see he was not persuaded. He was already full of despair. That young man would be 24 years old now, and I wonder what he thinks about the state of the earth today. His question is one we all need to answer. Why bother?
It was really my mother who inspired me in this direction. She's very ill, and I am afraid that she's dying. It's not something that's happened all of a sudden. The disease has been developing over many years, and we've all tried to deny it, pretending that the symptoms were part of her normal life cycle. But the symptoms have grown more severe so that now many of us who know her recognize that she is failing. The sickness takes different forms: various cancers, a dimming of vision as if a haze has fallen over her eyes, trouble with elimination, hot flashes bringing intense thirst, something like immune-system breakdown where parts of her body seem to be at war with other parts, and increasing weakness over time. The doctors say her persistent low-grade fever is slowly rising, and they're helpless to stop it.
Everyone's mother has to go sometime, you may be thinking, and so this isn't the saddest story in the world. But this mother is special. She has been generous to countless individuals, giving life to more people than you can imagine, feeding from her gardens, giving gifts such as jewels to some, flowers to others. She was extraordinarily beautiful in her younger years, and even now, on her good days, her beautiful features can take your breath away. Yes, she's old. She's four and a half billion years old [slide of full earth]. Here's a recent picture of my mother, and yours, our earth, known to her friends as Gaia. My human mother, I'm happy to say, is in her prime and is with us here today along with my father. [slide of Halls]
The real tragedy about our mother's illness is that it's an unnatural death she's facing. Mother Earth suffers not from old age, but from the carelessness of her own children. With a little more long-range planning, with a little more loving attention from us to the details of her health, I believe she could actually recover from this malaise and live well for many more years. But certain of her children have a character flaw that prevents them from behaving in a loving and helpful manner toward our mother. This character flaw is what they call independence. They say they've won it, this independence, and it's rightfully theirs. They say that it's a free country and they can do what they want. I believe independence has its place. But they've carried a good idea to an extreme. They don't understand they're still connected to our mother and to all the rest of us.
How can we help our mother Earth? So many ways, on so many levels. We UU's, of all people, can teach others to perceive not only independence but interdependence, to think not only of individualism but also of globalism, to extend the concept of family from the nuclear family to the human family, to think not of one lifetime but of our children's children's children's time, to see that the whole planet is really our backyard.
Let me show you. Here's the church viewed by satellite, [photo] here's just to the east a picture of my backyard. [slide of the garden] Here's someone else's backyard [slide of green lawn]. Somewhere in here is your backyard, [Map of southwest Florida] All the backyards that include grass that needs fertilizer leak nutrients into the storm sewers, rivers, and bay. A little north of us is Tampa, which sends us smog downwind. East of us are phosphate mines and agricultural fields and groves spread with sewage sludge from our human waste. Southeast of us are sugar cane fields in whose name the Everglades were drained and poisoned. West of us is the Gulf, still with red tide that not only drives us from our beaches but kills fish and manatees, 64 this year, I believe. [slide of dead manatee] That red tide is probably caused by the nutrient runoff from our backyards, golf courses, and farms. [split screen with dead manatee and green lawn] All over the state clearing and burning proceeds, to make room for more people, more houses, more roads, and with every tree burned and every mile driven, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, and global warming occurs. The same thing is happening all over our country. [slide of US map] Everywhere people live, we burn fossil fuels to light our lights. [slide of earth at night, with the lights] Who's burning the most energy? The same people who are burning all the lights at night. Mother Earth has a fever, and the fever is going up all the time. She suffers cold sweats as the polar ice, the glaciers, and Greenland melt. Fever and chills, and what is brewing in our backyard is a climate change that will be catastrophic if it is not stopped. Climatologists say that Florida is ground zero for the effects of global warming and its climate changes.
People used to say, when confronted with a proposed new high rise building or a nuclear waste storage site or an incinerator or a chemical company that would dump toxic waste into the land and water, Not In My Back Yard, or NIMBY. [slide of Not In My Back Yard] And the NIMBY's got a bad reputation, for being selfish and wishing to maintain their lifestyles at someone else's expense. It's understandable. Nobody wants a mess in her own backyard. But if the whole planet is our backyard, then we don't want this mess anywhere, period. When we throw stuff away, when we burn gasoline and coal, there is no "away" anymore. Let's test this idea. Would you take in a deep breath? Now, as you hold your breath, is the air in your lungs part of you? Is the oxygen passing through your lungs into your blood stream you? I think so. Let the breath out. Now is that air you expelled part of you? It seems not. You exhaled it "away." Imagine now that you had a cold, and when you exhaled last week, the person next to you inhaled the cold germs. You got well, and now they're exhaling it back to you. You can catch the cold again. The germs go away, but we still have a relationship with them. And so it is with everything we exhale, give off, throw away, from our bodies or our cars or our homes. And all of this, everything in you and outside you is made of the same few elements: mostly hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, a little of this, a little of that. Physicists tell us that these same bits have been around since the beginning of the universe. We are, literally, stardust. [slide of stars] Matter is neither created nor destroyed. The waves and particles that are present now, in your body and my body, are the same stuff that's been recycled through the galaxy, from the Big Bang beginning. We can't throw away nuclear waste, not really. We certainly can't escape the effects of our own greenhouse gases. I used to have a neighbor who came out with his leaf blower and blew all his grass clippings off his driveway into the middle of the street in front of his house. Did he think he'd made them go away? Sometimes they blew right back in his face. In any case, the pollution from running a leaf blower for half an hour is equivalent to driving an average car 110 miles. Did he imagine that pollution from his leaf blower would just go away? There is no away anymore. We have to deal with our own mess.
You may find this depressing. Depression is made up of helplessness and hopelessness. But if you feel depressed, just under the surface, you also have anger. [slide?] I'm here to ask you to get into that anger. Use it. Channel it. Your birthrights of clean air, fresh water and fertile soil are being ripped out from under you right now. How would you kids like it if your parents spent all their money on themselves, before they took care of you? Would you feel ripped off?
This is exactly what we adults are doing. We are spending and spoiling the earth for our own short-term comfort and ambitions. We're going to be dead and you're going to be left with a messed up planet. Aren't you angry about that?
We adults face insurmountable opportunities every day now. Please visit the Social Concerns table today to pick up colorful information and find out how you can be a better steward of earth. Field trip to Florida House. [hold Compact Fluorescent lightbulb overhead] Here at church we'll be bringing you a stream of bright ideas, including these high efficiency light bulbs, about how to live a greener, more beautiful, more sustainable life. As our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids figure out what we've done to the earth in our lifetimes, they're going to come to us and say: did you not know? And if you knew, how could you not have acted? We have a lot of work ahead of us.
Saving the earth will take energy. When we say Not In My Back Yard, NIMBY, we mean the whole earth. [whole earth slide-> NIMBY] So this dance we're going to do a little later in the service, the NIMBY, is a way to energize ourselves so we can do what needs to be done. First, though, we'll turn inward while we listen to a meditation by Rev. Don Beaudreault and then some special music.
Whenever you need some energy, you can do the NIMBY! The NIMBY tune is the Rolling Stones' "Between a Rock and a Hard Place." I need some help up here; please come up if you know the dance already or if you just need to move your body now. [Rolling Stones music comes on, volume gradually up as kids get into place on stage. Tune lasts 4 minutes] This is a simple little dance that you can vary as you like. Add your own footwork, if you like. You can do the head part in your seats: forward/ backward rock 4 times, shake head side to side 5 times in rhythm to music. Now the arms circle over head twice, out to table plane once, out through the wheel plane once. Now without hurting the person next to you, press twice with flexed wrist to your right side, then twice to your left side. We do the mirror image for you up here. [do dance: ] [slides of beautiful earth: forests, whale, etc.]
[volume lowers] Remember: we're between a rock and a hard place. We have a right to be angry. We have a right to speak up for the earth, for our back yard. Say it with me: [NIMBY + full earth slide] Not In My Back Yard! Not In My Back Yard! Not In My Back Yard! Blessed be, and keep on dancing in your life.