Sermon by Lea Hall, Ph.D.
OF CHICKENS AND DRAGONS AND
FALLING SKIES
Lea Hall, Ph.D.
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
June 26, 2005
You may recall the story of Chicken Little, who on a walk in the woods was hit on the head by an acorn. He interpreted this sensation to mean that the sky had fallen. On his way to tell the king, he picked up Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky and Turkey Lurkey. But Foxy Loxy tricked them all into following him home, where his family ate the naïve alarmists for dinner, and the king never did hear about the sky falling.
The power of fables such as Chicken Little lies in their threat of awful consequences for wrong action. This particular story’s lesson is the folly of jumping from personal experience to global conclusions, compounded by the folly of listening to false advice. Those of us who carry Chicken Little’s legacy in our cultural baggage are loathe to believe that global catastrophe could ever be heralded by small signs in the world around us. And we distrust experts who offer to show us the way.
Look at our response to global warming, for example. Acorn after acorn falls on our heads: drought, intense storms, melting glaciers, unseasonable heat, mild winters, reports from climatologists that the earth’s average temperature is up. But we are smarter than Chicken Little, and we refuse to interpret these signs as warnings of catastrophe. We dismiss the experts with their mystification, their abstract models, their hesitations and qualifications.
But suppose Chicken Little was right. Suppose the context of the acorn falling was that it was midsummer, too early for acorns to mature, so that the acorn falling meant something was radically wrong with the oak tree, the forest, and the sky. Suppose that in the parlance of chickens, “The sky is falling,” translates to mean, “The biosphere is severely imbalanced, and if it continues in its present course, life as we know it will end.” Suppose, in short, that the sky really is falling.
Environmental literature is hard to read and environmental talks are hard to hear. They leave us feeling distrustful and worried about problems that require technological and political solutions beyond our competence. Some of us may feel guilty that we aren’t doing enough, yet we don’t know what to do. Sorting out the relevant and the true from the barrage of information available now on global warming seems an overwhelming task. Messages of hope are rare. With each new climatology report, our sense of doom deepens.
It is this sense of doom and despair that prevents our doing what needs to be done. And so, at root, what we face is a spiritual problem. We must find a way of fusing our lifestyles with a sense of the sacred. The way we live now tends to split the sacred from the secular, mind from matter, spirit from body, and nature from civilization.
These splits have tempted us to master nature through economic rationality, devastating the planet in the process. Without regard for the long term consequences of industrial development and large-scale agribusiness, we have replaced jungle with desert, we have eroded topsoil, we have poisoned the air and water to the point that environmental illness has become a plague in eastern Europe; famine the norm in Sudan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Malaysia; irreversible destruction of rainforest the last resort in Latin America and Indonesia.
These things you may know. What we have forgotten, though, is that we human beings are not only the agents of environmental destruction. We are also a part of nature. Even the greenest, tree hugging-est, granola crunchiest of us are also part of the body politic. We are not only part of the solution, we have also always been part of the problem. Without our cooperation, none of these processes would have happened. This is hard to accept. It’s tempting to blame others. The administration. The Detroit car manufacturers. The oil industry. The people who drive vehicles with worse mileage than mine. It’s tempting to blame Them. They should pass a decent energy bill. They should make more fuel efficient cars. They should live more simply. It’s tempting to say, I am nothing like Them.
But They happen to be more successful at getting what they want, right now. If my side were in power, things would be better. You know, that’s what They were saying, a few years ago. They worked hard to wrest control of the White House and Congress, and they won. So, in that respect, I’m a little bit like Them. If I had the power I would use it to manifest my own values. This is the truth. I’m a little bit like Them.
When I think about it, each of us is trying to make the world the way we want it. We have a limited number of productive years in life, we do what we can with them, we live as well as possible. We all had mothers, and we all return to dust in the end. At that level, the level of creature pursuing what I believe to be a good life, I’m nothing but Them.
This is a profound truth. These three ideas, I’m nothing like Them, I’m a little bit like Them, and I’m nothing but Them, are all true. Some of you may feel offended at this notion. When I suggested at a forum that there are evangelical Christians working to take better care of the earth, and they are like us, some people were offended. Yes, they’re different. But they’re also the same. From now on, we need to learn to live with these paradoxes. Blaming gets us nowhere. Separating us from them gets us nowhere. But there are things worth doing together.
As we wake up, we find lots of opportunities to become active. We don’t have to start from scratch. Many of us in the church may already regard ourselves as environmentalists. Others may consider whatever efforts are possible as trivial to the ecological crisis facing the earth. Some social justice activists call environmentalism fluff, a white middle class indulgence that has neither social action value nor relevance for the disempowered people of the earth. In fact, global warming has rendered that argument moot, since it will be the poor and disempowered who suffer most first. Care of the earth is now being hailed by many faith communities as the most important social justice issue, the central moral imperative of our time.
The link between poverty and environmental problems is indisputable. And the Third World is developing as fast as it can, increasing their greenhouse gas production. The only way for us to slow global warming is to correct our own destructive habits and help them do likewise. Certainly we need to pass the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship bill and move toward compliance with the Kyoto protocol.
But once we’ve sent our letters, made our phone calls, changed our light bulbs, adjusted our thermostats, modified our driving habits, we come to even more difficult choices about earth stewardship. It’s easy to obsess about something tangible like cups. For our coffee hour, should we use Styrofoam, paper, or washable cups? The latter means more work and more energy spent heating the dish water. Styrofoam requires petroleum to manufacture and lasts for years. Paper costs trees and comes coated with chemicals that we don’t want in the air or water. Now there are biodegradable cups made from corn, but they’re expensive. Do we each carry a reusable cup to church? Does it really make any difference?
Certainly what we drive does make a difference. Many of us feel a little guilty when we get in the car now. There is talk about the danger of environmentalism becoming the new Puritanism.
One day some years ago this new Puritanism crept into my debate between whether to drive or bike to work. It was a little rainy and I was pressed for time so I drove my car guiltily. No sooner was I out of the garage and moving down the alley than a sparrow flew into the windshield and died instantly. Distraught, I bemoaned to my daughter that if I had biked, that sparrow would have still been alive. I know that we Unitarian Universalists supposedly believe in universal salvation, but I confess that my faith was shaken by that harbinger, the death of that sparrow. I read the sparrow’s death as a cosmic rebuke of my sloth. I reverted to a Calvinist kind of belief in salvation by works. Only if I would do the right thing would my conscience be salved and my soul be saved. My daughter, whose theology at age twelve was pretty free of Calvinism, argued that I might just as easily have killed the bird with my bike. Impossible, I told her. Birds can cope with bicycles. I had been undisciplined and impure. The bird’s blood was on my head.
Three days later, I was doing the right thing. I was biking conscientiously to an appointment with a world-famous expert on global warming, and I was pedaling hard because one wrong turn had made me ten minutes late. As I rushed down a hill, a sparrow flew into the front wheel of my bike. It was killed instantly. A second harbinger. Our minister had spoken that fall about how harbingers come when we need guidance, when we aren’t rational. That harbingers come to get us moving on our hero’s journey toward bliss, but sometimes they lead us through an unconscious shortcut to face our dragons. Now, how would you read this sign? Another cosmic message? Another acorn falling on my head? I’m pretty ecoliterate, but there are some signs that I find hard to read. Ecoliteracy is a difficult path, winding between despair on one side and a new Puritanism on the other. My first sparrow harbinger led me on a shortcut to the dragon of Puritanism. Then in three days, the amount of time it takes for a crucifixion and a resurrection, a second sparrow harbinger led me straight to the dragon of despair. This dragon taunted me: your best efforts don’t matter. Your life costs the lives of other beings. Your conservation efforts are misguided. You can save some gasoline, but you can’t save the planet or even an innocent sparrow.
Dejected and breathless, I arrived at the office of the global warming expert. Here was a scientist who argues that global warming is now the single greatest threat to life on this planet. In technical but clear terms he explains that we must abandon fossil fuels immediately if we are to avoid global catastrophe. In my zeal, I had written a challenge to him to do something to get people to prevent global warming, and he had agreed to meet me.
“What can we do?” I asked him. Imagine my surprise when this guru of global warming, this man who spends his time sounding the alarm, confessed off the record that it was already too late. That the lag in the warming means that by living the way we have, we’ve already committed to many decades of continual warming. That the administration is blocking international negotiations to limit greenhouse gases, that the United Nations is impotent. That individual governments are too slow to respond, that compliance follows international law slowly if at all. That by the time we have reduced our production of greenhouse gases, it will be too late. That we might as well speed up our use of fossil fuels and get it over with, so the earth can move on to its next phase. I had indeed followed my harbinger directly to the dragon’s lair: my dragon sat dressed in professorial tweed, equipped with the latest computers, and immersed in contagious despair. “What about grassroots action?” I asked, incredulous. He complained that environmentalism lacks visionary leadership in this country. All the big environmental organizations are pursing their traditional conservation-centered agendas while ignoring the problem of global warming. He compared the present crisis with the need in the ‘70’s for antinuclear activism. He recalled working with other concerned scientists to mobilize grassroots action through existing organizations, and of their failing to connect, with one exception. Anthropologist Margaret Mead was the member of his group who approached the churches. Eventually, after several years of her patient lobbying, the National Council of Churches joined in the anti-nuclear movement and mobilized tremendous popular opposition to the arms race, opposition which continued as long as necessary in UU congregations.
“Okay then,” I said, feeling a little better, “let’s go through the churches.”
“You can’t do it again,” he objected. “The National Council of Churches is dead. The churches are dead. And I’m too old to go through this again. You have to be young to sustain that kind of activity.”
And so our interview ended as, ironically, the guru went off to yet another radio interview, believing in his heart that nothing he does matters. Like Chicken Little, he fell prey to his dragon. Chicken Little and his friends followed their harbinger, the acorn falling from the sky, to their dragon, the fox. They made the mistake of trusting, rather than confronting, their dragon. The global warming guru, having faced his dragon of despair for decades, having seen the anti-nuclear movement contribute to the end of the Cold War, having prepared to celebrate his victory over that dragon, turned only to find a fiery new dragon towering over him. The new dragon is dressed as global warming, but its real name is Despair.
For me and for many of you, the dragon’s name is Despair. A few things have changed in the sixteen years since I visited that dragon. Global warming has proceeded. People ignored it, denied the truth of it. But now we’re noticing, finally. It’s in the news, and it’s not going away. The UUA identified global warming as the study-action issue for two years. The National Council of Churches has found its voice again and is calling care of the earth the central moral imperative of our time. This is not just one among many issues. Earth stewardship is the central moral imperative of our time, and climate change will eclipse all other social issues.
We come to our spiritual community looking for meaning in life. This church, like all churches today, needs meaningful work. Just as the Universalist Church at the turn of the twentieth century identified the need for universal literacy as a critical issue of that time, we can identify the need for universal ecoliteracy as the critical issue of our time. Our resources as a community, with our high level of education and our professional expertise, our relative affluence, our tradition of commitment to social justice, and our strong desire to help save the earth, make us prime candidates for this project. It is people like ourselves who must recognize the need to alter our lifestyles and to mobilize politically in order to avert ecological holocaust. As evangelical leader Jim Wallis says, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
We possess the resources and are gathering the knowledge necessary to change our own behavior, beginning with our church home and our personal homes, and expanding into the larger community. It is time to heal the splits between the sacred and the secular, mind and matter, body and spirit, nature and civilization. The sky really is falling, and we must tell the kings, the queens, the presidents, the Congress, the power companies, our neighbors and friends, and our children. We want to be proud to answer when one day these children ask us, “What were you doing when the sky started to fall?”