A Sermon for Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
by Rev. Clare Butterfield
January 11, 2004
Good morning. It is good to
be with you this morning, so early in the New Year. For those of you who don't
know me I'm the community minister referred to on the masthead and website.
Most of you probably do know that at this point. My community ministry consists
of directing the non-profit called Faith in Place, located at the Center for
Neighborhood Technology on the north side of Chicago. It's one of the
all-congregation projects this congregation has chosen for the last couple of
years and people here have been engaged in both the Oak Park Circle and in
supporting our urban agriculture project for young people in Humboldt Park and
Logan Square called From the Ground Up. Thank you for that. Thank you for the
more that you're going to do in the future.
Faith in Place is an interfaith environmental project with
an emphasis on both environmental sustainability and economic justice. We try
to create opportunities for people from the religious community to reflect on
what their faith has to tell them about caring for the Earth and each other. We
hope that this reflection will move people to action to improve the ecological
outlook of the planet. It's an outlook in some serious need of brightening, as
I don't have to tell you.
I don't usually stand up here and give you bad news. And
maybe you thought that in a religion that doesn't believe in hell there is no
bad news. Today we are going to talk about the Earth. This world, not the next
one. Bad news.
Sometimes the environmental conversation can seem a little
off message in the religious community. Food, clothing and shelter are seen as
fitting more easily within the mission of the average religious congregation.
Environmental matters can seem like a luxury issue.
I think that's a factor in large part of the emphasis of
the information that gets shared. I value open spaces and endangered species,
and think that learning to value things intrinsically - for their own sakes - is
very much a religious discipline. But I think that caring for this earth has as
much to do with justice for people as it does with recognizing the innate value
of non-human things. Caring for the earth is religion in practice. Religion,
as Alfred North Whitehead says, is world-loyalty. The process of becoming
religious is the process of merging the self into the whole.
I'm something of an evangelist both for Alfred North
Whitehead and for the environment. Two more harmless forms of evangelism you
could hardly hope to find. My evangelism for both is intended to explode the
too-small view we sometimes have of our relationships to one another and to the
living systems that surround and support us. Those systems give us life. We
conduct our lives at the sacrifice of other life. There is no way around this.
A religious task, and perhaps the main one, is to be self-aware about the cost
of our existence, and to be as loving as we can in response to it. Faith is
practiced. Your ideas about religion, about God, about ethical conduct, have
value, but they have the greatest clarity in what you do. There is no escaping
that simply by being here we do damage. We are required to reckon with that -
we are required to act in light of it.
The thing we've been looking at in the last few months at
Faith in Place is the recent research on the rate of depletion of fossil fuels.
Not, ostensibly, a theological subject. Bear with me. It is directly relevant
to the thing I was just talking about.
Fossil fuel depletion is not a subject for the faint of
heart. Data wonks fair best, and fortunately a lovely one wandered into Faith
in Place a few months ago asking how he could help. This is a student at CTS,
who spent the twenty years before that working in the area of renewable energy,
a subject in which he has a PhD. Volunteers like that you don't get every day
(except we get them strangely often), so I asked him to please explain to us
what our energy program should look like, besides a fitful attempt to encourage
the development of local wind power.
What Mark came back with was a data set. Now Mark is a
fairly low-key guy. It's hard to tell when he's excited about something. But
what his data shows is the rate of depletion of oil and gas in the world, and
the rate at which we are dependent on them.
For example, there is the first slide in the power point
presentation. It's a line with a bump in it. The bump is about three-quarters
of an inch wide. It represents the period of time over which we are using up
the world's supply of oil and gas. The line leading up to the bump represents
the time it took to produce that supply. The line is five miles long.
Three-quarters of an inch. Five miles.1
Any lack of proportion on that scale is a religious
problem.
The presentation Mark worked up for us goes in to
substantially more detail and spells out the basis for his conclusions. He maps
the rate of discovery of oil and gas and demonstrates historical patterns
between discovery and extraction. Worldwide discovery peaked about 30 years ago
- extraction peaks about this far behind discovery and there have been no new
large fields found.2
In fact there can't be, because the geological scientists are pretty clear that
the world has been mapped. There won't be new fields of any significance
because there isn't anyplace left to look that we haven't already looked.
The way that discovery and extraction work, the big fields get found first,
and then the smaller fields around them. The big finds are over - we may still
find some small sources of both oil and gas, but extraction will start to drop
shortly for both, and the drop off is pretty steep once it begins.
Demand, meanwhile, is rising.
I'm not going to walk you through a PowerPoint presentation
that you can't see. If you want to see it, you can come to the first of our
Social Mission Sunday presentations at the end of February, the beginning of
Lent. In the meantime, I want to share with you some of the statistics from it
just so you can have the pleasure of finding your head where mine's been for the
last few months. Given that discovery of oil and gas is over, and the trend on
discoveries has been unvaryingly and sharply downward for thirty years now, we
can anticipate that production will peak for both fuel types in about 2015. In
other words: now.
Given that estimate (and no reliable estimate varies from
it by more than ten years) and given more or less steady trends in the United
States, our nation's demand for oil and gas will equal world supply in the year
2040. After that it will exceed it. Let me restate that in case it slipped by
you - our nation's demand, one nation by itself, will exceed the world's
production of oil and gas in the year 2040.3 Thirty-seven years
from now. And after that it gets worse.
So, you may ask, is there untapped production anywhere
where oil or gas has already been discovered? The oil producing nations are all
producing at full capacity everywhere in the world with the exception of two:
Saudi Arabia and Iraq. In the case of natural gas the world supply will be eked
out a little longer by production capacity mainly in one other nation: Russia.
Have you looked at a newspaper lately, by any chance? I
know you've had a lot to do, but have you? And how old are your children?
Now the first question I would expect from you on hearing
this data is whether or not this could possibly be true. I would urge you to
accept it - the numbers are drawn mostly from that left-wing-looniest of
sources, the U.S. Department of Energy web page, and the rest came from
professionals in the field such as senior scientists at the U.S. Geological
Survey. So I would encourage you to spend only a modest Unitarian moment
pausing on "what if Mark is wrong?" and move right along to asking yourselves
"what if he's right?"
That might lead you to ask question number two: why isn't
our government concerned about this? Partly because they have adopted a policy
of number fudging. They have their own table of discovery predictors, and the
line that that USGS deems the 95% likely line goes on a steep angle down. The
line they have glibly entitled the 50% likely scenario, however, makes a
mysterious and slight turn back up - predicting large fields yet undiscovered.
Why the line would reverse after 30 years of solid downwardness is mysterious.
Why the U.S. policy would be based on the 50% line rather than the 95% line is
more mysterious.
Then there are the pie-in-the-sky scenarios. The Bush
administration has announced that it will go full-bore toward a hydrogen
economy. The "we're going to fix it with technology" angle. Only hydrogen
doesn't just float around loose in the actual universe that the rest of us live
in. It tends to pop up bonded to other things. And it requires energy to
separate it. Presently, it requires more energy than it produces.
The other thing the administration plans to do is to switch
back to coal and nuclear. Coal could buy us another 50 years, which might be
enough time to cook up another solution, but cook up is the right term, because
that kind of coal use will hasten the already alarmingly rapid warm-up of the
atmosphere.
I won't even get into the "let's build little town-sized
nuclear reactors everywhere" scenarios because while I can read the data I've
just shared with you and still sleep some nights, that scares me.
At the root of all of this is something we might call, for
lack of a better term, evil.
Because how do we use all that energy - that wonderful gift
of time - the warmth of the sun that came tenderly to the earth over millions of
years and was stored in the plants and then in the animals that made the plants
and then in the earth when the animals died and slowly transformed themselves
into fossil fuels that we burn in an instant? We don't even use it in stuff.
We use in the stuff we wrap stuff in. We use it to move our stuff around. We
use it to produce food as part of the green revolution - that has moved many
economies in the developing world from sustainable agriculture to agriculture
that requires ten calories of fuel for every calorie of food it produces.
Hunter-gatherers used to manage with a one-calorie input for a ten-calorie
output. We've managed to reverse that. Darwin would be puzzled.
Bad enough the time relationship between production and use
is as out of whack as it is - then we waste it.
And what is evil about waste isn't just some puritanical
notion of knowing our place. Waste is the denial of relationship. And denial
of relationship is the root of sin. Horizontally, waste is putting our own
desires ahead of the needs of our brothers and sisters. Waste is buying things
we don't need, wrapped in packaging we need even less while the typical resident
on this little planet lacks sufficient calories each day to support life.
Vertically, waste is squandering a beautiful gift - bound up in our own
selfishness and a desire to dominate and not seeing the persuasive, gentle
influence of the sun flowing through the atmosphere and bringing us everything
we need to live simply and well, if we could just alter our rate of consuming it
and live as if we were within nature instead of opposed to it. Waste is five
miles to 3/4 of an inch. Waste is a denial of providence - it is a sin against
God. Waste is disloyalty to the world.
We have some very important choices to make in the next few
decades about how we are related to the rest of the people we share the earth
with. As residents of the only remaining superpower we have more choices to
make than do the citizens of most other nations. They're going to have to
decide where to put the windmills. We're going to have to decide whether we're
going to shift our economy to conservation, to frugality, to slowing down and
living in greater appreciation of less stuff. We're going to have to decide
whether to switch to renewable sources of energy. Or whether we might simply
assume a dominant position on the globe and go after the few remaining sources
of the energy we need by force of arms - to review, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia.
Do you think those decisions are already being made? Are they in your interest
as a citizen and a member of a religious community?
The world is already a hard place to live. I open the
newspaper and I expect to see flames leaping out of it at my breakfast table.
The world is on fire and mentalities of scarcity will not improve an already bad
situation.
And as a theological matter, we at Faith in Place always
leave a door open for hope, but I must tell you that lately I am frankly finding
that harder and harder to do. I believe in the God described by Whitehead - the
God of gently persuasive influence, calling us to justify the fact of our
existence by the nature of our existence. I am in competition in that belief
for the minds of religious adherents with the likes of John Ashcroft who believe
that we dangle by a slender thread over the gaping maw of hell. And the
evidence is more with him than with me lately - because people who are motivated
by that belief have an uncanny tendency to create a world that tends to prove
it. So, my Universalist friends, we'd better get out there.
Alfred North Whitehead, in his book Religion in the Making,
described the old theological idolatries in the context of offering a new
description of a limited God. He said this about the God of unlimited power:
This worship of glory arising from power
is not only dangerous: it arises from a barbaric conception of God. I suppose
that even the world itself could not contain the bones of those slaughtered
because of men intoxicated by its attraction. …The glorification of power has
broken more hearts than it has healed.4
Later in the same chapter he
says:
In its solitariness the spirit asks,
What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such
value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective
universe. Religion is world-loyalty.5
Real religion - the kind that draws us to act in ways that
are in the long-term interest of the whole society - is a loyalty to the world.
A loyalty to the world, Whitehead says, that eventually causes value for the
self to give way to value for the other, until value for the other becomes value
for the self. God draws us toward that understanding with the power of
persuasion and goodness, not with the power of force. But which theological
view is ascendant on the world stage right now?
When I spend any time outside, at the lakeshore, in
Humboldt Park which is right outside my front door, at the Morton, or coming
down those streets in Oak Park where the elm trees still form a canopy, I am
reminded that we are surrounded by a gift of such immensity that it would take a
lifetime of gratitude to begin to acknowledge it. Good old Universalist,
fearless, gratitude. Instead of the Calvinist fear of not being one of the
elect - of needed proof of God's favor in this life to document the existence of
God's favor in the next. Of needing to have all the oil for ourselves because
those Godless Muslims can't possibly deserve it, nor those atheistic Russian
ex-communists either.
Did you think that theology had no role to play in
geopolitical matters?
Do you believe in a God of love who calls to us all equally
from the heart of the universe? Get out there and act like it - have the
courage to say so - the world needs to hear it. The world needs to know that
it's ok to believe it. The world needs the courage to be loving and hopeful, to
believe that we will figure out how to share the last few sparks of fire, and in
sharing them will give rise to the next generation of energy. The world needs
to believe that there is enough love in the creation we all must share to light
it and heat it and feed it and that fear is what's driving the illusion of
scarcity.
I can stand up here and preach the data of fossil fuel
depletion at you and you will accept that because I'm an environmental community
minister that's my job. But if you are serious about being in the world as a
person who claims to be religious, it is your job too. This is the real
condition of the world and you are not excused from it, whatever you spend your
days doing. You need a good description of the material world we live in and
the trans-rational reality of the abiding love of God whatever you would choose
to call that.
The God we describe is the God we will see the next day or
the next year or the next decade in the newspaper and it matters.
The society our religion helps to shape is the one that
will make decisions over the next few decades that will win or lose everything
familiar and dear.
Religion is practiced. You may have a metaphysical
concept of the world. You may have an ethic. You may have a theory about the
nature of God. But if you are moving at all you are doing damage, and the
solution to that is not to stop moving. It is to move in a way that is
most closely aligned with the divine call that you know you can hear in the best
discernment of your heart. What does that have to do with fossil fuel?
Everything. Not only do we conduct our lives in the modern world at the expense
of the lives we currently share the planet with, we fuel the current fit with
the accumulation of centuries of other life. We live on the bones of the
accumulated sacrifice of billions. This is not practicing any but the most
monstrous system of belief - it cannot by justified by any belief that is
consonant with the history and teachings of Unitarian Universalism or any other
religion I know and interact with in my ministry. We have to do
something different, and the change that is required is on such a scale that to
achieve it will take not only the initiative of a world full of people of good
will but the initiative of God God-self.
I would give up hope altogether myself but the God I
believe in and love recalls me, and reminds me that despair is the one
impermissible theological position. To that knowledge I am obedient. I hear
that call and I follow it. I continue to believe in it and I continue to
examine it in light of the true data of the world. I would urge you to do the
same, and not to think that you can separate your faith from the kinds of
distressing information I have shared with you this morning. Faith is
practiced. What we believe is best illustrated, most clearly illustrated by
what we do outside this building. Our inmost heart is revealed daily in the
quality of our passage through the world. If our faith is to have any value it
will be because it finds validity, hope and love in the clear light of truth and
the clear application of reason, and not only in place of them. Because it
looks in the face of hatred and answers with a steadfast love. Because it looks
in the face of fear and answers with a quiet courage. Because it is loyal to the
world, and because we practice it in the world.
May it be so.
1Hubbert’s Peak, The Impending World Oil
Shortage, Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 6. And US DOE Energy Information Agency http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/contents.html
2Harry Longwell, Exxon Mobile, “The future of the oil and gas industry: Past approaches, new challenges,” World Energy 5(3), 2002
3US DOE Energy Information Agency (EIA) 2003
4 Whitehead, Alfred North Religion in the Making [New York, NY: Fordham
University Press 1966, publication of 1926 Lowell Lectures, originally published
by Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster], 55.
5 Whitehead Religion in the Making, 60.
© Copyright 2004 Clare
Butterfield, All Rights Reserved.
