"And It Came to Pass, Not to Stay"

Readings:

Reading 1, from "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis",
Science, March 1967, by Lynn White, Jr.:

"...our present combustion of fossil fuels threatens to change the
chemistry of the globe's atmosphere as a whole, with consequences
which we are only beginning to guess. With the population explosion,
the carcinoma of planless urbanism, the now geological deposits of
sewage and garbage, surely no creature other than man has ever managed
to foul its nest in such short order.

"There are many calls to action, but specific proposals, however worthy
as individual items, seem too partial, palliative, negative.... The
simplest solution to any suspect change is, of course to stop it, or,
better yet, to revert to a romanticized past: make those ugly gas
stations look like Anne Hathaway's cottage or (in the Far West) like
ghost-town saloons. The "wilderness area" mentality invariably
advocates deep-freezing an ecology, whether San Gimignano or the High
Sierra, as it was before the first Kleenex was dropped. But neither
atavism nor prettification will cope with the ecologic crisis of our
time.

"What shall we do? No one yet knows. Unless we think about
fundamentals, our specific measures may produce new backlashes more
serious than those they are designed to remedy....

"I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided
simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology.
Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes
toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally held not
only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly
regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the
cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not,
in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to
nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.
The newly elected Governor of California, like myself a churchman, but
less troubled than I, spoke for the Christian tradition when he said
(as is alleged), "when you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them
all." To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The
whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and the
ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries
have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because
they assume spirit in nature.

"What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature
relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get
us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or
rethink our old one. The beatniks, who are the basic revolutionaries
of our time, show a sound instinct in their affinity for Zen Buddhism,
... however, ... I am dubious of its viability among us.

"Possibly we should consider the greatest radical in Christian history
since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi.... The key to an understanding
of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility---not merely for
the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried to depose man
from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God's
creatures. With him the ant is no longer simply a homily for the
lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God:
now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in
their own ways as Brother Man does in his."

Reading 2, from "Critical Path" (1981), by R. Buckminster Fuller:

"Humanity is moving ever deeper into crisis---a crisis without
precedent....

"We are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is
... irrevocably intent upon making omni-integrated humanity
omnisuccessful, able to live "sustainingly" at an unprecedentedly
higher standard of living for all Earthians than has ever been
experienced by any; able to live entirely within its cosmic-energy
income instead of spending its cosmic-energy savings account (i.e. the
fossil fuels) ... a spending folly no less illogical than burning your
house-and-home to keep the family warm on an unprecedentedly cold
midwinter night.

"Humanity's cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of
... dividends of waterpower, tidal power, wavepower, windpower,
vegetation-produced alcohols, methane gas, vulcanism, and so on.
Humanity's present rate of total entry consumption amounts to only one
four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income. ...

"Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option
to "make it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.
It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science
initiative and technological revolution."

Reading 3, Stephen Mitchell's adaptation of Psalm 8:

Unnamable God, how measureless
is your power on all the earth
and how radiant in the sky!
When I look up at your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the multitude of stars,
what is man, that you are mindful of him,
or woman, that you gladden her heart?
Yet you made us almost like the angels
and crowned us with understanding.
You put us in charge of all creatures
and placed your whole earth in our hands:
all animals, tame and wild,
all forests, fields, and deserts,
even the pure air of the sky,
even the depths of the ocean.
Unnamable God, how terrible
is our power on all the earth!

Silent Meditation

Sermon:

First, a disclaimer. I have no credentials as an environmentalist. I
may walk the unfrequented road with open eye and ear, but on the
frequented rode, well, most of the time I'm like those rush-hour
drivers in the Horsey cartoon. But there were two events in the past
year that intrigued me and inspired me to prepare this talk.

One was a play Mary Jane and I went to a year ago at the Intiman
Theatre titled "R. Buckminster Fuller: The History [and Mystery] of
the Universe", by D.W. Jacobs. This was a one man show starring Ron
Campbell as Fuller. Campbell has taken this show all around the
country. As many of you know, Fuller, who died in 1983 at the age of
88, was the inventor of the geodesic dome. But in this play,
described as a "roller coaster for the brain" by the PI reviewer, we
see Fuller's other sides as well: writer, teacher, architect,
engineer, mathematician, poet.

The second inspiration was a course I took - actually sat in on - last
spring, Environmental Studies 450B, "Nature in Scripture," taught by
Johnny Palka, Co-director of the "Program on the Environment" at the
UW. I'd like to thank Inge Theisen, who gave me the heads-up on this
course. There were 13 students, a lot of discussion, and four
excellent outside speakers representing Judaism, Christianity, Islam
and Buddhism. Even though I did not take it for credit, I did hand in
all the writing assignments - except the last term paper. I feel
guilty about that, so another reason for picking this topic is to
finish up that class.

Of course it's a truism that everybody likes Nature (with or without a
capital N). It's wired in, we think. Even taking into account its
annoyances---like nettles and black flies---nature has us. Here's
another poem by Mary Oliver...

Every morning the world is created.
Under the orange sticks of the sun
the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again
And fasten themselves to the high branches---
and the ponds appear like black cloth
on which are painted islands of summer lilies.

If it is your nature to be happy you will
swim away along the soft trails for hours,
your imagination alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit carries within it
the thorn that is heavier than lead---
if it's all you can do to keep on trudging---

There is still somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth is exactly
what it wanted---

Each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer
heard and answered every morning,
Whether or not you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

There's even a name for this innate affinity, "biophilia", a term
coined by the Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson; also the title of
his 1984 book. After all, for more than 99% of human history our
ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, totally and intimately involved
with the natural world. Despite modernity, there is still evidence of
that heritage. In the US, for example, more people attend zoos every
year than all professional sporting events combined. And researchers
have even found that for people in low-income housing in Chicago,
those randomly assigned to apartments overlooking some trees or a
patch of grass reported feeling significantly healthier and more
productive than their neighbors with views of alleys and
concrete---and performed better on tests of cognitive function.

So, if we individually love our natural world, why are we as
communities and civilizations so hard on that natural world? Most
animals modify their environment to a greater or lesser degree, but we
humans have been going at it hammer and tongs for several hundred
years now, to the point that a host of prophetic voices have been
crying out for at least the last half-century, saying, in effect: let
us consider what we are doing before we go too far!

Lynn White thought he knew why we ignore those voices: a religious
heritage that wiped out paganism, stripped nature of spirit, and made
it almost a sin *not* to exploit the things nature provides. Bucky
Fuller was more prosaic; he saw the cause as simple human selfishness
and shortsightedness: concern only for the local environment and the
short term profit. Pirates of the high seas have passed their
knowledge of the ways of the world to the captains of industry, the
new pirates of the high "seize".

There is more fundamental disagreement about what to do.

Fuller maintained that we both need and can achieve a so-called
"design-science revolution" in technology that will ensure the
sustainability of all life on earth and that will reform the
environment whereby all humanity can "realize full lasting economic
and physical success, plus enjoyment of all The Earth, without one
individual interfering with or being advantaged at the expense of
another." His mantra was "do more with less": more goods from fewer
resources. It was a task for "radical technical innovators, not
political voodoo-men."

I realize now that Fuller is a somewhat dubious figure to be holding
up as a prophet. But I was so impressed with that play that last
August I checked out every book by and about him from the UW libraries
and took them along on my yearly week-long retreat to the Nooksack
river near Mount Baker. When I wasn't looking at, and listening to,
the cascading river beside my campsite, I was looking up at the tall
trees. And in the brief time left over from those non-activities, I
read at least some of those books.

Fuller's place in history is, as one biographer said in 1990, poised
between oblivion and cult status. He was a shameless self-promoter
who bounced back from failure after failure until his success with the
geodesic dome. He tended to invent neologisms whose purpose was and
is to grab attention: One does not go upstairs and downstairs, rather
outstairs and instairs; there are no world-wide phenomena, rather
world-around phenomena; his word for the process of doing more with
less was "ephemeralization".

It is certainly true that from the 1960's on he was a cult figure.
When scheduled to deliver a one-hour lecture he frequently would go on
for 3 or more hours. Reporters found it difficult to ask more than
one question. On his first interview, Martin Pawley, one of Fuller's
unofficial biographers, vowed that he "would not be put off by two
hours of autopilot geometrical and algebraic nonsense about the
universe like all the other Fuller groupies." But Pawley only got to
ask one of the ten questions he had prepared.

Of late, though, Fuller's star is ascending: there is a recent book
about him, and that one-man show.

Fuller's technological vision of the future depended on highly
automated mass production, as well as sustainable energy sources that
would make energy essentially free. Of course mass production means
mass consumption. There would be a surplus of everything. No one
would have to work at a job he or she did not truly love. The vision
included proposals for huge projects, such as a dome covering 50
square blocks of New York City, giant spherical lighter-than-air
cities with populations of thousands, huge tetrahedral cities housing
up to a million people and up to 2.5 kilometers high, and a
world-wide--make that world-around---electrical transmission scheme.

Lynn White, on the other hand, proposes a new religion instead of more
technology---or at the very least a new tack to an old religion. It
is certainly true that mainstream religions *have* been undergoing a
transformation of sorts regarding environmental awareness since the
1960s. Frederick Denny, Professor of Islamic studies at the
University of Colorado, said a few years ago:

Muslims are reflecting on their fundamental and enduring religious
teachings and discovering theological and moral bases for an
environmental ethics that have been present ... both in their sacred
[texts] and in their habits of heart ... since Islam's founding.

This kind of statement can apply to many religions these days, even
to some branches of conservative evangelical Christianity.

You can't talk about the Western Christian tradition and its view of
the three-way relationship between humanity, God, and creation without
talking about "dominion." The book of Genesis makes a point of
humankind's so-called "dominion" over the natural world in both the
creation and flood stories. To those who insist on a literal
interpretation of the Bible---and there are *tens of millions* who do
in this country---defining what this means can mean a big difference
to our environmental health. Does dominion over creation mean, in
effect, "open season" on every non-human entity? Lynn White seems to
say that this is what it evolved into: dominion plus the power of
technology has exploited soulless nature and brought about an ecologic
crisis. In this view it cannot be said that nature suffers. That
leaves only humans and God to share the suffering. But in the
Christian tradition the only suffering God is capable of is on behalf
of humans. And what about human suffering? Christianity sees the
earth as both tainted (by original sin) and temporary. Suffering will
end in the world to come. A world without end. A new heaven and a
new earth. Streets paved with gold. Many mansions. Thus in this
tradition there is no one to feel for this earth, no one to speak for
this earth.

That is one view of dominion that has worked for centuries. It is
still held by the most conservative of Christians. But it's not the
only view, and dominion is being re-investigated and re-interpreted,
even by some conservatives. In the Genesis stories, dominion was
given to---one could say foisted on---humankind. We got it without
asking, and whether we like it or not, we are stuck with it. Dominion
does not imply ownership; the earth is still the Lord's, and the
fullness thereof. Rather, dominion is a solemn responsibility
requiring much study and self-reflection. That is the spirit of the
Psalms. There is also less emphasis on the supreme importance of
humans as the be-all and end-all of creation. The book of Job makes
this clear, as God speaks to Job:

Who hath cleft a channel for the waterflood,
Or a way for the lightning and thunder;
To cause it to rain on a land where no man is,
On the wilderness, wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground,
And to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth.
(Job 38:25-27)

In this view, all of creation does not exist for human purposes.
There is a tension here between the intrinsic value of trees and
animals and their value merely because they belong to God. But even
if one feels an obligation to the earth just because it belongs to
God, the practical effect is the same: an environmental sensitivity
and awareness that benefits everybody.

In more liberal Christian traditions spirit is back in nature---indeed
it never left. Liberal Christians are rediscovering leaders and
mystics from the time of the early church onward---in particular
St. Francis---who espoused a view that nature has intrinsic value in
addition to instrumental value, and that all of creation had been
redeemed by God, not just human souls,

White rejected eastern religious traditions as not viable in the West.
It is certainly true that the conservative branch of Christianity in
this country is a long way from incorporating Buddhist or Hindu ideas,
but liberal faiths of all kinds are doing this. Even Catholics
officially acknowledge and embrace the wisdom inherent in these
traditions.

The Nature in Scripture class scratched at the surface of what
Buddhism has to say about the relationship of humans and nature.
Buddhist writers, like Christian, do not speak with one voice, but the
concern of all of them seemed to be that the purification of one's
mind is more important than any overt environmental action. The
author most accessible to my Western mindset is Thich Nhat Hanh. He
says:

Life is one. We do not need to slice it into pieces and call this or
that piece a "self." What we call a self is made only of nonself
elements. When we look at a flower, for example, we may think that it
is different from "nonflower" things. But when we look more deeply,
we see that everything in the cosmos is in that flower. Without all
of the nonflower elements---sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, heat,
rivers, and consciousness---a flower cannot be. That is why the
Buddha teaches that the self does not exist. We have to discard all
distinctions between self and non-self. How can anyone work to
protect the environment without this insight?

So then, what path to save the earth? Technological revolution or
religious revival? Well, being Unitarian Universalists, we'd have to
say: "It depends". (And if true to form we would form a task force to
look into the matter more deeply and report back recommendations.)

It may depend, I think, on the kind of technology. Freeman Dyson, the
Princeton physicist and futurist, makes an interesting distinction
between what he calls gray and green technologies:

In everything we undertake, either on earth or in the sky, we have a
choice of two styles, which I call the gray and the green. The
distinction between gray and green is not sharp. Only at the extremes
of the spectrum can we say without qualification, this is green and
that is gray. The difference between green and gray is better
explained by examples than by definitions. Factories are gray,
gardens are green. Physics is gray, biology is green. Plutonium is
gray, horse manure is green. Bureaucracy is gray, pioneer communities
are green. Self-reproducing machines are gray, trees and children are
green. Human technology is gray, God's technology is green.... Army
field manuals are gray, poems are green.

Why should we not say simply, gray is bad, green is good, and find a
quick path to salvation by embracing green technology and banning
everything gray? Because to answer the world's material needs,
technology has to be not only beautiful but also cheap. We delude
ourselves if we think that the ideology of "Green Is Beautiful" will
save us from the necessity of making difficult choices in the future,
any more than other ideologies have saved us from difficult choices in
the past. (Disturbing the Universe, 1979, pg 227)

Religious faiths based on humility and on seeing ourselves as part of
the family of all life can influence these difficult choices. But,
sadly, so can religious faiths based on a pecking order of creation
and on humans lording it over other species. Religious faiths, yours
and mine and everyone else's, are crucial to the future environmental
health of the planet.


Buckminster Fuller had a great talent for giving his books catchy
titles. "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth", "Utopia or Oblivion",
"Critical Path", and "I Seem to be a Verb" are a few. And this thin
volume "And It Came to Pass (Not to Stay)" (1976), from which I stole
the title of this talk, and from which I take this poem:

Planetary revolution is here:/But there are options---
A hot-headedly conducted,/Bloody revolution---/Everyone Loses;
A cool-headedly conducted,/Design science computer-accommodated
Wealth-accounting revolution---/All humanity wins.

Here you can see one of the big worries of the 70's and 80's. It was
*not* global warming but a hot-headedly conducted nuclear war, and the
opposite of warming: nuclear winter. In casting about for sources
while preparing this talk I happened to scan the table of contents of
Carl Sagan's 1980 book, Cosmos, and found a chapter titled "Who Speaks
for Earth?". This might have something, I thought, until in turning
to it I remembered it to be mainly about nuclear winter.

Nuclear winter came to pass, not to stay. It is just possible, a
generation hence, that we will say the same thing of global warming,
but only if we can also say then, about our present American attitude
toward fossil fuel consumption: it came to pass, not to stay. What
combination of religious ethic, technology (of any color), and luck
will it take to get us there?