Earth Day / Third Sunday of Easter

“They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.” (Luke 24: 42-43)

Today is Earth Day; Friday was the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Because the oil “spill” ended up being so much bigger than we realized it would be on Earth Day 2010, Earth Day probably will be shadowed by the anniversaries of the oil spill for many years to come.

Today is also the Third Sunday of Easter, and our Gospel lesson for today (Luke 24: 36-48) is about the resurrected Jesus appearing to the disciples. Jesus asks if they have anything to eat, and they give him a piece of broiled fish, which Jesus eats. Luke’s report of Jesus eating the fish helps us to see that Jesus was truly there, that this wasn’t an apparition. It’s striking to have this reading as we observe Earth Day this year.

Fish was a basic food for the disciples and Jesus, as it was and remains for many people in the world. Fish is a principal source of protein for many people, and fishing – the occupation of several of the disciples – is still the way many people make a living.

Two years after the Gulf oil spill, fish near the oil spill site are sick. (See Cain Burdeau’s article for the Associated Press.) Evidence connecting the ulcers, black streaks, and damaged fins to the oil spill is circumstantial; what is known is that something isn’t right in that part of the Gulf ecosystem.

According to a report in the May 7, 2012 edition of The Nation entitled “Two Years After: BP’s Toxic Legacy”, people who live along the Gulf Coast are also sick. Along with fighting poor health, people have had to fight to get access to proper medical care. The article gives details of some of the justice and fairness issues involved. Surely Jesus, who healed the sick, would have us be concerned about those suffering from exposure to toxins.

The Gulf of Mexico isn’t the only place where fishing doesn’t provide the sort of healthful protein and steady livelihood it used to. The health of our ocean ecosystems as well as many freshwater ecosystems is suffering from pollution by various toxins, plastic pollution, loss of habitat, ocean acidification caused by global warming, and other changes in ecosystems brought on by warming waters. Something so basic as catching a fish and grilling it, something so basic that Luke uses it to help us see the reality of the risen Christ, is now something we can’t take for granted.

“What would Jesus eat?” may be a more instructive guide to action than “What would Jesus do?”  What basic foods will remain sustainably available to people around the world who have traditionally relied on fish and seafood for daily protein? As Saturday’s forum about the intersection of poverty and the environment   made clear, issues of environmental sustainability, poverty, and human health are interconnected. The church has always served Christ through serving the poor and sick; in today’s world, we must extend that service to the earth’s ecosystems in order to truly serve our neighbors near and far.

Praying the News: November 5 2011

Theologian Walter Wink says this about intercessory prayer:

When we pray, we are not sending a letter to a celestial White House where it is sorted among piles of others. We are engaged rather in an action of cocreation, in which one little sector of the universe rises up and becomes translucent, incandescent, a vibratory center of power that radiates the power of the universe.
 

History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. If this is so, then intercession, far from being an escape from action, is a means of focusing for action and of creating action. (Engaging the Powers, pp. 303-3-4)

When we approach our prayers for the news about the earth in this way, we pray in a spirit of hope and with a commitment to do the work God gives us to do. In that spirit, here are particular topics for prayer from this week’s news.

Almighty God, in giving us dominion over things on earth you made us fellow workers in your creation: Give us wisdom and reverence so to use the resources of nature, that no one may suffer from our abuse of them, and that generations yet to come may continue to praise you for your bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Collect For the Conservation of Natural Resources (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 827)

Please pray for:

The special sessionof the Nebraska Unicameral. The purpose of the special session is “to find a legal and constitutional solution to the siting of oil pipelines within the state”. The immediate issue that resulted in the decision to hold a special session is, of course, the proposal for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to cross through Nebraska’s Sandhills region. (See also Praying the News: Keystone XL Pipeline.)

The approaching UN climate conference (COP17) in Durban, South Africa.  As BBC environment correspondent, Richard Black, puts it: “The task, as always, will be to find enough common ground for an outcome that takes the global community of nations forwards, if only by a few steps, rather than backwards. Such steps as there may be are likely to be small ones.” Pray for progress; pray for those involved in the conference and those they represent to remain aware of the reality of the consequences of climate change on people and other living things.

Gulf oil spill cleanup workers.  Health problems linger for people who were hired to help with cleanup from the Gulf oil spill. Pray for these people and for justice to allow them full access to continuing healthcare and fair compensation.

The people of island nations, including Tuvalu. The 42-nation Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) says that proposals to delay a significant international climate agreement until 2018 or 2020 are “both environmentally reckless and politically irresponsible”. (See Island states slamwait on climate action.)  Remember especially the people of Tuvalu and Archbishop Halapua’s requests for prayers and action. (See this report from the Anglican News Service and the Green Sprouts November 3 post .)

Wisdom and compassion for us all as catastrophic weather events occur more often. The Associated Press reports that a draft of an upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts more floods, more heat waves, and more droughts in coming years.

Along with praying for these particular needs, we might pray for our own hearts to be open so we can see the needs in the world around us and gladly respond to those needs:

O heavenly Father, who has filled the world with beauty; Open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works; that, rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer for Joy in God’s Creation (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 814)

One Year After

It’s been a year since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Over this year, reports about the severity of the resulting oil spill and its effects have varied widely, and there remain conflicting reports about the long-term effects of this disaster. What do we know? What have we learned?

One thing on which the majority of people looking at its effects can agree is that we don’t know enough at this point to know what to expect in the future for the gulf and its coastal communities.

Immediately after the explosion last year, this blog had two posts that talked about it. One of them, The Day After, was written on April 23, the day after Earth Day. It talked about the discouragement of having something like this happen around the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, especially given that an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 is said to have inspired Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s proposal to have such a day. But then the post added this: “The good news the day after Earth Day is that there doesn’t seem to be a major oil spill, though there is an oil slick that at last report…measured ten miles by ten miles.” The days immediately after the explosion were like that – conflicting information, an effort to minimize worries about the disaster, and a public eager to believe the more positive reports.

On April 24 I posted Two Days After. The main point of the piece was that environmental problems were most probably not going to be solved by either the political establishment or industry. The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill had been put on hold. As for the oil rig explosion, there was this:

The Coast Guard discovered today that, contrary to earlier reports, the well that fed the oil rig that exploded and burned last week, collapsing into the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day, is leaking oil. This evening’s story from the AP about the situation reports that the oil slick has grown to a twenty by twenty mile square.

Things suddenly looked very different! As information continued to change over weeks and months, it was often hard to tell the size and scope of the disaster.

An Associated Press article from this week, Scientists: Gulf health nearly at pre-spill level, surveys some of the scientific opinions about where we stand a year later. While there is some disagreement, the overall consensus is that the health of the Gulf waters is close to where it was before the oil spill. That rating is not particularly high. The article explains:

If that pre-spill grade isn't impressive, it's because the Gulf has long been an environmental victim_ oil from drilling and natural seepage, overfishing, hurricanes and a huge oxygen-depleted dead zone caused by absorbing 40 percent of America's farm and urban runoff from the Mississippi River.

A close reading of the article reveals that while this standard sort of overall rating is back to where it was, many of the scientists expressed concerns in interviews about what we might see down the road that either hasn’t shown up yet or isn’t the sort of thing taken into account in grading the overall health of the gulf. There is simply a lack of data in some areas. Of particular concern are observations of effects on certain animals: dolphins, sea turtles, crabs. Effects on cetaceans (dolphins and whales), for example, can be found here where the NOAA Fisheries unit posts information about the “cetacean unusual mortality event” in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

What do we know? We know that environmental disasters affect all living things, including human beings. We know that ecosystems are complex and there are things we simply don’t know, such as the long-term effects of the dispersants that were used. It’s very difficult to predict the effects of this sort of disaster.

What have we learned? Apart from what scientists and the oil industry might have learned, those of us who aren’t directly involved in it have observed a couple of things. One is that collectively we have short attention spans. Once the aerial shots of the huge oil slick and the close-ups of pelicans covered in oil were gone, we moved on to other things. Little has been done to prevent another such disaster from happening partly because there is not a strong and sustained outcry from the public for policies to change. Things look pretty normal now, and we move on.

Related to this is something else we have learned yet again: we see things as isolated that are really connected. The concerns about the proposed oil pipeline through Nebraska are connected to the Gulf oil disaster; in both cases, local ecosystems are put at risk because of our addiction to oil. The situation in the Gulf is connected to the way we devalue poor people, people of color, and nonhuman creatures. It has to do with an inability to see the connection between our own consumer habits and the suffering of other people. It’s connected very much to the Gospel, to the command to love our neighbors, and to the teaching that the way we treat the most powerless people is the way we treat Christ (Matthew 25).

An assessment not of the science but of some of these other concerns comes from Patty Whitney, a Louisiana coastal communities advocate. Her piece, For Gulf Coast Residents, the Oil Spill Nightmare Continues appeared in Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics blog yesterday. She describes the ongoing social and economic effects of the oil spill on Gulf Coast communities, ending her post with these words:

The cameras and attention needed to bring light upon the injustices that continue are darkened and silent. The plight of the voiceless has been minimized and shrugged off in the name of scoring points for one political party or another in a unique game of one-upmanship. The fact that God’s creations are priceless makes them value-less in our society, which only measures value by the dollar.

So, where are we one year later? Still suffering the impacts of human-made and natural disasters. Still fearing that the other shoe is yet to drop. Still fighting for justice. Still tired. Still aware that God is the Master and the final judge, and that God doesn’t value things by the dollar. We’re counting on that.

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(Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard)

Oceans: Oil and Plastic

It’s Day 50 of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As days and weeks pass and more and more oil gushes into the water, people are more aware and more concerned about what has happened already and about the long-term effects of this on the gulf ecosystem. Humankind’s failure to care for creation as God intended us to do hits us forcefully as the effects become more obvious. We knew, of course, that if the oil kept gushing it would eventually pollute coastal waters and beaches; we knew that all sorts of wildlife would be endangered. But so often we don’t really believe something like this, aren’t really concerned about it, until we can actually see it unfold.

Images like this AP video of Gulf coast birds in the oil make the situation very real to us. 

As we think about how to respond to these heartbreaking images, it might be helpful to remember that petroleum is the raw material of plastics. As the oil seems to be everywhere in certain areas of the Gulf, plastics are everywhere in our world.  Right now, my hands are touching a plastic keyboard as I sit in a chair that’s upholstered with a synthetic fabric made from petroleum. If part of my response to the disaster in the Gulf is to lessen my demand for petroleum, I’ll need to reduce my use of plastic.

Plastic’s origin in petroleum isn’t its only connection to our most critical present concern, however. The way plastic is polluting the ocean has some parallels to the way the oil from BP’s broken well is polluting the Gulf.

•        What we see of the oil spill on the surface of the water hides what may be the worst of the disaster, as some underwater cameras have shown us.  As marine animals swim through the oil, they ingest the polluted water, bits of tar, and other creatures that have been in contact with the oil. The worst of the plastic is also not readily visible. The big, visible chunks of plastic are both easy and unpleasant to see in the ocean, but the smaller nearly invisible bits permeate sections of the ocean and are ingested by marine animals and birds, thus entering the food chain.
•          The long-term effects of both the oil in the Gulf (and the dispersants that have been thrown into the mix) and of the plastic particles in the ocean are unknown.
•          People seem to find it hard to be very concerned about either offshore drilling or the plastic in the oceans   until images appear of birds dying, until it’s too late in many ways.

Some of the worst plastic for the oceans (because of the way it breaks down) is that found in plastic cutlery, including those white plastic spoons many parishes set out at coffee hour, and the forks and spoons we set out with disposable plates and cups at parish picnics and potlucks. 

One simple, concrete action we can take is to drastically reduce our use of single-use plastic, those things that are made to be used once and thrown away (wherever “away” might be).  For times when someone else has made the decision about utensils and nothing but disposable plastic is offered, some people carry their own utensils along. If it seems a bit much to carry your own knife, fork, and spoon with you, a spork (which combines all three in a single utensil) can be useful. Using something like this can not only avoid the use of a couple of single-use plastic utensils, but when people ask about the spork it’s a good opportunity to talk about our overuse of plastics and of petroleum in general. A simple way to show a congregation’s commitment to creation care is to avoid the use of disposable cups, plates, and utensils at parish functions.

Two events in recent days – one in my own backyard and one in Antarctica -- have reminded me of the importance of addressing our use of plastics as part of being intentional about environmental stewardship.  Recently I bought four bags of garden soil to help fill in some raised vegetable beds. (They will be filled further later in the summer with my own compost.) As I spread the soil over the beds, I started to see a familiar blue color in the soil – plastic bits! I picked up some of the bigger pieces for a photo:

Meanwhile, I saw this article about plastics – including fishing buoys and a plastic cup -- found in the seas around Antarctica.  The photo with the article shows a familiar sight, those same little bits of plastic that we see along the edges of lakes in Nebraska, on ocean beaches, or in garden soil from the nursery. Is this what God intended us to do with the gift of this beautiful planet?

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For more information about plastics in the ocean and ways we can take better care of the ocean and its creatures, search the web. Two places to begin are the Plastic Pollution Coalition website and the 5Gyres website.

Perspectives addendum

Here's an addition to today's earlier post, another perspective on the Gulf oil disaster.

In Perspective: Visualizing the BP Oil Spill Disaster  superimposes the area covered by oil in the Gulf on a map of someplace close to home, giving us a better perspective of the size of the area. Centered on Lincoln, the northern part of the oil blob lies a little southeast of Wayne, the eastern part somewhere east of Council Bluffs, the southern tip just south of Beatrice. The western reach of the blob is all the way out in Kearney. In other words, if the area of the spill were along I-80 in our part of the world, it would extend from where I-80 and I-680 split in Iowa to Kearney. It's a big area.
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Thanks to Elizabeth Kaeton for sharing this link on Facebook.

Perspectives

You give us mastery over the works of your hands; you put all things under our feet:

All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field,

The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea.

(Psalm 8: 7-9, St. Helena Psalter)

What we know about the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf, its effects on the entire ecosystem, and the possibilities (or impossibilities) of stopping the flow of oil into the ocean and of dealing with the effects of the oil and the chemicals used to disperse it has been in constant flux. This changing stream of information along with the volume of words that have been written and spoken about it in recent days make it difficult to stay with any one picture of the disaster long enough to really process it and see what sort of sense can be made of it. The finger-pointing and blaming that has threatened at times to take our focus away from the search for a solution and from consideration of ways we might help to ameliorate it effects is perhaps an attempt to catch hold of some pieces of information and make some sense, make a story, out of it. Something I’ve found helpful is to take note of articles, videos, and photographs that strike me as especially meaningful and then look at them again awhile later, allowing time for some deeper reflection to displace some of the string of immediate reactions that allow information to reach my brain without allowing for any deeper understanding.

Psalm 8 on Trinity Sunday brought some of these pieces from the past week together. The thought of God giving humankind mastery over creation, and especially the thought of God putting us in charge of caring for the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and “whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea”, shed some light on the larger meaning of this disaster. We’ve seen pictures of oily birds – some alive, some dead – and we are beginning to see the results on fish and turtles and other sea creatures. Something has gone terribly wrong; our demand for lots of oil at a fairly cheap price has come at a high cost for everything in the path of the Gulf waters.

Last Monday, the New York Times ran an article Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration  that talked about the changes in perception of the crisis as the oil washed ashore and became more visible in bays along the coast. The story begins with this sentence: “For weeks, it was a disaster in abstraction, a threat floating somewhere out there.”  Everyone knew there was oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, and scientists had been telling us what to expect as the oil kept on gushing, but the severity of any environmental crisis is easy to deny if we can’t see the damage. When the oil starts significantly affecting coastal areas, it’s harder to deny its impact.

On Tuesday (“Oil Spill Day 36” as they called it), ABC News ran a story that showed what Phillippe Cousteau, Jr., and Sam Champion saw when they put on hazmat suits and dived into the Gulf. This was a chance to see what lay between the place on the sea floor where the oil gushed continually and the surface, and it was a sobering perspective:

Then, on Wednesday, the Huffington Post carried A Lesson from the Gulf Oil Spill: We Are All Connected    by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. Bishop Jefferts Schori wrote about the truth of humankind’s interconnectedness with the rest of the creation, a truth she said is known by the original peoples of North America, by scientists, and by the Abrahamic faiths. She wrote:

 Another way of saying this is that we are all connected and there is no escape; our common future depends on how we care for the rest of the natural world, not just the square feet of soil we may call "our own." We breathe the same air, our food comes from the same ground and seas, and the water we have to share cycles through the same airshed, watershed, and terra firma.

The contrast she made between “our own” square feet of soil and the entire natural world, along with the reminder that God has charged us with caring for all of creation, not just our own private piece of it, opened another perspective on the oil disaster.

In shrinking ourselves to fit only our own personal space and our private concerns, we make ourselves less than what God created us to be. This is not humility; true humility would be seeing ourselves as we are. Instead, this is denial of who we are, which brings with it a denial of who God the Creator is. The denial is tempting because if it were true that we have no effect on the rest of the world, then our responsibilities would be small. If my own greed and lack of care for the effects of my choices on creation are insignificant, then I can blame either BP or the government for the disaster while pumping gas or waiting for a plane or packing my groceries into a plastic bag.

When we diminish ourselves to take away our sense of responsibility, though, we diminish God.  If we are good at convincing ourselves of our insignificance and smallness, then we also become convinced that a small god can meet our spiritual needs. A small god can tend to our immediate concerns and give us some comfort; such a god would not be concerned with the bigger picture, with people we don’t know and with other living things, and certainly not with the entirety of creation. But such a god would not be our God, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, the Alpha and Omega. In times of disaster, it's especially important to keep everything in proper perspective.

Water, Love, and Gratitude

At St. Stephen’s this morning, we had our United Thank Offering Ingathering, remembered Ascension Day with the Collect for Ascension, and connected with the Rogation Days in the homily and music. The lessons we used for all of this were simply the lessons for the Seventh Sunday of Easter; the theme of responding to God’s gifts with grateful hearts filled with love tied together the lessons and this set of occasions.

The lesson from Revelation includes this: “…[L]et everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” (Revelation 22:17) 

Water has been in the news recently. Without water we humans wouldn’t last long.  When we speak of the water of life, we’re talking about the spiritual gift of metaphorical water that’s as essential to us as is the water we drink and the water that sustains the other living things on whom we depend for survival. That the metaphor for Christ’s essential spiritual gift to us is water underscores the essential nature of non-metaphorical water for life on this planet. 

Water is essential, and an abundant supply of fresh, clean water is a wonderful gift in any community that can access it, but as we have been reminded the past couple of weeks, water can also be destructive and water can be poisoned. The record rainfalls in Tennessee caused the sort of destructive flooding that’s predicted to become more common as our climate continues to get warmer. Warm air holds more moisture; there’s a reason we talk about tropical downpours. And the oil gushing – not “leaking” as first reported, but gushing – into the Gulf of Mexico has polluted the waters off the American Gulf coast. This disaster will have long-term consequences for the entire Gulf Coast ecosystem, including the people.  There are some serious problems to tackle, and tackling these problems is made more difficult by the division, the lack of unity, that has become so pronounced in our culture in recent years.

But while there’s plenty of doom and gloom to consider, if that’s our only focus when we look at God’s creation, we will never find ourselves restored to good relationship with one another and with the rest of God’s creation. As in other areas of our lives, it’s essential to maintain grateful hearts. Caring for creation must go hand in hand with giving thanks for God’s creation. One reason the voice of the faith community must be heard in discussions about the environment is so that we remember the spiritual sustenance God offers us through the wonder of God’s creation, and so that we can encourage a shared ethos of gratitude for all of creation. If we aren’t in loving relationship with God, with one another, and with creation, we won’t be very successful in caring for ourselves or the world. We know that children raised in orphanages where they are kept fed and clean but where there’s no opportunity to bond with a caregiver don’t thrive in the way that children raised by loving caregivers do. It works the same way when we go out to serve others or to care for creation: if it’s done out of duty without grateful hearts filled with love, it won’t be the same.

There is news from the Gulf  today about “giant plumes” of oil beneath the surface, with the oil itself on the one hand, and the oxygen-depleting microbes that feed on the oil (and its dispersants) threatening marine life.  There is good news as well, that the most recent attempt to control or contain the oil seems to be working. That good news is tempered by this from Samantha Joye , one of the researchers looking at the underwater oil plumes: she says it could take “years or even decades” for the ecosystem to recover.

The news from the Gulf illustrates the spiritual challenge facing us as we come to understand more and more about the long-term effects of our neglect and abuse of the environment. How do we maintain a spirit of hope and gratitude when presented with the magnitude of the problem?  How do we keep ourselves spiritually whole and healthy?  I’m thinking that the simple practice of counting our blessings – consciously listing those things, no matter how small, for which we are grateful – is an important spiritual discipline for these times.  The same heart can hold gratitude for God’s gifts and concern for our world. In fact, being intentional about gratitude can open our hearts in a way that allows us to be more compassionate and more effective in the world.

Today we have a lovely, gentle rain in central Nebraska.  The grasses and trees are especially green, and the late spring wildflowers and garden perennials are beginning to bloom. We do have access to clean, fresh water in Nebraska. And along with all the gifts we can see in God’s creation, there are many people who are working and praying for the repair and healing of the damage we have done to our waters, air, and ecosystems. There is much for which to be thankful!

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