Haiti

The devastating earthquake in Haiti last week has touched our hearts. People here are responding with generous donations and with prayers; the images we have seen from Haiti touch us deeply and raise the question of what we can do to help.

At times like this, some people – both those in Haiti who were directly affected by the earthquake and people who are watching from afar – ask theological questions: Where is God in all of this? Why do such terrible things happen? Where is Christ? When something like this earthquake results in such a huge amount of human suffering and loss of life, these questions are not asked in the abstract. The questions come from the heart, as part of the cries of the victims or the exclamations of the rest of us as we see the pictures and the estimates of the number of people killed or badly injured or homeless.

As we all know by now, the answers have run the gamut. Pat Robertson’s now infamous explanation that this suffering is the logical outcome of a “pact with the devil” made by the ancestors of the people who are suffering is only one example of many who think bad things happen because God punishes people. On Sunday evening, CNN showed a clip of a religious service held in Haiti that day, with the pastor telling the congregation that God was punishing Haitians for their sins.

Episcopalians for the most part reject such explanations; we think Christ is found the midst of people who are suffering; when we are suffering, Christ shares our pain and grief, comforts us and encourages us. Christ’s love and presence is made visible through the Church; our task is to provide food, water, shelter, healing, comfort, and hope. This report from the Episcopal News Service provides examples of particular responses to the earthquake from the Episcopal Church. Most importantly at this time, we can continue giving to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Haiti Fund. The Diocese of Haiti is numerically the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church; our network of churches, schools, and people has been badly damaged, but still gives us a way to get to the work at hand fairly quickly and well.

One of the most heartbreaking things about Haiti is that the earthquake is one of a history of tragedies in that country. There was great need there before the earthquake struck. When we talk about the Millennium Development Goals targeting the poorest people on Earth, we are talking about places like Haiti. Like most other countries where there is extreme poverty, one piece of the puzzle has to do with the environment. In Haiti’s case, deforestation has resulted in soil instability that makes hurricane rains take many more lives than in places like the Dominican Republic, which shares the island; with deforestation, topsoil for growing food is gone, and desertification makes it more difficult to grow food. (Pictures and links to animation showing satellite images of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic – made very clear because of the deforestation on the Haitian side of the border – is available here from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.)

Most Americans don’t know about the deforestation of Haiti; before the earthquake, many were vaguely aware that Haiti was a poor country, but knew little about why Haiti is so poor. Yesterday evening there was a Prayer Service for Haiti at the Washington National Cathedral. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached; I recommend taking a few minutes to watch the video of her sermon . One of the things she said was this: “May this terror shake us out of complacency and willful ignorance.”

We have chosen to remain ignorant of conditions in Haiti and many other places in the world where there is severe poverty. Knowing little history, we don’t know the causes of Haiti’s political and economic instability. Knowing little science, we don’t know about deforestation and pollution and the ways these intersect with economic and political forces to impact people’s lives every day. Many people choose to remain ignorant of the wider issues of pollution and climate change and how they affect every living thing on the Earth.

Bishop Jefferts Schori talked about planting seeds of hope in Haiti, and we are doing that now as we respond with aid. But she also reminded us that we must be constant in our caring: “Our remembering has to be long term. It must endure if it is to beat back the terror of this disaster.”

Her words apply not only to the current disaster in Haiti, but to all the work there is to do in our world to end extreme poverty. A big piece of that work is the seventh Millennium Development Goal, ensuring environmental stability so that people are less vulnerable to natural disasters and so that all of us can live in hope of a healthier, more secure future.

Please consider a generous donation to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Haiti Fund . As we reach out to help our sisters and brothers in Haiti, may we become more aware of the world around us, more willing to look at the realities of our world, and more able to serve as the Body of Christ.

Nebraska Green Sprouts: Blog Action Day 09

Today bloggers around the world are participating in Blog Action Day, a huge conversation of sorts, all writing about climate change from the perspective of each blog’s topic. This blog is about creation care, about caring for the Earth with the understanding that the Earth is part of God’s creation. More particularly, this is a blog about creation care in the context of the Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska.

Nebraska Episcopalians have all sorts of reasons to care about climate change. We are, after all, not only Episcopalians who live in Nebraska, but Christians, Americans, parents and grandparents, and part of the family of God’s children that lives all over this planet. But what do we bring to the conversation as Nebraska Episcopalians in particular?

As Nebraskans, we have a strong connection to the land. Nebraska is still a primarily rural state. We are aware of the weather; we know the effects of unseasonable weather patterns, of storms and temperature fluctuations and rainfall patterns on our lives and livelihoods. As farmers and hunters, Nebraskans are aware of the migration patterns of animals. And we are in the heart of the spring flyway for many migratory birds, including the Sandhill cranes, and are aware of the effects climate change has already had on some bird populations and the potential for more dramatic effects in the future.

Several of the theological reasons for caring about climate change can be summarized by consideration of the Great Commandment Jesus gave us: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Loving God with our entire being entails sharing God’s love for creation, and being reverent towards God’s good creation. God gave humankind dominion over creation, and climate change brings a great threat of species extinction. Engaging our hearts, souls, and minds in caring for the Earth is part of loving God the Creator.

Love for our neighbors calls us to focus on the effects of climate change on human beings. Flooding, famine, and other effects of climate change on human populations tend to have their first and worst effects on the poorest people of the world. Caring about the people whose homes and lives are threatened by climate change is part of loving our neighbors in the global community.

The Episcopal Church endorses the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). One of the MDGs is to ensure environmental stability, which includes climate stability. The eight MDGs are interrelated, though; climate stability is bound up with the eradication of hunger, with combating malaria and other diseases, with developing global partnerships for development, and in reducing child mortality. The MDGs give Episcopalians a framework for loving our neighbors around the world, and point clearly to climate change as a focal point for truly caring about our brothers and sisters.

Our baptismal covenant binds us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. Given the potential for climate change to widen the gap between poor people and rich people and to cause famine, flooding, the displacement of large numbers of people, and possibly wars as resources become scarcer, our baptismal covenant calls us to pay attention to climate change. The baptismal covenant also binds us to resist evil and, whenever we fall into sin, to repent and return to God. The Catechism in The Book of Common Prayer says that sin is “the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Choosing our own convenience over a healthy relationship with God’s creation is sin.

I’ve had wonderful conversations with people in the Diocese of Nebraska who are very clear about the interconnectedness of creation care, love of neighbor, and love of God. People who care for ranchland, grow crops, and care for gardens understand the importance of creation care; people who know the beauty of Nebraska sunsets, the starry skies in the Sandhills, and the wonder of the annual crane migration understand that God’s creation is good and that God’s love for us and our love for God are connected to our experiences of the goodness of creation.



You can go to http://www.blogactionday.org/ to follow the conversation about climate change from the context of other blogs with a wide variety of topics. The website also suggests ways that people who feel moved to take action to curb greenhouse gas emissions can get involved.

...All (Sea) Creatures Great and Small

“Yonder is the great and wide sea with its living things too many to number, creatures both small and great. There move the ships, and there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it.” (Psalm 104: 25-27)

The Psalmist says the living things in the seas are too many to number; in the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, God says, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures…” Somehow we have gone from thinking of marine plants and animals as existing in swarms too dense and too great in size to number to pondering the effects of very reduced numbers of some of these creatures. Those ships that move in the sea along with Leviathan have a lot to do with this, especially the ships that bring fishermen who engage in overfishing, bottom trawling, or other practices that can destroy habitat. The rest of us have a lot to do with it also, though, as we eat the fairly inexpensive fish that get caught by the bottom trawlers, as our increased carbon dioxide emissions cause ocean acidification (particularly harmful to shellfish), and as plastic bags and other trash get blown into inland waterways and eventually find their way to the ocean to be ingested by marine animals.

A variety of species of fish, coral, whales, and dolphins are on lists of endangered species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List website has a search feature; the search can be as general as ‘fish’ or ‘coral’, or can be a search for a specific species. The Psalmist was amazed by the number of species found in the sea; today, some of us are amazed by the number of ocean species that are in danger of becoming extinct.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium devotes some of its website to an effort they call "Seafood Watch". More information on habitat damage, overfishing, bycatch (fishermen catching and discarding fish and animals that play important roles in marine ecosystems), and the role of aquaculture is available on the “Ocean Issues – What’s Troubling Our Waters” page.

The health of our oceans and other waters is necessary to the health of our planet, and to humankind. The depletion and extinction of ocean species especially affects poorer people living along coasts or on islands who depend on fish and other seafood as a protein source. This is a key reason why environmental sustainability is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Because God told human beings to care for the Earth, and because we delight in these creatures, it is spiritually dangerous to do nothing about the major changes taking place in the waters. Because the ocean is a major food source both for those of us who have other options for protein and for some of the world’s poorest people who depend on fish and seafood as a food source, it is dangerous to our physical health and also politically dangerous to remain unaware and unresponsive to the crisis in our oceans.

The next post about what we can do to minimize species extinction will include the good news about the oceans: evidence that conservation efforts and changes in fishing techniques can restore collapsed populations of fish. We inland consumers can help by making good choices about the seafood we eat.

Looking for Nature

Here in Nebraska we have had a variety of weather the past couple of weeks, with some days inviting us to spend time outdoors, and other days leaving us happy to shelter indoors.

On one of those more inviting days, my daughter and I decided to walk at Lake Hastings, an artificial lake surrounded partly by both residential property and some city parkland. I took my camera along hoping to snap some “nature” photos – trees in early bud, birds, and so forth.

Now we weren’t walking in “nature” as I might usually think of it; we were in a city park walking on concrete, and it was difficult to get a photo without catching some bit of a park bench, disc golf basket, or sidewalk in the photo. I said something offhand about not being able to take “nature” photos there because of all the stuff made by human beings, and that got us into a discussion of what we mean by ‘nature’ and ‘natural’.

If I’m walking along a creek bed and come upon a beaver dam, I consider that an interesting part of a nature walk. Why not view the dam that human beings built to create this lake in the same way? Why distinguish human beings and our creations from everything else in the world? After all, human beings are part of God’s creation.

Human Beings and “Nature”
Setting us and our products apart from other living things tends to dispose us toward just the sort of thinking that most “nature-lovers” want to avoid, the sort of thinking that sees the rest of creation as resources for us to use however we choose for whatever human purposes we choose. It makes it easy to abuse the resources at our disposal to the point where we find ourselves now, slowly waking up to the real limits of certain resources and the negative consequences of our often careless treatment of creation. Alternatively, this distinction between human products and everything else can lead to the sort of thinking that romanticizes “nature” to the point of ignoring the needs of human beings, setting up a clash between environmentalism and issues of human justice.

We do, in fact, use words like ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ to categorize certain experiences and issues. Even if the impact of human beings on the air, water, and web of life on this planet can now be considered to be all-pervasive, it’s still useful to be able to have words that somehow name the idea of something untouched by human activity. On the other hand, it seems very important to remember that the distinction that such words seem to describe is an artificial one. I first heard the phrase ‘built environment’ from my green architect friend Sara Sweeney, and that seems a useful way to name the distinction; it reminds us that what we have built is indeed a part of that interconnected web of everything around us that is our actual environment.

Caring for Creation and One Another
When used carefully, the phrase ‘creation care’ can point us in the same direction, reminding us that Christian stewardship extends to all of creation, including human beings and the things we produce. Caring for creation includes caring for one another. Looking at the eight Millennium Development Goals that are aimed at halving extreme poverty and disease by 2015 is one way to remind ourselves that everything around us makes up our environment; those issues we place in the environmental category when we are speaking more casually are in fact intertwined with several other issues that we might not initially place in this category called ‘the environment’. MDG #7 is the goal of ensuring environmental sustainability in the ordinary sense of the world – reversing the loss of natural resources and increasing the amount of clean water on our planet. This goal impacts other goals related to improving human health and economic development, and the way we achieve those goals will in turn impact environmental sustainability.

The Church has traditionally worked to relieve the suffering of people who are hungry, sick, or living in poverty. In today’s world, working to ensure environmental sustainability is a necessary piece of that traditional church work, and effective work in those traditional areas will include attention to environmental sustainability. When we are being careful with language and using our words with precision, we realize that religious environmentalism is a new perspective on some very traditional concerns of religious folks. And still, when it’s time to relax and retreat and look for God in the world around us, we all know what a “nature walk” is, and we know that it might be just the thing to remind us of the presence of the Creator of all that is in everything around us.

As for my photos that day at Lake Hastings: I ended up with a series of pictures from the edge of the lake. Over the winter, all sorts of plastic objects have been washed up along with the more “natural” debris of sticks and dead fish. The number of bottle caps, pieces of plastic cups, drinking straws, and bits of plastic toys was shocking, and made me wonder what effect all of this has on the fish, birds, and other living things in and around this little lake, and what effect all of that has on the human community. The plastic bits along the shore of our local lake are as much a part of our environment as are the beautiful sunsets and the snow geese that have arrived this week. Removing them from the picture too often allows us to deny the reality of the consequences of our choices, and the reality of the work we have been given as stewards of creation.