Burning Water

This morning's news includes a report that the Coast Guard is considering burning the oil slick on the Gulf of Mexico. Choosing the controlled burn seems to be the sort of option I often discuss with my students in ethics class: what do we do when faced with two or more options, none of which are desirable? In this case, if the oil slick isn’t burned, forecasters think it will be reaching the Gulf shore, covering birds and beaches with oil and creating a disaster for both wildlife and for people whose incomes depend on tourism along the shore.

The irony of learning that what was left of the oil rig fell into the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day is compounded by this latest development. Seth Borenstein’s Earth Day article that ran in many newspapers and that I mentioned in my post The Day After looked back at the sorts of environmental issues that were the impetus for the first Earth Day, including the infamous flammability of the Cuyahoga River. So we have come full circle in these forty years. There’s still concern in the United States about offshore oil spills, and there’s still talk of water burning. This time, though, instead of river pollution accidentally catching fire, we are talking about a controlled burn in the Gulf of Mexico as a possible best option.

For Christians, water is a symbol of cleansing, of new life in baptism. Last Wednesday at Hastings College we held an outdoor chapel service designed by students. We started with a water liturgy, pouring water into a container while talking about its meaning for us throughout Scripture and especially in our baptisms. Dr. Dan Deffenbaugh preached about the river of the water of life, using Revelation 22 as the text and reminding us of the wonder and sacredness of the great Ogallala aquifer beneath our feet. At the end of the service, we used smaller containers to take water from our “font” to the trees and flowers around us.

Coming soon after our celebration of the Great Vigil of Easter, when we talk about water in the story of creation, in the Exodus from Egypt through the Red Sea, and in our baptisms, this Earth Day service reinforced for me the sense of the holy meaning of water for Christians.

I wonder today, then, what meaning we give to burning water. What might it say to us on a deeper level if later today we do see images of the huge oil slick burning in the Gulf? What does it mean to have burning water become a recurring image in the United States? What does it mean when setting the water on fire -- and adding to the pollution of our air -- looks like our best option? And I wonder how we can make a connection with the reality of burning water in our liturgy, how we can acknowledge and find hope and redemption in the image of the water that cleanses us and gives us life being so contaminated that it burns.

Two Days After...

An Earth Day Addendum

This evening as we prepare for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the John 5:1-9 Gospel lesson that is an option for us in two weeks comes to mind. When Jesus notices the man lying by the pool of Beth-zatha, Jesus asks him “Do you want to be made well?”  Two days after Earth Day, after a week in which many people have expressed the desire for a cleaner, more sustainable environment, I’m wondering what we really want. Do we want to be made well?  (See the January 24 post about this passage.) 

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. 

This evening we have also learned that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill that was supposed to be unveiled on Monday is now on hold. While many environmentalists considered the bill’s reported goals for carbon dioxide emissions to be too low to be very effective, the bill was a step in the right direction, and evidently the most robust bill that could be thought to have a chance to get passed in today’s partisan political climate. According to Matthew Daly’s article in the Huffington Post, Senator Kerry is talking about this as a short delay. However, the work on immigration reform will not be easy, and the political timing may mean that any climate bill has little chance of getting through the Senate.

Where do we put our trust? The man at the pool was empowered when he trusted Jesus and got up and walked. Trusting in Christ, we may be empowered to get up and galvanize the many grassroots efforts to change our own habits and to advocate for a sustainable environment. We would expect industry and political institutions to solve this problem, but God sometimes does the unexpected and surprises us with the people and circumstances God uses to do God’s work.

Industry and government could -- and probably should -- be leading the way in addressing climate change in a significant way that does justice to the almost incomprehensible importance of the issue. However, industry looks first at profit, and many holding political office today seem to look first at gaining and holding onto power. People of faith, following the Great Commandment of Jesus, have a primary allegiance to God and to loving our neighbors. We are in a position to put the integrity of God’s creation and the needs of our neighbors near and far ahead of profit and power; the voices consistently calling us to the work that needs to be done on behalf of the generations of humankind that follow us may need to come primarily from the church.

The Day After

The 40^th Earth Day is now over, though events centered around it continue. Here in Nebraska, an event called Earth Day Omaha  was held last Saturday, while Earth Day Lincoln  is scheduled for tomorrow at Antelope Park. In between, there have been events large and small around the state, along with lots of television specials, news stories, and commercial events aimed at the day. At its best, Earth Day reminds us to care for our environment and to think about stewardship; at its worst, Earth Day allows us to put a band-aid on environmental problems, encouraging us to continue in our collective denial of the actual state of our environment.

An oil spill off of the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 is said to have inspired Sen. Gaylord Nelson to propose the first observance of Earth Day.  Forty years later, one of yesterday’s headlines was about an oil rig that had been burning sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Today we have been learning about the size and nature of the resulting oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico and what effects it may have on living things in the Gulf and along the coast.  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 the last report I heard measured ten miles by ten miles.

The lack of progress in some areas can be discouraging. However, an article by Seth Borenstein for the Associated Press that was carried in several newspapers on Earth Day noted areas of progress as well. Entitled Earth Day: No more burning rivers, but new threats, the article begins with the good news that the Cuyahoga River no longer is flammable and smog levels are down significantly in several cities.  

The question now is whether we can continue to make progress and make it rapidly enough to limit the effects of climate change and pollution to levels that prevent significant loss of individual human lives and whole species of plants and animals. Any resolve any of us felt on Earth Day to be better stewards and do more to improve the environment needs to be put into action. If progress is not being made quickly enough, then we will have to act with even more energy to make up what we can for the time that has been lost.

Earth Day is not part of our liturgical calendar; we in the church are still in Easter. The Sixth Sunday of Easter is Rogation Sunday, another good time to think about our stewardship of the Earth’s resources and to pray for God’s blessings on our efforts to use them well. Throughout the Easter season, though, we might contemplate the miracle of the resurrection and God’s assurance that out of death can come abundant life. The day after Earth Day may be clouded by discouraging circumstances, but we are people who always live in hope. Seeing for one day yesterday that many people were willing to participate in some sort of Earth Day activity or discover some small changes they might make that will make a big difference in the long run indicates that people do care about the environment; the work to be done is to increase the level of that care and public understanding about the work ahead of us.

New Reading for Earth Day

Just in time for Earth Day (April 22), Newsweek has published a special issue called 100 Places to Remember before They Disappear.   It’s a beautiful magazine of places to remember from around the world that are in danger of disappearing because of global warming. Some of them, such as the Maldives or the Franz Josef Glacier on New Zealand’s South Island are expected to literally disappear; others will disappear in the same sense that we might say “My old neighborhood is gone”, meaning that there is still something there, but it has changed drastically. These are places like Olympia, Greece, where increasingly warm and dry summers have led to an increase in wildfires, threatening archeological treasures, or the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Coast Rica, where rising temperatures could upset the ecological balance that now supports many rare plant and animal species.

The photos and their descriptions are available on the Newsweek website as well as in the print edition. This is based on a book by the same name , published originally in Denmark.

With Earth Day approaching and publishers using this date to launch new publications about the environment, I decided to pick out for this blog post a couple of the many things I’ve been reading about the Earth that are especially relevant to people in the church. The 100 Places to Remember special edition isn’t written from the point of view of religious environmentalism, but I think it speaks to people of faith.

One reason it may resonate with people of faith is the beauty of the photographs. It shows the goodness of creation, and the wonder of some of the most beautiful places on our planet.  After an initial read-through to see which one hundred places had been chosen for this project and what sorts of environmental stresses are threatening them, I’ve gone back several times to browse and look at the pictures again. It’s meditative to look at the beauty of the photos, but it’s also prayerful on a deeper level to see this beauty while contemplating the very real possibility of losing so much of it.

In the beginning of the print edition, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek writes: “This book isn’t about atmospheric chemistry or carbon emissions; it’s about people, the places they inhabit and the places they have made, and a heart-tugging evocation of what we may lose if global warming proceeds apace.” This is the other reason this book may be important to Christians. It’s a look at places where our brothers and sisters live, and it’s a glimpse of the hardships many people will face. As glaciers disappear, the primary water sources for many people will be gone. Others face flooding, and some face the disappearance of their homes on islands or coastlands. Increased heat and drought bring threats of wildfires in some places and famine in others. Changes in ecological systems on land and in the seas would make it more difficult to find food in many parts of the world.

A new book that can take us deeper into contemplation about the changes to our planet and their implications is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.    The author of Eaarth (which is, by the way, not a typo, but a deliberate new spelling to emphasize the idea that this is not the same planet on which we middle-aged folks were born) is Bill McKibben,  the founder of 350.org  and author of several books about the environment. McKibben is an active Methodist layperson; while this is not an ostensibly religious or spiritual book, some of McKibben’s religious ethos shines through. 

Eaarth has been compelling reading for me. In recent months, I’ve come to realize that while it’s imperative to continue working to do all we can to reduce the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere in hopes of slowing and perhaps even reversing global warming, it’s also time to realize that no matter how successful our efforts, some changes have already begun that are irreversible. There is a new piece of work for people of faith who are aware of what is happening to our planet; it’s time to start figuring out how we respond to the spiritual crisis that awaits us when people begin to realize what sort of damage has already been done to the Earth. And if we don’t succeed in turning things around quickly and actually reach the point of no return on climate change, what sort of spiritual response shall we have to that? McKibben isn’t writing about a spiritual crisis per se, but he is laying out the facts as we know them about the changes that have already occurred, and looking at what we do now. It’s the sort of realistic assessment we need to have before us as we consider how we can promote healing for our planet and for our souls, and something to bring to prayer long after this year's Earth Day celebrations have ended.

The Joy of Composting

Late on the night of the Great Vigil of Easter, my husband and I pulled into our garage, and Gary popped the trunk open. We had driven up together to Grand Island that evening; since I had wanted to be at the church well ahead of the beginning of the service, he had dropped me off and gone off to spend some time somewhere – he said he might go to Starbucks -- until it was time for the Vigil. Evidently that had all been a ruse, because in the trunk were two things for which I had been shopping this spring: a kit to make a raised garden bed, and another kit to make a composting bin.

The two gifts went together. Our house sits on two half lots, side by side; we have no back yard to speak of, and a small side yard is all the space we have for gardening. A couple of summers ago when our contractor finished using stacks of materials that he had used while working on our hail-damaged house, we suddenly had a couple of large rectangular areas where the grass had died – instant beds for vegetables! Last summer, we expanded one of the areas. The soil in these beds needs a lot of work; meanwhile, we have a trash bin full of yard waste hauled away from our house most weeks during the growing season. I began thinking that if I could figure out where we could put a compost pile, we could reduce our waste and have what we needed to improve the soil. When we started looking at making another bed with a raised bed kit – eliminating the problem of the lawn encroaching on the garden – we realized that a good compost bin or pile would give us something to mix with soil to help fill up the raised space. After seeing a couple of bins that seemed small and unobtrusive enough to sit in the back corner of our lot, a compost bin began looking very practical.

Last weekend I put together the kit for the bin and put in the initial layers per its instructions: a layer of dry leaves and twigs to provide carbon, and a layer of moist soil to provide micro-organisms to help get things started. (My bin is a Soilsaver; the instruction booklet is called “A Sense of Humus: Your Guide to Composting with the Classic Composter”.) After this, we are supposed to add alternating layers of browns (such as dried leaves and twigs) for carbon and greens (grass clippings, weeds that have not yet gone to seed, tea leaves and coffee grounds) for nitrogen. Things should start “cooking” when we get enough mass in the bin. I’m happily anticipating our first mowing of the lawn this weekend, when I can let some grass clippings dry for a day or so and then add them to the bin in alternate layers with the dried leaves from last fall that are in corners and under shrubs. Meanwhile, I’ve been adding a combination of dried leaves, a few early weeds, spent flowers from Easter lilies, and vegetable peels, tea leaves, and coffee grounds from the kitchen.

What’s been surprising is how much fun this is! The practical value has really been overshadowed for me by the sheer joy of composting. It’s stirred up pleasant childhood memories of playing outdoors using whatever was at hand – making mudpies, crunching dried leaves underfoot or crumbling them over soil, playing with flowers (weeds and garden flowers were equally fascinating and fun to use in various ways), and breaking up small sticks just to hear them snap and see what was inside.

There’s something very elemental about paying attention to the “waste” from the garden and the kitchen and using it to nourish new plants, some of which will produce food for us this summer. There’s a bit of Easter in seeing things that we would usually discard become the source of new life. Composting is a literally down-to-earth project, something that helps us connect to the Earth and to the basic functions and patterns of living things. The reminder of this connection several times a day as I set aside scraps and garden clippings for the compost pile ends up being a sort of prayer woven through the day, a sense of connectedness to God’s creation, a reminder of our role in caring for creation. Through these things, it’s a reminder of humility in its true sense: who we are and whose we are.

Hastings College has started its Earth Week activities (leading up to Earth Day next Thursday). At a roundtable discussion last night led by SEAC (the Student Environmental Action Coalition), there was some discussion of the possibility of composting on the campus, working with the food service to reduce the amount of waste hauled off to the landfill. It made my heart glad to be reminded that practices like composting that most people my age did not know about when we were younger are practices that will be a normal part of life for younger generations. There’s hope in this that adds to the joy of composting!

Easter Joy

Early this morning we had sunshine in central Nebraska. I walked outside as the carillon at a church a few blocks away started playing “Jesus Christ is risen today”; the neighborhood birds provided a background chorus. In the center of our lawn, the sun was shining down on a bunch of daffodils in full bloom. Easter joy!

One of our hymns at St. Stephen’s for both the Great Vigil of Easter and Easter Day was Hymn 178: “Alleluia, alleluia! Give thanks to the risen Lord.” The first verse of this hymn reminds us that while we tend to focus on the Easter message of renewal and salvation for humankind -- looking at what the empty tomb means for us -- the resurrection of Christ is much bigger even than human salvation; our renewal and salvation is connected to the renewal or newness of all creation! And so we sang: “Jesus is Lord of all the earth. He is the King of creation.”

The snow that covered the ground for months this winter in Nebraska has melted away, the grasses and trees and other plants are greening, sprouting, in bud or beginning to bloom. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, and other animals are active. Everything has suddenly come to life! In such a springtime, the proclamation of the renewal of creation resonates with us; it’s easy to feel the interconnection between God and us and the rest of creation. We feel energized by the increased light and warmth in our part of the world and by life and growth of the plants and animals around us.

As a deacon, the words of the Exsultet remain with me in these days following the Great Vigil: “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and [we are] reconciled to God.” That image of the realms of earth and heaven being joined together in unity, and the linking of that joining to the restoration of a good and holy relationship between God and humankind get to the depths of the Easter message: in Christ, the chasm has been bridged. All of creation is infused with God’s Holy Spirit; the spiritual and the physical are intertwined.

We rejoice in God and in God’s creation, and we have a sense of God’s joy in creation. With Easter joy in our hearts, our work as humans in the care of creation is both an obvious duty and itself the source of profound joy.

The Exsultet ends with an entreaty for God to accept the offering of the Paschal candle: “May it shine continually to drive away all darkness. May Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, find it ever burning – he who gives his light to all creation, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.”

 

[Note: In the Episcopal Church, the Great Vigil is the first service of Easter Day. In our parish, we celebrate it Saturday evening. The Book of Common Prayer says it may be celebrated at any convenient time between sunset on Saturday and sunrise on Easter morning. The words to the Exsultet are found on pp. 286-287 of The Book of Common Prayer.]

Seasons: Loving our Neighbors

Thursday was the sort of early spring day we in Nebraska have been awaiting all winter. The sun was shining, the wind wasn’t particularly high, we could see bits of color where crocuses and snowdrops were starting to bloom, and birds were singing. The Earth calendar says it’s now officially spring; the church calendar says it’s still in the Lenten season that started back in snowy February. And despite the warmth of the late March sun, the air is still cool and there’s another chilly rain coming, reminding us that it’s still very early in the spring. I heard someone this week remark that though spring is now here, she wouldn’t feel as if we were fully in springtime until Easter; once Easter arrives, we know that spring is really here and the heaviest winter clothes can be put away for several months.

My family and I lived in New Zealand for four years before moving to south central Nebraska. With southern hemisphere seasons the opposite of ours, The Earth seasons and liturgical seasons are easily separated there; the Lenten journey begins in late summer and ends with an autumnal Easter. It’s easy for us in Nebraska to forget that our liturgical calendar that arranges the church seasons in close order with the Earth seasons in the temperate part of the northern hemisphere doesn’t work the same way for people in other parts of the world. Our own immediate weather and our own immediate liturgical experience are what we know most easily, but we need to look beyond them to begin to understand the experience of people in other places.


As Easter approaches, even this early northern hemisphere spring, this not-quite-fully-arrived spring, is a great contrast to the cold and snowy winter we had this year. Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist for The Weather Channel, said that the best word to sum up this winter in the United States is ‘relentless’ -- one storm after another, one cold front after another. In a recent blog post, he gives a good overview of this winter and talks about the various climatological factors that came together to bring us so much snow and cold. He gives a fairly detailed look at the role of El Nino, both in the ways in which this was a typical El Nino year and the interactions with other factors that made it atypical in some ways. There’s a good discussion of the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) and the AO (Arctic Oscillation), both blocking patterns that bring Arctic air much farther south than normal. These factors this year gave us more cold farther south than usual in the United States, while Canada had a warmer than normal year, witnessed by many of us when we saw the snow conditions in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics. Finally, he talks about the role of climate change in all of this, noting that as our atmosphere warms, we can expect “increased precipitation extremes”.

Canada wasn’t the only place warmer than normal the past few months. In the southern hemisphere, for example, Western Australia sweltered through its hottest summer on record. 

A draft paper from NASA concludes that “global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade, despite large year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Nino-La Nina cycle of tropical ocean temperature,” and it predicts that a new record twelve-month global temperature will be set in 2010. In the Climate Progress blog, Joe Romm, quoting extensively from an e-mail message from climate scientist James Hansen, summarized some of the main points  for folks who don’t want to wade through the entire paper. As in Stu Ostro’s post, there is consideration of how various factors interact to determine both particular weather events and overall climate trends.

As Christians, we are called to love our neighbors; in this global village in which we all now live, loving our neighbors means caring about people all over the world as well as those who live in our own neighborhood, city, or state. Most of us are sympathetic to people in need in other parts of the world. We responded with great generosity to the survivors of the earthquake in Haiti, for example, and we are interested in knowing how the relief effort is going and what else we might do to help.

In the same way, it’s important for us to understand not only our own immediate weather and the personal and economic effects it has, but for us to be aware of the global climate and how that affects our global neighbors as well as ourselves. This week, a tiny island that was claimed by both India and Bangladesh disappeared , covered by the rising ocean. This island was not inhabited, but other nearby islands – and, very significantly, the coastal areas of Bangladesh – are. What lies ahead for these global neighbors?

As the Lenten season concludes with Holy Week, we might spend some time considering the global climate. Where are we headed, and what does it mean for ourselves and our neighbors? At this time, how can we best follow Christ, who taught us that in serving others we serve him? Looking past our own immediate experience of Earth seasons to enter into the experience of our liturgical season will help us first to look at the challenges our global neighbors face, and then to enter into the fullness of Easter and the fullness of spring with renewed hearts centered on serving Christ through serving our neighbors.