Baaa

"delicado, delicado, please handle with care . . ."

"Vrooom, vrooom . . ."

“Here’s what we ought to do . . .” he said, and I knew I was into yet another monologue on the evils, errors and, yes, remedies for the ills of the world. And while he talked, a germ of a thought began to grow and culminated in a centerpiece for this blog: what if our destinies are governed—not by predestination, fate, or even debate, planning and decision—but by the principles of evolution built into our genes.

               “We ought to raise the price of gasoline to $5.00 per litre,” he was saying, “so that people would actually think twice about buying a humungous pickup truck and settle for a smart car, or something.”

I couldn’t agree more, actually, unless that number were to be $10.00 instead of $5.00. Like so many others, I, too, have a head full of ideas for legislated solutions to developing problems: population control, tidal power, carbon tax, etc., etc.

“It’s not going to happen,” I said.

“Why not?” he replied, “it’s a simple matter, increasing the tax on gasoline to whatever figure you want.”

“Because,” I said, “. . . because the opposition party would immediately promise to roll back the tax if elected, which they would be, and we’d be back to exactly where we are now.”

“So what’s your solution,” he said, “you pessimist?”

“We wait,” I replied. “As oil gets scarcer, the price obviously goes up, eventually to the point where it has the same effect as you’re suggesting and no political party can do anything about it.”

“That’s a pretty sad scenario,” he said.

It is. He’s right, but that’s only if we focus on ourselves—individually—as the relative entities, and not on the herd. How do caribou or snow geese decide when to move and when to stay? They certainly don’t debate, vote and then act. More likely, there appears a need which registers with some or many of them who tentatively make a small gesture toward action. Gradually, the gesture registers with more and more of them—the speed depending on the degree of immediacy and drama in the need—until the collective will is in agreement, at which time the herd collectively stampedes, the flock takes off as a unit.

When the earth quakes or the tsunami strikes, the human herd reacts quickly. When the danger is less immediate (as in global warming) the response follows a slow, flat trajectory. Jump up and down and bleat at the edges of the herd as hard as you will; unless the collective mind is swayed, the herd will graze contentedly (I was going to say, ‘until the cows come home’) until the wolves are actually eating the calves.

Well this is probably overly pessimistic and over-simplified, but I predict that unless global warming actually causes the earth to shake under everybody’s feet, our governments will continue to place economic growth at the very top of every agenda.

Baaa . . ..

What time is it?

 West Brook, Gros Morne National Park

 On the set of Random Passage

What struck me most forcefully in reading paleoecologist Curt Stager’s Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth was his emphasis on our skewed perceptions of time. My example of what he’s talking about is this: if continental drift occurs at an average speed of one centimetre per year, then the final separation of Newfoundland from Labrador took place approximately three million years ago, assuming that the ferry crossing over the Strait of Belle Isle is 30 kilometres at present . . . and increasing by one centimetre per year. (For those of you who don’t think metric very often, a centimetre is the approximate width of a fingernail.)

               It’s little wonder that we can’t feel the earth move beneath us as it does in our imaginations, except when the continental plates grind against each other and earthquakes result.

               Stager's examples relate to the effect of human-activity-driven global warming on, for instance, the inundation of low-lying areas of earth. Florida will gradually disappear, but it will be so slow that people will not have to rush to higher ground. There will be plenty of time—possibly a few centuries—for the population to adapt to the slowly rising waters. The burning question becomes: “If it’s that far away, does it really matter?”

               And, as Hamlet says, “there’s the rub.” Our lives are such a short blip in the story of human life on earth and so fragile that we seldom sense our kinship with people who lived through the last ice age and the people thousands of years from now who will live on an earth shaped—in part—by our activities. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof (Matthew 6:34).” Stager would likely wish that Jesus would take this almost-epicurean aphorism back. When we talk about conservation these days, we hope for a good life for us, our children and grandchildren, and that’s about as far as we seem able or willing to think.

               Three things I can think of this morning prevent us from being responsible parents to future humanity:

1)      Our Politics: those who govern us have trouble thinking beyond the next election. There is little personal reward for a politician who advocates conservation now in the interest of the deep future.

2)      Our religions: a consciousness that assumes the end of everything is near is not likely to concern itself very much with a deep future.

3)      Our ignorance: we need to understand our lives in a bigger context than at present—both in time and space. Reading Stager’s Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is about to get a Whole Lot Smaller or The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have helped me gain new perspectives recently.

There may be an even bigger impediment to the awakening of a new vision for the human race, something to do with an overarching awareness of our kinship and an end to racial, ethnic and class differences that hamstring the chances for joint endeavour.

               Therein lies another “rub.” And it's a big one.

              

Make the world a better place. . . .

Rosthern elevator

To make the world a better place. . . .

If Joan Chittister is right in concluding that the improvement of the world makes sense as a platform for discussing purpose and meaning, then I have to ask, “what do I do to further that cause?”

First, define for me what constitutes improvement. In Saskatchewan at this time, a lot of politicians and entrepreneurs are ecstatic over the economic picture. People are moving into the province, the oil and gas industry is thriving, grain prices are up, we’re going to build a huge ethanol plant, we have an agreement with the federal government to refit a coal-burning power plant so that CO₂ emissions are safely sequestered underground, etc., etc. We’re on a roll; our world is getting better and better. We’re on the road to happiness, at least by the economic growth measurement.

Some time ago, CBC’s Ideas program on radio featured an interview with David Sanborn Scott, author of Smelling Land and founder of the Institute for Integrated Energy Systems at the University of Victoria. That institution is all about improving the world—environmentally. As I listened to the interview, I noted the following startling assertions by Scott (in my words).

1. The threat of global warming and the resulting upheavals cannot be reversed; it’s too late.
2. If we are to mitigate its effects, we will have to look at the whole energy picture as an integrated system and stop treating it as a bunch of disconnected bits (ethanol, earth hours, hybrid cars, windmills).
3. We must stop burning fossil fuels to obtain energy; this is not negotiable if we are to save all we can for the next generations.
4. All energy of the future—and the sooner the better—will have to come from non-CO₂ emitting sources, primarily nuclear energy augmented by wind, solar and tidal technologies.
5. In order to deliver the energy to trucks, trains, cars, ships, factories and homes, hydrogen will be the medium. (Energy will be harnessed to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen will be burned to produce water again while giving back the energy it has stored, that is 2H₂O + energy→2H₂ + O₂→2H₂O + energy). Did I get that right, students of chemistry?
6. Burning of ethanol, sequestering of CO₂ and so on represent a piecemeal approach which does not address the real issues at all. Reduction is not the goal; elimination is.

If I as a Christian want to contribute to God’s creative process—assuming that that involves an earth on which people can live well—then I will have to do more than recycle my newspaper. I will have to engage in the battle against the forces determined to maintain the status quo because they want to continue reaping the economic harvest that destroying the environment is providing for them.

By what measure do you and I define the “better world?” There are certainly other measures than economic and population growth. Most of us Christians are signaling by our acquiescence to the standards of our world that we don’t give a damn. While scientists are struggling to clue us in to the peril our consumption represents, we nod in agreement, and go out and buy another polluting SUV, or snowmobile, or quad-runner, or we fly in airplanes, drive nearly empty cars, shun the bicycle and public transit.

Our words are Christian, but our actions are decidedly not. If we are to authentically sway the world to disengage from its fossil fuel gluttony, we will need to shed a lot of our own baggage at the same time—or first.