Prevailing Green

Rev. Douglas Taylor

9-29-24

Friday night (Sept 27) Hurricane Helene made landfall. It was a category 4 storm and by Saturday morning, reports revealed it left a path of destruction through ten states, causing millions of residents and businesses to lose power, and leaving over 50 people dead so far.

NOAA hurricane scientist Jeff Masters has said Helene’s landfall “gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years. (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U. S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 or 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.” (As read in Heather Cox Richardson)

This is not going to go away. Record-breaking hurricane events have become part of our regular experience of the climate crisis we are in. Do we have that in our awareness living here in upstate New York? I know the people down in Florida and Georgia have had to grapple with this a they consider the messages they are receiving from their political leaders. But do we hear it up here? We have regular record-breaking natural disasters now.

Have you ever ridden the teacups at a carnival? I remember one time when our oldest Brin was maybe 3 years old there was a rinky-dink carnival set up in the parking lot of a run-down mall. They had very little business at that hour and we climbed into the teacup ride.

Brin were so excited. The operator smiled at us and started the ride. If you know the ride, you know the whole thing starts slow and builds up in speed, and as the whole ride circles around, each teacup can also spin. So we’re spinning away and I look at my child’s grinning face and ask, “Do you want to go faster?” They nod excitedly.

I no longer remember exactly how it worked, if I leaned forward or leaned back to get it spinning faster, but all the sudden we started whipping around. And the blood drained out of my child’s face. The operator of the ride noticed and quickly shut down the ride. Nice guy. I bought Brin some ice cream to help them perk back up. I double checked online recently to see if my memory of this ride was correct and found the line: “Under modern H&S guidelines children’s rides should not spin faster than eight times per minute.”

My point in telling you this story is that like the mechanical tea cup ride, we can manipulate the situation to spin faster if we want to. In the past century or so, the human species has made great strides in eradicating some major diseases, dramatically extended the average lifespan, and created an abundance of luxury available at our fingertips – or at least at the fingertips of some.

Our distribution of the abundance we have extracted from the earth is still problematic but the amount is indisputable. We have pushed the carrying capacity well beyond the limit because we have manipulated the situation to spin faster. We are spinning our tea cup beyond the guidelines for such rides, spinning faster than is recommended. We can reign it in. We can adjust our use of this ride we are on to better match the outcome we need.

Back in 2006, Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth came out. I bought a copy the DVD and we showed it here in our sanctuary. A few years later, our congregation was on its way to becoming a Green Sanctuary. We were buying reusable bags, changing out our lightbulbs, and boycotting bottled water. Eventually we got solar panels and air source heating and cooling units in the building, working to reduce our carbon footprint. And our renovation was grounded in a commitment to environmental awareness. We’ve been working on this for a while.

And we are far from the only ones. Did you hear in that list of positive stories we had for our reading https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/06/energy-transition-positive-climate-change/, that clean, renewable energy will likely become the world’s largest source of power by 2025? Did you hear the part about the vast offshore windfarm at full capacity, and the countries functioning fully under renewable energy, and the commitments to hold companies accountable for destruction of the environment? There are measurable actions happening that have noticeable impacts on the environment. The last line of our reading notices that we are headed in the right direction. And it ends with the question: are we traveling fast enough?

I would argue that question is irrelevant. That question is loaded to take us into a fruitless conversation of hand-wringing and apprehension that will undermine the work we have underway to build a better way forward. That question leads us into saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, tempts us into either denial or despair.

But the better answer is the one I often pull up when talking about climate change. Johanna Macy’s ‘three responses.’ Some stay in denial, refusing to acknowledge to looming disruption. Some succumb to despair, seeing no hope in the looming disruption. I refuse to either ignore the situation or despair of our chances. And Macy proposes the third way, the way of the Great Turning, the choice to hold hope. Not denial or despair; decision. Make the decision to keep seeking a new way, to remain hopeful, to keep working toward the better world. In Darwin’s theory of evolution, when we wrote about the ‘fittest’ surviving, he was referring to those that can accurately perceive their changing environment and adapt to it.

I remain hopeful that we will harness the creative resilience that has marked our species throughout time. Resiliency is the response nature offers after environmental trauma. We do well to lean into the fact that we are part of nature and our species can also be resilient. Creativity is the key. New solutions are always unfolding. In many ways, the biggest trick is to adjust our perspective enough to reimagine a new era together. The spirit is always moving among us as we respond.

And bell hooks reminds us “Rarely if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” We are meant to respond to life as a collective. We don’t need to find a super hero. We need to collectively become the answer we need. That list of positive things happening for the environment did not have a single person saving anything. It was all about the community doing the work together.

And here I want to emphasize, ‘the work’ may not be what you think it is. Because the trauma is spread around and the impacts show up in many ways. There is an intersectionality to the crisis and there must be an intersectionality in our response. All our efforts weave back into each other. Nearly every justice effort needs climate justice to be included. And climate justice needs every other justice effort included to be effective.

If you are passionate about fair housing or food scarcity, about racism or immigration, about voting rights or universal healthcare – there is a climate component directly or indirectly tangled up in the issues.

Locally, we can get involved in voter registration and voter turnout. We can work with groups creating better access to food and fair housing. We can take part in efforts to better empower marginalize people and vulnerable populations – locally, right now.

Because for us to see improvement toward environmental resiliency, we need to also see improvement in these other areas. The issues are connected and the traumas are overlapping. So the call this morning is not to drop everything and start campaigning for the environment. It is to notice and honor all the work we are doing and the ways it intersects with the work others are doing.

We are in this together, supporting disaster relief for the south and responding to food scarcity in Binghamton’s first ward. We are in this together, staffing the phone banks for voter registration for Pennsylvanians and donating blood at our next blood drive on Tuesday. We are in this together, lobbying congress to take up green energy bills and supporting local programs for at-risk queer youth.

There is so much we can do to support our earth and each other. As my colleague Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto writes, “All of us need all of us to make it.” As we respond to the call for Climate Justice, as we respond to another devastating hurricane, as we hear the question – are we doing enough … We are the answer, together. We are the answer, together.

In a world without end

May it be so.

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